Die Welt A New Vision of the World

Top 10 World companies

2010-09-13T10:35:00.000-06:00

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Bernanke is destroying US Economy

2010-08-28T13:53:00.001-06:00

Bernanke is only taking care of his Wall Street bosses

BBC Inside F-35

2010-07-18T11:18:00.000-06:00

A nice mini video of F-35 capabilities.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10652020

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10648250

SPACE RACE (TV)

2010-06-19T10:52:00.001-06:00

parte 1

parte 2

oarte 3

parte 4

parte 5

X-51 Waverider new missile

2010-04-10T14:14:00.001-06:00

New World Order (alex Jones)

2009-11-02T14:25:00.001-06:00

Watch this video of Alex Jones, interview by Russia Today and a very nice Russian reporter ;)

ABM Killer

2009-08-16T15:43:00.001-06:00

US Crisis more banks to rescue

2008-09-21T12:47:00.003-06:00

Watch this video of Ron Paul talking on Fox News about how the US would have to "rescue" more and more banks with taxpayers money, and its going to cost more that half trillion dollars

CAR THAT USES WATER INSTEAD OF GAS

2008-07-05T18:37:00.000-06:00

What a super invention by JAPAN now that Gas price is at the sky!,///

US empire VIDEO HISTORY

2008-04-20T15:34:00.001-06:00

Excellent video from Howard ZINN about a short history of US EMPIRE since they kill thousand of indians, stoling mexico territory and now...

ABSOLUT AD ABOUT MEXICO

2008-04-09T20:47:00.001-06:00

WAt a controversial AD of ABSOLUT showing a map of Mexico from 1876 before USA stole nearly 2 million km well of couse lot of ppl complain about that cuz they got all that turf by the only way USA get things from others USING BRUTE FORCE

US193 SHOTDOWN VIDEO

2008-02-22T12:10:00.001-06:00

Finally the Pentagon shotdown the US 193 Spy satellite using a SM-3 Missile fired from USS LAKE ERIE Ticonderoga class ship that already did the same thing for the MDA (Missile Denfense Agency) in october 2006.

well here is the video from the PENTAGON

Goodbye FIDEL

2008-02-20T09:43:00.002-06:00

February 18 2008, another historical date, Fidel Castro resign as President of Cuba cuz he's still sick and cannt give enough time to the Presidency, he was the people with most time in charge of a country when he overthrown Fulgencio Batista.

W Bush said that he doesnt care about Castro resign and that the embargo (illegal and unilateral) would continue until the people of Cuba have FREEDOM (strange that he didnt said DEMOCRACY ), but US Senate call for a new and complete overview of the Politics to the Island they also tell that embargo hasnt work to depose Comunism from the Island

KOSOVO Independence

2008-02-18T10:04:00.004-06:00

Finally they got what they want Independence, but the way the made it is ILLEGAL and Unilateral, but who cares when USA is backing u???, for Russia and China its very dangerous cuz it can ignite some frozen conflicts in their countries, Spain said a NOOOO!!!, Kosovo "urge" nearly 192 countries 2 give their blessing 2 the new country

Kosovo is a MAFIA state that sell illegal weapons, DRUGS and the "president" is linked 2 AL Qaeda and other crazy islamics movements, USA knew it before the 1999 Balcans Wars but these all part of the big plan of USA they already have a massive base call CAMP BONDSTEEL to protect some new oil pipes and other geopolitics interest of the empire

MARS DOOR

2008-02-07T19:20:00.000-06:00

Another amazing picture from MARS by MRO spacecraft, it appear to be a door entrance in a very strange montain take a look

NAVY NEW RAIL GUN TESTED

2008-02-03T11:53:00.000-06:00

January 2008, US NAVY tested a new Rail gun that use 10 megajoules to fire a projectil up to5640 mph!!!, this new weapon doesnt use any explosive just a special metal projectile that travel up to Mach 5 reaching over 200 miles with an acurracy of 5 meters to target.

VIDEOS

Microsoft would buy YAHOO for $44.6 billons

2008-02-01T16:07:00.000-06:00

Like I wrote last year Microsoft launches another offer to buy YAHOO but this time they would not accept a NO (steve Balmer), they are offering $44.6 billons to buy it so Microsoft can face Google in the internet business (google controls 60% of search on US).

Microsoft offers $44.6B for Yahoo

USA Secret EMPIRE

2008-01-31T13:10:00.000-06:00

John Perkins wrote a very interesting book call "The Secret History of the American Empire" with John Perkins about how the USA has blackmailed most of the 3rd world countries to get OIL giving them big loans that cannt be pay, he was working in that "project" but suddenly decide to leave it

US SPY Satellite could crash on earth

2008-01-30T10:22:00.001-06:00

LAst week a news came to the public that a spy satellite know as USA 193 could crash on earth this is truth they lost communications and control so it might crash on february polluting large areas with berilium and other substances, this USA 193 is the size of a bus, it was used to give precious information for the WAr on Terror

NASA space image of the USA 193

DOA sinking USA beyond limits

2008-01-28T18:20:00.000-06:00

This weekend I found a very very good (I know I tell that everytime) article of Chalmers Johnson I was thinking the Dollar sinking, Awesome USA debt, and High oil prices was the main reason cuz the USA economy is sinking but NO!!!! its all because the high expenditures on DOA (wars, black projects, military aid 2 Israel, etc..) since 1945 USA economy became a WAR ECONOMY they were thinking hey if that work on World War 2 why we dont continue expending more and more on that with the pretext OH We are doing these cuz we need protection against EVIL, yeah sure now DOA is the main receiver of USA BUDGET, BUSH think the same WAR ECONOMY can save the economy NO WAY!, USA throws more and more money in the military than the whole world take a look of the new owner of the budget MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

READ

Within the next month, the Pentagon will submit its 2009 budget to Congress and it's a fair bet that it will be even larger than the staggering 2008 one. Like the Army and the Marines, the Pentagon itself is overstretched and under strain -- and like the two services, which are expected to add 92,000 new troops over the next five years (at an estimated cost of $1.2 billion per 10,000), the Pentagon's response is never to cut back, but always to expand, always to demand more.

After all, there are those disastrous Afghan and Iraqi wars still eating taxpayer dollars as if there were no tomorrow. Then there's what enthusiasts like to call "the next war" to think about, which means all those big-ticket weapons, all those jets, ships, and armored vehicles for the future. And don't forget the still-popular, Rumsfeld-style "netcentric warfare" systems (robots, drones, communications satellites, and the like), not to speak of the killer space toys being developed; and then there's all that ruined equipment out of Iraq and Afghanistan to be massively replaced -- and all those ruined human beings to take care of.

You'll get the gist of this from a recent editorial in the trade magazine Aviation Week & Space Technology:

"The fact Washington must face is that nearly five years of war have left U.S. forces worse off than they have been in a generation, yes, since Vietnam, and restoring them will take budget-building unlike any in the past."

Even on the rare occasion when -- as in the case of Boeing's C-17 cargo plane -- the Pentagon decides to cancel a project, there's Congress to remember. Contracts and subcontracts for weapons systems, carefully doled out to as many states as possible, mean jobs, and so Congress often balks at such cuts. (Fifty-five House members recently warned the Pentagon of a "strong negative response" if funding for the C-17 is excised from the 2009 budget.) All in all, it adds up to a defense menu for a glutton.

Already, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has said that 2009 funding is "largely locked into place." The giant military-industrial combines -- Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon -- have been watching their stocks rise in otherwise treacherous times. They are hopeful. As Ronald Sugar, Northrop CEO, put it: "A great global power like the United States needs a great navy and a great navy needs an adequate number of ships, and they have to be modern and capable" -- and guess which company is the Navy's largest shipbuilder?

There should be nothing surprising in all this, especially for those of us who have read Chalmers Johnson's Nemesis, The Last Days of the American Republic, the final volume of his Blowback Trilogy. Published in 2007, it is already a classic on what imperial overstretch means for the rest of us. The paperback of Nemesis is officially out today, just as global stock markets tumble. It is simply a must-read (and if you've already read it, then get a copy for a friend). In the meantime, hunker in for Johnson's latest magisterial account of how the mightiest guns the Pentagon can muster threaten to sink our own country. (For those interested, click here to view a clip from a new film, "Chalmers Johnson on American Hegemony," in Cinema Libre Studios' Speaking Freely series in which he discusses military Keynesianism and imperial bankruptcy.) Tom

Going Bankrupt
Why the Debt Crisis Is Now the Greatest Threat to the American Republic
By Chalmers Johnson
The military adventurers of the Bush administration have much in common with the corporate leaders of the defunct energy company Enron. Both groups of men thought that they were the "smartest guys in the room," the title of Alex Gibney's prize-winning film on what went wrong at Enron. The neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon outsmarted themselves. They failed even to address the problem of how to finance their schemes of imperialist wars and global domination.

As a result, going into 2008, the United States finds itself in the anomalous position of being unable to pay for its own elevated living standards or its wasteful, overly large military establishment. Its government no longer even attempts to reduce the ruinous expenses of maintaining huge standing armies, replacing the equipment that seven years of wars have destroyed or worn out, or preparing for a war in outer space against unknown adversaries. Instead, the Bush administration puts off these costs for future generations to pay -- or repudiate. This utter fiscal irresponsibility has been disguised through many manipulative financial schemes (such as causing poorer countries to lend us unprecedented sums of money), but the time of reckoning is fast approaching.

There are three broad aspects to our debt crisis. First, in the current fiscal year (2008) we are spending insane amounts of money on "defense" projects that bear no relationship to the national security of the United States. Simultaneously, we are keeping the income tax burdens on the richest segments of the American population at strikingly low levels.

Second, we continue to believe that we can compensate for the accelerating erosion of our manufacturing base and our loss of jobs to foreign countries through massive military expenditures -- so-called "military Keynesianism," which I discuss in detail in my book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. By military Keynesianism, I mean the mistaken belief that public policies focused on frequent wars, huge expenditures on weapons and munitions, and large standing armies can indefinitely sustain a wealthy capitalist economy. The opposite is actually true.

Third, in our devotion to militarism (despite our limited resources), we are failing to invest in our social infrastructure and other requirements for the long-term health of our country. These are what economists call "opportunity costs," things not done because we spent our money on something else. Our public education system has deteriorated alarmingly. We have failed to provide health care to all our citizens and neglected our responsibilities as the world's number one polluter. Most important, we have lost our competitiveness as a manufacturer for civilian needs -- an infinitely more efficient use of scarce resources than arms manufacturing. Let me discuss each of these.

The Current Fiscal Disaster

It is virtually impossible to overstate the profligacy of what our government spends on the military. The Department of Defense's planned expenditures for fiscal year 2008 are larger than all other nations' military budgets combined. The supplementary budget to pay for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not part of the official defense budget, is itself larger than the combined military budgets of Russia and China. Defense-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history. The United States has become the largest single salesman of arms and munitions to other nations on Earth. Leaving out of account President Bush's two on-going wars, defense spending has doubled since the mid-1990s. The defense budget for fiscal 2008 is the largest since World War II.

Before we try to break down and analyze this gargantuan sum, there is one important caveat. Figures on defense spending are notoriously unreliable. The numbers released by the Congressional Reference Service and the Congressional Budget Office do not agree with each other. Robert Higgs, senior fellow for political economy at the Independent Institute, says: "A well-founded rule of thumb is to take the Pentagon's (always well publicized) basic budget total and double it." Even a cursory reading of newspaper articles about the Department of Defense will turn up major differences in statistics about its expenses. Some 30-40% of the defense budget is "black," meaning that these sections contain hidden expenditures for classified projects. There is no possible way to know what they include or whether their total amounts are accurate.

There are many reasons for this budgetary sleight-of-hand -- including a desire for secrecy on the part of the president, the secretary of defense, and the military-industrial complex -- but the chief one is that members of Congress, who profit enormously from defense jobs and pork-barrel projects in their districts, have a political interest in supporting the Department of Defense. In 1996, in an attempt to bring accounting standards within the executive branch somewhat closer to those of the civilian economy, Congress passed the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act. It required all federal agencies to hire outside auditors to review their books and release the results to the public. Neither the Department of Defense, nor the Department of Homeland Security has ever complied. Congress has complained, but not penalized either department for ignoring the law. The result is that all numbers released by the Pentagon should be regarded as suspect.

In discussing the fiscal 2008 defense budget, as released to the press on February 7, 2007, I have been guided by two experienced and reliable analysts: William D. Hartung of the New America Foundation's Arms and Security Initiative and Fred Kaplan, defense correspondent for Slate.org. They agree that the Department of Defense requested $481.4 billion for salaries, operations (except in Iraq and Afghanistan), and equipment. They also agree on a figure of $141.7 billion for the "supplemental" budget to fight the "global war on terrorism" -- that is, the two on-going wars that the general public may think are actually covered by the basic Pentagon budget. The Department of Defense also asked for an extra $93.4 billion to pay for hitherto unmentioned war costs in the remainder of 2007 and, most creatively, an additional "allowance" (a new term in defense budget documents) of $50 billion to be charged to fiscal year 2009. This comes to a total spending request by the Department of Defense of $766.5 billion.

But there is much more. In an attempt to disguise the true size of the American military empire, the government has long hidden major military-related expenditures in departments other than Defense. For example, $23.4 billion for the Department of Energy goes toward developing and maintaining nuclear warheads; and $25.3 billion in the Department of State budget is spent on foreign military assistance (primarily for Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Republic, Egypt, and Pakistan). Another $1.03 billion outside the official Department of Defense budget is now needed for recruitment and reenlistment incentives for the overstretched U.S. military itself, up from a mere $174 million in 2003, the year the war in Iraq began. The Department of Veterans Affairs currently gets at least $75.7 billion, 50% of which goes for the long-term care of the grievously injured among the at least 28,870 soldiers so far wounded in Iraq and another 1,708 in Afghanistan. The amount is universally derided as inadequate. Another $46.4 billion goes to the Department of Homeland Security.

Missing as well from this compilation is $1.9 billion to the Department of Justice for the paramilitary activities of the FBI; $38.5 billion to the Department of the Treasury for the Military Retirement Fund; $7.6 billion for the military-related activities of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; and well over $200 billion in interest for past debt-financed defense outlays. This brings U.S. spending for its military establishment during the current fiscal year (2008), conservatively calculated, to at least $1.1 trillion.

Military Keynesianism

Such expenditures are not only morally obscene, they are fiscally unsustainable. Many neoconservatives and poorly informed patriotic Americans believe that, even though our defense budget is huge, we can afford it because we are the richest country on Earth. Unfortunately, that statement is no longer true. The world's richest political entity, according to the CIA's "World Factbook," is the European Union. The EU's 2006 GDP (gross domestic product -- all goods and services produced domestically) was estimated to be slightly larger than that of the U.S. However, China's 2006 GDP was only slightly smaller than that of the U.S., and Japan was the world's fourth richest nation.

A more telling comparison that reveals just how much worse we're doing can be found among the "current accounts" of various nations. The current account measures the net trade surplus or deficit of a country plus cross-border payments of interest, royalties, dividends, capital gains, foreign aid, and other income. For example, in order for Japan to manufacture anything, it must import all required raw materials. Even after this incredible expense is met, it still has an $88 billion per year trade surplus with the United States and enjoys the world's second highest current account balance. (China is number one.) The United States, by contrast, is number 163 -- dead last on the list, worse than countries like Australia and the United Kingdom that also have large trade deficits. Its 2006 current account deficit was $811.5 billion; second worst was Spain at $106.4 billion. This is what is unsustainable.

It's not just that our tastes for foreign goods, including imported oil, vastly exceed our ability to pay for them. We are financing them through massive borrowing. On November 7, 2007, the U.S. Treasury announced that the national debt had breached $9 trillion for the first time ever. This was just five weeks after Congress raised the so-called debt ceiling to $9.815 trillion. If you begin in 1789, at the moment the Constitution became the supreme law of the land, the debt accumulated by the federal government did not top $1 trillion until 1981. When George Bush became president in January 2001, it stood at approximately $5.7 trillion. Since then, it has increased by 45%. This huge debt can be largely explained by our defense expenditures in comparison with the rest of the world.

The world's top 10 military spenders and the approximate amounts each country currently budgets for its military establishment are:

1. United States (FY08 budget), $623 billion
2. China (2004), $65 billion
3. Russia, $50 billion
4. France (2005), $45 billion
5. United Kingdom, $42.8 billion
6. Japan (2007), $41.75 billion
7. Germany (2003), $35.1 billion
8. Italy (2003), $28.2 billion
9. South Korea (2003), $21.1 billion
10. India (2005 est.), $19 billion

World total military expenditures (2004 est.), $1,100 billion
World total (minus the United States), $500 billion

Our excessive military expenditures did not occur over just a few short years or simply because of the Bush administration's policies. They have been going on for a very long time in accordance with a superficially plausible ideology and have now become entrenched in our democratic political system where they are starting to wreak havoc. This ideology I call "military Keynesianism" -- the determination to maintain a permanent war economy and to treat military output as an ordinary economic product, even though it makes no contribution to either production or consumption.

This ideology goes back to the first years of the Cold War. During the late 1940s, the U.S. was haunted by economic anxieties. The Great Depression of the 1930s had been overcome only by the war production boom of World War II. With peace and demobilization, there was a pervasive fear that the Depression would return. During 1949, alarmed by the Soviet Union's detonation of an atomic bomb, the looming communist victory in the Chinese civil war, a domestic recession, and the lowering of the Iron Curtain around the USSR's European satellites, the U.S. sought to draft basic strategy for the emerging cold war. The result was the militaristic National Security Council Report 68 (NSC-68) drafted under the supervision of Paul Nitze, then head of the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department. Dated April 14, 1950, and signed by President Harry S. Truman on September 30, 1950, it laid out the basic public economic policies that the United States pursues to the present day.

In its conclusions, NSC-68 asserted: "One of the most significant lessons of our World War II experience was that the American economy, when it operates at a level approaching full efficiency, can provide enormous resources for purposes other than civilian consumption while simultaneously providing a high standard of living."

With this understanding, American strategists began to build up a massive munitions industry, both to counter the military might of the Soviet Union (which they consistently overstated) and also to maintain full employment as well as ward off a possible return of the Depression. The result was that, under Pentagon leadership, entire new industries were created to manufacture large aircraft, nuclear-powered submarines, nuclear warheads, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and surveillance and communications satellites. This led to what President Eisenhower warned against in his farewell address of February 6, 1961: "The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience" -- that is, the military-industrial complex.

By 1990, the value of the weapons, equipment, and factories devoted to the Department of Defense was 83% of the value of all plants and equipment in American manufacturing. From 1947 to 1990, the combined U.S. military budgets amounted to $8.7 trillion. Even though the Soviet Union no longer exists, U.S. reliance on military Keynesianism has, if anything, ratcheted up, thanks to the massive vested interests that have become entrenched around the military establishment. Over time, a commitment to both guns and butter has proven an unstable configuration. Military industries crowd out the civilian economy and lead to severe economic weaknesses. Devotion to military Keynesianism is, in fact, a form of slow economic suicide.

On May 1, 2007, the Center for Economic and Policy Research of Washington, D.C., released a study prepared by the global forecasting company Global Insight on the long-term economic impact of increased military spending. Guided by economist Dean Baker, this research showed that, after an initial demand stimulus, by about the sixth year the effect of increased military spending turns negative. Needless to say, the U.S. economy has had to cope with growing defense spending for more than 60 years. He found that, after 10 years of higher defense spending, there would be 464,000 fewer jobs than in a baseline scenario that involved lower defense spending.

Baker concluded:

"It is often believed that wars and military spending increases are good for the economy. In fact, most economic models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment."

These are only some of the many deleterious effects of military Keynesianism.

Hollowing Out the American Economy

It was believed that the U.S. could afford both a massive military establishment and a high standard of living, and that it needed both to maintain full employment. But it did not work out that way. By the 1960s, it was becoming apparent that turning over the nation's largest manufacturing enterprises to the Department of Defense and producing goods without any investment or consumption value was starting to crowd out civilian economic activities. The historian Thomas E. Woods, Jr., observes that, during the 1950s and 1960s, between one-third and two-thirds of all American research talent was siphoned off into the military sector. It is, of course, impossible to know what innovations never appeared as a result of this diversion of resources and brainpower into the service of the military, but it was during the 1960s that we first began to notice Japan was outpacing us in the design and quality of a range of consumer goods, including household electronics and automobiles.

Nuclear weapons furnish a striking illustration of these anomalies. Between the 1940s and 1996, the United States spent at least $5.8 trillion on the development, testing, and construction of nuclear bombs. By 1967, the peak year of its nuclear stockpile, the United States possessed some 32,500 deliverable atomic and hydrogen bombs, none of which, thankfully, was ever used. They perfectly illustrate the Keynesian principle that the government can provide make-work jobs to keep people employed. Nuclear weapons were not just America's secret weapon, but also its secret economic weapon. As of 2006, we still had 9,960 of them. There is today no sane use for them, while the trillions spent on them could have been used to solve the problems of social security and health care, quality education and access to higher education for all, not to speak of the retention of highly skilled jobs within the American economy.

The pioneer in analyzing what has been lost as a result of military Keynesianism was the late Seymour Melman (1917-2004), a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University. His 1970 book, Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War, was a prescient analysis of the unintended consequences of the American preoccupation with its armed forces and their weaponry since the onset of the Cold War. Melman wrote (pp. 2-3):

"From 1946 to 1969, the United States government spent over $1,000 billion on the military, more than half of this under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations -- the period during which the [Pentagon-dominated] state management was established as a formal institution. This sum of staggering size (try to visualize a billion of something) does not express the cost of the military establishment to the nation as a whole. The true cost is measured by what has been foregone, by the accumulated deterioration in many facets of life by the inability to alleviate human wretchedness of long duration."

In an important exegesis on Melman's relevance to the current American economic situation, Thomas Woods writes:

"According to the U.S. Department of Defense, during the four decades from 1947 through 1987 it used (in 1982 dollars) $7.62 trillion in capital resources. In 1985, the Department of Commerce estimated the value of the nation's plant and equipment, and infrastructure, at just over $7.29 trillion. In other words, the amount spent over that period could have doubled the American capital stock or modernized and replaced its existing stock."

The fact that we did not modernize or replace our capital assets is one of the main reasons why, by the turn of the twenty-first century, our manufacturing base had all but evaporated. Machine tools -- an industry on which Melman was an authority -- are a particularly important symptom. In November 1968, a five-year inventory disclosed (p. 186) "that 64 percent of the metalworking machine tools used in U.S. industry were ten years old or older. The age of this industrial equipment (drills, lathes, etc.) marks the United States' machine tool stock as the oldest among all major industrial nations, and it marks the continuation of a deterioration process that began with the end of the Second World War. This deterioration at the base of the industrial system certifies to the continuous debilitating and depleting effect that the military use of capital and research and development talent has had on American industry."

Nothing has been done in the period since 1968 to reverse these trends and it shows today in our massive imports of equipment -- from medical machines like proton accelerators for radiological therapy (made primarily in Belgium, Germany, and Japan) to cars and trucks.

Our short tenure as the world's "lone superpower" has come to an end. As Harvard economics professor Benjamin Friedman has written:

"Again and again it has always been the world's leading lending country that has been the premier country in terms of political influence, diplomatic influence, and cultural influence. It's no accident that we took over the role from the British at the same time that we took over… the job of being the world's leading lending country. Today we are no longer the world's leading lending country. In fact we are now the world's biggest debtor country, and we are continuing to wield influence on the basis of military prowess alone."

Some of the damage done can never be rectified. There are, however, some steps that this country urgently needs to take. These include reversing Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for the wealthy, beginning to liquidate our global empire of over 800 military bases, cutting from the defense budget all projects that bear no relationship to the national security of the United States, and ceasing to use the defense budget as a Keynesian jobs program. If we do these things we have a chance of squeaking by. If we don't, we face probable national insolvency and a long depression.

Chalmers Johnson is the author of Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, just published in paperback. It is the final volume of his Blowback Trilogy, which also includes Blowback (2000) and The Sorrows of Empire (2004).

[Note: For those interested, click here to view a clip from a new film, "Chalmers Johnson on American Hegemony," in Cinema Libre Studios' Speaking Freely series in which he discusses "military Keynesianism" and imperial bankruptcy. For sources on global military spending, please see: (1) Global Security Organization, "World Wide Military Expenditures" as well as Glenn Greenwald, "The bipartisan consensus on U.S. military spending"; (2) Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, "Report: China biggest Asian military spender."]

DOLLAR TRAP

2008-01-25T17:06:00.000-06:00

A lot of things this week about Dollar collapse, yes BUSH made a new "IDEA" to make the economy run again but its stupid yeah ur gone have more TAX MONEY back but all that money would go 2 buy more and more imported good so whats the big deal, FED cut interest rate again making USA 1 of 3 countries in the world with lowest interest rate but its a patch for a sinking ship (Alan Greenspan) if they keep cutting rate down dollar would be no more attractive to foreigns, sooo whats next mmm another Bush WAR

READ THIS ARTICLE

the first government response to America's sinking economy was denial. We were told as recently as a month ago by administration officials and Wall Street charlatans that the economy was robust and that there would not be a recession. Now we are told that the economy is in trouble, but that the government is taking decisive action to shore it up.

We saw how effective the first "decisive" proposal was. Bush announced a plan to give every adult taxpayer (no poor people, thank you) $800 in a tax rebate this April. The stock market responded to this idea by dropping a few percent. The idea, as I wrote in my last column, was stupid to begin with because, with the US no longer producing much of anything, all that bonus borrowed cash would end up getting spent on imported goods anyhow, doing next to nothing for the US economy.

So now the Federal Reserve has weighed in with a 3/4 percent cut in the Federal Funds rate. Even though commercial banks followed suit, lowering the prime lending rate by a similar 3/4 percent, the stock market showed how much good that move would do, dropping almost 300 points at the opening bell today--about what it had been expected to do even without an interest-rate cut.

There was one place where the Fed's action did have an impact though: the exchange value of the dollar in foreign currency markets. No sooner was word of the interest rate cut announced, than the dollar fell against major currencies like the British Pound, the Euro and the Japanese Yen.

And there's the rub. The Fed is in a trap. It cannot cut interest rates much more without causing a collapse in the dollar, which, because of the huge US trade imbalance, and all those consumer goods and raw materials--especially oil--that are imported--would lead to serious and politically dangerous inflation. And there is another constraint: with the current rate cut, the US now has the third lowest interest rates in the world. If the Fed makes another cut, as it has hinted it might in a week or so, only Japan would have a lower interest rate environment than the US. That makes the dollar a very undesirable currency for foreigner investors, which means they won't want to hold dollars, and they won't want to hold US stocks.

Yet if the Fed doesn't cut interest rates even further, the stock market will continue to plunge, which again discourages foreign investors from pouring their money into the U.S., which in turn puts downward pressure on the dollar.

This was all predictable.

An economy that is almost wholly dependent on consumer spending, which is the case in the US, is in big trouble when consumers start to worry about the security of their jobs, and when they see inflation eating away at their disposable income. They naturally just stop spending. And that is happening, too.

So get ready for some hard economic times. The next step will be soaring inflation, as strapped companies in China, India and elsewere start raising their prices for goods shipped to the US and paid for in dollars. Then the Fed will have to respond by raising interest rates again, in an effort to shore up the currency. And with that will come deeper recession and an even lower stock market.

The Bush chickens--endless deficits as far as the eye can see, and a $2-trillion military debacle that has no end in sight and that is sucking money out of the country like a giant industrial vacuum cleaner--are coming home to roost. The President and Vice President clearly hoped that they could pass the wreckage of their eight years in office on to the next president and run off to retirement and senior stateeman status before it all blew up, but their luck ran out. The economic shit has hit the fan. Chances are that the war that they have tried to tuck away in the closet with a "surge" in troops and a brutal campaign of aerial bombardment, will also blow up on them before the year is out.

That's small consolation for all of us who have to live with the ensuing disasters, but at least--if we can't see them properly impeached and indicted, and if the Democrats in Congress don't manage to screw things up further so they can be blamed for the mess too--we'll have the satisfaction of seeing Bush and Cheney run out of town next January on a rail.

Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His n book of CounterPunch columns titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press. Lindorff's newest book is "The Case for Impeachment", co-authored by Barbara Olshansky.

MARS Strange figure by SPIRIT

2008-01-23T15:29:00.000-06:00

This past tuesday january 22 NASA release astonish picture of a strange thing that appears to be a Statue of a humanoid just looking somewhere else, its very incredible picture the news was announced by Daily MAil (UK newspaper) take a look

This pictures makes me believe that there were an ancient civilization there

ORiginal picture by NASA

Life on Mars? Amazing photos from Nasa probe reveal mystery figure on Red Planet

Spirit's West Valley Panorama (False Color)

USA - Israel Torture

2008-01-20T16:59:00.000-06:00

Finally some big country said something everybody know USA tortures prisioners possible terrorist and Israel makes the same, but when they said that is not truth Canada decide to remove their closest ally USA and Israel

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada's foreign ministry, responding to pressure from close allies, said on Saturday it would remove the United States and Israel from a watch list of countries where prisoners risk being tortured.

Both nations expressed unhappiness after it emerged they had been listed in a document that formed part of a training course manual on torture awareness given to Canadian diplomats.

Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier said he regretted the embarrassment caused by the public disclosure of the manual, which also classified some U.S. interrogation techniques as torture.

"It contains a list that wrongly includes some of our closest allies. I have directed that the manual be reviewed and rewritten," Bernier said in a statement.

"The manual is neither a policy document nor a statement of policy. As such, it does not convey the government's views or positions."

The document -- made available to Reuters and other media outlets -- embarrassed the minority Conservative government, which is a staunch ally of both the United States and Israel.

U.S. ambassador David Wilkins said the listing was absurd, while the Israeli envoy said he wanted his country removed.

Asked why the two countries had been put on the list, a spokesman for Bernier said: "The training manual purposely raised public issues to stimulate discussion and debate in the classroom."

The government mistakenly gave the document to Amnesty International as part of a court case the rights organization has launched against Ottawa over the treatment of detainees in Afghanistan.

AMPLE EVIDENCE OF ABUSE

Amnesty International Canada, which says it has ample evidence that prisoners are abused both in U.S. and Israeli jails, said it was disappointed by Bernier's announcement.

"When it comes to an issue like torture, the government's main concern should not be embarrassing allies," Alex Neve, the group's secretary-general, told Reuters. The U.S. embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Under "definition of torture," the document lists U.S. interrogation techniques such as forced nudity, isolation, sleep deprivation and blindfolding prisoners.

It also mentions the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where a Canadian man is being held.

The man, Omar Khadr, has been in Guantanamo Bay for five years. He is accused of killing a U.S. soldier during a clash in Afghanistan in 2002, when he was 15.

Other countries on the watch list include Syria, China, Iran, Afghanistan, Mexico and Saudi Arabia.

The foreign ministry launched the torture awareness course after Ottawa was criticized for the way it handled the case of Canadian engineer Maher Arar, who was deported from the United States to Syria in 2002.

Arar says he was tortured repeatedly during the year he spent in Damascus prisons. An official inquiry into the affair showed Canadian diplomats had not been trained to detect whether detainees might have been abused.

Iran Speedboats Vs US NAVY

2008-01-18T11:01:00.000-06:00

Finally all the theather of Iranian Speedboats vs the mighty US Fleet in Persian Gulf came to light they said now that a guy known as Filipino Monkey that has been hacking most of world navies comunications said all that things that we are going to explode u??, US Navy and goverment said that after Iran made public the Real VIDEO of what really happen, it was the perfect pretext that bush needed to destroy Iran the story came in the Guardian UK newspaper

Mischievous 'Filipino Monkey' could have triggered latest US-Iran row

A heckling radio ham known as the Filipino Monkey, who has spent years pestering ships in the Persian Gulf, is being blamed today for sparking a major diplomatic row after American warships almost attacked Iranian patrol boats.

The US navy came within seconds of firing at the Iranian speedboats in the Strait of Hormuz on January 6 after hearing threats that the boats were attacking and were about to explode.

Senior navy officials have admitted that the source of the threats, picked up in international waters, was a mystery.

And now the US navy's journal, Navy Times, has claimed that the threats, which were broadcast last week by the Pentagon, are thought to have come from an infamous radio prankster.

It said the Filipino Monkey, who could be more than one person, listens to ship-to-ship radio traffic and then interrupts, usually with abusive insults.

Rick Hoffman, a retired captain, told the paper: "For 25 years, there's been this mythical guy out there who, hour after hour, shouts obscenities and threats. He used to go all night long. The guy is crazy.

"Could it have been a spurious transmission? Absolutely."

An unnamed civilian mariner told the Navy Times: "They come on and say Filipino Monkey in a strange voice. You're standing watch on bridge and all of a sudden it comes over the radio. It's been a joke out there for years."

Last week, the Iranians and the US issued different video versions of what took place.

On the Pentagon's version, a strange voice, in English, can be heard saying "I am coming to you. You will explode in a few minutes." The voice sounds different from one heard earlier in the recording and there is no background noise that would usually be picked up from a speedboat radio.

In the Iranian version, there is no hint of aggressive behaviour.

The Pentagon said it recorded the film and the sound separately and then edited them together to give a "better idea of what is happening".

But Commander Lydia Robertson, a navy spokeswoman, admitted: "We don't know for sure where they [the threats] came from. It could have been a shore station."

The US lodged a formal complaint with Iran over the incident, and the president, George Bush, warned Tehran of "serious consequences" unless it stopped such aggression.

During the 20-minute incident, five Iranian patrol boats swarmed around three US warships and came within 200 metres, puttingthe ships on alert.

The US navy said its gunners came within seconds of firing on the speedboats.

USA IS BROKE

2008-01-14T10:17:00.000-06:00

More about how the US Debt is sooo HUGE and that Cowboy Bush and their goverment doesnt care, every year $500 billion dollars are added to it, more new taxes rebates BUT for the Rich ppl of course. US DOLLAR has lost lot of value against Euro and YES against Canadian Dollar

The next president faces an unenviable task: namely, to fix the national fiscal position after eight years of Republican mismanagement. If they don't make fixing this their top priority, then the US could have an incredibly difficult time when they leave office in either four or eight years.

Let's start with an overview of the last six years. These figures are from the Bureau of Public Debt. They are the total amount of debt outstanding as of the end of the government's fiscal years.

09/30/2006 $8,506,973,899,215.23
09/30/2005 $7,932,709,661,723.50
09/30/2004 $7,379,052,696,330.32
09/30/2003 $6,783,231,062,743.62
09/30/2002 $6,228,235,965,597.16
09/30/2001 $5,807,463,412,200.06
09/30/2000 $5,674,178,209,886.86

Currently, the total national debt stands at $9,136,418,062,457.29

The Associated Press recently made this observation:

Like a ticking time bomb, the national debt is an explosion waiting to happen. It's expanding by about $1.4 billion a day -- or nearly $1 million a minute.

What's that mean to you?

It means almost $30,000 in debt for each man, woman, child and infant in the United States.

The most widely used calculation of national debt is the debt/GDP ratio.

Using the debt figures above and the third quarter total GDP figures from the Bureau of Economic Analysis we get the following debt/GDP rations.

2001: 57.29%
2002: 58.80%
2003: 61.18%
2004: 62.64%
2005: 63.16%
2006: 64.11%
2007: about 65% (the time frame of the numbers didn't match exactly).

Notice the ratio has consistently increased for the last six years.

Now, we're in the middle of the primary season, so everybody and their brother is making promises. Rudy wants to cut taxes further, Romney wants to make the latest round of tax cuts permanent, and Edwards has announced a spending plan to help the middle class. I'm sure combing through all the speeches and policy pronouncements from all the candidates would reveal they have all without exception made similar promises to people.

Here's the news flash: we can't afford a single new spending plan and we can't afford more tax cuts until we bring the national debt under control. Notice that over the last five years the U.S. has added over $500 billion dollars of net new debt per year each year. In short -- we're issuing debt like it's going out of style. That means the Bush's tax cuts were in fact tax deferments because they'll have to increase in order to pay for the spending for the last six years. It also means that further tax cuts should be off the table. It also means the further spending for new programs are off the table.

Simple put, the U.S. has to go into "let's save the federal government from bankruptcy" mode. If we don't then we're going to have worse trouble then you've ever seen.

News Flash: We're Broke - Business on The Huffington Post

Who Gains with Bhutto Murder?

2008-01-10T11:13:00.000-06:00

Very good article hope u can read it!

Assassination of prominent political leaders, presumably protected by the best security, is no easy thing. It requires agencies of professional intelligence training to insure that the job is done and that no person is caught alive who can lead to those behind. Typically, from the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo in July 1914 to JFK, the person pulling the trigger is just an instrument of a far deeper conspiracy. So too in the assassination on December 27^th, of Pakistani former Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto. Cui bono?.

What was behind the murder of Bhutto at the moment her PPP party appeared about to win a resounding election victory in the planned January 8 elections, thereby posing a mass-based challenge to the dictatorial rule of President Musharraf?

Musharraf’s government was indecently quick to blame “Al-Qaeda,” the dubious entity allegedly the organization of Osama bin Laden, whom Washington accused for masterminding the September 11 2001 attacks. Musharraf just days after, declared he was “sure” Al Qaeda was the author, even though, on US pressure, he has asked Scotland Yard to come and investigate. "I want to say it with certainty, that these people (Al Qaeda) martyred ... Benazir Bhutto," Musharraf said in a Jan. 3 televised address. He named Baitullah Mehsud, a militant tribal chief fighting the Pakistani Army, who has alleged ties to al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taleban. Mehsud denied the charge. Had he been behind such a dramatic event, the desired propaganda impact among militant islamists would require taking open responsibility instead.

By linking the Bhutto killing to Al Qaeda, Musharraf conveniently gains several goals. First he reinforces the myth of Al Qaeda, something very useful to Washington at this time of growing global skepticism over the real intent of its War on Terrorism, making Musharraf more valuable to Washington. Second it gives Musharraf a plausible scapegoat to blame for the convenient elimination of a serious political rival to his consolidation of one-man rule.

Notable also is the fact that the Musharraf regime has rejected making a routine autoposy on Bhutto’s body. Bhutto publicly charged that the Government had refused to make followup inquiry after the October bombing which nearly killed her and did 134 followers near her auto. Bhutto accused Pakistani authorities of not providing her with sufficient security, and hinted that they may have been complicit in the Karachi attack. She also made clear in a UK television interview shortly before her death that she would clean out the Pakistan military and security services of corrupt and islamist elements.

In the same David Frost interview, Bhutto also dropped the explosive news that Osama bin Laden had been murdered by Omar Sheikh Mohammad, a British citizen of Pakistani origin, an ISI Pakistani intelligence operative, who 'confessed' to the killing of Daniel Pearl. He was arrested in February 2002. If Benazir's claim is correct, Omar Sheikh must have killed Osama before he was arrested in February 2002, which makes at least all the Osama messages after that date periodically delivered to western media clear forgeries.

Days after the Bhutto killing, Pakistani authorities published a photo alleged to be of the severed head of the suicide bomber who killed Bhutto. Severed heads, like a dead Lee Harvey Oswald don’t talk or say embarrassing things. Also curious is the fact that Bhutto was killed in Rawalpindi, a garrison town, where every millimeter is controlled by the Army security complex. The murder weapon was a Steyr 9mm, issued only to Pakistani Army Special

Forces. Hmmmm.

It has been known for months that the Bush-Cheney administration has been maneuvering to strengthen their political control of Pakistan, paving the way for the expansion and deepening of the “war on terrorism” across the region.

Who was Bhutto?

The Bhutto family was itself hardly democratic, drawing its core from feudal landowning families, but opposed to the commanding role of the army and ISI intelligence. Succeeding her father as head of the PPP, Benazir declared herself "chairperson for life" — a position she held until her death. Bhutto’s husband, Ali Zardari, “Mr. 10%,” is known in Pakistan for his demanding a 10% cut from letting major government contracts when Benazir was PM. In 2003, Benazir and her husband were convicted in Switzerland of money laundering and taking bribes from Swiss companies as PM. The family is allegedly worth several billions as a result. As prime minister from 1993 to 1996, she advocated a conciliatory policy toward Islamists, especially the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The Harvard educated Benazir had close ties to US and UK intelligence as well. She used the offices of neo-conservative US Congressman Tom Lantos when she was in Washington according to our informed reports, one reason Vice President Cheney backed her as a “safe” way to save his Pakistan strategic alliance in face of growing popular protest against Musharraf’s declaring martial law last year. The ploy was to have Bhutto make a face-saving deal with Musharraf to put a democratic face on the dictatorship, while Washington maintained its strategic control. According to the Washington Post of 28 Dec., “For Benazir Bhutto, the decision to return to Pakistan was sealed during a telephone call from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice just a week before Bhutto flew home in October. The call culminated more than a year of secret diplomacy -- and came only when it became clear that the heir to Pakistan's most powerful political dynasty was the only one who could bail out Washington's key ally in the battle against terrorism. . . .As President Pervez Musharraf's political future began to unravel this year, Bhutto became the only politician who might help keep him in power.”

In November, John Negroponte, former Bush Administration Intelligence Czar and now Deputy Secretary of State was deployed to Islamabad to pressure Musharraf to ease the situation by holding elections and forming a power-sharing with Bhutto. But once in Pakistan, where her supporters were mobilized, Bhutto made clear she would seek an election coalition to openly oppose Musharraf and military rule in the planned elections.

A cynical US-Musharraf deal?

Informed intelligence sources say there was a cynical deal cut behind the scenes between Washington and Musharraf. Musharraf is known to be Cheney’s preferred partner and Cheney we are told is the sole person running US-Pakistan policy today.

Were Musharraf to agree to stationing of US Special Forces inside Pakistan, “Plan B”, the democratic farce with Bhutto could be put aside, in favor of the continued Musharraf sole rule. Washington would “turn a blind eye.”

On Dec. 28, one day after the Bhutto assassination, the Washington Post reported that in early 2008, “US Special Forces are expected to vastly expand their presence in Pakistan as part of an effort to train and support indigenous counter-insurgency forces and clandestine counterterrorism units,” under the US Central Command and US Special Operations Command, a major shift in US Pakistani ties. Until now Musharraf and his military have refused such direct US control, aside from the agreement after September 11, extracted from Musharraf under extreme pressure of possible US bombing, to give the US military direct control of the Pakistan nuclear weapons.

The elimination of Bhutto leaves an opposition vacuum. The country lacks a credible political leader who can command national support, which leaves the military enhanced as an institution, with its willingness to defend Musharraf on the streets. This gives the Pentagon and Washington a chance to consolidate a military opposition to future Chinese economic hegemony—the real geopolitical goal of Washington.

Israel WMD Dimona

2007-12-30T14:49:00.000-06:00

A very nice video showing a 3d Model of ISRAEL WMD plant, DIMONA,its a big scale operation

MERRY XMAS TO ALL

2007-12-24T10:10:00.000-06:00

THIS TIME I JUST WANT TO WISH A MERRY XMAS TO ALL MY READERS, HOPE U SPEND A VERY NICE TIME WITH ALL UR FAMILIES :D

MARS would behit by ASTEROID

2007-12-21T16:57:00.000-06:00

astronomer find this past month that MARS would be hit by an asteroid on 2008, read NASA news:

Astronomers Monitor Asteroid to Pass Near Mars

WASHINGTON - Astronomers funded by NASA are monitoring the trajectory of an asteroid estimated to be 50 meters (164 feet) wide that is expected to cross Mars' orbital path early next year. Observations provided by the astronomers and analyzed by NASA's Near-Earth Object Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena , Calif. , indicate the object may pass within 30,000 miles of Mars at about 6 a.m. EST (3 a.m. PST) on Jan. 30, 2008.

"Right now asteroid 2007 WD5 is about half-way between Earth and Mars and closing the distance at a speed of about 27,900 miles per hour," said Don Yeomans, manager of the Near Earth Object Office at JPL. "Over the next five weeks, we hope to gather more information from observatories so we can further refine the asteroid's trajectory."

NASA detects and tracks asteroids and comets passing close to Earth. The Near Earth Object Observation Program, commonly called "Spaceguard," plots the orbits of these objects to determine if any could be potentially hazardous to our planet.

Asteroid 2007 WD5 was first discovered on Nov. 20, 2007, by the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey and put on a "watch list" because its orbit passes near Earth. Further observations from both the NASA-funded Spacewatch at Kitt Peak , Ariz. , and the Magdalena Ridge Observatory in New Mexico gave scientists enough data to determine that the asteroid was not a danger to Earth, but could potentially impact Mars. This makes it a member of an interesting class of small objects that are both near Earth objects and "Mars crossers."

Because of current uncertainties about the asteroid's exact orbit, there is a 1-in-75 chance of 2007 WD5 impacting Mars. If this unlikely event were to occur, it would be somewhere within a broad swath across the planet north of where the Opportunity rover is located.

"We estimate such impacts occur on Mars every thousand years or so," said Steve Chesley, a scientist at JPL. "If 2007 WD5 were to thump Mars on Jan. 30, we calculate it would hit at about 30,000 miles per hour and might create a crater more than half-a-mile wide." The Mars Rover Opportunity is exploring a crater approximately this size right now.

Such a collision could release about three megatons of energy. Scientists believe an event of comparable magnitude occurred here on Earth in 1908 in Tunguska, Siberia , but no crater was created. The object was disintegrated by Earth's thicker atmosphere before it hit the ground, although the air blast devastated a large area of unpopulated forest.

NASA and its partners will continue to track asteroid 2007 WD5 and will provide an update in January when further information is available. For more information on the Near Earth Object program, visit: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ .

An audio interview/podcast regarding 2007 WD5 is available at: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/podcast/mars-asteroid-20071221/

A videofile related to this story is available on NASA TV and the Web. For information and schedules, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/ntv.

-end-

Putin Man of the YEAR

2007-12-19T10:36:00.000-06:00

What a news TIME magazine named this week MAN OF THE YEAR Im really surprise cuz last year Hugo Chavez won that honor by getting most of the internet vote but the magazine decide to give the honor to the people and internet if I well remember

Well Putin received the honor cuz he made RUSSIA again a key player in this world, made the country 2nd oil producer behind Saudi Arabia, and most of all gave a rebirth to the dying country left behind by the corrupt Yeltsin

Bank of the SOUTH

2007-12-12T11:50:00.000-06:00

this past december 9th marks the beggining of a new era without IMF and World Bank, for Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina, this a new era that those South america countries would help each other with own money and would not ask again for more "expert" advice of IMF that made so great damage to the region.

Venezuela took out more of his money from IMF so that means another crisis for that US Organization that has lost a lot of revenues cuz most of the countries pay their lends

USA no more Globalization??

2007-12-10T10:44:00.000-06:00

Last week I was reading an article on Financial Times about what is coming for 2008 some quakes (economics) of high level that would move all the status quo that reigns today, USA began conquering most of the world markets cuz the GLOBALIZATION, but now some other big players (INDIA & China) would gAIN control and a bigger GNP that the mighty Empire.

this would be the first time in history that an Empire FALLS because economic problems!!!

Some other big economic group has a mighty GNP bigger than USA, UE no no BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) how about that??

Bush: Iran was and IS a Danger

2007-12-05T10:59:00.000-06:00

Bush said that Iran was and Is a Danger to the World, he doesnt care about the report of the 16 "Intelligence" Agencies about they stop their Nuke program back in 2003, he would continue with his agressive politics against Iran, Bush only about what his intelligence said (Cheney)...and also he cares about what God told him like when he invaded Irak

VIDEO of Reuters

Iran ended Nuclear weapons program time ago

2007-12-04T09:55:00.000-06:00

Found this article on the New York Times, most of US intelligence agencies says that Iran ended their program in 2003 just because international investigations, but of course the most intelligent president in the World (W Bush) doesnt care about he only hear what his brain (Cheney) has to said: BOMB & Destroy evil IRAN.

take a look on the article

WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 — A new assessment by American intelligence agencies concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains frozen, contradicting judgment two years ago that Tehran was working relentlessly toward building a nuclear bomb.

The conclusions of the new assessment are likely to reshape the final year of the Bush administration, which has made halting Iran’s nuclear program a cornerstone of its foreign policy.

The assessment, a National Intelligence Estimate that represents the consensus view of all 16 American spy agencies, states that Tehran is likely keeping its options open with respect to building a weapon, but that intelligence agencies “do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.”

Iran is continuing to produce enriched uranium, a program that the Tehran government has said is designed for civilian purposes. The new estimate says that enrichment program could still provide Iran with enough raw material to produce a nuclear weapon sometime by the middle of next decade, a timetable essentially unchanged from previous estimates.

But the new estimate declares with “high confidence” that a military-run Iranian program intended to transform that raw material into a nuclear weapon has been shut down since 2003, and also says with high confidence that the halt “was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure.”

The estimate does not say when American intelligence agencies learned that the weapons program had been halted, but a statement issued by Donald Kerr, the principal director of national intelligence, said the document was being made public “since our understanding of Iran’s capabilities has changed.”

Rather than painting Iran as a rogue, irrational nation determined to join the club of nations with the bomb, the estimate states Iran’s “decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs.” The administration called new attention to the threat posed by Iran earlier this year when President Bush had suggested in October that a nuclear-armed Iran could lead to “World War III” and Vice President Dick Cheney promised “serious consequences” if the government in Tehran did not abandon its nuclear program.

Yet at the same time officials were airing these dire warnings about the Iranian threat, analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency were secretly concluding that Iran’s nuclear weapons work halted years ago and that international pressure on the Islamic regime in Tehran was working.

Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, portrayed the assessment as “directly challenging some of this administration’s alarming rhetoric about the threat posed by Iran.” He said he hoped the administration “appropriately adjusts its rhetoric and policy,” and called for a “a diplomatic surge necessary to effectively address the challenges posed by Iran.”

But the national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, quickly issued a statement describing the N.I.E. as containing positive news rather than reflecting intelligence mistakes.

“It confirms that we were right to be worried about Iran seeking to develop nuclear weapons,” Mr. Hadley said. “It tells us that we have made progress in trying to ensure that this does not happen. But the intelligence also tells us that the risk of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon remains a very serious problem.”

“The estimate offers grounds for hope that the problem can be solved diplomatically — without the use of force — as the administration has been trying to do,” Mr. Hadley said.

The new report comes out just over five years after a deeply flawed N.I.E. concluded that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons programs and was determined to restart its nuclear program — an estimate that led to congressional authorization for a military invasion of Iraq, although most of the report’s conclusions turned out to be wrong.

Intelligence officials said that the specter of the botched 2002 N.I.E. hung over their deliberations over the Iran assessment, leading them to treat the document with particular caution.

“We felt that we needed to scrub all the assessments and sources to make sure we weren’t misleading ourselves,” said one senior intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Permanent Irak occupation YES SIR

2007-11-29T12:29:00.000-06:00

Past week Bush signed an agreement with Maliki to formalize the permanent occupation of Irak, of course to protect OIL and US interest, ppl mmm doesnt care its all about OIL!!!!

An Occupation Army would never win against local population. Lisa Simpsons War are based on lies. Sun tzu

Soldiers dead at Irak + u have 2 add Blackwater mercenaries and other deaths that Pentagon doesnt count.

President Bush and the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki signed an agreement Monday paving the way for the long-term occupation of the Middle Eastern country and its transformation into a semi-colonial protectorate of the US.

The “Declaration of Principles for a Long-Term Relationship of Cooperation and Friendship” outlines plans for the establishment of permanent US military bases in Iraq to suppress internal opposition to the US-installed regime and protect US economic and political interests throughout the region. It also provides for preferential treatment for US energy conglomerates and investors to exploit Iraq’s newly opened up oil resources.

The new agreement—signed during a secret videoconference between Bush and Maliki—without the slightest democratic pretenses in each country—exposes the repeated lies, peddled by the White House ever since the April 2003 invasion, that the US had no intention to set up permanent military bases or carry out an long-term occupation of Iraq.

The declaration calls for the current United Nations mandate—which has provided a legal fig leaf for the US occupation—to be extended one more year and thereafter to be replaced by a bilateral economic and security pact between the two countries.

The full details of the pact—including the size of the US occupying force—are to be worked out by July 31, 2008 and are scheduled to take effect in early 2009, i.e., after Bush leaves office. Although the agreement will commit US troops to remain in the country for years, if not decades, the White House insists that it will not rise to the level of a formal treaty, requiring congressional approval.

Maliki signed the declaration without any serious parliamentary debate. Sunni Arab and Shia politicians immediately denounced it, saying the agreement would lead to “US interference for years to come.” The Association of Muslim Scholars, a Sunni group, said the Iraqi signatories of the declaration would be looked on as “collaborators with the occupier.”

Under the proposed formula, Iraqi officials told the Associated Press, Iraqi forces will take charge of internal security, and US troops will relocate to bases outside the cities. They foresee at least 50,000 American troops remaining in the country indefinitely. The White House says the bilateral agreement will not contain timetables for the withdrawal of troops.

White House deputy national security advisor Lieutenant-General Douglas Lute said the declaration signaled that the US “will protect our interests in Iraq, alongside our Iraqi partners, and that we consider Iraq a key strategic partner, able to increasingly contribute to regional stability.”

US forces will protect the interests of American energy companies once the country’s vast oil wealth—the second largest proven oil reserves in the world—are opened up to international and in particular US investment. This is only possible by intensifying US military repression of the Iraqi people and crushing popular opposition to the US-installed regime and the American occupation.

At the same time permanent US bases are being set up to project American military power throughout the Middle East and provide US forces increased capabilities to launch attacks against Iran, Syria and other countries.

Debka-Net-Weekly, a web site associated with Israeli military intelligence, said the US has plans to remove 100,000 troops by the end of 2009, leaving behind 50,000-70,000 in 20 huge land and air bases. “These bases,” the site wrote, “are under construction; they will be secured by broad swathes of space, fortified with weaponry and remote-controlled electronic devices.” US troops will be responsible for protecting Iraq’s borders from “external threats,” Debka reported, adding, “US air strength and special forces in these bases will have rapid deployment capabilities for reaching points outside Iraq at need.”

The US launched the Iraq war to establish unchallenged domination of the Middle East and fend off the growing inroads into the energy-rich region by its economic rivals, such as China and Russia. The economic advantages of occupying Iraq are spelled out in one of the principles outlined in the new US-Iraqi declaration, which calls for “facilitating and encouraging the flow of foreign investment to Iraq, especially American investments, to contribute to the reconstruction and rebuilding of Iraq.”

Another declares US support for aiding Iraq’s “transition to a market economy,” which includes opening up the nationalized oil industry to the control of ExxonMobil, Chevron and other US energy conglomerates.

Earlier this month the Iraqi government, guided by American legal advisors, cancelled a contract originally signed by the Saddam Hussein government in 1997 with the Russian company Lukoil, for the development of the vast oil field in Iraq’s southern desert. The West Qurna fields—with estimated reserves of 11 billion barrels, the equivalent of the worldwide proven oil reserves of ExxonMobil, America’s largest oil company—will now be opened to international, and in particular, US bidders.

Vladimir Tikhomirov, the chief economist at the Russian bank UralSib, told the New York Times, “From the Russian government perspective, Iraq is seen as occupied and its administration directed by Washington, particularly when it comes to oil. The Russians see the cancellation of the contract in Iraq as part of the US drive to keep control over the major oil fields there.”

The declaration of principles is loaded with Orwellian language aimed at concealing its nakedly imperialist aims. The US—which launched an illegal war and occupation that have resulted in the virtual destruction of an entire society and the deaths of more than one million Iraqis—declares its commitment to “deter foreign aggression.” All those who oppose the occupation are “terrorists” and “outlaws” who must be defeated and “uprooted” from Iraq.

The real face of the American military presence was shown this week when US troops fired on vehicles at roadblocks in Baghdad and north of the Iraqi capital, killing at least five people, including three women and a child, in two separate shootings.

The commitment to a long-term occupation hardly provoked a murmur from the Democratic Party. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi criticized Bush for planning to leave office with a “US army tied down in Iraq and stretched to the breaking point, with no clear exit strategy.”

While opposing Bush for failing to efficiently wage the war the Democrats defend the same economic interests as the Republicans and have made it clear they will not end the occupation if they take control of the White House in 2009. In fact the military scenario envisaged in the deal signed by Bush corresponds to the bipartisan plans being worked out between the Bush administration and the Democrats for a “post-surge Iraq.”

Leading Democrats, such as presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, have argued for the reduction of US forces and their redeployment from the cities to “over-the-horizon” positions where they could strike opponents of the US-backed regime, as well as Iran. Clinton in particular has argued that pulling US troops out of the cities would reduce US casualties, thereby making the long-term occupation of Iraq more politically palatable in the US, while still keeping forces available to defend US economic interests.

Russia Slams US ABM proposal

2007-11-26T10:15:00.001-06:00

This past weekend Russia say that the US proposal of ABM is getting cloudier every day, now Americans went to Moscow to talk about it but this time they didnt talk about joint personal in the proposed bases (Poland & Czech Rep) neither about some inspections of Russians in the sites, Russia reacted and said that they are going to abandon the CFE treaty cuz other members (UE) doesnt comply with it and Russia indeed reduce most of their conventional forces, so DUMA said that Russia formally would abandon the treaty by December 12.

On November 21, President Putin told Strategic Nuclear Force to be ready against any Agression against the Motherland, he remarked how NATO is getting closer to his borders everyday against agreements that were signed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He said "We cannot allow ourselves to remain indifferent to the obvious 'muscle-flexing',"

Wall Street Crisis

2007-11-22T18:19:00.000-06:00

Very good article about the Dollar crisis that is coming! how dollar lost nearly 63% of value against Euro

What a week for the stock market. On Wednesday the market took a 360 point nosedive followed, two days later, by a 220 point belly-flop. By the time it was over, the trading pits looked more like a sausage-packing plant than the world's financial epicenter. After the bell, downcast traders could be seen tiptoeing through the carnage on their way to the local liquor store to load up on "Stoly" and boxes of Franzia---anything that would steady their nerves and put the week behind them.

Everyone could see it coming; the train-wreck. It was mostly carry-over from the night before when Asian stocks took a thumping on reports of slower growth in the US and growing troubles in the credit markets. That put the first domino in motion. Fed chief Bernanke's announcement that the economy will face "a sharp slowdown from the housing market's contraction" and an "inflationary surge from sharply higher oil prices and the weaker dollar", didn't help either. His remarks triggered a blow-off in the currency markets while equities were frog-marched to the chopping-block.

The Shanghai market took the worst hit dropping nearly 5% before the trading-day ended. Taiwan and Hong Kong followed suit, sliding 3.9% and 3.2% respectively. Share prices in Japan fell 2%. The next morning, Wall Street crashed. It was a massacre.

This is a bear market now. The last bull was dragged from the Street on Friday with a harpoon in its chest.

The subprime contagion has now spread beyond the US and Europe to markets in the Far East. No one is fooled by Bernanke's sunny predictions that the economy will bounce back next year with a strong showing in the first quarter. That's baloney and everyone knows it. The economy has stumbled down the elevator shaft and is just waiting to hit bottom. Consumer confidence is flagging, housing is falling, foreign capital is fleeing, and the greenback is one flush away from the sewage-treatment plant. Bernanke's soothing bromides are meaningless.

"I don't see any significant change in the broad holdings of dollars around the world. Dollars remain the dominant reserve asset and I expect that to continue to be the case," Bernanke said to the Congressional Economic Committee.

Really? So why is the greenback plummeting if people aren't dumping it, Ben? What an absurd comment. The dollar has lost 63% against the euro and dropped to record lows against a basket of world currencies. Foreign central banks and investors have been ditching it as fast as they can before it loses more value. The dollar's tumble has been the most dazzling currency-flameout in modern times and Bernanke is acting like he's still asleep at the switch. It's madness.

The greenback is getting clobbered by the Fed's "low-interest" snake oil and the gargantuan current account deficit. If Bernanke clips rates again to bail out the stock market, the dollar will slip into irreversible respiratory failure. Food and oil prices will shoot to the moon overnight and the remains of the greenback will be carted off to the nearest boneyard.

September's trade deficit was another blow to the waning dollar. The Census Bureau reported on Friday that the deficit clocked in at $56.5 billion. That's $684 billion per annum! Bush has been crowing about the "shrinking deficit", but the numbers are nothing to boast about. We're still borrowing more than we're producing. We're still living beyond our means. The lower numbers just reflect the decline in home construction which is import-intensive. The fact is, we're addicted to debt-fueled consumption and forgotten that, eventually, the trillions that we've borrowed from foreign creditors, will have to be repaid. If the dollar is replaced as the world's reserve currency, then we'll have to pay back $9 trillion of outstanding debt. We might as well hang out the "Foreclosed" sign right now and get fitted for Chinese workers-suits.

This is from Bloomberg News:

"As the dollar tumbles, concern is growing that its weakness may augur the end of the U.S. currency's 62-year reign as the world's specie of choice for trade, financial transactions and central-bank reserves..The dollar owes its position as the world's premier international currency to its status as a haven during times of turmoil, the absence of a suitable rival, weak domestic demand in other countries and plain old inertia. Geopolitics also play a role."

Nonsense. Who believes this rubbish? The dollar is the so-called "international currency" because the Federal Reserve and its well-heeled patrons are the directors of the US-Euro-Japan banking cabal which is at the center of the global Fiat money scam. There's nothing more to it than that. Notice the recent "unilateral" clamp-down on Iran by the US-led banking syndicate. The action was initiated without UN approval for the simple reason that the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and thousands of NGOs are just more of the Central Banks' prime properties. Don't expect the father to ask the child for permission to punish one of his errant children. The banks are the one's who really call the shots and--behind the curtain of feigned respectability---they are the driving force behind the endless wars.

The Fed's plan to "devalue" our way to prosperity appears to have hit a few ill-placed speed-bumps. The stock market is hanging by a thread and consumer confidence is at its lowest ebb since the start of the Iraq War. The falling dollar is expected to put a damper on Christmas spending and knock equities for a loop. That can't be good for economy--especially when 72% of GDP comes from consumer spending.

We're already begun to see the telltale signs that the consumer is loosing ground and about to slip into a debt-induced coma.

According to data from the University of Michigan:

"Consumer confidence reached its lowest level in more than two years this month amid concerns over record-high oil prices, continued trouble in the housing market and higher inflationAlthough consumer attitudes deteriorated across the board, the substantial drop in expectations contributed heavily to the sizeable decline in the overall index."

The average working stiff doesn't put any stock in Bernanke's palavering. He sees what's going on for himself every time he pulls up to the gas pump or goes the grocery store. He doesn't need the University of Michigan to tell him he's getting screwed; he knows it! The economy is sinking, inflation is skyrocketing, and the country is adrift. Every farthing in the public till has been shoveled into a black hole in the Middle East. Does Bernanke really think working people don't know that? Everyone knows that. Everyone knows the economy is on life-support; just like everyone knows the country is collapsing from mismanagement. Even the flag-waving, war-mongering maniacs on the Wall Street Journal's op-ed page are starting to shutter from the avalanche of bad news. They see what's going on and they're scared---scared sh**less.

Unfortunately, the sudden shift in consumer sentiment is the hurting retailers who depend on Christmas to carry them through the year. We've already seen the sluggishness in housing and auto sales. Now it's showing up in retail. Abercrombie, American Eagle, Ann Taylor, Chicos, Dillards, The Gap and Nordstrom are all reporting sagging sales. Walmart, Lowes and the other big-box stores are lowering their projections as well. It's going to be a lean Christmas.

The poor US consumer is finally maxed-out and can't tap into his home equity anymore for presto-credit. He's mortgaged "to the hilt" and he's already run up 6 or 7 credit cards to their limit. In fact, credit card debt is a growing concern for the banks, too.

The commercial banks are the victims' of their own success. After years of seductive promotions and saturation mailings the credit card industry is at its zenith leaving consumers with a staggering bill of nearly $1 trillion. ($915 billion) More and more customers are finding themselves unable to make even minimum payments on their balances and defaults are piling up at a record pace. This is the next phase of the subprime fiasco and it has the potential to be nearly as disruptive as the housing meltdown. The problem is complex, too. After all, most credit card debt in the last 6 years has been "securitized" and passed on to investors in the secondary market. (pension funds, hedge funds etc.) That means we can expect more tremors in the stock market as corporate earnings go south after credit card-backed bonds are downgraded. It's just more of the same "structured finance" chicanery; debt stacked on debt, until the whole edifice caves in.

It's looking more and more like Reagan's "shining city on the hill" was erected on a mountain of toxic debt. It's a wonder it hasn't sunk already.

The country is headed for recession and there's nothing that Bernanke can do to stop it. The only question is whether we'll be facing a colossal economy-busting meltdown like 1929 or a milder 5 or 6-year slump. That's up to the Federal Reserve. If the Fed chief decides to pit himself against the falling markets by slashing rates and destroying the currency; then we are likely to be digging-out for years. But if Bernanke steps aside, and lets the chips fall where they may, then the pace of recovery will be quicker.

Whatever choice he makes, there's no avoiding the inevitable downturn. The hammer is poised to strike the anvil. The stock market will fall, the over-extended banks and hedge funds will collapse, and the country will go into a protracted, economic tailspin. That much is certain. Economic fundamentals can only be shrugged off for so long. When markets correct it's like a tidal-surge that sweeps-away the deadwood of bad bets and over-levered investments leaving behind a broad-expanse of empty beach.

Recession is a normal part of the business cycle. It can't be avoided. The economy needs to unwind so debts can get written off and businesses can retool for the future. The upcoming recession is shaping up to be worse than its predecessors---a real doozey.

The damage caused by the Fed's excessive credit has been considerable. It'll take years to mop up the red ink and set the house aright. The markets are in a shambles, investors have been battered and confidence is gone.

Structured finance has been an unmitigated disaster. It needs to be scrapped. We need a new financial system for a new epoch; a system that is heavily regulated and supervised to discourage the crooks and con-artists; a system that it maintains its essential link to the real, productive underlying economy and avoids the galaxy of complex derivatives, "securitized" liabilities, and opaque debt-instruments that have brought on the present crisis; a system that responds to the needs of working people and takes into consideration the looming problems of environmental degradation, resource scarcity, and climate change; a system that reinvests in communities, education and health-care rather than fattening the bottom-line of corporate racketeers and brandy-drooling elites. It's time to remove the rotten scaffolding and rebuild the whole contraption brick by brick.

The system is broken. Maybe Greenspan did us all a favor by blowing it up with his "low interest" dynamite. Good riddance.

15000 soldiers kill by IRAK war

2007-11-19T17:23:00.001-06:00

CBS NEws discover that the Pentagon is hiding (covering) the real number of deaths in Irak take a look on these...

The Pentagon has been concealing the true number of American casualties in the Iraq War. The real number exceeds 15,000 and CBS News can prove it.

CBS's Investigative Unit wanted to do a report on the number of suicides in the military and "submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Defense". After 4 months they received a document which showed--that between 1995 and 2007-- there were 2,200 suicides among "active duty" soldiers.

Baloney.

The Pentagon was covering up the real magnitude of the "suicide epidemic". Following an exhaustive investigation of veterans' suicide data collected from 45 states; CBS discovered that in 2005 alone "there were at least 6,256 among those who served in the armed forces. That's 120 each and every week in just one year."

That is not a typo. Active and retired military personnel, mostly young veterans between the ages of 20 to 24, are returning from combat and killing themselves in record numbers. We can assume that "multiple-tours of duty" in a war-zone have precipitated a mental health crisis of which the public is entirely unaware and which the Pentagon is in total denial.

If we add the 6,256 suicide victims from 2005 to the "official" 3,865 reported combat casualties; we get a sum of 10,121. Even a low-ball estimate of similar 2004 and 2006 suicide figures, would mean that the total number of US casualties from the Iraq war now exceed 15,000.

That's right; 15,000 dead US servicemen and women in a war that--as yet--has no legal or moral justification.

CBS interviewed Dr. Ira Katz, the head of mental health at the Department of Veteran Affairs. Katz attempted to minimize the surge in veteran suicides saying, "There is no epidemic of suicide in the VA, but suicide is a major problem."

Maybe Katz is right. Maybe there is no epidemic. Maybe it's perfectly normal for young men and women to return from combat, sink into inconsolable depression, and kill themselves at greater rates than they were dying on the battlefield. Maybe it's normal for the Pentagon to abandon them as soon as soon they return from their mission so they can blow their brains out or hang themselves with a garden hose in their basement. Maybe it's normal for politicians to keep funding wholesale slaughter while they brush aside the casualties they have produced by their callousness and lack of courage. Maybe it is normal for the president to persist with the same, bland lies that perpetuate the occupation and continue to kill scores of young soldiers who put themselves in harm's-way for their country.

It's not normal; it's is a pandemic---an outbreak of despair which is the natural corollary of living in constant fear; of seeing one's friends being dismembered by roadside bombs or children being blasted to bits at military checkpoints or finding battered bodies dumped on the side of a riverbed like a bag of garbage.

The rash of suicides is the logical upshot of the U.S. war on Iraq. Returning soldiers are traumatized by their experience and now they are killing themselves in droves. Maybe we should have thought about that before we invaded.

Check it out the video at: CBS News "Suicide Epidemic among Veterans"

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com

DOLLAR downward spiral

2007-11-13T12:59:00.000-06:00

This past month has been a pretty hard time for US Dollar, it has lost a lot of value against gold and EURO, and that is why the Oil is so expensive these days nearly $95, People already stop buying US bonds usually they were buying $97 billions and now only $19 billions WHAT A DEFICIT!!! this is a very very bad situation for a country that get use to live beyond they can, and now the situation is getting worse some 6 countries are taking steps to drop Dollar:

Saudi Arabia, closest US oil provider, is taking measure to avoid any recession like in the US so they are not going to cut interest rate, this country has $800 billion on US Bonds if they start selling them it would begin a massive stampede to do the same.

South Korea, they have plans to diversify their invests outside since 2005, but now they are getting ready to shift from Dollar, cuz that currency lot value agains oil, Euro and against their own money, so plans of selling $1 billion in US bonds are very real now, on august 2007 they sold $100 million of US bonds. Asia alone has $2 trillion in US Securities and other invesment instruments.

CHINA, since they decided to drop the peg of Yuan with Dollar and decide that currency would be floating against other currencies, Yuan appreciate agains Dollar, but NUCLEAR OPTION against Dollar is still an option cuz USA want to put some trade sanctions agains them, so they use their huge amount of US bonds and instruments like a bargain chip.

RUSSIA, want to establish an alternative way for trading oil and commodities (not in dollars), since 2005 they decide to put more EUROS on the Money reserves and to put EURO Peg to Ruble.

IRAN, the most likely to abandon US DOLLAR, their first move to ask Japan to pay any Oil exports in euros, and also since 2006 they made the idea of an Oil bourse in their country to trade commodities (oil & Gas) in Euros. In October 2007 85% of their Oil sells where in other currencies (NO MORE DOLLARS)

Dollar against, Oil, Euro, click for a bigger pic

VENEZUELA, the bad boy of Latin America, they start selling oil to 12 countries in the region in EUROS, also PDVSA invesment are now in Euros only no more Dollar, he stated some argument in OPEC on 2000 to stop using PETRODOLLAR and change to other currencies.

This 6 countries represent a lot of OIL WEALTH (except Korea), they are trying to protect their own interest and economy, so if they start droping US DOLLARS it would be a high impact on US Economy.

Fears of dollar collapse as Saudis take fright

China launches currency shake-up

Korea To Limit Its Dollar Holdings

Russian Rouble to Attack the U.S.$?

Israel drop over 1 million cluster over Lebanon

2007-11-10T14:24:00.000-06:00

Before Israel Invasion over Lebanon they drop nearly 1 million of cluster bomb over the country, there is no exact data and some parts of the country is consider now DEAD ZONE cuz there is a lot of cluster bombs unexploded there.

The pretext for destroying Lebanon was to search and recover 2 soldiers kidnapped by HAMAS

watch the video HERE (would open Windows Media Player)_

New Planet like Earth discovered (55 Crancri)

2007-11-09T11:08:00.000-06:00

This month scientist discovered a new planet like Earth on the star 55 Cracri (about 41 light years from Earth), its 45 times bigger than Earth composition like Saturn, its about the same distance from Sun than Earth. But thats not all its has other planets (4), another solar system besides ours

this planets has nearly the same temperature than earth, so that means its can have life!!!

Citigroup Crisis

2007-11-07T11:49:00.001-06:00

Citigroup is on crisis now, their CEO quit after their earning drop 54% , and now the Bank faces investigation by SEC. Analist Meridth Whitney says that their only way to save the bank is to sell it by parts. In wall Street ppl start calling Citigroup the CITIcorpse. this maybe the beginning of another Enron.

Meredith Whitney: The $360bn analyst

The analyst who sparked pandemonium in global financial markets with a simple note has a colourful history

Philip Goldstein

The words of one woman were enough to knock fragile stock markets into a freefall not seen since the advent of the sub-prime crisis in August, after a pessimistic report on Citigroup's future sparked a chain reaction of panic selling.

The report of Meredith Whitney, a financial services analyst from CIBC World Market, a subsidiary of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, led to about $369 billion (£177 billion) being wiped off the US stock market value by the end of yesterday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average slid more than 360 points, or 2.6 per cent.

In London, the FTSE lost £32 billion, dropping 65 points. Today another £15.5 billion has been lost, bringing the total to £47 billion. Indications are that the FTSE will make some recovery in afternoon trading.

Ms Whitney's report caused Citibank to lose more than $15 billion of market capitalisation, with its stock plunging more than 7 per cent in the first half hour of trading. In her report, Ms Whitney said Citigroup would need to cut its dividend or sell assets to avert what she said was a $30 billion capital shortfall. It was the biggest stumble for Citibank’s shares since September 2002.

“No one had the moxie to put in print what I put in print,” Ms Whitney said.

Ms Whitney, 37, the maven (and expert) of the financial industry, has been steadily accruing influence and audience, and she is frequently quoted in numerous publications, ranging from The New York Times to Business Week, from Forbes to Fortune. She is also a regular business contributor to Fox News, 82.1 per cent owned by The News Corporation, parent company of The Times.

It was when making an appearance on Fox News' Bulls and Bears programme that she met her future husband, John Charles Layfield, a professional wrestler and former World Wrestling Entertainment champion.

Mr Layfield, whose wrestling persona is based on JR Ewing, the oil tycoon from the 1980s television series Dallas, had just written his book Have More Money Now: A Common Sense Approach to Financial Management.

The two immediately clicked over dinner.

Mr Layfield later said of his wife: "She took a country boy like me and kind of refined me. I know what fork to use now at the dinner table, and I drink my beer from a glass."

Prior to her work at CIBC, where she and her team focuses on mid-to-large sized banks as well as corporate financial institutions, Ms Whitney spent four years leading Financial Institutions research at Wachovia Securities. Before that she spent six years covering Specialty Finance at CIBC World Markets (formerly Oppenheimer).

help find ET

2007-11-03T12:31:00.000-06:00

Here I ask all of my readers to help find ET (aliens) using seti@home Boinc pogram, u would SETI that have been searching for alien signals from the space since 1970's but they dont have enough computers to do the job so they made SETi@home program, u can download it and help them, it would not cost nothing and it only use free computer of ur PC

download here

Oil above $93 dollars

2007-11-02T19:40:00.000-06:00

This week oil reach $93 per barrel cuz Mexico shut down their production nearly 600,000 barrels a day cuz storms and some accidents on Cantarell, another big reason that oil so expensive now is because DOLLAR is falling very fast agains currencies specially EURO. Just because the Dollar is very weak other commodities are going up like Gold, silver, grains and of course OIL.

Another big tension agains Iran persist so if the USA attack them surely barrel can reach $400 dollars!

Russia New Weapons

2007-11-01T18:45:00.000-06:00

SKAT Russian new UAV

RUSSIA new UAV

After the collapse of USSR Russia is back like a Phoenix rebirth from ashes thanks to Vladimir Putin and Oil MONEY, and Russia Military Industrial Complex has money and a lot of new ideas for weapons

To FACE USA ABM system on Europe they tested a new short range missile call Iskander K (R-500) with an error to the target of only 30 meters it can reach an speed of 250 m/s, can take evading actions.

Iskander E

Another anti ABM weapons RS-24 ICBM (Topol M MIRV version) it can take 10 nuclear warheads its mainly intended to replace SS-19 and SS-18 Satan (world most powerful ICBM in the world). Every warhead can maneuver during reentry and evade ABM.

RS-24 testing by May 2007

Also to face and destroy US stealth planes like the RAPTOR, USA is developing 5^th generation aircraft call PAK FA (Su-50) its unclear what type of Stealth technology they are going to use (plasma or radar absorbing tech). this plane would replace in the near future Mig-29 and Su-27.

PAK FA Artist conception

Space Weapons yes of course they have been working on that since 1980’s when Reagan proposed (and failed) to make an space ABM, USSR project was called POLYUS or SkifDM an space battle built using space modules ZARYA (used today on ISS), their main weapons was space mines, laser cannon and Stealth technology. This Soviet station was 122 feet long and

14 feet (diameter), weight 80 tons. Official Soviet statements tell that they failed to put the Station on orbit and it fell onto the Pacific Ocean, they have the technology they only need to revive it.

Polyus Launch on May 1986

Polyus Diagram

Another weapon for submarine warfare the SHKVAL (VA-111) WORLD deadlist and fast torpedo of the world, it was development since 1977, USA try to steal it on 1999 but failed, it can reach 200 knots, none of today Navies can stop it, it can reach super speed cuz they manage to create an elliptical bubble that makes supercavity reducing water friction.

This just a small view of the new weapons Russia are building to face the continue aggressions of NATO, but there more be more special weapons.

R-500 capable of destroying any ABM

http://english.pravda.ru/russia/kremlin/30-05-2007/92443-missile_R_500-0

Overwhelming UN support to end US embargo on Cuba

2007-10-31T10:27:00.001-06:00

UN session condemn USA illegal embargo again

Again USA lost on UN, they condemn the unilateral and illegal embargo over Cuba since 1960, they lost 180 against embargo only 4 votes where with USA (USA of course, Israel, Marshall islands, Palau), USA ppl at UN didnt leave the session after loosing but they said "Cuba's problems derive not from any decision of the United States, but from the embargo on freedom that the Cuban regime has imposed on its own people," he said. because the embargo is a very "good thing" for Cuba!!!! like everything USA do to help preserve Democracy and of course USA Interest!

here is the complete news

UNITED NATIONS (AFP) - The UN General Assembly on Tuesday voted overwhelmingly for the 16th year in a row to demand an end to the crippling US trade embargo against Cuba, despite Washington's pledge to keep it in place.

By a vote of 184 in favor, it reiterated its "call upon all states to refrain from promulgating and applying laws and measures (such as those in the US embargo) in conformity with their obligations under the Charter of the United Nations and international law."

The 192-member assembly again urged "states that have and continue to apply such laws and measures to take the necessary steps to repeal or invalidate them as soon as possible in accordance with their legal regime."

Like last year, four countries -- the United States, Israel, Marshall Islands and Palau -- voted against the resolution and one, Micronesia, abstained.

Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque immediately hailed the vote as a "splendid victory" coming less than a week after US President George W. Bush vowed to keep in place the US sanctions, which were imposed 45 years ago against the communist-ruled island following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion by US-backed Cuban exiles.

"As long as the regime maintains its monopoly over the political and economic life of the Cuban people, the United States will keep the embargo in place," Bush said.

"I think the president's remarks stand," US national security council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said Tuesday in reaction to the UN vote.

The margin of support for ending the embargo has grown steadily since 1992 when 59 countries voted in favor of the resolution. The figure was 179 in 2004 and 182 in 2005.

Addressing the Assembly ahead of the vote, Perez Roque said the economic and trade sanctions were having a crippling effect, and estimated Cuba had suffered losses of "no less than 222 billion dollars," based on the US dollar's current value.

The blockade "has never been applied with as much ferocity as in the past year," he said, noting that Washington even barred US companies from providing Internet services to Cuba and was denying Cuban children access to needed medication.

And he later told AFP that the vote was "the expression of the virtual universal rejection of the policy of blockade and aggression which Bush, like no other US president, has applied toward Cuba."

He said ailing Cuban President Fidel Castro "followed the (UN) debate live and was the main architect of this victory because he embodies like no-one else the will of Cubans to be a free people despite the embargo and the aggressions we have suffered."

The 81-year-old Castro has been sidelined from power since he underwent gastrointestinal surgery in July 2006. His brother Raul Castro, 76, is serving as interim president.

Ronald Godard, the US State Department's senior advisor for Latin American affairs, blamed the communist regime for the country's woes.

"Cuba's problems derive not from any decision of the United States, but from the embargo on freedom that the Cuban regime has imposed on its own people," he said.

"We call on the international community to join together in demanding that the Cuban government unconditionally release all political prisoners as the essential step in beginning a process that restores to the Cuban people their basic human rights," he told the assembly.

Several speakers denounced the embargo slapped on Cuba on February 7, 1962 by the US administration under the late president John Kennedy.

Egypt's UN envoy, Maged Abdelaziz, said the Non-Aligned movement "reiterates its deep concern over the widening of the extra-territorial nature of the embargo against Cuba and rejects the reinforcement of the measures adopted by the US government aimed at tightening the embargo."

Pakistan's deputy UN ambassador Farukh Amil, speaking on behalf of another grouping of 130 nations, called for greater dialogue and cooperation to "contribute greatly not only toward the removal of tensions, but also promote meaningful exchange and partnership between countries whose destinies are linked by history and geography."

Speaking on behalf of the European Union, Portuguese delegate Jorge de Lemos Godinho said: "we express our rejection of all unilateral measures against Cuba which are contrary to commonly accepted rules of international trade, and repeat our view that the lifting of the US trade embargo would open Cuba's economy to the benefit of the Cuban people."

Soviet UFO Secrets

2007-10-30T17:17:00.000-06:00

A very interesting article about how and why the USSR studied all the strange UFO that appear on the motherland since Tunguska incident, they have their own Bluebook but it was called Institute 21.

From History Channel

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

ASIA Bye bye DOLLAR

2007-10-29T10:38:00.000-06:00

Most of the biggest Asian countries are saying Bye Bye Dollar and replacing the Dollar with something different and with more real value, most of the goverments are tired of watching US military power extending all over the world (no money no more imperial wars for Oil)

Japan got rid 4% of USA bonds, so is China.
USA borrows nearly $9 billion dollars every year from the world

USA

watch this video WMV format

Blackwater new Border Patrol

2007-10-27T10:07:00.000-06:00

Bush is giving more new contracts ($$$$$) to his favorite company BLACKWATER (CEO is very close to Bushie), now they would form a new cheap border patrol, imagine if they start killing illegal aliens for touching a rock thinking that the rock is a bomb (WMD?)

The notorious security contractor has plans for a military-style complex near the U.S.-Mexico border. Critics worry the firm's "mercenary soldiers" could join the U.S. Border Patrol.

Oct. 23, 2007 | There are signs that Blackwater USA, the private security firm that came under intense scrutiny after its employees killed 17 civilians in Iraq in September, is positioning itself for direct involvement in U.S. border security. The company is poised to construct a major new training facility in California, just eight miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. While contracts for U.S. war efforts overseas may no longer be a growth industry for the company, Blackwater executives have lobbied the U.S. government since at least 2005 to help train and even deploy manpower for patrolling America's borders.

Blackwater is planning to build an 824-acre military-style training complex in Potrero, Calif., a rural hamlet 45 miles east of San Diego. The company's proposal, which was approved last December by the Potrero Community Planning Group and has drawn protest from within the Potrero community, will turn a former chicken ranch into "Blackwater West," the company's second-largest facility in the country. It will include a multitude of weapons firing ranges, a tactical driving track, a helipad, a 33,000-square-foot urban simulation training area, an armory for storing guns and ammunition, and dorms and classrooms. And it will be located in the heart one of the most active regions in the United States for illegal border crossings.

While some residents of Potrero have welcomed the plan, others have raised fears about encroachment on protected lands and what they see as an intimidating force of mercenaries coming into their backyard. The specter of Blackwater West and the rising interest in privatizing border security have also alarmed Democratic Rep. Bob Filner, whose congressional district includes Potrero. Filner says he believes it's a good possibility that Blackwater is positioning itself for border security contracts and is opposed to the new complex. "You have to be very wary of mercenary soldiers in a democracy, which is more fragile than people think," Rep. Filner told Salon. "You don't want armies around who will sell out to the highest bidder. We already have vigilantes on the border, the Minutemen, and this would just add to [the problem]," Filner said, referring to the Minuteman Project, a conservative group that has organized civilian posses to assist the U.S. Border Patrol in the past. Filner is backing legislation to block establishment of what he calls "mercenary training centers" anywhere in the U.S. outside of military bases. "The border is a sensitive area," he said, "and if Blackwater operates the way they do in Iraq -- shoot first and ask questions later -- my constituents are at risk."

A spokesman for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection denied there are any specific plans to work directly with Blackwater. And Blackwater officials say the complex would be used only for training active-duty military and law enforcement officials, work for which the company has contracted with the U.S. government.

But statements and lobbying activity by Blackwater officials, and the location for the new complex, strongly suggest plans to get involved in border security, with potential contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Moreover, Blackwater enjoys support from powerful Republican congressmen who advocate hard-line border policies, including calls for deploying private agents to beef up the ranks of the U.S. Border Patrol. Lawmakers supporting Blackwater include California Rep. and presidential candidate Duncan Hunter -- who met last year with company officials seeking his advice on the proposal for Blackwater West -- and Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, who is sponsoring a bill to allow private contractors such as Blackwater to help secure U.S. borders.

When questioned at a public hearing with the Potrero planning group on Sept. 13 about Blackwater West, Brian Bonfiglio, a Blackwater spokesman, said, "I don't think there's anyone in this room who wouldn't like to see the border tightened up." Blackwater currently had no contracts to help with border security, Bonfiglio said, but he emphasized that "we would entertain any approach from our government to help secure either border, absolutely." Bonfiglio was responding to questions from Raymond Lutz, a local organizer who opposes the new complex. (Lutz recorded the exchange and posted video of it on Oct. 12 at CitizensOversight.org.) Lutz also asked Bonfiglio if Blackwater West would be used as a base for deployment of Border Patrol agents. "Actually, we've offered it up as a substation to Border Patrol and U.S. Customs right now," Bonfiglio replied. "We'd love to see them there."

Ramon Rivera, a spokesman for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Washington, denied Bonfiglio's claim that the agency is entertaining an offer to use Blackwater West as a substation. "I think that's just Blackwater trying to sell themselves," Rivera said.

In fact, Blackwater has been selling itself for direct involvement in border security at least since May 2005, when the company's then president, Gary Jackson, testified before a House subcommittee. Jackson's testimony focused on Blackwater's helping to train U.S. Border Patrol agents and included discussion of contracts theoretically worth $80 million to $200 million, for thousands of personnel. Asked by one lawmaker if his company saw a market opportunity in border security, Jackson replied: "I can put as many men together as you need, trained and on the borders."

The company has turned to powerful allies on Capitol Hill for support, including Hunter, the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee and a longtime proponent of tougher border security. Joe Kasper, a spokesman for Hunter, confirmed to Salon that Blackwater officials sought guidance from Hunter on getting Blackwater West approved for Potrero. Hunter met with Blackwater officials in May 2006, at which time Hunter recommended the firm contact Dianne Jacob, the county supervisor responsible for Potrero and one of five supervisors who would vote on countywide approval for Blackwater West. Blackwater officials then met with Jacob in May, and in June the company submitted its proposal to the county, where it now must go through an approval process.

Rep. Filner says Potrero residents have complained to him that Hunter also brought pressure locally for Blackwater West. "People in the area told me he called the landowner [of the proposed site] to urge him to sell [to Blackwater]. I don't know that he did, but it wouldn't surprise me," says Filner. "That's what people in the area are saying." (Hunter has ties to Potrero, which used to be part of his congressional district; after a redestricting in 2001, Potrero became part of Filner's district, which borders Hunter's district.)

Spokesman Kasper denied that Hunter called the landowner, whose identity remains unclear. But Kasper also said that Hunter "supports Blackwater and other private security contractors in Iraq, and he supports the training facility in Potrero."

One specific concern Potrero residents have raised with relation to Blackwater West is the high risk of wildfires in their part of the county -- a danger on display the last two days as Potrero has been ravaged by fire along with other parts of Southern California. Blackwater has in fact pushed as a selling point that the complex would be a "defensible location" during wildfires. But opponents, including Jan Hedlun, the only member of the Potrero Planning Group opposed to Blackwater West, foresee danger rather than a safe haven. As Hedlun wrote in a recent editorial in the San Diego Union-Tribune, "residents state they would not flee to a box canyon with one access point and an armory filled with ammunition and/or explosives."

Ever since illegal immigration became a top issue for the Bush administration and lawmakers on Capitol Hill, there have been growing calls for the U.S. to bring private security companies into border enforcement. In September 2006, the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington released a policy paper titled "Better, Faster, and Cheaper Border Security," which urged Congress and the president to beef up forces as fast as possible. "In particular," the report said, "private contractors could play an important role in recruiting and training Border Patrol agents and providing personnel to secure the border." Late last month, one of the report's authors hosted a symposium in Washington for an updated discussion on the topic, for which Rep. Rogers -- a proponent of both Blackwater and DynCorp International, another private security contractor with personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan -- was the keynote speaker.

On June 19 of this year, during a House subcommittee meeting titled "Ensuring We Have Well-Trained Boots on the Ground at the Border," Rep. Christopher Carney, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, acknowledged "it's no secret that CPB [Customs and Border Protection] as a whole lacks the manpower to fulfill its crucial mission." Robert B. Rosenkranz, president of the government services division of DynCorp, presented a plan for putting 1,000 DynCorp employees at the border in 13 months, at a cost of $197 million.

In May 2006, the Bush administration had called for a sharp increase in manpower, at least with the existing federal force. President Bush then signed a bill into law on Oct. 4, 2006, to boost the number of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents on the ground by nearly 50 percent, from approximately 12,300 to approximately 18,300, by the end of 2008.

But even such an ambitious increase would do little to stop the flow of illegal immigrants, says T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, which represents most U.S. Border Patrol agents. Bonner, himself a field agent in east San Diego County, told the House subcommittee in June, "Realistically, there is no magic number of Border Patrol agents required to secure our borders and even if there were, it would certainly be much higher than the 18,000 proposed by the administration."

Scott Borgerson, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who specializes in homeland security, says it makes sense that U.S. companies would try to position themselves to fill gaps in national security with lucrative private-sector solutions. "If I was running a company doing private security, it's definitely what I would do," he says of Blackwater's plan to locate near the border.

In an Oct. 15 article in the Wall Street Journal, Blackwater CEO Erik Prince said that the company now sees the market diminishing for the kind of security work its employees have done in Iraq. He said that going forward the company's focus "is going to be more of a full spectrum," ranging from delivering humanitarian aid to responding to natural disasters. But priorities for the Bush administration, including immigration and border security, could also figure into Blackwater's plans -- as Salon reported recently, the company's skyrocketing revenues during Bush's presidency are accompanied by the firm's close ties with influential Republicans and top Bush officials.

Blackwater spokeswoman Anne Tyrrell said that the notion of Blackwater vying for lucrative border security contracts is "merely speculation," and noted that the location for Blackwater West is close to San Diego's military bases, a major training market for the company. "But hypothetically," Tyrrell added, "if the government came to us and needed assistance with border security, we'd be honored."

Borgerson says there is a role for private contractors in helping keep the United States safe. "But certain jobs belong to trained U.S. government officials -- men and women in uniform who have a flag on their sleeves," says Borgerson, who was a Coast Guard officer for 10 years. "You recite an oath that says you will defend -- not Congress, not the president, not even the people -- but the Constitution. You don't sign that oath when you go to work for Blackwater."

Bonner, of the U.S. Border Patrol, remains skeptical about Blackwater getting involved, and he says others in the upper ranks of the Border Patrol are opposed to private contractors working alongside them. He sees potential problems with both training and patrolling. The much higher pay likely offered to private agents, for example, would threaten an already difficult-to-retain federal force. "It will entice people to jump over to the other side," he says, "especially if they don't have a long-term career in mind." Bonner also says it is crucial to have a single training curriculum, and a single chain of command, to help ensure effective and lawful operations. "This is a bad idea from so many perspectives," he says of potentially privatizing the force.

The issue may be linked to broader problems the U.S. is currently facing with national security. "If we weren't allocating a tremendous amount of our resources in Iraq, we wouldn't have to outsource to companies like Blackwater," Borgerson says. While securing the U.S. borders is an important priority, he adds, "I feel we shouldn't outsource our sovereignty."

BUSH and ABM

2007-10-24T09:58:00.000-06:00

ABM Diagram

This week Bush insisted that Europe (EU) need the ABM system to protect against an inminent attack of Iran (on 2015 very close), and that the threat is very real (just like Saddam WMD), but in Prague Robert Gates said that the construction of the ABM is in jeopardy (he didnt said why??) and that US would present the real proof that an Iranian attack on Europe is very real (I dont know why cuz Europe is the main partner of that country and buyer of Iranian Oil) Hope they dont give some Photshops pictures like Colin Powell did on UN summit where he show some proofs that Saddam was making WMD some months before the Illegal invasion of Irak...maybe the reason that ABM is on Jeopardy is that the Neo Conservative goverment of Poland lost the past elections and they dont know if the new Prime Minister would continue with the same game of the old Prime Minister.

another big news was that Fidel Castro made an statement saying that Bush could spark the 3rd World War if he launches a nuclear attack on Iran, and some hours later Dana Perino said that Castro says a lot of crazy thing like Dictators and that USA would accelerate the process of Democracry on Cuba and help the poor people of Cuba.

Russia is BACK

2007-10-22T12:54:00.000-06:00

High oil price and the guide of Vladimir Putin make the Air Force retake Bomber training flight over Europe and on USA borders, but these doesnt compare with flight hours of UK or USA so why the west is worried?

Take a look on the nice video in that site of SKY

VIDEO

Putin Flexes His Muscles: More Nuke Flights

Pentagon New Weapons

2007-10-19T18:04:00.000-06:00

DDX

DDX firing rail gun

US Military industrial complex is the entity that invest more in new technologies so they can get more effective and intelligent weapons for the future, the most recent idea that change the way they hunt enemies was to put Hellfire missile to UAV Predator.

But the most advance and state of the art weapon is to put weapons on satellites with Rail Guns (Gauss Weapon) that can shoot a 40 pounds projectile at Mach 7, and can travel up to 200 miles and obliterate a target, that projectile would not need explosive they would be effective only with kinetic energy of the impact. The cost of munition of that weapon would be smaller than 1 million Tomahawk.

Satellite weapons would be available maybe beyond 2015.

Also known as RODS Of GOD

RODS of GOD Satellites

These weapon would be also on the Destroyer DDX that would run using Permanent Magnet Motor technology.

Another NEW weapon would be the laser gun that US Air force plan to put on a 747 plane to shoot down enemy missiles.

Future C-130 with Laser Gun

LINKS RELACIONADOS

Airborne laser weapon stays on course - Space.com - MSNBC.com

POPSCI Pentagon new weapon Space-launched darts that strike like meteors

ROD FROM GOD BIG ANALISIS

how China can Crash the US Dollar

2007-10-17T10:14:00.000-06:00

Another good essay about this global economic issue, even that the fall of US dollar would affect all the world, the biggest damage would be in the US.

Over the last 30 years, China’s economy has grown at an average annualized rate of nearly 10%. While this statistic alone is jaw-dropping, what is more impressive is the extent to which the nominally Communist country’s economy has become intertwined in the global economy. China now exerts enormous influence over the economies of virtually every country in the world, and a slight change in its domestic economic policy has the potential to send shockwaves rippling throughout the world. Nowhere is this more apparent-and frightening-then in China’s economic relationship with the United States, which is very much at the mercy of China when it comes to prices, wages, interest rates, most importantly, the value of the Dollar.

The precariousness of this relationship is already the subject of significant publicity, redolent of the Japanaphobia of the 1980’s that saw American economists scare-mongering about Japanese control of the US economy. [Of course this later turned out to be unfounded, but that is beyond the scope of our discussion.] With regard to China, most of the analysis is focused on its growing foreign exchange reserves, the majority of which are held in Dollar-denominated assets. This article will go beyond forex reserves and discuss several other facets of China’s economy. From US house prices to global commodity prices, from interest rates to inflation rates, we will explore how China could cripple the US economy, both willfully and unintentionally, if so desired.

Forex Reserve Diversification

Let’s begin with an examination of China’s forex reserves, which is probably China’s biggest bargaining chip in its economic relationship with the US. Up until two years ago, China’s currency, the RMB or Yuan, was pegged to the Dollar. As with any peg, there often develops a discrepancy between the fixed value of the currency and the value that the market would assign if the currency were permitted to float. As China’s economy surged ahead, especially over the last five to ten years, tremendous pressure began to build under the RMB. In order to maintain the peg and hold down the value of the RMB, China began accumulating foreign exchange reserves by withdrawing foreign currency from circulation. Today, China’s foreign exchange reserves are massive, at $1.4 trillion as of September 2007.

In the eyes of American policy-makers, this presents a problem because the majority of these reserves are held in Dollar-denominated assets, namely in the form of US Treasury securities. The US government theoretically could not be happier that foreign Central Banks are willing to finance its perennial budget deficits. However, this borrowing has reached a point where foreigners now control over 40% of the US national debt. Moreover, long-term US interest rates are market-driven, based on the buying and selling of US government bonds. In other words, the US has gradually ceded control of its long-term interest rates to foreign Central Banks, namely China and Japan.

As the Dollar has depreciated over the last five years, many Central Banks have begun “diversifying” their forex reserves, by switching from Dollar assets to assets denominated in other currencies. This is problematic for the Dollar for two reasons. First, switching from US assets to European assets, for example, directly causes the Dollar to depreciate. Second, the bulk sale of US treasury securities (whether or not they are replaced with other US-assets) causes US bond prices to decline and hence, yields to increase. Thus, if China suddenly decided to diversify its reserves, for economic and/or political reasons, it could potentially crash the Dollar and send US long-term interest rates skyward. Since mortgage rates are tied directly to government bond yields, a rise in interest rates would probably also affect US real estate prices. Higher interest rates would make borrowing for a home more difficult, which would lower the demand for houses and thus, the value of American real estate.

In fact, China recently created the China Investment Co. Ltd., capitalized with almost $300 Billion, charged with investing its vast forex reserves in higher-yielding assets. However, the company’s inaugural investment was a stock purchase in the Blackstone group, an American private equity firm. Thus, while it seems likely that China will gradually discard some of its stock of US Treasury Securities, the affect on the value of the Dollar will be minimal. Besides, while China would certainly punish US businesses and consumers by unloading US Treasuries on the market, it would punish itself even more, since the value of the government bonds that it didn’t sell would decline. In short, it seems China will probably hold off on exercising its “nuclear option” for the time being.

Currency Manipulation

The second aspect of the China-US economic relationship which China could wield to its advantage is the RMB, itself. American public officials enjoy criticizing China for failing to allow its currency to appreciate more quickly. In fact, there is a bill that has been lying dormant in the US Congress, which threatens to slap a massive across-the-board tariff on all Chinese imports if China fails to allow the RMB to appreciate adequately against the Dollar. What policymakers don’t realize is that a rapid appreciation in the RMB would actually harm the US economy.

Coupled with its growing role as the world’s factory, China’s cheap currency has made Americans wealthier, by increasing their purchasing power. As production of labor-intensive goods was outsourced to China over the last decade, prices for finished products began to fall both in real terms and in nominal terms. While the effect on US employment trends is debatable, its effect on prices has been unambiguous. Thus, even while the American economy boomed, inflation remained relatively modest by historical standards. This allowed the Federal Reserve Board to hold interest rates down and foment economic growth.

As the RMB appreciates, Chinese producers will become ever-more forced to pass along some of the price increase to consumers. Now, if China was to suddenly revalue its currency by the 25%-30% that western policy-makers are demanding, prices on a whole host of Chinese products would jump up overnight. This would adversely affect American purchasing power and limit consumption to such an extent that the US would be in danger of slipping into recession. While the trade deficit that is the bane of American politicians’ existence might decrease in the long-term, it would skyrocket in the short-term. Besides, as many analysts have been quick to point out, there is not much overlap between Chinese and American production. Thus, a more expensive Yuan would send production to other parts of Asia, rather than back to America. While the US-China trade deficit might narrow, it would be offset by increased imbalance with the rest of Asia. Just like with the case of its foreign exchange reserves, however, China is unlikely to exercise this option because it would deal equal harm to itself. China’s ruling Communist party derives most of its legitimacy from the strength of its economy, and especially exports. If a more expensive Yuan forced producers to relocate to other parts of Asia, it would certainly spell trouble for the CCP!

Direct Competition with US Exporters

A more potent (and plausible) weapon would be to compete more directly with US exporters, by expanding into high-technology products. Currently, China specializes in manufacturing labor-intensive products, which have long since been manufactured outside of the United States. As previously stated, a revaluation of the Chinese Yuan would surely not return production to the US. However, if China were to expand into capital-intensive and/or high-technology products, it could easily steal marketshare and jobs from the US.

Limiting the Importation of US Products

Of course, there is also the imports side of the trade equation. China is quickly becoming one of the United States’ largest export markets; limiting the importation of US goods and services would certainly be felt in the US. In fact, China already requires multinational companies in many industries to form joint ventures with Chinese companies in order to produce and/or sell their wares in China. Other anti-competitive measures include tariffs, import taxes, quotas, or a simple ban on the importation of certain types of products. Each would have a devastating impact on the US trade deficit with China and would probably result in retaliatory sanctions by the US.

Wage Pressure

Next, there is the impact that China has exerted on global wages. When Deng XiaoPing’s famous tour of the South in 1979 ignited three decades of dizzying growth, hundreds of millions of Chinese were added to the global labor pool overnight. Yet, the majority of China’s population remains concentrated in rural areas. In fact, there are perhaps 500 million Chinese peasants that have yet to join the modern labor force, which means the full effect of China’s economic explosion has yet to be fully realized by the rest of the world. Already, there is no hope of unskilled work that has already been outsourced returning to the US. If/when China begins to expand into the production of high-technology goods and more complex services, it will encroach on the territory of American businesses. Unfortunately for the US, China will likely make these undercapitalized sectors of its economy more of a priority in its next five year plan.

One popular method for estimating GDP is the income approach, which as its name suggests, represents a summation of the reported incomes of a given country’s domestic population. Logic dictates that downward pressure on the wages of skilled American workers would negatively impact US GDP, and at the very least, would curtail the purchasing power of American consumers. This would also limit US exports to China, since Chinese would have homegrown alternatives to choose from.

Raw Material Pricing

In addition, there is the impact that China’s economic growth has exerted on global raw material prices. It has been said that 25% of the world’s construction cranes are currently located in China, to support the country’s building boom. These massive development and infrastructure projects require proportionally massive quantities of raw materials, namely cement and steel. Unfortunately, China is especially inefficient at converting raw materials into finished products. Combined with the CCP’s emphasis on the near-term (which inherently prioritizes low cost over efficiency), this is placing a tremendous strain on global energy supplies, driving prices skyward.

Competition for Energy

The global prices for oil and coal are already at record highs and China only consumes 1/15 the amount of per-capita energy as the US! Chinese energy companies are becoming increasingly visible, scouring the globe for stable supplies of energy and often coming head-to-head with American energy companies. Conveniently, China does not recognize the ethical issues which arise from purchasing energy from dictatorships and corrupt regimes, whereas US companies are limited from doing business in these places. From Sudan to Myanmar to Kazakhstan, Chinese companies have set up join ventures where US companies could not. While energy prices have certainly risen in the US, they have not kept pace with global energy prices. In this way, China is able to ensure that its citizens and its businesses have the oil, coal, and natural gas that they require, while their American counterparts may be forced to conserve.

Two years ago, the Chinese National Offshore Oil Company (CNOOC) attempted to purchase an American energy company, Unocal, for over $18 Billion. However, the deal was blocked by the US Congress, which feared Unocal’s energy reserves would be supplied to China at the expense of Americans. It did not help CNOOC’s case that 70% of the Company was effectively owned by the CCP. Needless to say, Chinese government officials were not happy with the outcome; (Unocal was ultimately sold to Chevron for a lower price). China has already shown its willingness to use extreme tactics to secure an adequate energy supply. It seems reasonable to expect its energy policy will continue to oppose and inconvenience the US.

Conclusion

In short, China has several economic “weapons” at its disposal for countering the US, ranging from the manipulation of its currency to the diversification of its burgeoning stock of forex reserves. It also has several less blunt options to choose from, such as enabling Chinese companies to compete more directly and effectively with US companies, and opposing the US in securing a domestic energy supply. On all of these fronts, the US is essentially being held hostage, since it has become so dependent on China as the world’s factory. Ultimately, it seems unlikely that China will deliberately butt heads with the US unless it is first provoked, but America should nonetheless be on its guard, since its economy hangs in the balance.

Rice is worried about Russia Spends

2007-10-15T20:29:00.000-06:00

Presupuesto militar del Mundo vs USA (2002)

Condi is on Russia right now, and she said that US is worry about how much Money Russia is spending on new weapons (what is she saying Russian spend nearly 1/4 of 1 trillion USA is spending right now on weapons), she said that Russia spend on weapons should be more available to public news and transparent (yeah sure USA always tell how much money spends on weapons).

Tu-95 Bear H escorted by UK Eurofighter

She also said that is very bad Russia is selling weapons to Iran, Syria and Venezuela, like if USA didnt do the same using the CIA

What a world

have a nice weekend

Bush Lies on VIDEO

2007-10-14T11:23:00.000-06:00

Bush filosofy...so STUPID!

Mercenaries on IRAK

2007-10-12T12:01:00.000-06:00

Another reason why Irak people doesnt want the US troops there, cuz most of the sniper can shoot them to death without any reason just if they think they are possible terrorist, that is the same with the crazy killers of BLACKWATER...even if they kill 10 or 20 irakis they have TOTAL INMUNITY cuz USA doesnt care about War tribunals and doesnt obey anything they said..

Is just like the case of a Marine call Frank Wuterich that was in charge of a platoon and killed 20 peoples and raped a 14 year old, and now he is free in the USA waiting a "trial" that would said its ok dont worry u do ur duty...he is a KILLER

READ the next article

George W. Bush has transformed elite units of the U.S. military – including Special Forces and highly trained sniper teams – into “death squads” with a license to kill unarmed targets on the suspicion that they are a threat to American military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to evidence from recent court cases.

Though this reality has been the subject of whispers within the U.S. intelligence community for several years, it has now emerged into public view with two attempted prosecutions of American soldiers whose defense attorneys cited “rules of engagement” that permit the killing of suspected insurgents.

One case involved Army sniper Jorge G. Sandoval Jr. who was acquitted by a U.S. military court in Baghdad on Sept. 28 in the murders of two unarmed Iraqi men – one on April 27 and the other on May 11 – because the jury accepted defense arguments that the killings were within the approved rules.

The Sandoval case also revealed a classified program in which the Pentagon’s Asymmetric Warfare Group encouraged U.S. military snipers in Iraq to drop “bait” – such as electrical cords and ammunition – and then shoot Iraqis who pick up the items, according to evidence in the Sandoval case. [Washington Post, Sept. 24, 2007]

(Sandoval was convicted of a lesser charge of planting a coil of copper wire on one of the slain Iraqis. He was sentenced to five months in prison and a reduction in rank but will be eligible to rejoin his unit in as few as 44 days.)

The other recent case of authorized murder of an insurgent suspect surfaced at a military court hearing at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in mid-September. Two U.S. Special Forces soldiers took part in the execution of an Afghani who was suspected of leading an insurgent group.

Though the Afghani, identified as Nawab Buntangyar, responded to questions and offered no resistance when encountered on Oct. 13, 2006, he was shot dead by Master Sgt. Troy Anderson on orders from his superior officer, Capt. Dave Staffel.

According to evidence at the Fort Bragg proceedings, an earlier Army investigation had cleared the two soldiers because they had been operating under “rules of engagement” that empowered them to kill individuals who have been designated “enemy combatants,” even if the targets were unarmed and presented no visible threat.

Yet, whatever the higher-ups approve as “rules of engagement,” the practice of murdering unarmed suspects remains a violation of the laws of war and – theoretically at least – would open up the offending country’s chain of command to war-crimes charges.

Troubling Picture

The troubling picture is that the U.S. chain of command, presumably up to President Bush, has authorized loose “rules of engagement” that allow targeted killings – as well as other objectionable tactics including arbitrary arrests, “enhanced interrogations,” kidnappings in third countries with “extraordinary renditions” to countries that torture, secret CIA prisons, detentions without trial, and “reeducation camps” for younger detainees.

The U.S. counterinsurgency and security operations in Iraq and Afghanistan also have been augmented by heavily armed mercenaries, such as the Blackwater “security contractors” who operate outside the law and were accused by Iraqi authorities of killing at least 11 Iraqi civilians in a shooting incident on Sept. 16.

The use of lethal force against unarmed suspects and civilians has a notorious history in irregular warfare especially when an occupying army finds itself confronting an indigenous resistance in which guerrillas and their political supporters blend in with the local population.

In effect, Bush’s “global war on terror” appears to have reestablished what was known during the Vietnam War as Operation Phoenix, a program that assassinated Vietcong cadre, including suspected communist political allies.

Through a classified Pentagon training program known as “Project X,” the lessons of Operation Phoenix from the 1960s were passed on to Third World armies, especially in Latin America allegedly giving a green light to some of the “dirty wars” that swept the region in the following decades. [For details, see Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush.]

Bush’s global strategy also has similarities to “Operation Condor” in which South American right-wing military regimes in the 1970s sent assassins on cross-border operations to eliminate “subversives.”

Despite behind-the-scenes support for some of these Latin American “death squads,” the U.S. government presented itself as the great defender of human rights and criticized repressive countries that engaged in extrajudicial killings and arbitrary detentions.

That gap between American rhetoric and reality widened after 9/11 as Bush waged his “war on terror,” while continuing to impress the American news media with pretty words about his commitment to human rights – as occurred in his address to the United Nations on Sept. 25.

Under Bush’s remarkable double standards, he has taken the position that he can override both international law and the U.S. Constitution in deciding who gets basic human rights and who doesn’t. He sees himself as the final judge of whether people he deems “bad guys” should live or die, or face indefinite imprisonment and even torture.

Effective Immunity

While such actions by other leaders might provoke demands for an international war-crimes tribunal, there would appear to be no likelihood of that in this case since the offending nation is the United States. Given its “superpower” status, the United States and its senior leadership are effectively beyond the reach of international law.

However, even if the Bush administration can expect a real-politik immunity from a war-crimes trial, the brutal tactics of the “global war on terror” – as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan – continue to alienate the Muslim world and undermine much of Bush’s geopolitical strategy.

The ugly image of Americans killing unarmed Iraqis also helps explain the growing hostility of Iraqis toward the presence of U.S. troops.

While the Bush administration has touted the supposed improved security created by the “surge” of additional U.S. troops into Iraq, a major poll found Iraqis increasingly object to the American occupation.

A survey of more than 2,000 Iraqis by the BBC, ABC News and the Japanese news agency, NHK, discovered mounting opposition to the U.S. occupation and increasing blame put on American forces for Iraq’s security problems.

Eighty-five percent of those polled said they had little or no confidence in American and British occupation forces, up from 82 percent in February, when the “surge” began. Only 18 percent said they thought the coalition forces had done a good job, down from 24 percent in February. Forty-seven percent said occupying forces should leave now, up from 35 percent.

The number of Iraqis who feel the U.S. invasion was wrong also jumped 10 percentage points to 63 percent in August compared to 53 percent in February. The new survey found 57 percent of Iraqis supporting attacks on U.S. troops, up from 51 percent in February and 17 percent in 2004.

As for the surge itself, 70 percent said it had made the security situation worse with only 18 percent citing any improvement.

Regarding social and economic conditions, the poll also revealed a dismal outlook:

Only 8 percent of Iraqis now rate their supply of electricity as good, down from 46 percent in 2005. Only 25 percent were satisfied with the availability of clean water compared to 58 percent two years ago, helping to explain the outbreak of cholera from northern Iraq to Baghdad.

Only 32 percent of Iraqis called medical care adequate compared to 62 percent in 2005. Satisfaction with schools fell to 51 percent from 74 percent in 2005. Satisfaction with family economic situations also was down to 37 percent from 70 percent two years ago.

Blackwater Mercenaries

Little wonder that the unpopular Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has sought to make an issue over the trigger-happy tendencies of Blackwater mercenaries who provide security for U.S. embassy personnel and other American VIPs.

On Sept. 16, Blackwater gunmen accompanying a U.S. diplomatic convoy apparently sensed an ambush and opened fire, spraying a Baghdad square with bullets. Eyewitness accounts indicated that the Blackwater team apparently overreacted to a car, containing a son and his mother, moving into the square and killed about 17 people, including those in the car.

(Earlier accounts erroneously reported that a child also died in the car and put the total death toll lower, at between 8 and 11. Though at least one child did die in the incident, there was no child in the car, according to a detailed investigation by the New York Times published on Oct. 3.)

“Blackwater has no respect for the Iraqi people,” an Iraqi Interior Ministry official told the Washington Post. “They consider Iraqis like animals, although actually I think they may have more respect for animals.” [Washington Post, Sept. 20, 2007]

Iraqis have objected to other disregard of innocent life by American troops, such as the killing of two dozen Iraqis in Haditha on Nov. 19, 2005, after one Marine died from an improvised explosive device.

According to published accounts of U.S. military investigations, the dead Marine’s comrades retaliated by pulling five men from a cab and shooting them, and entering two homes where civilians, including women and children, were slaughtered.

The Marines then tried to cover up the killings by claiming that the civilian deaths were caused by the original explosion or a subsequent firefight, according to investigations by the U.S. military and human rights groups.

One of the accused Marines, Sgt. Frank Wuterich, gave his account of the Haditha killings in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” including an admission that his squad tossed a grenade into one of the residences without knowing who was inside.

“Frank, help me understand,” asked interviewer Scott Pelley. “You’re in a residence, how do you crack a door open and roll a grenade into a room?”

“At that point, you can’t hesitate to make a decision,” Wuterich answered. “Hesitation equals being killed, either yourself or your men.”

“But when you roll a grenade in a room through the crack in the door, that’s not positive identification, that’s taking a chance on anything that could be behind that door,” Pelley said.

“Well, that’s what we do. That’s how our training goes,” Wuterich said.

Who’s at Fault?

Four Marines were singled out for courts martial over the Haditha killings though some legal analysts believe the case could be jeopardized by the loose “rules of engagement” that let U.S. troops kill Iraqis when a threat is detected.

Nevertheless, as in earlier killings of Iraqi civilians – or the sexual and other abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison – punishments are likely to stop at the level of rank-and-file soldiers with higher-ups avoiding accountability.

In large part, the lack of high-level accountability stems from the fact that the key instigator of both the illegal invasion of Iraq and the harsh tactics employed in the “war on terror” is President Bush.

Not only did he order an aggressive war – a concept condemned by World War II’s Nuremberg Tribunal as “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” – but Bush pumped U.S. troops full of false propaganda by linking Iraq with the 9/11 attacks.

Bush’s subliminal connections between the Iraq War and 9/11 continued years after U.S. intelligence dismissed any linkage. For instance, on June 18, 2005, more than two years into the Iraq War, Bush told the American people that “we went to war because we were attacked” on 9/11.

Bush’s rhetorical excesses, though primarily designed to build and maintain a political consensus behind the war at home, had the predictable effect of turning loose a revenge-seeking and heavily armed U.S. military force on the Iraqi population.

Little wonder that a poll of 944 U.S. military personnel in Iraq – taken in January and February 2006 – found that 85 percent believed the U.S. mission in Iraq was mainly “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks.” Seventy-seven percent said a chief war goal was “to stop Saddam from protecting al-Qaeda in Iraq.”

In that context, many Americans sympathize with the individual U.S. soldiers who have to make split-second life-or-death decisions while thinking they are operating under legitimate rules of engagement that allow killing perceived enemies even if they are unarmed and showing no aggressive intent.

‘Salvador Option’

By early 2005, as the Iraqi insurgency grew, an increasingly frustrated Bush administration reportedly debated a “Salvador option” for Iraq, an apparent reference to the “death squad” operations that decimated the ranks of perceived leftists who were opposed to El Salvador’s right-wing military junta in the early 1980s.

According to Newsweek magazine, President Bush was contemplating the adoption of that brutal “still-secret strategy” of the Reagan administration as a way to get a handle on the spiraling violence in Iraq.

“Many U.S. conservatives consider the policy [in El Salvador] to have been a success – despite the deaths of innocent civilians,” Newsweek wrote.

The magazine also noted that many of Bush’s advisers were leading figures in the Central American operations of the 1980s, including Elliott Abrams, who is now an architect of Middle East policy on the National Security Council.

In Guatemala, about 200,000 people perished, including what a truth commission later termed a genocide against Mayan Indians in the Guatemalan highlands. In El Salvador, about 70,000 died including massacres of whole villages, such as the slaughter committed by a U.S.-trained battalion against hundreds of men, women and children near the town of El Mozote in 1981.

The Reagan administration’s “Salvador option” also had a domestic component, the so-called “perception management” operation that employed sophisticated propaganda to manipulate the fears of the American people while hiding the ugly reality of the wars.

[For details about how these strategies worked and the role of George H.W. Bush, see Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege. For more on the Salvador option, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush’s Death Squads,” Jan. 11, 2005.]

In the Iraqi-sniper case, Army sniper Sandoval admitted killing an Iraqi man near the town of Iskandariya on April 27 after a skirmish with insurgents. Sandoval testified that his team leader, Staff Sgt. Michael A. Hensley, ordered him to kill a man cutting grass with a rusty scythe because he was suspected of being an insurgent posing as a farmer.

The second killing occurred on May 11 when a man walked into a concealed location where Sandoval, Hensley and other snipers were hiding. After the Iraqi was detained, another sniper, Sgt. Evan Vela, was ordered to shoot the man in the head by Hensley and did so, according to Vela’s testimony at Sandoval’s court martial.

Sandoval was acquitted of murder charges because a military jury concluded that his actions were within the rules of engagement. Hensley is to go on trial in a few weeks.

Regarding the Afghanistan case, Special Forces Capt. Staffel and Sgt. Anderson were leading a team of Afghan soldiers when an informant told them where a suspected insurgent leader was hiding. The U.S.-led contingent found a man believed to be Nawab Buntangyar walking outside his compound near the village of Hasan Kheyl.

While the Americans kept their distance out of fear the suspect might be wearing a suicide vest, the man was questioned about his name and the Americans checked his description against a list from the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force Afghanistan, known as “the kill-or-capture list.”

Concluding that the man was insurgent leader Nawab Buntangyar, Staffel gave the order to shoot, and Anderson – from a distance of about 100 yards away – fired a bullet through the man’s head, killing him instantly.

‘Classified Mission’

The soldiers viewed the killing as “a textbook example of a classified mission completed in accordance with the American rules of engagement,” the International Herald Tribune reported. “The men said such rules allowed them to kill Buntangyar, whom the American military had designated a terrorist cell leader, once they positively identified him.”

Staffel’s civilian lawyer Mark Waple said the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command concluded in April that the shooting was “justifiable homicide,” but a two-star general in Afghanistan instigated a murder charge against the two men. That case, however, has floundered over accusations that the charge was improperly filed. [IHT, Sept. 17, 2007]

The U.S. news media has given the Fort Bragg case only minor coverage concentrating mostly on legal sparring. The New York Times’ inside-the-paper, below-the-fold headline on Sept. 19 was “Green Beret Hearing Focuses on How Charges Came About.”

The Washington Post did publish a front-page story on the “bait” aspect of the Sandoval case – when family members of U.S. soldiers implicated in the killings came forward with evidence of high-level encouragement of the snipers – but the U.S. news media has treated the story mostly as a minor event and has drawn no larger implications.

The greater significance of the cases is that they confirm the long-whispered allegations that the U.S. chain of command has approved standing orders that give the U.S. military broad discretion to kill suspected militants on sight.

The “global war on terror” appears to have morphed into a global “dirty war” with George W. Bush in ultimate command.

US debt now 10 trillions

2007-10-09T17:18:00.000-06:00

Last week of september US Congress aproved to raise the National Debt to $9.815 trillions of dollars, that would be a debt of $30,000 to every house in the US. Maybe the Congress is crazy or something cuz no one sees what is happening and the debt is going to explode when its reach the red line $10 trillions, only one Senator (Kent Conrad) said something against Bush Regime, that the debt exploded when Bush decide to cut most of US taxes (with the believe that is going to have the same effect as 20 years ago when Reagan did the same).

THe US dollar is collapsing and loosing value everyday against Euro and YEN, another big problems is USA loaners like Japan (600 billions of USA debt in their hands), and China (400 billions)

LINKS

U.S. $10 trillion in the red

US National debt clock growing everyday

Russia China Alliance vs USA Imperial Ambitions

2007-10-04T21:52:00.000-06:00

Another interesting article I found, and want to share with u, this alliance threats USA Imperial Ambitions on ASIA

“But if the middle space [Russia and the former Soviet Union] rebuffs the West [the European Union and America], becomes an assertive single entity, and either gains control over the South [Middle East] or forms an alliance with the major Eastern actor [China], then America’s primacy in Eurasia shrinks dramatically. The same would be the case if the two major Eastern players were somehow to unite. Finally, any ejection of America by its Western partners [the Franco-German entente] from its perch on the western periphery [Europe] would automatically spell the end of America’s participation in the game on the Eurasian chessboard, even though that would probably also mean the eventual subordination of the western extremity to a revived player occupying the middle space [e.g. Russia].”

-Zbigniew Brzezinski (The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, 1997)

Sir Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” These precepts of physics can also be used in the social sciences, specifically with reference to social relations and geo-politics.

America and Britain, the Anglo-American alliance, have engaged in an ambitious project to control global energy resources. Their actions have resulted in a series of complicated reactions, which have established a Eurasian-based coalition which is preparing to challenge the Anglo-American axis.

Encircling Russia and China: Anglo-American Global Ambitions Backfire

“Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force — military force — in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts. As a result we do not have sufficient strength to find a comprehensive solution to any one of these conflicts. Finding a political settlement also becomes impossible. We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law. And independent legal norms are, as a matter of fact, coming increasingly closer to one state’s legal system. One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way.”

-Vladimir Putin at the Munich Conference on Security Policy in Germany (February 11, 2007)

What American leaders and officials called the “New World Order” is what the Chinese and Russians consider a “Unipolar World.” This is the vision or hallucination, depending on perspective, that has bridged the Sino-Russian divide between Beijing and Moscow.

China and Russia are well aware of the fact that they are targets of the Anglo-American alliance. Their mutual fears of encirclement have brought them together. It is no accident that in the same year that NATO bombarded Yugoslavia, President Jiang Zemin of China and President Boris Yeltsin of Russia made an anticipated joint declaration at a historic summit in December of 1999 that revealed that China and the Russian Federation would join hands to resist the “New World Order.” The seeds for this Sino-Russian declaration were in fact laid in 1996 when both sides declared that they opposed the global imposition of single-state hegemony.

Both Jiang Zemin and Boris Yeltsin stated that all nation-states should be treated equally, enjoy security, respect each other’s sovereignty, and most importantly not interfere in the internal affairs of other nation-states. These statements were directed at the U.S. government and its partners.

The Chinese and Russians also called for the establishment of a more equitable economic and political global order. Both nations also indicated that America was behind separatist movements in their respective countries. They also underscored American-led amibitions to balkanize and finlandize the nation-states of Eurasia. Influential Americans such as Zbigniew Brzezinski had already advocated for de-centralizing and eventually dividing up the Russian Federation.

Both the Chinese and Russians issued a statement warning that the creation of an international missile shield and the contravention of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) would destabilize the international environment and polarize the globe. In 1999, the Chinese and Russians were aware of what was to come and the direction that America was headed towards. In June 2002, less than a year before the onslaught of the “Global War on Terror,” George W. Bush Jr. announced that the U.S. was withdrawing from the ABM Treaty.

On July 24, 2001, less than two months before September 11, 2001, China and Russia signed the Treaty of Good-Neighbourliness and Friendly Cooperation. The latter is a softly worded mutual defence pact against the U.S., NATO, and the U.S. sponsored Asian military network which was surrounding China. [1]

The military pact of the Shanghai Treaty Organization (SCO) also follows the same softly worded format. It is also worth noting that Article 12 of the 2001 Sino-Russian bilateral treaty stipulates that China and Russia will work together to maintain the global strategic balance, “observation of the basic agreements relevant to the safeguard and maintenance of strategic stability,” and “promote the process of nuclear disarmament.” [2] This seems to be an insinuation about a nuclear threat posed from the United States.

Standing in the Way of America and Britain: A “Chinese-Russian-Iranian Coalition”

As a result of the Anglo-American drive to encircle and ultimately dismantle China and Russia, Moscow and Beijing have joined ranks and the SCO has slowly evolved and emerged in the heart of Eurasia as a powerful international body.

The main objectives of the SCO are defensive in nature. The economic objectives of the SCO are to integrate and unite Eurasian economies against the economic and financial onslaught and manipulation from the “Trilateral” of North America, Western Europe, and Japan, which controls significant portions of the global economy.

The SCO charter was also created, using Western national security jargon, to combat “terrorism, separatism, and extremism.” Terrorist activities, separatist movements, and extremist movements in Russia, China, and Central Asia are all forces traditionally nurtured, funded, armed, and covertly supported by the British and the U.S. governments. Several separatist and extremist groups that have destabilized SCO members even have offices in London.

Iran, India, Pakistan, and Mongolia are all SCO observer members. The observer status of Iran in the SCO is misleading. Iran is a de facto member. The observer status is intended to hide the nature of trilateral cooperation between Iran, Russia, and China so that the SCO cannot be labeled and demonized as an anti-American or anti-Western military grouping.

The stated interests of China and Russia are to ensure the continuity of a “Multi-Polar World.” Zbigniew Brzezinski prefigured in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and the Geostrategic Imperatives and warned against the creation or “emergence of a hostile [Eurasian-based] coalition that could eventually seek to challenge America’s primacy.” [3] He also called this potential Eurasian coalition an “‘antihegemonic’ alliance” that would be formed from a “Chinese-Russian-Iranian coalition” with China as its linchpin. [4] This is the SCO and several Eurasian groups that are connected to the SCO.

In 1993, Brzezinski wrote “In assessing China’s future options, one has to consider also the possibility that an economically successful and politically self-confident China — but one which feels excluded from the global system and which decides to become both the advocate and the leader of the deprived states of the world — may decide to pose not only an articulate doctrinal but also a powerful geopolitical challenge to the dominant trilateral world [a reference to the economic front formed by North America, Western Europe, and Japan].” [5]

Brzezinski warns that Beijing’s answer to challenging the global status quo would be the creation of a Chinese-Russian-Iranian coalition: “For Chinese strategists, confronting the trilateral coalition of America and Europe and Japan, the most effective geopolitical counter might well be to try and fashion a triple alliance of its own, linking China with Iran in the Persian Gulf/Middle East region and with Russia in the area of the former Soviet Union [and Eastern Europe].” [6] Brzezinski goes on to say that the Chinese-Russian-Iranian coalition, which he moreover calls an “antiestablishmentarian [anti-establishmentarian] coalition,” could be a potent magnet for other states [e.g., Venezuela] dissatisfied with the [global] status quo.” [7]

Furthermore, Brzezinski warned in 1997 that “The most immediate task [for the U.S.] is to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitration role.” [8] It may be that his warnings were forgotten, because the U.S. has been repealed from Central Asia and U.S. forces have been evicted from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

“Velvet Revolutions” Backfire in Central Asia

Central Asia was the scene of several British-sponsored and American-sponsored attempts at regime change. The latter were characterised by velvet revolutions similar to the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Rose Revolution in Georgia.

These velvet revolutions financed by the U.S. failed in Central Asia, aside from Kyrgyzstan where there had been partial success with the so-called Tulip Revolution.

As a result the U.S. government has suffered major geo-strategic setbacks in Central Asia. All of Central Asia’s leaders have distanced themselves from America.

Russia and Iran have also secured energy deals in the region. America’s efforts, over several decades, to exert a hegemonic role in Central Asia seem to have been reversed overnight. The U.S. sponsored velvet revolutions have backfired. Relations between Uzbekistan and the U.S. were especially hard hit.

Uzbekistan is under the authoritarian rule of President Islam Karamov. Starting in the second half of the 1990s President Karamov was enticed into bringing Uzbekistan into the fold of the Anglo-American alliance and NATO. When there was an attempt on President Karamov’s life, he suspected the Kremlin because of his independent policy stance. This is what led Uzbekistan to leave CSTO. But Islam Karamov, years later, changed his mind as to who was attempting to get rid of him.

According to Zbigniew Brzezinski, Uzbekistan represented a major obstacle to any renewed Russian control of Central Asia and was virtually invulnerable to Russian pressure; this is why it was important to secure Uzbekistan as an American protectorate in Central Asia.

Uzbekistan also has the largest military force in Central Asia. In 1998, Uzbekistan held war games with NATO troops in Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan was becoming heavily militarized in the same manner as Georgia was in the Caucasus. The U.S. gave Uzbekistan huge amounts of financial aid to challenge the Kremlin in Central Asia and also provided training to Uzbek forces.

With the launching of the “Global War on Terror,” in 2001, Uzbekistan, an Anglo-American ally, immediately offered bases and military facilities to the U.S. in Karshi-Khanabad.

The leadership of Uzbekistan already knew the direction the “Global War on Terror” would take. To the irritation of the Bush Jr. Administration, the Uzbek President formulated a policy of self-reliance. The honeymoon between Uzbekistan and the Anglo-American alliance ended when Washington, D.C. and London contemplated removing Islam Karamov from power. He was a little too independent for their comfort and taste. Their attempts at removing the Uzbek President failed, leading eventually to a shift in geo-political alliances.

The tragic events of Andijan on May 13, 2005 were the breaking point between Uzbekistan and the Anglo-American alliance. The people of Andijan were incited into confronting the Uzbek authorities, which resulted in a heavy security clampdown on the protesters and a loss of lives.

Armed groups were reported to have been involved. In the U.S., Britain, and the E.U., the media reports focused narrowly on human rights violations without mentioning the covert role of the Anglo-American alliance. Uzbekistan held Britain and the U.S. responsible accusing them of inciting rebellion.

M. K. Bhadrakumar, the former Indian ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-1998), revealed that the Hezbut Tahrir (HT) was one of the parties blamed for stirring the crowd in Andijan by the Uzbek government. [9] The group was already destabilizing Uzbekistan and using violent tactics. The headquarters of this group happens to be in London and they enjoy the support of the British government. London is a hub for many similar organizations that further Anglo-American interests in various countries, including Iran and Sudan, through destabilization campaigns. Uzbekistan even started clamping down on foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs) because of the tragic events of Andijan.

The Anglo-American alliance had played its cards wrong in Central Asia. Uzbekistan officially left the GUUAM Group, a NATO-U.S. sponsored anti-Russian body. GUUAM once again became the GUAM (Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldava) Group on May 24, 2005.

On July 29, 2005 the U.S. military was ordered to leave Uzbekistan within a six-month period. [10] Literally, the Americans were told they were no longer welcome in Uzbekistan and Central Asia.

Russia, China, and the SCO added their voices to the demands. The U.S. cleared its airbase in Uzbekistan by November, 2005.

Uzbekistan rejoined the CSTO alliance on June 26, 2006 and realigned itself, once again, with Moscow. The Uzbek President also became a vocal advocate, along with Iran, for pushing the U.S. totally out of Central Asia. [11] Unlike Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan continued to allow the U.S. to use Manas Air Base, but with restrictions and in an uncertain atmosphere. The Kyrgyz government also would make it clear that no U.S. operations could target Iran from Kyrgyzstan.

Major Geo-Strategic Error

It appears that a strategic rapprochement between Iran and America was in the works from 2001 to 2002. At the outset of the global war on terrorism, Hezbollah and Hamas, two Arab organizations supported by Iran and Syria, were kept off the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorist organizations. Iran and Syria were also loosely portrayed as potential partners in the “Global War on Terror.”

Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Iran expressed its support for the post-Saddam Hussein Iraqi government. During the invasion of Iraq, the American military even attacked the Iraqi-based Iranian opposition militia, the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK/MOK/MKO). Iranian jets also attacked the Iraqi bases of the MEK in approximately the same window of time.

Iran, Britain, and the U.S. also worked together against the Taliban in Afghanistan. It is worth mentioning that the Taliban were never allies of Iran. Up until 2000, the Taliban had been supported by the U.S. and Britain, working hand in glove with the Pakistani military and intelligence.

The Taliban were shocked and bewildered at what they saw as an American and British betrayal in 2001 — this is in light of the fact that in October, 2001 they had stated that they would hand over Osama bin Laden to the U.S. upon the presentation of evidence of his alleged involvement in the 9/11 attacks.

Zbigniew Brzezinski warned years before 2001 that “a coalition allying Russia with both China and Iran can develop only if the United States is shortsighted enough to antagonize China and Iran simultaneously.” [12] The arrogance of the Bush Jr. Administration has resulted in this shortsighted policy.

According to The Washington Post, “Just after the lightning takeover of Baghdad by U.S. forces three years ago [in 2003], an unusual two-page document spewed out of a fax machine at the Near East bureau of the State Department. It was a proposal from Iran for a broad dialogue with the United States, and the fax suggested everything was on the table — including full cooperation on nuclear programs, acceptance of Israel and the termination of Iranian support for Palestinian militant groups.” [13]

The White House impressed by what they believe were “grand victories” in Iraq and Afghanistan merely ignored the letter sent through diplomatic channels by the Swiss government on behalf of Tehran.

However, it was not because of what was wrongly perceived as a quick victory in Iraq that the Bush Jr. Administration pushed Iran aside. On January 29, 2002, in a major address, President Bush Jr. confirmed that the U.S. would also target Iran, which had been added to the so-called “Axis of Evil” together with Iraq and North Korea. The U.S. and Britain intended to attack Iran, Syria, and Lebanon after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In fact immediately following the invasion, in July 2003, the Pentagon formulated an initial war scenario entitled “Theater Iran Near Term (TIRANNT).”

Starting in 2002, the Bush Jr. Administration had deviated from their original geo-strategic script. France and Germany were also excluded from sharing the spoils of war in Iraq.

The intention was to act against Iran and Syria just as America and Britain had used and betrayed their Taliban allies in Afghanistan. The U.S. was also set on targeting Hezbollah and Hamas. In January of 2001, according to Daniel Sobelman, a correspondent for Haaretz, the U.S. government warned Lebanon that the U.S. would go after Hezbollah. These threats directed at Lebanon were made at the start of the presidential term of George W. Bush Jr., eight months before the events of September 11, 2001.

The conflict at the United Nations Security Council between the Anglo-American alliance and the Franco-German entente, supported by Russia and China, was a pictogram of this deviation.

American geo-strategists for years after the Cold War had scheduled the Franco-German entente to be partners in their plans for global primacy. In this regard, Zbigniew Brzezinski had acknowledged that the Franco-German entente would eventually have to be elevated in status and that the spoils of war would have to be divided with Washington’s European allies.

By the end of 2004, the Anglo-American alliance had started to correct its posture towards France and Germany. Washington had returned to its original geo-strategic script with NATO playing an expanded role in the Eastern Mediterranean. In turn, France was granted oil concessions in Iraq.

The 2006 war plans for Lebanon and the Eastern Mediterranean also point to a major shift in direction, a partnership role for the Franco-German entente, with France and Germany playing a major military role in the region.

It is worth noting that a major shift occurred in early 2007 with regard to Iran. Following U.S. setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan (as well as in Lebanon, Palestine, Somalia, and former Soviet Central Asia), the White House entered into secret negotiatiations with Iran and Syria. However, the dye has been cast and it would appear that America will be unable to break an evolving military alliance which includes Russia, Iran, and China as its nucleus.

The Baker-Hamilton Commission: Covert Anglo-American Cooperation with Iran and Syria?

“America should also strongly support Turkish aspirations to have a pipeline from Baku in [the Republic of] Azerbaijan to Ceyhan on the Turkish Mediterranean cost serve as [a] major outlet for the Caspian Sea basin energy sources. In addition, it is not in America’s interest to perpetuate American-Iranian hostility. Any eventual reconciliation should be based on the recognition of a mutual strategic interest in stabilizing what currently is a very volatile regional environment for Iran [e.g., Iraq and Afghanistan]. Admittedly, any such reconciliation must be pursued by both sides and is not a favor granted by one to the other. A strong, even religiously motivated but not fanatically anti-Western Iran is in the U.S. interest, and ultimately even the Iranian political elite may recognize that reality. In the meantime, American long-range interests in Eurasia would be better served by abandoning existing U.S. objections to closer Turkish-Iranian economic cooperation, especially in the construction of new pipelines...”

-Zbigniew Brzezinski (The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, 1997)

The recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton Commission or the Iraq Study Group (ISG) are not a redirection in regards to engaging Iran, but a return to the track that the Bush Jr. Administration had deviated from as a result of the delusions of its hasty victories in Afghanistan and Iraq. In other words, the Baker-Hamilton Commission was about damage control and re-steering America to the geo-strategic path originally intended by military planners that the Bush Jr. Administration seems to have deviated from.

The ISG Report also subtly indicated that adoption of so-called “free market” economic reforms be pressed on Iran (and by extension Syria) instead of regime change. The ISG also favoured the accession of both Syria and Iran to the World Trade Organization (WTO). [14] It should also be noted, in this regard, that Iran has already started a mass privatization program that involves all sectors from banking to energy and agriculture.

The ISG Report also recommends an end to the Arab-Israeli Conflict and the establishment of peace between Israel and Syria. [15]

The joint interests of Iran and the U.S. were also analysed by the Baker-Hamilton Commission. The ISG recommended that the U.S. should not empower the Taliban again in Afghanistan (against Iran). [16] It should also be noted that Imad Moustapha, the Syrian ambassador to the U.S., the Syrian Foreign Minister, and Javad Zarif, the Iranian representative to the United Nations, were all consulted by the Baker-Hamilton Commission. [17] The Iranian Ambassodor to the U.N., Javad Zarif, has also been a middle man between the U.S. and Iranian governments for years.

It is worth mentioning that the Clinton Administration was involved in the track of rapprochement with Iran, while also attempting to keep Iran in check under the “dual-containment” policy directed against Iraq and Iran. This policy was also linked to the 1992 Draft Defence Guidance paper written by people within the Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. Administrations.

It is worth noting that Zbigniew Brzezinski had stated as far back as 1979 and again in 1997 that Iran under its post-revolutionary political system could be co-opted by America. [18] Britain also ensured Syria and Iran in 2002 and 2003 that they would not be targeted and encouraged their cooperation with the White House.

It should be noted that Turkey has recently signed a pipeline deal with Iran that will take gas to Western Europe. This project includes the participation of Turkmenistan. [19] It would appear that this cooperation agreement between Tehran and Ankara points to reconciliation rather than confrontation with Iran and Syria. This is in line with what Brzezinski in 1997 claimed was in America’s interest.

Also, the Anglo-American sponsored Iraqi government has recently signed pipeline deals with Iran.

Once again, America’s interests in this deal should be questioned, as should the high opinions being given about Iran by the puppet leaders of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Something’s Amiss...

The media attention given in North America and Britain to the positive comments made about Tehran by Anglo-American clients in Baghdad and Kabul is sinister.

Although these comments from Baghdad and Kabul about the positive role Iran plays in Iraq and Afghanistan are not new, the media attention is. President George W. Bush Jr. and the White House criticized the Iraqi Prime Minister for saying Iran plays a constructive role in Iraq in early-August of 2007. The White House and North American or British press would usually just ignore or refuse to acknowledge these comments. However, this was not the case in August, 2007.

The Afghani President, Hamid Karzai, during a joint press conference with George W. Bush Jr. stated that Iran was a positive force in his country. It is not odd to hear that Iran is a positive force inside Afghanistan because the stability of Afghanistan is in Iran’s best interests. What comes across as odd are “when” and “where” the comments were made. White House press conferences are choreographed and the place and time of the Afghani President’s comments should be questioned. It also so happens that shortly after the Afghani President’s comments, the Iranian President arrived in Kabul in an unprecedented visit that must have been approved by the White House.

Iran’s Political Leverage

In regards to Iran and the U.S., the picture is blurry and the lines between cooperation and rivalry are less clear. Reuters and the Iranian Student’s News Agency (ISNA) have both reported that the Iranian President may visit Baghdad after August 2007. These reports surfaced just before the U.S. government started threatening to label the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a special international terrorist organization. Without insinuating anything, it should also be noted that the Revolutionary Guard and the U.S. military have also had a low-key history of cooperation from Bosnia-Herzegovina to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

The Iranian President has also invited the presidents of the other four Caspian states for a Caspian Sea summit in Tehran. [20] He invited the Turkmen president while in Turkmenistan and later the Russian and Kazakh presidents at the August of 2007 SCO summit in Kyrgyzstan. President Aliyev, the leader of the Republic of Azerbaijan (Azarbaijan) was also personally invited during a trip by the Iranian President to Baku. The anticipated Caspian Sea summit may be similar to the one in Port Turkmenbashi, Turkmenistan between the Kazakh, Russian, and Turkmen presidents where it was announced that Russia would not be cut out of the pipeline deals in Central Asia.

Iranian leverage is clearly getting stronger. Officials in Baku also stated that they will expand energy cooperation with Iran and enter the gas pipeline deal between Iran, Turkey, and Turkmenistan that will supply European markets with gas. [21] This agreement to supply Europe is similar to a Russian energy transport deal signed between Greece, Bulgaria, and the Russian Federation. [22]

In the Levant, Syria is involved in energy-related negotiations with Ankara and Baku and important talks have started between American officials and both Tehran and Damascus. [23]

Iran has also been involved in diplomatic exchanges with Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, and the Republic of Azerbaijan. Additionally, starting in August 2007, Syria has agreed to reopen Iraqi oil pipelines to the Eastern Mediterranean, through Syrian territory. [24] The recent official visit of Iraqi Prime Minister Al-Maliki to Syria has also been described as historical by news sources like the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Also, Syria and Iraq have agreed to build a gas pipeline from Iraq into Syria, where Iraqi gas will be treated in Syrian plants. [25] These agreements are being passed as the sources of tensions between Baghdad and the White House, but they are doubtful. [26]

Iran and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) are also planning on starting the process for creating an Iranian-GCC free trade zone in the Persian Gulf. In the bazaars of Tehran and amongst the political circle of Rafsanjani there are also discussions about the eventual creation of a single market between Iran, Tajikistan, Armenia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. The American role in these processes in regards to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the GCC should be explored.

Under President Nicholas Sarkozy, France has indicated that it is willing to engage the Syrians fully if they gave specific guarantees in regards to Lebanon. These guarantees are linked to French economic and geo-strategic interests.

In the same period of time as the French statements about Syria, Gordon Brown indicated that Britain was also willing to engage in diplomatic exchanges with both Syria and Iran. Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, the German Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development, has also been involved in talks with Damascus on mutual projects, economic reform, and bringing Syria closer to the European Union. These talks, however tend to be camouflaged by the discussion between Syria and Germany in regards to the mass exodus of Iraqi refugees, resulting from the Anglo-American occupation of their country. The French Foreign Minister is also expected in Tehran to talk about Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq. Despite the war-mongering by the U.S. and more recently by France, this has all led to speculation of a potential about-turn in regards to Iran and Syria. [27]

Then again, this is part of the two-pronged U.S. approach of preparing for the worst (war), while suing for the diplomatic capitulation of Syria and Iran as client states or partners. When large oil and weapons deals were signed between Libya and Britain, London said that Iran should follow the Libyan example, as has the Baker-Hamilton Commission.

Has the March to War been Interrupted?

Despite talks behind closed doors with Damascus and Tehran, Washington is nonetheless arming its clients in the Middle East. Israel is in an advanced state of military preparedness for a war on Syria.

Unlike France and Germany, Anglo-American ambitions pertaining to Iran and Syria are not one of cooperation. The ultimate objective is political and economic subordination.

Moreover, either as a friend or foe, America cannot tolerate Iran within its present borders. The balkanization of Iran, like that of Iraq and Russia, is a major long-term Anglo-American goal.

What lies ahead is never known. While there is smoke in the horizon, the U.S.-NATO-Israeli military agenda will not necessarily result in the implementation of war as planned.

A “Chinese-Russian-Iranian coalition” — which forms the basis of a global counter-alliance — is emerging. America and Britain rather than opting for outright war, may choose to reel in Iran and Syria through macro-economic manipulation and velvet revolutions.

War directed against Iran and Syria, however, cannot be ruled out. There are real war preparations on the ground in the Middle East and Central Asia. A war against Iran and Syria would have far-reaching worldwide implications.

Iran bye bye Dollar

2007-10-02T12:34:00.000-06:00

These may be the last sign of an inminent attack on Iran and a new Oil WAR , Saddam Hussein did the same prior USA illegal attack on Iraq,

Iran is only accepting 15% of Oil payments on Dollars, rest on EUROS and Yens

This can be a VIRUS that can spread thru the Middle East, so they would throw away Dollar and start using EURO, Kuwait has been thinking on that cuz they are loosing lots of Money using Dollars

Here is the story

TEHRAN (AFP) - Iran has slashed the use of the dollar in payment for its oil exports to 15 percent, an official said on Tuesday, amid growing pressure from arch-foe the United States on its financial system.

The vast majority of transactions for oil from OPEC's number two producer are now being carried out in euros, said Mohammad-Ali Khatibi, deputy head of the National Iranian Oil Company in charge of marketing.

"Iran is selling about 85 percent of its oil in the non-dollar currencies," Khatibi was quoted as saying by state television.

"Currently, about 65 percent of the oil sale income is in euros and 20 percent in yen," Khatibi added.

Japan, which purchases 20 percent of Iran's crude oil, has recently agreed to pay for the crude oil in yen, he said.

He also said that the remaining sums being paid in dollars, about 15 percent, are going to shift to "other creditworthy currencies".

Khatibi also cited the United Arab Emirates dirham as one other possible currency for use in oil transactions.

He said the main reason for the move was fluctuations of the dollar on the currency markets and the depreciation of its value since 2004.

Iran had previously announced that 60 percent of its oil transactions for export had been switched into euros.

Iran, the world's fourth largest oil exporter, has massively cut down its dependence on the dollar in the face of US pressures.

The United States has been seeking to make international banking transactions harder for Iran, as another tool to pressure Tehran into backing down over its controversial nuclear programme.

Several European banks have drastically cut business with Iran as a result of US pressure.

However despite problems with inflation and unemployment at home, Iran's economy is being helped by revenue windfalls from current high crude oil prices.

Iran's foreign currency reserves held in banks abroad have risen by 37 percent over the past year to the equivalent of 65 billion dollars as of the end of June 2007, the central bank said in September.

BIOLOGICAL weapons VIDEO

2007-09-29T12:47:00.000-06:00

About how USA and USSR develop a large scale program of these weapons of mass destruction.

PART 1

PART 2

PART 3

PART 4

PART 5

GRAND THEFT IRAQ

2007-09-25T10:09:00.000-06:00

It is time to see how much bounty every pirate is going to get for the ILLEGAL Invasion and Destruction of Irak, of course the big winner USA, UK with some bones, and Neatherland, Spain with maybe 1 contract...it doesnt matter if a lot of Iraquies are fleeing from their country and some more dying there...its all about MONEY and OIL.

“We live under a system by which the many are exploited by the few - and war is the ultimate sanction of that exploitation.” Harold Laski, 1945.

At the end of August, in Dubai and the beginning of September, in London, conferences were held in order to privatize and carve up contracts for every essential service and infrastructure in Iraq. There was not a mega-corporate pig anywhere on earth, seemingly, who did not have its trotters in the trough. As Iraqis flee in an exodus of biblical proportions and die in a genocidal one, US/UK government backed corporate priority is a smash and grab raid of every asset and facility in the “land between two rivers”.

Meetings were organised by the Iraq Development Programme, under the auspices of the Arab-British Chamber of Commerce (“Arab” clearly secondary, as since Arabic is written from right to left, Britain comes first and the Arabic version, last) ninety five percent of “tendered” (“assumed” seems more apt) contracts are US giants. The UK was thrown minimal bones, with Egypt, Netherlands and Spain getting one each, according the IDP website (http://www.iraqdevelopmentprogramme.org )

The “best-in-breed” technology is to the brought to Iraq, as it is milked dry.

Trough facilitators include: the misnamed United States Aid and International Development (USAID), U.S. Embassy Iraq, Department of Defence Army Corps of Engineers, (U.S.) Defence Procurement and Acquisition Police, U.S. Government Iraq Infrastructure and Reconstruction Programme (NB: http://www.bechtel.com/iraq ) the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, U.S. Government Iraq Reconstruction Projects - and on and on. To mix metaphors, potential cash cows don't come bigger than this.

The carpetbaggers had a little bit of help from their quisling friends in their illegitimate and illegal carve up. Dr Adel Abdul Mehdi, Iraq's “Vice President”, said: “Iraq's new investment law will facilitate investment for both Iraqi and non-Iraqi businesses by providing a secure investment environment.” Referring to Iraq's resources, he said the conference presented opportunities across a wide range of industries: oil, gas, agriculture, infrastructure.

Indeed. Up for grabs are: hospital and security equipment, medicines, road and rail machinery, oil production tools, finance and telecommunication systems. Rebuilding of roads, rail, hospitals, government buildings, schools, water purification plants and electricity, information technology, telecommunications, all to move from state owned to the “free market economy”.

If Iraqis are down to near no electricity now, due to the liberators' inability to provide what Saddam Hussein's government did within just months after the 1991 decimation, they won't be able to afford it in the future anyway. “Yes we have plans for fully privatising”, Iraq's electricity “Minister” Karem Waheed Hassan, told UPI.

Ali Al Dabbagh, for the Electricity Company, was concerned only for assurances “for the investor”, Iraq's population did not come into the equation. Contracts will be granted; $Billions will be spent; contractors paid their massive profits - and the lights will go out all over Iraq (except the Green Zone, and the Vatican City sized U.S. embassy, if the resistance haven't blown them up.)

In the country which brought the world writing, the first written records, Algebra, Astronomy, the wheel, the first time piece, Irrigation, the first pharmaceutical college, the “Epic of Gilgamesh”, and it is thought, the first university, the Universities of Florida and Oklahoma are being drafted in as education “curricular consultants” to take advantage of the “key opportunities in ICT and education”.

It would be interesting to know what the Universities of Florida and Oklahoma can offer to a country which, as with Palestine, prior to the invasion, had the most PhD's per capita, in the world. Whose educational system was so exemplary, that UNESCO devised a unique award for Iraq, commenting that it was the only country, in their experience, where a child could be born in abject poverty, of illiterate parents and complete his education to become an architect, engineer, surgeon, or whatever he or she aspired to. Education was free from kindergarten through university and post graduate studies abroad.

“Panel sessions at the conferences covered the legal environment for conducting business in Iraq, financing private sector business, trade and commerce and private sector banking.”

You bet. American lawyers seemingly are on hand at every ministry to draft laws legitimising one of the biggest ram raids in history.

Electricity, of course, is also needed to pump oil. Some of those representing the oil industry - which, after nationalisation in 1971, saw the Iraqi government pour money into all that is now being privatised, thereby creating a near “first world country”, according to the U.N. - were: Chevron, B.P., Conoco Phillips, Marathon Oil, Total, Exxon, Lukoil, Statoil, General Electric, Dana Gas, Raytheon, Crescent Petrolium and Hawker Beechcroft.

Ahmed Janabi (Al Jazeera, 4th May 2006) reminds us of Douglas Feith, then US Under-Secretary of Defence, who said on February 11, 2003:

“Only someone ignorant of the easy-to-ascertain realities could think that the United States would profit from such a war, even if we were willing to steal Iraq's oil which we emphatically are not going to do.”

He was either economical with the truth, or very forgetful of President George H.W. Bush's statement after 1991, Janabi reminds, who said he would not let one country control twenty percent of the world's oil resources. Further, at a conference in London on 20th June 2003, just a month after the fall of Baghdad, writes Janabi, Israel's Binyamin Netanyahu told a group of investors that Iraqi oil would be flowing through Israel's Jaffa pipeline “sooner or later”.

“Iraq has the capacity to become the biggest revenue generating country in the Middle East”, states I.D.P., with one delegate shown on BBC Newsnight, nearly salivating, as he talked of opportunities unheard of anywhere on the globe. “A follow up summit is expected to take place in 2008, by which time the hydro-carbon law will have been approved.” The “Iraqi people are going to become part of the international community”, said another I.D.P. delegate.

Indeed, stripped of all and sold down Mesopotamia's two great rivers. Coincidentally, the U.S. is to build another vast base in Wasit Province, to protect Iraq from “insurgents” coming in from Iran. As the gimlet eyed analyst Sarah Meyer points out coincidentally, another vast oilfield, it seems, has just been discovered there.

(http://www.indexresearch.blogspot.com);

In an article worth revisiting, (U.S.) Major General Smedley Butler, in Common Sense Magazine, in November 1935 wrote:

“There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its 'finger men' (to point out enemies) its 'muscle men' (to destroy enemies) its 'brain guys' (to plan war preparations) and a 'Big Boss' (supernationalistic capitalism.)

“It may seem odd, for me, a military man, to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to do so. I spent thirty three years and four months in active service in one of our country's most agile forces - the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major General. During that period I spent most of my time being a high class muscle man for Big Business and Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism.

“I suspected I was just a part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it.... My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher ups. This is typical with everyone in military service.

“Thus, I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I made Haiti and Cuba a decent place for National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China, in 1927, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

“During those years, I had, as the boys in the backroom would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals and promotion. Looking back on it, I feel I might have been able to give Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. I operated on three continents.”

Mesopotamia is a racket so gargantuan, that it surely would have stunned even General Butler. Not, however, it seems, General Colin Powell, who told U.S, Commander in Chief, President George W. Bush, in the summer of 2002, that in the event of an invasion of Iraq: “You are going to be the proud owner of twenty five million people ... You'll own it all.”

Germs from space deadlier

2007-09-24T15:59:00.000-06:00

NASA took SALMONELLA to space on STS-115 last september, and they took back those samples to Earth and use it on some Mice and discover that germ is deadlier (3 times), why because when they are out there, they change their DNA in order to survive.

Hope this kind of reseach is not used in some other new biological weapon

here is the full news

Canada loosing water

2007-09-24T09:53:00.001-06:00

Some article for my Canadian friends and blog visitors
Protect ur water from the US Empire

Under the North American Free Trade Agreement, Canada lost control over its energy resources. Now, with “NAFTA-plus”, it could also lose control over its freshwater resources, say experts.

Canada’s water is on the trade negotiating table despite widespread public opposition and assurances by Canadian political leaders, said Adèle Hurley, director of the University of Toronto’s Programme on Water Issues at the Munk Centre for International Studies.

A new report released Sep. 11 by the programme reveals that water transfers from Canada to the United States are emerging as an issue under the auspices of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP). The SPP — sometimes called “NAFTA-plus” — is a forum set up in 2005 in Cancún, by the three partners, Canada, United States and Mexico.

Economic integration as envisioned by the powerful but little-known SPP is slowly changing the lives of Canadians, says Andrew Nikiforuk, author of the report “On the Table: Water Energy and North American Integration”.

The SPP is comprised of business leaders and government officials who work behind the scenes and are already responsible for changes to border security, easing of pesticide rules, harmonisation of pipeline regulations and plans to prepare for a potential avian flu outbreak, Nikiforuk writes.

“The SPP is run by corporate leaders; governments are irrelevant,” said Ralph Pentland, a water expert and acting chairman of the Canadian Water Issues Council.

Pentland envisions a future where, in response to ongoing drought problems in the United States, the SPP will make arrangements to dole out millions of dollars of public funds for private companies to build pipelines to transfer water from Canada.

“The SPP is like putting the monkeys in charge of the peanuts,” he told Tierramérica.

Massive water diversions from Canada do not make economic or environmental sense, according to water experts. Far better and cheaper is to improve water efficiency and eliminate waste. The United States and Canada lead the world in water consumption and are extraordinarily wasteful, Pentland says.

Moreover, most of Canada’s water is in the far north, not near its border with the United States. And even the transboundary Great Lakes are at their lowest levels in 100 years due to climate change, notes Nikiforuk.

William Nitze, prominent member of the SPP and chairman of GridPoint Inc., a company that makes energy management systems, is not in favor of bulk water exports.

“Water management has been poor in all three countries,” Nitze said. Canada, for example, favors guidelines over mandatory rules for keeping pollutants out of water. And Mexico needs to double its investment in its water infrastructure, he noted.

Nikiforuk agrees that Canada has mismanaged its water resources. He points out that Canada already ships enormous volumes of water to the United States, in the form its main exports: grain, cattle, hogs, aluminum, automobiles and oil. Each of these requires many tons of water to produce, but the latter is perhaps the most controversial.

Most of Canada’s oil comes from the tar sands, a 125-billion-dollar capital project in the boreal forest of northern Alberta province. One million barrels of oil flow south each day to the U.S. making Canada its largest supplier.

However, it takes three barrels of freshwater to produce one barrel of oil from the tar sands, says Nikiforuk.

The project already consumes 359 million cubic metres of water, enough for a city of two million people in Canada. Ninety percent of the water becomes contaminated and has to be stored in vast tailings impoundments. More than 10 of these exist, covering an area of 50 square km.

Members of the SPP North American Energy Working Group met in Houston, in the southern U.S. state of Texas, in 2006, where they talked about the “pipeline challenge”, a proposed a five-fold increase in production at the tar sands, said Nikiforuk.

“No mention was made of water at the meeting, but there isn’t nearly enough water in the region for this kind of expansion,” he said.

Under NAFTA rules, Canada cannot reduce its energy exports to the United States, according to Gordon Laxer, director of the Parkland Institute, a research network at the University of Alberta. “The U.S. is the most energy wasteful nation on Earth. And Canada is sacrificing its environment to feed America’s addiction to oil,” Laxer said in an interview.

“Respected energy analyst Matthew Simmons told me Canada should stop furthering the U.S. addiction to liquid fuels and make it illegal to use fresh water in tar sands,” said Nikiforuk.

There is ample evidence that environmental standards and stewardship in Canada and Mexico have plummeted since NAFTA went into effect in 1994, and “accelerated trade under the SPP means accelerated environmental abuse,” he said.

Are Americans Stupids

2007-09-17T11:28:00.001-06:00

A very funny video from an Australian Program a person goes an ask simple question of what is the Axis of Evil, did u support a war agains this country just cuz Bush says they are a threat, and also about tell me what countries are the biggest threat, sometimes they said FRANCE, korea in a map with diff name like France instead of Australia...

sooo funny i cannt believe they even dont know what money ENglad use, some says mmm AMERICAN MONEY LOL

STOP WAR AND BUSH

2007-09-16T16:39:00.000-06:00

This past saturday, a new protest against the Irak war came to DC, nearly 10,000 people protest to bring the troops back and Impeach Bush for lying to the nation about WMD on Irak.

9-11 goverment was plotting

2007-09-13T17:30:00.000-06:00

Now a very important russian news agency says that 9-11 was a orchested by some US goverment agencies like CIA, and now the comission tells that some explanations they gave were "far from truth"

9-11 a Big coverup from UK newspaper

video of the protest

Six years after 9/11, the American public have still not been provided with a full and truthful account of the single greatest terror attack in US history.

What they got was a turkey. The 9/11 Commission was hamstrung by official obstruction. It never managed to ascertain the whole truth of what happened on September 11 2001.

The chair and vice chair of the 9/11 Commission, respectively Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, assert in their book, Without Precedent, that they were "set up to fail" and were starved of funds to do a proper investigation. They also confirm that they were denied access to the truth and misled by senior officials in the Pentagon and the federal aviation authority;
and that this obstruction and deception led them to contemplate slapping officials with criminal charges.

Despite the many public statements by 9/11 commissioners and staff members acknowledging they were repeatedly lied to, not a single person has ever been charged, tried, or even reprimanded, for lying to the 9/11 Commission.

From the outset, the commission seemed to be hobbled. It did not start work until over a year after the attacks. Even then, its terms of reference were suspiciously narrow, its powers of investigation curiously limited and its time-frame for producing a report unhelpfully short - barely a year to sift through millions of pages of evidence and to interview hundreds of key witnesses.

The final report did not examine key evidence, and neglected serious anomalies in the various accounts of what happened. The commissioners admit their report was incomplete and flawed, and that many questions about the terror attacks remain unanswered. Nevertheless, the 9/11 Commission was swiftly closed down on August 21 2004.

I do not believe in conspiracy theories. I prefer rigorous, evidence-based analysis that sifts through the known facts and utilises expert opinion to draw conclusions that stand up to critical scrutiny. In other words, I believe in everything the 9/11 Commission was not.

The failings of the official investigation have fuelled too many half-baked conspiracy theories. Some of the 9/11 "truth" groups promote speculative hypotheses, ignore innocent explanations, cite non-expert sources and jump to conclusions that are not proven by the known facts. They convert mere coincidence and circumstantial evidence into cast-iron proof. This is no way to debunk the obfuscations and evasions of the 9/11 report.

But even amid the hype, some of these 9/11 groups raise valid and important questions that were never even considered, let alone answered, by the official investigation. The American public has not been told the complete truth about the events of that fateful autumn morning six years ago.

What happened on 9/11 is fundamentally important in its own right. But equally important is the way the 9/11 cover-up signifies an absence of democratic, transparent and accountable government. Establishing the truth is, in part, about restoring honesty, trust and confidence in American politics.

There are dozens of 9/11 "truth" websites and campaign groups. I cannot vouch for the veracity or credibility of any of them. But what I can say is that as well as making plenty of seemingly outrageous claims; a few of them raise legitimate questions that demand answers.

Four of these well known "tell the truth" 9/11 websites are:

1) Scholars for 9/11 Truth, which includes academics and intellectuals from many disciplines.

2) 250+ 9/11 'Smoking Guns' a website that cites over 250 pieces of evidence that allegedly contradict, or were omitted from, the 9/11 Commission report.

3) The 911 Truth Campaign that, as well as offering its own evidence and theories, includes links to more than 20 similar websites.

4) Patriots Question 9/11, perhaps the most plausible array of distinguished US citizens who question the official account of 9/11, including General Wesley Clark, former Nato commander in Europe, and seven members and staffers of the official 9/11 Commission, including the chair and vice chair. In all, this website documents the doubts of 110+ senior military, intelligence service, law enforcement and government officials; 200+ engineers and architects; 50+ pilots and aviation professionals; 150+ professors; 90+ entertainment and media people; and 190+ 9/11 survivors and family members. Although this is an impressive roll call, it doesn't necessarily mean that these expert professionals are right. Nevertheless, their scepticism of the official version of events is reason to pause and reflect.

More and more US citizens are critical of the official account. The respected Zogby polling organisation last week found that 51% of Americans want Congress to probe President Bush and Vice-President Cheney regarding the truth about the 9/11 attacks; 67% are also critical of the 9/11 Commission for not investigating the bizarre, unexplained collapse of the 47-storey World Trade Centre building 7 (WTC7). This building was not hit by any planes. Unlike WTC3, which was badly damaged by falling debris from the Twin Towers but which remained standing, WTC7 suffered minor damage but suddenly collapsed in a neat pile, as happens in a controlled demolition.

In a 2006 interview with anchorman Evan Soloman of CBC's Sunday programme, the vice chair of the 9/11 Commission, Lee Hamilton, was reminded that the commission report failed to even mention the collapse of WTC7 or the suspicious hurried removal of the building debris from the site - before there could be a proper forensic investigation of what was a crime scene. Hamilton could only offer the lame excuse that the commissioners did not have "unlimited time" and could not be expected to answer "every question" the public asks.

There are many, many more strange unexplained facts concerning the events of 9/11. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to be puzzled and want an explanation, or to be sceptical concerning the official version of events.

Six years on from those terrible events, the survivors, and the friends and families of those who died, deserve to know the truth. Is honesty and transparency concerning 9/11 too much to ask of the president and Congress?

What is needed is a new and truly independent commission of inquiry to sort coincidence and conjecture from fact, and to provide answers to the unsolved anomalies in the evidence available concerning the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Unlike the often-stymied first investigation, this new commission should be granted wide-ranging subpoena powers and unfettered access to government files and officials. George Bush should be called to testify, without his minders at hand to brief and prompt him. America - and the world - has a right to know the truth.

Russia super Bomb

2007-09-12T20:24:00.001-06:00

They use the TU-160 to drop it

VIDEO

Russia tests superstrength bomb: military

By Dmitry Solovyov Tue Sep 11, 5:09 PM ET (Reuters)

Russia has tested the world's most powerful vacuum bomb, which unleashes a destructive shockwave with the power of a nuclear blast, the military said on Tuesday, dubbing it the "father of all bombs."

The bomb is the latest in a series of new Russian weapons and policy moves as President Vladimir Putin tries to reassert Moscow's role on the international stage.

"Test results of the new airborne weapon have shown that its efficiency and power is commensurate with a nuclear weapon," Alexander Rukshin, Russian deputy armed forces chief of staff, told Russia's state ORT First Channel television. The same report was later shown on the state-sponsored Vesti channel.

"You will now see it in action, the bomb which has no match in the world is being tested at a military site."

It showed a Tupolev Tu-160 strategic bomber dropping the bomb over a testing ground. A large explosion followed.

Pictures showed what looked like a flattened multi-storey block of flats surrounded by scorched soil and boulders. "The soil looks like a lunar landscape," the report said.

"The defense ministry stresses this military invention does not contradict a single international treaty. Russia is not unleashing a new arms race."

Such devices generally detonate in two stages. First a small blast disperses a main load of explosive material into a cloud, which then either spontaneously ignites in air or is set off by a second charge.

This explosion generates a pressure wave that reaches much further than that from a conventional explosive. The consumption of gases in the blast also generates a partial vacuum that can compound damage and injuries caused by the explosion itself.

"The main destruction is inflicted by an ultrasonic shockwave and an incredibly high temperature," the reports said. "All that is alive merely evaporates."

Rukshin said: "At the same time, I want to stress that the action of this weapon does not contaminate the environment, in contrast to a nuclear one."

"FATHER OF ALL BOMBS"

The Tu-160 supersonic bomber that dropped the bomb, widely known under its NATO nickname of "Blackjack," is the heaviest combat aircraft ever built.

Putin, who has overseen the roll-out of new tactical and anti-aircraft missiles and combat aircraft, has ordered "Blackjacks" and the Tu-95 "Bear" bombers to patrol around the world.

The report said the new bomb was much stronger than the U.S.-built Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb -- MOAB, also known under its name "Mother of All Bombs." "So, Russian designers called the new weapon 'Father of All Bombs'," it said.

Showing the orange-painted U.S. prototype, the report said the Russian bomb was four times more powerful -- 44 metric tons of TNT equivalent -- and the temperature at the epicenter of its blast was two times higher.

In 1999 Russian generals threatened to use vacuum bombs to wipe out rebels from the mountains during the "anti-terrorist operation" in its restive Chechnya province.

New York-based Human Rights Watch then appealed to Putin to refrain from using fuel-air explosives. It remains unclear if weapons of this type were used during the Chechen war.

U.S. forces have used a "thermobaric" bomb, which works on similar principles, in their campaign against al Qaeda and Taliban forces in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan.

"It (the bomb) will allow us to safeguard our state's security and fight international terrorism in any circumstances and in any part of the world," Rukshin said.

Hard Oil ERA NOW

2007-09-10T16:49:00.000-06:00

Very nice article u should read ASAP, about Oil Peak and how would affect lives everywhere

When "peak oil" theory was first widely publicized in such path breaking books as Kenneth Deffeyes' Hubbert's Peak (2001), Richard Heinberg's The Party's Over (2002), David Goodstein's Out of Gas (2004), and Paul Robert's The End of Oil (2004), energy industry officials and their government associates largely ridiculed the notion. An imminent peak -- and subsequent decline -- in global petroleum output was derided as crackpot science with little geological foundation. "Based on [our] analysis," the U.S. Department of Energy confidently asserted in 2004, "[we] would expect conventional oil to peak closer to the middle than to the beginning of the 21st century."

Recently, however, a spate of high-level government and industry reports have begun to suggest that the original peak-oil theorists were far closer to the grim reality of global-oil availability than industry analysts were willing to admit. Industry optimism regarding long-term energy-supply prospects, these official reports indicate, has now given way to a deep-seated pessimism, even in the biggest of Big Oil corporate headquarters.

The change in outlook is perhaps best suggested by a July 27 article in the Wall Street Journal headlined, "Oil Profits Show Sign of Aging." Although reporting staggering second-quarter profits for oil giants Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell -- $10.3 billion for the former, $8.7 billion for the latter -- the Journal sadly noted that investors are bracing for disappointing results in future quarters as the cost of new production rises and output at older fields declines. "All the oil companies are struggling to grow production," explained Peter Hitchens, an analyst at the Teather and Greenwood brokerage house. "[Yet] it's becoming more and more difficult to bring projects in on time and on budget."

To appreciate the nature of Big Oil's dilemma, peak-oil theory must be briefly revisited. As originally formulated by petroleum geologist M. King Hubbert in the 1950s, the concept holds that worldwide oil production will rise until approximately half of the world's original petroleum inheritance has been exhausted; once this point is reached, daily output will hit a peak and begin an irreversible decline. Hubbert's successors, including professor emeritus Kenneth Deffeyes of Princeton, contend that we have now consumed just about half the original supply and so are at, or very near, the peak-production moment predicted by Hubbert.

Since the concept burst into public consciousness several years ago, its proponents and critics have largely argued over whether or not we have reached maximum worldwide petroleum output. In a way, this is a moot argument, because the numbers involved in conventional oil output have increasingly been obscured by oil derived from "unconventional" sources -- deep-offshore fields, tar sands, and natural-gas liquids, for example -- that are being blended into petroleum feedstocks used to make gasoline and other fuels. In recent years, this has made the calculation of petroleum supplies ever more complicated. As a result, it may be years more before we can be certain of the exact timing of the global peak-oil moment.

On Tap: The Tough-Oil Era

There is, however, a second aspect to peak-oil theory, which is no less relevant when it comes to the global-supply picture -- one that is far easier to detect and assess today. Peak-oil theorists have long contended that the first half of the world's oil to be extracted and consumed will be the easy half. They are referring, of course, to the oil that's found on shore or near to shore; oil close to the surface and concentrated in large reservoirs; oil produced in friendly, safe, and welcoming places.

The other half -- what (if they are right) is left of the world's petroleum supply -- is the tough oil. They mean oil that's buried far offshore or deep underground; oil scattered in small, hard-to-find reservoirs; oil that must be obtained from unfriendly, politically dangerous, or hazardous places. An oil investor's eye-view of our energy planet today quickly reveals that we already seem to be entering the tough-oil era. This explains the growing pessimism among industry analysts as well as certain changes in behavior in the energy marketplace.

In but one sign of the new reality, the price of benchmark U.S. light, sweet crude oil for next-month delivery soared to new highs on July 31, topping the previous record for intraday trading of $77.03 per barrel set in July 2006. Some observers are predicting that a price of $80 per barrel is just around the corner; while John Kildruff, a perfectly sober analyst at futures broker Man Financial, told Bloomberg.com, "We're only a headline of significance away from $100 oil." New disruptions in Nigerian or Iraqi supplies, or a U.S. military strike against Iran, he explained, could trigger such a price increase in the energy equivalent of a nano-second.

A signal of another sort was provided by the government of Kazakhstan in oil-rich Central Asia on August 7. It warned the private operators of the giant offshore Kashagan oil project -- in the Kazakh sector of the Caspian Sea -- to cut costs and speed the onset of production or face a possible government takeover. In an interview, Prime Minister Karim Masimov said threateningly: "We are very disappointed with the execution of this project. If the operator can't resolve these problems, then we don't exclude their possible replacement."

Kashagan, it must be borne in mind, is not just any oil project: it is the largest field to be developed anywhere in the world since the discovery of Alaska's Prudhoe Bay some 40 years ago. With estimated oil reserves of 9-13 billion barrels, it is crucial to the hopes of its principal developers -- Exxon, ConocoPhillips, Shell, Total (of France), and Eni (of Italy) -- to increase their output in the years ahead. Consistent with the "tough oil" aspect of peak-oil theory, Kashagan is, however, proving dauntingly difficult to turn into a successful font of petroleum. The oil reservoir itself is buried beneath high-pressure strata of gas, making its extraction exceedingly tricky, and it contains abnormally high levels of deadly hydrogen sulfide; moreover, the entire field is located in a shallow area of the Caspian Sea that freezes over for five months of the year and is the breeding ground for rare seals and beluga sturgeon.

As a result of these and other problems, the Kashagan operating consortium has seen the price-tag for launching the project nearly double -- from $10 billion to $19 billion -- and has postponed the onset of initial production from 2005 to 2010, infuriating the Kazakh government, which had hoped to be earning billions of dollars in taxes and royalties by now.

A Demanding World

And then there are those reports from high-level agencies and organizations on the global energy picture, all coming to the same basic conclusion: Whether or not the peak in world oil output is at hand, the future of the global oil supply in a world of endlessly growing demand appears grim.

The first of these recent warnings, entitled the "Medium-Term Oil Market Report," was released on July 8 by the International Energy Agency (IEA), an arm of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the club of major industrial powers. Although filled with statistics and technical analyses, the report, assessing the global oil supply-and-demand equation through 2012, seemed to leak anxiety and came to a distinctly worrisome conclusion: Because world oil demand is likely to keep rising at a rapid tempo and the development of new oil fields is not expected to keep pace, significant shortfalls are likely to emerge within the next five years.

The IEA report predicts that world economic activity will grow by an average of 4.5% per year during this period -- driven largely by unbridled growth in China, India, and other Asian dynamos. Global oil demand will rise, it predicts, by about 2.2% per year, pushing world oil consumption from an estimated 86.1 million barrels per day in 2007 to 95.8 million barrels by 2012. With luck and substantial new investment, the global oil industry may be able to increase output sufficiently to satisfy this higher level of demand -- but, if so, just barely. Beyond 2012, the production outlook appears far grimmer. And keep in mind, this is the best-case scenario.

Underlying the report's conclusions are a number of specific fears. Despite rising fuel prices, neither the mature consumers of the OECD countries, nor newly affluent consumers in the developing world are likely to significantly curb their appetite for petroleum. "Demand is growing, and as people become accustomed to higher prices, they are starting to return to their previous trends of high consumption," was the way Lawrence Eagles, an oil expert at the IEA, summed the situation up. This is clearly evident in the United States, where record-high gasoline prices have not stopped drivers from filling up their tanks and driving record distances.

In addition, oil output in the United States and most other non-members of the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries (OPEC) has peaked, or is about to do so, which means that the net contribution of non-OPEC suppliers will only diminish between now and 2012. That, in turn, means that the burden of providing the required additional oil will have to fall on the OPEC countries, most of which are located in unstable areas of the Middle East and Africa.

The numbers are actually staggering. Just to satisfy a demand for an extra 10 million or so barrels per day between now and 2012, two million barrels per day in new oil would have to be added to global stocks yearly. But even this calculation is misleading, as Eagles of the IEA made clear. In fact, the world would initially need "more than 3 million barrels per day of new oil each year [just] to offset the falling production in the mature fields outside of OPEC" -- and that's before you even get near that additional two million barrels.

In other words, what's actually needed is five million barrels of new oil each year, a truly daunting challenge since almost all of this oil will have to be found in Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Angola, Libya, Nigeria, Venezuela, and one or two other countries. These are not places that exactly inspire investor confidence of a sort that could attract the many billions of dollars needed to ramp up production enough to satisfy global requirements.

Read between the lines and one quickly perceives a worst-case scenario in which the necessary investment is not forthcoming; OPEC production does not grow by five million barrels per day year after year; ethanol and other substitute-fuel production, along with alternate fuels of various sorts, do not grow fast enough to fill the gap; and, in the not-too-distant future, a substantial shortage of oil leads to a global economic meltdown.

The Missing Trillions

A very similar prognosis emerges from a careful reading of "Facing the Hard Truths About Energy," the second major report to be released in July. Submitted to the U.S. Department of Energy by the National Petroleum Council (NPC), an oil-industrial association, this report encapsulated the view of both industry officials and academic analysts. It was widely praised for providing a "balanced" approach to the energy dilemma. It called for both increased fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles and increased oil and gas drilling on federal lands. Contributing to the buzz around its release was the identity of the report's principal sponsor, former Exxon CEO Lee Raymond. Having previously expressed skepticism about global warming, he now embraced the report's call for the taking of significant steps to curb carbon-dioxide emissions.

Like the IEA report, the NPC study does claim that -- with the perfect mix of policies and an adequate level of investment -- the energy industry would be capable of satisfying oil and gas demand for some years to come. "Fortunately, the world is not running out of energy resources," the report bravely asserts. Read deep into the report, though, and these optimistic words begin to dissolve as its emphasis switches to the growing difficulties (and costs) of extracting oil and gas from less-than-favorable locations and the geopolitical risks associated with a growing global reliance on potentially hostile, unstable suppliers.

Again, the numbers involved are staggering. According to the NPC, an estimated $20 trillion in new investment (that's trillion, not billion) will be needed between now and 2030 to ensure sufficient energy for anticipated demand. This works out to "$3,000 per person alive today" in a world in which a good half of humanity earns substantially less than that each year.

These funds, which can only come from those of us in the wealthier countries, will be needed, the council notes, in "building new, multi-billion-dollar oil platforms in water thousands of feet deep, laying pipelines in difficult terrain and across country borders, expanding refineries, constructing vessels and terminals to ship and store liquefied natural gas, building railroads to transport coal and biomass, and stringing new high-voltage transmission lines from remote wind farms." Adding to the magnitude of this challenge, "future projects are likely to be more complex and remote, resulting in higher costs per unit of energy produced." Again, think tough oil.

The report then notes the obvious: "A stable and attractive investment climate will be necessary to attract adequate capital for evolution and expansion of the energy infrastructure." And this is where any astute observer should begin to get truly alarmed; for, as the study itself notes, no such climate can be expected. As the center of gravity of world oil production shifts decisively to OPEC suppliers and to state-centric energy producers like Russia, geopolitical rather than market factors will come to dominate the energy industry and a whole new set of instabilities will characterize the oil trade.

"These shifts pose profound implications for U.S. interests, strategies, and policy-making," the report states. "Many of the expected changes could heighten risks to U.S. energy security in a world where U.S. influence is likely to decline as economic power shifts to other nations. In years to come, security threats to the world's main sources of oil and natural gas may worsen."

Read from this perspective, the recent reports from pillars of the Big- Oil/wealthy-nation establishment suggest that the basic logic of peak-oil theory is on the mark and hard times are ahead when it comes to global oil-and-gas sufficiency. Both reports claim that with just the right menu of corrective policies and an unrealistic streak of pure luck -- as in no set of major Katrina-like hurricanes barreling into oil fields or refineries, no new wars in Middle Eastern oil producing areas, no political collapse in Nigeria -- we can somehow stagger through to 2012 and maybe just beyond without a global economic meltdown. But in an era of tough oil, the odds tip toward tough luck as well. Buckle your seatbelt. Fill up that gas tank soon. The future is likely to be a bumpy ride toward cliff's edge.

1200 targets on Iran to Attack

2007-09-03T11:51:00.001-06:00

A very interesting article about what would happen with Iran, nearly 1200 targets a 3 days attack using B-2 and F-117, Bush need something to make his presidency to be remember for ever now that most of his "rats" I mean Hawks are going away....





The Sunday Times of London is reporting that the Pentagon has plans for three days of massive air strikes against 1,200 targets in Iran . Last week, Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center , told a meeting of The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal, that the military did not intend to carry out "pinprick strikes" against Iranian nuclear facilities. He said, "They're about taking out the entire Iranian military." Bush has already set the wheels in motion. With Rovian timing, Alberto Gonzales' resignation was sandwiched between two Bush screeds - one aimed at ensuring Congress scares up $50 billion more for the occupation of Iraq , the other designed to scare us into supporting war on Iran . As Gonzales rides off into the sunset, the significant questions are who will take his place and how that choice will facilitate Bush's occupation of Iraq and attack on Iran . One name that's been floated for Bush's third attorney general is Joe Lieberman, the "independent" senator from Connecticut . Lieberman, who advocates the use of military force against Iran , was the only person Bush quoted in his August 28 speech to the American Legion. Bush called Iran "the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism" and pledged to "confront Tehran 's murderous activities." Gonzales greased the Bush/Cheney wheels for torturing in violation of the Geneva Conventions, illegally spying on Americans, and purging disloyal Bushies. Similarly, Lieberman would ensure the Justice Department mounts a vigorous defense of a war of aggression against Iran . And Bush would get a two-fer: Connecticut 's Republican governor would appoint a Republican to fill Lieberman's seat, returning control of the Senate to the GOP. A Republican-controlled Senate would direct the agenda, thereby furthering the Bush/Cheney plan. Lieberman is closely affiliated with American Israeli Public Affairs Committee. "AIPAC leverages its power by an alliance with the Christian Right, which has adopted a bizarre ideology of 'Christian Zionism,'" according to University of Michigan professor Juan Cole. "It holds that the sooner the Palestinians are ethnically cleansed, the sooner Christ will come back. Without millions of these Christian Zionist allies," Cole added, "AIPAC would be much less influential and effective." During the 2004 election, a 100% "AIPAC voting record" was Lieberman's litmus test for an acceptable presidential candidate. As the House of Representatives was on the verge of passing a resolution that would've required Bush to consult Congress before attacking Iran, the AIPAC lobby stopped it in its tracks. Bush's WMD-hyping against Iran is déja vu in the run-up to Operation Iraqi Disaster, where he played loose and fast with the truth about Iraq 's alleged WMDs. His statement that a nuclear Iran could put the region "under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust" conjures up his images of a "mushroom cloud" in the hype-up to Iraq . How inconvenient for Bush that the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) just found Iran 's uranium enrichment program is operating well below capacity and is nowhere near producing significant amounts of nuclear fuel. The IAEA report says Iran "has been providing the agency with access to declared nuclear materials, and has provided the required nuclear material accountancy reports in connection with declared nuclear material and facilities." Iran and IAEA agreed on a plan with a step-by-step timetable of cooperation to settle unresolved issues. The agreement said there were "no other remaining issues and ambiguities regarding Iran 's past nuclear program and activities," and characterized the accord as "a significant step forward." "This is the first time Iran is ready to discuss all the outstanding issues which triggered the crisis in confidence," said IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei. "I'm clear at this stage you need to give Iran a chance to prove its stated goodwill. Sanctions alone, I know for sure, are not going to lead to a durable solution". In 2003, when Dr. ElBaradei reported there was no evidence that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program, the White House was not pleased. And as Saddam Hussein became more cooperative with the weapons inspector, Bush became "infuriated," according to Bob Woodward. Bush's vow, "We will confront this danger before it is too late," is the Iran incarnation of his illegal preemptive war doctrine, which he inaugurated in Iraq . In a clear signal he is seeking regime change in Iran , Bush called for "an Iran whose government is accountable to its people, instead of leaders who promote terror and pursue the technology that could be used to develop nuclear weapons." Barnett Rubin reported on Global Affairs blog that one of the leading neo-conservative institutions has "instructions" from Dick Cheney's office to "roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don't think they'll ever get majority support for this - they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is 'plenty.'" Bush/Cheney created the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) to lead a propaganda campaign to bolster public support for war with Iraq . The White House decided to wait until after Labor Day of 2002 to kick off WHIG's mission. Chief of staff Andrew Card explained, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." Five years later, they're marketing a new and even more dangerous product - war with Iran . British military historian Corelli Barnett says "an attack on Iran would effectively launch World War III." Our military spending has reached $1 billion every 2-1/2 days and we are borrowing $2-1/2 billion per day. Bush is mortgaging our children’s future security and wealth. We have lost more than 3,700 soldiers in Iraq and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died. We have already seen how easily Congress caves in to AIPAC. It's up to the people. As Noam Chomsky said, "The most effective barrier to a White House decision to launch a war [on Iran] is the kind of organized popular opposition that frightened the political-military leadership enough in 1968 that they were reluctant to send more troops to Vietnam." Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and president of the National Lawyers Guild. She is the author of " Cowboy Republic : Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law." Her articles are archived at http://www.marjoriecohn .com/.

Death score of all USA WARS

2007-08-28T09:36:00.001-06:00

USA became the country that spend more money on weapons than any country in the world nearly $1 trillion every year, but how about how many deaths the world suffer with the very good invasion they made in the name of PEACE and DEMOCRACY....

North Korea: they kill nearly 1/3 of all population there (1950-53).

Philipines, at the beginning of the century: 1/6 of the population there

NEARLY All Native americans Sioux, cheyenes and others

VIETNAM: the kill 3 millions with bomb raids and the use of chemical weapons, US lost 50,000

IRAQ: 655,000 since the ILLEGAL invasion began, US lost 3500 until now

So that is all the good things USA has made with their weapons to the world

Irak War a Quagmire

2007-08-26T12:12:00.000-06:00

In the words of Dick Cheney on 1994, about an invasion to Irak, why did he change his mind now? $$$$$ of Halliburton of course and the MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

USA superpower in Decline

2007-08-25T10:51:00.000-06:00

a very nice article u should read.

The Sole Superpower in Decline
The Rise of a Multipolar World
By Dilip Hiro
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States stood tall -- militarily invincible, economically unrivalled, diplomatically uncontestable, and the dominating force on information channels worldwide. The next century was to be the true "American century," with the rest of the world molding itself in the image of the sole superpower.

Yet, with not even a decade of this century behind us, we are already witnessing the rise of a multipolar world in which new powers are challenging different aspects of American supremacy -- Russia and China in the forefront, with regional powers Venezuela and Iran forming the second rank. These emergent powers are primed to erode American hegemony, not confront it, singly or jointly.

How and why has the world evolved in this way so soon? The Bush administration's debacle in Iraq is certainly a major factor in this transformation, a classic example of an imperialist power, brimming with hubris, over-extending itself. To the relief of many -- in the U. S. and elsewhere -- the Iraq fiasco has demonstrated the striking limitations of power for the globe's highest-tech, most destructive military machine. In Iraq, Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to two U.S. presidents, concedes in a recent op-ed, "We are being wrestled to a draw by opponents who are not even an organized state adversary."

The invasion and subsequent disastrous occupation of Iraq and the mismanaged military campaign in Afghanistan have crippled the credibility of the United States. The scandals at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Guantanamo in Cuba, along with the widely publicized murders of Iraqi civilians in Haditha, have badly tarnished America's moral self-image. In the latest opinion poll, even in a secular state and member of NATO like Turkey, only 9% of Turks have a "favorable view" of the U.S. (down from 52% just five years ago).

Yet there are other explanations -- unrelated to Washington's glaring misadventures -- for the current transformation in international affairs. These include, above all, the tightening market in oil and natural gas, which has enhanced the power of hydrocarbon-rich nations as never before; the rapid economic expansion of the mega-nations China and India; the transformation of China into the globe's leading manufacturing base; and the end of the Anglo-American duopoly in international television news.

Many Channels, Diverse Perceptions

During the 1991 Gulf War, only CNN and the BBC had correspondents in Baghdad. So the international TV audience, irrespective of its location, saw the conflict through their lenses. Twelve years later, when the Bush administration, backed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, invaded Iraq, Al Jazeera Arabic broke this duopoly. It relayed images -- and facts -- that contradicted the Pentagon's presentation. For the first time in history, the world witnessed two versions of an ongoing war in real time. So credible was the Al Jazeera Arabic version that many television companies outside the Arabic-speaking world -- in Europe, Asia and Latin America -- showed its clips.

Though, in theory, the growth of cable television worldwide raised the prospect of ending the Anglo-American duopoly in 24-hour TV news, not much had happened due to the exorbitant cost of gathering and editing TV news. It was only the arrival of Al Jazeera English, funded by the hydrocarbon-rich emirate of Qatar -- with its declared policy of offering a global perspective from an Arab and Muslim angle -- that, in 2006, finally broke the long-established mold.

Soon France 24 came on the air, broadcasting in English and French from a French viewpoint, followed in mid-2007 by the English-language Press TV, which aimed to provide an Iranian perspective. Russia was next in line for 24-hour TV news in English for the global audience. Meanwhile, spurred by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Telesur, a pan-Latin-American TV channel based in Caracas, began competing with CNN in Spanish for a mass audience.

As with Qatar, so with Russia and Venezuela, the funding for these TV news ventures has come from soaring national hydrocarbon incomes -- a factor draining American hegemony not just in imagery but in reality.

Russia, an Energy Superpower

Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia has more than recovered from the economic chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. After effectively renationalizing the energy industry through state-controlled corporations, he began deploying its economic clout to further Russia's foreign policy interests.

In 2005, Russia overtook the United States, becoming the second largest oil producer in the world. Its oil income now amounts to $679 million a day. European countries dependent on imported Russian oil now include Hungary, Poland, Germany, and even Britain.

Russia is also the largest producer of natural gas on the planet, with three-fifths of its gas exports going to the 27-member European Union (EU). Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland, and Slovakia get 100% of their natural gas from Russia; Turkey, 66%; Poland, 58%; Germany 41%; and France 25%. Gazprom, the biggest natural gas enterprise on Earth, has established stakes in sixteen EU countries. In 2006, the Kremlin's foreign reserves stood at $315 billion, up from a paltry $12 billion in 1999. Little wonder that, in July 2006 on the eve of the G8 summit in St Petersburg, Putin rejected an energy charter proposed by the Western leaders.

Soaring foreign-exchange reserves, new ballistic missiles, and closer links with a prospering China -- with which it conducted joint military exercises on China's Shandong Peninsula in August 2005 -- enabled Putin to deal with his American counterpart, President George W. Bush, as an equal, not mincing his words when appraising American policies.

"One country, the United States, has overstepped its national boundaries in every way," Putin told the 43rd Munich Trans-Atlantic conference on security policy in February 2007. "This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations…This is very dangerous."

Condemning the concept of a "unipolar world," he added: "However one might embellish this term, at the end of the day it describes a scenario in which there is one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making…It is a world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And this is pernicious." His views fell on receptive ears in the capitals of most Asian, African, and Latin American countries.

The changing relationship between Moscow and Washington was noted, among others, by analysts and policy-makers in the hydrocarbon-rich Persian Gulf region. Commenting on the visit that Putin paid to long-time U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar after the Munich conference, Abdel Aziz Sagar, chairman of the Gulf Research Center, wrote in the Doha-based newspaper The Peninsula that Russia and Gulf Arab countries, once rivals from opposite ideological camps, had found a common agenda of oil, anti-terrorism, and arms sales. "The altered focus takes place in a milieu where the Gulf countries are signaling their keenness to keep all geopolitical options open, reviewing the utility of the United States as the sole security guarantor, and contemplating a collective security mechanism that involves a host of international players."

In April 2007, the Kremlin issued a major foreign policy document. "The myth about the unipolar world fell apart once and for all in Iraq," it stated. "A strong, more self-confident Russia has become an integral part of positive changes in the world."

The Kremlin's increasingly tense relations with Washington were in tune with Russian popular opinion. A poll taken during the run-up to the 2006 G8 summit revealed that 58% of Russians regarded America as an "unfriendly country." It has proved to be a trend. This July, for instance, Major Gen Alexandr Vladimirov told the mass circulation newspaper Komsolskya Pravada that war with the United States was a "possibility" in the next ten to fifteen years.

Chavez Rides High

Such sentiments resonated with Hugo Chavez. While visiting Moscow in June 2007, he urged Russians to return to the ideas of Vladimir Lenin, especially his anti-imperialism. "The Americans don't want Russia to keep rising," he said. "But Russia has risen again as a center of power, and we, the people of the world, need Russia to become stronger."

Chavez finalized a $1 billion deal to purchase five diesel submarines to defend Venezuela's oil-rich undersea shelf and thwart any possible future economic embargo imposed by Washington. By then, Venezuela had become the second largest buyer of Russian weaponry. (Algeria topped the list, another indication of a growing multipolarity in world affairs.) Venezuela acquired the distinction of being the first country to receive a license from Russia to manufacture the famed AK-47 assault rifle.

By channeling some of his country's oil money to needy Venezuelans, Chavez broadened his base of support. Much to the chagrin of the Bush White House, he trounced his sole political rival, Manuel Rosales, in a December 2006 presidential contest with 61% of the vote. Equally humiliating to the Bush administration, Venezuela was, by then, giving more foreign aid to needy Latin American states than it was.

Following his reelection, Chavez vigorously pursued the concept of forming an anti-imperialist alliance in Latin America as well as globally. He strengthened Venezuela's ties not only with such Latin countries as Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and debt-ridden Argentina, but also with Iran and Belarus.

By the time he arrived in Tehran from Moscow (via Minsk) in June 2007, the 180 economic and political accords his government had signed with Tehran were already yielding tangible results. Iranian-designed cars and tractors were coming off assembly lines in Venezuela. "[The] cooperation of independent countries like Iran and Venezuela has an effective role in defeating the policies of imperialism and saving nations," Chavez declared in Tehran.

Stuck in the quagmire of Iraq and lashed by the gusty winds of rocketing oil prices, the Bush administration finds its area of maneuver woefully limited when dealing with a rising hydrocarbon power. To the insults that Chavez keeps hurling at Bush, the American response has been vapid. The reason is the crippling dependence of the United States on imported petroleum which accounts for 60% of its total consumed. Venezuela is the fourth largest source of U.S. imported oil after Canada, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia; and some refineries in the U.S. are designed specifically to refine heavy Venezuelan oil.

In Chavez's scheme to undermine the "sole superpower," China has an important role. During an August 2006 visit to Beijing, his fourth in seven years, he announced that Venezuela would triple its oil exports to China to 500,000 barrels per day in three years, a jump that suited both sides. Chavez wants to diversify Venezuela's buyer base to reduce its reliance on exports to the U.S., and China's leaders are keen to diversify their hydrocarbon imports away from the Middle East, where American influence remains strong.

"The support of China is very important [to us] from the political and moral point of view," Chavez declared. Along with a joint refinery project, China agreed to build thirteen oil drilling platforms, supply eighteen oil tankers, and collaborate with the state-owned company, Petroleos de Venezuela S.A. (PdVSA), in exploring a new oilfield in the Orinoco Basin.

China on a Stratospheric Trajectory

So dramatic has been the growth of the state-run company PetroChina that, in mid-2007, it was second only to Exxon Mobil in its market value among energy corporations. Indeed, that year three Chinese companies made it onto the list of the world's ten most highly valued corporations. Only the U.S. had more with five. China's foreign reserves of over $1 trillion have now surpassed Japan's. With its gross domestic product soaring past Germany's, China ranks number three in the world economy.

In the diplomatic arena, Chinese leaders broke new ground in 1996 by sponsoring the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), consisting of four adjoining countries: Russia and the three former Soviet Socialist republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. The SCO started as a cooperative organization with a focus on countering drug-smuggling and terrorism. Later, the SCO invited Uzbekistan to join, even though it does not abut China. In 2003, the SCO broadened its scope by including regional economic cooperation in its charter. That, in turn, led it to grant observer status to Pakistan, India, and Mongolia -- all adjoining China -- and Iran which does not. When the U.S. applied for observer status, it was rejected, an embarrassing setback for Washington, which enjoyed such status at the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN).

In early August 2007, on the eve of an SCO summit in the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek, the group conducted its first joint military exercises, codenamed Peace Mission 2007, in the Russian Ural region of Chelyabinsk. "The SCO is destined to play a vital role in ensuring international security," said Ednan Karabayev, foreign minister of Kyrgyzstan.

In late 2006, as the host of a China-Africa Forum in Beijing attended by leaders of 48 of 53 African nations, China left the U.S. woefully behind in the diplomatic race for that continent (and its hydrocarbon and other resources). In return for Africa's oil, iron ore, copper, and cotton, China sold low-priced goods to Africans, and assisted African counties in building or improving roads, railways, ports, hydro-electric dams, telecommunications systems, and schools. "The western approach of imposing its values and political system on other countries is not acceptable to China," said Africa specialist Wang Hongyi of the China Institute of International Studies. "We focus on mutual development."

To reduce the cost of transporting petroleum from Africa and the Middle East, China began constructing a trans-Burma oil pipeline from the Bay of Bengal to its southern province of Yunan, thereby shortening the delivery distance now traveled by tankers. This undermined Washington's campaign to isolate Myanmar. (Earlier, Sudan, boycotted by Washington, had emerged as a leading supplier of African oil to China.) In addition, Chinese oil companies were competing fiercely with their Western counterparts in getting access to hydrocarbon reserves in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

"China's oil diplomacy is putting the country on a collision course with the U.S. and Western Europe, which have imposed sanctions on some of the countries where China is doing business," comments William Mellor of Bloomberg News. The sentiment is echoed by the other side. "I see China and the U.S. coming into conflict over energy in the years ahead," says Jin Riguang, an oil-and-gas advisor to the Chinese government and a member of the Standing Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Council.

China's industrialization and modernization has spurred the modernization of its military as well. The test-firing of the country's first anti-satellite missile, which successfully destroyed a defunct Chinese weather satellite in January 2007, dramatically demonstrated its growing technological prowess. An alarmed Washington had already noted an 18% increase in China's 2007 defense budget. Attributing the rise to extra spending on missiles, electronic warfare, and other high-tech items, Liao Xilong, commander of the People's Liberation Army's general logistics department, said: "The present day world is no longer peaceful and to protect national security, stability and territorial integrity we must suitably increase spending on military modernization."

China's declared budget of $45 billion was a tiny fraction of the Pentagon's $459 billion one. Yet, in May 2007, a Pentagon report noted China's "rapid rise as a regional and economic power with global aspirations" and claimed that it was planning to project military farther afield from the Taiwan Straits into the Asia-Pacific region in preparation for possible conflicts over territory or resources.

The Sole Superpower in the Sweep of History

This disparate challenge to American global primacy stems as much from sharpening conflicts over natural resources, particularly oil and natural gas, as from ideological differences over democracy, American style, or human rights, as conceived and promoted by Western policy-makers. Perceptions about national (and imperial) identity and history are at stake as well.

It is noteworthy that Russian officials applauding the swift rise of post-Soviet Russia refer fondly to the pre-Bolshevik Revolution era when, according to them, Tsarist Russia was a Great Power. Equally, Chinese leaders remain proud of their country's long imperial past as unique among nations.

When viewed globally and in the great stretch of history, the notion of American exceptionalism that drove the neoconservatives to proclaim the Project for the New American Century in the late 20th century -- adopted so wholeheartedly by the Bush administration in this one -- is nothing new. Other superpowers have been there before and they, too, have witnessed the loss of their prime position to rising powers.

No superpower in modern times has maintained its supremacy for more than several generations. And, however exceptional its leaders may have thought themselves, the United States, already clearly past its zenith, has no chance of becoming an exception to this age-old pattern of history.