If the stock market is down or bad economic data prints, one can always assume President Trump will make time out of his day to bash the Federal Reserve on Twitter.
President Trump’s Fed bashing, sometimes a daily occurrence, if not at least several times a week, has irritated incoming European Central Bank (ECB) President Christine Lagarde, who says in an upcoming 60 Minutes interview, expected to air on Sunday, Oct. 20 at 7 p.m. ET/PT on CBS, that “Market stability should not be the subject of a tweet here or a tweet there. It requires consideration, thinking, quiet and measured, and rational decisions.”
Lagarde told 60 Minutes correspondent John Dickerson that central banking is like “navigating a plane” with policymakers keeping a very close eye on the instrument panel, i.e., economic trends.
Dickerson asks Lagarde if it’s okay if a leader [refering to President Trump] was actively criticizing a central bank head in public. Dickerson pulled a quote from President Trump’s Sept. 11 tweet, where he called Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell a “bonehead” for not cutting “interest rates down to ZERO.”
….The USA should always be paying the the lowest rate. No Inflation! It is only the naïveté of Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve that doesn’t allow us to do what other countries are already doing. A once in a lifetime opportunity that we are missing because of “Boneheads.”
Lagarde responds by saying, “a central bank governor does best his job if he is independent.”
According to CBS, the interview took place last month at Lagarde’s home in Normandy and the IMF headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Lagarde also criticized President Trump’s Twitter practices as a whole and his trade war with China that has sent the global economy into one of its most vulnerable periods since the last financial crisis.
She said world leaders need to find a resolution to trade disputes: “My very, very strong message to all policymakers is please sit down like big men, many men in those rooms and put everything on the table, and try to deal bit by bit, piece by piece, so that we have certainty.”
Lagarde calling out President Trump in an upcoming 60-Minutes interview indicates that central bankers across the world are panicking to control an economic narrative that they have lost thanks to President Trump’s tweeting.
60-Minutes has an average viewership of 8 million Americans, which means central banks, led by the upcoming Lagarde interview, want to convince as many people as possible that President Trump is wrong for criticizing Federal Reserve policy, but also want to persuade millions of people that the next recession should be blamed on the president — not central banks.
For those who don’t know, Lagarde was convicted for a massive bribery scheme as French finance minister, and her latest stunt in suggesting President Trump is interfering and influencing Powell to lower rates to zero is humorous.
Largard’s absolutely disastrous tenure at the IMF, most recently the failed $57 billion bailout of Argentina through an IMF loan, has left the country of 45 million, essentially bankrupt, but more importantly, it shows that she will destroy the Eurozone as ECB head.
Peace in the Middle East is coming at us fast and we’re going to have Russian President Vladimir Putin to thank for it.
The howls of agony coming from U.S. and European foreign policy centers are deafening. Pat Buchanan lists them in his latest article which asks if Putin is now the new king of the Middle East.
“Donald Trump Has Handed Putin the Middle East on a Plate” was the title of a Telegraph column. “Putin Seizes on Trump’s Syria Retreat to Cement Middle East Role,” said the Financial Times.
The U.S. press parroted the British: Putin is now the new master of the Mideast. And woe is us.
Remember that the epicenter of virulent anti-Russian, pro-Israeli sentiment doesn’t begin with the Neocons along K-Street. It begins with the remnants of the British imperial class which still holds tremendous sway over British politics.
Think I’m wrong about that. Just look at Brexit.
As I pointed out the minute Trump defended his initial pullout of 50 U.S. troops to allow Turkey to cross into northern Syria, Putin has the situation mostly under control by laying the groundwork to craft win/win/win/win possibilities for everyone in the region.
Buchanan remains skeptical of this, saying that if Putin is the new king of the Middle East, will the crown lie heavy on his head?
It’s a fair question but I think it betrays Pat’s biases as an old Cold Warrior.
Pat makes a series of comparisons between Russia’s military presence in the region and the size of the economies backing them to make his point. I think, frankly, that’s outdated analysis.
It is based on the premise that Russia has imperial aspirations in the region, similar to that of the U.S. At his core, Buchanan is still a ‘great powers theory’ kind of guy.
From the moment Putin began his intervention into Syria the U.S.’s punditocracy said he would get bogged down in a quagmire. That he couldn’t afford the coming war with entrenched ISIS fighters.
This was based on the fact that the U.S. couldn’t defeat ISIS. But that logic only held if you believed the U.S. was actually fighting ISIS which I never did. Once Russia moved into Syria it exposed the lie of ISIS’s strength.
Within days of Russian air operations beginning the Syrian Arab Army began taking large chunks of territory from U.S. and Turkish-backed rebels and from ISIS.
The turnaround was striking. And the U.S. was stunned into fumbling silence, complaining that Putin was bombing the wrong people. The efficiency of the Russian air crews was off the charts and the results on the ground spoke for themselves.
This isn’t revisionist history or Putin shilling here. These are facts. The Russians were turning their planes over three to four times a day at that point.
It’s clear from the way that Putin has built Russia’s military that it is designed around defense of Russia’s borders not invading or maintaining an Empire.
And that’s why Buchanan’s criticisms of Putin’s victories here ring hollow. Pat rightly points out that if Putin does craft a network of deals that bring regional peace he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.
But I suspect Pat doesn’t believe that to be happening.
My read, however, is the opposite. Peace is exactly what is happening.
That vision of the Grand Bargain never materialized because the influence of those allies within Trump’s government were too strong for him to resist politically.
Putin was smart to remain skeptical of Trump’s ability to deliver on his promises. And Trump, for his part, was sent down a path which would define his first term as a shambolic mess thanks to his inability to grasp the enormity of the problem confronting him.
He pushed U.S. policy too far in the pro-Israel, pro-Saudi direction to sell his version of Middle East peace, lobbied for intensely by Benjamin Netanyahu, Jared Kushner and their backers who helped install arch neocons around Trump like John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Fiona Hill and Gina Haspel.
These folks were put in place to keep Trump ignorant of the dangers of his policy while Secretary of State James Mattis was there to stoke the hard-line militarily on Iran. Add to that General Joseph Dunford’s role as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to suppress strategic conclusions about our operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Now with the passing of the Dunford regime as Joint Chief in September, General Milley steps in, with significant changes to public policy already on display. For example, Milley’s commissioned study of the Iraq war — long awaited and delayed by military pressure to prevent release of a largely negative report — was publicly released by Milley in January of 2019. The report states, “that coalition warfare (in Iraq) was ‘largely unsuccessful’ for several reasons, that failing to account for a lack of understanding of the inner workings of Iraqi politics and group struggles’ in part led to failure there. That’s an account that Dunford was unlikely to approve, and may have caused him to delay. So, with the departure of Dunford and Mattis as we shall see, the way forward for US disengagement from Syria’s northeast was made possible.
I don’t think U.S. disengagement is just possible. I think it’s happening right in front of our eyes.
Any thought that Putin is not up to the task here isn’t reading the tea leaves.
Everyone who has been fronting strength has been bluffing. Hard.
Israel is weak. Saudi Arabia weak. Turkey weak.
The U.S. weaker than anyone wants to admit.
Pat’s right that Russia isn’t strong, but no one here is. Everyone’s been drained by the refusal to give up the dream of atomizing the region in the service of the outdated Brzezinski/Wolfowitz doctrine of sowing discord in Central Asia.
The EU has drained itself in the service of a political union no one except The Davos Crowd wants. The U.K. is drained from decades of the EU vacuuming their wealth from the core economy, hollowing it out to a financial shell centered around City of London.
The Russia/China/Iran axis has simply played the ultimate game of attrition, reading the economic and political tea leaves perfectly while executing a pan-Eurasian strategy of integration through disengagement from U.S. and U.K. financial institutions.
Russia is the only country with the unique mix of resources, geography and financial stability, thanks to its policy of de-dollarization and prudent fiscal management, that can make good on any of the promises it makes to its potential partners on the other side of the negotiating table.
Trump is following Putin’s lead in his dealings with Turkey. By leaving places like Manbij to the Syrians and the Russians it makes it clear to all that this is a bargain that can work for everyone directly involved.
Syria gets its territory back, Turkey gets the Kurdish SDF off its border in an important town and the U.S. alerts the world that the old game is over and a new one is starting.
Both of them made moves to stabilize Saudi Arabia — Trump with troops to keep Iran honest and Putin with major deals to assist the Saudi financial position through investment. Trump has worked with Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan to act as his proxy in Saudi/Iranian peace talks.
Putin is limiting Turkey’s Erdogan’s adventurism in Syria by fully supporting Assad and the restoration of Syrian territorial integrity through diplomacy with the YPG Kurds.
Putin and Trump are both waiting to see who takes power in Israel. But at this point it’s clear that whoever does will finally be order-takers and no longer order-makers unless Trump is impeached and convicted.
At this point that’s the biggest wild card. And regardless of that outcome, the rest of Putin’s deft use of diplomacy and his efficient military have created a different reality for Israel, that even with a full neocon restoration post-Trump, won’t be favorable to them.
And yes, you can thank Vladimir Putin for that.
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Dramatic Footage Shows National Spanish Police In Brutal Catalonia Protest Crackdown
Increasingly violent protests continue to rage in the Catalonia region of Spain, with unrest bringing Barcelona to a standstill for a second day, after some 500,000 pro-independence marchers converged on the city Friday from other towns and the countryside, following nearly a week of ongoing protests against Monday’s supreme court verdict sentencing at least nine Catalan independence leaders to between 9 and 13 years in prison.
Overnight Friday police used riot control measures, including water cannons and rubber bullets in attempts to disperse the large crowds, which according to the Associated Press were “throwing cobblestones and flammable bottles, building barricades and setting dozens of bonfires in large garbage bins.”
Seriously! What the hell is this?
Whatever you think of #Catalonia I think we can all agree that this kind of violence is completely unprovoked and unjustified pic.twitter.com/LhJOE9Q29A
As the clearest sign of growing violence in the protests, state sources cited around 400 people injured by the end of this week of growing chaos in the streets, many of them police officers.
According to some estimates around 100 security personnel have suffered injuries; however, police were in a number of instances caught on video brutally beating demonstrators.
Friday’s riots were the worst since smaller protests began in the immediate aftermath of Monday’s court sentencing.
Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau made an urgent public appeal for calm: “This cannot continue. Barcelona does not deserve it,” she said on Saturday.
Getty Image
Some protest organizers have blamed ‘infiltrators’ who they say by and large have been responsible for upping the violence against police and acts of vandalism.
Catalan interior chief and police authority Miquel Buch told the AP, “The images of organized violence during the night in Barcelona have overshadowed the half a million people who demonstrated in a peaceful and civic manner to show they rejected the verdict.”
Barcelona’s streets looked like a ‘war zone’ into the weekend, with no sign that the unrest will let up.
AFP via Getty
It was announced by Madrid authorities on Friday that Spain’s civil guard had been deployed to Barcelona streets. The civil guard is essentially a militarized police force which has authority to deploy across the whole country.
Shocking footage showing increasingly aggressive tactics against activists by Spanish police appears to only be escalating the violent reactions among young people in the streets.
La policia española lleva 5 dias reprimiendo en Cataluña. Cada dia cientos de imágenes de violencia cada dia. Un -muy pequeño resumen- de lo que está pasando en las calles de Barcelona. El Gobierno teme que esto se vea fuera de España. Ayúdanos a difundir. pic.twitter.com/22011HERqW
This dramatic move to give federal bolstering to the local police came after some 20 major roads in Barcelona were blocked by the sheer size of protesting crowds, and as local police couldn’t bring the unrest under control.
Multiple viral social media videos showed police in some cases beating protesters over the head with batons.
Spanish cops beat Catalan demonstrators with no reason. This is pure hate. They appear, hit and leave. pic.twitter.com/gu0hK8KHHR
Home to about 7.5 million people, the wealthy and linguistically distinct Catalonia region has its own parliament, flag, and distinct history; however, Catalan nationalists have long complained Madrid over-taxes the region for the sake of Spain’s poorer regions and cities.
The region is responsible for up to a fifth of Spain’s gross domestic product, by far the biggest share, which has translated into its leaders long seeking greater autonomy from Madrid.
UK police are investigating the potential “hate crime” of a transgender woman being turned down for a porn role because she still has a penis.
Yes, really.
25-year-old Ria Cooper, who became the UK’s youngest transgender person 10 years ago, received messages on WhatsApp from on anonymous photographer who wanted to have sex on camera and sell the tape.
However, when the photographer found out that Cooper still had male reproductive organs, he said he couldn’t work with her because she “has a cock.”
This prompted Cooper to alert Humberside Police to this “transphobic behavior” and authorities are now investigating whether a hate crime was committed.
A spokeswoman for Humberside Police said:
“We received a report of a hate incident yesterday, on Wednesday, October 16. The report has been logged and will be investigated.”
The UK’s violent crime rate has risen by 19% in the last year. Fatal stabbings are becoming commonplace in major cities.
But thank God police resources are being wasted on the urgent issue of transgenders being offended over words.
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Erdogan Vows To ‘Crush Heads’ Of Kurds If They Don’t Withdraw
We noted previously that chances are high that by the time Trump and Erdogan meet for their planned summit in Washington on Nov. 13, the ceasefire deal in northern Syria brokered by Pence and Pompeo on behalf of the White House is likely to be in complete tatters and all but dead.
With already the Syrian Kurds and Turkish forces accusing the other of violating the truce, including charges of chemical and banned weapons use, President Erdogan over the weekend said he’s ready to order a resumed offensive if all Kurdish don’t withdraw by this coming Tuesday night, which marks the close of the initial 120-hour truce agreement. A further or permanent ceasefire was conditioned on the 5-day “pause” being observed.
“The 120-hour pause on operations will end Tuesday night, we will continue crushing heads of terrorists if they don’t withdraw by then,” Erdogan told a political rally in the central Anatolian city of Kayseri on Saturday, according to Bloomberg.
Turkish tank along the border with Syria, via Reuters.
This after one of Turkey’s soldiers was reported killed during a breach of the ceasefire, according to Turkish official sources.
Kurdish YPG forces charged Turkey with blocking the evacuation of their dead and wounded, while Turkish troops claimed to have come under fire some 20 times in what would be a violation of the agreement.
Following Thursday’s deal, the result of some four hours of meetings between the US vice president and Turkey’s leader, the White House cautioned that the reality of a complete pause in fighting could take a little time to implement.
But perhaps the more important deal-making is set to occur with Moscow, as Erdogan and Putin are set to meet this upcoming week to discuss the rapidly developing events in Syria. Currently Russian troops have filled the power vacuum left in the wake of the rapid Pentagon draw down from border towns in northeast Syria.
“There are regime forces under Russian protection in parts of our operation area. We will discuss it with Putin. We’ve to find a solution,” Erdogan said Saturday.
Indeed whatever comes out of meeting with Putin is likely to set the final trajectory which could bring the fighting to a close.
International Man: In a broad sense, how would you describe the foreign policy of the US?
David Stockman: Well, in two words: Empire First. I contrast that with what Donald Trump thought he wanted to seek as a candidate, America First.
Now these are obviously simplifications and slogans, but there is an underlying substance that’s really important.
I think the basic idea behind “America First” is reaching way back to Robert Taft in the 1950s. He said that we cannot have a permanent warfare state in America, because our foreign policy doesn’t require it and our fiscal capacities can’t afford it.
What Taft basically said is the US sits between these two great ocean moats in a nuclear age, where the number-one threat is a nuclear threat, not an invasion of conventional forces. The way you deal with that is to have overwhelming retaliatory capacity, to keep the other side at bay.
As a matter of fact, he was totally right. It worked for 40 years. The Soviet Union finally crumbled under its own weight in 1991, and therefore the case was proved. There was no industrial society, high-tech conventional military threat left in the world. The opportunity arose in the early 1990s to go really full out America First.
Why did we keep all of these aircraft carriers, battleships, all this forward power projection capability, air refueling capabilities, 100 bases or more all over the world? None of that was needed throughout the entire Cold War, but most especially after 1991. That’s the direction we should have gone.
Where we ended up was in the opposite direction of what I call “America First.” Instead of dismantling NATO, we expanded it from 15 to 29 countries.
Instead of keeping faith with the promise that was made to Gorbachev by Secretary of State Jim Baker and George Bush the elder—that NATO would not expand a single inch to the east—instead, we basically encircled the entire rump state of Russia that was left after the Soviet Union fell apart. That has then led to the case for a military budget this year of $750 billion, when the truth is a homeland defense would cost less than $250 billion.
International Man: What are your thoughts on the amount of money the US spends on foreign aid, wars, the so-called intelligence community, the State Department, and other aspects of foreign policy?
David Stockman: The excess over what we need for homeland defense is more than a half trillion dollars per year—money we are wasting that we don’t have, that we’re borrowing and passing on to future generations.
We’re really at a point where there is a stark contrast between what homeland security and the safety of people in Lincoln, Nebraska, or Spokane, Washington, require—and what they continually produce in the imperial city in Washington, DC, with this massive warfare-state budget.
Now, unfortunately the lesson that we’ve learned in the first three years of the Trump administration is that good intentions, even vague ones—and Trump surely had no articulated or well-developed content to his notion of America First—they don’t stand a chance against this massive machine that is self-perpetuating.
In other words, Empire First dominates our foreign policy, because there’s so much money flowing into the Pentagon, the 17 intelligence agencies, and the rest.
That money is also going to the tens of thousands of people who are getting paid big salaries to work as contractors for the NSA and other agencies. They form a built-in lobbying force of tremendous effectiveness to keep the funds flowing.
When you add to that all of the think tanks that get money from the State Department, the National Endowment for Democracy, and various pockets and crevices in the Pentagon that no one can even keep up with, essentially you have what I call the equivalent of a self-licking ice cream cone.
The thing just keeps going because it’s so big it feeds itself—the $750 billion defense budget is just the beginning. That’s the Department of Defense budget per se, but if you add in another $25 billion for nuclear energy programs at the Department of Energy, $50 billion for security assistance and foreign aid, international relations, another $60–70 billion for Homeland Security, and then the veterans’ budget, which is $200 billion, it’s just massive. It represents the deferred cost of all these stupid wars that we’ve had and didn’t need.
Altogether we’re talking about a $1.1 trillion budgetary monster that creates these enormous flows of dollars that want to perpetuate themselves. Therefore, the kind of America First rationality that the world situation clearly would permit and support is completely lost.
I don’t know what these people think they’re fighting. Do they think that China is going to get up and bomb 4,000 Walmart stores in America? That’s not going to happen. Their economy would collapse in six months if they began serious military activities or threats against the United States or Western Europe.
Russia has a GDP of $1.6 trillion, which is less than the GDP of the New York metropolitan area. It’s a little rump state that has a lot of hydrocarbons, some wheat fields, and a workforce that is shrinking because of a fondness for vodka.
These are obvious facts and the fundamentals. Let’s call it the structure of the global national security environment. It’s so obvious that this massive warfare state machine that we have is not needed. We could go the route of America First—homeland defense, the Taftian posture—and yet there’s not a snowball’s chance in the hot place that it gets any kind of airtime, exposure, or debate in Washington, DC.
Donald Trump even tried to get the last 2,000 or 3,000 troops out of Syria, where we have no reason to be whatsoever. None, zero, zip. He can’t do that because he is undermined by his own advisors and the embedded Deep State that has never seen a war that it wanted to end and never an occupation that it didn’t want to perpetuate.
International Man: It seems the one thing Democrats and Republicans agree on is a more aggressive foreign policy. Why does US foreign policy never seem to change, regardless of who is in power?
David Stockman: That’s really a good question, and I think there are two dimensions to it.
One, just in terms of the structure, when you have $1.1 trillion dollars pouring into the system every year, it creates an overwhelming lobbying force for self-perpetuation. To perpetuate this massive budget, it needs to have threats, dangers, enemies, and all the rest. The whole system is in the business of threat inflation—even threat manufacture.
It’s not just the defense contractors, as I said before. It’s all the chattering classes that inhabit these NGOs, think tanks, and all the rest of it.
Ukraine would be a great example of this now, or why we are stumbling around in Syria. Why did we walk away from the Iranian nuclear deal and impose this vicious economic blockage and sanction war? That’s inviting some kind of hostile response at some point.
The second thing is this whole Russia-gate issue from 2016. It has essentially neutered the Democratic Party as a rational voice in foreign affairs and the restraint that it historically had on the warfare state.
I started back in the ’60s, protesting the Vietnam War. I went to all the marches on the Pentagon and all the rest of it.
The reason I bring this up is, at that point in time, the Democratic Party was loaded with doves and antiwar people and people who were skeptical of anything you would hear from the CIA. We knew what the CIA was.
The Democratic Party produced a lot of statesmen in the 1970s: McGovern, Fullbright, the Church Committee, and all these guys who investigated the abuses of the warfare state and the CIA—the lies that got us into the quagmire of Vietnam, which ended up being a stain on America’s history. It really was a genocide perpetuated against a defenseless people who weren’t a threat to us at all. That’s what it was.
We came out of the 1970s with a pretty healthy debate—and a lot of checks and balances politically against this warfare-state machine.
Now what happened to the Democratic Party? They’re basically AWOL on the issue of war and peace—and on the need for a restrained foreign policy. They’ve got it into their heads that they lost the election not because their policies were failing and not because they had the worst candidate the Democrats had fielded in decades, but because allegedly the Russkies infiltrated our political system in the Trump campaign and stole the election.
Now, we can make fun of that, but what it’s done is basically put the Democrats in a posture where every night if you watch the war channel, CNN, they have half a dozen of them saying Trump is jeopardizing national security. He’s not listening to his intelligence community. He’s leaving the Ukrainians high and dry—and Putin’s going to be occupying Kiev within hours.
This is all complete nonsense. They’ve lost their minds. There’s a couple antiwar Democrats left, and that’s it. That changes the equation fundamentally.
Here’s why. One way or another, the Republican Party was hijacked by the neocons back in the 1980s and 1990s, and it’s just gone from bad to worse.
So, you can’t expect the Republican Party to be any kind of vehicle for common sense and a peaceful foreign policy. The Democratic Party was supposed to be the check, and it is now AWOL. So, now there is no debate. It’s a pretty dangerous thing, because we’re doing stupid stuff all over the world.
The latest example, which is red hot of course, is Ukraine-gate.
Let’s just roll back the picture a couple years. Why is this thing even happening? The answer is because, in 2014, Washington supported, financed, and encouraged a coup on the streets of Kiev that threw out a legitimately elected government. It put in a lot of right wing neo-Nazi Ukrainian nationalists that scared the hell out of the Russians living in the eastern part of Ukraine and in Crimea—where there are few Ukrainians by the way; only 15% of the population of Crimea is Ukrainian. The rest is basically Russian and Tatars.
That’s where the whole damn thing started. We never should have been there. That’s right on Russia’s doorstep. It’s not our business to sort out the history there. Crimea was a Russian territory for 200 years anyway.
Once we got into the middle of that, that’s why we had to send our vice president, Joe Biden, to Ukraine to be the policy coordinator. Now let’s think about it.
There are 190 countries or so in the world, and Ukraine has a GDP of $130 billion. Ukraine is an absolute nothing, irrelevant piece of global real estate. We didn’t need to send the vice president of the United States to coordinate policy. In a good policy environment, you wouldn’t need to send the vice president there to coordinate anything.
What did that lead to? Well, once the vice president was there, all of a sudden everything changed, including this Burisma energy company. It was basically run by a guy—which never comes out on CNN—but he was allied with the president who was overthrown. And what did they do? They called Washington. They looked for the sleaziest lobbyist they could find. What they came up with was Hunter Biden and his buddy, Devon Archer, who was equally a sleaze bag, his roommate in college apparently or something like that. He was a campaign finance bundler for John Kerry all the time he was in the Senate.
This is how the whole damn thing got started. The debate today focuses on what Trump was doing during a very brief phone call in July 2019 and not about the history—how we got there and why the thing is off base to begin with. They pretend history only started with a phone call on July 25, 2019.
That’s the way the empire rolls. It demands that anybody who is paying attention should have amnesia and that the only thing that you’re supposed to focus on is what happened yesterday, as it’s spun by the machinery of the warfare state.
That’s why we have the irony of the Democratic majority in the House. I don’t think that they’re necessarily conscious tools of the military-industrial-intelligence complex. They’re just stupid. They’re uninformed, and they’re caught up in this imperial city groupthink.
Now they’re out to impeach a president who casually wanted to look into what was clearly a blatant case of influence peddling on the part of the prior vice president and his son.
Biden says he didn’t know what Hunter was doing. Who believes that? But the point is, why in the world would this big energy company based in Ukraine be hiring a guy, a lobbyist from Washington, DC, unless his name was Biden? Biden knew nothing about natural gas, energy, Eastern Europe, or Ukraine.
Once the empire gets as massive as it is, it behooves everybody around the world to have all of the influence operations that they can afford or can mobilize in Washington to weigh into the policy debate.
It really is like an imperial city. There are tens of millions—hundreds of millions—and billions of dollars every year being paid by foreign countries to Washington, because they think they have to defend their self-interest in the day-to-day operation of the US warfare state.
Again, it’s another example of how Empire First perpetuates itself. Not only do you have all of the domestic lobbies, the defense contractors, intelligence contractors, and think tanks that get all their money from government agencies, but then you have all of the foreign outposts. The two are actually pretty melded together.
The Atlantic Council is one of the most odious of these so-called think tanks that dominates the debate. They confuse these wet-behind-the-ears young people who get elected to Congress. I can appreciate that. I was elected when I was pretty wet behind the ears.
They send people to Washington to influence in a very subtle way, because the money goes through the back door. Much of the money for the Atlantic Council comes from Ukrainian oligarchs who are anti-Russian for whatever reason, and a lot more comes from Saudi Arabia and the UAE and the rest of the oil states.
It’s all on behalf of a big, slick lobbying operation that’s created this pro-empire mentality. It got us in the middle of all of these conflicts in the Middle East, but also Ukraine.
It is really bad. The Atlantic Council’s role in pushing the Russia-gate hoax and getting us involved in Ukraine—essentially threatening Russia on its very border—is pretty nasty stuff.
Don’t forget that Russia bought Crimea in 1783 with good gold money from the Turks, who were perennially short on cash. It was populated by Russian speakers all that time. It became the base for the home port of the great Black Sea Fleet, which is what Russia has seen as its defense under czars and commissars alike. For 170 years, it was an integral part of the Old Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union.
Crimea got added to Ukraine when there were few Ukrainians living there, only because Khrushchev won the violent struggle for succession after Stalin died. Khrushchev was Ukrainian, and so in a drunken celebration one night, he basically said, I hereby will Crimea to my buddies in Ukraine for all the good work that they did in helping kill off my two rivals to power.
Then a couple days later, the Presidium officially passed a law that added Crimea to the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine.
So, what these Washington idiots are doing—led by think tanks like the Atlantic Council and all the rest of those who got us into this conflict in Ukraine—is basically trying to enforce the dead hand of the Soviet Presidium from 65 years ago.
Crimea wasn’t the site of a Russian occupation. After the Ukrainian nationalists and neo-Nazis took control of the Ukraine government in the coup, the people in the Russian-speaking regions were scared to death.
There’s a whole bloody history behind this. Hitler marched through on the way to Stalingrad, and the Nationalist Ukrainians were with him. Then the Red Army marched back through after Stalingrad and liquidated all their Ukrainian enemies. Yet decades and decades later, Washington gets itself into the middle of this, trying to enforce the dead hand of the Soviet Union.
Crimea got partitioned. There was a vote. No one can say that 90% of the people didn’t vote to rejoin Mother Russia, because they did. So what is the big deal? And yet the warfare state found it convenient to bulk up the Russian threat as one reason for continuing to have all the defense money and the imperial footprint around the world. The next thing you know, it becomes policy, because the Democrats really embrace it—after they decided that Putin cost them the election.
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The amount of money the US government spends on foreign aid, wars, the so-called intelligence community, and other aspects of foreign policy is enormous and ever-growing. It’s an established trend in motion that is accelerating, and now approaching a breaking point. It could cause the most significant disaster since the 1930s. Most people won’t be prepared for what’s coming. That’s precisely why bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released an urgent video with all the details. Click here to watch it now.
What is happening in Syria, following yet another Russia-brokered deal, is a massive geopolitical game-changer.
I’ve tried to summarize it in a single paragraph this way:
“It’s a quadruple win. The U.S. performs a face saving withdrawal, which Trump can sell as avoiding a conflict with NATO ally Turkey. Turkey has the guarantee – by the Russians – that the Syrian Army will be in control of the Turkish-Syrian border. Russia prevents a war escalation and keeps the Russia-Iran-Turkey peace process alive. And Syria will eventually regain control of the entire northeast.”
Syria may be the biggest defeat for the CIA since Vietnam.
Yet that hardly begins to tell the whole story.
Allow me to briefly sketch in broad historical strokes how we got here.
It began with an intuition I felt last month at the tri-border point of Lebanon, Syria and Occupied Palestine; followed by a subsequent series of conversations in Beirut with first-class Lebanese, Syrian, Iranian, Russian, French and Italian analysts; all resting on my travels in Syria since the 1990s; with a mix of selected bibliography in French available at Antoine’s in Beirut thrown in.
The Vilayets
Let’s start in the 19thcentury when Syria consisted of six vilayets — Ottoman provinces — without counting Mount Lebanon, which had a special status since 1861 to the benefit of Maronite Christians and Jerusalem, which was a sanjak (administrative division) of Istanbul.
The vilayets did not define the extremely complex Syrian identity: for instance, Armenians were the majority in the vilayet of Maras, Kurds in Diyarbakir – both now part of Turkey in southern Anatolia – and the vilayets of Aleppo and Damascus were both Sunni Arab.
Nineteenth century Ottoman Syria was the epitome of cosmopolitanism. There were no interior borders or walls. Everything was inter-dependent.
Ethnic groups in the Balkans and Asia Minor, early 20th Century, Historical Atlas, 1911.
Then the Europeans, profiting from World War I, intervened. France got the Syrian-Lebanese littoral, and later the vilayets of Maras and Mosul (today in Iraq). Palestine was separated from Cham (the “Levant”), to be internationalized. The vilayet of Damascus was cut in half: France got the north, the Brits got the south. Separation between Syria and the mostly Christian Lebanese lands came later.
There was always the complex question of the Syria-Iraq border. Since antiquity, the Euphrates acted as a barrier, for instance between the Cham of the Umayyads and their fierce competitors on the other side of the river, the Mesopotamian Abbasids.
James Barr, in his splendid “A Line in the Sand,” notes, correctly, that the Sykes-Picot agreement imposed on the Middle East the European conception of territory: their “line in the sand” codified a delimited separation between nation-states. The problem is, there were no nation-states in region in the early 20thcentury.
The birth of Syria as we know it was a work in progress, involving the Europeans, the Hashemite dynasty, nationalist Syrians invested in building a Greater Syria including Lebanon, and the Maronites of Mount Lebanon. An important factor is that few in the region lamented losing dependence on Hashemite Medina, and except the Turks, the loss of the vilayet of Mosul in what became Iraq after World War I.
In 1925, Sunnis became the de facto prominent power in Syria, as the French unified Aleppo and Damascus. During the 1920s France also established the borders of eastern Syria. And the Treaty of Lausanne, in 1923, forced the Turks to give up all Ottoman holdings but didn’t keep them out of the game.
Turkish borders according to the Treaty of Lausanne, 1923.
The Turks soon started to encroach on the French mandate, and began blocking the dream of Kurdish autonomy. France in the end gave in: the Turkish-Syrian border would parallel the route of the fabledBagdadbahn — the Berlin-Baghdad railway.
In the 1930s France gave in even more: the sanjak of Alexandretta (today’s Iskenderun, in Hatay province, Turkey), was finally annexed by Turkey in 1939 when only 40 percent of the population was Turkish.
The annexation led to the exile of tens of thousands of Armenians. It was a tremendous blow for Syrian nationalists. And it was a disaster for Aleppo, which lost its corridor to the Eastern Mediterranean.
Turkish forces under entered Alexandretta on July 5, 1938.
This emergent Syria — out of conflicting Turkish, French, British and myriad local interests —obviously could not, and did not, please any community. Still, the heart of the nation configured what was described as “useful Syria.” No less than 60 percent of the nation was — and remains — practically void.Yet, geopolitically, that translates into “strategic depth” — the heart of the matter in the current war.To the eastern steppes, Syria was all about Bedouin tribes. To the north, it was all about the Turkish-Kurdish clash. And to the south, the border was a mirage in the desert, only drawn with the advent of Transjordan. Only the western front, with Lebanon, was established, and consolidated after WWII.
From Hafez to Bashar
Starting in 1963, the Baath party, secular and nationalist, took over Syria, finally consolidating its power in 1970 with Hafez al-Assad, who instead of just relying on his Alawite minority, built a humongous, hyper-centralized state machinery mixed with a police state. The key actors who refused to play the game were the Muslim Brotherhood, all the way to being massacred during the hardcore 1982 Hama repression.
Secularism and a police state: that’s how the fragile Syrian mosaic was preserved. But already in the 1970s major fractures were emerging: between major cities and a very poor periphery; between the “useful” west and the Bedouin east; between Arabs and Kurds. But the urban elites never repudiated the iron will of Damascus: cronyism, after all, was quite profitable.
Damascus interfered heavily with the Lebanese civil war since 1976 at the invitation of the Arab League as a “peacekeeping force.” In Hafez al-Assad’s logic, stressing the Arab identity of Lebanon was essential to recover Greater Syria. But Syrian control over Lebanon started to unravel in 2005, after the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, very close to Saudi Arabia, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) eventually left.
Bashar al-Assad had taken power in 2000. Unlike his father, he bet on the Alawites to run the state machinery, preventing the possibility of a coup but completely alienating himself from the poor, Syrian on the street.
What the West defined as the Arab Spring, began in Syria in March 2011; it was a revolt against the Alawites as much as a revolt against Damascus. Totally instrumentalized by the foreign interests, the revolt sprang up in extremely poor, dejected Sunni peripheries: Deraa in the south, the deserted east, and the suburbs of Damascus and Aleppo.
Protest in Damascus, April 24, 2011. (syriana2011/Flickr)
What was not understood in the West is that this “beggars banquet” was not against the Syrian nation, but against a “regime.” Jabhat al-Nusra, in a P.R. exercise, even broke its official link with al-Qaeda and changed its denomination to Fatah al-Cham and then Hayat Tahrir al-Cham (“Organization for the Liberation of the Levant”). Only ISIS/Daesh said they were fighting for the end of Sykes-Picot.
By 2014, the perpetually moving battlefield was more or less established: Damascus against both Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS/Daesh, with a wobbly role for the Kurds in the northeast, obsessed in preserving the cantons of Afrin, Kobane and Qamichli.
But the key point is that each katiba (“combat group”), each neighborhood, each village, and in fact each combatant was in-and-out of allegiances non-stop. That yielded a dizzying nebulae of jihadis, criminals, mercenaries, some linked to al-Qaeda, some to Daesh, some trained by the Americans, some just making a quick buck.
For instance Salafis — lavishly financed by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait — especially Jaish al-Islam, even struck alliances with the PYD Kurds in Syria and the jihadis of Hayat Tahrir al-Cham (the remixed, 30,000-strong al-Qaeda in Syria). Meanwhile, the PYD Kurds (an emanation of the Turkish Kurds’ PKK, which Ankara consider “terrorists”) profited from this unholy mess — plus a deliberate ambiguity by Damascus – to try to create their autonomous Rojava.
A demonstration in the city of Afrin in support of the YPG against the Turkish invasion of Afrin, Jan. 19, 2018. (Voice of America Kurdish, Wikimedia Commons)
That Turkish Strategic Depth
Turkey was all in. Turbo-charged by the neo-Ottoman politics of former Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, the logic was to reconquer parts of the Ottoman empire, and get rid of Assad because he had helped PKK Kurdish rebels in Turkey.
Davutoglu’s Strategik Derinlik (“Strategic Depth’), published in 2001, had been a smash hit in Turkey, reclaiming the glory of eight centuries of an sprawling empire, compared to puny 911 kilometers of borders fixed by the French and the Kemalists. Bilad al Cham, the Ottoman province congregating Lebanon, historical Palestine, Jordan and Syria, remained a powerful magnet in both the Syrian and Turkish unconscious.
No wonder Turkey’s Recep Erdogan was fired up: in 2012 he even boasted he was getting ready to pray in the Umayyad mosque in Damascus, post-regime change, of course. He has been gunning for a safe zone inside the Syrian border — actually a Turkish enclave — since 2014. To get it, he has used a whole bag of nasty players — from militias close to the Muslim Brotherhood to hardcore Turkmen gangs.
With the establishment of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), for the first time Turkey allowed foreign weaponized groups to operate on its own territory. A training camp was set up in 2011 in the sanjakof Alexandretta. The Syrian National Council was also created in Istanbul – a bunch of non-entities from the diaspora who had not been in Syria for decades.
Ankara enabled a de facto Jihad Highway — with people from Central Asia, Caucasus, Maghreb, Pakistan, Xinjiang, all points north in Europe being smuggled back and forth at will. In 2015, Ankara, Riyadh and Doha set up the dreaded Jaish al-Fath (“Army of Conquest”), which included Jabhat al-Nusra (al-Qaeda).
At the same time, Ankara maintained an extremely ambiguous relationship with ISIS/Daesh, buying its smuggled oil, treating jihadis in Turkish hospitals, and paying zero attention to jihad intel collected and developed on Turkish territory. For at least five years, the MIT — Turkish intelligence – provided political and logistic background to the Syrian opposition while weaponizing a galaxy of Salafis. After all, Ankara believed that ISIS/Daesh only existed because of the “evil” deployed by the Assad regime.
The Russian Factor
Russian President Vladiimir Putin meeting with President of Turkey Recep Erdogan; Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov standing in background, Ankara, Dec. 1, 2014 Ankara. (Kremlin)
The first major game-changer was the spectacular Russian entrance in the summer of 2015. Vladimir Putin had asked the U.S. to join in the fight against the Islamic State as the Soviet Union allied against Hitler, negating the American idea that this was Russia’s bid to restore its imperial glory. But the American plan instead, under Barack Obama, was single-minded: betting on a rag-tag Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a mix of Kurds and Sunni Arabs, supported by air power and U.S. Special Forces, north of the Euphrates, to smash ISIS/Daesh all the way to Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor.
Raqqa, bombed to rubble by the Pentagon, may have been taken by the SDF, but Deir ez-Zor was taken by Damascus’s Syrian Arab Army. The ultimate American aim was to consistently keep the north of the Euphrates under U.S. power, via their proxies, the SDF and the Kurdish PYD/YPG. That American dream is now over, lamented by imperial Democrats and Republicans alike.
The CIA will be after Trump’s scalp till Kingdom Come.
Kurdish Dream Over
Talk about a cultural misunderstanding. As much as the Syrian Kurds believed U.S. protection amounted to an endorsement of their independence dreams, Americans never seemed to understand that throughout the “Greater Middle East” you cannot buy a tribe. At best, you can rent them. And they use you according to their interests. I’ve seen it from Afghanistan to Iraq’s Anbar province.
The Kurdish dream of a contiguous, autonomous territory from Qamichli to Manbij is over. Sunni Arabs living in this perimeter will resist any Kurdish attempt at dominance.
The Syrian PYD was founded in 2005 by PKK militants. In 2011, Syrians from the PKK came from Qandil – the PKK base in northern Iraq – to build the YPG militia for the PYD. In predominantly Arab zones, Syrian Kurds are in charge of governing because for them Arabs are seen as a bunch of barbarians, incapable of building their “democratic, socialist, ecological and multi-communitarian” society.
Kurdish PKK guerillas In Kirkuk, Iraq. (Kurdishstruggle via Flickr)
One can imagine how conservative Sunni Arab tribal leaders hate their guts. There’s no way these tribal leaders will ever support the Kurds against the SAA or the Turkish army; after all these Arab tribal leaders spent a lot of time in Damascus seeking support from Bashar al-Assad. And now the Kurds themselves have accepted that support in the face of the Trukish incursion, greenlighted by Trump.
East of Deir ez-Zor, the PYD/YPG already had to say goodbye to the region that is responsible for 50 percent of Syria’s oil production. Damascus and the SAA now have the upper hand. What’s left for the PYD/YPG is to resign themselves to Damascus’s and Russian protection against Turkey, and the chance of exercising sovereignty in exclusively Kurdish territories.
Ignorance of the West
The West, with typical Orientalist haughtiness, never understood that Alawites, Christians, Ismailis and Druze in Syria would always privilege Damascus for protection compared to an “opposition” monopolized by hardcore Islamists, if not jihadis. The West also did not understand that the government in Damascus, for survival, could always count on formidable Baath party networks plus the dreaded mukhabarat — the intel services.
Rebuilding Syria
The reconstruction of Syria may cost as much as $200 billion. Damascus has already made it very clear that the U.S. and the EU are not welcome. China will be in the forefront, along with Russia and Iran; this will be a project strictly following the Eurasia integration playbook — with the Chinese aiming to revive Syria’s strategic positioning in the Ancient Silk Road.
As for Erdogan, distrusted by virtually everyone, and a tad less neo-Ottoman than in the recent past, he now seems to have finally understood that Bashar al-Assad “won’t go,” and he must live with it. Ankara is bound to remain imvolved with Tehran and Moscow, in finding a comprehensive, constitutional solution for the Syrian tragedy through the former “Astana process”, later developed in Ankara.
The war may not have been totally won, of course. But against all odds, it’s clear a unified, sovereign Syrian nation is bound to prevail over every perverted strand of geopolitical molotov cocktails concocted in sinister NATO/GCC labs. History will eventually tell us that, as an example to the whole Global South, this will remain the ultimate game-changer.
Unfortunately, as Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, generosity simply isn’t possible in some countries due to unrest or high poverty levels.
As in previous years, Myanmar had the highest share of people most likely to donate to charity with 81 percent. It consistently tops studies about charitable giving, mainly because of the strong influence of Theravada Buddhists practising Sangha Dana where many people believe that doing good in this life improves their chances of their next life being a better one.
At the other end of the spectrum, the lowest scoring countries in the index were Georgia and Yemen with 6 percent of people stating that they made a charitable donation in the past month.
A mysterious set of patents filed recently by a U.S Navy researcher has caught the eyes of technologists and conspiracy theorists alike.
These patents describe exotic technologies that do not exist in the commercial or military spheres—as far as we know—and that usually only surface in UFO lore, including high-energy electromagnetic force fields, revolutionary propulsion systems, and a “hybrid aerospace-underwater craft.”
The newest patent is for a practical fusion reactor that could be stored in aircraft to help achieve unimaginable speeds and maneuverability.
The mystery around these patents continues to grow during a time in which the Navy and State Department have stunningly reversed their decades-old policy of not acknowledging UFO sightings. The Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division is the home of the high-level Navy researcher, the equally mysterious Salvatore Cezar Pais, who in recent years has filed patents for supposedly operable revolutionary technologies such as room temperature superconductor (RTSC) and the high-energy electromagnetic field generator (HEEMFG).
Perhaps the most surprising patent concerns the “hybrid aerospace-underwater craft,” which can supposedly navigate with equal precision through space, air, and water with no heat signature and “engineer the fabric of our reality at the most fundamental level.”
In the patents filed, Pais has revealed that Chinese scientists are already way ahead of the United States in such fields. The reason this is a shocking admission is because military personnel, Navy officers, and air pilots have for years reported USOs (unidentified submerged objects) that seem to fly in and out of the sea at incomphrensible speeds.
The newest patent teases the discovery of the “Holy Grail” of energy production, the long sought nuclear fusion reactor, which could revolutionize life on Earth by creating a sustainable long-term fuel source and reduce radioactive waste and greenhouse gas emissions. Currently, scientists do not know how to manage systems that utilize high-pressure plasma in the range of hundreds of millions of degrees Fahrenheit and can only create split second controlled nuclear fusion reactions.
However, the patent for Pais’ “Plasma Compression Fusion Device,” which was only disclosed September 26, 2019 states:
“At present there are few envisioned fusion reactors/devices that come in a small, compact package (ranging from 0.3 to 2 meters in diameter) and typically they use different versions of plasma magnetic confinement. Three such devices are the Lockheed Martin (LM) Skunk Works Compact Fusion Reactor (LM-CFR) , the EMC2 Polywell fusion concept, and the Princeton Field-Reversed Configuration (PFRC) machine. […] These devices feature short plasma confinement times, possible plasma instabilities with the scaling of size, and it is questionable whether they have the ability of achieving the break – even fusion condition, let alone a self-sustained plasma burn leading to ignition.”
Pais states that this technology would be capable of producing as much as a terawatt (1 trillion watts) of power, which vastly surpasses America’s largest current nuclear power plant. While it’s not known whether such technology is possible at all, much less in a compact structure, we do know that the U.S. military and private firms like Lockheed Martin are competing with the government run-Chinese Academy of Sciences to create the world’s first compact nuclear reactor.
China Buying Boatloads Of Soybeans From Brazil After US Trade Talks
China ramped up Soybean purchases from Brazil last week, despite President Trump showboating a potential $50 billion agriculture deal with Beijing.
Multiple traders told Reuters that Brazilian soybeans are more appealing to commercial importers, especially ones from China, who are looking for deep discounts.
As of last week, Beijing hasn’t lifted 25% tariffs on US soybeans nor granted new waivers to state-owned businesses, indicating that China isn’t ready to buy US agriculture products, as of late October.
China typically sources most of its soybeans from the US between October and January, then from South American countries in early 1Q. But this year, according to traders, as the trade war continues to escalate to the point of return, China is abandoning US markets despite positive sentiment from President Trump’s tweets.
Since Monday, traders said China purchased eight bulk carrier cargoes of soybeans from Brazil, or about 480,000 tons, worth $173 million.
Brazil is China’s top soybean supplier, and Reuters made an interesting point, “large purchases from South America are unusual at this time of year with the US harvest coming in.” Translation: China isn’t buying US soybeans, so President Trump’s tweets about agriculture purchases are meaningless at the moment and are only used to calm fears of Midwest/Central US farmers.
President Trump and his administration spent several weeks pumping headlines through different wirehouses and even on Twitter, about a breakthrough deal and massive agriculture purchases China was performing.
Three US soybean exporters told Reuters that China logged zero sales with the US last week, along with no transactions at the USDA.
“I’ve not had any inquiries at all for US (shipments),” said one of the US soybean exporters. “There were a few November boats bought from Brazil and several new-crop South American boats for March forward but nothing here.”
Another US exporter said a drop in Brazilian soybean prices triggered boatloads of new purchases by China last week.
Chinese state-owned firms COFCO and Sinograin, which are exempt from US tariffs, have no intention of purchasing US soybeans unless spot prices drop, said one of the exporters.
After the Trump administration spent several weeks pumping the stock market on headlines describing China repurchasing soybeans, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow on Thursday finally admitted that for China to buy $50 billion worth of US agriculture good, it would depend on spot prices.
On Tuesday, China said that it would struggle to buy $50 billion of US agriculture products if the Trump administration doesn’t remove retaliatory tariffs on some products. Something that President Trump cannot afford to do because it would allow China to continue its ascension as a global superpower.
