Tag: Syria

Collateral Damage: Can We Make Civilians Spectators Again? Probably Not

I am fully aware that the term “collateral damage” as used by the US Empire refers to the “unfortunate” death of innocent civilians as a result of “pre-war” sanctions. The most popular clip on the Internet is Secretary of State Madeline Albright being interviewed about the 500,000 children that died as a result of sanctions on Iraq between Gulf War I and II:

The reason I ‘air-quote’ the term pre-war is that in all reality, sanctions themselves are an act of war, even though it is on the economic variety. While there are no guns used, there is force used to ensure that the economic activity sanctioned actually does not take place, and that is indeed backed by guns. It is both coercion and violence-based. The state dictates that peaceful trade can not take place and its edicts will be followed, as the consequences to any business is well known. No business can go rogue in the sanction war.

Truth be told, we in the US on the domestic front are again close to having personal conversation scrutinized for words of support towards these sanctioned countries filled with people who desire peaceful trade with American citizens. If one supports Palestinian people, one is assumed to be anti-Semitic, if one supports Russian people, one is assumed to be a Russian-bot.

There was a time when war’s harm toward civilians caught in the crossfire was recognized and attempts were made toward international rules that safeguarded citizens as much as possible from the political conflicts that broke out across the world. By the 1700s in fact, this was the norm, which is why there was such disgust when British dragoon leader Banastre Tarleton would kill both the wounded enemy as well as civilians that appeared to “aid the enemy”.

By the time seven states decided to leave the American union in 1861, this norm had not yet changed. Most of the civilized world’s battles took place on the outskirts of cities.

From an article written by one who has seen war with his own eyes since Vietnam, Tom’s Dispatch writes about this time period:

In fact, the classic American instance of war-as-spectator-sport occurred in 1861 in the initial major land battle of the Civil War, Bull Run (or, for those reading this below the Mason-Dixon line, the first battle of Manassas). “On the hill beside me there was a crowd of civilians on horseback, and in all sorts of vehicles, with a few of the fairer, if not gentler sex,” wrote William Howard Russell who covered the battle for the London Times. “The spectators were all excited, and a lady with an opera glass who was near me was quite beside herself when an unusually heavy discharge roused the current of her blood — ‘That is splendid, Oh my! Is not that first rate? I guess we will be in Richmond tomorrow.’”

Yes, a picnic lunch adjacent to a large battle. You now know how everyone assumed that civilians would not be targeted. People in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as Syria, Pakistan, Yemen and Libya pretty much know the opposite is true with the US Empire in the 21st century.

Reflecting back once more:

That woman would be sorely disappointed. U.S. forces not only failed to defeat their Confederate foes and press on toward the capital of the secessionist South but fled, pell-mell, in ignominious retreat toward Washington. It was a rout of the first order. Still, not one of the many spectators on the scene, including Congressman Alfred Ely of New York, taken prisoner by the 8th South Carolina Infantry, was killed.

By in large, the southern armies were driven by principles. The leadership time and again desired to spare the civilian population of the havoc of war. When Robert E. Lee’s army invaded the northern states of Maryland and Pennsylvania, his men were under strict orders NOT to help themselves to the resources of these civilians but rely on their own supplies. This was even apparent at the end of the war in 1865 when a hungry, tired and destitute southern army under Robert E. Lee retreated from Richmond and came across a rare cow in the countryside. Robert E. Lee directed his hungry men to return that cow to its rightful owner.

We do however know that there were civilian deaths during this internal conflict where one section of the country desired to depart in peace. Tom’s Dispatch explains:

Judith Carter Henry was as old as the imperiled republic at the time of the battle. Born in 1776, the widow of a U.S. Navy officer, she was an invalid, confined to her bed, living with her daughter, Ellen, and a leased, enslaved woman named Lucy Griffith when Confederate snipers stormed her hilltop home and took up positions on the second floor.

“We ascended the hill near the Henry house, which was at that time filled with sharpshooters. I had scarcely gotten to the battery before I saw some of my horses fall and some of my men wounded by sharpshooters,” Captain James Ricketts, commander of Battery 1, First U.S. Artillery, wrote in his official report. “I turned my guns on that house and literally riddled it. It has been said that there was a woman killed there by our guns.” Indeed, a 10-pound shell crashed through Judith Henry’s bedroom and tore off her foot. She died later that day, the first civilian death of America’s Civil War.

We know she was not the last to die. Many would die as Union army cut swaths through the south in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. Civilian’s fields, silver and homes would not be spared, nor were their personal bodies as many women were raped by the marauding troops from the north. As in many countries in the Middle East today, these atrocities would not soon be forgotten.

Tom’s Dispatch (Nick Turse) continues:

No one knows how many civilians died in the war between the states. No one thought to count. Maybe 50,000, including those who died from war-related disease, starvation, crossfire, riots, and other mishaps. By comparison, around 620,000 to 750,000 American soldiers died in the conflict — close to 1,000 of them at that initial battle at Bull Run.

So by 1865 these ratios were starting to change. Civilian deaths are hard to estimate, but you can be assured that military deaths these days are minimal when compared to those of innocent civilians.

In Vietnam, we saw this on black and white TV before the government decided to control more of what the masses would view:

A century later, U.S. troops had traded their blue coats for olive fatigues and the wartime death tolls were inverted. More than 58,000 Americans lost their lives in Vietnam. Estimates of the Vietnamese civilian toll, on the other hand, hover around two million. Of course, we’ll never know the actual number, just as we’ll never know how many died in air strikes as reporters watched from the rooftop bar of Saigon’s Caravelle Hotel ..

Since the 1960s, this trend has only accelerated and has not only produced more of what our own CIA calls “blowback” (I mean, when you blow up funeral processions with drones, you will multiply the number of freedom-fighters, errr I mean “terrorists” in a region) but it also has cause economic and political refugees seeking a better life in other regions of the world. For both the military-industrial complex and politicians, this is actually a win-win for them. How sick is that?

Tom’s Dispatch article winds down by saying:

In this century, it’s a story that has occurred repeatedly, each time with its own individual horrors, as the American war on terror spread from Afghanistan to Iraq and then on to other countries; as Russia fought in Georgia, Ukraine, and elsewhere; as bloodlettings have bloomed from the Democratic Republic of Congo to South Sudan, from Myanmar to Kashmir. War watchers like me and like those reporters atop the Caravelle decades ago are, of course, the lucky ones. We can sit on the rooftops of hotels and listen to the low rumble of homes being chewed up by artillery. We can make targeted runs into no-go zones to glimpse the destruction. We can visit schools transformed into shelters. We can speak to real estate agents who have morphed into war victims.  Some of us, like Hedrick Smith, Michael Herr, or me, will then write about it — often from a safe distance and with the knowledge that, unlike Salah Isaid and most other civilian victims of such wars, we can always find an even safer place.

A safer place. I am sure this is what those imprisoned in Gaza feel, or those in Libya near Tripoli these days, or in various areas of Iraq and Afghanistan and even in areas of Syria.

This will probably all “come home to roost” as our foreign policy of intervention and disruption plus regime change causes people to uproot and move. There is always “baggage” involved when violence displaces families.

This all will not end well, nor will this country be exempt from the fallout.

-SF1

From Clan to State to Empire: Why Constant War? -and- What is the Antidote?

Reflecting on the “progress” of man towards ordering things in this world, it is of no surprise to me the thought of “bigger is better”. Even reflecting on the rise of the Hebrew people from nomads to being slaves in Egypt, and from there to the “Promised Land” west of the Jordan River and then being ruled by judges and eventually a king, you can see this is a very human trait.

The transition toward wanting a king is not something that the Hebrew’s God wanted for them, but it was allowed, with a warning. You see, earthly kings have kingdoms, which inherently need resources, taxes and young men to supply military might for both defense and offense operations. The list goes on and on as to the drain on society, communities and families to support a kingdom let alone an empire.

I think too of the struggle in the late 1700s when American colonists, while appreciating what the British Empire had done to facilitate their ability to immigrate to such a place as America, and supplied protection from those native to this land, they had however, grown resentful at the way their “parents” were treating them, almost like there was an expectation of independence not unlike what happens to humans when the are in their mid to late teens! In this case, many if not most did not want a king after kicking out the British, but some painted the road ahead with fear so as to make many desire the safety that a king, a central state, can supply.

In both of these situations, you have a taxing authority promising protection. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe points out:

A tax-funded protection agency is a contradiction in terms and will lead to ever more taxes and less protection.

One only has to look around today to see the end result of the belief that the state could be counted on to provide safety while taxing its citizens for that safety. Not only do we see the US Empire drone bombing “terrorists” (their claim is that every death is indeed a terrorist death), but also promoting regime change in countries around the globe that have nothing to do with keeping Americans safe. From the lies that launched the invasion of Iraq to the lies that led to epic cultural destruction in Libya, attempted destruction in Syria and desired destruction in Venezuela and Iran, the empire seems determined to start a war with someone. Trade wars and sanctions with Russia and China also indicate that the US Empire is itching for a fight.

But why?

Unknown to most Americans is the fact that a series of macro-economic shifts have happened over the course of this nation’s life that seem to be at the core of the angst this country’s leaders and elites feel at this time.

Remember the phrase “follow the money”? Well, it is pretty prophetic that not only did the Bible both in the Old and New Testament state that the love of money is the root of all evil, but that an inherent distrust of our provision and safety in our Creator fuels this. If there is any entity that is the furthest from God is that of the state. The state is actually the antithesis of a loving father, it is force at its core and “war is the health of the state” – ( Randolph Bourne) is its motto.

Today’s Lew Rockwell site provides a writer by the name of L. Reichard White who is willing to identify the “whys” of this latest round of desired wars. I hope to follow up with a series of  posts that go back through history and link America’s coups and wars to show how each one was premised on a lie and historically have been altered to show that these were moral victories for the state when in fact:

The sheer number of people killed by states in the twentieth century—up to 100 million, with more killed in peacetime “social reconstruction” than in wars—makes one suspect that state-provided security is extremely expensive in all respects and that meaningful alternatives have been overlooked.

So on to today’s revelation about the ways of the state and the root issue we are facing here in the 21st century, the constant wars and then some thoughts towards future alternatives.

After walking through some of the most recent “crazy” the the US Empire’s foreign policy seems to have taken since 9/11 and even before, the author states:

With all these U.S. Government interventions, at least 198 of them remember — and sanctions — it’s tempting to conclude there is no rational reason and “we” screw with other folks purely on whim, whimsey, and maybe as a hobby.

But sometimes, maybe there’s a method to this madness. And if so, it often does involve oil, just not quite the way most left-coasters think.

Oil, seems to be a common denominator. But if so, why didn’t the US occupy Libya and keep the oil? Why didn’t the US occupy Iraq and keep the oil? It just doesn’t add up. The author continues:

… because of a 1974 agreement cobbled together by the Nixon administration between the U.S. and Saudis, nearly all oil trade in the world ended up requiring U.S. dollars…

Understand that pre-1974, the US primarily used a central bank to fund its wars across the globe, and unlike your history book says, WWI (joined by the US only a few years after establishing a central bank) and WWII were not actually started by Germany, it has been only covered up that way by “Fake History” (a cousin to “Fake News”)

With a national debt of over $22T these days and over $200T of unfunded liabilities, the US government wants to stabilize and control the future, but the railroad tracks are leading to a gorge that has no bridge yet.

Not coincidentally, this [1974 action] was just three years after Nixon, attempting to finish replacing the gold standard with the U.S. paper-dollar standard, closed the gold window and thus threatened to throw the world economy into chaos. This explains a lot more than most folks realize.

Remember the “petro dollar?” Well, thanks to the Saudi/U.S. established oil-for-dollars tradition, the Brits, Germans, Japanese — in fact just about everyone — had to keep dollars on hand to pay for their oil imports.

And the oil sellers also ended up with a lot of dollars. And so did the countries they bought stuff from. And the dollar tradition spread to trade in other commodities as well. That meant that a large aggregate of U.S. dollars stayed overseas and didn’t return to the U.S.

Econ 301 is needed to understand what this means. Mr White does a good job:

Experts estimate that “majority of cash … outside the United States” is as much as 80% of the U.S. dollars in circulation. All that money overseas has a lot to do with the fact that everyone has to pay for oil, etc., with dollars.

As Case Sprenkle of the University of Illinois puts it, “Insofar as the money remains abroad and is not used to purchase goods or services from the country that printed it, it serves as an interest-free loan from poor countries to the rich.”

That’s mostly how Uncle Sam is able to run-up such huge budget deficits without causing inflation.

At this point, it will become clear to any student of history, that the actions of the US Empire since the 1953 assassination of the democratically elected president of Iran after he threatened to nationalize his nation’s oil to the most recent effort by Venezuela, sanctions, intervention, regime change and if necessary, outright war itself are the only tools the US Empire has at this point of time to get out of the hole it dug itself.

… what happens if people overseas stop using the dollar — and discover the only place they can spend it now is back here in the good ole’ U.S. of A.?

What would happen if the Saudi Arabians said they didn’t want to be paid [for oil] in dollars anymore, but wanted instead, to be paid, say in yen. There would be inflation that would make the 15 to 20 percent inflation in the early 80’s look good. —Sen. Pete Domenici, R-NEW MEXICO, C-SPAN II, 18 May 1995 ~12:33:55 PM

Unfortunately, selling oil for something other than U.S. dollars isn’t the only thing threatening the paper-standard. It’s also become the norm for governments and central banks to stockpile U.S. Treasuries to support their own currencies.

So, if a country reduces its stock-pile of U.S. Treasuries, either by selling them off or no longer rolling them over when they reach maturity — and replaces them with something else, as in the past, gold perhaps — this also threatens the U.S. dollar paper-standard.

The problem is, the paper-standard is mostly psychological. It’s literally a con — that is, confidence — game and when the confidence evaporates, game over.

And it’s very difficult to enforce confidence, no matter how many aircraft carriers, etc. you deploy. Or to predict when the confidence will implode.

Confidence is already waning on the USD Petro Dollar’s use, we know that North Korea does not participate, neither does Cuba, but lately, Venezuela, Iran, Russia and even Saudi Arabia favor de-dollarization in the oil markets, and this is huge:

I agree with Mr. White when he says:

Could that threat [Saudi Arabia’s look at USD de-dollarization] be why Mr. Trump vetoed Congress’ first attempt in 70 years to control unconstitutional U.S. war involvement by ending support for the Saudi-led murder of the men, women and children in Yemen?

What a tangled web an empire weaves. In desperation, the empire struggles to stay relevant and keep the bubble economic facade intact. Gold-based currency was a more honest way to run a nation, but quick money seems to be the way empires go.

.. killing more men, women and children is a classic result of the the paper-standard. As Ferdinand Lips explains so well, compared to the gold standard, the paper-standard makes financing wars easy and so they happen more often, are longer, stronger, and kill more innocent men, women and children.

As some folks like to put it, “The U.S. dollar used to be supported by gold, now it’s supported by aircraft carriers, B-52s and killer drones.”

I think we can safely add that it’s also supported by election meddling, coup, regime change, assassination, sanctions, invasion, and fake undeclared war. Perhaps, then, a more accurate title for this piece would be “Intervention and the Paper Standard.”

Okay then, enough depressing talk, and for those who have stayed along for this journey, what, if any, antidote is there for such a huge situation?

there’s a subtle but insidious problem with the way Trump and the U.S. Deep State are chronically implementing “All options are on the table” Games Theory. Originally a U.S. invention, Games Theory is based on poker.

The problem with poker — and BTW mercantilism as well — is that, unlike voluntary exchange in unhampered markets, it’s a zero-sum game. If you’re in a game with someone who thinks they’re playing poker, someone wins and someone loses — and they intend to make sure you’re the loser.

Unhampered markets on the other hand — and other forms of normal co-operation — are, in the long run, nearly always win-win propositions. As long as they stay unhampered — and normal.

Markets, UNHAMPERED is the key.  How can markets be “unhampered”? (Remember the Hebrews when their leadership was judges, wise men who provided justice in a society or community, or the American colonists that homesteaded on acres of trees and developed ways so that they could bring value to their communities out of sight of any British flag or British noble?)

The state is a cancer for so many things in our world. I believe the only saving grace might be for the average human (not just in America, but globally) to understand the state for what is actually is. The average human needs to know “the gun in the room”.

Anarchy, the absence of rulers (not natural rules), is probably the only healthy path forward. One of the best things I have see so far this year is this 52 minute interview on Jeff Berwick’s Anarchast page that supplies a double dose of reality into the reality of 2019, the consideration of both anarchy and Jesus as a possible path forward. I am not talking chaos and religion here, so it might be good to view this YouTube so you can understand both of these options without accepting them:

Anarchast About:

Anarchast is your home for Anarchy Podcasts on the internet

To us, Anarchy means freedom. The desire to live without a violent, coercive State. Anarchy is peace, love and prosperity. Free markets. And, power to the people.

Anarchist.  Libertarian.  Freedom fighter against mankinds two biggest enemies, the State and the Central Banks.

Jeff is the Chief Editor of The Dollar Vigilante, a newsletter focused on investments and expatriation information to survive the coming collapse of the US dollar based financial system.

Jeff is also a contributing editor at many of the world’s largest libertarian, financial and precious metals related websites including LewRockwell.com, The Daily Reckoning, Whiskey and Gunpowder, Kitco, Gold-Eagle, Safehaven.com, Market Oracle and is a speaker at many of the world’s most important hard-money investment and freedom conferences including Libertopia, the San Francisco & New York Hard Assets Show, the PDAC held in Toronto, the Silver Summit and all the Cambridge Houseconferences in Vancouver, Calgary,

So remember, money is not the root of all evil, the love of money is. If your faith is in money and/or government, you are going to have a bad day.

I hope to post more on what the future might hold as far as alternatives to the state, especially the “in your face” state that we are seeing in the USA that used to be restricted to the USSR, Communist China and East Germany for a few decades.

Enjoy your weekend y’all!

-SF1

What is With the Obsession with Russia, Primarily, and China Secondarily? PART 1

I have to be honest, I am a “boomer” who served in the US Navy after Vietnam and before Gulf War I, in a relative season of peace (rare for the US Empire these days).

The 1970s saw increased cooperation and trade with China and in the late 1980s finally saw increased cooperation and trade with Russia. With the Cold War over, people in general felt a lot better about the global conflicts and started to look at our domestic issues. Politicians and the Deep State do not like that. In search of distractions the Deep State looked for opportunities and continued to feed skewed Intel to the US government.

One would have thought that peace would allow the US to get a handle on its own economy and its own trade balance sheet. Nothing could be further from the truth. What happens time and again in large corporations, government and in bureaucracy in general is that politics squanders opportunities to take things to the next level, a better place AFTER addressing some key foundational and structural issues. The problem with politics and older organizations is that the momentum of the status quo keeps the change agents and whistle-blowers at bay while the existing paradigm sucks the life out of the organization or nation slowly. Because the leaders are temporary custodians of the organization, there is little incentive to do anything but “kick the can” down the road for others to deal with, the next generations of corporate leaders or the next crop of politicians or even the next generation of consumers and taxpayers.

Not cool.

In our existing morass it is apparent that the US Empire desperately needs an enemy. It needed one in 1990 as the USSR dissolved into over a dozen republics and it needed it yet again after the easy Gulf War I win that failed to produce the need for military in a big way for the long haul. Enter the “War on Terror” (Gulf War II, Iraq Invasion), which was designed to never end. This helped Bush II and Obama to satisfy the deep state and elites who see nothing but upsides to perpetual war, but after some rather apparent blunders, the target has shifted to Russia especially followed by China. Sure North Korea and Iran are in the mix but I am pretty sure the deep state is after another multi decade conflict so it can keep its job.

The blunder in the war on terror had to do with the exposure from Wikileaks and other leaks that made it clear that ISIS was actually a US/Saudi/UK and Israel initiative (to keep Iran from being a regional power that threatened Israel). The attempts to regime change Libya and Syria were part of an effort to further destabilize the Middle East which sent refugees to Western Europe by the droves, destabilizing Germany and France especially. The empire likes to keep its competition at bay, either directly or indirectly.

For the past three years, Russia has received the brunt of the attacks claiming that its motives are evil. A quick look at maps from 1990 to present say otherwise:

As you can see, the efforts in the Ukraine in 2014 was an attempt to further weaken Russian influence in the region. Their actual restraint shows the wisdom that Putin possesses in dealing with the US Empire and NATO. Russia did tactfully stepped in and secured Crimea and the critical port of Sevastopol on the Black Sea which they had possession of under lease agreements up until the US sponsored regime change in 2014. Beyond this, with the vast majority of Crimeans desiring ties to Russia there was swift and peaceful investments made by Russia like the Crimean Bridge below:

Crimean Bridge
Sevastopol Naval Base (Russia) on the Black Sea

This peaceful move PLUS the fact that the Russians were invited by Syrians to remove ISIS from their territories actually allowed Russian military to test their weapon systems and now have an edge in several different technological categories that make the Pentagon nervous. The fact that in October 2015 when this calculated effort to push ISIS out of Syria really started, Obama predicted that Russia would fail:

Syria (October 2015)
Syria Dec 2018

So the US was showed up in Syria, as trespassers they “fought” ISIS until Russia could beat ISIS .. and now the US rebels hold the land east of the Euphrates River.

Then, in 2019, the US turns its attention to Venezuela. The US Empire DOES have an addiction that it is not ready to admit. Of course they pull out the old Monroe Doctrine crap .. wondered if that applied in Iraq and Afghanistan, opps, wrong continent. Geez. But I digress. Why can’t the US just defend the US? Because it has a “need for empire” and its belief in the myth called “American Exceptionalism”.

At its root, the US obsession with “extending” Russia until it breaks is summed up by Moon of Alabama in this hilarious highlighting of a RAND think-tank article that was revised to look at the US instead in this  post:

This brief summarizes a report that comprehensively examines nonviolent, cost-imposing options that the Russian Federation and its allies could pursue across economic, political, and military areas to stress —overextend and unbalance— the United States’ economy and armed forces and the U.S. government’s political standing at home and abroad. Some of the options examined are clearly more promising than others, but any would need to be evaluated in terms of the overall strategy for dealing with the United States, which neither the report nor this brief has attempted to do.

Today’s United States suffers from many vulnerabilities — the financial crisis has caused a drop in living standards, regressive tax policies that have furthered that decline, a decreasing life expectancy, and increasing authoritarianism under Barack Obama’s and now Donald Trump’s rule. Such vulnerabilities are coupled with deep-seated (if exaggerated) anxieties about the possibility of Russia-inspired political manipulation, loss of great power status, and even military attack.

Despite these vulnerabilities and anxieties, the United States remains a powerful country that still manages to be Russia’s peer competitor in a few key domains. Recognizing that some level of competition with the United States is inevitable, RAND researchers conducted a qualitative assessment of “cost-imposing options” that could unbalance and overextend the United States. Such cost-imposing options could place new burdens on the United States, ideally heavier burdens than would be imposed on the Russian Federation for pursuing those options.

A team of RAND experts developed economic, geopolitical, ideological, informational, and military options and qualitatively assessed them in terms of their likelihood of success in extending the United States, their benefits, and their risks and costs.

Too funny, because the original 2019 RAND publication was focused in Russia’s situation and how the US might exploit her weaknesses.

What is noteworthy is the last line of this think-tank production, which SHOULD cause the deep state (as well as their Mossad ties) to pause in their agenda:

Most of the options discussed, including those listed here, are in some sense escalatory, and most would likely prompt some Russian counterescalation. Thus, besides the specific risks associated with each option, there is additional risk attached to a generally intensified competition with a nuclear-armed adversary to consider. This means that every option must be deliberately planned and carefully calibrated to achieve the desired effect. Finally, although Russia will bear the cost of this increased competition less easily than the United States will, both sides will have to divert national resources from other purposes. Extending Russia for its own sake is not a sufficient basis in most cases to consider the options discussed here. Rather, the options must be considered in the broader context of national policy based on defense, deterrence, and—where U.S. and Russian interests align—cooperation.

Cooperation, now there is a novel idea!

Hang on, there are more deep state and political thinkers that love their wallet more than life on this planet, especially for generations after their death!

Next time we will look more at China as well as the budding relationship that Russia and China are now enjoying and how Japan and other nations like Iran and Syria figure into all these geopolitics as well as the association called BRICS ( Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa ).

-SF1

Timing of Pres. Trump’s Declaration on the Status of the Golan Heights

Politics distorts both history (old news) and recent announcements (new news). Rarely are these accomplished as a conclusion of some logical research, but is almost always a reaction to something that this BIG news can cover up, you know, a distraction.

Case in point is the abrupt change in policy about the status of the Golan Heights:

It is “time”? Ok, to understand why it is time, one needs to follow independent media to get to the bottom of this. Moon of Alabama has the goods on what is really going on. In summary, with Israel’s Netanyahu’s election coming up, and all the scandals that have come to light, there was even a bigger scandal that just surfaced, and so the US President breaks with all former policy and against UN rulings to go out on a limb and state a stupid idea that will sound great all over DC where everyone’s pocket is filled with AIPAC money. Even the general public and evangelical Christians will cheer this message since in their mind it is Israel and US against the world.

Back to the back-story, the source of this recent “surfacing” (no pun intended) of this submarine-centric tale is an Israeli publication that has been keeping track of the corruption for decades. Similar to the US political environment, the Israeli one has its own immense swamp.

The high-profile Case 3000 investigation has ensnared several close associates of Netanyahu, but not the premier himself, on suspicion that they received illicit funds as part of a massive graft scheme in the multi-billion-shekel state purchase of naval vessels and submarines from German shipbuilder ThyssenKrupp. Some have called it the largest suspected graft scandal in the country’s history.

That seems a bit distant from Netanyahu, however, the article meticulously weaves this tale that comes right into his lap:

Having previously claimed he obtained the shares when he was a private citizen, Netanyahu has appeared to change his story, admitting he became a SeaDrift shareholder in 2007 while serving as the leader of the opposition, Haaretz reported Monday. The Marker website has reported a different timeline, saying Netanyahu purchased the SeaDrift shares in April 2005, when he was the finance minister.

This file photo taken on December 11, 2012 shows a general view of the headquarters of German heavy industry giant ThyssenKrupp AG in Essen, Germany. (AFP/Patrik Stollarz)

He sold his SeaDrift shares to Milikowsky on November 29, 2010 — a day before its merge with GrafTech was completed — according to The Marker — 20 months after being elected prime minister.

OK then, what is the difference of a few years? Well, what about the money, just follow the money:

Netanyahu’s selling of his Seadrift shares in 2010 to Milikowsky for NIS 16 million ($4.5 million) — reportedly four-to-seven times more than the amount he paid for the shares several years earlier. Analysts, including Channel 12’s Amnon Abramovich and the Yedioth Ahronoth daily’s Sever Plotzker, have said the premier received the shares from his cousin “virtually for free.”

That could potentially lead to a new investigation similar to Case 1000, in which Netanyahu faces fraud and breach of trust charges, pending a hearing, for allegedly receiving illicit gifts from billionaire benefactors. Milikowsky has reportedly given Netanyahu sums of money several times over the last two decades, and the fact that they are cousins isn’t likely to shield them from scrutiny.

So finally, back to Trump’s surprise move, it’s international law violation and most importantly, his ethical and moral violations are laid bare by Moon of Alabama:

The people who paid for Trump’s election campaign, foremost casino magnate and zionist Sheldon Adelson, want to keep the Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahoo in office. Netanyahoo is under investigation in several corruption cases and has a serious competitor in the upcoming general elections in Israel. Trump needs money for his re-election campaign and is willing to do anything to get it.

Trump is colluding with Netayahoo to influence the Israeli election. It is the reason why he decided yesterday to claim that Israel has sovereignty over the Golan Heights ..

So here we go again, right after it is made clear that the Russians did not influence the 2016 US elections, the US resorts to yet again, influence other country’s elections, something it has been doing for decades and in 1953 the US through the CIA actually assassinated a president of another country in an election they could not influence enough. This country is Iran and they will NEVER forget. But I digress .. :

About these heights, this is Syrian land period! Wrong side of the river Israel IF you are really Israel 2.0, following the Law of Moses and being led by people who have the DNA of Hebrews. The very real thing is that this is NOT Israel 2.0 but a convenient cover of Zionists.

McClatchy has the tic toc of Trump’s decision:

President Donald Trump’s tweet on Thursday recognizing the Golan Heights as Israeli territory surprised members of his own Middle East peace team, the State Department, and Israeli officials.U.S. diplomats and White House aides had believed the Golan Heights issue would be front and center at next week’s meetings between Trump and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House. But they were unprepared for any presidential announcement this week.

Yeah, so has the US adopted Israel as the 51st state OR does Israel have Washington DC on a short leash? I pick B.

Trump’s declaration was expected, but not for yesterday. The reason for the premature ejaculation is obvious. Yesterday a new case of Netyahoo’s utter corruption came to light:

State prosecutors are reportedly considering opening yet another criminal graft investigation against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this time in the so-called submarine affair, citing “dramatic” new information.

Netanyahoo made a profit of $4 million from shares he owned in a company that was bought out by Thyssen-Krupp, a German conglomerate from which Israel under Netanyahoo ordered submarines and corvettes.

The new revelations threatened to blow up Netanyahoo’s reelection campaign. Trump’s sudden Golan Heights move was timed to bury them.

So on to the legal, moral and ethical around granting foreign land to a foreign nation? Who does that? Oh yeah, the country that has driven itself $22T into debt spending more on our military than the next TEN countries COMBINED. Our children and their children will be debt slaves for generations .. pure Boomer move.

Trump has no power to give Israel sovereignty over anything. Several UN resolutions determined (UNSCR242) and reconfirmed (UNSCR497) that the Golan Heights are Syrian territory illegally occupied by Israel. The European Union, Russia and others rejected Trump’s move and called it illegal.

Trump’s move though might have some standing in U.S. courts. That will become important when law suites are filed against Genie Energy Ltd., an oil company in Newark New Jersey that wants to drill for oil in the Golan Heights area:

Genie Energy is no “penny stock” run-of-the-mill oil company. Its board of Advisors includes Dick Cheney. It includes former CIA head and chairman of the above-mentioned Foundation for Defense of Democracies, James Woolsey. It includes Jacob Lord Rothschild of the London banking dynasty and a former business partner of convicted Russian oil oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Before his arrest Khodorkovsky secretly transferred his shares in Yukos Oil to Rothschild.Further this little-known Newark, New Jersey oil company board includes former US Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, pro-Israel media mogul and owner of Trump’s favorite Fox News TV, Rupert Murdoch. Also on the board are former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and hedge fund billionaire Michael Steinhardt. Steinhardt, a philanthropic friend of Israel and of Marc Rich, is also a board member of Woolsey’s neo-con Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which advises Trump among other things that it would be good for Washington to recognize Israel as legitimate owner of the Golan Heights lands taken by Dayan in the 1967 War.

Under international law it is illegal to draw natural resources from occupied territory. With Trump’s move the owners and board members of Genie Energy receive an additional layer of legal cover in U.S. and Israeli courts.

Cheney is involved in this too? Geez, nice swamp draining there Donald ..

Anyway, so what does this mean for the Middle East where Zionists and Arabs play (remember, Israel’s BEST regional partner is Saudi Arabia, and that country is waging terror on Yemen just like Israel wages terror on Gaza)?

The occupied Golan Heights include the Sheeba farms which are Lebanese territory. The resistance axis of Hizbullah, Syria and Iran is strengthened by Trump’s move and will use it move to justify further activities against Israel and perhaps against United States interests elsewhere. The move will be used to recruit more resistance fighters, especially from the Druze on the Syrian side of the Golan who have brethren living on the Israel controlled side.

It further delegitimizes the Syrian ‘rebels’ and the Syrian Kurds who are allied with the U.S. while Trump gives away Syrian land. It demonstrates the weakness of those Arab rulers who are allied with the U.S. but were not even informed that Trump planed to hand off Arab land. It will incite their domestic population against them. That makes it much more difficult for them to continue their policy of detente with Israel.

The ‘deal of the century’ for peace between Arabs and the Zionists that Trump’s son in law Jared Kushner was supposed to arrange is now dead.

OK then .. more war to come .. this will make sure the Military Industrial Complex does not suffer from failure to overthrow Syria’s Assad .. or Venezuela’s Muduro.

Jesus said there would be wars and rumors of wars ad nauseum .. He was right. The thought that the US is a Christian nation must make Him nauseous. The US foreign and domestic policies are NOT His ways.

-SF1

Empire Tactics: 1780 Green Dragoons/Hessians to 2019 US Special Ops/Blackwater

The benefit of knowing history is knowing when you are about to be scammed. In the past week we have heard that President Trump suddenly, without the blessing of his neo-con staff personnel, decided to exit Syria in the near-term. What happened next was typical to this empire’s entertainment aspects, people that were against war at some point in their life all of a sudden WANT war in Syria. I mean it was normal to hear most of Congress (who have been lobbied by the Military Industrial Complex – $$$) get upset that we can’t keep our “covert” war there intact since we have invested 7 years there with various rebel groups including ISIS.

It is all indeed a show, and having watched Home Alone over the Christmas break seeing Donald Trump giving advice to Kevin, we can’t be surprised in 2019 to understand that Donald Trump is still acting. All empires need good actors when they approach end of life status, it keeps the masses entertained while what is happening behind the scenes gets more and more desperate.

During the Revolutionary War, the British Empire used 30,000 Hessian mercenaries (30% of the total British force in the American Colonies) towards their attempt to hang on to their empire. Also deployed was their Green Dragoon Legions and the tactics that had local innocent citizens and their property in the cross-hairs of these forces.

During the follow-up of the Iraq invasion in 2003, the US Empire also used mercenaries in their attempt to hang on to the territory in Iraq as part of the US Empire. By 2007 there had been a huge number of incidents where these mercenaries were guilt of massacres throughout Iraq. In fact, trials are still ongoing here in 2019!

A more in depth article is this one by Chuck Baldwin who has been following closely the Trump promises before his election compared to the Trump realities to date. One of the most startling statistics is in the quote that follows:

.. the first two years of Trump’s presidency was a flagrant disavowal of that campaign promise. Not only did Trump not disengage our forces from these illegal and immoral wars, but, as I have documented, he dramatically INCREASED America’s involvement in these wars. In fact, President Trump has dropped more bombs on more people in his first two years of office than President Obama did in his entire last term in office. Plus, he sent thousands of additional ground troops to Afghanistan and Syria and several other countries.

So that leads us to Trump’s latest claim, that the US is “leaving” Syria and also drawing down troops in Afghanistan. Well, it all depends on who is doing the counting and what is being counted. Knowing full well that none of these numbers include deep state CIA operatives throughout the region, if we are talking “official military” personnel in Syria, the US claims that only 2000 are there currently. I highly doubt that. But what is really going on? Chuck says:

This month, in the January/February print issue of the gun and hunting magazine “Recoil,” the former contractor security firm Blackwater USA published a full-page ad, in all black with a simple message: “We are coming.”

Is the war in Afghanistan — and possibly elsewhere ― about to be privatized?

If Blackwater returns, it would be the return of a private security contractor that was banned from Iraq, but re-branded and never really went away.

21st century Hessians! This Empire is outsourcing the dirty work left behind by the 17 year Afghanistan conflict and the 7 year illegal intrusion into the sovereign nation of Syria that Obama pulled the trigger on.

The legacy is trillions spent, that we have a debt for, just to _______? You fill in the blank, is this to keep military contractors employed? Is this to keep the petro-dollar in placed globally? Is this to help Israel out .. perpetually?

And what of the US Empire’s legacy?

Here’s the horrifying part: These “private contractors,” i.e., mercenaries, operate in a manner that is totally unaccountable to the rule of law. Totally! They operate outside the Constitution, outside the Rules of Engagement, outside the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), outside the Law of Nations, outside law period—and also outside public scrutiny. There is virtually no accountability for whatever murders, rapes, plunderings or criminalities of any sort that these mercenaries commit.

More terrorists are home-grown the more the empire’s atrocities are known. This is “job-security” as the US Empire’s last gasp around the globe. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

In summary, Chuck Baldwin concludes:

Combining Special Forces units that are already plagued with rampant abuses of power with mercenaries who are virtually unaccountable to any human authority is a recipe for the worst kind of barbarity and atrocity. This is what the Roman Empire did during its last days of power and what Great Britain did in its failed war against the American colonies. And this is exactly what Donald Trump is preparing to do. In fact, Trump is already setting the table for an unaccountable military force by shutting down military watchdog groups, thus turning off the light of public knowledge and ensuring military unaccountability.

The “swamp” is still intact. The cynic in me points to the root of this nation’s poisonous government. Many, including Chuck claim that if we would just get back to the Constitution … yeah, it was never meant to be “got back to”. As Lysander Spooner said in the 19th century:

“But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain – that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist.”
― Lysander Spooner, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority

My thinking, thanks to Ben Stone’s efforts and his manual , has evolved to this:

When I first read this a year ago I just laughed. About six months ago I read this and still thought that maybe Thomas Jefferson was blindsided by this whole Constitution coup d’tat that happened while he was Ambassador to France. I understood that George Washington was a Federalist at heart and wanted a mini-British nation on this continent, and that Benjamin Franklin was getting old and nodded his consent. But the likes of George Mason and Patrick Henry saw through all this and rightfully noted the slippery slope that this document created a path for going forward.

I now think that Thomas Jefferson really thought that there would be another revolution inside a generation as what was created was just an “experiment”, a beta-test version 1.0 of a federated republic that would have checks and balances like nullification and secession options that could keep it grounded until another version could be tried.

I do think that the pioneer spirit of that founding generation did not even last a decade before this country fell back into its old ways. Before you know it you have George Washington taking thousands of troops into Pennsylvania to enforce a 25% Whiskey Tax to fund his government. You can not possibly make this stuff up!

Happy 2019 y’all .. I will try to stay more positive in my future posts this year, if the Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise.

-SF1

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun – Ecclesiastes 1:9