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Gary Edwards

Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House | Zero Hedge - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...14-forecast-burning-down-house

Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14
     
    Incredible must read analysis. Take away: the world is going to go "medevil". It's the only way out of this mess. Since the zero hedge layout is so bad, i'm going to post as much of the article as Diigo will allow: Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/06/2014 19:36 -0500 Submitted by James H. Kunstler of Kunstler.com , Many of us in the Long Emergency crowd and like-minded brother-and-sisterhoods remain perplexed by the amazing stasis in our national life, despite the gathering tsunami of forces arrayed to rock our economy, our culture, and our politics. Nothing has yielded to these forces already in motion, so far. Nothing changes, nothing gives, yet. It's like being buried alive in Jell-O. It's embarrassing to appear so out-of-tune with the consensus, but we persevere like good soldiers in a just war. Paper and digital markets levitate, central banks pull out all the stops of their magical reality-tweaking machine to manipulate everything, accounting fraud pervades public and private enterprise, everything is mis-priced, all official statistics are lies of one kind or another, the regulating authorities sit on their hands, lost in raptures of online pornography (or dreams of future employment at Goldman Sachs), the news media sprinkles wishful-thinking propaganda about a mythical "recovery" and the "shale gas miracle" on a credulous public desperate to believe, the routine swindles of medicine get more cruel and blatant each month, a tiny cohort of financial vampire squids suck in all the nominal wealth of society, and everybody else is left whirling down the drain of posterity in a vortex of diminishing returns and scuttled expectations. Life in the USA is like living in a broken-down, cob-jobbed, vermin-infested house that needs to be gutted, disinfected, and rebuilt - with the hope that it might come out of the restoration process retaining the better qualities of our heritage.
Paul Merrell

Asia Times Online :: Orwell does America - 0 views

www.atimes.com/...WOR-01-230413.html

boston-bombings false flag unanswered-questions

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Welcome to the sweet abyss of an Orwellian vortex. 2013 increasingly looks like 1984. In two previous articles, for RT RT and for Asia Times Online I have looked into the superimposed levels of blowback implied by the Boston bombing. With still so many unanswered questions regarding what took place on the ground in Boston after the bombing, it's time to look at an extra, possible Top Ten list of lingering absurdities. And this without sidestepping other unanswered crucial questions, such as why a bomb drill - organized by Craft - was going on during the marathon at which the bombing took place; and why it was <a href='http://asianmedia.com/GAAN/www/delivery/ck.php?n=a9473bc7&cb=%n' target='_blank'><img src='http://asianmedia.com/GAAN/www/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=36&cb=%n&n=a9473bc7&ct0=%c' border='0' alt='' ></a> vehemently denied that a bomb drill was going on. For this current set of questions, I'm grateful for the help of Asia Times Online's Bostonian readers.
  • 2. Since 9/11, the preferred FBI modus operandi is to use informants to lure ''potential'' terra-rists to act. See for example the Fast and Furious<-style Iran cum Mexican cartel plot. There's a strong possibility the Tsarnaev brothers were set up. In this case, is there anyone anywhere among the vast US intel apparatus investigating the FBI investigators?
  • 4. A Saudi student, injured at the bombing, who was in the US via a legal student visa, is suddenly deported on ''national security grounds'', even as investigators found ''unusual burns'' on his hand inconsistent with the injuries of other victims. He may have been a member of a Saudi clan notorious for its al-Qaeda connections. The FBI ''investigation'' is suddenly dropped shortly after the Saudi ambassador in the US held an unscheduled meeting with President Barack Obama. Add to it that even before the smoke had cleared, the Israel Lobby and the notorious disinformation website DEBKA were pointing their fingers at ''domestic terrorists with Middle East connections''.
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  • 5. The description of the car hijacked by the brothers, a Mercedes E350 SUV, matches the description of their car left at a service station in Cambridge for two weeks prior to the bombing. A mechanic in Cambridge said Dzhokhar, Tamerlan's brother, picked up his "black Mercedes SUV" on Tuesday, the day after the marathon. The two cars may be one and the same; that blows up the whole official ''carjacking'' narrative. 6. Additionally, there's a media blackout on the owner of the allegedly hijacked Mercedes, who in theory managed to escape and call the police, who maintains that the brothers went to three ATMs and withdrew US$800 from his account - not before telling him they were the ''marathon bombers and had killed an MIT police''. The driver said he was let off at a gas station on Memorial Drive in Cambridge. But some witnesses saw Dzhokhar at the station's convenience store - without any driver. Then the narrative of the brothers robbing a convenience store was revealed to be false. Police scanners referred to a "black top" person. Still, the official narrative is that the Tsarnaev brothers were at the same place and the same time of the robbery.
  • 9. The whole law enforcement apparatus insisted that there was a heavy exchange of gunfire with Dzokhar while he was hiding in a boat, before his arrest. That is false. He was unarmed, barely moving and the hail of bullets towards the boat came from the police.
  • Do the martial dance What the day-long delay in Dzhokhar's arrest indeed made possible was to turn Watertown into a monster dry run for urban martial law - euphemized as ''lockdown'' - in a very near future. As total militarization of civilian life goes - featuring, for instance, Homeland Security running amok with hundreds of armored vehicles - this was a major success. Meanwhile, on the ''legal'' front, the White House and the Justice Department are firmly on track to finally suppress the Miranda warning; that went into effect already two years ago, when an Obama secret executive order ruled the Miranda warning would not apply to suspected terrorists. Dzhokhar is a ''suspected'' terrorist - now charged with using and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction, yet already convicted by corporate media. Welcome to Police State USA - where at least everyone still has the right to go out shopping. For now.
Paul Merrell

Pambazuka - Egypt is calling the West's bluff over its phony war on ISIS - 1 views

www.pambazuka.net/...94051

war & peace Libya Egypt U.S.-foreign-policy ISIL

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • As Egyptian President Sisi calls for more support in the fight against NATO-funded militias in Libya, the West’s refusal to back him raises the question of their ultimate aims in entering the region. The West is complicity in enabling ISIS to gain a strong foothold and further destabilise Libya, Syria and, potentially, Egypt.Western states are trumpeting ISIS as the latest threat to civilisation, claiming total commitment to their defeat, and using the group’s conquests in Syria and Iraq as a pretext for deepening their own military involvement in the Middle East. Yet as Libya seems to be following the same path as Syria – of ‘moderate’ anti-government militias backed by the West paving the way for ISIS takeover – Britain and the US seem reluctant to confront them there, immediately pouring cold water on Egyptian President Sisi’s request for an international coalition to halt their advances. By making the suggestion – and having it, predictably, spurned – Sisi is making clear Western duplicity over ISIS and the true nature of NATO policy in Libya.
  • On 29th August 2011, two months before the last vestiges of the Libyan state were destroyed and its leader executed, I was interviewed on Russia Today about the country’s future. I told the station: “There’s been a lot of talk about what will happen [in Libya after the ouster of Gaddafi] – will there be Sharia law, will there be a liberal democracy? What we have to understand is that what will replace the Libyan state won’t be any of those things. What will replace the Libyan state will be the same as what has replaced the state in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is a dysfunctional government, complete lack of security, gang warfare and civil war. And this is not a mistake from NATO. They would prefer to see failed states than states that are powerful and independent and able to challenge their hegemony. And people who are fighting for the TNC, fighting for NATO, really need to understand that this is NATO’s vision for their country.” Friends at the time told me I was being overly pessimistic and cynical. I said I hoped to God that they were right. But my experiences over a decade following the results of my own country (Britain)’s wars of aggression in places like Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq long after the mainstream media had lost interest, led me to believe otherwise.
  • Of course, it was not only me who was making such warnings. On March 6th 2011, several weeks before NATO began seven months of bombing, Gaddafi gave a prophetic interview with French newspaper Le Monde du Dimanche, in which he stated: “I want to make myself understood: if one threatens [Libya], if one seeks to destabilize [Libya], there will be chaos, Bin Laden, armed factions. That is what will happen. You will have immigration, thousands of people will invade Europe from Libya. And there will no longer be anyone to stop them. Bin Laden will base himself in North Africa and will leave Mullah Omar in Afghanistan and Pakistan. You will have Bin Laden at your doorstep.”
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  • his is the state of affairs NATO bequeathed to Libya, reversing the country’s trajectory as a stable, prosperous pan-African state that was a leading player in the African Union, and a thorn in the side of US and British attempts to re-establish military domination. And it is not only Libya that has suffered; the power vacuum resulting from NATO’s wholesale destruction of the Libyan state apparatus has dragged the whole region into the vortex. As Brendan O Neill has shown in detail, the daily horrors being perpetrated in Mali, Nigeria and now Cameroon are all a direct result of NATO’s bloodletting, as death squads from across the entire Sahel-Sahara region have been given free reign to set up training camps and loot weapons across the giant zone of lawlessness which NATO have sculpted out of Libya.
  • The result? African states that in 2010 were forging ahead economically, greatly benefitting from Chinese infrastructure and manufacturing investment, moving away from centuries of colonial and neo-colonial dependence on extortionate Western financial institutions, have been confronted with massive new terror threats from groups such as Boko Haram, flush with new weaponry and facilities courtesy of NATO’s humanitarianism. Algeria and Egypt, too, still governed by the same independent-minded movements which overthrew European colonialism, have seen their borders destabilised, setting the stage for ongoing debilitating attacks planned and executed from NATO’s new Libyan militocracy. This is the context in which Egypt is launching the regional fightback against NATO’s destabilisation strategy.
  • Over the past year in particular, Egyptians have witnessed their Western neighbour rapidly descending down the same path of ISIS takeover as Syria. In Syria, a civil war between a Western-sponsored insurgency and an elected secular government has seen the anti-government forces rapidly fall under the sway of ISIS, as the West’s supposed ‘moderates’ in the Free Syrian Army either join forces with ISIS (impressed by their military prowess, hi-tech weaponry, and massive funding) or find themselves overrun by them. In Libya, the same pattern is quickly developing. The latest phase in the Libyan disaster began last June when the militias who dominated the previous parliament (calling themselves the ‘Libya Dawn’ coalition) lost the election and refused to accept the results, torching the country’s airport and oil storage facilities as opening salvos in an ongoing civil war between them and the newly elected parliament. Both parliaments have the allegiance of various armed factions, and have set up their own rival governments, each controlling different parts of the country. But, starting in Derna last November, areas taken by the Libya Dawn faction have begun falling to ISIS. Last weekend’s capture of Sirte was the third major town to be taken by them, and there is no sign that it will be the last. This is the role that has consistently been played by the West’s proxies across the region – paving the way and laying the ground for ISIS takeover. Egyptian President Sisi’s intervention – airstrikes against ISIS targets in Libya - aims to reverse this trajectory before it reaches Iraqi-Syrian proportions.
  • The internationally-recognised Libyan government based in Tobruk – the one appointed by the House of Representatives that won the election last summer - has welcomed the Egyptian intervention. Not only, they hope, will it help prevent ISIS takeover, but will also cement Egyptian support for their side in the ongoing civil war with ‘Libya Dawn’. Indeed, Egypt could, with some justification, claim that winning the war against ISIS requires a unified Libyan government committed to this goal, and that the Dawn’s refusal to recognise the elected parliament , not to mention their ‘ambiguous’ attitude towards ISIS, is the major obstacle to achieving such an outcome. Does this mean that the Egyptian intervention will scupper the UN’s ‘Libya dialogue’ peace talks initiative? Not necessarily; in fact it could have the opposite effect. The first two rounds of the talks were boycotted by the General National Congress (GNC) - the Libya Dawn parliament- safe in the knowledge that they would continue to receive weapons and financing from NATO partners Qatar and Turkey whilst the internationally-recognised Tobruk government remained under an international arms embargo. As the UK’s envoy to the Libya Dialogue, Jonathan Powell, noted this week, the “sine qua non for a [peace] settlement” is a “mutually hurting stalemate”. By balancing up the scales in the civil war, Egyptian support military support for the Tobruk government may show the GNC that taking the talks seriously will be more in their interests than continuation of the fight.
  • Sisi’s call for the military support of the West in his intervention has effectively been rejected, as he very likely expected it to be. A joint statement by the US and Britain and their allies on Tuesday poured cold water on the idea, and no wonder – they did not go to all the bother of turning Libya into the centre of their regional destabilisation strategy only to then try to stabilise it just when it is starting to bear fruit. However, by forcing them to come out with such a statement, Sisi has called the West’s bluff. The US and Britain claim to be committed to the destruction of ISIS, a formation which is the product of the insurgency they have sponsored in Syria for the past four years, and Sisi is asking them to put their money where their mouth is. They have refused to do so. In the end, the Egyptian resolution to the UN Security Council (UNSC) on Wednesday made no mention of calling for military intervention by other powers, and limited itself to calling for an end to the one-sided international arms embargo which prevents the arming of the elected government but does not seem to deter NATO’s regional partners from openly equipping the ‘Libya Dawn’ militias. Sisi has effectively forced the West to show its hand: their rejection of his proposal to support the intervention makes it clear to the world the two-faced nature of their supposed commitment to the destruction of ISIS.
  • There are, however, deep divisions on this issue in Europe. France is deepening its military presence in the Sahel-Sahara region, with 3000 troops based in Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali and a massive new base opened on the Libyan border in Niger last October, and would likely welcome a pretext to extend its operations to its historic protectorate in Southern Libya. Italy, likewise, is getting cold feet about the destabilisation it helped to unleash, having not only damaged a valuable trading partner, but increasingly being faced with hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the horror and destitution that NATO has gifted the region. But neither are likely to do anything without UNSC approval, which is likely to continue to be blocked by the US and Britain, who are more than happy to see countries like Russian-allied Egypt and Chinese-funded Nigeria weakened and their development retarded by terror bombings. Sisi’s actions will, it is hoped, not only make abundantly clear the West’s acquiescence in the horrors it has created – but also pave the way for an effective fightback against them.
  • Paul Merrell on 27 Feb 15
     
    Now why would the U.S. and European powers oppose military intervention against ISIL in Libya if ISIL is in fact this force of unmitigated evil we hear about so often in American politics? Or is it a matter of who actually controls ISIL?  
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