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“We’re certainly not advocating any strategy for reducing hydrocarbon emissions by keeping oil in the ground…that’s not a position.”

This was the response of Christopher A. Smith when he was asked what he thought of the “growing movement of keeping oil in the ground” at the 2016 Columbia Global Energy Summit in April.

Since Chris Smith worked for more than a decade for Chevron and Texaco, this answer should not surprise anyone.

However, Chris Smith now works for President Obama as assistant secretary of fossil energy, so when he says “we’re certainly not advocating” he is referring to the fact that the Obama Administration’s Department of Energy does not support any strategy to keep oil in the ground.

And if you think Mr. Smith isn’t in a position of authority in the Obama administration when it comes to oil policy, you might want to consider how he was introduced at the event by moderator Antoine Halff:

“[Smith is] Assistant secretary of energy for fossil fuels since 2014 but really at the heart of R&D and policy development issues since the beginning of the first Obama administration. And Chris has had a huge role in the government’s embrace of tight oil and shale, their benefits and the opportunities they represent…after perhaps a somewhat lukewarm start early in the first Obama administration.”

So according to Halff, who came to Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy from a position as chief oil analyst at the International Energy Agency, Chris Smith was instrumental in getting the Obama administration to “embrace” fracking for oil. And Smith is now saying that same administration certainly does not advocate keeping any oil in the ground.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Obama ‘Legalized’ the War on Terror

May 8, 2016

How Obama ‘Legalized’ the War on Terror

Among the troubling legacies of Barack Obama’s presidency is his consolidation of the dubious legal principles that George W. Bush cobbled together to justify the Global War on Terror, explains Michael Brenner.

President Barack Obama’s uneasy encounters with the law in devising numerous innovative means to prosecute the “War on Terror” are treated exhaustively in Charlie Savage’s much discussed book, Power Wars. This compendious volume is destined to be a landmark in the writing of the period’s history.

It also should be seen as a marker of its times as it at once explains how Obama sought legal grounds by which to justify methods that skirt the Constitution and takes at face value the assertions of those who claim to have done a conscientious analysis of the laws and the Constitution without prejudice.

President Barack Obama concludes a National Security Council meeting in the Situation Room of the White House, April 19, 2016. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Therein lies the heart of the dilemma associated with an account of this kind. For there are two broad approaches available. One is to surmise that policy preferences were made prior to and independent of the legal exegesis – however elaborate that exercise may have been.

The other is to give the participants, in the Oval Office on down, the benefit of considerable doubt in ascribing to them an earnest dedication to ascertaining where the legal boundaries lay before the decisions were taken on policies and programs.

Savage doesn’t make a choice – explicitly. He does so implicitly, though, by concentrating on a systematic account of the deliberative process among the lawyers charged with demarcating legal territory. For this purpose, he spent hundreds of hours interviewing those officials. The strategic and political dimensions are present only as background factors.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Dire Future

May 7, 2016

A Dire Future

Do you remember all the hopes Americans had for Obama when we elected him to his first term? Painful memories. He betrayed the voters on every one of his promises. There was no change, except for the worst as Obama went on to become one of the most vicious war criminals in world history. Despite his horrific record, we re-elected him, only to have US economic policy turn against the people in order to bail out at our expense the mega-banks and the One Percent.

Now Obama is coercing Asia and Europe to turn the governments of their countries over to rapacious American corporations empowered by TPP and TTIP to subordinate all interests to their profits.

Here is Pepe Escobar on how the great and wonderful United States treats its enserfed vassals: “Hardball, predictably, is the name of the game. Washington no less than threatened to block EU car exports [to the US] to force the EU to buy [Monsanto’s] genetically engineered fruits and vegetables.” http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article44594.htm

Now we face the prospect of electing an even worse president than Obama—Killary Clinton. Killary is the bought-and-paid-for property of Wall Street, Israel, and the military-security complex. She will bring back to power the totally discredited neoconservatives, and the US will proceed with its butchery and slaughter of other countries and all reformist governments everywhere.

The question is: will enough insouciant Americans align with the One Percent, the neocons, the men-hating feminists, homosexuals, the transgendered, and other “preferred minorities” to put the US presidency in the hands of an aggressive, corrupt person with a conscience deficit? That is the goal toward which the presstitutes are driving the brainwashed.

If we end up with Killary, neither the US nor the world will survive the mistake. She will be the last American president.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Peak Oil: Are We Not Better Than This? Pt 5

May 2, 2016

Peak Oil: Are We Not Better Than This? Pt 5

[T]he West’s energy security is assured to a degree that has not existed in the past.
That’s good news for the American people and for the world, even if it is not news that Obama wants to hear.

He doesn’t? I wonder how that author knows this? Any chance it’s instead just a variation of the same let’s-not-consider-facts-and-instead-just-make-stuff-up-to-“prove”-our-point-and-keep-the-followers-properly-agitated strategy?

With a century’s worth of cheap, practical energy in hand, the global economy has a good chance of expanding.

A “good chance”?! And that would be based on … what?

What if we actually had meaningful discussions about the assertions contained in ExxonMobil’s “The Outlook for Energy: A View to 2040” report which the author of the above-quote focused on [in one of the two articles which serve as the foundation of this series]? What if it was finally agreed that just firing off assertions based on little more than conjecture, hope, or a let’s-do-or-say-whatever-we-have-to animosity?

There’s no reason my grandchildren should not be living ten times as well as I am today. What stands in their way is not a lack of resources or technology – it’s government. Specially, liberal government.

Of course that’s the problem! Geology? Costs? An array of exploration, production, financial, and access considerations? Nah! Just liberals in keeping with their still vast, double-top-super-duper-secret conspiracy to … do stuff that the Right doesn’t approve of. We certainly don’t want our children or grandchildren to have better opportunities and better lives than we’ve enjoyed! Nope!

Our focus continues to be solely on dealing with facts, raising concerns based on same, seeking options and alternatives, planning, preparing, and … wait! Where is that approach going to take all of us? Damn those facts!

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

One More Casualty Of The 9/11 Farce – The Petrodollar

April 27, 2016

One More Casualty Of The 9/11 Farce – The Petrodollar

It’s been about 15 years now since passenger airliners struck the World Trade Center towers on 9/11, and we are still suffering the consequences of that day, though perhaps not in the ways many Americans might believe.

The 9/11 attacks were billed by the Bush Administration as a “wake-up call” for the U.S., and neocons called it the new Pearl Harbor. But instead of it being an awaking, the American public was led further into blind ignorance. The event launched wars throughout the Middle East, energized by a strike-first doctrine which was supposed to bring unprecedented “democracy” to the region. Instead, the Middle East has now become as unstable as it was during WWII.

The penchant for Western governments to fund and train terrorist groups is now verifiable mainstream fact rather than being considered “conspiracy theory” as was the common accusation back in 2001. Pentagon papers outlining support for the formation of ISIS are available for anyone to read. The only disconnect that the public still seems to suffer from is that orthodox Republicans fail to recognize that the support for Islamic terrorism has been just as prevalent under Republican presidents (al-Qaeda) as it has been under Barack Obama. And, Democrats refuse to recognize that Barack Obama has been guilty of all the same criminal foreign policies they used to protest under George W. Bush.

There have been substantial economic consequences as well. The Iraq War alone is estimated to have cost around $2 trillion, with billions more in veteran benefits forthcoming. These numbers, of course, stop accounting for costs after 2010, when the war was deemed officially “over.” Costs continue to this day as the U.S. maintains its military presence in the region along with thousands of private contractors we rarely ever hear about.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Torrid Week for the Transatlantic Corporatocracy

April 27, 2016

A Torrid Week for the Transatlantic Corporatocracy

The carefully woven fabric is unraveling.

A new survey conducted by YouGov for the Bertelsmann Foundation showed that only 17% of Germans believe the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a good thing, down from 55% two years ago.

In the United States, only 18% support the deal compared to 53% in 2014.

Such low popularity ratings are an incredible feat for a trade agreement that until last year the public had barely even heard of, purposefully, even as it had been on the negotiation table for years, while the governments associated with it had expected to pass it with flying colors.

During his visit to Germany at the weekend, President Barack Obama tried to breathe life back into the deal, insisting that “the majority of people still favor trade” and “still recognize, on balance, that it’s a good idea.” While that may be so, TTIP, like the other alphabet-soup trade agreements, is not really about promoting trade; it’s about reconfiguring the legal apparatus and superstructures that govern national, regional, and global commerce, business and society, for the benefit of the world’s largest multinational corporations.

Obama could not have chosen a worse possible location to plug his sacred trade deal. Offering a quite visible contradiction to his rose-tinted interpretation of corporate-sponsored trade deals, tens of thousands marched against TTIP in the streets of Hanover on Saturday. Opposition to the trade agreement is also fierce among Germany’s Mittelstand (small and medium-size companies), which represent over 90% of firms in the country. A 2014 Commerzbank study found that only 15% of Mittlestand companies believe TTIP would be a good thing for their business.

Germany’s not alone. Across the old continent, public opposition to TTIP is swelling. Just in the past week three vital developments took place that spell even more trouble for the transatlantic corporatocracy.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Doug Casey Warns: “It’s The Next Stage Of The Greater Depression… The Economy Is Going To Be Very, Very Bad”

April 25, 2016

Doug Casey Warns: “It’s The Next Stage Of The Greater Depression… The Economy Is Going To Be Very, Very Bad”

While President Obama took credit this weekend for saving the world economy from a global depression and stock markets are hovering around all-time highs, not everyone is convinced that central bank policy and government involvement in financial markets has stabilized the system. Doug Casey, one of the most well respected institutional investors in the world and someone who thrives in environments plagued with volatility and risk, joins Future Money Trends to explain exactly why the world has not avoided a Greater Depression and how things are about to get “very, very bad.”

And by very bad he means that centrally manufactured super-bubbles and bubbles are set to wipe out trillions.

You’ve got to remember that all of these governments and central banks all around the world have driven interest rates not just to zero, but to negative levels in some cases… and they are simultaneously printing up trillions of currency units. And even while they are desperately doing that the economy is falling apart in lots of different ways.

…They’ve created a super-bubble in bonds, a bubble in stocks, and meanwhile commodities have collapsed and are below production costs in many cases.

…The economy is going to be very, very bad… It’s the next stage of what I call the Greater Depression.

Full interview via Future Money Trends:

(Watch At Youtube)

But as centrally manufactured bubbles burst in one sector of the economy, says Casey, capital will flow en masse to other sectors as investors panic. First to safe haven assets like gold, and then to to broader commodities which have been left for dead since the start of the decade:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is the US trying to destroy ISIS?

April 24, 2016

Someone asked me to find war lies during the past few years. Perhaps they had in mind the humanitarian pretenses around attacking Libya in 2011 and Iraq in 2014, or the false claims about chemical weapons in 2013, or the lies about an airplane in Ukraine or the endlessly reported Russian invasions of Ukraine. Maybe they were thinking of the “ISIS Is In Brooklyn” headlines or the routine false claims about the identities of drone victims or the supposedly imminent victory in Afghanistan or in one of the other wars. The lies seem far too numerous for me to fit into an essay, though I’ve tried many times, and they are layered over a bedrock of more general lies about what works, what is legal, and what is moral. Just a Prince Tribute selection of lies could include Qadaffi’s viagra for the troops and CNN’s sex-toys flag as evidence of ISIS in Europe. It’s hard to scrape the surface of all U.S. war lies in something less than a book, which is why I wrote a book.

So, I replied that I would look for war lies just in 2016. But that was way too big as well, of course. I once tried to find all the lies in one speech by Obama and ended up just writing about the top 45. So, I’ve taken a glance at two of the most recent speeches on the White House website, one by Obama and one by Susan Rice. I think they provide ample evidence of how we’re being lied to.

In an April 13th speech to the CIA, President Barack Obama declared, “One of my main messages today is that destroying ISIL continues to be my top priority.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why US Govt. And Saudi Arabia Don’t Want Americans Knowing the Truth About 9/11

April 22, 2016

Why US Govt. And Saudi Arabia Don’t Want Americans Knowing the Truth About 9/11

(ANTIMEDIA) In a rare show of bipartisanship, President Obama and top Republicans in Congress have come together to shield Americans from knowing the truth about who was behind the 9/11 terror attacks, which took the lives of 2996 people in 2001. However strange it is for neoconservative members of Congress to agree with Obama on anything, there is no doubt the issue must be serious if it warrants this level of partnership.

The issue at hand is the classified, 28-page section of the 9/11 commission report, which many experts and politicians with knowledge of the documents have said point to Saudi Arabian government officials’ direct role in the terror attacks. This is why the Saudis put out a stern warning several days ago threatening to dump up to $750 billion in U.S. assets if Senate Bill 2040 becomes law; S.B. 2040 would make public the 28 pages and also allow for victims of 9/11 to sue foreign governments found responsible.

The Saudis’ warning seems to have worked, with Obama now in the nation to “mend ties” with the monarchy and top Republicans sounding the alarm about the 9/11 bill. In an interview with Charlie Rose, President Obama claimed:

“If we open up the possibility that individuals in the United States can routinely start suing other governments, then we are also opening up the United States to being continually sued by individuals in other countries,” apparently referencing the U.S.’ own attacks overseas that have taken the lives of countless civilians.

Currently, Saudi Arabia enjoys “sovereign immunity” with the U.S., meaning even if the 28 pages proved Saudi officials were indeed behind the 9/11 attacks, Americans would not be able to seek justice for their losses. The new 9/11 bill would change that, and the Saudi response to the legislation moving through Congress reinforces suspicions the kingdom is somehow behind the 9/11 attacks.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

US Assaults British Sovereignty

April 21, 2016

US Assaults British Sovereignty

The Washington elite believe that the British people should serve Washington’s interest and not their own. To this end, President Obama has been sent to London to emphasize that the UK must remain in the EU.

Does this make you wonder why it is important to Washington for the British people to surrender their national sovereignty to the European Union? If not, it should.

It is easier and less expensive for Washington to control the EU government than to control 28 seperate governments. For example, if Washington wants to open up Europe to Monsanto, it is easier for Washington to bribe one EU government than to deal with 28 governments, especially as the European Commission is not accountable to the European people, whereas the individual populations of the countries would make their objections known to the national governments. The EU can open the door to Monsanto without accountability.

If you think the US government has too much integrity and righteousness to force the EU to serve
Europeans and not Monsanto, read this: http://www.globalresearch.ca/gmos-produced-through-gene-editing-european-commission-fails-to-regulate-new-gmos-after-intense-us-lobbying/5521139

Then there is the NATO consideration. NATO is cover for Washington’s war crimes. Without this cover there likely would be arrest warrants for US officials and, if not, certainly much hostile publicity. The notion that Washington is bringing “freedom and democracy” when it destroys a country would no longer fly.

If the UK leaves the EU, other countries are likely to follow. The desertion could spread to NATO, in which case Washington’s hegemony over Europe and ability to threaten and destabilize Russia disappear. The neoconservatives cannot stand the thought.

Just as have the Americans and Europeans, the British have been lied to, deceived, and brainwashed for so long that it is surprising that such a large part of the population and political element are in favor of the UK leaving the EU.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Economic Collapse? Fed Issues an Ominous Warning to JPMorgan Chase and Leaders Flock to Secret Meetings

April 19, 2016

Economic Collapse? Fed Issues an Ominous Warning to JPMorgan Chase and Leaders Flock to Secret Meetings

Tick. Tock.

Do you hear that? It’s the clock on the time bomb, and it appears to be ticking relentlessly toward our economic collapse.

It seems like every day, there is a new threat to the financial well-being of the disappearing middle class in America. Of course, less affected are the members of Congress and their buddies on Wall Street. You know, the ones that put the politicians in office to get favorable decisions made on their behalf in Washington.

But if you happen to have been ignoring the folks Obama calls “peddlers of fiction” who have been warning us all of an impending economic crisis along the lines of the last financial collapse, you might want to pay attention now, because a disturbing series of events is in motion.

First of all, the Fed just issued a terrifying warning to the biggest bank in the country.

Finally, the Fed has admitted that we just can’t take another hit without incurring an epic disaster.

And by “admitted” I mean they’ve issued a chilling warning to JP Morgan Chase, the biggest bank in America.

The letter is addressed to Teflon-coated Jamie Dimon, the leader of the bank (who seems to have made a deal with the Devil to become completely immune to prosecution, no matter what he does.)

It is 19 pages and heavily redacted, but here are some excerpts that should send a chill down your spine. The emphasis is mine.

The Agencies also identified a deficiency in the 2015 Plan regarding the criteria for a rational and less-complex legal entity structure. In order to substantially mitigate the risk that JPMC ‘s material financial distress and failure would have systemic effects, JPMC should ensure that its legal entity structure promotes resolvability under the preferred resolution strategy across a range of failure scenarios.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A World War Has Begun. Break the Silence.

April 18, 2016

A World War Has Begun. Break the Silence.

I have been filming in the Marshall Islands, which lie north of Australia, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Whenever I tell people where I have been, they ask, “Where is that?” If I offer a clue by referring to “Bikini”, they say, “You mean the swimsuit.”

Few seem aware that the bikini swimsuit was named to celebrate the nuclear explosions that destroyed Bikini island. Sixty-six nuclear devices were exploded by the United States in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958 — the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs every day for twelve years.

Bikini is silent today, mutated and contaminated. Palm trees grow in a strange grid formation. Nothing moves. There are no birds. The headstones in the old cemetery are alive with radiation. My shoes registered “unsafe” on a Geiger counter.

Standing on the beach, I watched the emerald green of the Pacific fall away into a vast black hole. This was the crater left by the hydrogen bomb they called “Bravo”. The explosion poisoned people and their environment for hundreds of miles, perhaps forever.

On my return journey, I stopped at Honolulu airport and noticed an American magazine called Women’s Health. On the cover was a smiling woman in a bikini swimsuit, and the headline: “You, too, can have a bikini body.” A few days earlier, in the Marshall Islands, I had interviewed women who had very different “bikini bodies”; each had suffered thyroid cancer and other life-threatening cancers.

Unlike the smiling woman in the magazine, all of them were impoverished: the victims and guinea pigs of a rapacious superpower that is today more dangerous than ever.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why is the MSM Covering Up Recessionary Data?

April 14, 2016

WHY IS THE MSM COVERING UP RECESSIONARY DATA?

The Census Bureau put out their monthly retail sales report this morning. During good times, the MSM would be hailing the tremendous increases as proof the consumer was flush with cash and all was well with the economy. Considering 70% of our GDP is dependent upon consumer spending, you would think this data point would be pretty important in judging how well Americans are really doing.

It’s not perfect, because the issuance of debt to consumers to purchase autos, furniture, appliances and electronics can juice the retail sales numbers and create the false impression of strength. That’s what has been going on with auto sales for the last two years.

The retail sales figures have been propped up by the issuance of subprime auto loans to deadbeats, 7 year 0% interest loans to good credit customers, and an all-time high in leases (aka 3 year rentals). Despite this Fed induced auto loan scheme, retail sales have still been pitiful, as the average American has been left with stagnant wages, 0% interest on their minuscule savings, surging rent and home prices, and drastic increases in their healthcare costs due to Obamacare.

The retail sales for March, reported this morning, were disastrous and further confirmed a myriad of other economic indicators that the country is in recession. GDP for the first quarter will be negative. And this time they can’t blame it on snow in the winter. They have already doubly seasonally adjusted the figures, and they will still be negative. Retail sales in the first quarter were atrocious. It might make a critical thinking person question the establishment storyline of solid job growth being peddled by politicians and their MSM mouthpieces. If people had good paying jobs, they would be spending money.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Duping Progressives into Wars

April 14, 2016

Duping Progressives into Wars

The online advocacy group, Avaaz, has pulled progressives into support of U.S. “humanitarian” wars in Libya and Syria by promoting sweet-sounding ideas like “no-fly zones,” as John Hanrahan explains.

In a recent two-part series in The New York Times laid out in detail the pivotal role that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton played in President Obama’s decision to join in France and Britain’s 2011 military campaign against long-time Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. The Times articles make the case that Clinton bears a heavy part of the responsibility for the tragic, increasingly chaotic aftermath of that campaign in which Gaddafi was ousted and killed.

As The Times summaries of the articles put it, Gaddafi’s fall “seemed to vindicate Hillary Clinton. Then militias refused to disarm, neighbors fanned a civil war, and the Islamic State found refuge,” leaving Libya “a failed state and a terrorist haven.”

Ousted Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi shortly before he was murdered on Oct. 20, 2011.

While neocons, right-wingers and humanitarian interventionists back in 2011 were seeking regime change in Libya, there was one non-governmental organization that was alone among progressive groups in mobilizing public opinion around the world in support of military action in Libya in the form of “a no-fly zone.”

And this wasn’t just any organization, but the fast-growing, on-line advocacy giant Avaaz.org, which in 2011 had seven million members and today boasts 43.1-million members in 194 countries. As such, the New York City-based Avaaz is, as we noted in a previous article, the largest and most influential Internet-based, international advocacy organization on the planet.

Through its members’ petitions and a full-page ad last June in The New York Times, Avaaz has for the last few years been pushing for “a no-fly zone” in Syria, as have assorted neocons and war-hawks in Congress and think-tanks who favor military operations to remove Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from power.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

America Now Preparing for World War III

April 13, 2016

America Now Preparing for World War III

Because this article states so many things that might be likely to contradict what most people in Western countries have been led to believe, readers here are especially strongly encouraged to click onto any allegation which seems at all questionable, in order to get to the sources behind any given questionable allegation. And wherever a clicked-onto source turns out to be another article, one is encouraged similarly to do the same there, so that the reader will be able, in this way, to probe down to the ultimate sources, which are the sources upon which this article is finally based.

After having expanded NATO right up to Russia’s borders and essentially surrounded Russia with US military installations, the United States is now using the pretext of Russia’s having allowed the people of Crimea in 2014 to rejoin Russia (after the Soviet dictator Khrushchev had transferred Crimea from Russia to Ukraine in 1954) as being an excuse for arming and soldiering Russia’s northwestern borders sufficiently to be able to launch as soon as 2017 a ground invasion of Russia, which would then be backed up by US air power and nuclear arms.

In the United States and Europe, the promotion for this action presents the plan as purely defensive against ‘Russian aggression’, for Russia’s having ‘seized’ Crimea in 2014. Promptly, US President Barack Obama slapped economic sanctions against Russia for Russia’s accepting Crimea back into Russia. It was actually hardly a ‘seizure’; it was a protection of the residents there, 75% of whom had voted for the man who had recently been overthrown in a violent coup (which was presented in the West as being a ‘democratic revolution’.)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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