Government Reports Link US Gangs to Mexican Drug War, But Fail to Address Causes of Gang Violence
Mexico's record-breaking year of violence in 2008 put the drug war in the headlines in the US. In June, former President Bush signed the Merida Initiative into law, officially supporting (morally, financially, and logistically) Mexican President Felipe Calderon's military-heavy strategy in combatting organized crime. In July, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced that it would draw up plans for a DHS "surge" on the Mexico-US border to prepare for the possibility that Mexico's drug war would "spill over" into the US. Phoenix has since been ranked "second in the world" in kidnappings behind Mexico City (thanks to fuzzy math), and Phoenix officials blame their kidnapping problems on Mexican criminal organizations that participate in human smuggling.
The Americas Program's Laura Carlsen separated the truth from the hype in her recent article "Drug War Doublespeak." Even without the hype, the truth is scary enough: with over 5,000 drug-related murders in Mexico in 2008, the drug war has become deadlier than the drugs themselves.
With the drug war in the news weekly, if not daily, government officials have faced increasing pressure to resolve the problem. Despite increasing public support for drug decriminalization, officials have refused opportunities to analyze drug decriminalization as a possible way to reduce (but not eliminate completely) drug-related death and violence. El Paso's City Council passed a resolution urging the US and Mexican governments to study and debate the possibility of decriminalizing drugs, but El Paso's mayor vetoed the resolution. This past week, Congress held a series of hearings on violence in Mexico and on the border. All of the hearings were in some way related to drug trafficking, but none of them included a single witness to discuss drug policy reform.
Rather than stepping back and carrying out serious analysis and debate over the drug policies that have driven Mexico into a crisis, US officials are playing the blame game. Since the US is the world's biggest drug market and Mexican drug trafficking organizations' primary source of weapons, US officials can't blame Latin America for all of its drug woes. So they're turning to gangs.
The US government recently released three major drug-related reports: the National Drug Threat Assessment, the International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, and the National Gang Threat Assessment. In all reports, gangs figure prominently in drug trafficking. The International Narcotics Control Strategy Report is broken down by country, and gangs feature prominently in almost every country report.
The National Gang Threat Assessment alleges "close associations" between US street gangs and Mexican drug trafficking organizations (DTOs). According to the report, "gang members provide Mexican DTOs with support, such as smuggling, transportation, and security." In addition to smuggling drugs and migrants into the US, the report argues that "gangs are increasingly smuggling weapons from the United States into Mexico as payment for drugs or to sell for a significant profit."
The National Drug Threat Assessment places the most emphasis on US street and prison gangs' alleged relationships with Mexican DTOs. While Mexico's increasing violence places increasing pressure on government officials, the National Drug Threat Assessment has found that US "gangs are becoming increasingly involved in wholesale-level drug trafficking, aided by their connections with drug trafficking organizations, particularly Mexican and Asian ones." Some highlights from the report:
* Gangs are active in drug distribution, particularly at the retail level, throughout the United States, and their involvement in drug distribution at the wholesale level is increasing.
* Gangs have developed or strengthened relationships with transnational criminal organizations and DTOs, gaining access to international sources of supply for larger shipments of illicit drugs that they then distribute.
* Mexican drug traffickers affiliated with the Sinaloa, Gulf, Juárez, and Tijuana Cartels maintain working relationships with at least 20 street gangs, prison gangs, and OMGs [outlaw motorcycle gangs].
* These affiliations have significantly increased the availability of illicit drugs in many of these areas.
* Gangs smuggle drugs, firearms, and aliens across the U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada borders.
* Some of these gangs have established associate gangs or chapters in border cities in Mexico, according to law enforcement reporting.
And, in the ultimate passing of the buck, the National Drug Threat Assessment states: "Gangs promote drug use through street-level trafficking."
It's important to note that while the National Drug Threat Assessment focuses almost exclusively on Latino, Black, and Asian-American gangs, the Department of Justice acknowledges that white gangs, even white supremacist ones like the Aryan Brotherhood, have "business relationships" with Mexican DTOs.
As government officials and the media look to more law enforcement-heavy solutions to drug-related violence, sooner or later their wrath is bound to fall on US gangs. But a law enforcement response to gangs will only exacerbate the situation because, as Jose Luis Pavon of the San Francisco-based organization HOMEY explains in the interview below, "prisons create gang members." As with drug violence, law enforcement responses to gang violence fail because they do not address the root causes of the problem.
Narco News: Please explain the work that HOMEY (Homies Organizing the Mission to Empower Youth) does.
Jose Luis Pavon: HOMEY is an organization that works primarily with Latino youth and recently immigrated youth in San Francisco, California. We work to prevent gang violence in the community here. We offer a number of different services--we do case management, counseling, street outreach, we have a social enterprise, a silkscreening business. We sell shirts which helps fund our work, we also have a youth organizing group called Kalpulli ["council" in the Nahuatl language], where young people work on political campaigns to fight for the rights of youth and they receive political education and skills training.
Narco News: US government reports are presenting gangs as the foot soldiers of Mexican drug trafficking organizations. Are gangs principally drug trafficking organizations, or they driven by other factors?
Jose Luis Pavon: Gangs aren't an isolated phenomenon. They are the result of not only a systemic failure in terms of society's or government's failure to meet the basic needs of its people and of its youth, but I also believe that it is a result of racist and very oppressive institutions that create the conditions and lead to the development of gang violence both within the United States as well as outside the United States.
The major contributing factor is poverty. There's really no justification for why, in a first world country like the United States of America, the richest country in the world, should have people in poverty. It's definitely not the same sort of poverty that people in third world countries live through, but there is a large portion of the population that doesn't make enough money to cover their basic needs in terms of food, rent, clothing, etc. First and foremost, the conditions of poverty drive people to join gangs or mafias.
So we have to talk about what contributes to poverty. In the United States, we have a failed public school system. We have a below base-line education within American public schools. What that means is that young people, particularly a large percentage of Black and Latino youth, are not graduating high school. 50% of youth drop out of high school before finishing.[1]
Secondly, kids are graduating school without having learned basic skills. We have a huge illiteracy problem. Kids don't know how to do math when they're done with school. These kids are not being prepared to enter the workforce. They're being pushed into low-wage jobs or into joining the military, or, again, creating the economic pressure for young people to join gangs or to engage in illegal activities in the drug trade.
Another contributing factor is that the jobs that are out there in the private sector discriminate against young people of color.
The other big driving factor is the huge concentration of jails. The state of California has one of the largest prison populations in the world. It is a huge industry. This combination of factors, the economic, the lack of education, and hundreds of thousands of people going in and out of prisons is what I believe is creating the gang violence within the United States.
Narco News: Government reports say that gangs, including those with connections to Mexican DTOs, use prisons to recruit members, and that they often run their distribution operations from US prisons.
Jose Luis Pavon: It's not necessarily that the Mexican cartels are using prisons to recruit gangs, it's the prisons create gang members. Prisons teach people to become murderers and criminals.[2] We have a gross over-investment in prisons in the United States, particularly in California, New York, and Texas. Prisons are extremely hostile. You don't go there to get rehabilitated, to receive therapy or job training in order to go through some sort of healing process. When you go there, bring imprisoned is like being in a constant state of warfare. People come out heavily emotionally traumatized when they're incarcerated. Many people come out of prison suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, similar to what war veterans suffer. So what's happening is folks are coming out of prison more violent than when they went in to prison. So it's the other way around, the prisons are creating the conditions for people to participate in the drug trade.
Narco News: How are government spending priorities contributing to the gang problem?
Jose Luis Pavon: The state of California has been cutting money for schools. At this point some areas of the state, including San Francisco, are shutting down schools because they don't have enough money to operate. Well, let me rephrase that. The state isn't spending enough money to continue to operate the number of schools we have.[3]
Since the Reagan administration, there has been a consistent slashing of workforce development dollars, which used to be used for job training such as in the construction trade, or mechanics--giving youth access to different industries where they can find employment. That money has been cut. If these were the government systems in place to prepare the population to enter the workforce, they have been consistently cutting it and concurrently increasing the amount of money that goes into prisons and law enforcement and the military.
One of the strongest lobbying forces in Sacramento and Washington DC is the prison guards' union. They purposely lobby the government to create policies that shift more young people into jail. They don't go to Sacramento or Washington to advocate for more after-school funding. They go to advocate for increases in law enforcement funding and policies that make it easier to incarcerate more youth. They ultimately go to advocate for their job security. So they prefer to lock young people up to maintain job security for prison guards and police officers than to actually work towards a solution.
HOMEY recently lost more than half of the city funding that we used to receive, and city funding made up the majority of our budget. So we've been laying off staff.
Organizations like HOMEY all across the US right now are [experiencing budget] cuts. We are the front line in terms of a proactive solution to the violence. We do have a considerable impact in being able to slow down the violence. If we didn't exist, a lot of the kids that we work with now would be directly engaged in the violence. So we feel like these cuts are both the result of the economy--they're not talking about bailing us out--but they're also a form of political retaliation against our organization because of the positions we've taken. We've been a very vocal organization. We've mobilized campaigns against public officials around issues involving the criminalization of youth and racial profiling and demanding that they address the root causes of violence.
This is happening to social programs across the board--everything from childcare centers to recreation, sports, and arts programs, violence prevention, academic programs--everything is getting cut--the schools, the universities, the junior colleges. It's going to increase poverty and it's going to increase violence, so eventually we have to spend the money anyways on the jails and the police. It's a reallocation of funding for militarization of these poor and working class communities. That's generally what happens during economic downturns--law enforcement gets an increase in funding.[4]
The economic downturn is having a direct impact on increasing the violence. Young people that we had success with, young people that we had convinced to leave the gang life, that had secured good jobs and were trying to go to school, they're going right back to the streets because they're unemployed now. Young people are coming to us saying, "If I can't find a job then I'm going to have to go back to selling drugs."
Narco News: How could government policy be more effective in reducing gang violence?
Jose Luis Pavon: The models for the solution exist. If you look at the wealthy areas of the United States, like Manhattan or Beverly Hills, the children of wealthy people aren't shooting each other. They have access to quality education, their basic needs in terms of housing and healthcare are secured. They have access to the resources necessary for developing into an adult.
When you look at other countries such as Britain or France or Spain or even Cuba, these are countries that have invested and prioritized spending in education. They've also created programs to secure access to higher education as well as universal healthcare and stronger labor regulations to secure access to living wage jobs and quality employment. These countries don't have a gang violence problem like you see in the United States or in other countries around the world.
It's simple cause and effect: if you invest in young people's development, they become healthy productive citizens and members of society. If you fail to invest in young people, and instead of investing them you process them and institutionalize them through dysfunctional and racist and oppressive institutions, what you will get is dysfunctional adults.
The solution is out there, but ultimately the big resistance to it is that it requires a reallocation of wealth. If you're going to fund education, the money has to come from somewhere. If you're going to increase wages, the money has to come from somewhere. Ultimately it means increasing taxes for the middle class and the rich. Within the United States, that's something that the powers that be are extremely resistant to. But in Europe they pay really heavy taxes. All of the western European countries have much stronger policies in terms of securing the development of youth. And it works there, so I think it could work in other places, too.
Narco News: You mention Cuba as an example of a country that prioritizes education. Since Cuba is so close to countries with serious gang problems and because it's such a poor country, can you elaborate on the Cuba example?
Jose Luis Pavon: What's really interesting about Cuba is that Cuba has a tiny economy, is a very poor country, and even with the small amount of financing it has, it has some of the best education and some of the highest literacy rates in the world--it has a higher literacy rate than the United States.[5] It has universal healthcare, it has affordable housing, and Cuba does not have a gang violence problem. It does not have a massive amount of youth (or adults) killing each other like we've seen in neighboring countries like Haiti, Puerto Rico, Mexico, or Central American countries. Again, it's cause and effect. If you invest in young people, they grow up healthy. If you don't invest in them, they don't grow up healthy and you have problems.
Footnotes:
[1] Approximately 50% of Black, American Indian, and Hispanic youth complete high school with a diploma. Approximately one-third of all US youth drop out of high school. The drop-out rate in southern states is higher: about 50%. For more statistics on youth graduation rates, see Silent Crisis: Large Numbers of Youth Are Not Completing High School.
[2] Most prisoners aren't murderers or violent criminals when they enter prison. In 2004, the last time the Department of Justice analyzed non-violent offenders in the state prisons, 75% of incarcerated individuals were non-violent offenders. According to the Justice Department, "The single largest offense category of nonviolent offenders discharged from prisons was drug trafficking, accounting for nearly 1 in 5 nonviolent releasees." The Justice Department's statistics also confirm Pavon's assertion that failings in the US education system also play a role in driving youth to criminal activities: 40% of non-violent offenders had less than a high school education, and an additional 25% had received a GED. This means that 65% of non-violent offenders did not complete high school with a diploma. For more information, see Profile of Nonviolent Offenders Exiting State Prisons (PDF file).
[3] The LA Times reports that California spends "far less than the national average for each of its students.... Even before the budget cuts, the state planned to spend $5,900 a student in California's higher-education system this year (including community college students) but almost 10 times that amount ($58,000) per inmate in our bloated prison system, which absorbs as much money from the state budget as Cal State and UC combined."
[4] The President's stimulus package includes $2 billion for law enforcement agencies across the country.
[5] Cuba's literacy rate is 99.8%. The United States' literacy rate is 99.0%
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Legal U.S. Arms Exports May Be Source of Narco Syndicates Rising Firepower
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/bill-conroy/2009/03/legal-us-arms-exports-may-be-source-narco-syndicates-rising-firepower
Legal U.S. Arms Exports May Be Source of Narco Syndicates Rising Firepower
Posted by Bill Conroy - March 29, 2009 at 3:18 pm
More Than $1 billion In Private-Sector Weapons Exports Approved For Mexico Since 2004
Mainstream media and Beltway pundits and politicians in recent months have unleashed a wave of panic in the nation linking the escalading violence in Mexico, and its projected spread into the U.S., to illegal weapons smuggling.
The smokescreen being spread by these official mouthpieces of manufactured consensus is that a host of criminal operators are engaging in straw (or fraudulent) gun purchases, making clandestine purchases at U.S. gun shows or otherwise assembling small caches of weapons here in the states in order to smuggle them south of the border to the “drug cartels.”
The Obama administration is now sending hundreds of additional federal agents to the border in an effort to interdict this illegal arms smuggling to reassure an agitated middle-America that Uncle Sam will get these bad guys. The cascade of headlines from mainstream media outlets printing drug-war pornography assures us in paragraphs inserted between the titillation that the ATF’s Operation Gunrunner and other similar get-tough on gun-seller programs will save America from the banditos of Mexico.
To be sure, some criminal actors in the U.S. are smuggling small arms across the border. But the drug war in Mexico is not being fought with Saturday night specials, hobby rifles and hunting shotguns. The drug trafficking organizations are now in possession of high-powered munitions in vast quantities that can’t be explained by the gun-show loophole.
At least one report in a mainstream media outlet deserves credit for recognizing that trend.
“[Mexican] traffickers have escalated their arms race, acquiring military-grade weapons, including hand grenades, grenade launchers, armor-piercing munitions and antitank rockets with firepower far beyond the assault rifles and pistols that have dominated their arsenals,” states a recent story in the Los Angeles Times. “The proliferation of heavier armaments points to a menacing new stage in the Mexican government's 2-year-old war against drug organizations. …”
Narco News, in a report last December [“Juarez murders shine a light on an emerging Military Cartel”] also examined the increasing militarization of narco-trafficking groups in Mexico and pointed out that U.S. military-issued ammunition popped up in an arms cache seized in Reynosa, Mexico, in November 2008 that was linked to the Zetas, a mercenary group that provides enforcement services to Mexican narco-trafficking organizations.
So where are these military-grade weapons really coming from?
Rather than address that valid question head on, the mainstream media, and now even the Obama administration, have been attempting to paint lipstick on the pig, trumpeting, in the words of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the “courageous efforts undertaken by [Mexican] President Calderon.”
And the “courageous” Mexican President Felipe Calderon, for his part, redirects the blame for the Mexican narco-organization’s increasing firepower back to the U.S.
In a story published by the Associated Press in late February of this year, Mexican President Calderon is quoted alleging the following:
We need to stop the flow of guns and weapons towards Mexico. Let me express to you that we've seized in this two years more than 25,000 weapons and guns, and more than 90 percent of them came from United States, and I'm talking from missiles launchers to machine guns and grenades.
But no matter how hard Calderon and U.S. officials try to disguise the pig, it still oinks.
A Narco News investigation into the flow of arms across the U.S. border appears to lead right back to the systemic corruption that afflicts a vast swath of the Mexican government under President Felipe Calderon and this nation’s own embrace of market-driven free-trade policies.
The deadliest of the weapons now in the hands of criminal groups in Mexico, particularly along the U.S. border, by any reasonable standard of an analysis of the facts, appear to be getting into that nation through perfectly legal private-sector arms exports, measured in the billions of dollars, and sanctioned by our own State Department. These deadly trade commodities — grenade launchers, explosives and “assault” weapons —are then, in quantities that can fill warehouses, being corruptly transferred to drug trafficking organizations via their reach into the Mexican military and law enforcement agencies, the evidence indicates.
“As in other criminal enterprises in Mexico, such as drug smuggling or kidnapping, it is not unusual to find police officers and military personnel involved in the illegal arms trade,” states an October 2007 report by the for-profit global intelligence group Stratfor, which Barron’s magazine once dubbed the Shadow CIA. “… Over the past few years, several Mexican government officials have been arrested on both sides of the border for participating in the arms trade.”
Counting Commerce
The U.S. State Department oversees a program that requires private companies in the United States to obtain an export license in order to sell defense hardware or services to foreign purchasers — which include both government units and private buyers in other countries. These arms deals are known as Direct Commercial Sales [DCS]. Each year, the State Department issues a report tallying the volume and dollar amount of DCS items approved for export.
The reports do not provide details on who the weapons or defense services were exported to specifically, but do provide an accounting of the destination countries. Although it is possible that some of the deals authorized under the DCS program were altered or even canceled after the export licenses were issued, the data compiled by State does provide a broad snapshot of the extensive volume of U.S. private-sector arms shipments to both Mexico and Latin America in general.
According to an analysis of the DCS reports, some $1 billion in defense hardware was approved for export to Mexico via private U.S. companies between fiscal year 2004 and fiscal year 2007 — the most recent year for which data was available. Overall, during the same period, a total of some $3.7 billion in weapons and other military hardware was approved for export under the DCS program to all of Latin America and the Caribbean.
In addition to the military hardware exports approved for Mexico, some $3.8 billion in defense-related “services” [technical assistance and training via private U.S. contractors] also were approved for “export” to Mexico over the same four-year period, according to the DCS reports.
That means the total value of defense-related hardware and service exports by private U.S. companies to Mexico tallied nearly $5 billion over the four-year window. And that figure doesn’t even count the $700 million in assistance already authorized under the Merida Initiative [Plan Mexico] or any new DCS exports approved for fiscal years 2008 and 2009 [which ends Sept. 30].
Following is a sample of the types of arms shipments approved for export to Mexico through the DCS program during fiscal years 2006 and 2007 alone:
• $3.3 million worth of ammunition and explosives, including ammunition-manufacturing equipment;
• 13,000 nonautomatic and semiautomatic firearms, pistols and revolvers at a total value of $11.6 million;
• 42 grenade launchers valued at $518,531;
• 3,578 explosive projectiles, including grenades, valued at $78,251;
• Various night-vision equipment valued at $963,201.
A troubling revelation about the DCS program, which has direct relevance to the drug war in Mexico, is contained in a fiscal 2007 report issued by the State Department. That report summarizes the results of the State Department’s Blue Lantern end-use monitoring program for DCS exports.
That Blue Lantern report found that "the Western Hemisphere (especially Latin America and the Caribbean) continues to be a region with a high incidence of unfavorable cases involving firearms and ammunition." The unfavorable finding indicates that fraud may have occurred and those cases "may be subject to civil enforcement actions or referred to law enforcement for criminal investigation."
For the entire DCS program, and this is a disturbing figure, of the 634 Blue Lantern cases closed in fiscal year 2007, a total of 143, or 23 percent, were deemed “unfavorable."
The Blue Lantern report does not mention specific transactions in detail, but does provide case-study examples. One included in the report indicated that a Latin American firearms dealer acted as a “front company for another Latin American company.”
“[The] owner admits that [the] company exists only on paper…,” the fiscal year 2007 Blue Lantern report states. “[The] host country authorities had temporarily suspended the firearms import licenses to [the] parent company because of its link with small arms smuggling to gangs in [a] third country.”
Given Mexico’s strict gun laws with respect to private individuals, it is likely most of the DCS program defense hardware approved for export to that nation was directed toward the military or law enforcement agencies. But it is precisely that fact which should be raising some alarm in Washington.
Mexico, by Calderon’s own admission, is dealing with a serious corruption problem within the ranks of Mexican law enforcement.
From a December 2008 report in the Los Angeles Times:
Mexican President Felipe Calderon on Tuesday said his government was making strides against corruption but warned that graft remained a threat to the nation's efforts against crime.
Calderon’s rival in the 2006 Mexican presidential race, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, in recent open letter published in the Mexican newspaper Por Esto! and addressed to U.S. Secretary of State Clinton, is even more blunt in his assessment of the extent of corruption within the Calderon regime.
You surely know that all of this began when a group of about 30 traffickers of influence and corrupt politicians, using the cover of so-called neoliberal economic policies, took control of the Mexican State, as well as a good part of national and so-called public goods. And these policies of pillaging that has enriched a minority in an exaggerated and obscene manner, in a way that has not occurred in any other part of the world, has condemned the Mexican people to exile and survival.
And that corruption is not limited to Mexican law enforcement. Sources provided Narco News with a PowerPoint presentation prepared for the DEA that indicates the following:
Between Jan 2000-Dec 2006: More than 163,000 military members were criminally processed during former president Vicente Fox’s 6 years term of office. The majority of the crimes were: [the list includes abuse of power, homicide, embezzlement, kidnapping, bank robbery, illegal possession of firearms and health crimes [essentially organized crime].
Another slide in that same DEA PowerPoint presentation states that the Mexican military reported an average of 1,200 desertions per month in 2006.
And it should not be ignored that the Zetas, one of the most violent drug-organization groups in Mexico right now, was founded by former elite Mexican special-operations troops — many of whom received some training in the United States.
[The two most recent DCS reports can be found at these links: FY2006 and FY2007.]
The Elephant in the Room
A former senior U.S. Customs Inspector, who asked that his name not be used, provided the following reaction when presented with the DCS data:
I would agree entirely [that] DCS (and DoD gifted, as opposed to DCS sold) weapons are obviously the simplest explanation for the massive rise in the number of fully automatic weapons, grenades, rockets, etc., obtained by the narcotics gangs. … That is to say, they are obtaining their weapons from their own, Mexican, government, by various illegal means.
… The Mexican government has a long and well-documented history of corruption at all levels, from city to federal. Most of the weapons being "displayed" [in the media] are simply not available for sale to American civilians, particularly including the grenades — both 40mm and hand types. …
… The source of these weapons can be easily traced by ATF. … All foreign sales must be reported to ATF prior to shipment, just in case the government wishes to hold up a shipment to a particular country, etc. Tracing the serial numbers would be easy, with US government assistance, of course.
But that assumes the Mexican government, and our own government, really want to trace those weapons. A November 2008 report in the San Antonio Express News, which includes details of the major weapons seizure in Reynosa, Mexico, that same month involving the Zetas, reveals the following:
Another example of coordination problems occurred this month. Mexican authorities in Reynosa across the border from McAllen, seized the country’s single largest stash of cartel weapons — nearly 300 assault rifles, shoulder-fired grenade launchers and a half million rounds of ammunition.
But weeks later, Mexican authorities still have not allowed the ATF access to serial numbers that would help them track down the buyers and traffickers on the U.S. side.
To be sure, cartel corruption and intimidation of Mexican law enforcement at every level and in every agency has caused some dysfunction.
A former DEA agent, who also asked not to be named, says the shipment of military-grade weapons to the Mexican government under the DCS program, given the extent of corruption within that government, is essentially like “shipping weapons to a crime syndicate.”
At least one individual with long connections to U.S. intelligence agencies is convinced that the corrupt transfer of arms between the Mexican military and narco-criminals in Mexico is more than theory.
Tosh Plumlee is a former CIA contract pilot who flew numerous missions delivering arms to Latin America and returning drugs to the United States as part of the covert Iran/Contra operations in the 1980s, according to public records. After becoming troubled by those government-sanctioned missions, Plumlee decided to take his concerns to Congress.
Plumlee was eventually called to testify before Congress on a number of occasions, only to find that the Congressional committees hearing his testimony ordered it classified — which meant if Plumlee later spoke about it publicly, he would be violating the law.
Plumlee, however, still has deep contacts in the spook world, some of whom, it seems, want him to bring some information forward concerning the nature of the drug war in Juarez, Mexico. As a result, Plumlee says he recently made a journey with individuals he described as “sensitive sources” to a small warehouse in Juarez — located just across border from El Paso, Texas. Plumlee says he agreed to accompany the sources because he is currently doing research for a book he is writing about the drug war.
Plumlee says it was clear to him that the warehouse was not part of a Mexican military operation, yet it was packed with U.S. military weapons — including grenades, grenade launchers, LAW anti-tank weapons [essentially high-tech bazookas], M16 rifles and night-vision equipment.
Plumlee says his sources indicated that the U.S. weapons in that warehouse — as well as another warehouse located elsewhere in Juarez that he did not visit — were now under the control of a narco-trafficking organization, which had obtained the munitions from corrupt elements of the Mexican military.
Plumlee concedes he does not know why he was allowed to step inside that warehouse and later walk out alive. All he can say for sure is that he was being used to get the information out and suspects that those weapons have since been relocated.
As incredible as Plumlee’s story sounds, it cannot really be surprising that there would be stores of weapons in clandestine warehouses in a city like Juarez, which, since the beginning of 2008, has produced about 2,000 of the estimated 7,000 murders in Mexico’s bloody drug war. And whether anyone chooses to believe Plumlee’s information or not, it is clear he has a long history of being a player in the netherworld of black operations, and might well be trusted by some players who still engaged in that dark art.
Mike Levine, a former DEA agent who has years of experience participating in dangerous undercover operations overseas, says Plumlee is who he claims to be. Levine now hosts a radio show in New York City on a Pacifica Radio station [the Expert Witness Radio Show] and Plumlee has appeared on that show several times over the years.
Here’s what Levine has to say about Plumlee’s credibility:
Before I invited Tosh to come on the air, because his story was so incredible, I vetted him through government agents, all of whom said he is the real thing. I have a copy of the air map he turned over to a San Diego Weekly newspaper, bearing notations of all his drug flights, which first sold me on the guy.
After he had made many revelations on-air in New York, and mainstream media continued to ignore him, Congress was apparently listening. I had been told by my own sources that agencies like CIA were regularly recording our show. (I used to remind them, on air, to make sure they pressed the red button to record.)
So Tosh calls me one day in around 1997 and says that Congress had asked him to testify about his experiences, in closed-door session. I told him, "If you do that, they are going to do nothing but classify your testimony making it illegal for you to tell your own story."
And that, indeed, is what did happen, according to Tosh.
Could it be that Plumlee was used as a type of message in a bottle because, like has happened so many times in the past history of this nation, the normal chain of command and our politicians in Washington, D.C., simply don’t want to hear the truth, don’t want to risk rocking the boat of international relations with Mexico or interrupting the free-trade flow of a multi-billion dollar “legal” arms business?
After all, if our government had to concede that the Mexican military is so wracked with corruption and beyond the control of Mexican President Calderon that it cannot be trusted to control its own weapons, then how can U.S. cooperation with Calderon’s government have any hope for success in what many would argue is an already ill-conceived drug war?
In fact, if that is what we are now confronting in Mexico, it is likely that U.S. cooperation with Calderon’s government, when it takes the form of U.S. weapon shipments, is likely only going to fuel further bloodshed and put U.S. agents and operatives now in the field assisting in those efforts at grave risk.
Narco News did seek to get comment from officials at both the Department of Justice and the Department of State about the issues raised in this story. To date, those queries — both by phone and e-mail — have been met with dead silence.
Stay tuned ….
Legal U.S. Arms Exports May Be Source of Narco Syndicates Rising Firepower
Posted by Bill Conroy - March 29, 2009 at 3:18 pm
More Than $1 billion In Private-Sector Weapons Exports Approved For Mexico Since 2004
Mainstream media and Beltway pundits and politicians in recent months have unleashed a wave of panic in the nation linking the escalading violence in Mexico, and its projected spread into the U.S., to illegal weapons smuggling.
The smokescreen being spread by these official mouthpieces of manufactured consensus is that a host of criminal operators are engaging in straw (or fraudulent) gun purchases, making clandestine purchases at U.S. gun shows or otherwise assembling small caches of weapons here in the states in order to smuggle them south of the border to the “drug cartels.”
The Obama administration is now sending hundreds of additional federal agents to the border in an effort to interdict this illegal arms smuggling to reassure an agitated middle-America that Uncle Sam will get these bad guys. The cascade of headlines from mainstream media outlets printing drug-war pornography assures us in paragraphs inserted between the titillation that the ATF’s Operation Gunrunner and other similar get-tough on gun-seller programs will save America from the banditos of Mexico.
To be sure, some criminal actors in the U.S. are smuggling small arms across the border. But the drug war in Mexico is not being fought with Saturday night specials, hobby rifles and hunting shotguns. The drug trafficking organizations are now in possession of high-powered munitions in vast quantities that can’t be explained by the gun-show loophole.
At least one report in a mainstream media outlet deserves credit for recognizing that trend.
“[Mexican] traffickers have escalated their arms race, acquiring military-grade weapons, including hand grenades, grenade launchers, armor-piercing munitions and antitank rockets with firepower far beyond the assault rifles and pistols that have dominated their arsenals,” states a recent story in the Los Angeles Times. “The proliferation of heavier armaments points to a menacing new stage in the Mexican government's 2-year-old war against drug organizations. …”
Narco News, in a report last December [“Juarez murders shine a light on an emerging Military Cartel”] also examined the increasing militarization of narco-trafficking groups in Mexico and pointed out that U.S. military-issued ammunition popped up in an arms cache seized in Reynosa, Mexico, in November 2008 that was linked to the Zetas, a mercenary group that provides enforcement services to Mexican narco-trafficking organizations.
So where are these military-grade weapons really coming from?
Rather than address that valid question head on, the mainstream media, and now even the Obama administration, have been attempting to paint lipstick on the pig, trumpeting, in the words of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the “courageous efforts undertaken by [Mexican] President Calderon.”
And the “courageous” Mexican President Felipe Calderon, for his part, redirects the blame for the Mexican narco-organization’s increasing firepower back to the U.S.
In a story published by the Associated Press in late February of this year, Mexican President Calderon is quoted alleging the following:
We need to stop the flow of guns and weapons towards Mexico. Let me express to you that we've seized in this two years more than 25,000 weapons and guns, and more than 90 percent of them came from United States, and I'm talking from missiles launchers to machine guns and grenades.
But no matter how hard Calderon and U.S. officials try to disguise the pig, it still oinks.
A Narco News investigation into the flow of arms across the U.S. border appears to lead right back to the systemic corruption that afflicts a vast swath of the Mexican government under President Felipe Calderon and this nation’s own embrace of market-driven free-trade policies.
The deadliest of the weapons now in the hands of criminal groups in Mexico, particularly along the U.S. border, by any reasonable standard of an analysis of the facts, appear to be getting into that nation through perfectly legal private-sector arms exports, measured in the billions of dollars, and sanctioned by our own State Department. These deadly trade commodities — grenade launchers, explosives and “assault” weapons —are then, in quantities that can fill warehouses, being corruptly transferred to drug trafficking organizations via their reach into the Mexican military and law enforcement agencies, the evidence indicates.
“As in other criminal enterprises in Mexico, such as drug smuggling or kidnapping, it is not unusual to find police officers and military personnel involved in the illegal arms trade,” states an October 2007 report by the for-profit global intelligence group Stratfor, which Barron’s magazine once dubbed the Shadow CIA. “… Over the past few years, several Mexican government officials have been arrested on both sides of the border for participating in the arms trade.”
Counting Commerce
The U.S. State Department oversees a program that requires private companies in the United States to obtain an export license in order to sell defense hardware or services to foreign purchasers — which include both government units and private buyers in other countries. These arms deals are known as Direct Commercial Sales [DCS]. Each year, the State Department issues a report tallying the volume and dollar amount of DCS items approved for export.
The reports do not provide details on who the weapons or defense services were exported to specifically, but do provide an accounting of the destination countries. Although it is possible that some of the deals authorized under the DCS program were altered or even canceled after the export licenses were issued, the data compiled by State does provide a broad snapshot of the extensive volume of U.S. private-sector arms shipments to both Mexico and Latin America in general.
According to an analysis of the DCS reports, some $1 billion in defense hardware was approved for export to Mexico via private U.S. companies between fiscal year 2004 and fiscal year 2007 — the most recent year for which data was available. Overall, during the same period, a total of some $3.7 billion in weapons and other military hardware was approved for export under the DCS program to all of Latin America and the Caribbean.
In addition to the military hardware exports approved for Mexico, some $3.8 billion in defense-related “services” [technical assistance and training via private U.S. contractors] also were approved for “export” to Mexico over the same four-year period, according to the DCS reports.
That means the total value of defense-related hardware and service exports by private U.S. companies to Mexico tallied nearly $5 billion over the four-year window. And that figure doesn’t even count the $700 million in assistance already authorized under the Merida Initiative [Plan Mexico] or any new DCS exports approved for fiscal years 2008 and 2009 [which ends Sept. 30].
Following is a sample of the types of arms shipments approved for export to Mexico through the DCS program during fiscal years 2006 and 2007 alone:
• $3.3 million worth of ammunition and explosives, including ammunition-manufacturing equipment;
• 13,000 nonautomatic and semiautomatic firearms, pistols and revolvers at a total value of $11.6 million;
• 42 grenade launchers valued at $518,531;
• 3,578 explosive projectiles, including grenades, valued at $78,251;
• Various night-vision equipment valued at $963,201.
A troubling revelation about the DCS program, which has direct relevance to the drug war in Mexico, is contained in a fiscal 2007 report issued by the State Department. That report summarizes the results of the State Department’s Blue Lantern end-use monitoring program for DCS exports.
That Blue Lantern report found that "the Western Hemisphere (especially Latin America and the Caribbean) continues to be a region with a high incidence of unfavorable cases involving firearms and ammunition." The unfavorable finding indicates that fraud may have occurred and those cases "may be subject to civil enforcement actions or referred to law enforcement for criminal investigation."
For the entire DCS program, and this is a disturbing figure, of the 634 Blue Lantern cases closed in fiscal year 2007, a total of 143, or 23 percent, were deemed “unfavorable."
The Blue Lantern report does not mention specific transactions in detail, but does provide case-study examples. One included in the report indicated that a Latin American firearms dealer acted as a “front company for another Latin American company.”
“[The] owner admits that [the] company exists only on paper…,” the fiscal year 2007 Blue Lantern report states. “[The] host country authorities had temporarily suspended the firearms import licenses to [the] parent company because of its link with small arms smuggling to gangs in [a] third country.”
Given Mexico’s strict gun laws with respect to private individuals, it is likely most of the DCS program defense hardware approved for export to that nation was directed toward the military or law enforcement agencies. But it is precisely that fact which should be raising some alarm in Washington.
Mexico, by Calderon’s own admission, is dealing with a serious corruption problem within the ranks of Mexican law enforcement.
From a December 2008 report in the Los Angeles Times:
Mexican President Felipe Calderon on Tuesday said his government was making strides against corruption but warned that graft remained a threat to the nation's efforts against crime.
Calderon’s rival in the 2006 Mexican presidential race, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, in recent open letter published in the Mexican newspaper Por Esto! and addressed to U.S. Secretary of State Clinton, is even more blunt in his assessment of the extent of corruption within the Calderon regime.
You surely know that all of this began when a group of about 30 traffickers of influence and corrupt politicians, using the cover of so-called neoliberal economic policies, took control of the Mexican State, as well as a good part of national and so-called public goods. And these policies of pillaging that has enriched a minority in an exaggerated and obscene manner, in a way that has not occurred in any other part of the world, has condemned the Mexican people to exile and survival.
And that corruption is not limited to Mexican law enforcement. Sources provided Narco News with a PowerPoint presentation prepared for the DEA that indicates the following:
Between Jan 2000-Dec 2006: More than 163,000 military members were criminally processed during former president Vicente Fox’s 6 years term of office. The majority of the crimes were: [the list includes abuse of power, homicide, embezzlement, kidnapping, bank robbery, illegal possession of firearms and health crimes [essentially organized crime].
Another slide in that same DEA PowerPoint presentation states that the Mexican military reported an average of 1,200 desertions per month in 2006.
And it should not be ignored that the Zetas, one of the most violent drug-organization groups in Mexico right now, was founded by former elite Mexican special-operations troops — many of whom received some training in the United States.
[The two most recent DCS reports can be found at these links: FY2006 and FY2007.]
The Elephant in the Room
A former senior U.S. Customs Inspector, who asked that his name not be used, provided the following reaction when presented with the DCS data:
I would agree entirely [that] DCS (and DoD gifted, as opposed to DCS sold) weapons are obviously the simplest explanation for the massive rise in the number of fully automatic weapons, grenades, rockets, etc., obtained by the narcotics gangs. … That is to say, they are obtaining their weapons from their own, Mexican, government, by various illegal means.
… The Mexican government has a long and well-documented history of corruption at all levels, from city to federal. Most of the weapons being "displayed" [in the media] are simply not available for sale to American civilians, particularly including the grenades — both 40mm and hand types. …
… The source of these weapons can be easily traced by ATF. … All foreign sales must be reported to ATF prior to shipment, just in case the government wishes to hold up a shipment to a particular country, etc. Tracing the serial numbers would be easy, with US government assistance, of course.
But that assumes the Mexican government, and our own government, really want to trace those weapons. A November 2008 report in the San Antonio Express News, which includes details of the major weapons seizure in Reynosa, Mexico, that same month involving the Zetas, reveals the following:
Another example of coordination problems occurred this month. Mexican authorities in Reynosa across the border from McAllen, seized the country’s single largest stash of cartel weapons — nearly 300 assault rifles, shoulder-fired grenade launchers and a half million rounds of ammunition.
But weeks later, Mexican authorities still have not allowed the ATF access to serial numbers that would help them track down the buyers and traffickers on the U.S. side.
To be sure, cartel corruption and intimidation of Mexican law enforcement at every level and in every agency has caused some dysfunction.
A former DEA agent, who also asked not to be named, says the shipment of military-grade weapons to the Mexican government under the DCS program, given the extent of corruption within that government, is essentially like “shipping weapons to a crime syndicate.”
At least one individual with long connections to U.S. intelligence agencies is convinced that the corrupt transfer of arms between the Mexican military and narco-criminals in Mexico is more than theory.
Tosh Plumlee is a former CIA contract pilot who flew numerous missions delivering arms to Latin America and returning drugs to the United States as part of the covert Iran/Contra operations in the 1980s, according to public records. After becoming troubled by those government-sanctioned missions, Plumlee decided to take his concerns to Congress.
Plumlee was eventually called to testify before Congress on a number of occasions, only to find that the Congressional committees hearing his testimony ordered it classified — which meant if Plumlee later spoke about it publicly, he would be violating the law.
Plumlee, however, still has deep contacts in the spook world, some of whom, it seems, want him to bring some information forward concerning the nature of the drug war in Juarez, Mexico. As a result, Plumlee says he recently made a journey with individuals he described as “sensitive sources” to a small warehouse in Juarez — located just across border from El Paso, Texas. Plumlee says he agreed to accompany the sources because he is currently doing research for a book he is writing about the drug war.
Plumlee says it was clear to him that the warehouse was not part of a Mexican military operation, yet it was packed with U.S. military weapons — including grenades, grenade launchers, LAW anti-tank weapons [essentially high-tech bazookas], M16 rifles and night-vision equipment.
Plumlee says his sources indicated that the U.S. weapons in that warehouse — as well as another warehouse located elsewhere in Juarez that he did not visit — were now under the control of a narco-trafficking organization, which had obtained the munitions from corrupt elements of the Mexican military.
Plumlee concedes he does not know why he was allowed to step inside that warehouse and later walk out alive. All he can say for sure is that he was being used to get the information out and suspects that those weapons have since been relocated.
As incredible as Plumlee’s story sounds, it cannot really be surprising that there would be stores of weapons in clandestine warehouses in a city like Juarez, which, since the beginning of 2008, has produced about 2,000 of the estimated 7,000 murders in Mexico’s bloody drug war. And whether anyone chooses to believe Plumlee’s information or not, it is clear he has a long history of being a player in the netherworld of black operations, and might well be trusted by some players who still engaged in that dark art.
Mike Levine, a former DEA agent who has years of experience participating in dangerous undercover operations overseas, says Plumlee is who he claims to be. Levine now hosts a radio show in New York City on a Pacifica Radio station [the Expert Witness Radio Show] and Plumlee has appeared on that show several times over the years.
Here’s what Levine has to say about Plumlee’s credibility:
Before I invited Tosh to come on the air, because his story was so incredible, I vetted him through government agents, all of whom said he is the real thing. I have a copy of the air map he turned over to a San Diego Weekly newspaper, bearing notations of all his drug flights, which first sold me on the guy.
After he had made many revelations on-air in New York, and mainstream media continued to ignore him, Congress was apparently listening. I had been told by my own sources that agencies like CIA were regularly recording our show. (I used to remind them, on air, to make sure they pressed the red button to record.)
So Tosh calls me one day in around 1997 and says that Congress had asked him to testify about his experiences, in closed-door session. I told him, "If you do that, they are going to do nothing but classify your testimony making it illegal for you to tell your own story."
And that, indeed, is what did happen, according to Tosh.
Could it be that Plumlee was used as a type of message in a bottle because, like has happened so many times in the past history of this nation, the normal chain of command and our politicians in Washington, D.C., simply don’t want to hear the truth, don’t want to risk rocking the boat of international relations with Mexico or interrupting the free-trade flow of a multi-billion dollar “legal” arms business?
After all, if our government had to concede that the Mexican military is so wracked with corruption and beyond the control of Mexican President Calderon that it cannot be trusted to control its own weapons, then how can U.S. cooperation with Calderon’s government have any hope for success in what many would argue is an already ill-conceived drug war?
In fact, if that is what we are now confronting in Mexico, it is likely that U.S. cooperation with Calderon’s government, when it takes the form of U.S. weapon shipments, is likely only going to fuel further bloodshed and put U.S. agents and operatives now in the field assisting in those efforts at grave risk.
Narco News did seek to get comment from officials at both the Department of Justice and the Department of State about the issues raised in this story. To date, those queries — both by phone and e-mail — have been met with dead silence.
Stay tuned ….
The United States, Germany and Beyond
from STRATFOR
The United States, Germany and Beyond
March 30, 2009
Graphic for Geopolitical Intelligence Report
By George Friedman
Related Link
* Part 2: The Obama Administration and Europe
Three major meetings will take place in Europe over the next nine days: a meeting of the G-20, a NATO summit and a meeting of the European Union with U.S. President Barack Obama. The week will define the relationship between the United States and Europe and reveal some intra-European relationships. If not a defining moment, the week will certainly be a critical moment in dealing with economic, political and military questions. To be more precise, the meeting will be about U.S.-German relations. Not only is Germany the engine of continental Europe, its policies diverge the most sharply from those of the United States. In some ways, U.S.-German relations have been the core of the U.S.-European relationship, so this marathon of summits will focus on the United States and Germany.
Although the meetings deal with a range of issues — the economy and Afghanistan chief among them — the core question on the table will be the relationship between Europe and the United States following the departure of George W. Bush and the arrival of Barack Obama. This is not a trivial question. The European Union and the United States together account for more than half of global gross domestic product. How the two interact and cooperate is thus a matter of global significance. Of particular importance will be the U.S. relationship with Germany, since the German economy drives the Continental dynamic. This will be the first significant opportunity to measure the state of that relationship along the entire range of issues requiring cooperation.
Relations under Bush between the United States and the two major European countries, Germany and France, were unpleasant to say the least. There was tremendous enthusiasm throughout most of Europe surrounding Obama’s election. Obama ran a campaign partly based on the assertion that one of Bush’s greatest mistakes was his failure to align the United States more closely with its European allies, and he said he would change the dynamic of that relationship.
There is no question that Obama and the major European powers want to have a closer relationship. But there is a serious question about expectations. From the European point of view, the problem with Bush was that he did not consult them enough and demanded too much from them. They are looking forward to a relationship with Obama that contains more consultation and fewer demands. But while Obama wants more consultation with the Europeans, this does not mean he will demand less. In fact, one of his campaign themes was that with greater consultation with Europe, the Europeans would be prepared to provide more assistance to the United States. Europe and Obama loved each other, but for very different reasons. The Europeans thought that the United States under Obama would ask less, while Obama thought the Europeans would give more.
The G-20 and Divergent Economic Expectations
Begin with the G-20 summit of 20 of the world’s largest economies, which, along with the Americans and Europeans, include the Russians, Chinese and Japanese. The issue is, of course, the handling of the international financial crisis. In contrast to the G-20 meetings held in November 2008, the economic situation has clarified itself substantially — itself an improvement — and there are the first faint signs in the United States of what might be the beginning of recovery. There is still tremendous economic pain, but not nearly the panic seen in October.
There is, however, still discord. The most important disagreement is between the United States and United Kingdom on one side and France and Germany on the other. Both the United States and the United Kingdom have selected a strategy that calls for strong economic stimulus at home. The Anglo-American side wants Europe to match it (though the United Kingdom has begun tempering its demands). It fears that the heavily export-oriented Germans in particular will use the demand created by U.S. and British stimulus on their economies to surge German exports into these countries as demand rises. Germany and France would thus get the benefit of the stimulus without footing the bill, enjoying a free ride as the United States builds domestic debt. We must focus here on Germany and the United States because Germany is the center of gravity of the European economy just as the United States is of the Anglo-American bloc. Others are involved, but in the end this comes down to a U.S.-German showdown.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel argued that Germany could not afford the kind of stimulus promoted by the Anglo-Americans because German demographic problems are such that the proposed stimulus would impose long-term debt on a shrinking population, an untenable situation. Germany and France’s position makes perfect sense, whether it is viewed as Merkel has framed it, or more cynically, as Germany taking advantage of actions Obama already has taken. Either way, the fact remains that German and U.S. national interest are not at all the same. As Merkel put it in an interview with The New York Times, “International policy is, for all the friendship and commonality, always also about representing the interests of one’s own country.”
Paralleling this is the issue of how to deal with the Central European financial crisis. Toxic U.S. assets did not create this problem, internal European practices did. Western European banks took dominant positions in Eastern Europe in the past decade. They began to offer mortgages and other loans at low interest rates denominated in euros, Swiss francs and yen. This was an outstanding deal unless the Polish zloty and the Hungarian forint were to plunge in value, which they have over the past six months. Loan payments soared, massive defaults happened, and Italian, Austrian and Swedish banks were left holding the bag.
The United States viewed this as an internal EU matter, leaving it to European countries to save their own banks. Meanwhile, the Germans — who had somewhat less exposure than other countries — helped block a European bailout, arguing that the Central European countries should be dealt with through the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which was being configured to solve such problems in second-tier countries. From the German point of view, the IMF was simply going to be used for the purpose for which it was created. But Washington saw this as the Germans trying to secure U.S. (and Chinese and Japanese) money to deal with a European problem.
Add to this the complexity of Opel, a German carmaker owned by GM, which Germany wants the United States to bailout but which the United States wants nothing to do with, and the fundamental problem is clear: While both Germany and the United States have a common interest in moving past the crisis, Germany and the United States have very different approaches to the problem. Embedded in this is the hard fact that the United States is much larger than any other national economy, and it will be the U.S. recovery (when it comes) pulling the rest of the world — particularly the export-oriented economies — out of the ditch. Given that nothing can change this, the Germans see no reason to put themselves in a more difficult position than they are already in.
The Germans will not yield on the stimulus issue and Obama will not press, since this is not an issue that will resonate politically. But what could be perceived as a massive U.S. donation to the IMF would resonate politically in the United States. The American political system has become increasingly sensitive to the size of the debt being incurred by the Obama administration. A loan at this time to bail out other countries would not sit well, especially when critics would point out that some of the money will be going to bail out European banks in Central Europe.
European Fragmentation
Obama will need something in return from the Europeans, and the two-day NATO summit will be the place to get it. The Obama administration laid out the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan last Friday in preparation for this trip. Having given on the economic issue, Obama might hope that the Europeans would be forthcoming in increasing their commitment to Afghanistan by sending troops.
But there is almost no chance of Germany or France sending more troops, as public opinion in those countries is set against it and they have vastly limited military resources. During the U.S. presidential debates, Obama emphasized that he would be looking to the Europeans to increase aid in Afghanistan (the “good” war) while Iraq (the “bad” war) ends. The Germans will make some symbolic gestures — aid to Pakistan, reconstruction workers — but they will not be sending troops.
This will put Obama in a difficult position. If he donates money to the IMF, some of it earmarked for Europe, while the Europeans not only refuse to join the United States in a stimulus package but refuse to send troops to Afghanistan, the entire foundation of Obama’s foreign policy will start becoming a public issue. Obama argued that he would be more effective in building cooperation with European allies than Bush was or U.S. Sen. John McCain would have been. If he comes home empty-handed, which is likely, the status of that claim becomes uncertain.
Which brings us to the third meeting: the Obama-EU summit. We have been speaking of Germany as if it were Europe. In one sense, it is, as its economic weight drives the system. But politically and militarily, Europe is highly fragmented. Indeed, one of the consequences of German nationalism in dealing with Europe’s economy is that Europe’s economy is fragmented as well. Many smaller EU members, which had great expectations of what EU membership would mean, are disappointed and alienated from Germany and even the European Union itself largely due to the lack of German willingness to help them in their time of need.
More Fertile Ground for Obama
These are the waters Obama can go fishing in. Clearly, NATO is no longer functioning as it was a generation ago. Reality has shifted, and so have national interests. The international economic crisis has heightened — not reduced — nationalism as each nation looks out for itself. The weaker nations, particularly in Central Europe, have been left to fend for themselves.
The Central European countries have an additional concern: Russia. As Russia gets bolder, and as Germany remains unwilling to stand in Moscow’s way due to its energy dependence on Russia, countries on the EU periphery will be shopping for new relationships, particularly with the United States.
Obama’s strategy of coming closer to the Franco-German bloc appears to be ending in the same kind of train wreck in which Bush’s attempts ended. That is reasonable since these are not questions of atmospherics but of national interest on all sides. It therefore follows that the United States must consider new strategic relationships. The countries bordering Russia and Ukraine are certainly of interest to the United States, and share less interests with Germany and France than they thought they did. New bilateral relations — or even multilateral relations excluding some former partners like Germany — might be a topic to think about at the EU summit, even if it is too early to talk about it.
But let’s remember that Obama’s trip doesn’t end in Europe, it ends in Turkey. Turkey is a NATO member but has been effectively blocked from entry into the EU. It is doing relatively well in the economic crisis, and has a substantial military capability as well. The United States needs Turkey to extend its influence in Iraq to block Iranian ambitions, and north in the Caucasus to block Russian ambitions. Turkey is thus a prime candidate for an enhanced relationship with the United States. Excluded from Europe out of fears of Turkish immigration, economically able to stand on its own two feet, and able to use its military force in its own interest, it doesn’t take a contortionist to align U.S. and Turkish policies — they flow naturally.
However planned, Obama’s visit to Turkey will represent a warning to the Germans and others in its orbit that their relationship with the United States is based, as Merkel put it, on national interest, and that Germany’s interests and American interests are diverging somewhat. It also drives home that the United States has options in how to configure its alliance system, and that in many ways, Turkey is more important to the United States than Germany is.
Obama has made the case for multilateralism. Whatever that means, it does not have to mean continued alignment with all the traditional allies the United States had. There are potential new relationships and potential new arrangements. The inability of the Europeans to support key aspects of U.S. policy is understandable. But it will inevitably create a counter pressure on Obama to transfer the concept of multilateralism away from the post-World War II system of alliances toward a new system more appropriate to American national interests.
From our point of view, the talks in Europe are locked into place. A fine gloss will be put on the failure to collaborate. The talks in Turkey, on the other hand, have a very different sense about them.
The United States, Germany and Beyond
March 30, 2009
Graphic for Geopolitical Intelligence Report
By George Friedman
Related Link
* Part 2: The Obama Administration and Europe
Three major meetings will take place in Europe over the next nine days: a meeting of the G-20, a NATO summit and a meeting of the European Union with U.S. President Barack Obama. The week will define the relationship between the United States and Europe and reveal some intra-European relationships. If not a defining moment, the week will certainly be a critical moment in dealing with economic, political and military questions. To be more precise, the meeting will be about U.S.-German relations. Not only is Germany the engine of continental Europe, its policies diverge the most sharply from those of the United States. In some ways, U.S.-German relations have been the core of the U.S.-European relationship, so this marathon of summits will focus on the United States and Germany.
Although the meetings deal with a range of issues — the economy and Afghanistan chief among them — the core question on the table will be the relationship between Europe and the United States following the departure of George W. Bush and the arrival of Barack Obama. This is not a trivial question. The European Union and the United States together account for more than half of global gross domestic product. How the two interact and cooperate is thus a matter of global significance. Of particular importance will be the U.S. relationship with Germany, since the German economy drives the Continental dynamic. This will be the first significant opportunity to measure the state of that relationship along the entire range of issues requiring cooperation.
Relations under Bush between the United States and the two major European countries, Germany and France, were unpleasant to say the least. There was tremendous enthusiasm throughout most of Europe surrounding Obama’s election. Obama ran a campaign partly based on the assertion that one of Bush’s greatest mistakes was his failure to align the United States more closely with its European allies, and he said he would change the dynamic of that relationship.
There is no question that Obama and the major European powers want to have a closer relationship. But there is a serious question about expectations. From the European point of view, the problem with Bush was that he did not consult them enough and demanded too much from them. They are looking forward to a relationship with Obama that contains more consultation and fewer demands. But while Obama wants more consultation with the Europeans, this does not mean he will demand less. In fact, one of his campaign themes was that with greater consultation with Europe, the Europeans would be prepared to provide more assistance to the United States. Europe and Obama loved each other, but for very different reasons. The Europeans thought that the United States under Obama would ask less, while Obama thought the Europeans would give more.
The G-20 and Divergent Economic Expectations
Begin with the G-20 summit of 20 of the world’s largest economies, which, along with the Americans and Europeans, include the Russians, Chinese and Japanese. The issue is, of course, the handling of the international financial crisis. In contrast to the G-20 meetings held in November 2008, the economic situation has clarified itself substantially — itself an improvement — and there are the first faint signs in the United States of what might be the beginning of recovery. There is still tremendous economic pain, but not nearly the panic seen in October.
There is, however, still discord. The most important disagreement is between the United States and United Kingdom on one side and France and Germany on the other. Both the United States and the United Kingdom have selected a strategy that calls for strong economic stimulus at home. The Anglo-American side wants Europe to match it (though the United Kingdom has begun tempering its demands). It fears that the heavily export-oriented Germans in particular will use the demand created by U.S. and British stimulus on their economies to surge German exports into these countries as demand rises. Germany and France would thus get the benefit of the stimulus without footing the bill, enjoying a free ride as the United States builds domestic debt. We must focus here on Germany and the United States because Germany is the center of gravity of the European economy just as the United States is of the Anglo-American bloc. Others are involved, but in the end this comes down to a U.S.-German showdown.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel argued that Germany could not afford the kind of stimulus promoted by the Anglo-Americans because German demographic problems are such that the proposed stimulus would impose long-term debt on a shrinking population, an untenable situation. Germany and France’s position makes perfect sense, whether it is viewed as Merkel has framed it, or more cynically, as Germany taking advantage of actions Obama already has taken. Either way, the fact remains that German and U.S. national interest are not at all the same. As Merkel put it in an interview with The New York Times, “International policy is, for all the friendship and commonality, always also about representing the interests of one’s own country.”
Paralleling this is the issue of how to deal with the Central European financial crisis. Toxic U.S. assets did not create this problem, internal European practices did. Western European banks took dominant positions in Eastern Europe in the past decade. They began to offer mortgages and other loans at low interest rates denominated in euros, Swiss francs and yen. This was an outstanding deal unless the Polish zloty and the Hungarian forint were to plunge in value, which they have over the past six months. Loan payments soared, massive defaults happened, and Italian, Austrian and Swedish banks were left holding the bag.
The United States viewed this as an internal EU matter, leaving it to European countries to save their own banks. Meanwhile, the Germans — who had somewhat less exposure than other countries — helped block a European bailout, arguing that the Central European countries should be dealt with through the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which was being configured to solve such problems in second-tier countries. From the German point of view, the IMF was simply going to be used for the purpose for which it was created. But Washington saw this as the Germans trying to secure U.S. (and Chinese and Japanese) money to deal with a European problem.
Add to this the complexity of Opel, a German carmaker owned by GM, which Germany wants the United States to bailout but which the United States wants nothing to do with, and the fundamental problem is clear: While both Germany and the United States have a common interest in moving past the crisis, Germany and the United States have very different approaches to the problem. Embedded in this is the hard fact that the United States is much larger than any other national economy, and it will be the U.S. recovery (when it comes) pulling the rest of the world — particularly the export-oriented economies — out of the ditch. Given that nothing can change this, the Germans see no reason to put themselves in a more difficult position than they are already in.
The Germans will not yield on the stimulus issue and Obama will not press, since this is not an issue that will resonate politically. But what could be perceived as a massive U.S. donation to the IMF would resonate politically in the United States. The American political system has become increasingly sensitive to the size of the debt being incurred by the Obama administration. A loan at this time to bail out other countries would not sit well, especially when critics would point out that some of the money will be going to bail out European banks in Central Europe.
European Fragmentation
Obama will need something in return from the Europeans, and the two-day NATO summit will be the place to get it. The Obama administration laid out the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan last Friday in preparation for this trip. Having given on the economic issue, Obama might hope that the Europeans would be forthcoming in increasing their commitment to Afghanistan by sending troops.
But there is almost no chance of Germany or France sending more troops, as public opinion in those countries is set against it and they have vastly limited military resources. During the U.S. presidential debates, Obama emphasized that he would be looking to the Europeans to increase aid in Afghanistan (the “good” war) while Iraq (the “bad” war) ends. The Germans will make some symbolic gestures — aid to Pakistan, reconstruction workers — but they will not be sending troops.
This will put Obama in a difficult position. If he donates money to the IMF, some of it earmarked for Europe, while the Europeans not only refuse to join the United States in a stimulus package but refuse to send troops to Afghanistan, the entire foundation of Obama’s foreign policy will start becoming a public issue. Obama argued that he would be more effective in building cooperation with European allies than Bush was or U.S. Sen. John McCain would have been. If he comes home empty-handed, which is likely, the status of that claim becomes uncertain.
Which brings us to the third meeting: the Obama-EU summit. We have been speaking of Germany as if it were Europe. In one sense, it is, as its economic weight drives the system. But politically and militarily, Europe is highly fragmented. Indeed, one of the consequences of German nationalism in dealing with Europe’s economy is that Europe’s economy is fragmented as well. Many smaller EU members, which had great expectations of what EU membership would mean, are disappointed and alienated from Germany and even the European Union itself largely due to the lack of German willingness to help them in their time of need.
More Fertile Ground for Obama
These are the waters Obama can go fishing in. Clearly, NATO is no longer functioning as it was a generation ago. Reality has shifted, and so have national interests. The international economic crisis has heightened — not reduced — nationalism as each nation looks out for itself. The weaker nations, particularly in Central Europe, have been left to fend for themselves.
The Central European countries have an additional concern: Russia. As Russia gets bolder, and as Germany remains unwilling to stand in Moscow’s way due to its energy dependence on Russia, countries on the EU periphery will be shopping for new relationships, particularly with the United States.
Obama’s strategy of coming closer to the Franco-German bloc appears to be ending in the same kind of train wreck in which Bush’s attempts ended. That is reasonable since these are not questions of atmospherics but of national interest on all sides. It therefore follows that the United States must consider new strategic relationships. The countries bordering Russia and Ukraine are certainly of interest to the United States, and share less interests with Germany and France than they thought they did. New bilateral relations — or even multilateral relations excluding some former partners like Germany — might be a topic to think about at the EU summit, even if it is too early to talk about it.
But let’s remember that Obama’s trip doesn’t end in Europe, it ends in Turkey. Turkey is a NATO member but has been effectively blocked from entry into the EU. It is doing relatively well in the economic crisis, and has a substantial military capability as well. The United States needs Turkey to extend its influence in Iraq to block Iranian ambitions, and north in the Caucasus to block Russian ambitions. Turkey is thus a prime candidate for an enhanced relationship with the United States. Excluded from Europe out of fears of Turkish immigration, economically able to stand on its own two feet, and able to use its military force in its own interest, it doesn’t take a contortionist to align U.S. and Turkish policies — they flow naturally.
However planned, Obama’s visit to Turkey will represent a warning to the Germans and others in its orbit that their relationship with the United States is based, as Merkel put it, on national interest, and that Germany’s interests and American interests are diverging somewhat. It also drives home that the United States has options in how to configure its alliance system, and that in many ways, Turkey is more important to the United States than Germany is.
Obama has made the case for multilateralism. Whatever that means, it does not have to mean continued alignment with all the traditional allies the United States had. There are potential new relationships and potential new arrangements. The inability of the Europeans to support key aspects of U.S. policy is understandable. But it will inevitably create a counter pressure on Obama to transfer the concept of multilateralism away from the post-World War II system of alliances toward a new system more appropriate to American national interests.
From our point of view, the talks in Europe are locked into place. A fine gloss will be put on the failure to collaborate. The talks in Turkey, on the other hand, have a very different sense about them.
Global warming is a hoax, invented in 1988
Global warming is a hoax, invented in 1988
August 1, 2006 — budsimmons
Man-Made Global Warming Hoax
Excerpts reprinted with permission from Tom Gremillion
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Global warming is a hoax, invented in 1988, that combines old myths including limits to growth, sustainability, the population growth time bomb, the depletion of resources, pollution, anti-Americanism and anti-corporate sentiment and, of all things, fear of an ice age. Those that espoused and supported the old myths have joined forced into a new group called “Environmentalists.”
Most environmentalists have no technical or scientific credentials whatsoever. What they have are major news outlets ready and willing to publicize their every utterance regardless of whether or not they are backed up by scientific proof. Atmospheric science requires highly technical knowledge and skills, not possessed by the vast majority of the so-called environmentalists, who yet feel qualified to demand that human activity subjugate itself to the whims of their new deity, Mother Nature.
Environmentalists claim that the Earth’s atmosphere is getting hotter. They claim that the polar icecaps and glaciers will melt and sea levels will rise over two hundred feet, flooding most coastal cities. They claim that many areas of the Earth will turn into deserts. They make all these claims but cannot substantiate them with real scientific evidence. Parts of the polar icecap and glaciers are melting but other areas of the polar icecaps and glaciers are thickening. The environmentalists base their “proof” of the existence of global warming on the melting areas but are strangely silent, even militant to the point of violence, if anyone mentions the areas that are thickening, and those thickening areas are many.
In the past, there have been many times when the global mean temperatures were warmer, sometimes much warmer and colder, much colder than they are now. Global mean temperatures are cyclical with the seasons but also with other normal cycles, as they have been for the entire history of the Earth. Scientific data from ice cores, tree rings and other indicators of global mean temperatures prove this. Human activity has never been the cause of these global temperature swings as the “global warming” advocates claim. If human activity was the cause, where were the SUVs, the power plants and industries in our historical past? They did not exist. If human activity was not the cause of these global temperature swings, what was?
The energy output of the Sun is far greater in one second than human activity could produce in a million years. The Earth rotates around the Sun. Its orbit is slightly elliptical. The energy reaching the Earth from the Sun varies slightly as the distance from the Sun to the Earth varies due to its elliptical orbit. The Sun activity increases and decreases with fluctuations in the solar flares emitted by the Sun. Differences in these fluctuation rates cause increases and decreases of solar energy hitting the Earth. This causes fluctuations in the global mean temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere.
In 2004, the energy from massive solar flares bombarded the Earth with solar energy. This solar energy caused heating of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere. Most of the energy of the solar flare eruptions dissipated into space. The amounts of energy ejected were massive, much greater than normal. Had the Earth received a full blast of the solar energy from one of the numerous flare eruptions in 2004, the consequences to life on Earth could have been disastrous. The higher than usual amounts of energy that struck the Earth’s atmosphere did have their effects, however, including some heating of the atmosphere.
Then there is the eruption of volcanoes, such as Mt. St. Helens, ejecting dust and ash into the Earth’s atmosphere. The amount of dust and ash in the atmosphere varies the amount of energy that can cause heating or cooling of the Earth’s atmosphere. Volcanoes also eject the kind of compounds that environmentalists call greenhouse gases. A single eruption the size of the Mt. St. Helens eruption released more of these gases, dust and ash into the atmosphere than all such emissions by human activity since the beginning of recorded human history. And there are numerous volcanic eruptions yearly.
The oceans are also a major source of greenhouse gases, as are trees. Trees and other vegetation take in carbon dioxide and give off other gases such as methane, a major greenhouse gas, and a host of other compounds, many of which are also greenhouse gases. Decaying vegetation also gives off methane gas. Studies of smog in the Los Angeles basin indicate that over 90% of the smog is generated by the vegetation in the area. To aid in perpetuating the hoax, however, environmentalists, aided by major news media outlets, censored and suppressed this study.
Studies have shown that greenhouse gases produced by human activity accounts for around 1 percent of the gases in the atmosphere. The total elimination of human generated greenhouse gases would have a negligible effect on Earth’s global mean atmospheric temperatures. The elimination of all U.S. gasoline powered vehicles would reduce worldwide “greenhouse” emissions by less than 0.2%.” What would be the effect on global mean temperatures? None. Doubling of manmade greenhouse emissions above current levels would increase the global mean temperature by one degree Centigrade, which is within the normal range of temperature swings.
It is the fluctuations of the Earth’s orbit around the sun, volcanic eruptions, the emission of gases by oceans and trees, all natural occurrences, that cause rises and declines in global mean temperatures, i.e., “global warming” and “global cooling,” not human activity.
Satellite data taken over the past 25 years indicate no surface or atmospheric warming. If anything there has been a very slight cooling, on the order of 0.01 degree Centigrade.
Recently, astronomers have noticed a thinning of the polar icecaps on Mars.
Is this “global warming, Mars style” and do Martian SUVs, power plants, and industries cause it? Hardly, but the “environmentalists” think so. Some even blame it on us here on Earth.
Global warming IS a hoax. Those claiming that “global warming” is real have an agenda other than saving the planet from human activity
Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
* The Sun Also Sets
Posted in Uncategorized.
7 Responses to “Global warming is a hoax, invented in 1988”
1.
Wes Says:
April 14, 2007 at 12:04 pm
Thanks. Finally somebody who stands up to the environmentalists thought-crime.
I can really use this for my paper on Global Warming. I do also tell the Environmentalists story, and let the others make up their mind.
2.
David A. Bem Says:
April 15, 2007 at 12:08 am
So very true that sad thing is it is being taught in schools that this is real,our daughter is 13 and they are poisioning children minds of tommorow
3.
jessica Says:
May 16, 2007 at 8:10 am
wow intresting?
4.
Andrew Says:
September 6, 2007 at 12:26 am
The unprecedented increase in CO2 levels is scientific *fact*. And it is NOT caused by fluctuations in the Earth’s orbit or volcanic eruptions, which have existed throughout history.
There’s only one variable that has changed drastically over the last 100 years or so that could explain such dramatic increases in atmospheric CO2 levels. Guess what it is…
5.
Yves Says:
April 2, 2008 at 9:47 pm
“Recently, astronomers have noticed a thinning of the polar icecaps on Mars.
Is this “global warming, Mars style” and do Martian SUVs, power plants, and industries cause it? Hardly, but the “environmentalists” think so. Some even blame it on us here on Earth.”
As I said before:
- Pluto, Triton, Jupiter climate = GW without SUV (It’s The Sun, stupid !),
- Mars climate = AGW caused by 2 SUV, according to alarmists,
- Spirit = Contributes to 50% of Mars AGW, according to alarmists,
- Opportunity = (See Spirit),
Have a nice day
Yves
6.
Rocky Says:
May 30, 2008 at 1:59 pm
As a geologist and earth scientist for over 40 years, I have a fairly strong understanding of the history of the earth and cyclic events. In the geologic record (fossil/ice caps, etc.), corroborated by more recent historical records, tree rings, flora/fauna, a roughly 1500-year warming/cooling cycle is evident for at least 2 million years.
CO2 is generally as a byproduct of warming as seas warm and release gases, which leads to times of plenty as plants thrive and expand their ranges and provide more food for fauna, increasing biodiversity. By contrast, cooler periods are times of want, tracked in human history by wars for food, pestilence and famine.
The 0.03% CO2 content of the atmosphere is minimal and has less impact and is lower in volume than, for example, methane given off by termites (who outweigh humans by 30x). During much colder periods, such as the Ordovician, CO2 content was 10x higher than today.
Man is arrogant indeed if he feels he can influence weather, except on a very local basis, such as in urban heat islands, where much of the data have shown an increase in temperature, as cities grow and generate more heat. The atmosphere is not warming, the seas as a group are not warming, the Antarctic ice sheet has never been bigger or thicker, Greenland’s ice sheet is thickening, the 160,000 glaciers are both advancing and retreating and Polar Bear populations have grown 5-fold since the 1970’s.
Let’s have a little respect for facts and scientific method instead of using computer-generated predictions (none have been accurate), manipulated by investigators whose paychecks, perks and prominence depend upon keeping the funds flowing from misled concerned individuals and from politicians and corporations reaping 10’s of $billions from enviro products, taxes and control.
Check it out. -Rocky-
7.
Frank of Oz Says:
August 14, 2008 at 10:50 am
Global warming :-)
It would be funny, if it was not sooo sad.
Rocky, you hit the nail on the head. Pity that there are so many intellectually handicapped people on this planet. This entire episode reminds me of the building of St. Peters Basilica in Rome.
In the 15 century, Pope Julius (and others) decided to build the biggest and best Basilica befitting the “Holy Roman Catholic Church”.
This of course, was a very costly exercise. In order to raise the necessary cash, priest in all of Europe would forgive sins for money. No dastardly deed could not be “absolved” for a considerable “consideration of cash.
Then like now: Your sins are forgiven, but you must pay for “Carbon Credits”.
Come on, suckers.
Frank of Oz
August 1, 2006 — budsimmons
Man-Made Global Warming Hoax
Excerpts reprinted with permission from Tom Gremillion
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Global warming is a hoax, invented in 1988, that combines old myths including limits to growth, sustainability, the population growth time bomb, the depletion of resources, pollution, anti-Americanism and anti-corporate sentiment and, of all things, fear of an ice age. Those that espoused and supported the old myths have joined forced into a new group called “Environmentalists.”
Most environmentalists have no technical or scientific credentials whatsoever. What they have are major news outlets ready and willing to publicize their every utterance regardless of whether or not they are backed up by scientific proof. Atmospheric science requires highly technical knowledge and skills, not possessed by the vast majority of the so-called environmentalists, who yet feel qualified to demand that human activity subjugate itself to the whims of their new deity, Mother Nature.
Environmentalists claim that the Earth’s atmosphere is getting hotter. They claim that the polar icecaps and glaciers will melt and sea levels will rise over two hundred feet, flooding most coastal cities. They claim that many areas of the Earth will turn into deserts. They make all these claims but cannot substantiate them with real scientific evidence. Parts of the polar icecap and glaciers are melting but other areas of the polar icecaps and glaciers are thickening. The environmentalists base their “proof” of the existence of global warming on the melting areas but are strangely silent, even militant to the point of violence, if anyone mentions the areas that are thickening, and those thickening areas are many.
In the past, there have been many times when the global mean temperatures were warmer, sometimes much warmer and colder, much colder than they are now. Global mean temperatures are cyclical with the seasons but also with other normal cycles, as they have been for the entire history of the Earth. Scientific data from ice cores, tree rings and other indicators of global mean temperatures prove this. Human activity has never been the cause of these global temperature swings as the “global warming” advocates claim. If human activity was the cause, where were the SUVs, the power plants and industries in our historical past? They did not exist. If human activity was not the cause of these global temperature swings, what was?
The energy output of the Sun is far greater in one second than human activity could produce in a million years. The Earth rotates around the Sun. Its orbit is slightly elliptical. The energy reaching the Earth from the Sun varies slightly as the distance from the Sun to the Earth varies due to its elliptical orbit. The Sun activity increases and decreases with fluctuations in the solar flares emitted by the Sun. Differences in these fluctuation rates cause increases and decreases of solar energy hitting the Earth. This causes fluctuations in the global mean temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere.
In 2004, the energy from massive solar flares bombarded the Earth with solar energy. This solar energy caused heating of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere. Most of the energy of the solar flare eruptions dissipated into space. The amounts of energy ejected were massive, much greater than normal. Had the Earth received a full blast of the solar energy from one of the numerous flare eruptions in 2004, the consequences to life on Earth could have been disastrous. The higher than usual amounts of energy that struck the Earth’s atmosphere did have their effects, however, including some heating of the atmosphere.
Then there is the eruption of volcanoes, such as Mt. St. Helens, ejecting dust and ash into the Earth’s atmosphere. The amount of dust and ash in the atmosphere varies the amount of energy that can cause heating or cooling of the Earth’s atmosphere. Volcanoes also eject the kind of compounds that environmentalists call greenhouse gases. A single eruption the size of the Mt. St. Helens eruption released more of these gases, dust and ash into the atmosphere than all such emissions by human activity since the beginning of recorded human history. And there are numerous volcanic eruptions yearly.
The oceans are also a major source of greenhouse gases, as are trees. Trees and other vegetation take in carbon dioxide and give off other gases such as methane, a major greenhouse gas, and a host of other compounds, many of which are also greenhouse gases. Decaying vegetation also gives off methane gas. Studies of smog in the Los Angeles basin indicate that over 90% of the smog is generated by the vegetation in the area. To aid in perpetuating the hoax, however, environmentalists, aided by major news media outlets, censored and suppressed this study.
Studies have shown that greenhouse gases produced by human activity accounts for around 1 percent of the gases in the atmosphere. The total elimination of human generated greenhouse gases would have a negligible effect on Earth’s global mean atmospheric temperatures. The elimination of all U.S. gasoline powered vehicles would reduce worldwide “greenhouse” emissions by less than 0.2%.” What would be the effect on global mean temperatures? None. Doubling of manmade greenhouse emissions above current levels would increase the global mean temperature by one degree Centigrade, which is within the normal range of temperature swings.
It is the fluctuations of the Earth’s orbit around the sun, volcanic eruptions, the emission of gases by oceans and trees, all natural occurrences, that cause rises and declines in global mean temperatures, i.e., “global warming” and “global cooling,” not human activity.
Satellite data taken over the past 25 years indicate no surface or atmospheric warming. If anything there has been a very slight cooling, on the order of 0.01 degree Centigrade.
Recently, astronomers have noticed a thinning of the polar icecaps on Mars.
Is this “global warming, Mars style” and do Martian SUVs, power plants, and industries cause it? Hardly, but the “environmentalists” think so. Some even blame it on us here on Earth.
Global warming IS a hoax. Those claiming that “global warming” is real have an agenda other than saving the planet from human activity
Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
* The Sun Also Sets
Posted in Uncategorized.
7 Responses to “Global warming is a hoax, invented in 1988”
1.
Wes Says:
April 14, 2007 at 12:04 pm
Thanks. Finally somebody who stands up to the environmentalists thought-crime.
I can really use this for my paper on Global Warming. I do also tell the Environmentalists story, and let the others make up their mind.
2.
David A. Bem Says:
April 15, 2007 at 12:08 am
So very true that sad thing is it is being taught in schools that this is real,our daughter is 13 and they are poisioning children minds of tommorow
3.
jessica Says:
May 16, 2007 at 8:10 am
wow intresting?
4.
Andrew Says:
September 6, 2007 at 12:26 am
The unprecedented increase in CO2 levels is scientific *fact*. And it is NOT caused by fluctuations in the Earth’s orbit or volcanic eruptions, which have existed throughout history.
There’s only one variable that has changed drastically over the last 100 years or so that could explain such dramatic increases in atmospheric CO2 levels. Guess what it is…
5.
Yves Says:
April 2, 2008 at 9:47 pm
“Recently, astronomers have noticed a thinning of the polar icecaps on Mars.
Is this “global warming, Mars style” and do Martian SUVs, power plants, and industries cause it? Hardly, but the “environmentalists” think so. Some even blame it on us here on Earth.”
As I said before:
- Pluto, Triton, Jupiter climate = GW without SUV (It’s The Sun, stupid !),
- Mars climate = AGW caused by 2 SUV, according to alarmists,
- Spirit = Contributes to 50% of Mars AGW, according to alarmists,
- Opportunity = (See Spirit),
Have a nice day
Yves
6.
Rocky Says:
May 30, 2008 at 1:59 pm
As a geologist and earth scientist for over 40 years, I have a fairly strong understanding of the history of the earth and cyclic events. In the geologic record (fossil/ice caps, etc.), corroborated by more recent historical records, tree rings, flora/fauna, a roughly 1500-year warming/cooling cycle is evident for at least 2 million years.
CO2 is generally as a byproduct of warming as seas warm and release gases, which leads to times of plenty as plants thrive and expand their ranges and provide more food for fauna, increasing biodiversity. By contrast, cooler periods are times of want, tracked in human history by wars for food, pestilence and famine.
The 0.03% CO2 content of the atmosphere is minimal and has less impact and is lower in volume than, for example, methane given off by termites (who outweigh humans by 30x). During much colder periods, such as the Ordovician, CO2 content was 10x higher than today.
Man is arrogant indeed if he feels he can influence weather, except on a very local basis, such as in urban heat islands, where much of the data have shown an increase in temperature, as cities grow and generate more heat. The atmosphere is not warming, the seas as a group are not warming, the Antarctic ice sheet has never been bigger or thicker, Greenland’s ice sheet is thickening, the 160,000 glaciers are both advancing and retreating and Polar Bear populations have grown 5-fold since the 1970’s.
Let’s have a little respect for facts and scientific method instead of using computer-generated predictions (none have been accurate), manipulated by investigators whose paychecks, perks and prominence depend upon keeping the funds flowing from misled concerned individuals and from politicians and corporations reaping 10’s of $billions from enviro products, taxes and control.
Check it out. -Rocky-
7.
Frank of Oz Says:
August 14, 2008 at 10:50 am
Global warming :-)
It would be funny, if it was not sooo sad.
Rocky, you hit the nail on the head. Pity that there are so many intellectually handicapped people on this planet. This entire episode reminds me of the building of St. Peters Basilica in Rome.
In the 15 century, Pope Julius (and others) decided to build the biggest and best Basilica befitting the “Holy Roman Catholic Church”.
This of course, was a very costly exercise. In order to raise the necessary cash, priest in all of Europe would forgive sins for money. No dastardly deed could not be “absolved” for a considerable “consideration of cash.
Then like now: Your sins are forgiven, but you must pay for “Carbon Credits”.
Come on, suckers.
Frank of Oz
Monday, March 30, 2009
American leverage in South Asia
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7971128.stm
American leverage in South Asia
By Barbara Plett
BBC News, Islamabad
In recent days three top American generals have turned their guns on Pakistan, accusing elements of its main intelligence agency, the ISI, of supporting Taliban and al-Qaeda militants.
The unprecedented broadside followed the announcement by the US President Barack Obama of a new strategy for Afghanistan.
Mr Obama cited as its cornerstone the need to destroy militant safe havens in the Pakistani tribal belt along the Afghan border, something he knows can't be achieved without complete cooperation from the country's army and intelligence.
To win, or compel, such support, the president and his generals have offered a mixture of incentives and warnings: for example, an increase in civilian aid alongside a warning that there's no "blank cheque" for the military if it doesn't perform.
The charges against the ISI seem to be part of the latter. They are not new, but have never before been made so publicly.
The chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said elements of the ISI maintain links with militants on Pakistan's borders with both Afghanistan and India.
General David Petraeus, head of the US Central Command, spoke of cases "in the fairly recent past" where the ISI appeared to have warned militants that their positions had been discovered.
Collusion charge
According to the New York Times, Pakistani support to Taliban commanders extends to "money, military supplies and strategic planning guidance".
Last year Washington's suspicions were such that it scaled down intelligence sharing with the ISI, especially after accusing it of involvement in the July bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul.
The charge of collusion is rigorously denied by Pakistani officials.
They insist top levels of the army and intelligence agencies were purged of ideological officers after 2001, when the government dropped its open support for the Taliban and fell in with what the US called its War on Terror.
They point out that Pakistan has lost more soldiers in fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda on the Afghan border than all of the NATO forces combined; and that American officials acknowledge the ISI has captured more Al Qaeda operatives than any other intelligence agency.
Within the security establishment there is a belief that the ISI is being used as a scapegoat for coalition failures in Afghanistan.
However, few independent Pakistani analysts doubt the intelligence agency maintains links with Islamist militants, especially the Afghan Taliban who have sanctuary in the border region.
"The army will operate against militant groups that it defines as anti-Pakistan," says one informed observer who spoke off-the-record.
"But it will not go after those groups that have a purely Afghan agenda, like the Afghan Taliban. Not at least until the United States listens to what the army regards as Pakistan's legitimate regional concerns."
Strategic depth?
There are mixed views here about what those concerns are.
“ No state can be successfully pressured into acts it considers suicidal ”
Ahmed Rashid and Barnett Rubin Foreign Affairs magazine
Some believe the military has never given up its policy of "strategic depth": the belief that in order to defend itself against its traditional enemy, India, to the east, it needs a pro-Pakistan government (like the Taliban) in Afghanistan, to the west.
Others say it wants a "neutral" Afghanistan.
But Kabul is not neutral as far as the army is concerned.
Its government is full of factions hostile to Islamabad and closely allied with India, Pakistan's great regional rival. And India is expanding its influence in the country.
American leverage in South Asia
By Barbara Plett
BBC News, Islamabad
In recent days three top American generals have turned their guns on Pakistan, accusing elements of its main intelligence agency, the ISI, of supporting Taliban and al-Qaeda militants.
The unprecedented broadside followed the announcement by the US President Barack Obama of a new strategy for Afghanistan.
Mr Obama cited as its cornerstone the need to destroy militant safe havens in the Pakistani tribal belt along the Afghan border, something he knows can't be achieved without complete cooperation from the country's army and intelligence.
To win, or compel, such support, the president and his generals have offered a mixture of incentives and warnings: for example, an increase in civilian aid alongside a warning that there's no "blank cheque" for the military if it doesn't perform.
The charges against the ISI seem to be part of the latter. They are not new, but have never before been made so publicly.
The chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said elements of the ISI maintain links with militants on Pakistan's borders with both Afghanistan and India.
General David Petraeus, head of the US Central Command, spoke of cases "in the fairly recent past" where the ISI appeared to have warned militants that their positions had been discovered.
Collusion charge
According to the New York Times, Pakistani support to Taliban commanders extends to "money, military supplies and strategic planning guidance".
Last year Washington's suspicions were such that it scaled down intelligence sharing with the ISI, especially after accusing it of involvement in the July bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul.
The charge of collusion is rigorously denied by Pakistani officials.
They insist top levels of the army and intelligence agencies were purged of ideological officers after 2001, when the government dropped its open support for the Taliban and fell in with what the US called its War on Terror.
They point out that Pakistan has lost more soldiers in fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda on the Afghan border than all of the NATO forces combined; and that American officials acknowledge the ISI has captured more Al Qaeda operatives than any other intelligence agency.
Within the security establishment there is a belief that the ISI is being used as a scapegoat for coalition failures in Afghanistan.
However, few independent Pakistani analysts doubt the intelligence agency maintains links with Islamist militants, especially the Afghan Taliban who have sanctuary in the border region.
"The army will operate against militant groups that it defines as anti-Pakistan," says one informed observer who spoke off-the-record.
"But it will not go after those groups that have a purely Afghan agenda, like the Afghan Taliban. Not at least until the United States listens to what the army regards as Pakistan's legitimate regional concerns."
Strategic depth?
There are mixed views here about what those concerns are.
“ No state can be successfully pressured into acts it considers suicidal ”
Ahmed Rashid and Barnett Rubin Foreign Affairs magazine
Some believe the military has never given up its policy of "strategic depth": the belief that in order to defend itself against its traditional enemy, India, to the east, it needs a pro-Pakistan government (like the Taliban) in Afghanistan, to the west.
Others say it wants a "neutral" Afghanistan.
But Kabul is not neutral as far as the army is concerned.
Its government is full of factions hostile to Islamabad and closely allied with India, Pakistan's great regional rival. And India is expanding its influence in the country.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Canadians find vast computer spy network: report
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE52R2HQ20090328
Canadians find vast computer spy network: report
Sat Mar 28, 2009 7:12pm EDT
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Canadian researchers have uncovered a vast electronic spying operation that infiltrated computers and stole documents from government and private offices around the world, including those of the Dalai Lama, The New York Times reported on Saturday.
In a report provided to the newspaper, a team from the Munk Center for International Studies in Toronto said at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries had been breached in less than two years by the spy system, which it dubbed GhostNet.
Embassies, foreign ministries, government offices and the Dalai Lama's Tibetan exile centers in India, Brussels, London and New York were among those infiltrated, said the researchers, who have detected computer espionage in the past.
They found no evidence U.S. government offices were breached.
The researchers concluded that computers based almost exclusively in China were responsible for the intrusions, although they stopped short of saying the Chinese government was involved in the system, which they described as still active.
"We're a bit more careful about it, knowing the nuance of what happens in the subterranean realms," said Ronald Deibert, a member of the Munk research group, based at the University of Toronto.
"This could well be the CIA or the Russians. It's a murky realm that we're lifting the lid on."
A spokesman for the Chinese Consulate in New York dismissed the idea China was involved. "These are old stories and they are nonsense," the spokesman, Wenqi Gao, told the Times. "The Chinese government is opposed to and strictly forbids any cybercrime."
The Toronto researchers began their sleuthing after a request from the office of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, to examine its computers for signs of malicious software, or malware.
The network they found possessed remarkable "Big Brother-style" capabilities, allowing it, among other things, to turn on the camera and audio-recording functions of infected computers for potential in-room monitoring, the report said.
The system was focused on the governments of South Asian and Southeast Asian nations as well as on the Dalai Lama, the researchers said, adding that computers at the Indian Embassy in Washington were infiltrated and a NATO computer monitored.
The report will be published in Information Warfare Monitor, an online publication linked to the Munk Center.
At the same time, two computer researchers at Cambridge University in Britain who worked on the part of the investigation related to the Tibetans are releasing an independent report, the Times said.
They do fault China and warned that other hackers could adopt similar tactics, the Times added.
(Writing by Paul Simao; Editing by Peter Cooney)
Canadians find vast computer spy network: report
Sat Mar 28, 2009 7:12pm EDT
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Canadian researchers have uncovered a vast electronic spying operation that infiltrated computers and stole documents from government and private offices around the world, including those of the Dalai Lama, The New York Times reported on Saturday.
In a report provided to the newspaper, a team from the Munk Center for International Studies in Toronto said at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries had been breached in less than two years by the spy system, which it dubbed GhostNet.
Embassies, foreign ministries, government offices and the Dalai Lama's Tibetan exile centers in India, Brussels, London and New York were among those infiltrated, said the researchers, who have detected computer espionage in the past.
They found no evidence U.S. government offices were breached.
The researchers concluded that computers based almost exclusively in China were responsible for the intrusions, although they stopped short of saying the Chinese government was involved in the system, which they described as still active.
"We're a bit more careful about it, knowing the nuance of what happens in the subterranean realms," said Ronald Deibert, a member of the Munk research group, based at the University of Toronto.
"This could well be the CIA or the Russians. It's a murky realm that we're lifting the lid on."
A spokesman for the Chinese Consulate in New York dismissed the idea China was involved. "These are old stories and they are nonsense," the spokesman, Wenqi Gao, told the Times. "The Chinese government is opposed to and strictly forbids any cybercrime."
The Toronto researchers began their sleuthing after a request from the office of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, to examine its computers for signs of malicious software, or malware.
The network they found possessed remarkable "Big Brother-style" capabilities, allowing it, among other things, to turn on the camera and audio-recording functions of infected computers for potential in-room monitoring, the report said.
The system was focused on the governments of South Asian and Southeast Asian nations as well as on the Dalai Lama, the researchers said, adding that computers at the Indian Embassy in Washington were infiltrated and a NATO computer monitored.
The report will be published in Information Warfare Monitor, an online publication linked to the Munk Center.
At the same time, two computer researchers at Cambridge University in Britain who worked on the part of the investigation related to the Tibetans are releasing an independent report, the Times said.
They do fault China and warned that other hackers could adopt similar tactics, the Times added.
(Writing by Paul Simao; Editing by Peter Cooney)
Barack Obama's war: focus on beating Taliban and al-Qaida
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/28/barack-obama-foreign-policy-taliban-pakistan
Barack Obama's war: focus on beating Taliban and al-Qaida
At end of two-month review, president puts region at centre of foreign policy, warning of plans to attack US homeland
Ewen MacAskill in Washington
* The Guardian, Saturday 28 March 2009
* Article history
*
Link to this video
President Barack Obama yesterday embarked on a new and risky US strategy for Afghanistan aimed at wiping out al-Qaida and the Taliban and forcing Pakistan to tackle safe havens inside its borders.
Speaking at the White House at the end of a two-month long review of policy in Afghanistan, he described the situation as "increasingly perilous" and the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan as "the most dangerous place in the world".
His new policy, putting Afghanistan at the centre of US foreign policy, effectively makes the conflict Obama's war in the way that Iraq was President George Bush's.
In a half-hour speech in front of troops and diplomats headed for Afghanistan, Obama set out what he regards an achievable mission: "I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan."
Selling the war to the US public, he presented Osama bin Laden and his allies as unfinished business that posed a real threat to America.
"Multiple intelligence estimates have warned that al-Qaida is actively planning attacks on the US homeland from its safe havens in Pakistan," Obama said.
The danger for the Obama administration is that the Taliban is gearing up for a spring offensive and that the US public, long disillusioned with the war in Iraq, may have little patience for the war in Afghanistan if US casualties mount as violence spills back and forward across the border.
Another risk is Obama's ultimatum to Pakistan: if it fails to act aggressively against al-Qaida and Taliban forces in safe havens in its tribal regions, the US will act unliterally. "Pakistan must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out al-Qaida and the violent extremists within its borders. And we will insist that action be taken one way or another when we have intelligence about high-level terrorist targets," he said.
Any further US infringement of Pakistan's sovereignty beyond the present CIA-directed Predator drone strikes could inflame public opinion in the country and undermine the US-friendly government.
The new strategy presented by Obama provides for 4,000 new US troops to help train the Afghan army, which is set to rise from 65,000 to 130,000 and eventually 230,000, though the president set out no figures yesterday.
The US is sending 17,000 combat troops to Afghanistan and confirmed it has asked allies to increase their contributions.
Combined with the military push, the US is to try to isolate al-Qaida and the Taliban by building up the infrastructure in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Obama is to ask Congress to approve $1.5bn in aid to Pakistan each year for the next five for spending on infrastructure but this would not be a blank cheque and would require Pakistani action.
The US is also asking Nato and other allies who are unable to contribute militarily to provide financial help.
Obama's plan was widely welcomed yesterday, including by the Pakistan and Afghanistan governments, in spite of his veiled warnings to both.
The Pakistan prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, told reporters: "We are in favour of this policy."
Obama, in one passage in his speech, spoke explicitly about the high level and massive amounts of corruption in Afghanistan, something Bush never did. "I want to be clear: we cannot turn a blind eye to the corruption that causes Afghans to lose faith in their own leaders.
"Instead, we will seek a new compact with the Afghan government that cracks down on corrupt behaviour and sets clear benchmarks for international assistance so that it is used to provide for the needs of the Afghan people," the president said.
In spite of the public slapdown of the Afghanistan government, its president, Hamid Karzai, watching the speech on CNN in Kabul, apparently welcomed it.
Humayun Hamidzada, the presidential spokesman, said: "We particularly welcome the recognition of the regional aspect of the problem in Afghanistan."
The US, which has lost faith in Karzai, is adopting a neutral position towards him in the forthcoming Afghanistan election. But it will seek to bypass him by creating a more trusted chief executive figure.
Seeking to repeat the Iraq policy of buying up hostile militia groups, the new US strategy will try to divide the Taliban by isolating the hard core round the former Afghan leader, Mullah Omar, and wooing away elements more amenable to negotiation or payment.
Obama said: "In a country with extreme poverty that has been at war for decades, there will also be no peace without reconciliation among former enemies.
"I have no illusions that this will be easy. In Iraq, we had success in reaching out to former adversaries to isolate and target al-Qaida. We must pursue a similar process in Afghanistan while understanding that it is a very different country."
Main points
Clear objective The destruction of the Taliban and al-Qaida safe havens in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
More US troops 4,000 more US troops to be sent to Afghanistan on top of 17,500 committed last month. This in addition to 38,000 US troops already there. The new troops are to help train Afghan forces.
Afghan army and police Key to introducing a degree of stability and paving the way for a US exit. 65,000-strong Afghan army to be doubled, and then increased to 230,000.
Pakistan US demands that Pakistan deals with Taliban and al-Qaida safe havens. In return the US will provide $1.5bn in aid each year for the next five. Failure to act will see the US step up unilateral operations.
Corruption Zero tolerance of corruption involving the Kabul government that undermines the fight against the Taliban.
Barack Obama's war: focus on beating Taliban and al-Qaida
At end of two-month review, president puts region at centre of foreign policy, warning of plans to attack US homeland
Ewen MacAskill in Washington
* The Guardian, Saturday 28 March 2009
* Article history
*
Link to this video
President Barack Obama yesterday embarked on a new and risky US strategy for Afghanistan aimed at wiping out al-Qaida and the Taliban and forcing Pakistan to tackle safe havens inside its borders.
Speaking at the White House at the end of a two-month long review of policy in Afghanistan, he described the situation as "increasingly perilous" and the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan as "the most dangerous place in the world".
His new policy, putting Afghanistan at the centre of US foreign policy, effectively makes the conflict Obama's war in the way that Iraq was President George Bush's.
In a half-hour speech in front of troops and diplomats headed for Afghanistan, Obama set out what he regards an achievable mission: "I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan."
Selling the war to the US public, he presented Osama bin Laden and his allies as unfinished business that posed a real threat to America.
"Multiple intelligence estimates have warned that al-Qaida is actively planning attacks on the US homeland from its safe havens in Pakistan," Obama said.
The danger for the Obama administration is that the Taliban is gearing up for a spring offensive and that the US public, long disillusioned with the war in Iraq, may have little patience for the war in Afghanistan if US casualties mount as violence spills back and forward across the border.
Another risk is Obama's ultimatum to Pakistan: if it fails to act aggressively against al-Qaida and Taliban forces in safe havens in its tribal regions, the US will act unliterally. "Pakistan must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out al-Qaida and the violent extremists within its borders. And we will insist that action be taken one way or another when we have intelligence about high-level terrorist targets," he said.
Any further US infringement of Pakistan's sovereignty beyond the present CIA-directed Predator drone strikes could inflame public opinion in the country and undermine the US-friendly government.
The new strategy presented by Obama provides for 4,000 new US troops to help train the Afghan army, which is set to rise from 65,000 to 130,000 and eventually 230,000, though the president set out no figures yesterday.
The US is sending 17,000 combat troops to Afghanistan and confirmed it has asked allies to increase their contributions.
Combined with the military push, the US is to try to isolate al-Qaida and the Taliban by building up the infrastructure in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Obama is to ask Congress to approve $1.5bn in aid to Pakistan each year for the next five for spending on infrastructure but this would not be a blank cheque and would require Pakistani action.
The US is also asking Nato and other allies who are unable to contribute militarily to provide financial help.
Obama's plan was widely welcomed yesterday, including by the Pakistan and Afghanistan governments, in spite of his veiled warnings to both.
The Pakistan prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, told reporters: "We are in favour of this policy."
Obama, in one passage in his speech, spoke explicitly about the high level and massive amounts of corruption in Afghanistan, something Bush never did. "I want to be clear: we cannot turn a blind eye to the corruption that causes Afghans to lose faith in their own leaders.
"Instead, we will seek a new compact with the Afghan government that cracks down on corrupt behaviour and sets clear benchmarks for international assistance so that it is used to provide for the needs of the Afghan people," the president said.
In spite of the public slapdown of the Afghanistan government, its president, Hamid Karzai, watching the speech on CNN in Kabul, apparently welcomed it.
Humayun Hamidzada, the presidential spokesman, said: "We particularly welcome the recognition of the regional aspect of the problem in Afghanistan."
The US, which has lost faith in Karzai, is adopting a neutral position towards him in the forthcoming Afghanistan election. But it will seek to bypass him by creating a more trusted chief executive figure.
Seeking to repeat the Iraq policy of buying up hostile militia groups, the new US strategy will try to divide the Taliban by isolating the hard core round the former Afghan leader, Mullah Omar, and wooing away elements more amenable to negotiation or payment.
Obama said: "In a country with extreme poverty that has been at war for decades, there will also be no peace without reconciliation among former enemies.
"I have no illusions that this will be easy. In Iraq, we had success in reaching out to former adversaries to isolate and target al-Qaida. We must pursue a similar process in Afghanistan while understanding that it is a very different country."
Main points
Clear objective The destruction of the Taliban and al-Qaida safe havens in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
More US troops 4,000 more US troops to be sent to Afghanistan on top of 17,500 committed last month. This in addition to 38,000 US troops already there. The new troops are to help train Afghan forces.
Afghan army and police Key to introducing a degree of stability and paving the way for a US exit. 65,000-strong Afghan army to be doubled, and then increased to 230,000.
Pakistan US demands that Pakistan deals with Taliban and al-Qaida safe havens. In return the US will provide $1.5bn in aid each year for the next five. Failure to act will see the US step up unilateral operations.
Corruption Zero tolerance of corruption involving the Kabul government that undermines the fight against the Taliban.
China: Partner, Adversary, Rebel
http://www.kitco.com/ind/willie/mar272009.html
China: Partner, Adversary, Rebel
By Jim Willie CB, KITCO, Mar 27 2009
www.GoldenJackass.com
A crisis of global confidence in the USDollar is upon us. Foreigners have begun to lose respect for USGovt approach to problem solving, for US bank administration, and for USDollar custodial management. Foreigner creditors have suffered deep losses from fraudulent bond export, continue to sit atop mountains of US$-based debt securities, and watch current events in horror. The heap of moldy paper includes both USTreasury Bonds and USAgency Mortgage Bonds. Foreigner creditors see the USDollar valuation propped up by liquidation forces rather than USEconomic strength. Foreigner creditors see the USTBond yields forced down by liquidation forces rather than USGovt debt integrity. Foreigners are aghast at four new trends. They lose respect when the financial market rules change periodically, obviously to favor the insiders, elite, and connected. They lose respect when the approach taken by the Obama Admin is marred by lack of consistency, coordination, or even thorough research. They lose respect at the flow of $trillion$ in rescues and redemptions for failed institutions, most of which are responsible for the global crisis. They lose respect at the prospect of $trillion$ in ongoing federal budget deficits as far as the eye can see. They lose respect at the prospect of $trillion$ in monetized US$-based bonds, with the prospect of repeated announcements.
View Ben Bernanke, now turned commodity supplier. He is shoveling and humping around confetti laced with mold reinforced by a massive flow of swill, and does not even realize it! Forget the helicopter images. The palettes of $100 bills stacked neatly vastly overshadow any volume dropped from black unmarked choppers. His partner Tim Geithner is a seeming rookie with a very questionable past record, whose errors are too numerous to properly cite, starting with the ruinous decisions he recommended for Indonesia with the IMF during the 1998 Asian Meltdown. Details of harsh criticism, hardly reported by the US press networks, were delivered by former Australian Prime Minister Keating. The quotes, discussion, and analysis are included in recent Hat Trick Letter reports.
The latest is a firm undercut against both confidence and integrity in the USDollar, when $1.05 trillion in monetized USTBonds and USAgency Bonds will be completed, using printed money, undermining the USDollar further. My deep firm belief is that another $1 trillion in monetized bonds will be required in summer, then another possibly larger >$1 trillion in monetized bonds will be required this autumn when the USEconomy deteriorates further, led by supply shortages including food. Acceleration in flow of funds is necessary to sustain a bubble, and a similar acceleration is necessary to prevent a bubble collapse. These are hardly the characteristics of a nation entrusted with the global reserve currency. It is no wonder that foreign creditors are both aghast at the situation in the Untied States, and mobilized to defend themselves.
My theory is very simple for a complex global financial structure. The longer foreign nations wait to establish a multi-polar global reserve working alternative, employed broadly within their continental regions, laced within banking and commerce, the greater their loss will be to wealth funds and the greater the disruption will be to their entire economies, their standard of living, and their internal political stability. So let’s see what China is up to. Far more details are provided in the Hat Trick Letter report on Gold & Currencies in the March issue.
This message was just received by a trusted colleague. This summer could be very bloody, in terms of global retribution against the Untied States, its debt peddlers. The gloves could finally come off. The person has global connections, decades of gold and banker experience, connections with the Euro Central Bank, numerous commercial contacts in Russia, China, and Arab world, and lives with several feet in several ponds, fluent in a few key languages. He is involved in many meetings of international importance, and lately has had the advantage of being involved with both bilateral barter arrangements created by Russia (with China, with Germany). He has a strong reliability record, with advanced notice often provided in a valuable manner. Here is a quote from this morning, which was in response to some queries about continued USTreasury Bond support, recently difficulty with UK Gilt bond auctions, and general monetary debauchery by major nations like US, UK, and Switzerland.
He wrote: “However, come the end of May/June/July 2009, the United States will be put through the meat grinder once and for all. You have no idea how pissed off the creditor nations are with the unmitigated arrogance and delusional bulxxhit coming out of Washington DC / Wall Street. I have never heard people be so furious and vocal on how the US needs to be dealt with from here on forward, as demonstrated during an early morning conference call we had with Europeans, including Russians and Asians. All on the call are heavy-duty decision makers.” A time of reckoning comes for the US, and my opinion is that what lies directly ahead is a dark place with more economic hardship. Be prepared with ownership of gold & silver bullion, bars, and coins. If not, a likely outcome is more destruction of personal finances, savings, and pension holdings, along with job cuts.
USDOLLAR & THIRD WORLD REFLECTION
As prelude, examine the USDollar DX index. In my past analyses, a forecast error was given in living color when my call was for the US$ to roll over and turn down a couple months ago. The October high provided surmountable after all. My biggest errors of forecasting are clearly with the USTreasury Bond long-term yield and the USDollar DX index lately. Of course they are subject to the greatest market intervention, despite claims of free markets, despite claims of strong markets that seek equilibrium and proper value through price discovery. Nothing remotely is the case, not when the Plunge Protection Team goes to work, not when the Caribbean bank centers realize a jump from $117 billion in July 2008 to a hefty $204 billion in October 2008 in USTBond holdings. Such numbers are consistent with enormous nations with huge economies, vast banking systems, large indigenous credit markets, massive industries, etc. No, in the US, secretive Caribbean slush operations and phony front agencies do the USFed’s bidding and do the USTreasury’s bidding. In such an environment, it is easy to make wrong forecasts with the USTreasury Bond long-term yield in the USDollar DX index.
The DX index faces an increasing challenge. The October 2008 high was rebuffed, but then supported at the 8-month moving average, only to be surpassed with further European and British distress of intense variety. An old reliable rule of thumb in technical analysis says to turn to a longer term chart to gain more clarity and direction in forecast for price movement. So turn to the monthly chart. The October and March highs now look like a failed double top with respect to the autumn 2005 highs registered in the 92 level. Two big red candles look ominous indeed but not fatal. The monthly stochastix appears elevated and stretched. The DX index did well in even approaching the 90 level at all. Dead men cannot usually walk, let alone climb a staircase. Just as the 2005 rebound in the US$ bear market enjoyed a run, the 2008 rebound has enjoyed a different kind of run. Its strength is derived from US bank insolvency, bank ruin, and major corporate ruin, all of which require staggering liquidation funds and insurance payout funds. It is akin to claiming that Acme Hardware has strong stock value because it has a destroyed business, a destroyed franchise name, is enduring the shame of endless liquidation distress sales, is axing a large proportion of its workforce, has supply chain strangulation. But the Acme stock is strong, since its discontinued wares are in demand!!! The reflection on the USDollar is inevitable.
IN MY VIEW, A LOWER VALUATION COMES FOR THE USDollar ONLY WHEN ALTERNATIVES ARE PRESENTED, INSTALLED, AND USED BROADLY ON INTERCONTINENTAL BASIS. Weak US fundamentals clearly are not enough. Extreme distress, dislocation, and disruption in foreign lands act as the bull whip urging those foreign creditor nations into action toward alternatives. The lead is China, without question. They do not feel the political and military pressure that Saudi Arabia has endured for decades. A band of corrupt royals in Riyadh compares badly to a billion throng of upstart industrialists in the famed Middle Kingdom who harbor a bad taste for a century toward Westerners generally, from past and present attempts at domination. The trade war with China was forecasted in my analysis long ago, like four years ago. The sequence is simple, from offshore manufacturer to trade partner to global adversary to large-scale credit provider to angry creditor to credit master, and maybe to receivership committee governor.
PROLOGUE TO THIRD WORLD
As a quick preface, bear in mind firmly that when foreign creditors own more than half the US debt securities, they slowly take control of the nation with hidden strings, hidden deals, as subtle changes occur in priorities held by US leaders. Worse, foreign creditors begin either to control the selection of key position appointments, or else to go into revolt. With the continuation of the Wall Street control from vividly clear criminal syndicate monoliths, the foreigners have begun to react with firm established detailed blueprint plans for new financial foundation structures. The US press does not cover much at all of these important developments, likely because their outcomes are so dreaded to the US financial way of life. The foreign developments are like turns in the road, where the new pathways are directed to the Third World. The clear signposts scream out of capital shortage and supply shortage. Numerous are the traits of the nation which sadly are showing strong resemblance to the initial stage of Third World entrance.
By the way, not only is war funding profitable above board, but hugely profitable when basic pilferage enters the picture. The exact sum missing remains unclear, but the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) suggests it may exceed $50 billion, a figure that eclipses the Madoff Ponzi scheme. This is more than basic grand larceny, but rather systemic looting, reminiscent of the Hurricane Katrina Relief effort. Big projects enable bigtime skimming, it would seem.
CONFLICT RISES WITH CHINESE CREDITOR
The war of words, the high-level conflict, between the Untied States and China continues to escalate. This is an significant titanic conflict since China is a principal creditor. The other important creditor nation is Saudi Arabia. Two weeks ago, an unprecedented warning was given by Premier Wen Jiabao, complete with a finger wagging gesture. The implied message was crystal clear: Do not devalue the USDollar through reckless spending. China already is the biggest foreign creditor to the USGovt, with an estimated $1 trillion in USTreasury debt. Wen wants to avert massive additional losses from a currency collapse. At issue is an vast stream of stimulus packages, escalated federal deficits, endless rescues, to push down the value of the USDollar, and thus the held value of the Chinese hoard of savings. The international conflict has reached the Bloomberg, Reuters, and Wall Street Journal news. Of course, they leave out major important points. But the WSJ article entitled “China Takes Aim at Dollar” (CLICK HERE) certainly should act like a cold splash of water to readers, unless myopia is a chronic problem, or unless the reader wears flag draped skivvies every day out of the house.
Chinese leaders are openly critical, expressing deep anxiety. Debate is rampant inside China about the wisdom of continued support to purchase USTreasurys. These are preliminary tectonic shifts to be identified before important new financial structures come to fore. They will disturb the USDollar system at its global foundation, with much inherent hegemony. The shock waves will come region by region, in a succession. By attracting a lot of attention to this issue, China has decided to attempt to gain influence at the G-20 meeting.
An important issue being watched is the Chinese Govt decision to expand its 4 trillion yuan (=US$586B) stimulus, if needed. The Untied States prints money, undercuts its currency and debt integrity, and adds dangerously to its financial weakness with the parade of rescues and stimulus that seem designed to ignore the people on Main Street. The Chinese have a war chest, and are using it. The Chinese are confident about emerging from the financial crisis and demonstrating vitality again. The Chinese Economy is indeed under stress. Many analysts wrongly conclude that the US is in much better shape. Not true! The USEconomy is undergoing a dangerous disintegration process. The Chinese are actively trying to spur domestic consumption, a difficult task when millions of job losses have occurred. A great migration has begun back to the rural areas, away from the cities. The seeds of Chinese social turmoil have been sown, to be sure.
CONCESSIONS MADE TO CREDITORS
An extremely dangerous and controversial agreement might have been struck between the USGovt and Chinese Govt during a visit to Beijing by Secy State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Some call this news pure rumor, while others claim it is suppressed fact. Time will tell. The Chinese had been demanding greater assurances for continued USTreasury Bond purchase. The public is not privy to actual discussions, as US leaders continue to betray the US public with a string of secret deals in enclosed rooms absent reporters. Details and quotes appear in the Hat Trick Letter, in particular the Gold & Currency report for March out last weekend. The US Embassy in Beijing confirmed the deal to the source. Hillary closed the deal. A quid-pro-quo agreement was struck, continued USTBond purchases in return for Eminent Domain option to exercise by China for property seizure, “to physically take, inside the USA, land, buildings, factories, perhaps even entire cities.” The concepts of colonization and carpet-bagging should come to mind!
In order to maintain credit flow for the deeply insolvent USGovt, the federal authorities might have mortgaged the physical land and property of citizens and businesses in the Untied States to a foreign power. What makes the betrayal all the worse if its apparent secrecy. In my analysis last autumn, mention has been made that a great risk grows for China to embark on a COLONIZATION movement. Huge tracts of USTBonds have been accumulated by China since September. The USTBond hoard held by China would be converted into mortgage bonds, and then into actual hard asset property, including commercial buildings. Sadly, the Secy State post under Hillary has morphed into an emissary post to plead with creditors. This is NOT so much about forcible confiscation, but rather conversion to property like during any other ordinary liquidation, ordered within receivership. China has embarked on early stages in preparation to convert debt securities into hard assets like property. They are crafty and deliberate. What few seem to acknowledge is the path from mortgage bond ownership to property purchase (for a very low price) upon foreclosure is a very short path.
CHINESE BANKS TO REPLACE USDOLLAR
In a bold plan, the Chinese Govt has announced the yuan currency will soon replace the USDollar as the new Asian regional reserve currency. The stage is set for Asia to install the Chinese yuan for broad usage across Asia, with possible massive dump of USTreasury Bonds. Look for other new global reserve currency to spring up in the next year, especially after the Chinese run interference on the financial, geopolitical, and diplomatic fronts. The impact alone from the Chinese plans presents a dire prospect for the Untied States, with dangerous economic and credit impacts. The Asia News is full of excellent analytic editorials, some full of valuable data.
Due to USDollar instability and unreliability, Beijing is introducing a serious currency experiment, in order to aid in the stability of the Asian economy. The Chinese intention seems clearly to decouple both China and Asia from the USDollar and to introduce the yuan as the regional reserve currency. The yuan will be infused throughout their banking system. Other Asian governments will surely follow suit and discharge reserve USTBonds in favor of the yuan currency. The full impact will be felt when Asian nations who participate in this new reserve currency begin to purchase raw materials and commodities like grains, energy, and metals in Asia, using yuan currency in hand. The giant blow taken by the Untied States will result in further isolation. That will severely weaken US$ demand in an important continent.
This is a very clever economic as well as political plan by China. The plan is a pathway for regional economic stability for Asia, centered finally in China in a monetary sense. China will proceed under the legitimate political cover of their own financial reform toward stabilization. Chinese bank leaders like Zhou Xiaochuan have begun to state publicly some nontrivial arguments about how continuation of the current US$-based global unipolar financial system bears costs and risks that far exceed the benefits. If the USEconomy wishes to import Chinese finished products, then the American consumer will indirectly contribute toward financing any new Chinese debt. The Chinese are considering a new debt security, which will compete for Asian surplus funds and thus displace the USTreasury Bond. If successful, the Chinese will turn the tables completely, and wear the big currency boot. Chinese sentiment has changed, as has their patience. Geithner’s initial comments directed against the Chinese were disastrous, and meant the ‘kiss of death’ for the USDollar and USTBond. My firm belief is that a new Asian regional community fund, designed to ward off currency attack, might be vastly expanded to become the precursor of an Asian Credit Market denominated in Chinese yuan, and using newly created Chinese debt securities. The distrust of the IMF is acute these days. They actively seek alternatives. They are collectively wealthy enough to create new support structures, all of which in turn undermine the USDollar and USTreasury Bond.
The graphic on FOREX reserves firmly proves the point that the balance of power has shifted to developing nations. Wealth accumulation leads to shifts in bank power. If the existing structures do not incorporate and accommodate the new reality, then new structures will come into form and take root. The US and UK have given nothing but lipservice to Chinese, Arab, and Russian demands, their creditors. The time for revolt is here. The current system is highly unstable.
The biggest beneficiary is sure to be gold & silver, as the USDollar and USTreasury Bond are weakened. They are the competitors to gold. For practicality reasons, the USTBond will be preserved at all costs. The USEconomy desperately requires that mortgage rates remain low, and that long-term interest rates remain low for commercial loans. Avoidance of further damage from housing decline is urgent. Avoidance of further credit derivative accidents and heavy losses is also urgent. So the more vulnerable of the pair is the USDollar. The Gold-US$ connection is soon to return in powerful force. A decline in the USDollar will send the gold price well above the $1000 level. The only obstacle to the gold runup is continued cartel gold futures contract short positions, like 1.2 million ounces in total put to work in the two days following the USFed $trillion$ monetization announcement. Corruption continues, but gold will prevail!
THE HAT TRICK LETTER PROFITS IN THE CURRENT CRISIS.
Jim Willie CB
Editor of the "HAT TRICK LETTER"
Hat Trick Letter
***
Jim Willie CB is a statistical analyst in marketing research and retail forecasting. He holds a PhD in Statistics. His career has stretched over 24 years. He aspires to thrive in the financial editor world, unencumbered by the limitations of economic credentials. Visit his free website to find articles from topflight authors at www.GoldenJackass.com . For personal questions about subscriptions, contact him at JimWillieCB@aol.com
China: Partner, Adversary, Rebel
By Jim Willie CB, KITCO, Mar 27 2009
www.GoldenJackass.com
A crisis of global confidence in the USDollar is upon us. Foreigners have begun to lose respect for USGovt approach to problem solving, for US bank administration, and for USDollar custodial management. Foreigner creditors have suffered deep losses from fraudulent bond export, continue to sit atop mountains of US$-based debt securities, and watch current events in horror. The heap of moldy paper includes both USTreasury Bonds and USAgency Mortgage Bonds. Foreigner creditors see the USDollar valuation propped up by liquidation forces rather than USEconomic strength. Foreigner creditors see the USTBond yields forced down by liquidation forces rather than USGovt debt integrity. Foreigners are aghast at four new trends. They lose respect when the financial market rules change periodically, obviously to favor the insiders, elite, and connected. They lose respect when the approach taken by the Obama Admin is marred by lack of consistency, coordination, or even thorough research. They lose respect at the flow of $trillion$ in rescues and redemptions for failed institutions, most of which are responsible for the global crisis. They lose respect at the prospect of $trillion$ in ongoing federal budget deficits as far as the eye can see. They lose respect at the prospect of $trillion$ in monetized US$-based bonds, with the prospect of repeated announcements.
View Ben Bernanke, now turned commodity supplier. He is shoveling and humping around confetti laced with mold reinforced by a massive flow of swill, and does not even realize it! Forget the helicopter images. The palettes of $100 bills stacked neatly vastly overshadow any volume dropped from black unmarked choppers. His partner Tim Geithner is a seeming rookie with a very questionable past record, whose errors are too numerous to properly cite, starting with the ruinous decisions he recommended for Indonesia with the IMF during the 1998 Asian Meltdown. Details of harsh criticism, hardly reported by the US press networks, were delivered by former Australian Prime Minister Keating. The quotes, discussion, and analysis are included in recent Hat Trick Letter reports.
The latest is a firm undercut against both confidence and integrity in the USDollar, when $1.05 trillion in monetized USTBonds and USAgency Bonds will be completed, using printed money, undermining the USDollar further. My deep firm belief is that another $1 trillion in monetized bonds will be required in summer, then another possibly larger >$1 trillion in monetized bonds will be required this autumn when the USEconomy deteriorates further, led by supply shortages including food. Acceleration in flow of funds is necessary to sustain a bubble, and a similar acceleration is necessary to prevent a bubble collapse. These are hardly the characteristics of a nation entrusted with the global reserve currency. It is no wonder that foreign creditors are both aghast at the situation in the Untied States, and mobilized to defend themselves.
My theory is very simple for a complex global financial structure. The longer foreign nations wait to establish a multi-polar global reserve working alternative, employed broadly within their continental regions, laced within banking and commerce, the greater their loss will be to wealth funds and the greater the disruption will be to their entire economies, their standard of living, and their internal political stability. So let’s see what China is up to. Far more details are provided in the Hat Trick Letter report on Gold & Currencies in the March issue.
This message was just received by a trusted colleague. This summer could be very bloody, in terms of global retribution against the Untied States, its debt peddlers. The gloves could finally come off. The person has global connections, decades of gold and banker experience, connections with the Euro Central Bank, numerous commercial contacts in Russia, China, and Arab world, and lives with several feet in several ponds, fluent in a few key languages. He is involved in many meetings of international importance, and lately has had the advantage of being involved with both bilateral barter arrangements created by Russia (with China, with Germany). He has a strong reliability record, with advanced notice often provided in a valuable manner. Here is a quote from this morning, which was in response to some queries about continued USTreasury Bond support, recently difficulty with UK Gilt bond auctions, and general monetary debauchery by major nations like US, UK, and Switzerland.
He wrote: “However, come the end of May/June/July 2009, the United States will be put through the meat grinder once and for all. You have no idea how pissed off the creditor nations are with the unmitigated arrogance and delusional bulxxhit coming out of Washington DC / Wall Street. I have never heard people be so furious and vocal on how the US needs to be dealt with from here on forward, as demonstrated during an early morning conference call we had with Europeans, including Russians and Asians. All on the call are heavy-duty decision makers.” A time of reckoning comes for the US, and my opinion is that what lies directly ahead is a dark place with more economic hardship. Be prepared with ownership of gold & silver bullion, bars, and coins. If not, a likely outcome is more destruction of personal finances, savings, and pension holdings, along with job cuts.
USDOLLAR & THIRD WORLD REFLECTION
As prelude, examine the USDollar DX index. In my past analyses, a forecast error was given in living color when my call was for the US$ to roll over and turn down a couple months ago. The October high provided surmountable after all. My biggest errors of forecasting are clearly with the USTreasury Bond long-term yield and the USDollar DX index lately. Of course they are subject to the greatest market intervention, despite claims of free markets, despite claims of strong markets that seek equilibrium and proper value through price discovery. Nothing remotely is the case, not when the Plunge Protection Team goes to work, not when the Caribbean bank centers realize a jump from $117 billion in July 2008 to a hefty $204 billion in October 2008 in USTBond holdings. Such numbers are consistent with enormous nations with huge economies, vast banking systems, large indigenous credit markets, massive industries, etc. No, in the US, secretive Caribbean slush operations and phony front agencies do the USFed’s bidding and do the USTreasury’s bidding. In such an environment, it is easy to make wrong forecasts with the USTreasury Bond long-term yield in the USDollar DX index.
The DX index faces an increasing challenge. The October 2008 high was rebuffed, but then supported at the 8-month moving average, only to be surpassed with further European and British distress of intense variety. An old reliable rule of thumb in technical analysis says to turn to a longer term chart to gain more clarity and direction in forecast for price movement. So turn to the monthly chart. The October and March highs now look like a failed double top with respect to the autumn 2005 highs registered in the 92 level. Two big red candles look ominous indeed but not fatal. The monthly stochastix appears elevated and stretched. The DX index did well in even approaching the 90 level at all. Dead men cannot usually walk, let alone climb a staircase. Just as the 2005 rebound in the US$ bear market enjoyed a run, the 2008 rebound has enjoyed a different kind of run. Its strength is derived from US bank insolvency, bank ruin, and major corporate ruin, all of which require staggering liquidation funds and insurance payout funds. It is akin to claiming that Acme Hardware has strong stock value because it has a destroyed business, a destroyed franchise name, is enduring the shame of endless liquidation distress sales, is axing a large proportion of its workforce, has supply chain strangulation. But the Acme stock is strong, since its discontinued wares are in demand!!! The reflection on the USDollar is inevitable.
IN MY VIEW, A LOWER VALUATION COMES FOR THE USDollar ONLY WHEN ALTERNATIVES ARE PRESENTED, INSTALLED, AND USED BROADLY ON INTERCONTINENTAL BASIS. Weak US fundamentals clearly are not enough. Extreme distress, dislocation, and disruption in foreign lands act as the bull whip urging those foreign creditor nations into action toward alternatives. The lead is China, without question. They do not feel the political and military pressure that Saudi Arabia has endured for decades. A band of corrupt royals in Riyadh compares badly to a billion throng of upstart industrialists in the famed Middle Kingdom who harbor a bad taste for a century toward Westerners generally, from past and present attempts at domination. The trade war with China was forecasted in my analysis long ago, like four years ago. The sequence is simple, from offshore manufacturer to trade partner to global adversary to large-scale credit provider to angry creditor to credit master, and maybe to receivership committee governor.
PROLOGUE TO THIRD WORLD
As a quick preface, bear in mind firmly that when foreign creditors own more than half the US debt securities, they slowly take control of the nation with hidden strings, hidden deals, as subtle changes occur in priorities held by US leaders. Worse, foreign creditors begin either to control the selection of key position appointments, or else to go into revolt. With the continuation of the Wall Street control from vividly clear criminal syndicate monoliths, the foreigners have begun to react with firm established detailed blueprint plans for new financial foundation structures. The US press does not cover much at all of these important developments, likely because their outcomes are so dreaded to the US financial way of life. The foreign developments are like turns in the road, where the new pathways are directed to the Third World. The clear signposts scream out of capital shortage and supply shortage. Numerous are the traits of the nation which sadly are showing strong resemblance to the initial stage of Third World entrance.
By the way, not only is war funding profitable above board, but hugely profitable when basic pilferage enters the picture. The exact sum missing remains unclear, but the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) suggests it may exceed $50 billion, a figure that eclipses the Madoff Ponzi scheme. This is more than basic grand larceny, but rather systemic looting, reminiscent of the Hurricane Katrina Relief effort. Big projects enable bigtime skimming, it would seem.
CONFLICT RISES WITH CHINESE CREDITOR
The war of words, the high-level conflict, between the Untied States and China continues to escalate. This is an significant titanic conflict since China is a principal creditor. The other important creditor nation is Saudi Arabia. Two weeks ago, an unprecedented warning was given by Premier Wen Jiabao, complete with a finger wagging gesture. The implied message was crystal clear: Do not devalue the USDollar through reckless spending. China already is the biggest foreign creditor to the USGovt, with an estimated $1 trillion in USTreasury debt. Wen wants to avert massive additional losses from a currency collapse. At issue is an vast stream of stimulus packages, escalated federal deficits, endless rescues, to push down the value of the USDollar, and thus the held value of the Chinese hoard of savings. The international conflict has reached the Bloomberg, Reuters, and Wall Street Journal news. Of course, they leave out major important points. But the WSJ article entitled “China Takes Aim at Dollar” (CLICK HERE) certainly should act like a cold splash of water to readers, unless myopia is a chronic problem, or unless the reader wears flag draped skivvies every day out of the house.
Chinese leaders are openly critical, expressing deep anxiety. Debate is rampant inside China about the wisdom of continued support to purchase USTreasurys. These are preliminary tectonic shifts to be identified before important new financial structures come to fore. They will disturb the USDollar system at its global foundation, with much inherent hegemony. The shock waves will come region by region, in a succession. By attracting a lot of attention to this issue, China has decided to attempt to gain influence at the G-20 meeting.
An important issue being watched is the Chinese Govt decision to expand its 4 trillion yuan (=US$586B) stimulus, if needed. The Untied States prints money, undercuts its currency and debt integrity, and adds dangerously to its financial weakness with the parade of rescues and stimulus that seem designed to ignore the people on Main Street. The Chinese have a war chest, and are using it. The Chinese are confident about emerging from the financial crisis and demonstrating vitality again. The Chinese Economy is indeed under stress. Many analysts wrongly conclude that the US is in much better shape. Not true! The USEconomy is undergoing a dangerous disintegration process. The Chinese are actively trying to spur domestic consumption, a difficult task when millions of job losses have occurred. A great migration has begun back to the rural areas, away from the cities. The seeds of Chinese social turmoil have been sown, to be sure.
CONCESSIONS MADE TO CREDITORS
An extremely dangerous and controversial agreement might have been struck between the USGovt and Chinese Govt during a visit to Beijing by Secy State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Some call this news pure rumor, while others claim it is suppressed fact. Time will tell. The Chinese had been demanding greater assurances for continued USTreasury Bond purchase. The public is not privy to actual discussions, as US leaders continue to betray the US public with a string of secret deals in enclosed rooms absent reporters. Details and quotes appear in the Hat Trick Letter, in particular the Gold & Currency report for March out last weekend. The US Embassy in Beijing confirmed the deal to the source. Hillary closed the deal. A quid-pro-quo agreement was struck, continued USTBond purchases in return for Eminent Domain option to exercise by China for property seizure, “to physically take, inside the USA, land, buildings, factories, perhaps even entire cities.” The concepts of colonization and carpet-bagging should come to mind!
In order to maintain credit flow for the deeply insolvent USGovt, the federal authorities might have mortgaged the physical land and property of citizens and businesses in the Untied States to a foreign power. What makes the betrayal all the worse if its apparent secrecy. In my analysis last autumn, mention has been made that a great risk grows for China to embark on a COLONIZATION movement. Huge tracts of USTBonds have been accumulated by China since September. The USTBond hoard held by China would be converted into mortgage bonds, and then into actual hard asset property, including commercial buildings. Sadly, the Secy State post under Hillary has morphed into an emissary post to plead with creditors. This is NOT so much about forcible confiscation, but rather conversion to property like during any other ordinary liquidation, ordered within receivership. China has embarked on early stages in preparation to convert debt securities into hard assets like property. They are crafty and deliberate. What few seem to acknowledge is the path from mortgage bond ownership to property purchase (for a very low price) upon foreclosure is a very short path.
CHINESE BANKS TO REPLACE USDOLLAR
In a bold plan, the Chinese Govt has announced the yuan currency will soon replace the USDollar as the new Asian regional reserve currency. The stage is set for Asia to install the Chinese yuan for broad usage across Asia, with possible massive dump of USTreasury Bonds. Look for other new global reserve currency to spring up in the next year, especially after the Chinese run interference on the financial, geopolitical, and diplomatic fronts. The impact alone from the Chinese plans presents a dire prospect for the Untied States, with dangerous economic and credit impacts. The Asia News is full of excellent analytic editorials, some full of valuable data.
Due to USDollar instability and unreliability, Beijing is introducing a serious currency experiment, in order to aid in the stability of the Asian economy. The Chinese intention seems clearly to decouple both China and Asia from the USDollar and to introduce the yuan as the regional reserve currency. The yuan will be infused throughout their banking system. Other Asian governments will surely follow suit and discharge reserve USTBonds in favor of the yuan currency. The full impact will be felt when Asian nations who participate in this new reserve currency begin to purchase raw materials and commodities like grains, energy, and metals in Asia, using yuan currency in hand. The giant blow taken by the Untied States will result in further isolation. That will severely weaken US$ demand in an important continent.
This is a very clever economic as well as political plan by China. The plan is a pathway for regional economic stability for Asia, centered finally in China in a monetary sense. China will proceed under the legitimate political cover of their own financial reform toward stabilization. Chinese bank leaders like Zhou Xiaochuan have begun to state publicly some nontrivial arguments about how continuation of the current US$-based global unipolar financial system bears costs and risks that far exceed the benefits. If the USEconomy wishes to import Chinese finished products, then the American consumer will indirectly contribute toward financing any new Chinese debt. The Chinese are considering a new debt security, which will compete for Asian surplus funds and thus displace the USTreasury Bond. If successful, the Chinese will turn the tables completely, and wear the big currency boot. Chinese sentiment has changed, as has their patience. Geithner’s initial comments directed against the Chinese were disastrous, and meant the ‘kiss of death’ for the USDollar and USTBond. My firm belief is that a new Asian regional community fund, designed to ward off currency attack, might be vastly expanded to become the precursor of an Asian Credit Market denominated in Chinese yuan, and using newly created Chinese debt securities. The distrust of the IMF is acute these days. They actively seek alternatives. They are collectively wealthy enough to create new support structures, all of which in turn undermine the USDollar and USTreasury Bond.
The graphic on FOREX reserves firmly proves the point that the balance of power has shifted to developing nations. Wealth accumulation leads to shifts in bank power. If the existing structures do not incorporate and accommodate the new reality, then new structures will come into form and take root. The US and UK have given nothing but lipservice to Chinese, Arab, and Russian demands, their creditors. The time for revolt is here. The current system is highly unstable.
The biggest beneficiary is sure to be gold & silver, as the USDollar and USTreasury Bond are weakened. They are the competitors to gold. For practicality reasons, the USTBond will be preserved at all costs. The USEconomy desperately requires that mortgage rates remain low, and that long-term interest rates remain low for commercial loans. Avoidance of further damage from housing decline is urgent. Avoidance of further credit derivative accidents and heavy losses is also urgent. So the more vulnerable of the pair is the USDollar. The Gold-US$ connection is soon to return in powerful force. A decline in the USDollar will send the gold price well above the $1000 level. The only obstacle to the gold runup is continued cartel gold futures contract short positions, like 1.2 million ounces in total put to work in the two days following the USFed $trillion$ monetization announcement. Corruption continues, but gold will prevail!
THE HAT TRICK LETTER PROFITS IN THE CURRENT CRISIS.
Jim Willie CB
Editor of the "HAT TRICK LETTER"
Hat Trick Letter
***
Jim Willie CB is a statistical analyst in marketing research and retail forecasting. He holds a PhD in Statistics. His career has stretched over 24 years. He aspires to thrive in the financial editor world, unencumbered by the limitations of economic credentials. Visit his free website to find articles from topflight authors at www.GoldenJackass.com . For personal questions about subscriptions, contact him at JimWillieCB@aol.com
Truth About Energy
The Truth About Energy
Donald E. Lutz, PE
Please e-mail me if you have comments or questions. I will answer questions if possible. Lets have some dialogue.
"You must not be afraid to follow the truth no matter where it is found."
Thomas Jefferson
Mythology distracts us everywhere. For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie: contrived and dishonest. But the myth: persistent, persuasive, unrealistic.
John Kennedy.
Welcome to my energy web site. In this site I reveal the truth about energy that concerns the future of our country and the world. Also I discuss the religions, and environmentalists, who strongly espouse energy policies that I think would return us to the third world living conditions.
The blue underlined links on the left column forms a table of contents (TOC) of this Web site as well as an easy way to go to any Page by simply clicking on the link. Be sure and read about the Fast Breeder Reactor and Fuel Cycles.
Nuclear Power is the answer to our energy problem.
*
Nuclear power offers an infinite supply of energy.
*
Energy produced from nuclear power plants is the most economical of all sources.
*
Nuclear power has no pollutants
*
Nuclear power fission product wastes are minuscule and can be safely stored.
*
Nuclear power is safe as demonstrated by the records of 104 commercial plants each operated over 30 years.
Nuclear power employing Fast Breeder Reactors offers the world an infinite supply of energy. But Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter stopped its progress as payback to the environmentalists who voted for them. Carter also prevented recycle of fuel coming out of commercial reactors.
President Clinton actually pledged to remove all funding from nuclear power research during his nationally televised inaugural address. And he kept his promise. Clinton ordered the Experimental Breeder Reactor power plant (EBR II) shutdown. And he ordered that EBR II be destroyed..
As payoff to the environmentalists, President Bill Clinton shutdown Argonne National Lab's Experimental Breeder Reactor (EBR II) in Idaho and poisoned the reactor assembly with a carboniferous material so it can never be started again. This is one of the most egregious acts ever performed by a mentally sick president.
Obama is also beholden to he environmentalists and cannot restore the Fast Breeder (FIR) project. If Obama said he would restore Fast Breeders, he would not be elected dog catcher by the environmentalists.
Nearly 100% of the uranium that is introduced into the existing commercial nuclear power plant fuel cycles could be used in Fast Breeder Reactors to produce an infinite amount of energy.
Moreover, if we could reprocess our present stockpiles of depleted uranium currently stored at the sites of our 104 commercial nuclear reactors and also the depleted Uranium Hexafloride (DUF6) from the bomb program and apply these in Fast Breeder Reactors it could produce all of our Nation
Donald E. Lutz, PE
Please e-mail me if you have comments or questions. I will answer questions if possible. Lets have some dialogue.
"You must not be afraid to follow the truth no matter where it is found."
Thomas Jefferson
Mythology distracts us everywhere. For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie: contrived and dishonest. But the myth: persistent, persuasive, unrealistic.
John Kennedy.
Welcome to my energy web site. In this site I reveal the truth about energy that concerns the future of our country and the world. Also I discuss the religions, and environmentalists, who strongly espouse energy policies that I think would return us to the third world living conditions.
The blue underlined links on the left column forms a table of contents (TOC) of this Web site as well as an easy way to go to any Page by simply clicking on the link. Be sure and read about the Fast Breeder Reactor and Fuel Cycles.
Nuclear Power is the answer to our energy problem.
*
Nuclear power offers an infinite supply of energy.
*
Energy produced from nuclear power plants is the most economical of all sources.
*
Nuclear power has no pollutants
*
Nuclear power fission product wastes are minuscule and can be safely stored.
*
Nuclear power is safe as demonstrated by the records of 104 commercial plants each operated over 30 years.
Nuclear power employing Fast Breeder Reactors offers the world an infinite supply of energy. But Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter stopped its progress as payback to the environmentalists who voted for them. Carter also prevented recycle of fuel coming out of commercial reactors.
President Clinton actually pledged to remove all funding from nuclear power research during his nationally televised inaugural address. And he kept his promise. Clinton ordered the Experimental Breeder Reactor power plant (EBR II) shutdown. And he ordered that EBR II be destroyed..
As payoff to the environmentalists, President Bill Clinton shutdown Argonne National Lab's Experimental Breeder Reactor (EBR II) in Idaho and poisoned the reactor assembly with a carboniferous material so it can never be started again. This is one of the most egregious acts ever performed by a mentally sick president.
Obama is also beholden to he environmentalists and cannot restore the Fast Breeder (FIR) project. If Obama said he would restore Fast Breeders, he would not be elected dog catcher by the environmentalists.
Nearly 100% of the uranium that is introduced into the existing commercial nuclear power plant fuel cycles could be used in Fast Breeder Reactors to produce an infinite amount of energy.
Moreover, if we could reprocess our present stockpiles of depleted uranium currently stored at the sites of our 104 commercial nuclear reactors and also the depleted Uranium Hexafloride (DUF6) from the bomb program and apply these in Fast Breeder Reactors it could produce all of our Nation
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