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The slow burn is a world in which for most people income is flat or falling and expenses are steadily rising. It's a debasement scenario. And the reality is the central banks have been able to have a quite liberal monetary policy because we've been able to offset that with labor deflation. So by globalizing labor and instituting technology you have tremendous deflationary pressures, which offset very generous monetary policy.

You can balance the budget with fiscal measures or you can balance the budget by the Fed just buying bonds and if you look at the Fed's balance sheet, I think they have a much greater capacity to buy bonds. If you look at all the money that was stolen, the breakaway civilization has plenty of money to buy bonds.

So now you have big decisions. You have two economies. Before this started what I call the legacy systems had $100 trillion of liabilities and $100 trillion of assets – now, I'm just pulling those numbers out of the air – and

if you will. Now we've got the legacy systems trying to reconcile $60 trillion of assets to $100 trillion of liabilities and there is a long, drawn-out, grinding process by which some people will get 50 cents on the dollar, some people will get zero cents on the dollar, some people will get 100 cents on the dollar. It's just a very difficult, complex and tangled political scene as to how that's going to all happen. Meantime, NewCo, with $40 trillion dollars, is investing and going gangbusters. NewCo is enjoying an unprecedented boom, investing in lots of new technology and new frontiers, including space. So I think the next step is to manage the lowering of expectations in the legacy systems. That's basically what the administration and the Fed are going to be doing for the next couple years, is just gutting their way through retirees' disappointment.

There are three things

Well, the goal of Obamacare is to control.

in a relatively short period of time US Medicare expenses would be several multiplicities of the GNP.

If you go around the entire financial ecosystem, they're getting hit within every line by the same pro-centralization policies that ultimately go up to the same people.

If you look at it across all the different tools, from fabrication technology to new composite materials to robotics to lasers, we're reaching a critical mass of the economic costs dropping and the speed of learning accelerating.

If you look back at the history of the US stock market you'll see two huge spikes, one in the '20s, one in the '90s, both when very profound new communication and information technology came out.

Wall Street doesn't understand about crowdfunding, are the new alignments that are going to be created in terms of circulating knowledge and purchases and money between consumers and entrepreneurs and companies. It's going to create a whole new level of intimacy.

in North America there is almost an astonishing lack of transparency about how government money works within the jurisdiction for which we vote for political representation.

if you have all your assets in the legacy economy and none in the growing economy you're going to suffer.

That's number one.

Take a look at different predictions that gold is going to increase significantly in value. All those predictions assume that the monetary inflation is going to spill into commodities. And what you're watching instead is the G-7 have been essentially building a corral that forces the horses to run out through the stock market. That's why I call it a crash-up.

Right after 9/11 – and General Wesley Clark has said this and I experienced it in my tiny little community in Tennessee – we were basically given what the battle plan was going to be – the US military taking over Eurasia. First we were going to go to Afghanistan, then we were going to go to Iraq, then we were going to go to Libya, then we were going to go to Syria and then we're going to Iran. It was all laid out for us and we seem to be following that battle plan, albeit slower than predicted at that time.

what we're watching is an effort to bring everybody into a centrally controlled central banking model.

The same pattern repeats itself in the European Union. Loonwatch.com also compiles data on terrorism in the European Union from the reports of the European Union’s European Police Office (Europol) from 2007, 2008, and 2009 in its annual EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Reports. [4] The data further distances Muslims from terrorist acts. 99.6% of the terrorist attacks in the European Union were committed by non-Muslims. [5] The number of failed, foiled, or successful terrorist attacks by Muslims in the EU from 2007 to 2009 was simply five attacks whereas the number of terrorist attacks by separatist groups was 1,352 attacks, which equates to approximately 85% of all terrorist incidents in the European Union. [6] According to Europol, the number of failed, foiled, or successful terrorist attacks by so-called left-wing groups was 104 while another 52 attacks were categorized as non-specific. [7] In the same period, two attacks were attributed to so-called right-wing groups by Europol. [8]

There is a huge disparity in who is causing and committing terrorism and who is being victimized and blamed for it. Despite the overwhelming facts, whenever Arabs or Muslims commit crimes and acts of terrorism, they are the individuals that are focused on whereas non-Arabs and non-Muslims are ignored. If it does acknowledge that Muslims are the biggest victims of terrorism, Orientalism still manages to assess some guilt to the victims of terrorism by tacitly portraying them as members of a savage community or society that are as much prone to facing a violent end as animals in a jungle.

Illusions are at work in the world. The truth has been turned on its head. The victims are being portrayed as the perpetrators. Whether stated candidly, implied, or unmentioned, the notion of Arabs and Muslims as savages and terrorists plays on the imagery that the so-called Western World embodies equality, freedom, choice, civilization, tolerance, progress, and modernity whereas the so-called Arab-Muslim World underneath its surface represents inequality, restrictions, tyranny, a lack of choices, savagery, intolerance, backwardness, and primitiveness. This imagery actually serves to de-politize the political nature of tensions. It sanitizes the actions of empire, from coercive diplomacy with Iran and support for regime change in Syria to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and US military intervention in Somalia, Yemen, and Libya. As mentioned earlier, in varying degrees, this imagery extends to other places that are seen by US Orientalists as non-Western places or entities, like Russia and China. At its roots, this imagery is really part of a discourse that sustains a system of power that allows power to be practiced by an empire over «outsiders» and against its own citizens. It is because of US foreign policy and economic interests that Arabs and Muslims are unempirically portrayed as terrorists while real world data that shows that US intervention is creating terrorism is ignored. This is why there is a fixation on the attack on Parliament Hill in Canada, the Martin Place hostage crisis in Sydney, and the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, but US, Canadian, Australian, and French governmental support for terrorism that has cost tens of thousands of lives in Syria is ignored.

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 November an Obama administration spokesperson revealed the president’s willingness to support further sanctions against Venezuela which would freeze the financial assets of 27 Venezuelan government officials and increase funding for opposition groups. The proposed legislation is sponsored by Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio Last month the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) amended the Export Administration Regulations to restrict exports to Venezuela of items intended for “a military end use or end user.” The term “military end user” is broad and refers to non military bodies such as the coast guard, police and government intelligence.

Thousands of Venezuelans filled the streets of the capital on Sunday in support of a new constitutional enabling law that authorizes President Maduro to pass legislation in defense against U.S. threats to national sovereignty, which was approved in a special session of the National Assembly that very day. Waving banners that read “peace” and “Yankees go home,” the seemingly endless columns of demonstrators reached Miraflores Palace, where they were addressed by President of the Republic Nicolas Maduro. 

The last several days have seen large marches in solidarity with Venezuela staged in capitals throughout the world, including Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, Ecuador, Cuba, Nicaragua, Spain, China, and Russia. This mood of popular repudiation of U.S. aggression against Venezuela by international civil society was reflected at the regional level in a UNASUR statement rejecting U.S. interference and calling for dialogue. 

When Obama began bombing targets inside Syria in September, I noted that it was the seventh predominantly Muslim country that had been bombed by the U.S. during his presidency (that did not count Obama’s bombing of the Muslim minority in the Philippines). I also previously noted that this new bombing campaign meant that Obama had become the fourth consecutive U.S. President to order bombs dropped on Iraq. Standing alone, those are both amazingly revealing facts. American violence is so ongoing and continuous that we barely notice it any more.

There is an awful lot to be said about the factions in the west which devote huge amounts of their time and attention to preaching against the supreme primitiveness and violence of Muslims.

Employing the defining tactic of bigotry, they love to highlight the worst behavior of individual Muslims as a means of attributing it to the group as a whole, while ignoring (often expressly) the worst behavior of individual Jews and/or their own groups (they similarly cite the most extreme precepts of Islam while ignoring similarly extreme ones from Judaism). That’s because, as Rula Jebreal told Bill Maher last week, if these oh-so-brave rationality warriors said about Jews what they say about Muslims, they’d be fired. But of all the various points to make about this group, this is always the most astounding: those same people, who love to denounce the violence of Islam as some sort of ultimate threat, live in countries whose governments unleash far more violence, bombing, invasions, and occupations than anyone else by far. That is just a fact.

Those who sit around in the U.S. or the U.K. endlessly inveighing against the evil of Islam, depicting it as the root of violence and evil (the “mother lode of bad ideas“), while spending very little time on their own societies’ addictions to violence and aggression, or their own religious and nationalistic drives, have reached the peak of self-blinding tribalism. They really are akin to having a neighbor down the street who constantly murders, steals and pillages, and then spends his spare time flamboyantly denouncing people who live thousands of miles away for their bad acts. Such a person would be regarded as pathologically self-deluded, a term that also describes those political and intellectual factions which replicate that behavior. The sheer casualness with which Obama yesterday called for a new AUMF is reflective of how central, how commonplace, violence and militarism are in the U.S.’s imperial management of the world. That some citizens of that same country devote themselves primarily if not exclusively to denouncing the violence and savagery of others is a testament to how powerful and self-blinding tribalism is as a human drive.

Things to look very, very bad for Kiev and the current tactical difficulties faced by the regime might well result in an operational level collapse. At which point we can expect all sides except the Novorussians to try to revive some kind of stale and futile "peace process" which the Novorussians will have to accept, except that this time around Russia will probably make more demands then the first time around. Now that Putin has declared that the Junta's army is just "NATO's legion" the mood in Moscow is rather dark and the disgust with Poroshenko and all his lies very widespread. So even if Russia accepts another cease-fire, the Junta will have to pay a price for its failed assault. I think that the loss of Mariupol might be one of the conditions demanded by Russia (at least I hope so).

The proposed constitutional change was met by substantial public criticism – until the “Kurdistan Freedom Hawks” distracted from the discourse by exploding two bombs in Istanbul. Instead of discussions about and protests against what is widely perceived as the attempt to implement a semi-dictatorial presidential system, the AKP, the MHP and associated organizations are now calling for mass rallies against terror (Kurds), and national unity.

Aleksandr Yakimenko’s account supports previously voiced concerns over unknown snipers shooting both protesters and the police indiscriminately – who were the topic of the recently leaked phone conversation between EU’s Catherine Ashton and Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet. In a leaked phone conversation that took place February 26 Ashton and Paet discussed rumors that snipers were hired by some of the opposition leaders. “There is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovich, but it was somebody from the new coalition,” Paet said during the conversation. “I think we do want to investigate. I mean, I didn’t pick that up, that’s interesting. Gosh,” Ashton answered. Almost 100 people were killed and another 900 injured during the violent standoff near Maidan Square in Kiev last month that forced president Yanukovich out of the country and installed a new government. Ukrainian self-proclaimed authorities maintain that the shooting was authorized by Yanukovich. On Wednesday Moscow suggested setting up a probe to investigate the crimes perpetrated by extremist and armed elements of the opposition over the past three months. The proposal to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) also seeks to examine the legitimacy of the post-coup Ukrainian government.

Washington wants Correa's government replaced by a regime it controls, neo-colonial rule most Ecuadoreans oppose - following the pattern of earlier failed Venezuelan protests.  So far, popular support for Correa prevails. At the same time, dark forces headquartered in Washington never end their dirty game for unchallenged global dominance - a plot to create unfit to live in ruler-serf societies worldwide.

All of these changes are largely attributable to Obama's replacement of the democratic but corrupt government in Ukraine by a dictatorial but corrupt one (now elected only by voters in the areas of the country that the new regime isn't ethnically cleansing to get rid of the people who had voted into office the President -- Viktor Yanukovych -- whom Obama and the CIA overthrew in February 2014). Furthermore, there was no serious possibility of Crimea's rejoining Russia (of which Crimea had been a part between 1783 and 1954) until the new Ukrainian regime massacred hundreds of its opponents inside the Odessa Trade Unions Building on May 2nd, the event that caused Yanukovych's voters to fear for their lives. That massacre was co-masterminded by Ihor Kolomoysky, the billionaire gas oligarch who recently hired Joe Biden's son.

On 2 July 2014, I headlined "Gallup Poll Finds Ukraine Cannot Be One Country," and reported that, "The 500 people that were sampled in Crimea were asked 'Please tell me if you agree or disagree: The results of the referendum on Crimea's status [whether to rejoin Russia, which passed overwhelmingly] reflect the views of most people here.' 82.8% said 'Agree.' 6.7% said 'Disagree'." Moreover, "Additionally, in the Crimean region -- Ukraine's farthest southeast area, which our President, Barack Obama, says that Russia forcibly seized when the people there voted overwhelmingly on 16 March 2014 to become part of Russia again (as they had been until 1954) -- only 2.8% of the public there view the U.S. favorably; more than 97% of Crimeans do not." Moreover, Gallup surveyed Crimeans a few months before Obama's coup in Ukraine, and headlined "Public Opinion Survey: Residents of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, May 16-30, 2013." They found that when asked "Regardless of your passport, what do you consider yourself?" 40% said "Russian," 25% said "Crimean," and only 15% said "Ukrainian." So: when the Autonomous Republic voted after Obama's coup, when even fewer Crimeans self-identified with the now-fascist-run Ukraine, it had to have been a foregone conclusion they'd choose Russia, because even prior to that, there was nearly a three-to-one preference of Russia over Ukraine. That same poll showed 68% favorability for Russia and 6% favorability for "USA." 53% wanted to be part of the Customs Union with Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, while only 17% wanted to be part of the EU. Obama lies through his teeth about Crimea. On 25 March 2014, the Los Angeles Times headlined "President Obama Says Russia Seized Crimea."

The last time the strategic reserve was cleaned out so thoroughly was during the Chernobyl disaster, when the reserve sent steel plates, diesel fuel, gas masks and protective equipment, medicine and food. Moreover, most of the goods were sent from Donetsk. The other storehouses, for example, in Kharkov, store four, or petroleum and diesel fuel, as in Chernigov region. However, all gasoline and kerosene from the state reserve was used up already six months ago.

In addition, once combat operations resumed the State Reserve sent to the front everything that it could: steel plates, spare parts, tents, heaters, mattresses. All of that was stored by the “Yanukovych band”, but the strategic reserve came in handy for the new government.

It could hardly have been news to the Prime Minister: already in January he ordered to open up the State Reserve, including its stores of medicines. However, already by then the medical stores amounted to only portable first aid kits and medicinal preparations and expired (dating back to the 1960s) bandages, cotton, hypodermics, which even African countries refused to accept even though Ukraine was giving them away for free.

Medicines were cleared out in January, supposedly as humanitarian aid to Donbass.

Now it’s the turn of food stores, in order to calm down the rioting Kievans and prevent hunger rebellions. But, alas. Last year’s entire harvest was sold abroad, the acreage for new sowing season was reduced by 30%. The storehouses are the only remaining hope.

For example, there is a large food storehouse on the outskirts of Kiev, which contains frozen mean, butter, canned meat, sugar. Incidentally, this storehouse has existed since before WW2, it was the first Kiev target struck by the Luftwaffe in order to destroy the strategic food stores.

The Ukrainian government did not need airstrikes: the food reserve is empty only one year after it took power, as a result of several changes among the management of the reserve, and the theft and sale of its contents. The proceeds, of course, were already split. No doubt even the top leadership of the country got its cut.

As a reminder, the former Prime Minister Azarov filled the Strategic Reserve with Chinese buckwheat, which earned him considerable criticism. One of the former managers of the agency, a Party of Regions official by the name of Lelyuk, carried out reforms, refurbished obsolescent factories, and filled the storehouses with flour, evaporated milk, canned meat and fish, sugar, and gasoline.

Now that the “H-Hour” is here, it turns out it's all gone: all the food has “gone to the front”, since the army is also being supplied partly by the State Reserve, since MOD and State Reserve storehouses have been merged.

Having learned of the empty shelves not only in the stores but also in the State Reserve, Poroshenko reportedly went into shock. He fumed and demanded the management to find something and throw a few crumbs to the Kievans.

Yatsenyuk maintained icy composure: he was better informed about the state of affairs, since the State Reserve is under his “patronage” as it is part of the Cabinet of Ministers.

It would seem Ukraine’s Black Hour is here.

The real question is this: if concern over suppression of political rights is not the real reason the U.S. is imposing new sanctions on Venezuela (perish the thought!), what is? Among the most insightful commentators on U.S. policy in Latin America is Mark Weisbrot of Just Foreign Policy. Read his excellent article for Al Jazeera on the recent Obama decree on Venezuela. In essence, Venezuela is one of the very few countries with significant oil reserves which does not submit to U.S. dictates, and this simply cannot be permitted (such countries are always at the top of the U.S. government and media list of Countries To Be Demonized). Beyond that, the popularity of Chavez and the relative improvement of Venezuela’s poor under his redistributionist policies petrifies neoliberal institutions for its ability to serve as an example; just as the Cuban economy was choked by decades of U.S. sanctions and then held up by the U.S. as a failure of Communism, subverting the Venezuelan economy is crucial to destroying this success. As Weisbrot notes, every country in the hemisphere except for the U.S. and Canada have united to oppose U.S. sanctions on Venezuela. The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) issued a statement in February in response to the prior round of U.S. sanctions on Venezuela that “reiterates its strong repudiation of the application of unilateral coercive measures that are contrary to international law.” This week, the chief of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) issued a statement announcing that “UNASUR rejects any external or internal attempt at interference that seeks to disrupt the democratic process in Venezuela.” Weisbrot compares Obama’s decree this week on Venezuela to President Reagan’s quite similar 1985 decree that Nicaragua was a national security threat to the U.S., and notes: “The Obama administration is more isolated today in Latin America than even George W. Bush’s administration was.”

If Obama and supporters want the government of Venezuela to be punished and/or toppled because they refuse to comply with U.S. dictates, they should at least be honest about their beliefs so that their true character can be seen. Pretending that any of this has to do with the U.S. Government’s anger over suppression of political opponents — when their closest allies are the world champions at that — should be too insulting of everyone’s intelligence to even be an option.

[Background:  Governments from Around the World – Including Western, Islamic, Asian and African Nations – ADMIT They Carry Out False Flag Terror] Is it purely coincidence that the U.S. has heavily armed Al Qaeda Muslim extremists in Syria (and see this), and trained the jihadis who later became ISIS? Regime change in Syria was not a once-off plan.   Neoconservatives also planned regime change in Syria more than 20 years ago … in 1991. The West Has Been Arbitrarily Breaking Up Middle Eastern Countries for 100 Years The Western powers agreed 100 years ago to arbitrarily divvy up the Middle East, without regard for historical boundries. Neooconservatives in the U.S. and Israel have long advocated for the balkanization of Syria into smaller regions based on ethnicity and religion. The goal was to break up the country, and to do away with the sovereignty of Syria as a separate nation. (The same goal has long applied to Iraq and other Arab states as well.)

In summary, we don’t have conclusive proof that the U.S., Israeli or their allies have intentionally broken up Syria. But in light of such claims – and the 57-year old American-British plan to stir up Muslim Brotherhood and other religious extremists  in Syria – maps showing the Islamic jihadi group ISIS’ carving up of Syria (and Iraq) into “the Islamic State” are interesting, indeed: