Category Archives: Energy

The CIA-engineered oil glut to bring down Putin and Maduro

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Russian President Vladimir Putin shakes hands with his Venezuelan counterpart Nicolas Maduro during a signing ceremony at the Kremlin in Moscow

By Wayne Madsen

Source: Intrepid Report

John Brennan’s long familiarity with Saudi Arabia, owing to the time he spent there as the CIA station chief in Riyadh in the 1990s and his knowledge of Saudi oil operations, has paid off. WMR has learned that Brennan’s agents inside Saudi Aramco convinced the firm’s management and the Saudi Oil Ministry to begin fracking operations to stimulate production in Saudi Arabia’s oldest oil fields.

By pumping salt water into older wells, some at a depth of 3 to 6 thousand feet, an inordinate amount of pressure was built up. The CIA’s oil industry implants knew what would occur when the fracking operations began. Due to the dangerously high water pressure, the Saudis were forced continuously pump oil until the pressure became equalized. That process is continuing. If the Saudis ceased pumping oil, they would permanently lose the wells to salt water contamination. In the current “pump it or lose it” situation, the Saudis are forced to pump at a rate that may take up to 5 years before they can slow down production rates.

The net result of the CIA-inspired fracking operations, which the Saudis were warned not to pursue by petroleum engineers working for some foreign-based firms like Schlumberger, is that there will be an oil supply glut for the next 5 years. The glut will be followed by a reduction in Saudi oil production unless new oil fields are brought on line. There is now a major push by U.S. and Canadian oil companies to bring the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the United States to offset the expected sharp rise in oil prices in five years.

The CIA operation to frack Middle Eastern oil fields was not only limited to Saudi Arabia. WMR has learned from oil industry sources that similar fracking caused overproduction problems in Kuwait and Iraq.

The result of the sudden decline in oil prices has resulted in heavy damage to the economies of the CIA-targeted countries of Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. Brennan and his economic warfare operatives banked on the Saudi overproduction to harm the economies of all three countries and the CIA has not been disappointed. The CIA figures that the governments of Vladimir Putin in Russia, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Iran, and Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela will have long since collapsed and been replaced by pro-Western regimes within 5 years.

Already, from his base in Switzerland, exiled Russian tax evader billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky has called for Putin’s overthrow and even his assassination. Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress and the Obama administration have taken cues from the CIA to impose devastating economic sanctions on both Russia and Venezuela. Similar congressional legislation to increase sanctions on Iran is pending.

Russia has been harmed the most by the CIA’s Saudi oil production scheme. The Russian ruble fell 56 percent in value against the U.S. dollar while Russian interest rates climbed to 17 percent. The price of shares of Russia’s largest lending bank, Sberbank, fell 18 percent. Although the Russian economic collapse has resulted in financial ripples around the world, with Austrian and French banks losing their stock values and the value of the Polish zloty and Hungarian forint falling against the dollar, the Obama administration says that there will be no easing on economic sanctions imposed on Russia over Ukraine. Obama has put the investments of American holders of Russian bonds in dire jeopardy.

The Pacific Investment Management Company’s (PEBIX) Emerging Markets Bond Fund, which holds over $800 million in Russian bonds, has lost almost 8 percent in value in the past few weeks.

Russian Central Bank Vice Chairman Sergei Shvetsov said, “What is happening is a nightmare that we could not even have imagined a year ago.”

Meanwhile, basic staples in Venezuela, including cooking oil, rice, and corn flour, are becoming hard to obtain. The U.S. dollar has jumped 1,700 percent in value against the Venezuelan bolivar on the black market. The CIA is using the financial collapse to push for an undemocratic overthrow of the Venezuelan government.

Iran, which has been under punitive Western economic sanctions for a number of years over its nuclear power program, is probably best able to weather the storm. Iran has built up a rather impressive domestic food production, telecommunications, and oil industry infrastructure to survive the sanctions. However, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani appears very aware of the Saudi role in the conspiracy to drive down oil prices.

Rouhani recently said, “The main reason for [the oil price plunge] is [a] political conspiracy by certain countries against the interest of the region and the Islamic world and it is only in the interest of some other countries . . . Iran and people of the region will not forget such conspiracies, or in other words, treachery against the interests of the Muslim world.”

Brennan’s and the CIA’s industrial sabotage of the Saudi and other Middle East oil industries will continue to have far-reaching effects on the world economy. Oil industry insiders fear that the CIA has unleashed something that may deal a devastating blow to the global economy.

WSJ reports: Bank of North Dakota outperforms Wall Street

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By Ellen Brown

Source: Intrepid Report

While 49 state treasuries were submerged in red ink after the 2008 financial crash, one state’s bank outperformed all others and actually launched an economy-shifting new industry. So reports the Wall Street Journal this week, discussing the Bank of North Dakota (BND) and its striking success in the midst of a national financial collapse led by the major banks.

Chester Dawson begins his November 16 article:

It is more profitable than Goldman Sachs Group Inc., has a better credit rating than J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and hasn’t seen profit growth drop since 2003. Meet Bank of North Dakota, the U.S.’s lone state-owned bank, which has one branch, no automated teller machines and not a single investment banker.

He backs this up with comparative data on the BND’s performance:

[I]ts total assets have more than doubled, to $6.9 billion last year from $2.8 billion in 2007. By contrast, assets of the much bigger Bank of America Corp. have grown much more slowly, to $2.1 trillion from $1.7 trillion in that period.

. . . Return on equity, a measure of profitability, is 18.56%, about 70% higher than those at Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan. . . .

Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services last month reaffirmed its double-A-minus rating of the bank, whose deposits are guaranteed by the state of North Dakota. That is above the rating for both Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan and among U.S. financial institutions, second only to the Federal Home Loan Banks, rated double-A-plus.

Dawson goes on, however, to credit the BND’s remarkable performance to the Bakken oil boom. Giving his article the controversial title, “Shale Boom Helps North Dakota Bank Earn Returns Goldman Would Envy: U.S.’s Lone State-Owned Bank Is Beneficiary of Fracking,” he contends:

The reason for its success? As the sole repository of the state of North Dakota’s revenue, the bank has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the boom in Bakken shale-oil production from hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. In fact, the bank played a crucial part in kick-starting the oil frenzy in the state in 2008 amid the financial crisis.

That is how the Wall Street-owned media routinely write off the exceptional record of this lone publicly-owned bank, crediting it to the success of the private oil industry. It would be more accurate to say that the bank made the boom.

Excess deposits do not explain the BND’s record profits

Dawson confirms that the BND played a crucial role in kickstarting the boom and the economy, at a time when other states were languishing in recession. It did this by lending for critical infrastructure (roads, housing, hospitals, hotels) when other states’ banks were curtailing local lending.

But while the state itself may have reaped increased taxes and fees from the oil boom, the BND got no more out of the deal than an increase in deposits, as Dawson also confirms. The BND is the sole repository of state revenues by law.

Having excess deposits can hardly be the reason the BND has outdistanced even JPMorganChase and Bank of America, which also have massive excess deposits and have not turned them into loans. Instead, they have invested their excess deposits in securities.

Interestingly, the BND has also followed this practice. According to Standard & Poor’s October 2014 credit report, it had a loan to deposit ratio in 2009 of 91%. This ratio dropped to 57.5% in 2014. The excess deposits have gone primarily into Treasuries, US government agency debt, and mortgage-backed securities. Thus the bank’s extraordinary profitability cannot be explained by an excess of deposits or an expanded loan portfolio.

Further eroding the Dawson explanation is that the oil boom did not actually hit North Dakota until 2010. Yet it was the sole state to have escaped the credit crisis by the spring of 2009, when every other state’s budget had already dipped into negative territory. Montana, the runner-up, was in the black by the end of 2009; but it dropped into the red in March of that year and had to implement a pay freeze on state employees.

According to Standard & Poor’s, the BND’s return on equity was up to 23.4% in 2009—substantially higher than in any of the years of the oil boom that began in 2010.

The real reasons for its stellar success

To what, then, are the remarkable achievements of this lone public bank attributable?

The answer is something the privately-owned major media have tried to sweep under the rug: the public banking model is simply more profitable and efficient than the private model. Profits, rather than being siphoned into offshore tax havens, are recycled back into the bank, the state and the community.

The BND’s costs are extremely low: no exorbitantly-paid executives; no bonuses, fees, or commissions; only only one branch office; very low borrowing costs; and no FDIC premiums (the state rather than the FDIC guarantees its deposits).

These are all features that set publicly-owned banks apart from privately-owned banks. Beyond that, they are safer for depositors, allow public infrastructure costs to be cut in half, and provide a non-criminal alternative to a Wall Street cartel caught in a laundry list of frauds.

Dawson describes some other unique aspects of the BND’s public banking model:

It traditionally extends credit, or invests directly, in areas other lenders shun, such as rural housing loans.

. . . [R]etail banking accounts for just 2%-3% of its business. The bank’s focus is providing loans to students and extending credit to companies in North Dakota, often in partnership with smaller community banks.

Bank of North Dakota also acts as a clearinghouse for interbank transactions in the state by settling checks and distributing coins and currency. . . .

The bank’s mission is promoting economic development, not competing with private banks. “We’re a state agency and profit maximization isn’t what drives us,” President Eric Hardmeyer said.

. . . It recently started offering mortgages to individuals in the most underserved corners of the state. But Mr. Hardmeyer dismisses any notion the bank could run into trouble with deadbeat borrowers. “We know our customers,” he said. “You’ve got to understand the conservative nature of this state. Nobody here is really interested in making subprime loans.”

The downsides of a boom

The bank’s mission to promote economic development could help explain why its return on equity has actually fallen since the oil boom hit in 2010. The mass invasion by private oil interests has put a severe strain on the state’s infrastructure, forcing it to muster its resources defensively to keep up; and the BND is in the thick of that battle.

In an August 2011 article titled, “North Dakota’s Oil Boom is a Blessing and a Curse,” Ryan Holeywell writes that virtually all major infrastructure in the boom cities and counties is strained or exhausted. To shore up its infrastructure needs, the state has committed hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Meanwhile, it is trying to promote industries other than oil and gas, such as companies involved with unmanned aircraft, manufacturing associated with wind energy equipment, and data centers; but the remoteness of the western part of the state, along with the high cost of labor, makes doing business there complicated and expensive.

Hydrofracking, which has been widely attacked as an environmental hazard, is not as bad in North Dakota as in other states, since the process takes place nearly two miles underground; but it still raises significant environmental concerns. In 2011, the state levied $3 million in fines against 20 oil companies for environmental violations. It also undertook a review of industry regulations and was in the process of doubling its oil field inspectors.

The greatest stresses from the oil industry, however, involve the shortage of housing and the damage to the county road system, which in many places consists of two-lane gravel and dirt roads. Drilling a new well requires more than 2,000 truck trips, and the heavy rigs are destroying the roads. Fixing them has been estimated to require an investment of more than $900 million over the next 20 years.

These are external costs imposed by the oil industry that the government has to pick up. All of it requires financing, and the BND is there to provide the credit lines.

Lighting a fire under legislators

What the Bank of North Dakota has done to sustain its state’s oil boom, a publicly-owned bank could do for other promising industries in other states. But Dawson observes that no other state has yet voted to take up the challenge, despite a plethora of bills introduced for the purpose. Legislators are slow to move on innovations, unless a fire is lit under them by a crisis or a mass popular movement.

We would be better off sparking a movement than waiting for a crisis. The compelling data in Dawson’s Wall Street Journal article, properly construed, could add fuel to the flames.

Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books, including the best-selling Web of Debt. In The Public Bank Solution, her latest book, she explores successful public banking models historically and globally. Her 200+ blog articles are at EllenBrown.com.

 

Ready Or Not… The unsustainable status quo is ending

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By Chris Martenson

Source: Peak Prosperity

I have to confess, it’s getting more and more difficult to find ways of writing about everything going on in the world.

Not because there’s a shortage of things to write about — wars, propaganda, fraud, Ebola — but because most of the negative news and major world events we see around us are symptoms of the disease, not the disease itself.

There are only so many times you can describe the disease, before it all becomes repetitive for both the writer and the reader. It’s far more interesting to get to the root cause, because then real solutions offering real progress can be explored.

Equally troubling, in a world where the central banks have distorted, if not utterly flattened, the all important relationship between prices, risk, and reality, what good does it do to seek some sort of meaning in the new temporary arrangement of things?

When the price of money itself is distorted, then all prices are merely derivative works of that primary distortion. Some prices will be too high, some far too low, but none accurately determined by the intersection of true demand and supply.

If risk has been taken from where it belongs and instead shuffled onto central bank balance sheets, or allowed to be hidden by new and accommodating accounting tricks, has it really disappeared? In my world, risk is like energy: it can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed or transferred.

If reality no longer has a place at the table — such as when policy makers act as if the all-too-temporary shale oil bonanza is now a new permanent constant — then the discussions happening around that table are only accidentally useful, if ever, and always delusional.

Through all of this, the big picture as described in the Crash Course grows ever more obviously clear: we are on an unsustainable course; economically, ecologically, and — most immediately worryingly  — in our use of energy.

So let’s start there, with a simple grounding in the facts.

By The Numbers

Humans now number 7.1 billion on the planet and that number is on track to rise to 8 or 9 billion by 2050. Already ‘energy per capita’ is stagnant across the world and has been for a few decades. If the human population indeed grows by 15-25% over the next three and a half decades, then net energy production will have to grow by the same amount simply to remain constant on a per capita basis.

But can it? Specifically, can the net energy we derive from oil grow by another 15% to 25% from here?

Consider that, according to the EIA, the US shale oil miracle will be thirty years in the rear-view mirror by 2050 (currently projected to peak in 2020). And beyond just shale, all of the currently-operating conventional oil reservoirs will be far past peak and well into their decline. That means that the energy-rich oil from the giant fields of yesteryear will have to be replaced by an even larger volume of new oil from the energetically weaker unconventional plays just to hold things steady.

To advance oil net energy on a per capita basis between now and 2050, we’ll have to fight all of the forces of depletion with one hand, and somehow generate even more energy output from energetically parsimonious unconventional sources such as shale and tar sands with the other hand.

These new finds…they just aren’t the same as the old ones. They are deeper, require more effort per well to get oil out, and return far less per well than those of yesteryear. Those are just the facts as we now know them to be.

In 2013, total worldwide oil discoveries were just 20 billion barrels. That’s against a backdrop of 32 billion barrels of oil production and consumption. Since 1984, consuming more oil than we’re discovering has been a yearly ritual. To use an analogy: it’s as if we’re spending from a trust fund at a faster rate than the interest and dividends are accruing. Eventually, you eat through the principal balance and then it’s game over.

Meanwhile, even as the total net energy we receive from oil slips and our consumption wildly surpasses discoveries, the collective debt of the developed economies has surpassed the $100 trillion mark — which is a colossal bet that the future economy will not only be larger than it is currently, but exponentially larger.

These debts are showing no signs of slowing down. Indeed, the world’s central banks are doing everything in their considerable monetary power to goose them higher, even if this means printing money out of thin air and buying the debt themselves.

Along with this, the demographics of most developed economies will be drawing upon badly-underfunded pension and entitlement accounts — most of which are literally nothing more substantial than empty political promises made many years ago.

These trends in oil, debt and demographics are stark facts all on their own. But when we tie these to the obvious ecological strains of meeting the needs of just the world’s current 7.1 billion, any adherence to the status quo seems worse than merely delusional.

Here’s just one example from the ecological sphere. All over the globe we see regions in which ancient groundwater, in the form of underground aquifers, is being tapped to meet the local demand.

Many of these reservoirs have natural recharge rates that are measured in thousands, or even tens of thousands, of years.

Virtually all of them are being over-pumped. The ground water is being removed at a far faster rate than it naturally replenishes.

This math is simple. Each time an aquifer is over-pumped, the length of time left for that aquifer to serve human needs diminishes. Easy, simple math. Very direct.

And yet, we see cultures all over the globe continuing to build populations and living centers – very expensive investments, both economically and energetically – that are dependent for their food and water on these same over-pumped aquifers.

In most cases, you can calculate with excellent precision when those aquifers will be entirely gone and how many millions of people will be drastically impacted.

And yet, in virtually every case, the local ‘plan’ (if that’s the correct word to use here) is to use the underground water to foster additional economic/population growth today without any clear idea of what to do later on.

The ‘plan’ such as it is, seems to be to let the people of the future deal with the consequences of today’s decisions.

So if human organizations all over the globe seem unable to grasp the urgent significance of drawing down their water supplies to the point that they someday run out, what are the odds we’ll successfully address the more complex and less direct impacts like slowly falling net energy from oil, or steadily rising levels of debt? Pretty low, in my estimation.

Conclusion

Look, it’s really this simple: Anything that can’t go on forever, won’t.  We know, financially speaking, that a great number of nations are utterly insolvent no matter how much the accounting is distorted. Said another way: there’s really no point in worrying about the combined $100 trillion shortfall in Social Security and Medicare, because it simply won’t be paid.

Why? It can’t, so it won’t. The promised entitlements dwarf our ability to fund them many times over. There’s really not much more to say there.

But the biggest predicament we face is that steadily-eroding net energy from oil, which will someday be married to steadily-falling output as well, can’t support billions more people and our steadily growing pile of debt.

Just as there’s no plan at all for what to do when the groundwater runs out besides ‘Let the folks in the future figure that one out,’ there’s no plan at all for reconciling the forced continuation of borrowing at a faster rate than the economy can (or likely will be able to) grow.

The phrase that comes to mind is ‘winging it.’

The wonder of it all is that people still turn to the same trusted sources for guidance and as a place to put their trust. For myself, I have absolutely no faith that the mix of DC career politicians and academic wonks in the Fed have any clue at all about such things as energy or ecological realities.  Their lens only concerns itself with money, and the only tradeoff concessions they make are between various forms of economic vs. political power.

If the captains supposed to be guiding this ship are using charts that ignore what lies beneath the waterline, then you can be sure that sooner or later the ship is going to strike something hard and founder.

I’m pretty sure the Fed’s (and ECB’s and BoJ’s and BoE’s) charts resemble those of medieval times, with “Here be dragons” scrawled in the margins next to a series of charts of falling stock prices and unwinding consumer debt.

So there we are. The globe is heading from 7.1 billion to 8 or 9 billion souls, during a period of time when literally every known oil find will be well past its peak. Perhaps additional shale finds will come along on other continents to smooth things out for a bit (which is not looking likely), but it’s well past time to square up to the notion that cheap oil is gone. And with it, our prospects for the robust and widespread prosperity of times past.

The Political Dimension of Breakdown

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Source: The Hipcrime Vocab

This article claims that scientists have discovered an energy-efficient way to make biofuels. This brings up an often-overlooked point that there is nothing we can do under our current techno-industrial regime that requires fossil fuels. Anything we can do currently with fossil fuels we can theoretically do without them – power cars, generate electricity, make plastics, and so forth. There are substitutes – for example, ethanol and biodiesel in place of gas, corn for plastics, solar panels for electricity, and the like. We simply cannot do them on the scale we do now, because we would be limited by the earth’s solar budget. Fossil fuels were essentially “free” energy in so far as the EROI was so high because the sunlight that had created them occurred over the course of millions of years a long time ago. But to say that the techno-industrial system will cease to function with decreasing quality fossil fuels or net energy is simply not correct. It will simply decrease in scale. But that’s a different problem.

That’s also why the price issue never made sense to me. The argument is that the lower EROI of unconventional oil will cause the price of fuel to rise and the industrial economy to crash. So oil gets more expensive. So? Lots of things get more expensive, and the economy adapts. Oil was probably a lot cheaper fifty years ago than today. Well, we had an exploitative capitalist economy then, and we have one now. Nothing’s really changed. When something gets more expensive, it simply means that less people have access to it. Yes, the economy contracts, but so what? If it contracts slowly enough, no one will notice thanks to creeping normalcy.

Two recent stories about Detroit should illustrate this point. One is that thousands of people have been cut off from running water for delinquent bills. What has not been shut off, however, is water to the golf courses, businesses and sports fields, even though their bills are also delinquent:

Welcome to Detroit’s water war – in which upward of 150,000 customers, late on bills that have increased 119 percent in the last decade, are now threatened with shut-offs. Local activists estimate this could impact nearly half of Detroit’s mostly poor and black population – between 200,000 and 300,000 people.

“There are people who can’t cook, can’t clean, people coming off surgery who can’t wash. This is an affront to human dignity,” Charity said in an interview with Kate Levy. To make matters worse, children risk being taken by welfare authorities from any home without running water.

Denying water to thousands, as a sweltering summer approaches, might be bad enough in itself. But these shut-offs are no mere exercise in cost-recovery.

The official rationale for the water shut-downs – the Detroit Water Department’s need to recoup millions – collapses on inspection. Detroit’s high-end golf club, the Red Wing’s hockey arena, the Ford football stadium, and more than half of the city’s commercial and industrial users are also owing – a sum totalling $30 million. But no contractors have showed up on their doorstep.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/true-north/2014/jun/25/detroits-water-war-a-tap-shut-off-that-could-impact-300000-people

Second, this story points out that while services and pensions are slashed for working people, billionaires are still enjoying taxpayer-funded subsidies:

As U.S. states and cities grapple with budget and pension shortfalls, many are betting big on an unproven formula: Slash public employee pension benefits and public services while diverting the savings into lucrative subsidies for professional sports teams.

Detroit on Monday made itself the most prominent example of this trend. Officials in the financially devastated city announced that current and future municipal retirees had blessed a plan that will slash their pension benefits. On the same day, the billionaire owners of the Detroit Red Wings, the Ilitch family, unveiled details of an already approved taxpayer-financed stadium for the professional hockey team.

http://www.ibtimes.com/detroit-other-cash-strapped-us-cities-states-slashing-pension-benefits-while-subsidizing-1635660

There’s some idea that things will fall apart for everyone. They won’t. Things will keep chugging along for the rich and powerful in their air-conditioned sports luxury boxes and their golf courses and their gated communities; it’s just the people on the outside who won’t have access to jobs, adequate shelter, health care, decent food, or running water. Industrial society, however, will keep chugging along, even with $200.00 a barrel oil, because the pain and suffering can just be pushed down to those lower on the socioeconomic totem pole. We’ve already seen this with jobs – the workforce participation rate is down to what it was in the late 1970’s and this is rationalized as “the new normal.” No doubt not having access to healthcare and running water will be also rationalized as “the new normal” at some point in the not-to-distant future. There are still plentiful high-paying jobs for those with the “right” skills, and those skills mainly consist of having the right parents or knowing (or sucking up to) the right people. And if you’re not on the inside, it will be rationalized as “your own fault.”

People overlook the political dimension of collapse. Too often peak oil was used as an excuse for doing nothing. “What’s the use when it will all collapse anyway?” the argument went. “The economy will collapse and we’ll all be even anyway,” they thought. The slate will be wiped clean. The dollar will collapse and we’ll all be on an even footing once again trading with gold nuggets or something.

But the stories from Detroit show that even in a collapse situation, the elites will keep resources – water, oil, money, etc. – flowing to themselves even as they deprive them from the rest of us. Politics will appropriate the remaining resources, however scarce, and keep them flowing to the elites. Technology and industry may be deprived from us, but it will not be deprived from them, because there will always be some way to power industrial civilization within the earth’s solar budget for a certain ever-shrinking segment of the population. In that sense, collapse will never happen. For a certain segment of people, though, it has happened already. Just ask Detroit.

If we use collapse as some sort of excuse to not fight back politically, we will be left without, but rest assured, the elites will not. Not only will it not happen, but we will be as lambs to the slaughter.

BONUS: Who Bled Detroit Dry? (Vice):

The Water and Sewage Department has claimed some residents could pony up if they really wanted to but were simply mooching off the city.

This was a view shared by the surly cabdriver who gave me a lift into town from the airport. The city is “going to shit” he said before making the sinking sound of a bomb landing with his lips. The citizens of Detroit are, by and large, slovenly idiots—the kind of people who keep going back to the convenient store for cans of beer instead of buying the whole six-pack, he explained. The cabby had lived in the city for 35 years after immigrating from Iraq, but, he told me, these days “Detroit is worse than Baghdad.”

And certain statistics back him up. Baghdad actually has both a lower unemployment rate and a lower murder rate than Detroit.

Inventing a ‘Russian Threat’: Washington’s Full-Spectrum Subversion

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By Mark Hackard

Source: 21st Century Wire

What do postmodern exhibitionists, Islamic holy warriors and marauding ultra-nationalists share in common?

Seemingly little, aside from the fact that these bizarre bedfellows are the star assets of US policy in Eurasia. And despite their use of very different tactics, they all are tasked with the same mission: to undermine Russia, the only great power consistently opposed to American hegemony.

The Sochi Diversion

Today East and West contemplate the possibility of war over the fate of Ukraine, but the popular narrative was tailored for just such a standoff well in advance. Any attentive reader of Western press sources over recent months will have noticed that a dramatic upswing of negative Russia coverage began after Vladimir Putin thwarted Washington’s planned assault on Syria last summer. For just one example of the establishment’s dissemination of absurd Russophobia, look no further than the recent spy film Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, which features Kremlin-directed Orthodox Christian suicide bombers attacking Mammonism’s Holy of Holies, the New York Stock Exchange.

As the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics got underway, executives at the six US media giants plus their counterparts at the BBC and elsewhere had a green light to inflict maximum damage. Journalists were looking to fan the flames of any possible scandal at the games, but the stories didn’t add up to their hype.

A number of issues were used to paint Russia in an unflattering light, one at times approaching caricature. Was there some amount of corruption, mismanagement and inefficiency in constructing the new Olympic village in Sochi? Few Russians would doubt it, yet were American reporters really so insular as to expect nothing less than Switzerland? Exposure of bribery and fraud, lest we forget, featured as the epilogue to squeaky-clean Salt Lake City’s 2002 Winter Games. Meanwhile, threats by Islamic terrorists – the same Mujahedin operatives serving as proxies of US policy from Libya and Syria to Kosovo and Chechnya – against the Black Sea resort were amplified considerably with helpful leaks from “concerned” officials in Washington, to the point of convincing American Olympians’ families to stay home in fear[i]. But where were such warnings before two Chechens with connections to US intelligence allegedly bombed the Boston Marathon in April of 2013?

The media’s favorite manufactured controversy at the Olympics, moreover, had nothing at all to do with winter sports. Western audiences were led to believe that Russia’s laws banning the promotion of sodomy to children had cast a sinister pall over the games; in an expression of unfeigned displeasure, President Barack Obama skipped attendance (Killing Pashtun and Yemeni villagers with drone-launched Hellfire missiles is praiseworthy – upholding any measure of traditional morality is not[ii]). Try as they might, the press corps could find no evidence of “oppression” of homosexuals at Sochi, with the gay American skater Johnny Weir stating that he was treated “fantastically” by the Russian people during his stay. Even State Department-sponsored provocateurs from the cultural Marxist outfit Pussy Riot, famous for previous acts of obscenity and sacrilege, made a sorry attempt at spectacle before beating a hasty retreat. Unfazed, the Russian national team would go on to win first place for both gold medals and the overall count.

Flashpoint: Ukraine

Western vitriol over the Sochi Olympics represents one component of an information campaign, itself part of a wider US-led geopolitical offensive against Moscow. A variety of policy instruments are used for the objective of “containment,” from NATO expansion and power projection to sanctions against Russian companies. Yet by far the most economical means in the quest to weaken and demoralize Russia has been covert action, operations run under plausible deniability and comprising a broad range of activities. From the years of the Cold War, the Trans-Atlantic establishment has built an entire covert-action apparatus that encompasses not only intelligence services and special units of the military, but also nationalist paramilitaries, crime syndicates, transnational terror networks and a host of well-funded NGOs deeply intertwined with academia, major corporations and the media. In other words, an arsenal for full-spectrum subversion[iii].

Secret wars are waged just as intensively as the overt ones, and on multiple fronts. All the commotion over the Olympics amounted to a distraction from the central theater of action – Ukraine. As the curtain closed on Sochi, political unrest in Kiev climaxed with the overthrow of the undoubtedly corrupt but still legitimate President Viktor Yanukovych by pro-Western forces on February 22nd. The liberal-nationalist coalition that took power through mass protests and street fighting enjoyed extensive support – both public and clandestine – from the United States government. Timed for precisely the moment when Russia’s leadership was absorbed with showcasing its Olympics to the world, the coup’s main objective was to finally incorporate Ukraine as an EU/NATO satrapy.  The Washington-Wall Street agenda envisions stripping the country of its agricultural and industrial wealth and the deployment of US missile defense architecture just a day’s drive from Red Square.

What the events of early 2014 show is how quickly “soft power” can transition to the hard variant; subversion makes inroads for aggression. Washington spent two decades and $5 billion to make Ukraine safe for Chevron and Exxon-Mobil, but now it is reaping far more than it anticipated. Moscow has moved decisively to secure its vital interests in the region, leading to Crimea and the key naval base of Sevastopol being reunited with Russia after 60 years of estrangement. And the Russian-oriented south and east of Ukraine are also rising against an illegitimate regime resolved on virtually giving away strategic assets to multinationals – while sending ultra-nationalist militias to enforce the sales[iv]. From the port of Odessa to the Don River Basin, both Russians and Ukrainians share one thousand years of a unified Eastern Slavic civilization, an ideal that endures in blood and spirit; this reality will long outlive predatory IMF “structural adjustments” and the deformed chauvinism on offer from the current junta in Kiev.

After twenty years of eastward encroachment, the US push into Ukraine is the logical application of a policy to cripple Russia’s recovery and attain unchallenged dominance over the Eurasian heartland and its natural resources. Several consecutive rounds of NATO enlargement, the criminal bombardment of Serbia and subsequent overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic, a string of CIA-orchestrated color revolutions in the former Soviet space and the 2008 Georgia War – far from isolated occurrences, these events show an ever-tightening ring of encirclement. For Kremlin strategists, the Maidan takeover in Kiev proved the point of no return; they’ve seen that the Pax Americana plays for keeps. With their very future on the line, the Russians are fighting back.

Targeted for destabilization, Russia has demonstrated the will to use force in order to protect its people and interests. Short of outright military action, it possesses formidable covert capabilities. The ruthless Cheka-KGB pioneered the practice of human intelligence, and we should remember that most of Ukrainian territory was once the arena of unrelenting partisan campaigns during the Second World War. Given Ukraine’s importance to Russia’s overall geopolitical position, it’s a safe assumption that the contemporary FSB and GRU have developed robust agent networks and operational infrastructure for just the sort of contingency that Moscow confronts today. At the same time, the West’s feverish search for spetsnaz troops in the country is wholly beside the point; resistance in the pro-Russian southeast is organic and growing.

Russia is perhaps the one nation preventing the United States from becoming the last empire, the progenitor of a tyrannical world-state; it is therefore positioned squarely on the front line of a sustained twilight struggle. Globalist oligarchs, the actual controllers of the liberal order, employ multiple vectors of subversion in their ferocious attack on faith, sovereignty and identity. Whether our telescreens depict jihadists wreaking destruction from the Levant to the Caucasus, cells of NGO “activists” waging psychological warfare through the propagation of deviance, or deranged Ukrainian nationalists bent on fratricide, we are assured that all are heroes marching in the grand cause of democracy.

Though retaining effective deterrence is essential for any independent state, the ultimate strength of a Third Rome resurgent lies in its eternal tradition, that ancient Christianity once adopted by a rough-hewn Viking ruler from Kiev. When the Russian lands were threatened by ideological aggression from the West some eight centuries ago, soldier-prince Aleksandr Nevsky defended his people with spirit and sword:

From Adam to the flood, from the flood to the division of tongues, from the mixing of tongues to the beginning of Abraham, from Abraham until Israel’s passing through the Red Sea, from Israel’s Exodus to the death of Tsar David, from the beginning of Solomon’s reign to Tsar Augustus, from the beginning of Augustus to Christ’s Birth, from Christ’s birth unto the Passion and Resurrection of Our Lord, from His Resurrection to His Ascension into heaven, from His Ascension into heaven until the reign of Constantine, from the beginning of Constantine’s reign to the First Council, from the First Council until the Seventh – all of this we know well, and from you we accept no doctrine.

In our age Russia is accused by American officialdom of “betraying the New World Order” when the New World Order is betrayal itself, the very crowning of modern apostasy. Let the words of Aleksandr Nevsky be the answer of every free and noble people to the masters of subversion: From you we accept no doctrine.

[i] Dmitro Yarosh, the leader of Ukraine’s fascist Right Sector, called upon the Chechen militant Doku Umarov to carry out terror attacks in Russia just weeks before the latter was killed in March by an FSB special unit. Ukrainian nationalists are known to have fought on the side of Chechen rebels during the 1990s and 2000s. One such figure, the now-deceased Oleksandr Muzychko, “Sashko Biliy,” tortured and murdered at least 20 captured Russian soldiers.

[ii] Coincidentally or otherwise, the top financial donors for the Human Rights Campaign, America’s premiere homosexual lobbying organization, are drone manufacturers from the military-industrial complex.

[iii] Many are unaware that the CIA is far from a simple intelligence service; like Britain’s MI5 and MI6, its business has been social engineering both at home and abroad. Under the guidance of tax-exempt foundations, its programs have included funding and promoting not just jihadists and nationalist paramilitaries, but control of the media, feminism, the arts, the psychedelic revolution and narcotics trade. This is only a short rendering of cases of dialectics in action, giving one nonetheless a more definite sense of the aims of the “New World Order.”

[iv] Another odd partnership forged on the Maidan against Moscow has been that of Right Sector and Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, the head of the European Jewish Congress and a prominent patron of Zionist causes.

–

Read this and more of Mark Hackard’s work at his online project, Soul of the East.

 Author Mark Hackard is an independent foreign policy analyst. He earned a BA in Russian Language from Georgetown University and an MA in Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies from Stanford University. He studies the intersection of political culture, religion and strategic issues, which he approaches from a traditionalist-conservative position. Some of his major influences are Joseph de Maistre, Juan Donoso Cortes, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Rene Guenon and Fr. Seraphim Rose.

Saturday Matinee: Memorial Triple Feature

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Today happens to be the day of two pivotal events in American history: the WACO massacre (1993) and the Oklahoma City bombing (1995). In both cases there’s much evidence pointing towards state terrorism and cover-up. Two of the best documentaries which build convincing cases in support of this are “WACO: Rules of Engagement” and “A Noble Lie: Oklahoma City 1995”, both presented here in their entirety.

Lastly, I have recently and belatedly heard the news that whistleblower, investigative journalist and author of “Crossing the Rubicon” Michael C. Ruppert is dead. He reportedly killed himself last Sunday shortly after his final broadcast. Given the nature of Ruppert’s research it would be natural to suspect foul play, but the story is supported by the following statement from a close friend:

Sunday night following Mike’s Lifeboat Hour radio show, he was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. This was not a “fake” suicide. It was very well planned by Mike who gave us few clues but elaborate instructions for how to proceed without him. His wishes were to be cremated, and as of this moment, there are no plans for a memorial service. However, I will be taking his show this coming Sunday night, April 20, and the entire show will be an In Memoriam show for Mike with opportunities for listeners to call in. It was my privilege to have known Mike for 14 years, to have worked with him, to have been mentored by him, and to have supported him in some of his darkest hours, including the more recent ones. I am posting this announcement with the blessing of his partner Jesse Re and his landlord, Jack Martin. Thank you Mike for all of the truth you courageously exposed and for the legacy of truth-telling you left us. Goodbye my friend. Your memory will live in hour hearts forever. I have no more details to share than I am posting here. We should have much more information by Sunday night.

Carolyn Baker

Many including myself discovered Ruppert’s work through his early independent 9/11 research on his From the Wilderness website. A few years ago his work on Peak Oil was brought to a larger audience through the critically acclaimed documentery “Collapse” (2009). Rest in peace, Mike Ruppert.

11 Hanford Workers Sick From Toxic Fumes

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Image from HanfordChallenge.org

Image from HanfordChallenge.org

According to a KING5 report posted yesterday, at least 11 people have been poisoned in the past week after breathing in toxic fumes while working near underground tanks holding hazardous nuclear waste at the Hanford Nuclear Site. The exact source or sources of the vapors are still unknown.

The first two workers (employees for Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) which manages 177 underground tanks at the site) became ill last Wednesday after inhaling fumes that “tasted like copper”. Among the symptoms they reported suffering: headache, chest pain, difficulty breathing, nose bleeds, sore throats, and coughing up blood. Four more employees were sickened yesterday morning, after which an evacuation order was given to the entire tank farm facility. Two WRPS industrial hygiene inspectors fell ill shortly after followed by three more employees who breathed in fumes later that day.

Reported statements from the employees:

“The place is falling apart and they (WRPS) aren’t doing anything to fix it,”

“I feel fine now but when you get chemical exposure, you have respiratory issues.”

“It’s BS, We’ve expressed our opinion about it. We’ve said you haven’t taken the time to put in monitors and they say ‘It’s in the works’. Yet they keep sending us out to work. They’re not putting safety first.”

“They have some serious problems out there that they need to figure out,”

While this latest incident may not have been a surprise following recent revelations about “construction flaws” in the waste tanks at the site, it could have been avoided had the government and corporations that profited from nuclear energy and the nuclear arms industry bothered to invest a little more in the containment of their toxic byproducts. It also gives further credence to the suspicion that a cluster of rare birth defects in the surrounding areas are a direct result of environmental contamination from Hanford.

 

Kony 2012 Redux

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PHONY 2012

Two years ago it was difficult for most of us online to avoid the KONY 2012 viral video. It was a slickly produced ad by the Invisible Children advocacy group for their campaign to assist efforts to capture or kill Joseph Kony, leader of Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army (a militia infamous for using child soldiers). The video spread rapidly through social media, getting millions of views. Criticism and suspicion towards Invisible Children spread just as rapidly as people spoke out against the group’s methods and started noticing how the majority of their money went towards advertising, staff, and transportation rather than children of Uganda. Many also questioned the group’s motives, pointing out that Kony hasn’t been seen for years and how Uganda happened to be a source of natural resources the U.S. government has an interest in such as oil and valuable minerals. Uganda’s President and friend of Obama, Yoweri Museveni, has also used child soldiers and was the focus of a recent Human Rights Watch report uncovering his government’s high-level corruption. Possibly as a result of the public pressure, about two weeks after the release of KONY 2012 leader and co-founder of Invisible Children, Jason Russell, had a very unusual and scandalous public breakdown.

Despite the rapid loss of much of their public support following the incident, Invisible Children’s campaign still impressed the U.S. government enough to extend a military advise-and-assist mission to central Africa the following month (if we are to believe their stated motives). In addition, the European Union established a Joint Operations Centre to assist central Africa’s counter-LRA regional task force in a show of support (again, if we take them for their word). Congress also passed the Rewards for Justice Bill authorizing $5 million for information leading to Kony’s capture in January 2013.

Just last Sunday, the Obama administration announced the deployment of about 150 Special Operations troops and military aircraft to Uganda, ostensibly to search for Joseph Kony. According to the Pentagon, at least four CV-22 Osprey aircraft will arrive in the country by midweek, together with refueling planes and Special Operations forces airmen to fly and maintain them.

For more information on Kony, Invisible Children and the recent troop surge, read Patrick Henningsen’s report at 21st Century Wire: KONY 2014: Obama Orders New Troop Surge to ‘Find Ugandan Warlord’