The Writing Shop

Announcing Kirov - Military Science Fiction

2012-01-18T07:19:00.000-08:00

The Writing Shop is pleased to announced that author John Schettler has completed a new novel in the popular military science genre.

Kirov – Military Science Fiction (Naval) – Available Mar 15, 2012

The battlecruiser Kirov, is the most power surface combatant that ever put to sea. Built from the bones of all four prior Kirov Class guided missile cruisers, she is updated with Russia’s most lethal weapons, given back her old name, and commissioned in the year 2020. A year later, with tensions rising to the breaking point between Russia and the West, Kirov is completing her final missile trials in the Arctic Sea when a strange accident transports her to another time. With power no ship in the world can match, much less comprehend, she must decide the fate of nations in the most titanic conflict the world has ever seen—WWII.

The novel is an intensely focused naval saga, where the crew of the lost Russian battlecruiser must struggle to understand what has happened to them, and then make a choice that could be decisive in the outcome of the war—who’s side are they on? It is late July of 1941, and Germany has only recently invaded Russia, driving on Smolensk and Leningrad. The Nazis are clearly their enemy today, but it is the British and Americans who are their enemy tomorrow. After decades of suspicion and enmity, the Russia of 2021 is again at a major crisis point with Western powers. Yet, at this crucial time, Kirov finds herself just days and miles away from a secret summit at sea between Churchill and Roosevelt. On August 9, 1941, the two great leaders meet to plan cooperation in the war and lay down the Atlantic Charter, which decides the framework of post war power in the world and becomes the basis for the new United Nations and NATO.

With the hindsight of history as their guide, Kirov races south toward the secret meeting place at Argentia Bay in Newfoundland. Even as she cruises for the Denmark strait, both Roosevelt and Churchill prepare to embark for the sea journey as well. The Russian battlecruiser has an opportunity to decisively affect the outcome of the war, and all future history, but the Royal Navy soon discovers what they believe to be a fearsome new German raider in the Norwegian Sea, and they join with America’s Atlantic Fleet to bar the way and hunt down the most formidable surface action ship in the world.

The novel is an exciting, tense and highly focused naval saga that makes the fabled hunt for the Bismarck look like a training exercise!

Kirov is by John Schettler, the award winning author of the Meridian time travel series, is in final review and being readied for a release in mid February, 2012, by the Writing Shop Press. The book will be released on Amazon and Smashwords in popular eBook formats and sell for $4.99.

ISBN 978-0-9849465-1-8 - 320 Pages, about 120,000 words.
For more information and final release date please visit www.writingshop.ws

MERIDIAN V: Golem 7

2011-12-13T09:48:00.000-08:00

JUST RELEASED! (12/12/11)

Book V in the award winning Meridian Series Time Travel novels has just been released. The book brings this quintet of novels blending sci-fi and historical fiction to a satisfying conclusion, with the promise of more to come. Buy Golem 7 on Amazon.

Book V: Golem7

"Nordhausenis back with new research and his hand on the neck of the new terrorist behindthe Palma Event. Now the project team struggles to discover how and where theAssassins have intervened to restore the chaos of Palma, and their search leadsthem on one of the greatest naval sagas of modern history--the hunt for the German battleship Bismarck.

REVIEW:

The title Golem 7 refers to an industrious grouping of Kelly Ramer’s search Golem programs, who seem to be well ahead of the others in uncovering alarming variations in the history. By some means the Bismarck was not sunk on its maiden voyage, and now the team must sleuth the course of events in that campaign to find out how and why, and try to put the ship back in its watery grave before its fifteen inch guns wreak havoc on British convoys, and the time continuum as well!

This volume presents a new approach in the telling of the story. The same crisp and informative dialogue is used here to set the parameters of the history and mission, but the main weapon used by the project team this time is information. After identifying the key Pushpoints involved, the author then launches into a convincing and exciting alternate history retelling of the campaign, where all the little details in the history are keenly elucidated and one comes to feel that the history itself rested on the most precarious stack of small, inconsequential events.

These live history scenes alternate in groups with the more familiar chapters set in the Berkeley Lawrence Lab facility, as the author shows us results on a live stage peopled by the real historical figures instead of having his team members just talk about it in the lab. In those scenes, the team tries to understand how their interventions have affected the history we have just witnessed on stage, and try again with another intervention until they get the change they are hoping for.

As it turns out, the Bismarck is one slippery fish to reel in! In fact, after reading this you will come to feel that it was sheer luck that the British managed to sink the German ship at all, and wonder if someone actually was operating in time to control these odd events--a possibility darkly hinted at by the conclusion of the novel. The details here, some ferreted out of individual ship logs and eyewitness reports, are astounding. If you like naval sagas, as the author clearly does, you will love Golem 7. The treatment of the live history scenes, while unique, reads much like a C.S. Forester novel, and that is a compliment, to be sure."

Meridian V: Golem 7 is now available on Amazon.com here

Meridian IV: Anvil of Fate Just Released!

2011-11-08T12:20:00.000-08:00

The Writing Shop Press announces the release of Book IV in the award winning Meridian Series Time Travel novels by John Schettler. Meridian IV: Anvil of Fate is now available on the Amazon Kindle store and will also be released on Smashwords.com in numerous other eBook formats by Friday, Nov 11, 2011.

In volume IV, the Time War continues with a major intervention by the Assassin Cult aimed at defeating Charles Martel at the famous Battle of Tours. More on the Meridian Series novels here, including reviews and video trailers. Book V in the popular series, entitled Golem 7, is due out in 30 days!

Two New Meridian Novels Scheduled For Fall Release

2011-09-27T09:53:00.000-07:00

The Writing Shop has announced that the popular "Meridian" series time travel novels by John Schettler will continue, with a fourth book entitled The Anvil of Fate due out this fall in eBook format, followed soon after by a fifth volume tentatively titled Golem 7.

In the fourth volume, Anvil of Fate, the cryptic ending of Touchstone is clearly explained, and the project team now faces the most significant attack yet from unseen adversaries in the future, an "intervention" at a key moment in the 8th Century that threatens to completely alter the entire course of Western history in an outcome that is absolutely catastrophic, to say the least. The project team sleuths through the history to identify three key "Pushpoints" or levers on the historical events, and to think of what may have happened here gives one a real shudder. VIDEO TEASER HERE

The fifth volume Golem 7 begins just days after the conclusion of volume IV and sees the project team finally attempting to reverse the effects of the Palma Event, which was restored to the timeline earlier in the series. But far from just being about 'unfinished business,' it stands on its own as a unique alternate history novel set in the early years of WWII. When Chief Historian Nordhausen puts his hand squarely on the neck of the man he believes is now responsible for the plot, the threads of his research lead the team into the midst of one of the greatest naval sagas of all time. The author has also ended this one with a deep hook that opens the possibility of further series novels "in the future." VIDEO TRAILER HERE

The Meridian series explores the successful efforts of a project team at the Berkeley Lawrence Labs to travel in time, and the opening book, Meridian, focuses on the struggle to reverse a modern day terrorist event that makes 9/11 pale by comparison. Building on the award winning success of the series opener, two sequels have already been published, Nexus Point and Touchstone.

In the first sequel, Nexus Point, the team discovers that their technology has been discovered and used by adversaries in the future, and that a "Time War" is now underway where each opposing side is attempting to influence key moments in the meridians of history to alter events and secure a decisive cultural and political advantage in their world of the future. The third volume, Touchstone, sees the Berkeley team drawn further into the complex struggle in a harrowing mission to Egypt at the time of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone during Napoleon's invasion. Here they meet and learn more about the adversaries in this Time War and are slowly entangled in operations aimed at preserving the meridian of history as they know it.

This trilogy of novels will soon be joined by these two new volumes to form a "quintet" of stories, all related to one another in one massive Time travel adventure series. But don't look for chase scenes and gunfire here, and there are no mandatory teenage characters or cute little kids about as in typical run of the mill Hollywood treatments of this genre. These novels are heady, intriguing looks at key crisis points in history where the effects of even minor interventions can cause major consequences.

Ever since H.G. Wells first penned his landmark novel, The Time Machine, the genre has been extremely popular in its ability to blend both science and historical fiction together in one story. All the key elements of the genre are here, a plausible theory of how time travel is possible, incredible plot that has a new twist around every corner, the confounding effects of paradox and, of course, time shifts into key moments of the past where the team seeks to influence the "Pushpoints" of history, the actual triggers that set off and influence the outcomes of major events. Yet the theory here is that the really great events are set in motion by small inconsequential moments in time, little accidents, mishaps, stumbles, loose threads in the weave of time that become the real movers and shakers of history. Sleuthing the history to find these key moments makes up a large part of the fun and enjoyment in these stories.The four key characters are sharply drawn, the dialogue crisp and intelligent, the plot well structured and full of surprises.

Both new novels are now in final review and should be available in the Amazon Kindle store, on Smashwords.com and many other popular eBook outlets this fall.

MERIDIAN SERIES VIDEO TRAILER FEATURING ALL FIVE NOVELS

Doom On Ice

2011-09-27T09:37:00.000-07:00

Well... Here we are. The dreadful date of Sept 27, 2011 has been the focal point of so many predictions of doom on the internet that I can't begin to count them. Suffice it to say that the puny comet Elenin is now lined up with the sun and earth, and since this supposedly triggered earthquakes, including the big 9.0 in Japan last March, we were told to expect a mega-quake on this date. We were also told Elenin was so big that it would literally blot out the sun and there would be three days of darkness. But it's a beautiful, quiet sunny day here in Monterey, CA...No earthquake, no darkness, no Blue Kachina, no Red Kachina, in fact, no Elenin--the darn thing has been breaking up and diminishing in size for weeks now.

Let's face it folks....No, the world elite, on vacation, are not all out heading for their underground bunkers. And NO, these hidden sites have not been nuked lately, and NO there is no massive Brown Dwarf crackling with a super magnetic field about to toast us all here on Mother Earth. No, I'm sorry, there is nothing about this on a Swiss Frank either. It's all nonsense--all of it--junk on the Internet posted by people who don't seem to believe their lives have any viable or meaningful future. Perhaps it's a shadow of the times, with the economy so dark and gloomy that it inevitably manifests in these predictions of utter doom. And face it, there's more than one shyster out there making money off this, be it giving seminars or selling "insider info" on "what's about to happen."

Doomers, it's time to put that doom on ice or reset the doom clock again. You've still have all your doom dates in October to look forward to, and of course your 2012 doom schedule as well, but like this day, good old Sept 27, 2011 these dates will also pass uneventfully by, and you'll just have your ordinary, and apparently hopeless lives in front of you. Just this. Just this, and nothing more. Oh, yes, we'll have earthquakes, and typhoons and all the rest in the years ahead. We've always had them, and we always will.

What we won't have is the earth getting fried by Nibiru, or a hail of Elenin tail debris pummeling us to death. It would make a great Hollywood blockbuster however. You want doom? There's plenty home cooked to go around without needing a rogue planet to crash the dinner party. Look no further than the Banksters and the Fed, the IMF and Wall Street. There's all the doom you'll need for years to come.

In the meantime, the pumpkins are stacking up outside the grocery stores, the Christmas ornaments are being hung in the big mall anchors. The leaves are turning, fading, falling. It's autumn, and may it be a lovely one this year. And for those of you who cannot see a spring in your lives next year...Believe.

The Great Equalizer

2011-07-21T15:01:00.000-07:00

It's amazing how the Internet empowers us these days. The entire phenomenon of POD publishing has, in just a few years, morphed into a new digital eBook revolution. More books are now selling in the Amazon Kindle store than in their printed copy store. This does not surprise me, though it seemed to catch Borders Books off guard, and their inability to adapt to the digital revolution like Barnes & Noble did led to their sad demise.

One of my favorite bloggers, Juan Cole, recently posted a lament for the loss of Borders, fearing it may signal the end of the book store. Something about browsing the books, smelling the newly printed editions, enjoying a quiet read with a cup of coffee cannot be put into a Kindle. But readers are voting with their dollars, and the industry will follow this new digital trend, as I have. My Kindle sales now exceed actual physical book sales on all my novels and, in an effort to generate interest, I've been making some video trailers and posting on Youtube.

Here's an example of a trailer for my Silk Road series novels:

And here's a trailer I made for the popular Meridian Series Time Travel books I've written.

One of the fun parts was composing and recording the background music on my electronic keyboard, a tool that puts a full orchestra at your fingertips, quite literally. Tools like the computer, the Internet and this keyboard allow creative individuals to compete directly and successfully with the big publishing houses that once had complete control of an author's work. Those days are gone, as the Internet has become a great equalizer in the business of publishing. The challenge, of course, is how do you market your books effectively?

At the Writing Shop, my full time business, I've helped many other authors get their materials ready for both book and eBook publishing. Let's face it, a lot of very gifted people may be great writers, but they may not be artists and designers as well, with the required computer skills to produce their book blocks, cover designs, eBook formats and marketing materials. I've been privileged to help many through my Author Services Program at the Writing Shop, and to teach them about how they can put the Great Equalizer to work for them as well!

Are you an author with a successful marketing method for the Internet? I'd love to hear about it, and would be happy to publish your thoughts about the digital revolution and how you can reach more readers on my Writing Shop web site.

Thanks for reading!

John Schettler

Good Reads

2011-07-14T17:16:00.000-07:00

I recently discovered an interesting web site, GoodReads.com, and put up an author's profile page there for my novels. With over 5 million users, its a kind of literary Facebook, where people share their favorite books, write reviews, share what they are reading now, join discussion groups and forums, etc.

So give it a try and make some literary friends!

JS

The Overmind Worries

2011-07-07T08:23:00.000-07:00

The Internet today is like a vast multicultural overmind. Browsing the many blogs and web sites one can get a peek at the stream of consciousness, and I imagine that large search sites like Google are in an interesting position. They can view and interpret data that shows what the overmind is thinking, asking, wondering about. (Not to mention the fact that they also host thousands of blogs where individuals like myself vent their own internal thought strands.)

Lately the Overmind has been very worrisome. Sample the net and you will quickly find a huge dose of anxiety and outrage about the economy and the impending "collapse" of civilization. Sage advisers lecture and offer investment advice for riding out the coming storm. In its darker corners, the net is abuzz with conspiracy theory, distrust of government in all forms, hints of global masters secretly plotting history, and all with a backwash of imminent doom on an astronomical scale. Hollywood's blockbuster "2012" busted more than a few blocks. It touched a deep nerve of anxiety in the Overmind that seems to be nervously waiting for "earth changes."

There are maps on the net, reputed to be drawn by seers and prognosticators, that show vast changes to continents, like the massive flooding of the central US and disappearance of huge segments of the west coast, and most of Europe. Ever since Gordon Michael Scallion began hawking his map of the future world, this talk of "earth changes" has been a worrisome strain of thought in the bitstream.

Of late, however, there has been more and more posting about the arrival of a Nemisis to our inner solar system. NASA says the visitor is a long period comet, now named "Elenin" after the last name of the man who discovered it, Leonid Elenin. But the Overmind quickly dismissed that with talk of coverup and conspiracy, helped along by the fact that Google is inconveniently missing an image in the section of the sky where this object is supposed to be at any given moment. Any hint of censorship on the net quickly becomes fodder for conspiracy. Elenin is now supposed to be a acronym for "Extinction Level Event Now Is Near." The doom-sayers insist it is no simple comet, but the mysterious 10th planet they call "Nibiru," which they claim is really a brown dwarf companion star to our sun, the fabled "Bearded Star" that appeared in ancient times and is making its modern day debut this year.

Like an uninvited guest at our dinner party, this "thing" has now crossed the orbit of Mars and is heading for a close approach to earth on October 17th of this year, where it will be .0232 astronomical units from our world. (About 21.5 million miles.) There have been papers published claiming that the alignment of this body with the earth and sun has been causing all the volcanic and tectonic activity we've been experiencing in recent years, with big earthquakes occurring every time such an alignment occurs. Others claim that the mass of the object is so great that it will do one of two things: force a magnetic pole shift or force a much more radical tilting of the earth itself--a physical pole shift. UPDATE: The claim is now being made that the object has already caused a 90 degree tilt of the planet Saturn, and ignited major storms in its turbulent atmosphere. "Calculations" have appeared on the web indicating that the earth is also going to make a mighty planetary tilt as well. There are detailed timelines posted on the net, a plethora of Youtube videos and a gaggle of web sites all explaining what is supposedly about to happen, just weeks away now, as the massive gravitational pull of Nibiru is supposed to literally pull the earth over on its side as our planet "bows" to the interloper vying for control with our own sun. Good luck to anyone on the planet in surviving that!

Needless to say, this is "worrisome" to segments of the Overmind. I have run across posts that claim they overhear wealthy folks speaking in hushed conversations at country clubs about being "ticket holders" to special underground survival facilities, an idea floated through the script of the movie 2012 as well, where the elite sought refuge in their own modern version of Noah's Arc.

Drat...I don't have a ticket, so I guess I'll just have to ride out "the Show" with the rest of the rank and file. I'm comforted by the thought that NASA says Elenin is rather wimpy as comets go, and that given its size and distance from earth, you own car has more gravitational influence over the earth than Elenin does! I'll post again on this in October, so we can finally put this to rest and move on to something else. There are going to be a lot of very disappointed doomers and earth changers out there when September and October pass quietly by and the earth remains happily in its orbit--no Nibiru, no Nemesis, no Planet X, no passage through the tail of a massive brown dwarf star. It will be interesting to see how all the presently existing web sites devoted to this cut and run for cover when nothing happens. Will they all just edit their timelines and post new dates a few years hence, saying that Elenin was just a harbinger, the first in a series of dark objects yet to come, passing by like a prophet with its early warning. That's the most likely outcome.

UPDATE: True to this prediction, on July 27 another lengthy article seized the on-line doomer community with the claim that Elenin was indeed simply a harbinger. The "calculations" indicate that Nibiru is traveling in the wake of the comet, some 8 Astronomical Units behind it. This would put it close to the earth not this October, but a full year later, in October of 2012. As the Church Lady might say, "How convenient!" So we now have another full year of "impending doom" just when their lease on predicted catastrophe was drawing very short and about to be disproved when Elenin passed us harmlessly by.

Drat, I guess this means that all the "proof" of Elenin's awesome power that was supposedly printed on a Swiss Franc is, well..., BOGUS! (Not to mention the fact the the obvious comet depicted on that bank note is a short period object called "Halley's Comet," and not Elenin, which is approaching earth from an entirely different angle. But heck, who cares about details like that.) And by the way, Saturn has NOT tilted on its side, nor is there any massive object 8 AUs behind Elenin.

So many of these sites are so dead sure this is the arrival of Nibiru that they'll have to do a real song and dance to cover for the embarrassment when nothing happens. What will they think of next, then, to fill that yawning space in the soul that longs for catastrophe on a grand scale?

Then again...If all these folks are correct, and there is a massive worldwide coverup of this impending event, then we are all basically living out the last months or year of our lives. (Because if the earth undergoes a physical pole shift it will be an extinction level event. The massive surge this would create in the oceans alone would kill 80% of the earth's population that mostly lives on some coastline.) So who cares about the debt ceiling? Who cares about the fate of the Euro and the PIIGS? Who cares about Gadaffi and Libya? Or for that matter who wins the nomination in an election that will never be held next year?

Me? I'm betting on my October post about all this going up without incident. This year, and next year as well.

8.5 Billion and Counting...

2011-06-30T18:19:00.000-07:00

Bank of America "fessed up" and settled for a cool $8.5 billion in penalties for delivering a raft of fraudulent, bogus "securities," (what a misnomer), to investment customers. This is over four times the total first quarter profit of $1.7 billion, which was down a whopping 39% from the previous year. It is almost twice the total revenues the bank took in for its credit card division last quarter ($5.6 billion), also down 17.6% from the previous year. With headlines like this, one would think this bank was being managed by morons. So it's not surprising that the bank expects to post a loss in its next few quarterly reports until this untidy mortgage backed security business is behind it. Meanwhile, BofA announced new penalty rates for little folks who are late on their credit card payments, (29.99%), and upped their annual fee for about 5% of cardholders to $59.99. So they quickly passed the pain on down to the little guy. I guess the thought of NOT issuing faulty securities that result in massive $8.5 billion penalties never entered upper management's head.

Good lord, one has to wonder who was in charge of this bank while all the fraudulent paper was being hawked? Whoever they were, a select handful of a few thousands got very, very rich in this scheme. Yet to do so they derailed the entire mortgage business in the country, caused 24 million job losses and destroyed trillions in equity and other "wealth." Beyond that they have worked a radical shift in the mindset of people regarding debt, savings, and credit card usage. In effect, their malfeasance practically ruined most normal banking operations. BofA is still deemed solvent only because of accounting rules changes and massive Fed support. But please point to those who have been prosecuted and jailed for this stunning performance in the art of high finance. You will have a very hard time.

Now the game for banks is strictly one of borrow low from the Fed at a quarter of one percent interest, and buy Treasuries and other bonds that yield 2.5% or more, pocketing easy, pain free profits. Lending to get the economy moving? No thanks. Try getting seed money for a new small business. Try getting a mortgage these days without first handing over half of your children with the down payment. Face it. The mortgage business is wrecked. The middle class is now virtually locked out of the joy of "home ownership." No more "Flip That House." No more "Curb Appeal."

Considering that BofA received $50 billion in TARP funds from the taxpayers, not to mention the uncounted billions it plays with at the Fed discount window, the penalty of $8.5 billion doesn't seem too severe. Yet this case is just one of a thousand others that could be further prosecuted if there was an ounce of political will and a sufficient number of hungry attorneys. Or how about some aggressive reporting on all this financial fraud? Nope, the only trial getting any media attention these days is the "Casey Anthony" trial. And I must confess that I have no idea who Casey Anthony is, what the trial is about, nor do I have any plans to find out. I could care less. But look at the attention this trial gets, while headlines like the $8.5 billion hit to BofA float blithely away into the ether of forgetfulness as we move on to more important matters.

The impending election year is likely to derail, or at least slow similar, prosecutions, as the big banks line up to throw money at Representatives, Senators and presidential candidates they hope to influence and place in office to continue to further their interests. What a sad system we have, run by "the mother's milk of politics," (said Jess Unruh), money. If I had a magic wand, one of the very first things I would do is make all corporate campaign contributions illegal. All candidates would have to receive equal allotments from the tax donation pool so campaigning would not be reserved for the wealthy class. But there I go wishing I had that magic wand again.

The $8.5 Billion hit BofA took is just the tip of the iceberg that wrecked our Titanic economy, where trillions in fraudulent securities schemes tore a hole through the decks and flooded one commercial segment after another. And the executives at all the big banks, rescued by the Fed and now paying out record bonuses and compensation, all got seats in the very first lifeboats.

Meanwhile the rest of us trapped down in steerage, dither our way toward the celebrations planned for the Fourth of July, oblivious. The riots and unrest in Greece may be a template for our own future, however, as Congress tries to figure out how to prevent the government from going broke as we drown in debt. The real news is that the government is already broke, and has been for decades. That's what "deficit spending" means--spending money you don't actually have. But Bernanke and the Fed have apparently decided they can create as much money as is needed to keep the international banking system working. So, after simply creating money to buy up Treasury bonds by the billions, I guess they thought they had better quiet the masses complaining about those gas prices. The rank and file get a break this summer, as the government opened the spigot on the strategic gasoline reserve to the tune of 2 million gallons per day to get that gas price down to the mid $3.50s. It's just the opening act in the grand deceptive game we call "elections" in this country.

Speaking of elections, dufus Sarah Palin conveniently showed up in Iowa to throw a book signing party on the day "the other woman" courting Tea Party voters announced her candidacy. In all fairness, Obama was in the state as well, each one making sure they get a little visibility before the voters. They have to play this game for the next 18 months so they can get 3 more years to get back to the real business of backing banks, corporations and other landed wealthy interests. Ah what a wonderful thing democracy is...

Something Wicked This Way Comes...

2011-05-23T07:53:00.000-07:00

Is it just me with this strange feeling of presentiment these days or is there a lot of doom buzz out there? Do you feel it? The world was supposed to end with a massive earthquake two days ago according to an elderly man who reportedly spent his life fortune on ads to proclaim his vision of impending doom. When I first heard that, I dismissed it as the act of another senile old coot who had nothing better to do with a couple hundred thousand in his retirement account--until I learned that he collected a cool $17 million in donations from the publicity his seemingly foolish act garnered. The latest news of the event spins this way: "Believers Cope With An Intact World." The organization that grew up around this event now claims the actual date for total world destruction is October 21st, (not May), and they shout "God is God and he will do what he has to do." Apparently one thing he was unable to do was get his messenger and prophet the correct date. But then again "God works in mysterious ways." Anyone want a refund on your donations to this group? It seems they now have another five months to rake in the big bucks.

Stocks opened sharply lower this morning. If you read enough financial news you will inevitably run into gold bugs with their own message of impending doom. They say gold will hit $5000 and the dollar will crash...as if the dollar hasn't already crashed. It has lost 97% of its purchasing power since "The Fed" started printing them in 1913. Like our doom saying prophet, Paulson and Geithner both went to congress with their own litany of gloom, claiming disaster would befall us unless the debt ceiling was raised and the Fed was given permission to keep on printing. I guess predicting doom for big bucks has a lot of interesting angles. The government is already dipping into pension funds to keep the wheels turning. D-Day is supposed to happen in August some time, but I'm willing to bet the debt ceiling will be raised and the doomsayers in suits and ties at the Treasury and Fed will net billions, putting the crazy old coot I opened with to shame.

But beyond the unrepentant financial malfeasance of the banks and the Fed, there is still this patina of impending disaster over all the news these days. After the swine flu, the BP gulf oil disaster, the tornadoes, the flooding Mississippi, the massive earthquake and tsunami in Japan with three nuclear plants in meltdown and radiation wafting up into the atmosphere and washing into the ocean, one has to make a real effort to keep a balmy positive attitude. In recent years, May is a month that almost always holds some mega-story that dominates the news until at least September. All we got this month was Osama, and that is already old news. We've shaken off all the stories above and moved right on to the travails of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria, but that story is already fading away. Our collective attention span seems shorter and shorter. Perhaps we are so doom weary that we shrug things off reflexively now.

The doomers remain in high gear, however. There is talk of the next "false flag" attack being planned, with Osama's death being the setup for that event. Then there is always Comet Elenin out there, making its slow, inexorable way into the inner solar system. Stories have circulated that the alignment of earth, Sun and Elenin is causing...you guessed it--massive earthquakes. The doomtards on the popular forum "Godlike Productions" are reportedly setting up a space telescope observatory to look for Elenin. And not to be upstaged by crazy old coots or even the Fed, they now lead their forum pages with a bar graph showing how much people have donated towards the project. As of this morning they have collected just $7,055. of their hoped for goal of a cool quarter million. But watch that spike if we get another big disaster any time soon.

Well, I'll be the first to admit my own articles in the past have been predicting a lot of doom and gloom as well, though I haven't made a nickle on it. I guess instead of making serious forecasts of what the economy was likely to do after the banksters bankrupted themselves (and a good chunk of the American Middle Class) I should have just predicted the end of the world and left it at that.

So I finish this post and publish it, then scoot over to CNN to take in a little morning news before I read James Kunstler's Monday morning doom post... Lo and behold, we have a raging volcano in Iceland and Joplin Missouri was devastated by a big tornado this morning. The CNN video of the event was aptly led by a commercial from "eSurance" hawking auto insurance before we get treated to the stacks of damaged cars and trucks in Joplin...Is nothing sacred these days? Is all our misery just another occasion for advertising? No thanks eSurance. I'll stick with Geico.

The Year of Momentous News

2011-05-08T07:50:00.000-07:00

2011 has started off to be a new reporters dream, as one major story after another has moved through the news cycle. It began with a promising young congresswoman and her entourage gunned down in a small shopping mall, then moved quickly to the historic "Arab Spring," with uprisings and demonstrations in Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Jordan, Bahrain Syria and even Saudi Arabia. The millions of long oppressed people there were finally demanding more from their governments, and pressing for democracy and free expression. One autocratic government after another fell, the most significant being Egypt, and the Sheiks of the House of Saud trembled in their sleep, more and more uneasy with each passing week.

Then, right in the Middle of the Western effort to roust Colonel Gaddafi out of power in Libya with GBU bunker busters, a 9.0 mega quake complete with massive tsunami strikes Japan and sweeps whole communities away like tinker toys. The true disaster of that event was difficult to measure on any scale of misery, with four nuclear power plants in various stages of meltdown and a cloud of radiation blowing in to America from across the wide Pacific.

The Royal wedding gave us a commercial break of feel good happiness, but before the echo of the church bells faded we get this ominous message that the president was to address the nation on a quiet Sunday night in May, "on a matter concerning national security." There hasn't been something this dramatic since Roosevelt addressed the nation after Pearl Harbor.The message? We finally got Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, the Midwest and Southeast are ravaged by tornadoes and the mighty Mississippi is flooding with all the rainfall. That's a lot of real estate for "team coverage."

All these stories have played out on a background of slow, grinding inflation in key areas like commodities, food, and gasoline, while the value of the dollar plummeted to near all time lows. Meanwhile, the manipulated stock market continued to staircase up and up, oblivious to the realities of what has been happening. Auto plants and suppliers shutting down all over Japan and the US? Not to worry, up 60 points today. Gasoline at $4.29 a gallon in California (on up to $4.49)--too bad, up 40 points again. Double dip housing bust? Better push it up 100 points today. Silver and gold in a massive sell off after five margin calls? Just a rich man's game--up 50 points please. The market has been impervious to all the bad news!

Yet, even as I write, the Fed's rampant buying of treasury bonds, called "quantitative easing" today but "monetizing the debt" in other times, is slowly fading. The Fed's balance sheet has ballooned up like a puffer fish about to explode. Economists wonder who will buy the next round of bonds, with Japan prostrate and China ever more surly and irascible when it comes to funding our massive debt. Uncle Sam's credit rating now looks as bad ad that of most of the American Middle Class.

And the Internet? It continues to buzz with rumors of a Comet "Elenin" that is actually a brown dwarf star they call "Nibiru," slowly entering the inner solar system like a harbinger of doom. Some say that the comet's name really translates as E.L.E. Nin (Extinction Level Event "Nin," a word associated with an ancient Sumerian Goddess.) There is even a backlash against almighty Google, where doomsayers claim evidence of Nibiru has been systematically deleted from NASA and other internet databases, and this has spawned rebel search engine sites like "Gibiru" that purport to present the REAL story about Elenin and our impending doom. Check it out here. (Gotta love the Internet, eh?)

Yes, it has been a year of momentous news, but something tells me that we will have more stories to keep the news teams as fleet footed as ever. After all, it's only May, a news cycle month where we usually get a major story that dominates the airwaves for at least two months. Last year it was BP and the death of the Gulf of Mexico and the underwater volcano there that never blew. The year before it was the dread emergence of the "swine flu," and the world-wide pandemic that never happened. What will we get this year before Memorial Day weekend kicks off the summer driving season? Was Osama's demise just the teaser to be followed in short order by Al Qaeda's revenge--coming soon to a theater near you?

Time to break out that copy of "2012" and fire up some popcorn. Something tells me there will be another major story along in short order.

Holier Than Thou

2011-05-01T07:56:00.000-07:00

What is this strange fascination with the lives and doings of the holier than thou among us? The trappings of royalty in the UK have been on a roll this month with the lavish and extravagant wedding of "William & Kate," (Charles & Diana II). And for that matter, British royalty seized the early beachead with "The King's Speech" earlier in the year as our own glitterati gathered to pat themselves on the back for the academy awards. And Americans are equally fascinated with the celebrity of those in high places. In fact, a quick look at the sad state of television broadcasting in the US will show us nothing more than a series of vapid, circus like shows all about the commoner trying to achieve some holier than thou status under the watchful eye of a panel of expert judges.

Each week Americans go dancing with the stars and ice skating with them as well. Then they try to become stars themselves on shows like the Voice, American Idol and others. We have shows purporting to discover America's next top model, next super chef, and next millionaire. It's all about becoming more than you are, achieving some status and approval by "your betters." Even Donald Trump is largely known, not for his business operations like Warren Buffet, but for his TV show where hopeful teams of young wannabes complete trivial tasks under his stern and sour faced judgement.

How sad to think that our media culture equates the great "land of opportunity" with nothing more than the opportunity to get rich or achieve status and recognition from those who already are rich. In the meantime, ask any typical American what is going on in the world outside the frame set of his favorite TV shows and you will more often than not get a blank stare. They know more about how many times Kristy Alley has fallen on the dance floor than how many governments have fallen in the Middle East in the last several months. Talk to someone about news stories of any real importance, stories that matter and those events that will shape the world in months and years to come, and you are quickly tuned out, or worse yet, told these things don't matter.

I suppose for a nation of people who have had so much, America remains a nation of people who seem largely dissatisfied with the state of their lives, and are constantly yearning for more--that one super lotto number hit, or that one big break on the dance floor of life in the arms of a bona fide "star." Deep down, we all want to be "holier than thou."

Stalemate

2011-04-04T08:03:00.000-07:00

04/4/11 - Gaddafi apparently “slept on it,” over the weekend and decided, after a raft of defections from senior posts, that he had better seek a diplomatic solution. Al Jazeera reports: “Abdel Ati al-Obeidi, Libya's acting foreign minister, told the Greek prime minister in Athens that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi wants the fighting to end.” Italy earlier dismissed a message seeking negotiations from the same envoy as it did not meet the condition that Gaddafi step down. They then joined France in recognizing the Libyan revolution as the legitimate government of Libya.

So I have to take issue with the latest assessment article by Debka again, where they headline: “America’s exit from Libya ends coalition no-fly zone, military campaign.” This article again has that strange “pro-Gaddafi” slant to it that a lot of Debka’s coverage of this story has had in the past. Earlier they stated the coalition had but 6 aircraft aloft (on day 2 of the campaign), that Gaddafi was hiding all his aircraft in secret bases in the south where the US could not strike them, as if our B-2 stealth bombers, flying from the heart of the US itself, just couldn’t make that last few miles. They stated that Gaddafi was similarly hiding all his best AA weapons and SAMs, ( I suppose to use on another day when he was not under air attack). In their view Gaddafi has been the strong, implacable tribal leader, dictating terms to the West, scheming, dreaming up secret plans, and hiding in a remote desert compound as he systematically dismantles the coalition air campaign.

First off, it is ludicrous to suggest that the no-fly zone has ended. While it is true that the US is now taking a support role, this move was announced at the outset of the campaign. Any awareness of the actual sorties flown and strikes made will demonstrate that coalition forces are still very much active. NATO flew 184 sorties with 70 of those being “strikes” in the last 24 hours. Doesn’t sound like the coalition effort has ended at all, does it?

The US carried about 50% of the strike burden in the first two weeks, and fired most of the Tomahawks used in the early days. It will wind up combat missions on Monday and move to a stand-by role. But Libya is not all that “target rich” in the first place, and the primary mission of the US was to assure suppression of Libya’s air defense systems and command control assets so that the NATO coalition could take over. This was done, and the remaining coalition partners will now focus on ground support and routine patrol over selected air zones--the only zones that matter, which are near the coastal cities under contention. Gaddafi is not challenging coalition aircraft from the ground, and has flown exactly 1 trainer class aircraft since the no fly zone started. In effect, he has no air force or air defense system worth mentioning. Yet Debka sees it otherwise. They report: “Qaddafi has taken advantage of coalition shortcomings to start deploying his fleet of 145 large air transports. Free of around 90 percent of Libyan airspace, they are now able to move troop reinforcements and ordnance from place to place.” Debka sites no evidence to back up this claim, and I find it laughable that they think Gaddafi is flying these planes, on a scale that would rival a major airline, using large, cumbersome, easily detected transport aircraft all over Libya to position troops and supplies. Has Debka heard of AWACS?

Debka also states that all Gaddafi’s front line units are still 80% effective, implying their losses to coalition strikes were not significant. I suppose this is why they had to abandon all their remaining heavy armor and take up riding in civilian cars and trucks. (Or perhaps they are “hiding” all their remaining tanks and APCs in secret desert bases “in the south?”)

Debka does not explain why, if units like the Khamis and Saadi “Brigades” are still so effective, they have been stopped by a battalion sized force of ex-army and para-military units deployed by the rebellion at Mersa el Brega. (When they rolled merrily up to Benghazi 10 days ago) when they still had the bulk of their heavy armor and artillery. The answer is simple--they no longer have the combat power to advance, particularly with coalition fighters ready to intensify operations against them whenever needed. Their strategy now has been to dilute their forces into smaller groups, revert to smaller, more mobile mortar teams for artillery support, use superior tactics to outwit their untrained opponents in the open desert terrain. They ride in civilian cars, so as not to attract air strikes. This will see them prevail over the school boys the revolution sent against them on the road leading to Tripoli, but it will certainly not get them Benghazi back.

Debka goes on to write: “With the Americans gone, Qaddafi is free to start rebuilding the air defenses and command centers which their attacks crippled; he is now in a position to effectively shut down the Western allied military campaign to topple him.” I suppose this is why his new foreign minister is hopping from Italy to Greece to Turkey looking for a cease fire. No, far from being the sinister, undaunted, mastermind of the deep desert, Qaddafi realizes several facts that should be obvious to even Debka: 1) He will never regain control of eastern Libya. 2) His military can no longer concentrate the necessary force of armor, artillery and ground combat power to retake and effectively control the larger cities there. (He has yet to take Misurata after a month of trying, and one can only imagine that he would have even more trouble in places like Benghazi). So a military victory is not on the table for him, and he knows it. He can fight to a stalemate until the rebels pull together and learn the craft of war to effectively defeat him. The US is now organizing covert training and weapons for the revolution, and the young recruits are gradually learning, in the school of hard knocks, how to fight on the ground. This will take time, but the rebel position will only get stronger over time; Gaddafi’s only weaker as the ground campaign proceeds.

04/1-04/2- Gaddafi forces rejected a cease fire stating it was “mad” to presume they should withdraw from their own cities. Fighting continued at Mersa El Brega, where rebel forces claimed they had pushed Gaddafi units out of the town and were now hunting down stragglers and snipers. Once again, the rebels show they do much better in urban environments, while Gaddafi forces hold the edge in open terrain. The rebels have now divided their fighters into two groups. A smaller group of men from ex-army units and those who have had some basic military training have been placed on the front lines. The larger, untrained group of fighters is regrouping at Ajdabiya. The better trained fighters stopped the Gaddafi advance and retook Mersa el Brega. This is how the rebels must reorganize and learn to fight, using the mass of untrained men to feed in as replacements where the better trained men can slowly teach the raw recruits some basic skills. Gaddafi troops are also adapting, and now fight from civilian vehicles to frustrate NATO air strikes. This led to a coalition strike that killed 10 rebel fighters today. Fighting continues in Misurata, but it does not appear that Gaddafi troops will be able to push much further on the road to Benghazi.

03/30-03/31- Fighting continued at Misurata, where a US P-3 maritime Patrol aircraft and an A-10 ground attack plane fired maverick missiles and the A-10s heavy cannon at a Libyan coast guard ship that was firing on the port. The Libyan ship was beached to prevent it from sinking. In the east, Gaddafi forces pushed the rebels out of Ras Lanuf for the second time in a month today. The badly organized rebels complained that they lack arms and need Coalition air support to advance--both true. President Obama said he left the question of arming the rebels open, but with this step comes the need for advisers and training. This is a commitment of money, troops and time, which further involves the US in the rebel cause, should it happen.

Gaddafi forces clearly drew a “line of death” in the sand at Nawfaliyah, determined to defend the strategic and symbolic town of Surt. Their counterattack now nears Mersa el Brega, opening up the likelihood that they will again draw more intense Coalition air strikes. But unless the Coalition decides to simply obliterate the main strength of Gaddafi’s eastern campaign force, the rebels will have little offensive capability in this terrain. In my opinion, the West should simply communicate to Gaddafi that, as he continues to violate the UN order to cease hostilities, all his units, not simply selected tanks and APCs, will now be heavily targeted by air strikes unless they stand down and withdraw. To forestall this possibility, Gaddafi forces have switched to using light jeeps and civilian vehicles, to mask their appearance from the air and make it more difficult for Coalition aircraft to target them.

But the question gets very thorny when the rebels approach Surt, a town with “civilians” that will clearly support Gaddafi. Would the Coalition have to prevent rebel attacks on that city as well? The makings of “stalemate” are written all over this conflict. The rebel fighters are using old arms, running low on ammunition, and some still don’t even know how to load their rifles when the do find ammo. They fire their light artillery in the wrong direction, waste what little ammo they have with joy shots into the air, race around in disorganized groups of Toyota pickups, and scatter at the first signs of enemy advance. On average, it takes six months to give a new recruit basic military training. The rebels are now in “the school of hard knocks,” but they have not proved to be diligent students. Talking about what to do with Libya after Gaddafi leaves, Western leaders may be counting their chickens before they hatch.

03/29/11 - Where is Lawrence? The exuberance of youth gave way to its equal inexperience when rebel forces, confronted by a well designed blocking position at Nawfaliyah were stopped on the road to Surt, and then pushed back when a column of pro-Gaddafi army reinforcements reached the area from Misurata. The rebels showed that they have almost no real offensive military capability on the open coastal plain, where Gaddafi’s better trained and organized army units seem to scatter them with the slightest sign of an advance. Western correspondents in the region note the young rebel fighters simply race down the roads in pickup trucks, seeing how far they can advance. They do not properly reconnoiter the ground and enemy positions ahead, they do not give thought to protecting their flanks, they do not dig into defensive positions after taking ground. In short, they are not an army. The only advantage they have is numbers, zeal and the cover of dense urban settings, where Gaddafi forces have been unable to rout them when they stand and fight.

Today, the reinforced pro-government forces staged another counterattack, and advanced as far as Bin Jawad in the see-saw battle that again looks much like it did in early March. The rebels do not seem to have learned anything from their earlier defeat when a well equipped Gaddafi battle force pushed all the way to the outskirts of Benghazi before Western air power intervened and pulverized their heavy armor and artillery. Coalition air strikes did not support the recent rebel advance, as the area is a swirl of small units maneuvering this way and that, and the potential for striking the wrong side is real.

But even after losing its tanks and heavy Grad systems to Western strikes, Gaddafi’s army has proved resilient enough to use its experience to beat back the rebel pursuit. The action is now a game of small arms, mortars, machine guns and lighter truck mounted AA guns. The rebels have a few captured Grad missile systems, but do not really know how to properly use them for best effect. What the rebels really need now is a command and control structure. They have no communications aside from word of mouth, which quickly starts panic when attacked, and leads to rash advances. The rebels desperately need a leader to emerge from their ranks who is capable of organizing and controlling them as paramilitary units, and absent that, they need their own modern day version of “Lawrence of Arabia” to help lead their revolt.

Where is Lawrence? This is one situation where a group of tough, experienced and capable mercenaries from western nations could do a world of good, but in the end, this must be a fight made by the Libyans. Don’t look for US or other Western troops on the ground any time soon, though I would not be surprised to learn that “advisors” have already arrived in theater to try and help the rebel cause.

03/28/11 - Nawfaliyah, about 100 miles east of Surt, has become the front line as rebel forces washed up against a blocking position thrown up by Gaddafi forces. They have used mines and artillery fire to delay the rebel advance, though certain elements bypassed the position and actually entered the outskirts of Surt today, finding no significant Gaddafi resistance. In fact, a large convoy of military trucks and civilian cars was seen leaving the city, heading west towards Misurata and Tripoli. (Note: One source indicated that reinforcements finally did arrive late in the day and stiffened the defense at Nawfaliyah.)

This means that the cupboard was bare, at least for the moment, in Surt as far as reinforcements and equipment, and Gaddafi forces there are just buying time so they can get notables, including themselves, safely away from the rebel advance. It is now reported that Coalition air strikes, largely by the British and French, took out nearly all the Gadaffi’s heavy armor in the Khamis and Saadi Brigades at Ajdabiya. In spite of their better experience and training, Gaddafi troops were then outnumbered by about five to one in that battle, and could do nothing more with those odds than mount a delaying withdrawal, which is just a nice way of saying “retreat.”

The West Finds its Teeth

2011-03-23T08:22:00.000-07:00

03/23/11 - Far from petering out as Debka incorrectly reported yesterday, the Coalition air campaign is still in buildup phase as more air assets from Canada, Qatar, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands are now arriving on the scene. (Mirage 2000s from Qatar had to make a forced landing en-route due to bad weather and very high winds. 6 Mirages will contribute one sortie package from Qatar.) Ground support missions were flown from the USS Kearsarge (Harriers) against Gaddafi forces attacking Misurata, which has been under attack by Gaddafi tanks and artillery. Gaddafi Khamis and Saadi Brigade forces defending near Ajdabiya were also hit. Residents reported the artillery fire ceased after the air strike. Canadian F-16s and RAF Tornadoes flew support missions, and a package of 10 Italian F-16s and support aircraft flew SEAD patrols (Suppression of Enemy Air Defense). At least 48 aircraft were involved in the above mentioned activity. (Not “only 6 aircraft” as incorrectly reported by Debka). US forces fly tac ops at night, with French, British and other coalition forces flying by day, for round the clock operational tempo.

Khweldi and Sahban brigade units are reported to be mustering for an attack on Zintan, which “went green” in recent days and is now being targeted for the Gaddafi scorched earth tactics like those used against Zawiyah weeks ago. Expect Coalition air strikes there soon.

One US F-15 crashed due to engine failure yesterday, with both crew members safely rescued. No other Coalition aircraft have been lost or damaged, and no Libyan aircraft have flown from Gaddafi’s secret bases “in the south” since the campaign was initiated. The airspace over Libya is now designated a “Low Lethality Zone,” with Coalition aircraft patrolling unopposed, at will.

03/22/11 - It took just 12 French aircraft to halt the advance of Gaddafi’s ruthless “Khamis Brigade” on Benghazi. 4 Rafael C flew top cover air defense with 2 Rafael B Recon fighters picking out targets. The actual strikes were made by the last six planes, 2 Rafael Close Air Support fighters, 2 Mirage 2000-5 and 2 Mirage 2000Ds. The result was a mile long line of wrecked tanks, trucks, and other armored fighting vehicles. The column was virtually wiped out, its troops fleeing after the strike to positions held by the Saadi Brigade further south near Ajdabiya. The Brigade’s leader, Gaddafi’s son Khamis, was also reported to have died, though he was wounded by a kamikaze strike flown by the free Libyan air force last weekend when a brave pilot flew his damaged jet into the Gaddafi command and control compound in Tripoli. Khamis died of burn wounds suffered in that attack, (though Gaddafi’s government denies this report).

So much for the vaunted “elite Khamis Brigade,” its reign of terror against unarmed civilians is now largely over. This was just the leading edge of allied air power. It was followed by waves of F-15 and F-16 fighters from many nations, and Typhoon and Tornado fighter bombers from both Italy and the UK. Planes launched from NATO bases in France and Italy, as well as from CV Enterprise and the French carrier Charles De Gaulle. These aircraft took out the bulk of Gaddafi’s fixed air defense system assets, radars, sam missile sites, command and control facilities, and airfields. US B-2 stealth bombers also flew from their base in Missouri to make strikes against key facilities. The bombers flew deep into Libya to strike Gaddafi’s air fields at Sabha, Ghardabiya, and Mitiga, where the Israeli site Debka reported Gaddafi was hiding his planes “in the south” to avoid destruction. Bunker busters were used to take out all the hardened aircraft shelters at Ghardabiya.

Day three of the campaign involves the hunt for mobile SAM assets, where planes with radar seeking HARM missiles patrol waiting for the enemy to use its anti aircraft radar, then they use the radar signal itself to home in on the target. These sorties will be ongoing in the days, and probably weeks, ahead.

As I wrote earlier, the coalition does not have to patrol over all Libyan airspace. The zone is largely limited to the key coastal area, and the roads leading south through Sabha. (See Map) Thus in just a few days time Gaddafi lost his fledgling air force, his “Khamis Brigade” and most of his air defense system. There were no more than 1500 men assigned to Gaddafi’s eastern campaign against Benghazi. These are now outnumbered by at least 6000 lightly armed rebels in that sector. But Gaddafi’s forces still have Grad missiles and other hand held heavy weapons at their disposal, and the rebels are not really an organized fighting force. Still, it will soon become clear to the remaining Saadi Brigade units that they are fighting a lost cause on Gaddafi’s behalf now that Allied air power will insure they have little or no offensive capability.

So this is what can be accomplished with groups of just six to twelve aircraft. The major SEAD strikes being concluded, coalition will now scale its activity to routine patrol operations over the coastal region, with occasional strike sorties as the situation warrants. Groups of six F-16, Mirage and Rafael fighters will alternate patrols on a routine daily basis, while other groups engage in ground strikes against Gaddafi forces still attacking civilian locations. This is par for the course. Again, Debka wrongly characterizes this as a failure of the No Fly Zone, stating it “ran out of steam” after the Tomahawk missile strikes ended. I’m not sure who makes these assessments, but they certainly do not understand military operations. Debka believes the limited No Fly Zone will allow Gaddafi to fly his air force at will now. What air force? Not a single Libyan Air Force plane has flown in the last three days, and any that survived the bombing and managed to get airborne would be quickly dispatched by coalition fighters.

If you cannot use your assets, you may as well not have them. The No Fly Zone has decisively neutralized Gaddafi’s air force, (which was fairly ineffective in the first place), and completely removed his offensive capability against Benghazi. The revolution now has the time it needs to consolidate, arm itself, improve its organization and deal with Gaddafi’s remaining loyalist troops and mercenaries. Time is in their favor. They control the entire eastern section of the country, and Gaddafi can only hold ground where he can deploy snipers, armed security forces and his remaining tanks to suppress popular uprising. The French have shown an eagerness to take out Gaddafi’s armor when he tries to use it in force. The intervention has therefore proved decisive, though it may take the revolution some time before it can match and defeat Gaddafi’s remaining loyalist troops. Yet now they have that time.

Gaddafi’s only choice is to pull a Saddam and find a trench to hide in somewhere, then try to direct a lingering guerilla war against the revolution government that replaces him. This is an odd choice considering that he could instead announce his capitulation and probably receive guarantees of safe passage out of the country with his billions. But I think the threat of prosecution in the world court leads him to choose his “martyer’s death” instead of an ignominious trial and hanging like Saddam.

03/21/11 - Operation "Odyssey Dawn begins. The West found its teeth when French fighters targeted Gaddafi forces near Benghazi after their unsuccessful bid to enter the city. The strike knocked out numerous AFVs on the road outside the city. Al Jazeera, with observers on the scene reported: “the road between Benghazi and Ajdabiya was littered with the ‘burnout wreckage of what was Gaddafi's armor and tanks’, destroyed in air raids by coalition forces.” This strike, presumably made by French air force units, was followed by 112 cruise missiles fired from US and UK naval units to strike Gaddafi’s air defense systems and open the way for Western aircraft to patrol the skies. The Gaddafi main command and control center, a three story building in Tripoli, was targeted and destroyed. B-2 Stealth bombers also delivered strikes against Gaddafi air fields. US analysts stated the strikes “largely destroyed” Gaddafi’s air defense system. So much for the Debka claim, over a week ago, that Gaddafi had “taken precautions” to foil any Western attack by moving his air forces out of range to fields in the south of Libya. Debka is now also reporting that Gaddafi is hiding all his best anti aircraft missiles in the south as well. I guess, since any deployment and use of his remaining assets would expose them to certain destruction, hiding out is the only option left to Gaddafi. Note to Debka: Western air power has a global reach. It can be brought to bear anywhere “in the south” of Libya, and cannot be effectively opposed by any weapon in Gaddafi’s arsenal. If he chooses to use them, he will lose them. End of story.

Gaddafi, ever defiant, compared the attack to a crusading Christian army invading Libya, and said he would “open the depots” to arm his loyal people for a long all out war for Libya. Be careful what you wish for...you may get it. Gaddafi also declared the whole Mediterranean region a war zone, threatening ship traffic, and digging the trench of international ill will towards his regime just a little deeper. Libyan TV broadcast file footage of their armed forces and of crowds backing Gaddafi from days of yore.

While US and other coalition governments have stated Gaddafi has to go, the campaign is not explicitly designed to topple his regime. It’s primary objective is to protect the nascent formation of a free Libyan state and halt Gaddafi’s military offensive against his own people. The burden of proof, where control of Libya is concerned, lies on Gaddafi. The revolution merely has to survive, and it can now prevent Gaddafi military forces from taking their remaining cities. Gaddafi’s army has been trumped by Western air power. It is clear now that the sortie of the Saadi and Khamis Brigades to the east will certainly fail. US Admiral Michael Mullen summed things up this way: “Gaddafi's forces "are no longer marching on Benghazi." President Obama, who finally found his backbone over this issue, has stated that Gaddafi forces must also withdraw from Ajdabiya, Az Zuwiyah and Misurata. Expect more strikes on Gaddafi’s armor in those regions to make the point.

The question now is this--how loyal are Gaddafi’s remaining army units and military cadres? Are they willing to carry on the war under the pounding they will surely take from the combined military might of seven nations? Or will they realize Gaddafi’s day has come and gone, and join the rebellion to forge a new Libya.

03/19/11 - Gaddafi forces made a last minute dash for Benghazi today, doing exactly what I thought they would do. Army units pushed into the city under cover of tank and mortar fire. At least one air strike was reported, with Al Jazeerah showing images of a plane shot down even while the Libyan foreign minister was wagging his gums at the UN stating Libya was in full compliance with the cease fire.Resistance fighters in Benghazi captured at least 1 enemy tank trying to enter the city, with reports that three other tanks were also captured and Gaddafi forces were pushed back. The Libyan army knows that if it can enter the city and establish firm positions in built up areas, then Western air strikes will be much more difficult. Fierce fighting continued for in Misurata as well.

France is reportedly flying recon missions over Libya prior to launching ground attacks to make the point that the international community will enforce its edicts. But as of this writing no Western air strikes have been reported. While Gaddafi forces have reached the outskirts of the city, they have not yet cleared and secured Ajdabiya, or ant town north to Benghazi along the main roads. Their bid is to beat the clock and push into Benghazi before decisive Western air power can destroy the army’s heavy weapons on the ground.

Gaddafi has also reportedly sent messages to France and the UK telling them they will “regret” their interference in Libyan internal affairs. We shall see who has regrets when this is all over.

Cease Fire?

2011-03-18T08:18:00.000-07:00

03/18/11 - Gaddafi’s Libyan government declared an immediate cease fire, abandoning its rabid dog talk of “no mercy” for dissidents and reprisals against civilian targets in the Med, and stating instead: “We decided on an immediate ceasefire and on an immediate stop to all military operations... Libya takes great interest in protecting civilians." While this was said, Gaddafi forces continued attacking civilian targets. Yes, with tanks and armored carriers blasting their way into civilian occupied cities and firing indiscriminately at anyone who moved...with snipers and commandos posted on buildings and breaking into homes in the dead of night to kidnap civilians suspected of siding with the opposition. Gaddafi is a man who would only respond to one thing--force. In this case, just as I suspected and wrote of in these posts, the mere declaration of the No Fly Zone and intimation that we would begin hitting targets, including his precious Khamis and Saadi Brigades, convinced him to abandon his “line of death” rhetoric and become very peace loving--overnight.

Don’t believe it. Gaddafi is playing for time. He does not want his army destroyed by Western Air power, so he will instead hope to position it outside the last rebel stronghold of Benghazi under the cover of a “cease fire” and then use special ops and secret police units in the dark of night to launch in and out raids on the city that he can blame on “armed madmen.” Evil loves darkness. This, too, is a tactic that will fail. He will find the opposition in Benghazi armed and ready for his thugs, should they appear.

Faced with the prospect of air strikes within hours, as air units from Britain, France, Canada, Norway, the US and many Gulf Arab nations began to muster, Gaddafi folded his hand--game over. The resistance now has the best fighting air force units in the world available to provide cover, and even Gaddafi’s advantage on the ground with tanks and heavy artillery can be quickly and completely neutralized by this power.

This is what the West, and the UN, should have done weeks ago, and it may be a decisive moment in the troubled history of this region.

03/17/11 - Lots of tough talk from both sides and in the international community, where hints of a no-fly zone, or something more, continued to circulate in the news. The talk, a month in the making, finally became action when the UN authorized a No Fly Zone over Libya, and “all necessary measures” to protect civilians. A defiant Gaddafi said his army would show “no mercy” to the citizens of Benghazi, and stated he would launch another “final battle” for Misurata to cleans it from bands of roving madmen holding the population hostage. His forces lost at least 80 men yesterday and were repulsed for a fourth time in that effort. Meanwhile, the Saadi Brigade in the east has been heavily reinforced with elements of the veteran Khamis Brigade, fresh from its pogrom at Az Zawiyah. Should he persist and attempt to attack Benghazi, “all necessary measures” could quickly become direct strikes against his armored units.

Gaddafi was no happy: “This is craziness, madness, arrogance. If the world gets crazy with us, we will get crazy too...We will respond. We will make their lives hell, because they are making our lives hell. They will never have peace." His pledge to “get crazy” is perhaps one of the great understatements of our day.

The Military situation has now dramatically changed. It was clear to me days ago that the single Saadi Brigade (not to be confused with Saudi Arabia in any way) was inadequate to the task that lay before it in Cyrenacia. Gaddafi has now brought in his most ruthless fighters, and tribal forces, to try and finish the job before the international community can put teeth behind its words. He still has two choices--a direct attack on Benghazi or a lightning jab across the desert road, Rommel style, aimed at Tobruk to isolate the rebellion in Cyrenacia. The reinforced eastern command now has the forces to consider both options, and they have been taking on loads of supplies before launching this last planned stage of their counteroffensive. The Western No Fly Zone will apply to his flights of mercenaries from Sudan, Chad and other Central African locations, so his army must now fight with the means it presently has.

The No Fly Zone removes Gaddafi’s air force from the battle, which was only marginally effective in the fighting to date, (more a psychological weapon than anything else), but the threat of further action against Gaddafi’s ground units is a whole new matter. The Western air forces involved, from the US, France, the UK, Kuwait and the UAE, are highly experienced and capable forces. If the member states signing on to this resolution find their backbone they can stop Gaddafi’s army completely, using air power alone, well before it reaches either Benghazi or Tobruk.. Gaddafi would do well to remember the “highway of death” as Saddam’s army tried to flee from Kuwait. Western air force units can wreak destruction and havoc on his armored columns in the open desert terrain. If the UN words are truly backed by action, this is a “game over” for Gaddafi’s military. This would be the best possible outcome, and likely lead to a cease fire with the UN brokering the peace. Gaddafi’s objective now must be to close with his enemies on the ground, so that the Western advantage of air power is more difficult to use in urban areas inhabited by civilians.

The US must know exactly what is happening on the ground. They undoubtedly have been looking in on things with high resolution satellite imagery and know the disposition and strength of Gaddafi forces. CV Enterprise, which transited the Suez for a rendezvous in the North Arabian Sea days ago, has now reversed course and returned to the Red Sea. This carrier alone could have completely halted the Saadi Brigade along the exposed open coastal road, many days ago, but the Obama administration was not able to find a backbone over this issue, and many other issues in this historic uprising.

Reluctant to act on on its own, the US sought some international consensus, and was upstaged by France, who recognized the Libyan Interim Council in Benghazi and called for a no fly zone last week. Yet it was not until the Arab League seconded that call that the US really took notice. Obama follows, rather than leads. He seeks consensus where he should be defining a decisive stand against Gaddafi and in favor of the Libyan Revolution. Decisive action now could win the “hearts and minds” of a whole generation of young Arab people, struggling for human rights, freedom and democracy. But the US equivocated, talked, ruminated, parsed words, while Gaddafi, took decisive action on his front. Now, with Gaddafi forces in a position to strike either Tobruk or Benghazi, the US is late to the party. Will the application of Western Air power be enough to back the dictator down? Or will Gaddafi fight like a cornered tiger and use the full weight of his military against all comers.

While Gaddafi has hinted that Benghazi will “fall without a fight,” let us add that to the realm of wishful thinking on his part. The resistance cannot truly match the Libyan army, but they will undoubtedly fight on, as they fight today in Misurata. Action still continues today around Ajdabiya, though Gaddafi forces are still over 100 miles south of Benghazi. Air strikes were also reported near Benghazi, with no damage reported. It is likely that we will soon see the fledgling Libyan air force grounded, removing at least one weapon at Gaddafi’s disposal.

The Struggle Continues

2011-03-16T14:15:00.000-07:00

03/16/11 - Mustafa Gheiriani, a rebel spokesman in Benghazi characterized the situation today quite clearly. "The fighting is fierce. His supply lines are stretched so he can't push on from Ajdabiyah. We've got some surprises in store. We're going to fight on and we're going to win." The war of words was answered by Gadaffi’s son, who claimed the war was 48 hours from a successful conclusion. Then came the surprises.

Opposition web sites reported that the resistance has been able to fly Mig-23 aircraft and at least one helicopter and attack Gaddafi government naval vessels off the coast of Ajdabiya, sinking two ships and damaging a third. Reuters quickly echoed the story. The “Free Libyan Air Force” also bombed Saadi Brigade tanks near Ajdabiya and reportedly struck a government airfield near Surt as well. Another surprise from the rebel forces who appear to be slowly organizing their military arm in the face of heavy pressure from Gaddafi’s forces. The rebels also seized an oil tanker with 25,000 tons of fuel. Another surprise.

There are conflicting reports on the status of Ajdabiya, with both sides still claiming control, and reinforcements are on the way from Benghazi. CNN reporters traveling with Gaddafi forces claim that the brigade is massing outside the town, with substantial ammunition and supplies, which may have been replenished from a nearby ammo depot. Water and fuel are being mustered for the fighting ahead. And there is still low level fighting in Mersa El Brega, well behind Saadi Brigade lines.

In the west, yet another attempt to take Misurata has now apparently failed when opposition fighters stopped Gaddafi army units on three fronts and even captured at least two tanks in the fighting. The resistance there is but a shadow of what the army will find if it tries to take Benghazi. The Saadi Brigade would be ill advised to plan an attack on that city. They have proven they have the firepower and skill to push into rebel held towns, but the brigade has had considerable trouble holding and securing the ground it takes, with rebel infiltrations behind their lines and fighting erupting again in cities the government claimed they took days ago. This would be the case should the brigade move north into Cyrenacia, where rebel forces could infiltrate and cut the road south to Ajdabiya with relative ease.

It is clear that Gaddafi forces must decisively take, clear and secure Ajdabiya as a base for further operations. That has not yet been accomplished, but should they succeed they must then decide whether to advance on Benghazi or race for Tobruk to cut off support for the rebellion that might come from Egypt and isolate the revolution in Cyrenacia.

This is all going to take much longer than 48 hours, and we may see more rebel “surprises” in the hours and days ahead.

In Bahrain, the Sunni king has taken a leaf from Gaddafi’s book in his bid to crush opposition--bring in mercenaries. Hundreds of foreign troops, mostly from Saudi Arabia, have entered the island nation and did what local security forces were loathe to do--they fired on civilians in a bloody crackdown, wuth hundreds wounded and many killed. The invasion has heightened ethnic Sunni-Shia tensions throughout the region.

03/15/11- As troops from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Gulf Cooperation Council forces rush into Bahrain in American made tanks and APCs, to help the Sunni Kingdom put down a popular Shia revolt, the very same parties condemn Gaddafi’s use of the military against the Libyan people. The Middle East certainly gets confusing, doesn’t it? France and the UK now both support a No Fly Zone, while the US remains indecisive as Obama turns his attention to Japan.

Today Gaddafi appears to have made the decision to fight for Ajdabiya, being unwilling to bypass such a hard rebel nugget of resistance astride the vital road back to Surt and Tripoli. Both bombs and leaflets urging the population there to starve out the rebels in their midst were used in the initial effort to soften Ajdabiya up. Meanwhile, Khamis Brigade forces in the west also claimed nominal control of Zuwarah near the Tunisian border, and are now going house to house with lists of names to round up suspected dissidents. Gaddafi played his string of small victories for all it is worth, offering the rebels in the east a cease fire and amnesty. He was answered by a 2000 strong force of rebels led by ex-Army commandos who infiltrated back into Mersa El Brega and now control a large segment of the residential district there, behind Gaddafi’s main column!

The action shows the difficulty faced by Gaddafi and his small army of mercenaries and loyalists. He has the firepower to blast his way into towns and take nominal control over them, but he does not have the troops to garrison, hold and secure the ground, particularly in the larger cities, where a low lever guerrilla resistance is now replacing the direct confrontation in street fighting. The rebels will not give up as easily as he hopes. Mersa El Brega is a town of only 4600 people with little built up area, yet Gaddafi’s troops have been unable to decisively secure that hamlet as they advance on Ajdabiya. Good luck should they ever reach Benghazi, a city of 800,000 people all decidedly hostile to Gadaffi’s regime.

If Az Zawiya and Misurata are any template for what may occur, Gadaffi will have hard fighting in Benghazi, and there will be much destruction. In Misurata the Colonel has come up with a novel approach, Not only is electricity, phone and internet cut off, but now he has turned off the water for the 300,000 there. You can last only a week or two without water, so goes the logic in his demented mind.

Perhaps we should look over History’s shoulder at the Iran Iraq war where Iranian Shia youth launched human wave banzai charges against Saddam’s armor for 7 years before they sued for peace. There is no shortage of fervor and zeal among Libya’s rebel forces. Just a shortage of arms, ammunition and military know-how. But the recent defeats they have suffered will be their teacher. Don’t write off the rebel resistance any time soon. They are learning, organizing, toughening up under Gaddafi’s fire.

The coming hours and days will see the important battle for Ajdabiya play out as Japan’s nuclear reactors continue careening towards full meltdown. No shortage of drama in the news these days.

03/14/11 - How likely was the Libyan rebellion to roll westward to Tripoli from its strongholds in the east? Very unlikely. In spite of his little victories on the coast, how likely is Gaddafi to quickly storm Benghazi and topple the rebellion? Very unlikely, at least not with the forces he has deployed to the eastern campaign at this time. Therein lies the heart of this story.

Popular uprisings are sustained by the people in massive numbers within heavily populated urban centers. The road to Tripoli is long and thin, and blocked by a major bastion of Gaddafi support in the city of Surt. The rebellion was foolish to try and migrate west along this road to liberate Tripoli. If that is to happen it will have to come from the population within Tripoli itself. The rebellion in the east was successful because it originated in Libya’s second most populous city, Benghazi, and then rippled out to regional towns and cities until all of Cyrenacia was in the anti-Gaddafi camp. This quickly led to defections within army units stationed there, and the rebels were able to get hold of a few heavy weapons to bolster their confidence.

But the haphazard and badly disorganized rush to the west along the desert roads was ill advised, from a military standpoint, and really doomed to failure from its inception. It was stopped at Bin Jawad by the Gaddafi Saadi Brigade, which has now rolled the rebels back through Mersa El Brega to the gateway city of Ajdabiya. (Population 200,000) This city, a small but densely built up fist of opposition, will now present Gaddafi’s eastern campaigners with a thorny problem. ABC news reports it is defended by one of Gaddafi’s ex-ministers, with his head to lose should he be captured. “General Abdel Fatah Yunis, who resigned as interior minister and joined the revolt when rebels rose up against Mr Gaddafi in mid-February, said his troops would defend the strategic town of Ajdabiya at all costs. "War is a matter of advance and tactical withdrawal," the white-haired general told reporters at a hotel in Benghazi, just hours after his forces abandoned Brega under heavy fire. "And even if our forces have withdrawn tactically a few kilometers, that means nothing in military terms, especially when you are fighting in territory that is semi-desert. There is not a lot of value to this land," he said.

If not taken, the city will sit astride the Saadi Brigade’s lines of communications back to Surt, and make an advance further east inadvisable. Yet to take this place Gaddafi forces may have to engage in some heavy urban fighting against determined resistance fighters who know that to lose is to lose everything. In such conditions Gaddafi’s advantage of air power and armor is less effective than it has been in the relatively open terrain fought for and gained last week by his forces.

Militarily, the rebel withdrawal to this position was exactly what they should have done. Gaddafi must now fight for this city, as he did in Az Zawiya, or he must invest it and bypass it for ground further east. Neither choice is very promising for him. Bloody fighting in Adjabiya could put the story back in the headlines, as news teams will inevitably become weary of picking through the rubble of Japanese coastal cities for something more dynamic. It also buys time for the West to find a backbone, or even the Arab league to formulate some plan to support Benghazi. Yet to bypass Ajdabiya, Gaddafi will have to split his Brigade in two, and the troops left behind will have to be strong enough to impose and hold a siege there while the second column, now much weaker, advances into territory that is completely hostile to the Gaddafi regime. In my opinion this is a task beyond the capabilities of the single brigade assigned to the eastern campaign at this time. It will have to be strongly reinforced to proceed into Cyrenacia with any chance of snuffing out the rebellion. Ahead lies the large city of Benghazi, a battle ten times the size of the one that awaits Gaddafi at Ajdabiya.

Over the weekend Israeli site Debka posted two articles of interest. One claimed Syria’s Assad has sent arms and munitions by sea to re-fuel Gaddafi’s forces, the other that the rebels were beginning to flee from Benghazi. They seem to feel that, bolstered by his string of small victories between Bin Jawad and Mersa El Brega, Gaddafi can now just roll on into Benghazi and storm the place. But another Gaddafi attack on Misurata failed again this weekend, leaving that strategic western city still in the hands of the revolution. If the Debka story is confirmed, it also points out the weakness inherent in Gaddafi’s military, which now relies on outside arms shipments and imported mercenaries to sustain its bite. In my opinion Debka’s reporting is far to optimistic on Gaddafi’s behalf.

The little dictator now has his real work cut out for him. He must take or bypass Ajdabiya , then move another 200 kilometers to Benghazi and fight the heart of the rebellion there successfully and decisively if he is to win. I do not see that he can accomplish this easily, and we are likely to see a much longer struggle now that the “war” has come to ground strongly held by the rebellion. Gaddafi would be better advised to focus on taking Ajdabiya with the resources at hand, and then knife across the desert roads, taking the right hand fork to Tobruk as Rommel did, then fight for Tobruk. This would effectively isolate the rebellion in Cyrenacia. If he could also retake Misurata, he would then control enough territory to sustain his regime, and could basically ignore the rebellion indefinitely though this means he must settle for riding roughshod over only half of Libya for the foreseeable future. He should not fight for Benghazi.

As for the No Fly Zone, in my opinion it is much ado about nothing, and will stand merely as a symbol of Western or Arab League support for the rebellion if ever declared and enforced. Gaddafi is probably flying no more than ten to twelve aircraft on any consistent basis, old Mig 23s, a few Su-22s and one Mirage. (He has more planes in inventory but most are not air worthy). As I have stated before, the burden of proof where control of Libya is concerned, lies firmly with Gaddafi. The rebels only have to be stubborn and resist by whatever means they have. The road ahead for Gaddafi remains long and difficult, and time favors the rebellion as it has been gaining more legitimacy and recognition from European and Arab states.

History Will Remember

2011-03-12T16:07:00.000-08:00

03/12/11 - As the world was riveted by scenes of horror and utter destruction in Japan, the drama playing out on the coast of Libya was swept from the news bars. Libyan resistance fighters lost their grip on Mersa El Brega Saturday, continuing to withdraw through Adjabiya. Reports are that they are running low on ammunition and the weight of Gaddafi’s air power and armor is clearly turning the tide of the battle against them.

Strategically, the rebel advance was fueled by the zeal and fervor of the youthful fighters more than anything else, but was not a wise military maneuver. The lightly armed rebel partisans advance in pickup trucks and SUVs, small, inexperienced groups of young men exposed on the wide desert plains and dusty open roads. They have little real offensive capability if opposed by a trained military with armor and air cover, and the isolated towns along the road from Brega to Surt provide them little fodder for defense. The rebel advantage only truly exists in the larger cities, where the urban environment makes deployment and use of Gaddafi’s key assets (air power and armor) much more difficult, both in practical terms and public relations terms. His forces fought for two weeks to take Az Zawiya, wreaking wanton destruction there, and are now busy covering up the damage to hide the atrocities they unleashed on the Libyan people.

This revolution is different from that in Egypt because the so called “Libyan” army, infused with mercenary fighters from Sudan and Central Africa, (purchased by Gaddafi’s ill gotten billions), have no qualms about killing Libyan citizens. Gaddafi and his sons have tried to characterize this as a civil war fomented by outside terrorists who are holding the rebel held towns hostage. Nothing could be farther from the truth. This is not a civil war. There is no significant segment of the Libyan population supporting Gaddafi’s regime. His rule is extended through bribes, fear, oppression and cold hard cash. What we are watching is a war of oppression unleashed by a ruthless dictator on the Libyan people, not two opposing segments of the Libyan population vying for control. It’s Gaddafi and his thuggish security forces and mercenaries vs the people of Libya. Only in Surt, where Gaddafi has tribal roots well watered by his money and favor, will he enjoy any real popular support. All the rest he pays for, or commands at the point of a gun.

So while Western nations equivocate, ruminate, hold meetings, parse words in diplomatic statements, and issue meaningless warnings, the bottom line is that they have done nothing. Sanctions will not deter a man like Gaddafi. Sternly worded statements for the news media and finger wagging are pointless. And while we withhold any real support for the Libyan revolution, lacking the will to make a decisive choice in the matter, we tacitly lend support to Gaddafi through our inaction at this critical moment in the history of this region. And History will remember.

Gaddafi takes good advantage of the situation by hastening to crush the rebel forces under his tank tracks while he still can. I have little doubt that he is now eying Benghazi as his next Az Zawiya. If he can crush the rebellion there, at its very heart, the example will undoubtedly have a chilling effect on the remaining rebel towns and tribes.

The revolution has now reached a key tipping point. What will the West, and particularly the United States do? Will we sit by and let Gaddafi ravage Benghazi as he did Az Zawiya, and then let him launch the inevitable pogrom of reprisal against the rebel population for daring to demand their freedom? This is one of those moments on the cusp of time where decisive action in support of the revolution now could have the most dramatic and transforming effect on the region as a whole. But the West is well accustomed to turning a blind eye on oppression and even outright genocide... And Colonel Gaddafi knows this all too well. If we let this man trample his people into submission again, then shame on us as a nation, and as a people. And shame on Italy, France, and Germany as well, the old colonial masters of North Africa who sent their armed forces to exploit and war on each other in Libya in decades past, but cannot now muster the resolution and the means to end the reign of terror of this petty dictator once and for all by siding with those seeking their freedom.

The Arab League formally requested that the UN impose a no Fly Zone today, and recognized the Interim Council in Benghazi as the legitimate government representing the Libyan people. Meanwhile, a Libyan resistance fighter watched his brothers retreating under Gaddafi’s withering air strikes and wept. “Where is the West?”

03/11/11 - The potential political earthquake of Saudi Arabia’s “Day of Rage” was upstaged by Mother Nature and the massive earthquake/tsunami in Japan.

Over 35,000 people signed on in support of the two planned protests in Saudi Arabia this kindling was not enough to ignite a major demonstration. After what has already happened in Bahrain, the planned event had the Kingdom so worried that it signed on ten thousand new inductees to its security services in the last few weeks and deployed these forces to expected gathering places for any protest. Saudi government spokespersons have stated they would “cut off the finger” of anyone who raises their hand in protest. It has also put up a pro-Saud government Facebook site to counter the dissident Internet presence, and has opened up the royal coffers of late with $37 billion in low interest loans to its citizenry and a hefty 15% pay raise for all government employees. Yet the fire of dissent will not leave the Kingdom untouched. Friday also saw planned protests in Yemen and Kuwait that were largely overshadowed by the news out of Japan.

Meanwhile, NATO began 24 hr “surveillance” over Libyan airspace, (most likely by AWACS early warning radar planes out of Malta). The move is a necessary prelude to any potential “No Fly Zone,” should one be declared. The merits of such an operation have been debated in our media, with retired military types stating that a No Fly Zone would require intensive strikes on Libya’s “Integrated air defense system,” requiring us to take out command and control facilities, air strips, SAM-6 sites, etc.

Having studied military history most of my life and designed many professional military simulations in years past, Western powers need not impose such a wide ranging No Fly Zone to achieve what they want here--the end of Libyan air strikes on rebellious citizenry. Simply declare the No Fly Zone to be in effect, and handle the matter locally. Most of Gaddafi’s air strikes have been right near the coast. Our AWACs surveillance can determine where Gaddafi attempts to deploy air strikes, and we can fly combat air patrols locally in that one area, (such as over the current action near Ras Lanuf), daring him to challenge the superiority of Western air forces. The United States has not lost a single fighter to enemy aircraft for decades. Our naval aviators aboard CV Enterprise and the aircraft they fly are far superior to anything in the Libyan air force. Tell Gaddafi, through whatever back channel you wish, that should he challenge the No Fly Zone his aircraft will be shot down. Saddam did not challenge our No Fly Zone in Iraq, and it is my bet that Gaddafi will not challenge us here either, the memories of his last brush with American pilots over the Gulf of Sidra still fresh in his mind. Simply declare the No Fly Zone and be prepared to back it up if challenged and I would bet Gaddafi would order his air force to stand down. Libyan helicopters can be similarly grounded by threatening to take out the very few logistical bases they rely on for operations should they fly in support of the army again. Savvy and experienced military air campaign planners are undoubtedly war-gaming this possibility of a limited No Fly Zone that is dynamic, local and easily deployed with existing regional assets. Should Gaddafi challenge us with a SAM-6, the option to “unleash Hell” always remains available in reprisal.

Time to separate the boys from the men, Mr. President. Declare the No Fly Zone and see what results. And while you’re at it declare a naval exclusion zone as well to neutralize Libya’s gunboat diplomacy. It won’t stop Libya’s tanks on the ground, but it will be a sign of our support for the revolution, and strike a moral blow as well. But watch the clock closely as the sun rides high in Riyadh. Be prepared to handle a Saudi crackdown resulting in violence against its citizenry there with equal resolve. Yes, the Saudi’s will deploy American made M1-Abrahms tanks should the going get rough, and fly US made F-15 and F-16 fighters. Care to contemplate the old diplomatic standby of “sanctions” on Saudi Arabia? I think not.

Friday’s “Day of Rage” in Saudi Arabia may starkly reveal the two faced nature of “American Interests” in the region, where “Some Arabs are more equal than other Arabs,” to torture a famous line from Orwell’s Animal Farm. Hillary Clinton will have a lot to talk about on her visit to the region today.

Earthshaking Events

2011-03-11T07:47:00.000-08:00

The political earthquakes of the Middle East were upstaged by Mother Nature this morning when a series of powerful earthquakes struck just off the coast of Japan. The planned "Day of Rage" in Saudi Arabia was swept off the headline bars of news outlets the world over by the massive tsunami that struck the shores of Japan, sweeping cars and building inland and killing hundreds.

It began quietly enough when a relatively normal quake of magnitude 4.4 struck the Kurile Islands at 5:23am. Nothing more was felt until Kamchata to the north started rattling of a string of quakes registering 5.0, 4.7, 5.1 and 4.7 just after noon. The seismic activity migrated south to Japan's Bonin Islands with four more 4.7 range quakes, and this continued throughout the region with quakes striking off the Ryukyu until a large 7.2 quake struck Japan near the island of Honshu a 2:45pm. It looked like a typical quake scenario, with many regional foreshocks building up to this 7.1 event, and at least 17 aftershocks in the 4.7 to 5.3 range over the next 12 hours. Then Mother Nature really vented her wrath with a string of much larger quakes above 6.0 magnitude.

A 6.1 quake struck off Honshu at 6:16 am UTC. Another 6.0 struck a few minutes later at 6:44pm as the sun began to set. Three hours later yet another 6.1 struck at 9:22am. What appeared to be large aftershocks to the 7.1 event were actually fore-shocks to a massive 8.9 quake at 2:46pm local Japan time. This was the fifth largest earthquake on record. It has since been followed by a string of quakes that each would have made headlines under normal circumstances: 6.4, 6.4, 6.8, another 7.1, 6.3, 6.3, 5.8, 5.9, 6.3, 6.1, 6.1, six more quakes in the 5.5 to 5.9 range then 6.2, 6.2, 6.5, 6.1 then ten quakes in the 5 range, another 6.0, another ten quakes in the 5 range, a 6.5 followed by 20 more aftershocks in the 5 range! That's 15 events of 6.0 or greater, two of 7.0 or more and the big 8.9 quake. Bear in mind these 6.0 plus quakes were on the same scale as our "Northridge" quake in the LA basin.

Tsunami warnings were posted throughout the pacific, with waves due to hit the west coast of the US by 8am this morning.

Turning Point

2011-03-10T08:18:00.000-08:00

Gaddafi forces prevail at Ras Lanuf, opening gateway to Cyrenacia, heartland of the Rebellion.

03/10/11 - The battle for Ras Lanuf continued as the Gaddafi Saadi Brigade, backed by helicopters, Mig-23 jet fighters and naval gun ships launched a coordinated assault to rout rebel opposition and seize the oil facilities there and at Mersa Brega. The Libyan Army did what any military commander worth his salt would do under similar circumstances. The rebel forces, composed of untrained militias of partisan youth, many fighting with only a few days experience, have enough weaponry to block the coastal road leading to Ras Lanuf and make a frontal assault costly. So the Saadi Brigade divided its forces into two battalion assault columns and sent one directly at Ras Lanuf to fix the scattered defense there on the coastal road, while the second executed a wide envelopment aimed at outflanking rebel resistance and approaching Mersa Brega from the south. These are the very same tactics Rommel and Montgomery used in WWII when fighting along these desert coastlines. The Gaddafi attack was further augmented by helicopter gunship and air strikes, with naval gunboats flanking the rebel positions from the sea to the north of Ras Lanuf. It is clear now that the inexperienced and disorganized rebel forces are no match for Gaddafi’s Brigades in these circumstances, and Ras Lanuf is likely to fall back into pro-government hands within hours.

Behind it is the strategic town of Ajdabiya, which Israeli site Debka incorrectly reported captured by Gaddafi forces on March 8th. The town remains firmly in rebel hands, a small but densely structured urban center that could be easy to surround but difficult to clear. Should the rebels fall back to Ajdabiya and fight there, we are likely to see one of two outcomes: 1) a bloody urban battle like Zawiya wherein most of this town will be destroyed by the superior firepower of Gaddafi armored forces, or 2) Gaddafi forces could simply surround and bypass the town, cutting it off from outside help as they continue north into the Rebel held province of Cyrenacia. Frankly I was amazed it took the Libyan Army so long to prevail here, with a full brigade, air support, helicopters, gunboats and artillery at their disposal, outgunning the rebels by a factor of five. This operation marks the first decisive military victory by Gaddafi against the rebellion. His actions in the west have largely failed to retake Zawiya and Misurata.

In Zawiya, the Kamis Brigade has acted in a way that can only be described as criminal. As many as 50 tanks backed by infantry in Armored carriers blasted their way into the city, using their firepower to indiscriminately destroy buildings. Civilian casualties have been very high, but the rebels still control the city center. Gaddafi has tried to prevent the world from witnessing the brutal force he has applied there, intimidating, arresting, and beating foreign journalists like the three BBC reporters who were subjected to a mock execution. Yet reports have leaked out of tanks firing directly into buildings, soldiers breaking into residential homes, snipers killing anyone found outside, old men, women, children. This is what Gaddafi will have to do in Benghazi if he is to prevail.
Yet this is war. Western nations did not hesitate to bomb and utterly destroy civilian centers when they fought each other in WWII. And let us not forget we used atomic weapons to obliterate two Japanese cities, and killed over 100,000 more in a single weekend when we firebombed Tokyo. It is only in recent years that the world decries civilian casualties arising from political conflict--as long as they are not trumped by other “interests” that we value more than human lives.

One thing now is clear to the rebellion: it does not have the military strength to directly oppose and defeat Gaddafi’s more experience and much better armed military. Yet the rebels now know that should their uprising fail there will be brutal reprisals and a return to the 42 year tyranny of Gaddafi. I have little doubt that they will end up pursuing the only strategy they can really adopt given their lack of heavy weapons-- a defense of the most densely populated urban centers like Benghazi, Al Mart, Al Bayda, Darnah and Tobruk. They will fight for these cities as they fight now in Zawiya and Misurata, and Gaddafi will have to destroy the entire eastern province of Cyrenacia if he is to prevail.

With NATO and UN nations still quibbling over whether or not to impose a no fly zone and deny Gaddafi use of his small air force, the question is now firmly on the table--will the West sit by and allow the continued killing of civilian dissidents in Libya, with all the destruction urban fighting will most certainly entail in places like Benghazi? And what will the United States do in this event?

History seldom presents such pointed yet vital questions to an American president, but this is certainly one of them. Will the US support the Libyan revolution and recognize the Libyan Transitional National Council, or will it lend de-facto support to Gaddafi by failing to take action. We sat by and watched Saddam slaughter thousands in Southern Iraq when the Shia rebellion occurred there after the first Gulf War, even with the victorious US army just a few miles away. The result was that we had to go back and fight a second Gulf War for 8 long years in Iraq.

This is a moment on the cusp of time that will decide the fate of Libya, and strongly influence the future course of the popular Arab uprising now underway through the region. A whole generation of Arab peoples, most under 30 years of age, have courageously rebelled against the long entrenched autocracy of their oppressive governments, demanding the one thing we claim to hold most dear in this country--freedom. A decisive action now in support of the Libyan government is a strategic and moral imperative for the United States. The time for equivocation is over. History is asking us a question that we will long regret not answering here. It is time to support the Libyan revolution with the considerable means at our disposal.

Perhaps we fear to take such a decisive stand because rebellion has now come to the vital region of the Persian Gulf in places like Bahrain and now even Saudi Arabia, nations we have armed with our weapons and supported for generations in exchange for a stable and abundant flow of oil. We fear to answer the question in Libya because History may ask it of us yet again in Saudi Arabia. To say this is a thorny problem for the US, and the world, is putting things lightly. It would be far easier to do nothing. The world had no qualms when nearly a million were killed in bloody purges throughout Africa over the last decade. When oil, gas and money are on one scale and human lives on the other, we have too often chosen, to our great shame, to protect commodities and ignore human lives.

03/09/11 - The map above shows the present state of the Libyan revolution, and it is one that would give pro-Gaddafi comanders restless nights. Their one success to date has been the action by Saadi Brigade (4) at Bin Jawad, which stopped the rebel advance on Surt and is now increasing pressure on Ras Lanuf, with more air strikes reported daily there. The Gaddafi army has before it an imposing task, and a campaign much more difficult than Rommel had when he drove east on these desert roads during WWII. As Rommel could threaten to drive directly on Cairo, his Afrika Korps could take the right fork at Ajdabiya and race directly for Tobruk. He did not need to bother with cities like Benghazi, Al Mart, Al Bayda and Darnah. The British retreated as fast as he could advance, through their bastion at Tobruk and then back to the Egyptian border to defend Egypt. But Gaddafi’s loyalist brigades must retake all the green cities and towns, secure them, and re-impose Gaddafi’s authoritarian rule there. Then he must re-enlist the loyalty of all the desert tribes that have abandoned him as well. I reckon it near impossible for him to achieve this. His Khamis Brigade (1) continues to blast its way through Az Zuwiyah in the west, with reports of indiscriminate use of heavy weapons there, destroying buildings and infrastructure in an attempt to impose fear as their ultimate control over the dissident population. He will have to do the same to every city in Libya to re-impose his authority, leaving the nation in ruins if he were to succeed.

News sources have been intrigued today with a report that three of Gaddafi’s private planes have taken off, one heading for Austria, one for Egypt and one for Greece. Speculation is that someone, or some thing is being moved out of the embattled country. The revolutionary council gave Gaddafi a 72 hour ultimatum yesterday, but Israeli news site Debka again has an outlandish spin on the story.(They are sounding more like our own Fox News each day with their constant spin of the situation as one in which Gaddafi is firmly in control and driving events with his iron fisted elite brigades.) They published a photo of a jubilant Gaddafi and claimed the Rebels have offered Gaddafi a cease fire, agreeing to lay down their arms in exchange for a pledge from him to “save Benghazi.” Debka claims an Egyptian Field Marshal, the Greek Prime Minister, and Vienna based diplomats are behind these negotiations, which matches the flight paths of the three planes leaving Tripoli.

Gaddafi forces are, of course, nowhere near Benghazi. To pose any threat to that city they would first have to fight their way through Ras Lanuf, Mersa El Brega, Ajdabiya, Qumanius, Sulug and other smaller towns along the way. I find it improbable that the Rebellion would concede so easily after its initial dramatic successes. The burden of proof, where control of Libya is concerned, is firmly on Gaddafi. All the Rebellion has to do is hold the ground it presently has, in effect creating two Libyas, one liberated and one controlled by Gaddafi. A look at the map above tells the real story, and Gaddafi is a long, long way from restoring the authority of his regime. The Rebellion is unlikely to give him what he cannot take, and he has not proven he can take much at all, the capture of Bin Jawad being his only military victory to date.

03/08/11 - The Gaddaffi counteroffensive has reportedly seized control of Bin Jawad but has been unable to retake the oil towns of Ras Lanuf or Mersa El Brega where rebel forces are consolidating and awaiting reinforcements from Benghazi after advancing 100 miles in the previous week.

In Zawiya, (west of Tripoli) Gaddafi troops are able to bull their way into the city center, but cannot secure the city, as they come under constant attack by rebel forces there. Yet isolated as it is from any other outside help, the insurgents may have little remaining ammunition. In this light, Gaddafi’s inability to quell opposition there with his finest troops, “The Kamis Brigade” shows how difficult it is to secure hostile urban environments.

One has only to recall the intense fighting in Fallujah, Iraq, after the US threw more than 8 battalions of hardened US Marines and Army units, supported by an additional 2000 Iraqi army troops against an estimated 2500 insurgents. It took 9 days of intense fighting to secure the city, and sporadic fighting continued there for another five weeks as Marines had to continually patrol and re-clear areas over and over that had been re-infiltrated by insurgents. This Marine/Army unit was a highly skilled force comprised of two regimental combat teams, supported by tanks, APCs, helicopters and considerable air power and artillery. It possessed combat power an order of magnitude beyond Gaddafi’s “Kamis Brigade.” So the inability of Gaddafi’s best to secure Zawiya demonstrates, in no uncertain terms, that Gaddafi has no chance of ever re-imposing his authority over Libya in populous cities like Benghazi. His forces continue to struggle in Zawiya, and Misurata, all well within his sphere of influence near Tripoli and isolated from the main rebel resistance in the east.

Even though his troops possess tanks, have air and helicopter support, and have naval gunboats, they have not been able to decisively defeat the lightly armed rebel forces on the front lines near Ras Lanuf. The inability of Gaddafi troops to take and hold Ras Lanuf and Mersa El Brega in short order is telling. Keep in mind that the resistance is largely composed of a small core of defected army troops augmented by scores of youth who are holding weapons for the first time in their lives. The inability of Gaddafi forces to quickly defeat this opposition shows they have little chance of advancing on Benghazi, or ever retaking that eastern stronghold should they even manage to approach that city, the second most populous city in Libya. In fact, Gaddafi cannot even claim to completely control all of Tripoli, and there are whole segments of the city that are hostile to his regime.

These facts have led to stories this morning that there have been secret negotiations between the Gaddafi government and the Revolutionary council in Benghazi. Today the council announced it would not pursue Gaddafi for crimes, and would guarantee his safe travel, if he steps down and leaves the country within 72 hours.

Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia, the government there has reportedly augmented its security forces by drafting 10,000 new conscripts and is sending columns of armor and military to Shia areas most likely to demonstrate in the planned “Day of Rage” scheduled for March 11 and March 20. News like this has led oil futures traders to place call orders for oil at $200/barrel deliverable in June, 2011. (Such call orders guarantee the $200 price while not obligating the buyer to actually make the purchase.)

The Road to Tripoli

2011-03-06T19:09:00.000-08:00

03/07/11 - Conflicting reports were the order of the day over the weekend. Fighters in the besieged city of Az-Zawiya, 30 miles west of Tripoli, successfully repelled another major attempt by pro-Gaddafi forces to occupy the city, even while state TV in Tripoli broadcast that they city had been retaken. Yet rebel spokesmen in Zawiya reported to Al Jazeera that Libyan army forces loyal to Gaddafi penetrated to Martyr’s Square, several hundred strong with supporting armor, but were then driven out again by defending freedom fighters. 30 were reported dead and up to 200 injured in the fighting. The Israeli site Debka reported a different result in the battle for Az-Zawiya stating: “The Khamis Brigade No. 32 of the Libyan army, which Saturday morning won the battle for Zawiyah 30 kilometers west of Tripoli, using tanks, Grad surface missiles and artillery to break down opposition defenses.” It was clear by Sunday that pro-Gaddafi forces were no longer in the heart of the town, and had been forced to withdraw.

Elsewhere, the fighting on the coastal road continued from Ras Lanuf west, with the area still in dispute. Debka’s analysis claims the Libyan army still holds key centers in Ras Lanuf and that they also retook Misurata, a city of 600,000 people further west. And Debka also reported Gaddafi forces were still in the oil port of Mersa El Brega, well east of Ras Lanuf, though that town has been firmly under rebel control for days. Yet pro-government forces have apparently launched a major counteroffensive aimed at taking back all these towns, and the euphoric advance of the rebels on the road to Tripoli has been halted. Gaddafi’s forces have the advantage in experience, training, and combined arms, with both armor and air support, however minimal, from the fledgling Libyan air force. Yet Al Jazeera reported that there were many Rebel casualties, a good number from their own weapons, and they were young boys three weeks ago, now becoming men as they learn in the hardest way possible in the school of war.

Libyan opposition leaders still call for a “no fly zone” to help aid their cause, but Debka reported that Gaddafi has taken measures to defeat that should it ever come. At times the Debka analysis appears almost comical, however. They claimed, for instance, that Gaddafi has moved all his remaining aging Mig-23 and Su-22 fighters south near the Sahara where they will be “outside the range” of US carrier aircraft. Yet the Gaddafi’s SU-22 export version has a range of 590 nautical miles and no in flight refueling capability, and the old Mig-23s have a range of 970 nautical miles, while US carrier based F-16s have a range of 2500 nautical miles and unlimited in-flight refueling capability. Who does Debka’s research? Their analysis would seem to indicate the Libyans could easily sortie from their deep Saharan bases in the south and return home, while US carrier based planes in the Gulf of Sirte with about 2.5 to 5 times the flight range of their adversaries, could not make it to the Saharan bases and back? Nonsense. The distance from the sea to the southermost Libyan border is no more than 700-800 miles, well within F-16 strike range, yet well outside Su-22 strike range in the other direction. And should the US choose to intervene in the air they would not even have to take out the Libyan bases in the south or impose a nation wide no fly zone. All they would have to do is fly combat air patrols over the coastal roads leading west to Tripoli, and any pro-Gaddafi aircraft flying out of these Saharan bases would then have to face lethal and efficient US naval air patrols when they arrived at the coast--if they arrived at the coast. The US would see them coming well in advance and make short work of them if challenged. Enterprise could also be joined in due course by CV-77 (George Bush), which took on live ammunition from CV-Truman a week ago and is available on the US East coast. (Alas, the US government does not appear to have the will to use the considerable means at its disposal, so all of this may be a moot point in the end.)

Western reporters also flatly contradicted the Debka analysis, stating Misurata was still firmly in the anti-government camp but the situation remains very fluid. The live Libyan blog reported that as of 1am March 7: “Mohammed Ali, a member of the civil committee for Misurata affairs claimed rebels are in control of the area.” They stated that Gaddafi’s forces cannot hold positions they take inside the town for long, as the city of 600,000 is a hostile environment.

To the west, Libyan air force attacks have been made against advancing groups of rebelling fighters, and rebels claimed they shot down at least one plane. Al Jazeera reporter Tony Birtley, traveling with the resistance fighters, reported four air strikes but noted that Gaddafi's troops have retreated, pursued by rebel fighters still moving west. But the situation remained fluid on Sunday with rebel forces advancing west to Bin Jawad, where they were then ambushed by Gaddafi forces occupying residential homes in the town and forced to fall back on Ras Lanuf after stiffer pro-government resistance. The key fact is this: it was clear that the fighting had moved from Ras Lanuf to positions further west along the coastal road to Bin Jawad, where the Gaddafi forces have dug in to halt the advance west in Surt.

Noted Middle East specialist Professor Juan Cole reported: “The partisans of the liberation movement seem determined to go further and try to take the city of Sirt (Sirte, Surt) (pop. 135,000). The advantage here is that if they can conquer Sirt, they can link up with rebels who control Misurata (pop. 600,000), and so will control everything east of Tripoli. Since the eastern, working-class suburbs of Tripoli are not under control of the government, either, Qaddafi would be reduced to dominating only downtown Tripoli and some sparsely populated towns in the west.” Surt (Sirte), the birthplace of Gaddafi, may prove the most difficult test for the incipient rebellion, as it is home to a privileges class of many pro-Gaddafi families who have long benefited from his regime.

Heavy gunfire reported in Tripoli was supposed to have been the people there celebrating all these Gaddafi victories Debka has been reporting. Gaddafi himself also stated he still controls Benghazi and Tobruk, which puts him in the same league with the famous “Baghdad Bob,” the Iraqi spokesperson who claimed Baghdad was firmly under Saddam’s control when US Armored divisions were rolling through the city.

There was fighting again in Tobruk, but Gaddafi forces do not control that city. All this said, the lightly armed rebel forces that had been advancing west have apparently met determined pro-government resistance now, with Surt being the one stronghold that Gaddafi will now fight for to halt their advance. The action at Bin Jawad is a distant outpost to that city, which will prove the most difficult battle should the rebels be able to muster enough force to launch a concerted assault there.

What we have seen in all this fighting is that both sides have limited offensive capability. Gaddafi troops can fight their way into opposition towns, inflicting many civilian casualties, but the local population has been too numerous in places like Zawiya and Misurata for Gaddafi troops to hold their positions for very long. They are then forced to withdraw and regroup outside the city for another attack. (This is no “in and out tactic.” The rebel forces have moved quickly in light vehicles along the desert road through the much smaller towns of Mersa El Brega, Ras Lanuf and Bin Jawad, but here Gaddafi forces have been able to mount significant counterattacks and ambushes, and also harass them with desultory air strikes, as the local population is not great enough to create a truly hostile environment for them.

The Mayor of Tripoli

2011-03-01T07:26:00.000-08:00

03/01/11 - In Zawiya, just 30 kilometers West of Tripoli, the freedom movement strengthened its control of the city of 200,000 people while Gaddafi chided them as being under the influence of Bin Ladin. Residents have built defenses including tanks, anti-aircraft guns and other captured army weapons, with many manned by soldiers who have joined the rebellion. Between Zawiya and Tripoli, pro-government security forces have set up at least six barricaded checkpoints to ward off any threat to the capitol from the east, and they have also sent armored forces to the outskirts of Zawiya to prevent the rebellion from spreading from that point. The Libyan air force mounted emergency air ferry operations to bring in more foreign fighters from the south to reinforce the capitol.

In Tripoli itself, Gaddafi has taken a leaf from the Kuwaiti book by instructing the banks to pay a dividend of 500 Dinars ($400 US) to all city citizens, and promising to issue them low interest loans for housing. He has literally bought an interval of quiet, now rigidly enforced by security forces in the city. The streets of the capitol were eerily quiet and deserted.
Debka reported that US and other NATO nations have sent in military and intelligence advisors to the victorious rebel forces in the east. The US is also reportedly moving CV Enterprise and Kearsarge (a Marine amphibious transport carrier) to positions off the Libyan coast. The American carrier based air power could easily enforce a no-fly zone over Libya, and the Marine unit would serve for other contingencies.

Meanwhile, protests continued in Yemen, Bahrain and now Oman, where looting was reported in the latest round of demonstrations. And let us not forget the ticking clock on the planned “Day Of Rage” in Saudi Arabia, where demonstrations are planned for March 11 in Riyadh. Saudi security forces have already responded to minor protests in the kingdom, and they are reported to be mobilizing assets in the event the turmoil that has rocked the region comes home to plague the House of Saud.

02/28/11 - As Americans shook off the last hangover watching the 3.5 hour Oscars and another 2 hours of post ceremony partying by the Hollywood elite, the residents of Tripoli endure a virtual lockdown. Gaddafi’s security apparatus has manned checkpoints throughout the city and killed just enough people to frighten the remainder into staying home. Bread is now being rationed, with a limit of five loaves per family. The price of a 10 pound bag of rice has skyrocketed 500 percent to the US Equivalent of $40, money the people just do not have. So while the entire east of Libya has been liberated from Gaddafi’s rule, he remains the embattled Mayor of Tripoli, holding 2 million residents there hostage with gas, armored cars, kalishnikov rifle toting militias roving the city in SUVs and pickup trucks, and a hyperinflation fueled bout of starvation. Something tells me that by adding hunger to his mix of oppressive tools he is making a fatal mistake. Hungry people soon become desperate people, and it may not be long before the masses brave the rifles in their overwhelming numbers and emerge from their homes with a vengeance.

The interim government of Eastern Libya announced it would form paramilitary forces to extend their control over more cities. Gaddafi has already lost control of 80% of the oil production capacity of Libya, and his control anywhere outside of Tripoli is marginal in the west. Western national, including oil field workers, have fled the country, but locals have been reportedly struggling to keep the oil flowing. Even though Saudi Arabia increased production by 500,000 barrels per day to take up any slack, speculators have bid the price of oil futures up higher. Brent crude briefly hit $114/barrel before retreating to about $96/barrel over the weekend. Even though all the gasoline in the system now was purchased long ago at much lower prices, the oil companies have used the threat of future disruption in oil flows to ratchet up prices here almost immediately, with some US cities reporting prices nearing or exceeding $4.00/gallon. The Libyans pay inflated prices for their bread. We pay inflated prices for oil. This situation was further compounded by the spread of protests in Iraq, and now Oman, where demonstrators targeted oil facilities, refineries and roads used to transport refined oil to port. Clearly the people instinctively know how to get the world’s attention.

02/24/11 - Gaddafi claimed today that, (you guessed it), Al Qaeda was behind the Libyan uprising, and that it was mostly comprised of misled kids under 20 on drugs. This repeats the tired theme that all unrest is the work of “terrorists.” In fact, governments the world over have come to define any anti-government sentiment or action as “terrorism,” even here in the USA. In the meantime, Gaddafi has apparently called for a muster of his fighting militias, long veterans of the warfare with Chad, and columns have been seen heading north on the roads to Tripoli. Africa has no shortage of machete wielding, kalishnikov toting thugs who will kill and maim indiscriminately for pay. These are the real terrorists in the world, the men who gave us rape, pillage and death on a genocidal scale in Sudan, Darfur, Somalia and elsewhere. With most of western Libya no longer in government control, Gaddafi continues to hold on to his center of power in Tripol,i where leaving your home courts death these days. Yet an ominous, and as yet unconfirmed, “tweet” on the Internet has reported a large column of tanks heading west from Tripoli.

President Obama asked his national security team to consider “the full range of options” concerning Libya, but the word “sanctions” was high on the list, so don’t expect any real response in support of the freedom movement from Uncle Sam. Sanctions? This is a tool that can work only on a government concerned that shortages imposed by the measures will harm its people and economy. Gaddafi has no such qualms.

Desert War

2011-02-23T07:57:00.000-08:00

02/23/11 - The last time names like Benghazi and Tobruk led headlines Montgomery and Rommel were dueling it out in the Libyan desert during WWII. Today demonstrators, or should we properly call them “freedom fighters,” claim they have taken Tobruk! The cities of Bayda and Benghazi are now also firmly in control of the people, though there have been reports of French speaking African militias roaming at night with mischief in mind, and the residents believe they are mercenaries from Chad.

The liberation of the eastern half of the nation has cost perhaps 1000 lives thus far, but this time it is Arab blood staining the sands of this famous desert region, where German, Italian, British and New Zealanders once fought and died from, El Alamein in Egypt to Tunisia. Gaddafi is slowly losing his control over the nation. Beduin tribes long loyal to his regime have declared their support for the opposition, and several interior ministers have resigned. Elements of the army, particularly in the east, have also joined the uprising to fight for freedom, and soldiers in Tobruk are directing traffic and helping to keep order for the new civilian authorities there. Tripoli is likely to be the bloody finale of this latest desert campaign, where the front line begins at the doorstep of each and every Libyan, who must decide that day who’s side they are on when they cross that threshold. The choices they make will decide the fate of their nation, an the lives of Libyans in generations to come.

But where is the United States, that bastion of freedom and democracy? President Obama was reportedly “considering all appropriate actions” regarding Libya, but for the moment that seems restricted to making news statements and arranging the safe evacuation of US citizens still in the country. I hope it occurs to the us diplomats that support for freedom now could have a dramatic and lasting positive effect, and achieve more than a decade of fighting and a trillion dollars fed into that war machine in the Middle East.

Our 300 Spartans

2011-02-21T08:27:00.000-08:00

I came across a disturbing photo this morning of "our boys" in the army diligently running through a training exercise to control....Us! Never mind the venerable Posse Comitatus act passed way back 1878 that prohibited the military from any domestic law enforcement, based on the old fear of the quartering of British armies in the colonies. That was one of the many protections of our liberty that were quietly dismantled by Bush and his Republican cohorts in the 8 years when the country suffered so much damage under his administration, including 9-11, two unwinnable wars, the financial malfeasance and collapse of Wall Street and the onset of the second Great Depression to name but a few.

Lest we forget as we flip from the super bowl to Lady Gaga, to the next holiday sale, those were the halcyon days that brought us the great misnomer of our day, a piece of legislation called "The Patriot Act," which was also quietly "extended" by Change.gov and the new congress this month. Yet another blight on the constitution is H.R. 5122, the John Warner "Defense Authorization Act" for Fiscal Year 2007, signed by president Bush on October 17, 2006, that gives the president the power to employ the armed forces to restore public order in any state of the United States. Bye, bye Posse Comitatus. I guess the Founding Fathers, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton and all the rest had it wrong, and Bush and Cheney had to straighten them out, with a little help from John Warner.

The photo showed ranks of heavily armored young soldiers with what looked like kevlar padding on their shoulders and shins, and visored gray helmets. They carried clear plastic shields with the first rank forming a shield-wall and the second rank raising their shields up to form a roof. They looked like our modern version of the 300 Spartans or perhaps a cohort of Roman soldiers. Other troops wearing sweatshirts and blue jeans (to look more like you and me) and carrying brooms and sticks and bottles, were taunting and jabbing at the silent ranks of our new military crowd control force, training here in the good old USA, land of the free. Oh, they haven't shown up in Wisconsin yet to start busting open the heads of teachers and public workers who have pulled a Tahrir Square in the government buildings there the last week. But Lord knows they will show up somewhere on US soil one day...."our boys."

The US government was so quick to condemn the actions of authoritarian rulers in the Middle East, but should that sort of unrest ever visit our shores I wonder... I just wonder how far the new rubber bullet firing machine gun the army is deploying soon will serve, and whether the real bullets will start firing over here as well. Because a few battalions, or even a few brigades or divisions of "our boys" will not suffice to maintain order here in the US of A if people ever turn off their TV sets, get really hungry or angry, and take to the streets. These security forces will serve in a pinch, for small demonstrations and such. But there will come an awful moment when things get out of hand in these "uprisings" and I am from a generation who knows only too well what happens..."Four dead in Ohio..." was a song that led a generation of young Americans to protest the Viet Nam war. The lyrics "Got to get down to it, soldiers are cutting us down" cut through to our Rubber Souls like rubber bullets.

So if things ever go the way of Egypt over here "our boys" will be faced with a real thorny dilemma. You see, the government authorities who order their deployment on US soil are not the United States of America. The People they are deployed against are, in final and incontrovertible fact, the nation they have sworn to serve. We the People are the United States of America, not Congress, the Supreme Court or the Executive branch of our government--all entities created to serve the People. Our 300 Spartans had better damn well remember that as they oil their rifles in the barracks. Because should they ever forget, the hundreds of millions of Americans in this country will remind them fairly quickly. You see, "our boys," with most of the entire army deployed in Iraq for 8 years, and all firing live ammo with tanks, air support and the full weight of our military power, could not control the 23 million over there. Fat chance they will ever be able to control the 300 million over here.

The Great Uprising

2011-02-19T19:39:00.000-08:00

There hasn't been a Arab uprising since the days the Sheiks first assumed power after Lawrence of Arabia led the rebellion against the Turks during WWI. The historic revolution in Egypt continues to fuel the fires of unrest throughout the region.

02/19/11 - The violence continued in Libya where at least 15 people at a funeral joined the dead when police opened fire on the mourners this weekend in the turmoil of Benghazi. This is likely to continue, as the 40+ year dictatorship of Gaddafi will employ a host of foreign mercenaries to crush his opposition, much like the clashes in Bahrain where the government there employs Sudanese, Palestinian, Pakistani and other mercenary security forces. But the military there pulled out of the Pearl Roundabout where they shot and killed several people yesterday. The video, captured on cell phone, circulated to CNN, and perhaps the wealthy Sheiks decided it would be bad press to precipitate further violence. Yet the unrest on the shores of the Persian Gulf, where the US 5th Fleet maintains its headquarters for the region, is more than unsettling. The powers that be in the region cannot allow one of the Gulf States to go down, as the threat implied to the House of Saud would be dire indeed.
Meanwhile, demonstrations, protests and clashes with police continue all across North Africa in Algeria, Yemen and Morocco as the fire of uprising continues to burn through the Arab world. The life and death edge to the demonstrations overseas make the five day protest marches in Wisconsin look like a boy scout outing by comparison.

02/17/11 - Police waited until well after dark in the Capitol of Bahrain, then launched a massive surprise attack on the sleeping protesters in their roundabout square, killing six and wounding many dozens more. The armored cars, tear gas and batons were liberally applied. Meanwhile a massive “Day of Rage” protest was carried out in Libya, where 12 were reported killed. The government there has reportedly released convicts from prison, paid them, armed them and turned them loose on the crowd. Clearly the remaining authoritarian states are reacting violently to the spreading protest movement, having seen what it will lead to in Egypt if they do not put the fire out quickly.

02/16/11 - The word “Revolution” was made all too real in the three brief weeks this story has dominated the news. The fire was lit by a single man, who set himself on fire in Tunisia to protest the oppression and vast economic disparity there, and it has burned throughout the Arab world. Egypt’s example has ignited protests in Iran, where the government prepared the most extreme measures possible, death by hanging, for anyone caught organizing protests. Protesters have now clashed with police in the Libyan city of Benghazi and they are calling for their own “Day of Rage” on Thursday, 2/17/11. In Bahrain the death of two protesters led to an almost unprecedented apology by the king, but growing numbers are now gathering in a central square of the capitol there and vowing to make it their own Tahrir Square. They want the corrupt Prime minister to go. Violence escalated in Yemen as crowds there call for the removal of President Saleh. They have been attacked by baton wielding police and plain clothes security forces dubbed “loyalists.” In Iraq, no stranger to violence, thousands marched in Kut to protest for better services, and stormed the local government council building there.

It remains to be seen whether any of these other fires will spread to real revolution as it did in Egypt. All these ancillary rebellions are in their early stages, with batons, gun wielding police, media crackdowns, and vigorous action by secret services to ferret out the protest leaders--club them, beat them, shut it down. The uneasy calm in Syria is imposed by a ruthless and much feared security apparatus there. In Kuwait the government is literally buying its citizens good will by paying them a huge monthly bonus, over $3000, (US) to each citizen per month while the turmoil continues in the region. In Saudi Arabia, the House of Saud sits in its purloined billions, silent, corrupt, a stagnant remnant from an old era of sheikdoms, male dominance and rigid religious autocracy. Some of these weathered trees may succumb to the fire of revolution now spreading through the region, others will stand, resolute, and only time will bring change.

Stage Three: "Days of Rage" - UPDATE

2011-01-28T07:49:00.000-08:00

NOTE: This post will update daily as events play out in Egypt.

02/11/11 - MUBARAK RESIGNS! Power handed over to Military Council. Hundreds of thousands of jubilant demonstrators celebrated the People’s victory in Tahrir Square. Al Jazeera reports that Mubarak has left Cairo for a Red sea coastal resort while “the military said it would guarantee changes to the constitution as well as a free and fair election, and it called for normal business activity to resume.” With Mubarak handing over power to the Military, the position of VP Suleiman remained uncertain. It was clear yesterday that he remained president only in title. What we saw in the speech was little more than stubborn Arab male pride. The military, which has largely served as a referee to contain police brutality, is now the real center of government power in Egypt, backed by the awesome street power of the People, who defied an entrenched autocratic regime and its police force of 30,000 thugs. The army has been a trump card all along, an army of the people that refused to turn its guns on the the brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles in the protesting crowd. And isn’t it amazing how the “pro-government protesters” have also vanished again, just as the 30,000 police vanished for a three day huddle before they came charging back on horses and camels and trucks filled with rocks?

Day 18 saw “The People” out in force again, unintimidated, determined, victorious, as the rest of the oppressive Arab regimes in the Levant and Arabian Peninsula looked on with growing unease.

02/09/11 - As millions of Americans moved their focus of attention from the Superbowl to the Oscars and Valentine’s Day, protests were bolstered by substantial support from Egypt’s unions on day 16 of the historic uprising. Government VP wide receiver Suleiman, who took the lateral pass from Mubarak as protesters put on a strong rush, was on the air again warning that the country could not tolerate the demonstrations indefinitely. To this Abdul-Rahman Samir, a spokesman for the demonstrators commented: "He is threatening to impose martial law, which means everybody in the square will be smashed. But what will he do with the rest of the 70 million Egyptians who will follow us afterward?" Good question.

So it continues to be a standoff between the people in their massive numbers and an entrenched government determined to hold power at any cost. The veiled threats from the government and their statements about the damage to Egypt from the uprising were not so subtle attempts to fix blame on the anti-government camp. I have little doubt that all the “pro-government” protesters, chastened in recent days for “unnecessary roughness,” are huddled somewhere going over their play book to see if they can get their running game of street thuggery going again once Mubarak and Suleiman give the go sign. This isn’t over, and the story could move quickly from this standoff stage to violence again at any time.

02/07/11 - Something that wasn’t much noticed in the furor over Mubarak was the inconvenient natural gas pipeline explosion in Sinai near the town of El Arish on Feb 5th. Word on the Net is that Hamas infiltrated a special attack team to conduct the operation, which resulted in Egypt diverting natural gas bound for Israel to fuel domestic needs “indefinitely.” Israel has just lost 25% of its natural gas supply, but the situation in Jordan is even worse where they lost 80% of their supply and must now revert to heavy oil to keep the power stations running there.

As usual, any “trouble” in the Middle East always has a back story involving oil and gas. The US, which has been moving military “assets” like the Marine CV Kearsarge to the region has also reportedly dispatched elements of a national guard regiment to join the UN observer teams along the Sinai border. Israel beefed up security there, and at all its power stations, as well. Egypt also sent more troops to the border region.

Elsewhere in the region, Tehran is late on its promise to start up its Bushehr nuclear reactor due to a second infection by a nefarious Internet virus dubbed “Stuxnet.” And so not to be outdone by Egypt, Tehran stopped thousands of fuel trucks bound for Afghanistan, causing immediate price spikes there by as much as 70%.

Here in the US the public will awaken this morning still burping its nachos and buffalo wings, with visions of Super Bowl commercials and LED enhanced dancers glowing in their foggy minds. Perhaps some will take notice of the quiet price spike over here when it comes to gasoline, which hit $3.60 per gallon (regular) in some spots this week, particularly in places like California, which always leads the gas price wars.

02/06/11 - Mubarak’s son and most of the NDP resigned their positions this weekend, though the president himself has dug in his heels, determined to wait out the storm in Egypt. With images of the police/thug instigated violence circulating worldwide in spite of a calculated effort to target and suppress the free press, the Army is now intervening when things get too hot, and the violence has been quelled. That said, Katie Curic, Brian Williams and other major news reps who were all set to present “live coverage” from Egypt have all come scurrying home. The place is just too dangerous for major news anchors to do their thing.

US diplomats decried the violence as “unacceptable” but I found myself wondering what the US government would do if this were happening on the Mall in Washington DC...day after day after day.... How soon we forget how anti-Bush demonstrations were handled here in this country. Remember “Free Speech Zones?” These were little well guarded street pens, isolated from all media, where anyone with a beef was forced to go if they wanted to protest here. The FBI and secret service kept a close eye on them, made sure the cameras were OFF, except those they used to surveil the demonstrators. It was basically a polite version of the Mubarak media crackdown, without the camel and cavalry charges, batons, and rifle fire. Yet looking back on those cold eight years under Bush, can we really say free speech prevailed here? I’m wondering... if US citizens ever pulled a “Cairo” in Washington D.C., demonstrating in a mass scale for weeks on end, would the actions of our government match our “free speech / human rights” rhetoric? Did we pass the test when the batons and tear gas came out in Chicago at the Democratic national convention when McGovern ran? Did we measure up when the rifle fire started at Kent State and “Four dead in Ohio” became an anthem that moved a generation of young Americans to protest the Vietnam war?

I wonder what we would do if faced with a similar “uprising” here in the US. Our “Patriot Act,” is about to be quietly renewed by congress before it expires Feb 28th this year. Think you’ll see a lot of major media coverage here about that? Nope. But you can bet any amount of money the Feds would be quoting from the Patriot Act chapter and verse if Cairo ever happened here...And not quoting from the constitution.

02/03/11 - Control the media. Intimidate the population. These appear to me the last cards in Mubarak’s hand as reporters were widely targeted by the plain clothes police posing as “pro-government supporters.” After CNN’s Anderson Cooper was attacked a punched in the head 10 times as he and his crew attempted to find neutral ground, the American media got the story right and quickly assessed that the attacks were planned and orchestrated by the police and government.

How stupid can the Mubarak government be? Their cavalry/camel charge failing to have any real impact, it was gunfire that punctuated the overnight hours, finally prompting the Egyptian army to temporarily separate the two groups. After more anti-Mubarak protesters reinforced those remaining in embattled Tahrir Square, the army stepped back again, and clashes resumed. Clearly the army is treading a fine line here. They may as well turn in their uniforms for black and white vertical striped shirts, as they appear to be little more than referees in the conflict, there only to keep things from really getting out of hand.

The protesters bravely held their ground overnight after 1300 injuries were reported, and eight were killed. One woman in the square phoning in to Al Jazeera put their position quite simply. “We are staying until Mubarak goes, because if we give up now they will just hunt us down one by one after we leave here.” The chilling truth in her voice spoke of long familiarity with the Egyptian “Ministry of the Interior” and the cadres of police that have been the street muscle of the Mubarak regime for decades. The whole world now sees their handiwork first hand. Deception, brutality, brazen attack on citizens and all media sources.

The clock is now ticking in this dangerous standoff. The protesters have stated that Friday is their deadline for Mubarak to step down. Meanwhile, shortages of cash, bread and fuel become more serious. As I write now a large new group of protesters are assembling in Alexandria, and Al Jazeera reports they have been “infiltrated by plain clothes police who are attacking them and trying to ignite more violence.” Mubarak’s song remains the same.

02/02/11 - President Mubarak announced that he would not run for re-election in September, but the massive crowd in Tahrir square reacted with anger and disappointment. They continued to insist Mubarak must go now, and remained in the square. Yet the President clung stubbornly to power after 8 days of anti-government demonstrations, and he appears to have come up with a new strategy--taking the fight to the streets.

“Pro-government supporters” suddenly appeared in Alexandria yesterday to clash with the crowd, and today well organized groups of “pro-government supporters” literally arrived in trucks and busses at the approaches to the square to begin hurling rocks at the crowd within. They didn’t come with signs and slogans to make a peaceful demonstration, but with stones, batons and weapons. They had horses and camels and mounted charges against the people. The rocks were conveniently ready in the bed of the large trucks! And as night fell rifle fire was directed at the crowd, with four reported dead and over 500 injured.

The Army broke up the one emerging conflict in Alexandria, but has not moved to intervene in Tahrir square. Mubarak’s plain clothes secret police, the 30,000 regular police, all mysteriously “vanished,” two days ago. Yet now they appear to have returned in street clothes in the guise of “pro-government supporters,” many who stupidly still carried their police ID cards! Citizens phoning in to Al Jazeerah stated they could point out police officers that they knew from decades of interaction. With this thinly veiled ploy, Mubarak tries to make it seem that the government itself did nothing to incite the violence. Opposition voice Elbaradei condemned the move as “a crime against Egypt” and called in vain for the army to intervene.

The president appears to be counting on the growing instability to create such a desperate environment in the country that his cadres of trained thugs will prevail on the streets and the people will give up and go home. Will it work? Stay tuned.

02/01/11 - Up to two million people converged on Tahrir Square in Cairo to continue their protest against the Mubarak regime. As they did so the sound of yet another Arab government falling dimly echoed from the other side of Suez. King Abdullah II dismissed the Jordanian Government and selected a new Prime Minister with orders to begin reform and ease the hardships of the people. He might better begin by stepping down himself and ending the process of royal rule altogether, where Prime Ministers are "selected" and not "elected." Yet, as the fire of revolution now burns eastward onto the Arabian Peninsula and into the Levant, at least something of the message being shouted by the people is being heard. In Kuwait the ruling elite have decided to roll out the Burgie instead of the police and APCs. They will be paying every citizen a sum of $3000. (US) per month for the next several months, and also providing free food! Clearly they are hoping to prevent protests from coming to the shores of the Persian Gulf by literally buying good will now while they can.

The protesters represent the entire cross section of Egyptian society, the wealthy business class notably excepted, as they have already boarded their private jets for calmer climes. Far from the oddly paranoid notions of Glenn Beck on Fox News, this is no sinister “Islamic insurgency.” The people in Tahrir square represent all faiths, Christian and Muslim, and secular society as well. They are men and women, old and young, from nearly all walks of life. The Muslim Brotherhood organization mentioned in the news represents no more than 20% of the population,( a percentage roughly in line with Beck’s hard core followers here in the US.) Thank God both exist on the margins of their respective societies. Their voices join with the whole, yet do no dominate.

Meanwhile Mubarak is still standing fast in the presidential palace, and his home is now encircled by defensive barbed wire. The army remains in place throughout key cities of Egypt, yet no move has been made to quell the protests in the streets. Mass demonstrations were also staged in Alexandria and Suez in spite of efforts to curtail protest organization by shutting down the Internet and cell phone service. In its place the "Ministry of the Interior" and Egyptian media are broadcasting images of quiet streets and army units posted on empty bridges, as if the two million people gathered in the square were not there. These feeble measures, aimed at stifling free communication and using the media to deceive and cover up the truth, are pathetically typical of dictatorial regimes. Mubarak's only strategy now seems to be stubbornness, along with an equal measure of blindness. Meanwhile, food supplies and the basic commerce of the nation are becoming more stressed. Is Mubarak waiting for hunger to add fuel to the fire of this growing revolution? If so, it will be the most serious mistake of his life. Clearly, unequivocally, the Egyptian people have crossed their Rubicon with this uprising, and there is no going back.

01/31/11 - As Mubarak continued to go about rearranging furniture in his cabinet, a "March of Millions" is now being planned by the people increase pressure on the embattled strongman to step down. Meanwhile, another dimension of the crisis is building behind the scenes, as "investors" have transferred hundreds of millions of dollars out of the country. Like the wealthy businessmen who have already fled, the elite are covering their bets and cashing out on the Egyptian people. Banks and stock exchanges remain closed, and should banks open again it is likely that people would rush to withdraw what little they have there as well. The result will be a nation gripped by severe financial crisis, (as if current financial conditions were not bad enough), making stability even more difficult for any interim government to achieve. As in any crisis, people are seldom prepared, and basic food stocks run out quickly. Shortages lead to rapid price inflation, increasing the need for cash while banks remain closed. A massive population, already marginalized by poverty, unemployment and economic hardship, will find itself near the edge in little time. All this will do is increase the likelihood of violence, because when the normal means of commerce and exchange fail, hungry people will simply take what they need by force. Keep this back story in mind as you watch events play out this week.

01/30/11 - Al Jazeera reports agreement has been reached by the largest opposition groups in Egypt to nominate former nuclear watchdog Elbaradei as interim President. Elbaradi appeared in Tahrir square and addressed the crowd saying: "What we have begun cannot go back." Yet nothing substantial has come of this if the report is true. The historical revolution underway in the Arab world's most populous nation continues in the heart of Cairo, buzzed by military jet fighters that the people completely ignore, along with the curfew order that has been defied again for the consecutive third night.

Meanwhile, US rhetoric continues to evolve as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated that the US wants an orderly transition to a new government. Yet Mubarak continues to hold meetings with his newly appointed strong men, as if this change of clothing will fool the public into quiescence again. It will not. Something far more profound than simple "discontent" and political protests is now underway in Egypt. The foreshocks in Morocco and Tunisia were triggers, but Egypt is the San Andreas fault of the Arab world. This is one of those moments that move the fulcrum of history, and in spite of Mubarak's efforts to quell news and communications in Egypt, (Al Jazeera reports its bureau was shut down by government security), the whole world is watching--particularly the Arab world.

Dimitri Orlov's wheel slowly creaked and turned in Egypt as the world moved decidedly into Stage III collapse in recent months. For those unfamiliar with his writings, Orlov laid out a pathway for collapse after witnessing the event first hand when the old Soviet Union tumbled into the dustbin of history. Stage I was "Financial Collapse," Stage II was "Commercial Collapse," and we have now entered the more dangerous and explosive Stage III: "Political Collapse."

The process has been underway for some time. Here in the U.S. the Obama administration witnessed an overwhelming majority mandate erode away, losing the House of Representatives and forcing the president to "flee to the center" in just two short years. Clearly his inability to adequately address the causes or find real solutions to Stage I Wall Street and Big Bank shenanigans, and the awful job and home stealing Stage II it brought on the nation, has resulted in a real political crisis for him.

Overseas things are a little more advanced. People took torches to the parliament building in Iceland, they've been rioting in Greece for months, major protests have shaken Great Britain and France, and now the torch of discontent has lit the fire of revolution in North Africa. When this happens governments don't just flee to the center--they flee the country. altogether. The protests spread quickly from Morocco to Tunisia in a matter of days. Now the unrest has ignited in Egypt where people organized a "Day of Rage" against the long entrenched Mubarak government. In just a few days street protests have escalated in violence. On January 28, the police, some 30,000 strong in Cairo, were further reinforced by the Egyptian Army. Tear gas, batons, and gunfire have been used against the people. Armored vehicles are on the streets, though the army has not directly engages the protesters. The government has attempted to shut down the Internet and cell phone service there as well, as Facebook and other sites has been used to organize protests and rally the people.

Club them, gas them, shoot them, shut it down, roll out the tanks. These are the knee jerk responses of a government deeply disconnected from the real lives of its citizens. Mubarak finally broke his silence saying he would dismiss the government and start over--with him still at the helm as president. The instinct is to maintain order and power at any cost. Clearly Mubarak will not flee to Saudi Arabia as easily as others before him, even though “opposition leader” Elbaradei has arrived in the country to try and ride the wave of protest to the presidency there. He narrowly avoided a police charge outside a mosque the day of his arrival. Then reports circulated that he was under house arrest, as the government moved to prevent him from becoming a lightning rod for the protesters, but these reports were subsequently denied.

Now Elbaradi has addressed the crowd in Tahrir Square, clearly eager to put himself forward as a candidate for negotiations on a new interim government. The upheaval has created a power vacuum that will undoubtedly attract figures like this hoping to exploit the situation. Even the son of Gamel Abdul Nasr (Egyptian strong man before Sadat) joined the crowd to express his views on the uprising. Elbaradi, a member of the intelligentsia who has spent most of his life outside of Egypt, and now serves as an Executive Committee Member on the International Crisis Group, is hardly a symbol of the common Egyptian. Yet, one cannot help but recall images of Boris Yeltzin standing with the Russian protesters as the Soviet Union collapsed. A transitional figure always appears, yet it remains to be seen whether Elbaradi can consolidate and effectively represent opposition power, or if the people will accept him as their representative in any real way.

The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the largest opposition movement in the country, has thrown its support behind the protesters. Like rats fleeing a sinking ship, a cabal of top Egyptian business CEOs have reportedly fled. Reports have also surfaced that Mubarak's wife and family have already left the country, and that the president has explored plans to fly to Tel Aviv after being rebuffed by a justifiably nervous House of Saud.

Mubarak's move to appoint military and intelligence service insiders followed his speech to the nation wherein he claimed he was "on the side of the poor." The people simply did not buy it, and analysts seemed shocked at his disconnect with reality. The singular cry from the demonstrators from day one has been for Mubarak to go. It was clear that only the police and army stood between him and a noose. The real test of any government is this: can the leaders face their people and be embraced? Could Mubarak show his face on the streets of Cairo now? I think not.

Day five of the uprising saw the hated police finally overwhelmed and withdrawing to gutted police stations, no longer on the streets. Only the army was able to select out key enclaves like the Museum of antiquities, and protect them from harm. Elsewhere in Cairo, citizens have armed themselves to protect their interests, as there is now no firm rule of law. In a way I am reminded of the US army rolling into Baghdad after overthrowing Saddam. The armored division could not maintain control of the city any more than the Egyptian army can control the country there. The US guarded the oil ministry, then holed up in the Green Zone in the city for the duration of the war. Let this stand as a clear example of the complete impotence of government to impose its will on a hostile population. All the talk over here in spooky internet circles about FEMA camps, martial law and US divisions being trained to deploy in our cities is utter nonsense. The people, in their massive numbers, trump all when they take to the streets. The "ruling elite" should take notice. Mubarak's oppressive secret plain clothes police, the regular police, and the army can do little more than maintain a tenuous holding action in scattered outposts in Cairo. Elsewhere, "The People" are expressing their will in massive numbers. First they raise their voices, and when this is unheeded, then they raise their arms in protest. They have defied curfew orders, swarmed army and police armored vehicles, raided police stations, and persist with their demand: Mubarak must go.

It's Stage Three.... And it will just get worse until the inequalities of wealth distribution are corrected and people are no longer exploited, turned out of their homes, and squeezed by high food prices and joblessness. Amazingly, Washington's blog reported on Jan 30 that the wealth disparity here in the US is actually greater than in Egypt, yet Americans remain passive. Face it -- only the lack of real hunger in the U.S., where 43 million now rely on food stamps each week, keeps people off our streets -- that and our endless juvenile fascination with sports and celebrities. My bet is that more US citizens will watch the Super Bowl this weekend than news of the historic uprising in Egypt. Here we meekly accepted 20% real unemployment along with the 20% interest rates on our credit cards the banks long ago saddled us with, while they continue to borrow money from the Fed at near zero interest, not to lend and revitalize the economy, but to continue their speculation and "investment" in bonds and securities. Not a single CEO has been brought to justice for the $12.6 trillion dollar heist they pulled off. But if the ignorance and passivity of the American people will not demand real change here, it can come cascading to our shores from overseas.

How long will it be before Stage III takes a more ominous form in this country? As the fire of revolution spreads across north Africa and onto the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen, the House of Saud is no doubt very edgy these days. If we see street riots in Riyadh this year the ripple effect will shake us as well, right through Exxon to Main Street USA. Oil prices, already creeping toward the $100 mark, have surged again. Think it can't happen here? It already has. Our nation was born in revolution, and it can clearly happen again.

The message resounding in the streets of Cairo is plain for all to hear. When inequity and corruption rule the day; when justice is bought and paid for by the banks and the wealthy investor class, governments fall, even in civilized Western nations like ours. Just ask King Louie or the Romanovs.

- John Schettler, Jan-Feb, 2011

State of the Union

2011-01-26T08:00:00.000-08:00

It was an uplifting and positive speech, but did you notice that it was all about tomorrow, not the current state of our affairs. President Obama laid out all the things we should be doing in education, innovation, green energy, new rail transit. But sadly, we are simply not doing these things now. The claim that we have already "broken the back" of the recession was also a wild hope for tomorrow. In real terms, with unemployment deeply entrenched now, the recession is as still cold as the eastern winter this season. Only 47% of Americans presently have a full time job. 28 million are forced to work only part time, while a staggering 85 million are reported by the BLS as "not in the labor force" simply because they haven't looked for work the last four weeks--they've given that quest up.

Yet the one thing I found odd about the speech is that it simply failed to mention or acknowledge any of this, or the tremendous transfer of wealth from the public to the banks that has been underway in massive bailouts the last three years. Or the fact that the banks remain operating only because of accounting rules changes that allow them to carry worthless property portfolios at boom year values on their "balance sheet." Or the fact that the Fed balance sheet has nearly tripled in size as it absorbed a raft of toxic assets presented by banks as collateral for low interest loans so they could go out and buy treasuries, or invest in more securities schemes, not lend. Or the fact that the Fed itself has tinkered with the rules so they don't have to report these losses either. Gentlemen's agreements... They lost billions, but none of it has been properly acknowledged by any real accounting. They have simply decided to pretend nothing catastrophic actually happened, and the burden of all these losses has been quietly and deviously passed to the public taxpayer--that would be you.

People think the biggest banks only received little bundles of $25 to $50 billion each during the crisis. (Sums of money, I might add, that would feed every hungry person on earth for a year, all glibly given to the banks without a second thought while a tide of social unrest sweeps across North Africa, toppling governments as people protest the cost of living and corruption in government there.) In reality the big banks, who's former officers now hold all the key posts in our government, received a real bailout sum exceeding $12 trillion dollars, which would feed every soul on earth for generations.

The only reason we have not seen such unrest here in the US is that people simply don't know any of this with any real understanding--even intelligent, well educated people. The media doesn't report any of it, and most people are not diligent enough to seek the information out on their own. And of course it will never be mentioned in a state of the union address. The average person does not know what "the Fed" is, how it operates, or what its "policies" really mean or do. That ignorance, along with our endless fascination with dancing and ice skating celebrities, has kept the lid on any movement to the streets to protest the real state of our union. Another reason is that people are not yet desperately hungry here, in spite of the shrinking product packaging and rising food prices.

They are hungry enough in Tunisia, and Morocco, and Egypt, however, and the world had better take notice, because what we are seeing there is a well tried template that can quickly transfer to western nations as well. There comes a point when the reality of people's lives, in real terms, becomes so onerous that they will indeed take action and demand change. And as the old Indian once said: "if we keep heading in this direction we just might get where we're going."

Will it be a land of new high tech industries, revitalized educational systems, high speed trains? Perhaps, but not until we first acknowledge what really happened in the arcane realms of high finance, where the money really went, where the losses really are... At present the total funding dedicated to all the things Obama talked about last evening would not equal even a small fraction of the sums trucked off to to vanish into the black hole of big bank balance sheets. That is the sad fact, and the real state of our union.

Pharmaceuticals

2011-01-21T08:08:00.000-08:00

Have you ever noticed how the big pharmaceuticals constantly peddle their latest drug offerings in slick TV commercials? Of course you have. Time magazine recently reported that the big Pharmaceuticals spend about $5 billion per year on their drug pitch, and every $1000 they spend yields an average of 24 new prescriptions. Watch any evening news show and you will be bombarded by one drug pushing company ad after another.

The template for the typical drug ad always shows an actor playing the role of the patient, usually in a sublime natural setting, walking on the beach with a dog or children, firing up the barbecue on a quiet Saturday evening, adrift on a daisy covered hill with a toddler. The hidden message is that in order to continue to go about your life like this you need this drug.

And the names of the drugs themselves, cooked up in some drug name brainstorming session and undoubtedly vetted by focus groups of target consumers, are equally insidious. We get "Abilify," coining a new word that seems to indicate we will gain some new ability by taking this drug, or on that same tack, we get a bladder control drug dubbed "Enablex" so well be able to pee in a more timely manner. On and on they come, lined up like the bald headed bankers that used to be in your foyer hawking home loans. (The drug of easy money for nothing down and low easy monthly payments!)...Lunesta and Ambien compete to put us to sleep, Cymbaleth, Lipitor, Vytorin, Seasonale, Zoloft, not to mention the ubiquitous Viagra and Cyalis ads.

One of the most chilling things about these "wonder drugs" is the list of incredible side effects rattled off by the the dummy patient actor as they amble through the woods--dry mouth, trouble breathing, hearing loss, blindness, dizziness, balance issues, and then the matter of fact references to heart attacks, stroke, and even death! Listen closely to the list of potential side effects and you'll much rather stay with the condition the drug is supposed to cure! And some of the maladies the drugs take aim at seem to be equally concocted in the same brainstorming session that came up with the name: restless leg syndrome? Yes, all products aim to define a problem and then present themselves as the solution or cure, but honestly, popping pills for your toe tapping habbit is a bit much.

Is it any wonder that some lawmakers are considering legislation to rein in this ad blitz, now gleefully aimed at our aging population of Baby Boomers. They want to ditch the tax write-off for these drug ads and make Big Pharma pay for the privileged of ramming their Flomax and Aleve down our throats on nightly TV. Fat chance. The drug companies will be sure to buy off enough Senators or Reps to prevent that, and then make sure to defeat the "lawmakers" who came up with the idea in the first place. Ain't democracy wonderful?

Well... I'm still waiting for the first ad for "Soma." Oh Brave New World...

Two Americas

2011-01-14T08:45:00.000-08:00

No, it isn't a rehash of John Edwards political stump speeches. Two stories crossed the news wires in January that sharply defined two aspects of America. One was the feel good story of the man with the famous name and resonant voice, Ted Williams, just one of tens of thousands of homeless men and women in the nation. A reporter was passing by Ted as he begged for donations on a busy street corner, and required him to demonstrate his radio voice for a dollar. He filmed the incident and the video went "viral" on the Internet. Within days the good side of America rushed to offer Ted support. He was offered a job, a home, a future, not to mention the haircut and new clothes he soon sported for the media cameras. Then, sensing the heightened viewer interest, the predatory aspect of our media descended on the story. Ted was whisked off to Hollywood like John Savage in the Brave New World. He was booked on Dr. Phil, featured on Entertainment Tonight, used, exploited for viewership ratings, and then quietly dropped off at a rehab center. His last words to the viewers "Don't forget me."

Society had welcomed back one of its fallen and discarded members with all the fanfare and media hype our Brave New World is so expert at. Let us hope Ted fares better than John Savage after his run in with the cameras and circling helicopters in Huxley's chillingly accurate picture of the future he imagined so long ago, a world we now live in. Ted was rescued from the reservation, given back an identity in the Brave New World, and sent off for Soma rehab. God bless. As for the remaining tens of thousands of homeless men like Ted? We ignore them, as we did Ted for 20 some years...unless there's a story in there that can boost audience numbers.

The second story was the senseless and cruel mucker attack on a young, newly elected congresswoman as she met with her constituents at a local Safeway in Tuscon, Arizona. For those unfamiliar with the term as I use it here, "mucker" was coined by science fiction writer John Brunner in his landmark novel "Stand On Zanzibar." It was used to describe one who ran amok in society, going on a shooting rampage or killing indiscriminately. (The first two letters were taken from the word "murder.") In Brunner's world these attacks were reported daily on the news in the "Mucker Report," like bad weather: "7 dead in Chicago, 11 dead in New York today, 6 dead and 14 others wounded in Tuscon."

What caused the shooter to run amok is perhaps another deep vein of discontent beneath the glowing exterior of our Brave New World. Yet the incident also clearly defined the simple acts of love and heroism that give us hope in this life. People threw themselves on their loved ones to shield them from harm, sacrificing their lives for those they love. And like Ted Williams, an ordinary man found to have an extraordinary talent, the eulogies of those who were killed in the Tuscon attack enshrined each person's unique qualities and abilities. Six precious lives were lost to the demon ridden soul of the mucker. Yet the story seemed to elevate us all somehow, by revealing and reminding us of the character of love and sacrifice.

Let us not forget the thousands of other men like Ted Williams out there, and perhaps thousands more like Jason Loughner, simmering with discontent and waiting for their moment in the media. The saddest thing about it all is that we, as a nation, have the means to take care of them all. We simply lack the will.

A Bodyguard of Lies

2010-12-01T20:59:00.000-08:00

Winston Churchill had a few choice remarks concerning truth and the falsehoods that so often pose as truth. The truth was so precious, he remarked, that it must be attended by a bodyguard of lies. And of lies, he said "a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on!"

The recent news concerning Wikileaks' revelation of what really goes on in embassies around the world has had the Internet, and mainstream media, all abuzz. We live in a world, you must realize, where the truth is a sad third cousin that seldom gets invited to the dinner table. When it is revealed, for example, that conservative Arab governments have been urging the US to attack Iran, sounding a virtual harmony to the position taken by Israel on the matter, long time US diplomats get all in a huff about the danger of allowing this truth to be known. For in many ways, the government is an institution that is much like a magician. It creates illusions, based on lies, half truths and mangled statistics, and presents them to the general public as "official" reality. Churchill had yet another remark so applicable to our present time: "There are a lot of lies going around...and half of them are true!"

The big lies that have stood virtually unchallenged in recent years now permeate our society to the core. Our financial institutions have lied about their operations in virtually every aspect of the housing boom and bust that has brought our economy to the brink of depression. They don't have clear title to properties, and yet they foreclose as if they do, paying service companies to simply create fraudulent copies of missing documents so they can proceed. In many cases the loan in question was packaged in two, three, four or more different securities and sold off to pension funds, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds or the next chump in line willing to be the bag holder in the greatest theft of wealth the world has ever seen. And now they lie to themselves about their own insolvency, lobbying congress successfully to make polite gentlemen's agreement to change the way the toxic assets are reported on their books so they do not have to mark down losses from the calamity they created with their boiler room junk loan operations. Then they go merrily on to the Fed discount window and obtain credit at a quarter of one percentage point in interest--so they can offer that same credit to customers at 20% to 30% interest rates.

Ilargi of Automatic Earth put it so well today when he wrote: "Why do many Americans pay 10-20-30% interest on their credit card debt to the very same banks who at the very same time borrow at a rate that's some 100 times smaller? How mad is that? Why is that seen as somehow normal? Is it because there is a moral idea that those who rack up debt deserve to pay dearly for doing so? Well, if such an idea exists, it's apparently applicable to some, but not to others. Because the one and only justification provided as the reason that Wall Street's finest have access to the ultra low rates, is that they racked up enormous debts."

The Fed itself, creates a cool trillion in quantitatively eased pixel money and buys bonds to fund our debt. All the while it skillfully protects itself from the searching light of truth and refuses to allow any outside authority to audit it, even congress. It refuses also to reveal who the shadowy foreign counterparties are that received mega billions in bailout money. The truth about these dealings is perceived as "dangerous." The bodyguard of lies closes ranks, and secrecy and fraud go hand in hand through our most august institutions.

Wikileaks is now saying they will make a "mega dump" of documents that will reveal more shocking truth about a major US bank early next year. I can't wait. My bet is that the truth will reveal little more than I have inscribed about the issue in so many articles concerning our financial institutions: insolvency, fraud, deception, corruption, wholesale looting of the public purse--all for our own good, of course. We live, supposedly, in a land where all men are created equal, but they don't stay that way for long. As Orwell put it: "Some animals are simply more equal than others."

So while you go on chewing on the official line that the recession ended a year ago and we are in a "recovery," another two million jobless citizens learned another uncomfortable truth about their dilemma when long term unemployment benefits were terminated for them this week. The Republicans, flush with new power obtained in the last election, shrug their shoulders and say they'd love to help out, but the benefits have to be paid for. Did I hear that correctly? Let me quietly inform them that, with a $1.3 trillion deficit, nothing is being paid for! Every aspect and facet of officialdom is deeply in the red. Was there money for the big banks to cover their bad bets and make good their losses? Yes, by the truckload. No questions asked. Will there be money for the unemployed? Sorry...We're closed.

Last December I wrote that 2010 would be the year when the truth would out concerning all the fraud and criminality of the banking system that destroyed our economy. It's certainly been an interesting year, and Wikileaks has barely scratched the tip of the iceberg. I'll have more to say about this in my annual interview with the Nattering Nabob for his 2011 predictions. Stay tuned.

Have You Dropped Yet?

2010-11-28T08:46:00.000-08:00

The old shopper's rally: "Shop until you drop" was heard throughout the realm this weekend. CNN reported initial results for this year's Black Friday--more shoppers, modest sales. They led the article with a photo from a Coach handbag factory outlet, showing the small showroom packed with shoppers eager for handbags that come with an opening MSRP in the $250 to $500 range and sell for nice discounts. I can attest to the accuracy of that report, as I visited a similar Coach outlet store and was one of the bedraggled shoppers who squeezed from counter to counter and stood in what seemed an endless zig-zagging line to check out with the goods. I was just one of many similar men in the store absorbing the lesson that the women there, who outnumbered us about 3 to one, really, really, really liked these high end brand-named purses from China.

Oddly, just a few places ahead of me in the line, there were two Chinese men, obviously tourists, clutching five bags apiece! I passed a moment of quiet amusement to think that here was a product made in a factory in China and shipped 5000 miles to the US at some expense, and there were two tourists from China who flew to the US at even greater expense to buy the bags here and take them right back home to friends and relatives for gifts. Ah, what a wonder the modern branding and marketing machine is to produce these behaviors in the masses! My companion on the trip, a Chinese woman herself, explained that the handbags are not marketed and sold in China, but nonetheless are highly desired.

When I finally reached the end of the checkout line, ready to buy my gift, a friendly Coach salesgirl was offering tootsie rolls from a big leftover Halloween bag to restore the sugar burned in the effort to get this far. Remember Halloween? That was the big holiday we were were celebrating just a few weeks ago. Now we have finally launched the holiday shopping season in earnest. Black Friday has come and gone, and businesses around the nation have their fingers crossed in the hope that people will finally start spending money that they can really ill afford to spend in the midst of this near depression. A few moments later they were literally barring the door to the Coach outlet store, and a long line was forming outside the store again as they let shoppers in in twos and threes. I guess I was one of the lucky ones who got to just walk right in without a long wait.

Later, moving to the next group of outlet stores across the street, I stared at the jammed parking lot and decided it would be easier to simply drop my companion off in front of the store and then circle the lot, with about 30 other cars searching for spaces, while she shopped. I forsook the effort to find parking and just quietly listened to the radio, watching other drivers cutting each other off and honking in anger when someone maneuvered to steal the spot where they had been waiting for another shopper to leave. In the midst of it all, noting the seemingly endless rows of Toyotas and SUVs, it occurred to me that it would take years of severe adversity to beat this model down--designed and built by corporations and so long entrenched in our society. The advertising, the holiday setup, the shopping, were now the real cylinders that moved the engine of our social order along. You just go to your job each day, if you still have one, so you can afford to do this.

So now it's on to Cyber Monday, then the hectic "last ten days" of Christmas shopping, then New Year's and we start the merchandising cycle over again for 2011. Never mind the millions who have already dropped, with one in six on food stamps, a raft of foreclosures still in the housing fraud pipeline, and a real unemployment rate near 20 percent in this country. That's what happened to the other guy. The only question you have to answer is this: have you dropped yet?

Foreclosure “Crisis” Was Apparent From The Beginning

2010-10-18T08:07:00.000-07:00

Oh My! People are running about saying that the banks, particularly the BIG banks, are now mired in a “Foreclosure Crisis” as the discovery of forged, fraudulent paperwork underlying tons of rubber stamped mortgages has forced BofA and others to halt their seizure of homes. But really, wasn't it obvious from the start that all these loans were based on vapor? Isn't that why the banks set up massive boiler room loan origination operations that all mysteriously vanished when the first wave of defaults started to hit the fan? Isn't it why the industry itself coined the phrase “Liar Loans” or NINJA loans (No Income, No Job or Assets)? And didn't all these upstanding bank “officers” who presided over the “origination” and “processing” of these loans all know the transactions were based on very thin paperwork—in many cases, no paperwork, or forged documents churned out by special banking industry “service” companies who would provide any missing document for the low rate of $39.95? And isn't this why all these loans were quickly sliced up and shunted off to fun financial “instruments” called Mortgage Backed “Securities” (What a misnomer!) The idea, from the very first, was to crank up the mortgage machine, “create” millions of bad loans, then wrap them up in fraudulently rated securities and sell them off to pension funds, insurance companies, municipalities, or better yet, sovereign wealth funds and foreign “investors.” Then roll out the Burgie with the bonus money and book those reservations in the Bahamas.

That was our banking industry, all these folks who parade around in suits and ties and nice white shirts and present themselves as upstanding citizens, the backbone of capitalism. But greed, fraud and malfeasance were not enough. The banks were also just plain stupid, and ended up also holding billions of swaps and trades in each other's dirty laundry. So when the loans went bad and the banks all realized they were basically bankrupt, they simply lobbied congress to allow changes to the accounting rules that would let them value all these bad loans as if they were all backed with gold bullion, assigning them any value they wished with their “mark to model” shenanigans. Anything they couldn't twist their way favorably was just buried somewhere in an accounting landfill they called “Level Three,” a place the mafia used to call “the other set of books.” Then someone shouted panic, martial law, and trillions in public taxpayer money was quietly transferred to the banks to bail them out. The Fed balooned its balance sheet by accepting trillions more in toxic paper as “assets” against near zero interest loans, and wonder of wonder, instead of lending again the banks just took that free money at 0.25% interest and went out and bought Treasuries at 4% interest. Who needs the sub prime chumps any longer?

Phase three of the scam, now that the marks realized they had been taken to the cleaners, was to go out and start confiscating all that real estate—property the banks effectively “bought” when they issued the bad loans. And keep one other salient fact in mind—the banks were not using money you and I deposited for safekeeping when they “made” all these loans. That was all long gone. Using the miracle the industry calls “fractional reserve lending” the banks get to simply create money they loan, from nothing. What a job! The banks write bogus loans, using money fabricated on the spot when the loan is “funded,” then they wait a few quarters while they party with the bonus money, and when the loan blows up taking down a family or a few careers when it does, they doctor up a stack of forged documents and “foreclose,” collecting all that prime real estate. Try that in your next Monopoly game.

But the saddest thing about all this is that the SEC, FBI, CIA, BBB, and Attorneies General in all 50 states were apparently deaf, dumb and mute throughout the whole process. Worse yet is that “Change.gov” has done nothing whatsoever to face, fix, or solve the problem, because most of the government is bought, paid for and actually run by – wait for it – ex-bankers! Their work done, they quietly resign their government posts to get back to the real money where they came from.

Folks, I haven't posted for a long while, or written about these issues, because, quite frankly, I told you all of this years ago, right while it was all happening in the boom times of real estate heaven, when all those bankers were in your foyer competing for your “business,” and the slow ones were complaining that “damn, I lost another loan to Ditech.” This is what was going on while Bush and Cheney were launching their oil wars and waving Osama Bin Ladin puppets about, firing up those “terrorist” alerts and coding our days yellow, orange or red while they systematically dismantled the constitution—for our safety, of course.

All the while the real terrorists were sitting in the sanctified chambers of Citibank, Countrywide, BofA, Chase, Wells Fargo, and let not forget Goldman Sachs. Those were the men that destroyed the nation. They did more harm than ten thousand Osamas could have ever imagined, and guess what—they're still getting paid for it, in amounts that topple one record after another, year after year.

Isn't capitalism wonderful?

For the record.... A few article I wrote on the subject back in the good old days.

Home Wreckers

Fed Up?

Fire & Ice

Food, Fuel & Freedom

Fannie & Freddie

U.S.S.A.

The Price Of Confidence

Insolven t

Alpha Plus

B.S.O.D. (Blue Screen Of Death)

Tangled Web

Da Fed

The Fat Men

For Lease - Your Home!

Nuff said.

Dead...But Still Leaking?

2010-08-12T19:54:00.000-07:00

AUG 12, 2010 - UPDATE - Another oil industry expert has taken up the baton from fallen Matt Simmons. Bob Cavnar has viewed the recent capping and static kill effort in the Gulf with a healthy dose of guarded suspicion. Cavnar believes the pressure from the well, which should have gone to zero, indicates that there is still subsurface leakage, and that the static kill procedure may have made these leaks worse, creating open communication between the reservoir and the sea. And in fact, these leaks are fairly obvious. There have been numerous video sequences of obvious oil and gas eruption from the sea floor, but now that the constant light of the media has dimmed, these get little attention. But Cavnar asks some nagging questions: “Why is the wellhead leaking? To be clear, dead means dead. If it’s leaking oil, that means it’s not dead... I’m sitting here watching oil leaking from a well that is supposedly dead. I’m listening to Admiral Allen saying the well is dead and to Jane Lubchenco and Carol Browner seriously contending that almost 4 million barrels of oil have disappeared. Is it just me, or are we watching the Matrix in real life?” Cavnar also commented on the pressure, reported at 4300psi: “The fact that they’re getting pressure now tells me that they are indeed communicated to the reservoir below, probably obscured by the fact that they now have mud strung through the annulus. If they are indeed communicated, pressure will build on the wellhead, which is exactly what’s happening.”

Main article here

Macondo USA

2010-08-02T10:04:00.000-07:00

Our economy is mirrored by the slow motion disaster we have watched the last 100 odd days in the Gulf. The financial world and big rig banks were drilling deep into the dark, little understood world of derivatives sludge, pumping out credit to an artificially heated economy like light sweet crude. Then something went wrong. The line kicked in a massive burp of sub-prime gas, and one of our rigs went up like a firecracker, sinking into insolvency faster than you can say “Deepwater Horizon.” The financial blowout preventers failed, and the markets sank as fast as the rig. Lehman died and the whole system damn near froze in a self-imposed drilling moratorium of fear. CEO's bumbled about with one news gaffe after another, and were replaced. Then the “credit event” began to gush non-performing loans—40% sub prime methane and the rest spewing out the toxic ALT-A and option ARM petrol until our financial world was soon awash in a glistening sheen of failing portfolios.

Predictably, the tarballs of bad debt began to soil beaches from one end of our financial gulf to another. Some said they would migrate into the loop currents of international trade and kill the whole ocean. But like the liberal use of Corexit dispersant applied to hide the problem and keep the oil from rising to the surface where everyone would see it and be forced to deal with it, we applied liberal doses of FASB accounting rules changes, and Fed Programs as fat as “A Whale” to skim off any bad loans that did surface to the top of bank balance sheets. Most of the real damage was just shunted away in the limbo accountants call “Level 3,” an off balance sheet water column where most of the widely dispersed bad debt now still hangs in vast plumes. Then we pumped in billions of freshly printed TARP dollars like heavy mud in an effort to staunch the flow of debt. The ROVs of the formerly brain dead SEC have been hovering over the wreckage of the great firms that fell in the explosion, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, AIG, Chrysler, GM and all the rest. The public watched it all like a bad summer disaster movie, noting the seeps of oil and gas from one location after another.

The Fed skillfully positioned an array of financial vessels above the gushing hemorrhage of toxic debt, drilling deep into its portfolio to try and stem the flow. They siphoned off as much as they could through the risers of acronym laden programs aimed at sucking up the bad paper, but there was just too much toxic sludge in the financial waters, and the whole ecosystem began to choke on the methane soup of swaps, trades and securities. But eventually they engineered a multi-trillion dollar “cap” and lowered it over the wellhead of insolvency, pretending the problem was solved while they figure out how to kill the damn thing once and for all before something else blows out. They tinkered with the pressure in little "stress tests" and finally decided it was safe to call the show a "recovery." All the while the media ROVs have been beaming images of potential new leaks from the mangled BOP, and the tortured sea floor of the financial world has been seeping from one fault after another. Now they're wondering just how much more bailout mud they'll have to pump in to bolster the markets through the dog days of summer, and then finally seal off this blown out depression of an economy once and for all.

In the meantime, the oil and gas of credit that once greased our world has dried up and all but vanished. And like the carefully underestimated numbers put out by BP as to how much oil was really leaking and how much dispersant they really used to hide it all, no one actually knows just how much more bad debt is out there in the oil dark Gulf of insolvency, and how long it will take us now to clean it all up. All the while bloggers have been barking like Matt Simmons that the whole show was a sham and that there was another leak, (commercial real estate?) just a few miles off that was even bigger and threatened to create a lake of bad debt so big that it could poison the entire financial sea. Nobody listened ... They said he was off his rocker. The BOP was still there. The cap was holding. The recovery wells at the Fed were drilling and, in just a few weeks time, we could forget this moratorium of financial reform and get back to the deep water derivatives drilling again.

Meanwhile, unemployment skyrocketed and people lined up at the government trough like all the ex-shrimpers and oyster men of the Louisiana coast. The price of seafood went up and up, and the folks who lost their jobs and gave up looking have just been quietly removed from the "labor force" so we can continue to pretend unemployment is only 9.5%.

We fixed nothing; learned nothing. We just capped off the well and dispersed all that toxic debt to hide the problem. In the meantime, the banksters are gearing up for the next election in their too big to fail platforms, and when the cameras on the ROVs are finally turned off they can rub their palms in bonus money and get back to the long lost mantra of “Drill, Baby, Drill.”

Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind

2010-08-01T21:30:00.000-07:00

AUG 1, 2010 - A portion of the relief well has collapsed, forcing BP to retool that segment before they can be ready for a potential "Bottom Kill." Discussion on a possible "Static Kill" from the top is still being aired. Since the well is not flowing it will be easier to overcome the pressure. Yet now that the well has been capped, a lot of effort is being made to sweep the story off the news--out of sight, out of mind.

July 30, 2010 - EPA official Hugh Kaufman blew the whistle on BP and the government on MSNBC claiming that the oil that seems to have disappeared is in fact still hovering in the water column in a widely dispersed plume that is likely to remain in the Gulf for years. The amount of oil that actually reached the surface was only a small fraction of the total volume leaked. 95% or more remains beneath the surface in the vast “lake” of dispersed oil that Matt Simmons has been talking about. His claim that “We have poisoned the Gulf” certainly cannot be argued with, no matter what you may think of his other assertions. The use of Corexit dispersant, which BP rep Dudley claimed was “less toxic than dish soap”, has now caused hemorrhaging among cleanup workers and wildlife. It will remain a highly dangerous toxic element of the Gulf region, contaminating the water and rain for years. Called “we hides it” by oil industry insiders, Corexit was used to prevent oil from rising to the surface where it could be seen and threaten beaches. But this tactic also prevented it from being skimmed by ships and removed from the environment. There is no way to mitigate the remaining oil now that it has been dispersed. And I note BP continued to use Corexit even after being ordered to cease by the government, though their PR machine has been active claiming otherwise.

Kaufman believes the EPA is suppressing data on the toxicity of Corexit because “the public can’t handle” the information. “We’ve got hundreds of millions of gallons of oil spread out, mixed with 2 million gallons of dispersant,” said Kaufmann. “And so, what we have to do is accurately monitor the air and water and be very careful with the seafood. But we’ve now poisoned thousands of square miles of the Gulf... ” Other scientists are equally blunt on the subject. Toxicologist Dr. Riki Ott has advised that Gulf residents have three difficult choices now: 1) Leave the region as soon as possible, 2) Stay and wear a respirator, or 3) Become painfully ill.

July 27, 2010 - UPDATE: What’s Leaking? Thad Allen claimed the “seeps” found 3km from the BP well were from “another well,” and suggested it was the Texaco Rigel well. But an independent researcher has accurately mapped the sea floor to find that the Rigel well is only 2km from the BP site, and the area was scanned by US research ships weeks ago and found NO evidence of a seep there. According to Alexander Higgens: “Thomas Jefferson traveled directly over the area, created a highly detailed 3D model and did not detect any leaks near the well.”

Two Wells at Macondo - No Plans For Blowout, H2S, Gas

2010-07-20T14:06:00.000-07:00

July 20 - There were Two Drilling Sites At Macondo 252... And two Rigs.

The BP application to the MMS references two sites for exploration in the same tract, one 50 miles offshore, (Site A) and one 49 miles offshore (Site B). The bottom lease area block information on both well sites is listed in the documents as:

WELL/A - G32306/MC/252 6943 FNL, 1036 FEL
WELL/B - G32306/MC/252 7066 FNL, 1326 FEL

The Transocean Marianas Rig was initially tasked to drill both wells, with Well A to begin 7/15/2009 for a 100 day run, and well site B to be drilled 7/15/2010. Transocean Marianas began late, however. On October 7, 2009 it began drilling on the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico. On November 9, 2009 it was damaged by Hurricane Ida and was replaced by the ill fated Deepwater Horizon which was responsible for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill when that rig exploded on April 20, 2010.

Apparently the first well was abandoned when a drilling tool became stuck in the well bore. BP reimbursed the maker of the tool for the cost and then moved to site B. But was the initial well affected in any way by the blowout?

NO Contingency for Blowout or H2S Hazard in Macondo Well Plans

Application documents for the initial exploration plan (EP) on the Macondo 252 Deepwater Horizon well apparently did not require any contingency plan in the event of a blowout, or for the presence and management of dangerous H2S. Quoting from section 2.7 of these documents: “2.7 Blowout Scenario - A scenario for a potential blowout of the well from which BP would expect to have the highest volume of liquid hydrocarbons is not required for the operations proposed in this EP.” But look at these estimates of the amount of crude that these wells might release! According to the application, the volume of oil that could be released from an uncontrolled blowout in site A was estimated to be 300,000, BPD crude oil at API Gravity of 28 Degrees, and 162,000 BPD for site B at API gravity of 33 Degrees. (API Gravity determines the lightness or heaviness of the oil, and this is on the border of “Light” or “Medium” crude oil. )

In Like Manner BP asserted that there was no hazard from H2S in the area...The same H2S that frustrated the initial containment cap operation and is now building up on the new equipment there. From the application: “3.2.1 Concentration - It is not expected that H2S will be encountered during the operations proposed in this plan. 3.2.2 Classification - Pursuant to Title 30 CFR 250.490(c), BP requests a determination that Mississippi Canyon Block 252 is located in an area where the absence of H2S has been confirmed. 3.2.3 H2S Contingency Plan - An H2S Contingency Plan prepared according to 30 CFR 250.4990(f) will not be required for the operations proposed in this plan.”

Furthermore, the risk of encountering pockets of gas was deemed to be "moderate to negligible," and BP stated that no post drilling ROV survey of the area surrounding the well for for the purpose of biological and physical observations was required.

Amazingly, section 7.1.5 of the document states: “7.1.5 Oil spill response discussion - a discussion of response to an oil spill resulting from the activities proposed in this plan is not required for this Exploration Plan”

So there it is folks, a classic example of how these applications get rubber stamped - No contingency plans for blowout required, no expectation or plan for H2S or gas pockets, no emergency spill plan required, no post drilling ROV survey of the seabed required. Your government in action at the MMS.

Main Article Here

Sea Floor Leak Confirmed Near Well

2010-07-18T16:22:00.000-07:00

July 18, 2010 - UPDATE:
It’s Official: AP Reports Oil and Methane Gas is Seeping From Sea Floor Near Well. Both Associated Press and The LA Times reported: “An administration official familiar with the spill oversight, however, told The Associated Press that a seep and possible methane were found near the busted oil well. The official spoke on condition of anonymity...The official said BP is not complying with the government's demand for more monitoring.”

The National Incident Commander, Adm Thad Allen, sent the following letter to BP’s Chief of Gulf Coast Restoration, Bob Dudley, and I emphasize some key statements therein: “Dear Mr. Dudley, My letter to you on July 16, 2010 extended the Well Integrity Test period contingent upon the completion of seismic surveys, robust monitoring for indications of leakage, and acoustic testing by the NOAA vessel PISCES in the immediate vicinity of the well head. Given the current observations from the test, including the detected seep a distance from the well and undetermined anomalies at the well head, monitoring of the seabed is of paramount importance during the test period. As a continued condition of the test, you are required to provide as a top priority access and coordination for the monitoring systems, which include seismic and sonar surface ships and subsea ROV and acoustic systems. When seeps are detected, you are directed to marshal resources, quickly investigate, and report findings to the government in no more than four hours. I direct you to provide me a written procedure for opening the choke valve as quickly as possible without damaging the well should hydrocarbon seepage near the well head be confirmed.”

Thad Allen refers directly to the “detected seep a distance from the well.” On Sunday afternoon, Oly ROV 1 was monitoring what appeared to be a substantial eruption of gaseous oil NW of the BOP. I watched the eruption for some time between 3:00pm and 3:30pm PST.The entire screen was filled with a billowing, upward rising cloud that was definitely not disturbances of silt from the ROV thrusters. The ROV cameras zoomed and panned, clearly showing that its thrusters were nowhere near the scene begin filmed. The flow was substantial, it was continuous, (not intermittent), and it was persistent. I cannot imagine that BP would be filming silt kicked up by ROV jets for over 30 minutes. Please recall that BP was reportedly trying to seal sea floor cracks near the well site as far back as February, before the explosion.

The confirmation of this new leak lends support to the discussion that the geology of the region is unstable. Yet the fact that oil is now migrating up from beneath the sea floor is a strong indicator that the recently capped well is, and has been, leaking oil into the surrounding formations. The capped well may have increased the pressure on these leaks, making them more evident now. The LA Times report suggested BP was most interested in keeping that cap on, for obvious PR purposes, but government officials are now concerned that capping the well is increasing seepage to other subsurface cracks and fissures.

Main Article Here

Pressure Builds...Will it be Enough?

2010-07-16T17:15:00.000-07:00

July 16, 2010 - UPDATE:
Pressure Builds to 6700psi. BP “Cautiously Optimistic.”
All eyes are on the pressure gauges, somewhere in BP HQ, as the readings have steadily increased but have not reached the target hoped for over the last 12 hours. Ken Wells, the new “American” CEO of BP has suggested that the depletion of the reservoir may account for these lower pressure readings, but other experts state this is unlikely given the enormous size of the reservoir. The well pressure is now officially above the maximum flex joint rating, (See July 15 update), which is why Skandi ROV is constantly monitoring the mudline (sea floor) beneath the BOP stack. Authorities hope to reach a steady pressure of 8,700psi, and they are still 2000psi from that target. Meanwhile, seismic surveys are scanning regions approximately 10-12 miles from the well borehole, though Oil Drum posters continue to eviscerate Matt Simmons for his assertion that the real leak is indeed some 10 miles away. (See sidebar) Another survey is actively looking for the presence of methane gas, which has comprised about 40% of the leak flow, (while 5% is the norm). Scientists have reported the methane levels in the water are extremely high, and this remains a grave concern.

The relief well operation, temporarily halted while the pressure test was being conducted, has now resumed. It appears that BP will have to eventually restart the oil flow, possibly opening the smaller kill and choke lines on the new cap, and then attempt to capture oil with the Helix Producer and Q4000 ships above while the relief well makes a “bottom kill” attempt. We will have learned what we thought we already knew last May when the mud from the “top kill” procedure failed to stop the flow because they could not maintain required pressures--the oil is leaking somewhere downhole. The question tonight is: where are those last 2000 pounds of pressure per square inch? Where is the oil going into the undersea formations, and what does this bode for the bottom kill plan?

Main Article Link

Crucial Test Now Underway - Oil Flow Stopped

2010-07-15T15:28:00.000-07:00

July 15, 2010 - UPDATE:

Well Integrity Test Resumes. All Cap Valves Closed. Oil flow Halted. They will now continue to monitor well pressure at 6 hour intervals over the next 36 to 48 hours, and hope the pressure builds to at least 8,000 - 9.000psi. The media hailed the closure of the well after 87 days, though this is a temporary situation and is no real indication that the problem has been resolved. If the pressure does not build as hoped, it will mean significant downhole damage is allowing oil and gas to leak below the surface of the sea floor. One concern expressed by oil industry expert Robert Cavner is that a “flex joint” in the lower BOP area is not rated to hold the pressure BP hopes to obtain in this test. In fact, the test would subject this flex joint (rated at a 5,000psi maximum) to pressures well beyond its maximum tolerance. So the whole situation has now entered that breathless stage much akin to watching a boiling tea kettle. We are in “wait and see” mode, and will not really know the outcome of this procedure for some time. But we are much closer to proving or finally disproving the assertions of Matt Simmons and other analysts who claim the well is fatally damaged, and that the sea floor itself is gushing oil elsewhere. (Main article here)

More Nonsense

2010-07-14T19:57:00.000-07:00

Fringe sites on the Internet have taken up a new mantra--this time that BP is up in Canada secretly testing a “Flux Compression EMP generator” device to create a massive pulse to seal the well. The Canadian “troops” that were supposed to be heading to the Gulf last week to control the population have, (according to these rumors), now been sent to northern Canada to test the weapon instead. Authors of these articles now cite USGS earthquake records in Canada to back up the claim that the device was tested...though the USGS shows no earthquakes occurred in Canada in the last 7 days. This is the sort of nonsense that is now reaching a fever pitch on the web.

There is a segment of the public that slavers for these end of the world saved by Bruce Willis stories. The internet is like a collective mind, and these stories stand as worried thoughts in that matrix. There are now over 800 references to this story on the Internet, as fear seems to breed an alarmingly creative speculation. Though not a single article that I have read on the subject provided any credible evidence that any of this was true. Of course, it's all "secret."

Enough said.

Deep Engineering

2010-07-11T20:16:00.000-07:00

A mini-drama was played out in the afterglow of the final World Cup match this weekend, another contest, but this time man vs nature. At stake was the short term fate of the Gulf of Mexico, and with it the economies of four or five Southern states with a combined 3 trillion GDP. A mile beneath the turbulent, oil stained waters of the Gulf, BP engineers began the complex procedure of removing and replacing the containment cap sitting atop the Blowout Preventer stack. The new cap, with 10 inch thick walls of super hardened steel, is believed capable of withstanding pressures of over 40,000psi. But the process, as viewed live from the ROV cameras working the site, proved painfully slow as the the ROVs were used to methodically loosen and unscrew bolts beneath the gushing flange. I watched, mesmerized, for several hours as the ROV used a tool to unscrew the bolts. The engineers nudged at the component they were trying to remove, but it remained stubbornly stuck, like a loose tooth that would not come out of its socket.

Somewhere, a mile overhead on a humid, floating metal platform, the ROV operator was laboring to complete the complex procedure, one bolt at a time. The ROV put down the bolt removing tool and relied on the mechanical claw to try and jiggle the component lose, pulling and nudging without success. They switched back to their bolt remover and repeated the process until finally the component came off. At a little after 3:00pm EST the ROV pulled back away from the BOP, and as it maneuvered high above it, one could see the dark brown stream of oil and gas gushing from the top. It scudded away, following a yellow cable to find a white metal cage or “basket” sitting on the sea floor, where it used its pincers to remove a pair of large steel hooks, one arm gently handing them to the other as they dangled from convenient grappling ropes. The ROV itself looked like some bizarre undersea creature dreamed up by H.R. Geiger, with two bulbous light-bulb eyes above an exo-skeleton of metal and hydraulic hoses, and two remarkably agile mechanical arms that could be fitted with any number of tools.

As I watched I had the same feeling I experience while watching the Mars rovers scooping up soil millions of miles away on a distant red planet. But here we were working at yet another frontier, for we know less about the deep oceans of our own world than we do about the surface of Mars! The lesson hit home as the machines fumbled in the murky sea, that this was about the limits of human technology and engineering, all of it, the dead sea turtles, dolphins, pelicans, and the lives of those so profoundly affected on the Gulf coast. We were a mile deep in the Gulf because the oil we need to run our machines was no longer cheap and plentiful, or easy to find on land. Oh, we still produce oil and gas in the US each day, but increasingly, we rely on sources that sit on edgy, often inaccessible ground, be it deep beneath the sea or deep behind the borders of foreign nations and cultures where we have sent our young soldiers off to fight. We have reached our limit, and the whole crud encrusted mechanical mess beneath the Gulf was the result. Welcome to the 21st century, where we will spend more and more time discovering our limitations, and struggling to repair the slowly eroding infrastructure of our lives, finding a way to manage the inevitable contraction that is most certainly underway now, in spite of all the nonsense talk of a "recovery."

At times big events, like the Deepwater catastrophe, will hasten our demise, loosening the locked faults in a single disastrous slide slipping event. But mostly we will continue down the road we have been walking, like lost souls in a Cormac McCarthy novel by that same name.

While all this incredible engineering was working round the clock to try and stop the oil leak, the Internet continued to buzz with talk of ruptured and expanding sea floor near the well head, and the imminent release of a massive methane gas bubble similar to those that had cause extinction events in prehistorical eras. Some sites claimed the Navy was “evacuating” all its ships from the Gulf under a cover operation by sending them, (46 ships and 7,000 Marines), to Costa Rica on a drug interdiction mission. That's a lot of muscle for drug hunting. Another site claimed a brigade of Canadian Engineers, skilled in urban control operations from Bosnia, was now standing to in Edmonton on 72 hour notice to deploy to the Gulf Coast. (The implication was that they would somehow not be bound by US law when it came to operations involving US population there.) A third site exhorted people to get out of the gulf region altogether, before the catastrophe moved into its next evolution of doom. Another urged us all to withdraw ample cash from the bank and store food and water for a few weeks because massive solar flares were about to knock down the power grid. The “gubmint” was, of course, hiding all this from the people.

I found it odd, if such disaster was imminent and the Navy was on the run, that tens of thousands of people were gathering on Gulf beaches that weekend to watch an air show put on by the military and featuring the Blue Angels! The doomers would explain this away by saying “they” were intentionally luring people to the coast—to get rid of them.

These are the kind of outrageous and wild imaginings that cycle on the bitstream these days, as if the simple reality of the Deepwater Horizon event was not frightening enough. We have seen hundreds of miles of coastline fouled from Texas to Florida and millions of barrels of oil dumped into the Gulf to create a toxic methane-petro-stew of our great fertile fishing grounds there. Lives have been lost, businesses and livelihoods ended, a way of life altered forever for tens of thousands of locals. They have enough to worry about without lumping in mega-methane eruptions and tsunamis. The hope is that this collective national nightmare will be over soon, with a new containment cap that will stop or divert the leaking oil to producing ships above, and a successful deep kill operation from the relief well in the next 30 days.

Let us all hope the engineers at the other end of the wires controlling those ROVs get the job done, and then we can sort all this out and see what we, as a nation, may have learned. As for the Gulf of Mexico? Perhaps the blow it sustained may not be fatal, but how much more abuse can the Gulf take? And what new mantra will Fox news puppets and Sara Palin come up with now that we have seen the full measure of what we get with “Drill, Baby, Drill?”

Independence Day, 2010

2010-07-05T10:19:00.000-07:00

In the second year of the ongoing Depression, July 4th rolled around again to remind us of our heritage and of our mission in the months and years ahead. The stock market had lost 6% or more in the week proceeding the fireworks, largely on the continuing gloomy news regarding unemployment. The BLS “officially” obfuscated the reality again, claiming unemployment “fell” to 9.5%--this at the same time 400,000 jobs were shed and the workforce continued to shrink as 1.7 million American out of work fell off the in unemployment insurance rolls in recent months and became “los desaparacidos.” They joined the ranks of millions of others who have disappeared, vanished, and are no longer counted by the BLS as being out of a job. This is how the statistical lies continue to spin from the mill in officialdom, but the market was not fooled. At the same time President Obama's executive branch continues to spew the nonsense that we are in a “recovery,” and BP, having shunted their yacht sailing CEO off camera, continues to roll out soapy commercials featuring new “American” faces put into key company positions in charge of the massive ecological and economic catastrophe we call the Gulf oil “spill.”

In my neck of the woods, Monterey, California, I enjoyed a full weekend hiking Big Sur, getting my mandatory burger in a lodge restaurant under the pine trees, shooting the golden light of sunset on the coast at beautiful Sorbanes Point south of Pt. Lobos, and watching the parade of glitzy cars, clowns, military drill troops, and makeshift floats at the parade in nearby Seaside. I was pleased to see one marching group holding up signs demanding an end to corporate rule of America, part and parcel of the slowly evolving grass roots insurgency in this country, though I think any real protest beyond holding up placards will still be a long time coming. Here we were, celebrating the overthrow of the former legitimate government on this continent, yet, in spite of the grievances so many feel in their gut about the corprotocracy, no effective challenge is ever really mounted by “we, the people.” We're all too busy clipping 20% off coupons and flocking to one day sales at the malls to try and stretch our ever diminishing incomes just a tad further.

In spite of all the money on this peninsula, fireworks were canceled for the second year in a row due to city “budget constraints.” Instead the town threw a big outdoor barbecue on the grassy lawns of city hall, which I attended, camera in hand. The event featured an open house in the old adobe museum where California's original constitution was drafted and signed, complete with a painting of one George Washington by an itinerant painter some 200 years ago. I wondered what George was thinking about the barbecue just outside. Later that evening my partner and I eased down the hill to Cannery Row to join the “Evening on the Bay,” at the swank Monterey Plaza Hotel, eating fresh grilled hot dogs and listening to an R&B ensemble as people danced to the tunes and seagulls watched from private perches on nearby buildings, fountains, and seaside rails. A good time was had by all, as people just seemed to want to forget the gloomy job numbers, and the stock market, and the oil spewing into the Gulf, and celebrate. We settled for watching the fireworks on the local PBS broadcast of “A Capitol Fourth,” and listening to all the old favorite marching tunes, along with a slice of the 1812 Overture as the fireworks reached a crescendo. Indeed, I was “Proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free...”

We get the Monday after the holiday off to rest up, recuperate, and I suppose determine if we've forgotten to do any shopping. The “Monday kind of Tuesday” will come along in due course, and we can go back to the papered over realities of unsolved problems that still plague us and threaten the greatness we celebrated on the weekend past. Congress will pretend it actually passed a financial reform bill. The Republicans will huddle to figure out how they can defeat any further Democratic attempt at extending unemployment benefits, BP will keep drilling those relief wells and covering up the oil on the beaches. A toxic rain will fall gently on the Gulf coast while the northeast swelters in 100 degree plus temperatures, straining electrical grids all through the region. The markets will get back to their game of puts and calls, the banks, (now out of the glaring light of media coverage due to the oil crisis), will get back to their securities trading casino, and we'll all get back to the ongoing Depression. How many more years this thing has to run is anybody's guess. I'll call the recovery when I see it where it counts, on the streets of any-town America, when real job growth and viable production leads us forward, should that ever happen in the foreseeable future.

There are so many things we could be doing to create jobs now, but having squandered so many trillions to backstop the super wealthy and their banks, we have no money for things like alternatives to our reliance on companies like BP, or alternatives to the way in which we “move about the country.” So we'll just continue to limp along, big business as usual, as more teachers, policemen and firemen get laid off, city and state budgets continue to implode, and the oil we covet so dearly keeps washing up all along the Gulf coast in the long hot summer of our discontent.

Last year I summed up this same sentiment as articulately as I could in an article I called “Rocket's Red Glare.” It asked what the founding fathers would think of the nation if they were alive today, and what they might do about it. But what I was really asking is what are we going to do about it?

I'm still asking.

Republican Senators Defeat Unemployment Bill

2010-07-01T10:17:00.000-07:00

The Senate demonstrated yet again that it exists primarily to further the interests of the large financial institutions at the expense of the people...at least the Republican senators, who today managed to defeat a bill that would have extended emergency relief to millions of jobless Americans through extended unemployment benefits. But you can forget that now. Out of work in the greatest recession of our lives? Too bad. The Republican filibuster, and their lock step voting as a block against the bill, means those unemployed will no longer receive support for Uncle Sam, much unlike the large banks, who used those same Republican Senators to fight the financial reform bill and include exceptions and extensions that could suspend key provisions of the bill until the year 2022. They want to continue the casino game as long as possible before the new rules and regulations take effect. Putting things off until 2022 will give them plenty of time to make off with their proverbial ill gotten gain before the gambling houses are shut down. In the meantime, good luck in the soup kitchen lines.

To be fair, two Republicans (Snowe and Collins) refused to vote against the unemployment bill, and one democrat (Brown of Nebraska) sided with the Republican nay vote.The recent death of Senator Byrd (D) also took away a key democratic vote. But it was clear where the Ds and Rs all line up on such issues when you look at the final vote tally. The unemployment bill was going to ask for $33 billion in Government aid for a million unemployed workers now losing benefits. This was too much for the Republicans, who thought nothing of handing Citigroup, Chase, BofA, Wells Fargo, and so many others nice fat taxpayer funded checks of between $20 and $50 billion each just a few business quarters ago. Big bucks for the banks? No Problemo. Money for the unemployed? No thanks. This is the mainstream Republican line.

Has it ever been more clear what the Republican party is all about? In every case, when it comes to a choice between the people and big business, you can be sure the conservative right will close ranks to protect big corporate coffers. The recent flap over Texas Republican Senator Joe Barton's defense of British Petroleum, claiming that the $20 billion fund for damages to Gulf coast businesses due to the spill was a "shakedown," is ample evidence of positions taken by Republicans at every step. All you have to do is watch it all on CSPAN. Any issue that threatens to restrict big business, hold them accountable, limit the excessive graft, curtail corruption and rampant profit taking at the expense of the public, will be staunchly opposed by Republicans. They can't get their way any longer by passing new business friendly laws as under Bush and Cheney, or drafting new tax cuts for the wealthy, or figuring out more ways to prevent the little guy from getting a fresh start with his debt problem, but they have enough members to filibuster and prevent Democratic measures aimed at reforming the disastrous pillaging of the public purse that has been underway since Hank Paulson threatened the Senate with the specter of martial law if the banks didn't get their multi-trillion dollar bailouts.

So when you get your final notice from the unemployment office saying that your benefits will not be extended, just pick any Republican senator and write them a nice thank you letter. And no matter how long Sean Hannity whines about those lose spending Democrats, please remember this the next time you find yourself in a voting booth. The Ds wanted to spend that money on you and your family in time of great need. The Rs said "heaven forbid--we need that cash for Citigroup!"

The Other Gulf

2010-06-29T14:42:00.000-07:00

The Persian Gulf this time. Internet talk of an “imminent” attack on Iran has again reached a fever pitch in late June of 2010 after Iran continued to balk at talks regarding its nuclear program.

The normal US CVBG relief cycle that saw USS Truman transit the Suez Canal and head for the Persian Gulf while the Eisenhower, (completing its tour) still remained on duty again got many Internet sites in a lather about an impending attack. They have also lumped in the Marine Amphibious carrier Nassau to claim “Three US Carriers” are massing opposite Iran. (Again, this is a normally scheduled ship/unit rotation).

Even Cuba’s Fidel castro has suggested that there will be fireworks before July 4th. And rumors fly that Israel has cut a deal with the Saudis for use of an free airspace corridor. The Gulf Daily News reported: “Preparations are underway to launch the military attack from Azerbaijan and Georgia, reports our sister paper Akhbar Al Khaleej, quoting military sources. Israel was, in fact, training pilots in Turkey to launch the strike and was smuggling planes into Georgia using Turkish airspace, they said.”

Always ready with such news, the Israeli web site Debka reported: “In a rare move, Iran has declared a state of war on its northwestern border, debkafile's military and Iranian sources report. Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps men and equipment units are being massed in the Caspian Sea region against what Tehran claims are US and Israeli forces concentrated on army and air bases in Azerbaijan ready to strike Iran's nuclear facilities.”

I started cataloging all these signs of "imminent" attack on Iran over two years ago. This latest bout is much like all the others, which you can read here. Is this attack in the cards? I still think it is inevitable one day, but with the Gulf of Mexico gushing oil we have enough troubles of our own without launching a third war of choice.

Fear Factor

2010-06-23T15:14:00.000-07:00

The Internet is a wild and crazy place at times. Rumors are spawned every day, and blog posts bounce from site to site to sometimes build chilling stories of doom and conspiracy. A case in point surfaced three weeks ago, and then got top billing today in a popular "bad news" web blog titled "The Coming Economic Depression." The site has been posting off beat news to build a case for the next great depression--a prospect that seems fairly likely in any case. But today's fare included a video clip from a bearded recluse in the southeast who claimed he had spotted thousands of white "UN Vans" on an air base south of Jacksonville, FL. The implications he drew were that the Gulf oil spill was laying the foundation for mass evacuations and UN controlled martial law soon to be imposed on the Gulf states.

Admittedly, the overhead satellite image from Google earth did show thousands of white vehicles lined up on an airstrip, but it was not a US military base. The vehicles were parked at the Reynolds Airpark, a privately owned field that is sometimes used by car manufacturers to store inventory. A little digging on this story yielded some surprising speculation. One article claimed the facility was owned by Pegasus, a defense related contractor who mysteriously had offices in Utah in the same building as Halliburton and the Minerals Management Service (responsible for all those off shore oil drilling permits, and dating to the Cheney years). The spin in this article was that Cerberus Capital had acquired Pegasus, facilitated by Goldman Sachs, and that Pegasus was a CIA/NSA front company that was building thousands of Spy vans equipped with a dish antenna and slapping Dish TV signs on them to mask the plan. The author suggested that Goldman knew the Deepwater Horizon well was going to blow, dumped BP stock three days before it did, then brokered the Cerberus acquisition so the nefarious Big Brother outfits and Men in Black would have all the mobile spynet equipment necessary to monitor and control the population...

A phone call to the owner of the Airpark burst that bubble when he revealed that all the vehicles were unsold Kias waiting to be sent to Kia distributors. (Jacksonville is a major port of entry for foreign cars.) But the conspiracy sites are still abuzz with this image of cars lined up in groups of five, row after row, filling the whole of two long airstrips. Some posters commenting on the articles refused to believe the Airpark owner, and began to claim that the odd gaps in the ranks of parked cars were actually some kind of coded message meant to be viewed from space and decoded... By Aliens?

This is the Internet in full bore X-Files mode. Take one part legitimate outrage over the BP Gulf disaster, add one odd image from Google earth, season with liberal and wild speculation, throw in Dick Cheney, Halliburton, and Goldman Sachs to get the hate factor flowing, shake, stir, and post to a public that is already on edge and prone to a lot of fear as to what the real consequences of the Gulf nightmare will become.

There's a place for legitimate concern and speculation over what this catastrophe might bring in the months and years ahead, but I'm afraid that cars parked on airfields to code messages for ...whomever, or to work into dark plans for "Gubmint" control and martial law are a tad far fetched. Don't expect UN vans to roll out any time soon. The story was complete nonsense.

In Deep Water

2010-06-16T13:32:00.000-07:00

IN DEEP WATER

What we are not being told about the disaster in the Gulf is downright scary. Consider that we were originally told the “spill” was only 1000 to 5000 barrels per day (BPD), now we get the revised leak rate at 60,000 BPD, yet BP claims they will bring in enough new shipping to capture 80,000 BPD by mid July! How is that possible if the current leak is only 60,000 BPD? Answer: The current leak is obviously greater than reported, even after these latest upward “revisions.”

In early May I reported that BP would have never invested the millions required to drill such a well if they could not produce upwards of 100,000 and preferably 200,000 BPD. I still hold that these numbers are closer to the real leak rate. And if the speculations of many independent analysts and informed Netizens concerning the seabed are true, this disaster may be beyond our power to stop.

FULL ARTICLE HERE

Still Gushing

2010-06-04T16:21:00.000-07:00

The period May-June has produced a raft of crisis headlines of late. Last year it was economic blues coupled with an overblown "threat" of swine flu that got everyone in a tizzy fit and then fizzled when flu season actually arrived later that year. This year we get the return of 200-300 point swings in the Dow and the ongoing Deepwater Horizon spill. The crisis continues, still gushing, in all the major systems sustaining our "way of life," energy, finance, debt, jobs, housing, you name it. Talk of "recovery" is about as credible as a BLS unemployment report, (not), or BPs press releases. The oil crisis is just a visible and outward sign of the deeper crisis, no more than an ugly symptom of the choices we have made as a society regarding our energy situation.

The moment that well blew out in April, I knew it was going to be much more trouble than it first seemed on the surface. (See earlier May posts). None of the "official estimates" of how much oil has gushed into the Gulf have proven to be true. BP's anemic 5000 barrels per day has now been shown to be at least 20,000 barrels per day, and we are 46 days into this mess. Do the math. We have at least a million barrels sloshing around out there now, 95% of it still below the surface of the mile deep sea. That's 42 million gallons, and new studies today report that the actual flow rate may be as high as 56,000 barrels per day, over ten times BPs "official" tally. That would mean we have 2.3 million gallons in the Gulf as of this writing, and no end in sight. It's all still gushing, like a deep wound in the gut of our flagging nation. We bleed oil, the very life blood of our economy. Each day we use 8.9 million barrels of oil, or 378 million gallons. The oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak is therefore less than four days worth at our normal consumption rate. Who, then, is really responsible for the disaster in the Gulf? It gets at the question of who is to blame, the drug dealer or the user who buys the stuff. BP is drilling in mile deep waters off our shores because, quite simply, we need the damn oil.

After weeks of low level reporting on the story the media finally woke up to the fact that this was a significant event and began "full team coverage." Now we get the BP CEO making apologies on TV commercials like a dethroned Japanese Prime Minister and, as anyone could have predicted, the oil is slowly spreading and washing up on coastlines from Louisiana to Florida. Realize that what reaches the surface is probably no more than 5% of the oil. The rest is hanging in vast subsurface plumes, killing zones for any living thing that enters them. The killing will go on for years.

In the meantime, we've gone from Top Hat, to Top Kill, to Junk Shot, and now Cut & Cap. Each attempt to stop the oil flow has had little real effect. Video simulations are beginning to hit YouTube showing the oil moving into the Atlantic in the weeks and months ahead. Collapse oriented web sites are saying the spill will be the end of life in the US as we know it. Why? New Orleans is still but a shadow of its former self. Now turn off the $2.1 trillion dollar economies of the Gulf states and add that to our economic picture. At the moment we have fishing industries in limbo, the hotel and tourism industry on the gulf coast holding its breath, literally, as the oil draws near, and you can kiss off the last of coastal housing values in the region as well. Shipping traffic approaching the Mississippi delta now has to slog through the oil and the big vessels will drag it into the fresh river water as they move upstream. Someone will notice this eventually and what will it do to our big river shipping industry in the region? The implications of this "spill" have not even really fully registered. We have yet to see what the hurricane season does with all this toxic waste. So you can see why the markets are jittery, not over the prospect that tiny Hungary might default on its debt and injure a bonus ridden bank's profits (heaven forbid), but over the deeper implication of what this oil spill could mean for us as a nation.

In my novel 9 Days Falling I strangely predicted much of this crisis in fiction, writing a year ago when the world was mostly focused on the swine flu. The story was a series of snapshots of crisis points in our modern world, including the financial roller coaster we've been on, and one plot line featured a catastrophic event in the Gulf of Mexico involving British Petroleum, and a concurrent crisis in the oil soaked waters of the Nigerian Delta as well. Few people realize that Nigeria has oil "spills" on this scale every year, though the mainstream media never moves into "team coverage" mode when it happens over there. ( I put a large chunk of this novel on line here for the curious. )

It takes something like the destruction of the Gulf and a good category 4 hurricane to fling all that oil in our faces before this nation will wake up and realize that "if we keep heading this direction we just might get where we're going." The collapse web sites I visit from time to time are sounding more and more sane these days. The "don't worry, we'll manage" mentality is sounding more and more pathetic. But if this oil catastrophe doesn't shake us from our carbon fuel addiction, what else will but further crisis and collapse? I said long ago, in numerous articles, that I thought the only way we would get real change was to first suffer the painful consequences of our failed systems, be they energy systems polluting our oceans or financial systems gathered in equally dark pools of toxic debt, hidden below the surface of public awareness in "level three" and all neatly marked to fantasy so the banks will not have to incur any losses and the bonus money can flow unimpeded...like that gushing blown wellhead.

Congress looks as feeble as BP when they try to regulate and reform the banking industry. Nothing they have tried has worked. The too big to fail banks are bigger than ever, and public money continues to gush to the rescue of any financial institution that so much as whimpers its discontent.

So I am sad to report that nothing has changed since I stopped my regular biweekly articles on all these issues last January. Things have simple gotten worse. These developing crisis lines will simply have to run their course. We have no solution or reform to the financial crisis. The housing market remains dead. Jobs are not recovering. The economy is not recovering. Debt continues to pile up, and we have no new energy policy that promises anything in relief of our insatiable thirst for oil. We are in for another summer of hot uncertainty and crisis, in financial markets and on the shores of the gulf coast. What will be left come autumn and winter this year?

Looks like I'll have plenty of fodder for continuing that novel...

Korea

2010-05-25T16:56:00.000-07:00

So what's with North Korea these days? They torpedo a South Korean ship, killing 49, then deny it when confronted by evidence compiled by the UN. To "punish" their neighbor for making "false accusations" they decided to break off all ties and move to a war-time footing, with Kim Jong Ill (the extra "L" has been added deliberately), going on TV and ordering his military to get ready for action.

North Korea is always taking this sort of extreme posturing, which can do nothing but compromise its status as a "rogue" nation and incur further sanctions and hostility from the world. Yet they persist.

So is a new Korean war in the offing? The Pentagon says it has not even put US troops in South Korea on alert, so they don't seem to be all that concerned. There is, however, an unusually large group of US carriers on the West coast, though no deployments seem headed for Asian waters.

This is likely to be another venting of the 50+ year old conflict, but with a mind like Kim Jong Il involved, one never knows. Frankly, I don't think Kim wants to see just how far carrier based air support has advanced in the last 50 years, but if he does, the six CVBGs currently in Pacific waters will be more than happy to provide a demonstration.

Oil "Spill" Much Greater Than Reported

2010-05-14T17:56:00.000-07:00

This goes without saying to any person with an ounce of brains: the mainstream media is not reporting the full extent of the oil disaster underway in the Gulf of Mexico. The very use of the word "spill" to describe it immediately understates the magnitude of the event, which is largely unseen by cameras or satellite photography. For this was no ordinary "spill," an event that originates on the surface. Instead it was a blown out wellhead 5000 feet deep that is gushing oil from a ruptured pipe, the leak area nearly two feet in diameter.

The "Blow Out" refers to the failure of the massive Blow Out Prevention device (BOP) that sits directly atop the wellhead itself. This device has valves that are designed to close and pinch off the pipe passing through it in the event of a problem. In this event, the natural gas and oil that blew up through the pipe seems to have inhibited the BOP from closing off the leak, though it still remains attached to the wellhead itself. Oil is leaking from the mile long pipe that was attached to the top of the BOP, in at least two places now. The attempt to siphon off oil has helped, but only slightly. The main problem facing BP engineers is that the debris infused oil is eroding the steel elements of the BOB itself, and the crimped pipe attached to its top. It is only a matter of time before this erosion threatens to create an even more massive leak, and if the BOP were to be actually blown off the wellhead, then we would be looking at something even worse.

For now, however, it's the pipe attached to the BOP that is gushing oil. A pipe of that diameter can "spill" oil at a rate far beyond that being now reported by BP. In fact, writer Paul Noel, founder of the New Energy Congress, revealed that BP managers were celebrating on the rig right before the explosion, and that the company expected the well would yield at least 100,000 barrels per day under controlled conditions. Should the BOP itself fail or break off due to erosion before they can stop the leak, then the wellhead is said to be "running wild," which is a much greater flow rate than under controlled conditions

And how much oil is the well tapping into, another 25,000 feet beneath the ocean floor? Noel believes the deposit is in the trillions of barrels: "This is an out of control volcano of oil spewing up with 70,000 psi behind it, from a reservoir nearly the size of the Gulf, with an estimated trillions of barrels of oil and gas tucked away." Other experts have dismissed this saying the reservoir is known to be pressurized at 11,900psi. Perhaps Noel exaggerates to make a point, as the "trillions" of barrels would make it the largest known reservoir on earth, and that seems highly unlikely. (Saudi Arabia has only about 267 billion barrels in stated "proven" reserves.) But the main point to take away here is that know one seems to really know just how much oil the well tapped into before it blew. What if it is a truly massive reservoir of oil?

It is estimated that 80% of the oil spilled since April 22 is still deep underwater and may never reach the surface. The oil slick we can see is only composed of the lightest elements, and the real sludge of heavy oil is still hanging in a vast plume beneath the surface, now estimated to be ten miles long and eight miles wide. The size of that plume could hold well over 8.5 million barrels of oil already if the 4 barrel per second estimate is correct. Other analysts at Purdue University say the gush is at least 70,000 barrels per day, but take your pick--it is either 14 times greater than reported or 70 times greater than reported. The truth probably lies somewhere in that range.

So let's be plain here. This amount of oil is not going to "cleaned up" any time soon, if ever. It is likely to remain in the ocean indefinitely, eventually settling to the ocean floor, a mile deep, where it will create a dead zone in the heart of what was once one of the most productive fisheries on earth. This area produces a third of the seafood harvested each year. You can write a huge chunk of that off for the foreseeable future. This oil will go on killing sea life for another decade or more. And it may not be contained for another 90 days, which would make it an unprecedented catastrophe, the greatest "spill" we have ever had. Some articles say it may leak for years if not quickly capped.

The next hurricane that comes churning into the Gulf of Mexico will be much like taking an egg beater to a bowl of motor oil and water, and it will drive the lighter elements ashore wherever it makes landfall.

Meanwhile, TransOcean, the company operating the well, has put in a court motion to try and limit its damages to $27 Million...this after it was reported that the company collected several hundred million in insurance on the event, in effect, a big profit!

Voila!

2010-05-10T12:23:00.000-07:00

Financial magicians were waving their magic wants over the dark pools and swap tables during the weekend. Voila! A 962 Billion rescue package appears, with the Fed opening up a $400 billion dollar swap window to assure dollar liquidity for European banks. The magic answer for the unsustainable, unserviceable sovereign debt in Europe was... wait for it... 962 billion MORE debt, (which is all a loan is). Talk about fighting fire with fire. Where is the money coming from? Answer: printing presses at the ECB and Fed. When will it ever be paid back? Answer: Who cares, it stopped the market collapse again...for a while.

What we saw last week was a classic battle of computer algorithms and front running high speed trading programs vs a bunch of frustrated, scared humans who were watching all their stops get blown, seeing all their buy and sell offers get cut off by computer generated bids a penny, and sometimes a hundredth of a penny, higher or lower. Meanwhile, Fannie Mae puts in a request for $8.6 billion more tax dollars, this on top of the $10 or $11 billion Freddie Mac asked for a few days ago. The BLS also waved its magic wand and claimed a couple hundred thousand new jobs were "created" by using its "Birth and death model." It cannot point to any of these jobs in the real world. They exist only in the algorithm that created them and put them on the BLS job spreadsheets. In short, they are phantom jobs, magically created by math just like the phantom dollars and euros were magically created by the Fed and ECB.

Voila! No more problems! (Until the next time we need another trillion dollar bailout.)

Isn't capitalism wonderful?

When Will The Cleanup Start?

2010-05-07T12:59:00.000-07:00

A sea of toxic oil washes ashore in the Gulf of Mexico, and a sea of toxic debt clots the Adriatic on the shores of Greece. Over here officials speculate that the oil could enter the Gulf Loop current and be carried out into the Atlantic. Over there officials worry the toxic debt will spill out of the Adriatic and into the Mediterranean Sea, infecting the already struggling economies of Portugal, Spain, Italy...

One problem stems from our insatiable thirst for oil and the lack of any sustainable energy solution. The other arises from our insatiable thirst for profit, as our economies have been running on the sludge of debt for over a decade now. Instead of real productive growth we got "financial innovation," where digital ones and zeros created phantom trillions and packaged them up in great pools of dark matter securities and derivatives, all largely unregulated, and combining to equal the staggering sum of $600 trillion.

In both cases the same question presents itself: when will the cleanup begin? BP was on the hook for only $75 million for the Gulf cleanup mess, though legislation in in the works to raise that loss limit to $10 billion. It's clear who was responsible for the oil in the Gulf of Mexico, and who is responsible for the cleanup. BP didn't come whining to the US government and demand taxpayer dollars, but it remains ironic that fishermen who can no longer fish the Gulf waters will now be seekng cleanup contracts to try and save their businesses.

By the same token it should be all too obvious who is responsible for all the toxic debt choking the world's economies--just two words--"the banks." With the most unique scheme for making money ever devised, banks get to "create" ten times the amount of money they actually have in their vaults, in effect, "originating" and funding loans at their whim. Every loan made is just the creation of more debt. So the banks created all this massive debt, and then leveraged themselves so deeply in the securities trading game that even a small default rate will sink them, effectively wiping out their equity and rendering them insolvent. When this happened the accounting rules were all simply changed so they could continue to pretend they were still solvent, but accounting semantics cannot cure the underlying sludge of bad debt.

Now when we look to options for cleanup of this terrible mess, why is it that the banks are not held responsible? Instead the taxpayer was asked to foot the bill as governments rushed to bail out Wall Street and its big banking brethren. In the greatest calamity to strike the financial markets in over 60 years, the banks still reaped record profits and bonus money.

The people of Greece know who is responsible for the demise of their pensions, civil services, standard of living. They have taken to the streets to make it clear that they do not want their government to commit public funds in the rescue of private corporations holding the public in debt servitude.

Even a year after the great crisis of 2008-09 what has really been done to hold banks accountable for the enormous harm they have done to society? Nothing. And so the question remains: when will we demand that those responsible for the crisis take full responsibility for the cleanup? It is clear that congress will not do what is in the interest of the people, for senators and representatives are too easily bought by the banks. And if Greece is any indicator of where we are headed it is becoming equally clear that we will have to take this to the streets over here before anything gets done about it.

In the meantime, we watch thousand point swings in the markets, blasting through stops like toxic oil blasting through well heads, blowing out retirement portfolios one after another. When will Americans stop being idle spectators and start mounting real and effective pressure on their elected officials with a singular demand: start the cleanup, NOW, and hold the people who designed and delivered this crisis responsible for the mess...The Banks.

Sell, Winthorpe! Sell!

2010-05-06T13:55:00.000-07:00

Volatility was the name of the game today as fear returned to the casino on Wall Street. At one point the Dow was down nearly 1000 points--and then pulled an immediate about face and staged a 600 point rally. The suddenness of the move had the blogosphere whispering "plunge protection team" as the mainstream media tried to sort out the reason for the precipitous selloff. A few stocks, like mainstay Proctor & Gamble lost nearly 50% of their value and then rallied to gain most back. One stock Accenture, (and eight other stocks), fell from over $40 per share to just one cent--a single penny--then rallied to the $40 dollar mark again.

Marketwatch.com suggested that a trader had entered $16 billion on a trade instead of $16 million, and that the chaos was simple human error. But a look at charts on the day casts doubt on that story. The selloff started well before any big move to the downside on those suspect stocks. "Officials" huddled in a conference call to see if trades should be canceled or revalued. Whatever happened, you can bet that someone was making some big bucks on the rollercoaster today, but the fact that the market broke through several technical support levels and 50 day moving average lines made professionals nervous.

In the background, oil began to reach the Louisiana shoreline from the Deepwater Horizon spill, and the rioting continued in Greece over the cutbacks to services and pensions that will be imposed for the bailout the country receives. The news that US mortgage guarantor Freddie Mac wanted yet another $10.6 billion to cover recent losses seems to have been lost in the other bad news of the day. The Dow finished down 350+ points, and in the last three days the S&P has lost over 6% of its worth.

Why did the market drop? Because the smart money knows what I and many other astute bloggers have been writing about for months--that the so called "recovery" is sleight of hand manipulation of numbers and reports, and has no real basis in the main street economy. It is a recovery entirely bought and paid for by government dollars and Fed shenanigans. Take government out of housing, for example, and that market would collapse to near nothing in a few weeks time. (Government agencies now underwrite over 95% of all mortgages!) Even with that kind of support housing continues in decline. Take the BLS "Birth and death" algorithm and all those temporary census jobs out of unemployment statistics. Now put back the people who have lost jobs and given up looking. Then the real image of joblessness in this country would be seen approaching 20%. Unemployment is not improving as advertised. Now take the hundreds of thousands who have defaulted on their mortgage, still sitting in the homes but not paying that rent. That's the money that has driven "consumer spending." People pulled it out of their homes before the crash in home equity loans, now they just default and spend the mortgage payment money on goods and services. This is no recovery in consumer spending. And behind it all, the unsustainable debt remains on the books of the banks, no matter where they choose to hide it or how they choose to value it.

Think 1930 here. Everyone thought things were fine and that the economy had stabilized. The fact was that we had more pain and ten years of depression ahead of us. And until and unless we address our debt problem, (at every level of our society), and see real financial reform, we will have no real solution to the financial crisis that began with Bear Stearns so long ago, and continues to manifest in situations like the 1000 point ping pong game in the Dow. Anyone who saw that deep dip and immediate recovery has to know that big players were behind it with big money, and that the market is as manipulated as a puppet. Tired of seeing your "portfolio" and retirement being jerked around like this because of big institutional traders and their computer algorithms? Get the hell out of this market while you still can. As the fat cat investors yelled in the popular Eddie Murphy movie Trading Places, "Sell, Winthorpe. Sell!"

P.S. The above is not "investment advice." I'm not a trader or investor, just an observer.

How Convenient

2010-05-03T16:21:00.000-07:00

On a weekend fresh off the glaring light of the Senate hearings on Goldman Sachs, and as a massive oil slick bore down on our southern wetland coastline, another story suddenly "breaks" and blows these two major issues off the top spot in the news cycle.

What we had last Friday was news that capsulized two of the great issues before us as a society: 1) the vast fraud and malfeasance of the financial sector that designed and delivered the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, profiting immensely as trillions of taxpayer dollars and fantasy Fed funds gushed to the rescue; and 2) a story that graphically illustrated the importance of our diminishing energy situation, where we now have to drill off shore in water a mile deep and sink pipelines another six miles into the earth's crust to find oil, only to have it blow up in our face and contaminate huge fishing and wildlife areas in a mega disaster--again, all of our own making. The region generates $3 trillion of our $12 trillion annual GDP. The oil could destroy this area and decimate the fishing industries there, not to mention the impact it will have on wildlife and then oil prices in general, now at about $86 a barrel. These two major issues remain unsolved, unreformed and gushing like an uncapped well. We have no solutions, and no real plan of action, except to apparently to forget them and worry instead about "terrorists" at the top of the news hour.

By Monday, a scant two days later, what gets top billing in the news? An unexploded bomb in an SUV in Times Square. Our old friend "terrorism" the great non issue of our time, has conveniently made a timely return to sweep the airwaves and cover the enormous issues underlying the two real stories it replaced. Compared to the Goldman-Sachs tip of the iceberg fraud investigation and the Deepwarer Horizon catastrophe, we now get the reflexive much ado about nothing "ongoing coverage" of an incident that injured not one single soul. In fact, combine all terrorist acts ever perpetrated together in one lump sum and you fail to get damage even a fraction of that which the big banks and investment houses delivered to cities, neighborhoods, and homes all across this nation.

But hey, the cover story leads with the big "T" for terrorism. So just like we did during all the other non-issue "terrorist" events under Bush, (Richard Reid's bungled attempt to light his shoes on fire, and other attacks that failed spectacularly,) this latest event was just perfectly timed to distract the media and nation from the two major stories that threaten the very fabric of our nation and society.

As the Church Lady might put it: "How convenient!"

Drill Baby, Drill

2010-05-02T18:17:00.000-07:00

Remember the election campaign mantra on the lips of Sara Palin and the Republicans not so long ago? It's ironic the the Deepwater Horizon well blowout catastrophe happened just days after President Obama opened up segments of our Atlantic coast to offshore drilling, in a grudging admission of the problem that has been facing us as a nation for decades now--a problem our own best analysts in the US military say will be painfully evident by 2015. We are running out of the one commodity that has fueled the engine of our economy and way of life for the last 50 to 60 years--cheap oil.

Even though the world financial crisis has slowed demand so much that oil is being tankered for lack of buyers on the open market, the price has been creeping relentlessly upward, closing at $86.39 a barrel last Friday. This while some 210,000 gallons of oil now surge into the Gulf of Mexico from the ruptured Deepwater Horizon blowout. A post by an engineer has made some ripples on the web in recent days, as he seems to think the problem is much worse than the media or NOAA let on. Here is a passage:

"First, the BP platform was drilling for what they call deep oil. They go out where the ocean is about 5,000 feet deep and drill another 30,000 feet into the crust of the earth. This is right on the edge of what human technology can do. Well, this time they hit a pocket of oil at such high pressure that it burst all of their safety valves all the way up to the drilling rig and then caused the rig to explode and sink. Take a moment to grasp the import of that. The pressure behind this oil is so high that it destroyed the maximum effort of human science to contain it."

Now the massive oil slick is threatening the entire coast of Mississippi, the entire delta region of Louisiana, and the coasts farther east to Florida as well. Prevailing currents could see the contaminants spread into the Atlantic soon. At present, the threatened area generates a full third of our seafood supply in this country. Think prices on oysters, shrimp, crab and other fish are high now? Just wait.

Now a report circulating in official back channels believes the damage could be much more severe. There could be as much as ten times the reported oil leaking into the gulf daily. Our intrepid engineer explains it this way: "If we can't cap that hole that oil is going to destroy the oceans of the world. It only takes one quart of motor oil to make 250,000 gallons of ocean water toxic to wildlife. Are you starting to get the magnitude of this?"

Perhaps the warning is premature, as no one seems to know just how much oil the well has tapped into. If it is a relatively small pocket, then the spill would be self limiting. In fact a similar event occurred in the Timor Sea off the Australian coast, in August of 2009, and while it created a spill nearly the size of the state of Virginia, it eventually sealed up...some five months later. And the Ixtoc spill off the coast of Mexico in 1979 was also much bigger than this one so far, with nearly half a million barrels spilled and a huge swathe of the Texas Gulf coast contaminated. So it remains to be seen if this event becomes a major blow to the world's oceans. The Gulf recovered from the Ixtoc spill in just three years. But the what if in the engineer's warning still gives us pause. What if this is a truly massive pocket of deep oil, so highly pressurized that it blew the drilling rig apart? And what if it grows exponentially and moves from the Gulf to the Atlantic and beyond? This is the worse case scenario, but in any case "drill baby, drill" sounds pretty pathetic now, as hollow as Sara Palin's head.

This is what our insatiable thirst for oil brings upon us--oil that we need because we all need two or three cars parked in our driveways...Oil we need because of the fantasy we call perpetual growth required for our economy. When will the word "sustainable" enter our lexicon of thought, along with other words like "affordable"? And when will we, as a society, ever realize that having enough, is enough, and release this insatiable desire to always have more?

No matter what the size of this latest well blowout, the damage is already registering in lost tourist sales bookings all along the coast. This means more layoffs for the hotels, restaurants, suppliers, all on top of the body blow this has already dealt to the fishing industry in the region.

Good luck at the seafood counter next month.

Shuffle and Jive

2010-04-27T09:39:00.000-07:00

The Senate hearings on Goldman Sachs got underway this morning, and what a show it was. Senators opened their 5 minute remarks with statements that it was “unsettling” that Goldman Sachs sold securities to clients when it was taking substantial short positions, betting against those very same products. Unsettling indeed. A word like outrageous might have been more appropriate, but the semantics will flow depending on one's opinion of the matter.

What ensued was a series of opening statements by the four Goldman reps, all heavily laden with investment jive, and a heavy emphasis on the firm's role as a “market maker” as an apparent cover for the schemes they concocted. Then, when confronted by an 8 inch thick exhibit book with copies of internal emails, the Goldman strategy was to flip through the pages while offering up halting, confused answers, like school boys asked to turn to page 171 of their textbook and being unable to find the material in question.

At one point Senator Levin presented an email where internal Goldman Sachs officials referred to securities offered by a firm called “Timberwolf” as a “shitty deal” and asked if Goldman had an obligation to inform its clients that it was offering up this steaming platter of toxic waste when in fact they were shorting the deal themselves. Levin read email after email where Goldman senior managers urged sales teams to continue selling this “shitty deal” to clients after they made that assessment about it.

As the other senators took their turn, questions arose about the numerous mortgage “originators” during the boom who were issuing the so called “stated income” loans (liar loans) like candy on Halloween. The thought came to me that Goldman's role in then selling off the bad loan tranches as securities and their deft short selling of same for profit was just the tip of the iceberg. Where was the FBI while companies like Long Beach Mortgage, Countrywide, WAMU and countless others were cranking out these bad loans? Where were the regulators at the SEC while the securities were being structured and sold? The “unsettling” answer was that they were browsing porn sites on the Internet.

What we are seeing now is the barest glimpse of how the Big Boyz in their expensive suits work on Wall Street. And what we continue to see in the nearly half million first time claims for unemployment insurance each month is the inevitable result of the greed and corruption that has now been adopted as a market making best practice by the Alpha Plus of our society, the men who all pull down millions in points fees, interest and bonus money while all the rest of us struggle on trying to pay that 30% interest back on our credit cards.

Americans get this in their gut, even if 99% of them will not be watching the Senate hearings on CSPAN like I was this morning. Did Goldman Sachs have an obligation to serve the best interest of their clients as a market maker? The hemming and hawing and inability to find the correct page in the exhibit book was what we got in answer to that question.

Folks, this is just the beginning. These are things I, and other informed bloggers, have been writing about for years now, in one article after another. The whole “unsettling” mess has finally reached the kabuki theater of the Senate hearing chamber. Will it result in any meaningful reform? That remains to be seen. Up until now, as Senator McCaskill put it, the securities traders have had less supervision that a pit boss in Vegas.

Creeping Decline

2010-04-26T13:54:00.000-07:00

The creeping decline of Western Finance has been exposed for what it is: a combination of greed, and devious profit making schemes made possible only by the negligence of regulatory agencies and complicit government authorities. The “Too Big to Fail” banks now control assets equal to 60% of the US annual GDP. Congress will do nothing that seriously impedes their money making games in the securities markets. And in spite of President Obama’s speeches threatening reform, no real action is begin taken to rein in those who manufactured all the bad loans, packaged them into bogus AAA rated securities, and then bet against them with liberal “credit default swap” insurance policies backed inevitably by the US taxpayer. It was a system designed to fail and yield profit at both ends of every deal. And it failed as designed, but with repercussions even the dark hearts of Goldman Sachs could not foresee...

Read Day V - Creeping Decline

The Devil To Pay

2010-04-16T12:35:00.000-07:00

My recent scenes in the novel 9 Days Falling dubbed "Dark Matter" and "Hurricane Goldman" could have been "ripped from today's headlines." In it, I had the Chinese government as the first major counter-force to call the securities trading schemes of Wall Street what they were, quite plainly, a fraudulent casino game. Today it is the SEC that finally gets the nerve to bring charges of fraud against the mothership of all financial hocus pocus, Goldman Sachs. And of course, the markets react with a mid-day 150 point drop, greeting any news that their shenanigans might be subject to the scrutiny of law as bad news.

This alone should be clear and blatant testimony as to the integrity of our so called "free markets." Someone gets called on rule breaking, the market tanks, particularly all the financial stocks who are neck deep in leveraged toxic waste, the dredge of all their shadowy trading games. Everyone is wondering who might be implicated, and who might be next. Insiders, the folks with the real money, have been in a mad sell off of late. One can only wonder what they knew, and what they still know about the real state of the financial firms that engineered and delivered this crisis and near depression with their greed and incompetence. I must humbly say that I have known it, and written about it all for years now. To be brief:

1) The toxic and badly misnamed "securities" are all basically worthless paper.

2) The apparent normalcy of the current financial system is a thin facade covering a raft of fraud, of which the Goldman case is just the tip of the ice berg.

3) The banks and other institutions writing these securities down at "mark to fantasy" values are all basically insolvent. If they had to value them at real market values, the losses would break them immediately.

4) This fundamental fact, and the million foreclosures now working their way into the housing "market," will cause continuing deep erosion in house values through 2012.

5) The so called "recovery" is an illusion created by massive government intervention, bailouts, and unprecedented support from Fed "programs" aimed at propping up the collapsing mineshaft of the banking industry.

You don't have to be an economist or a genius to know all these things. You just have to read--and read the right blogs, not mainstream media sources.

One thing is clear. The firms that packaged up the bad mortgages, slapped a AAA rating on them, and foisted them off to pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and other dupped marks all know who they are. And yes, they really have to wonder who's next now.

It's day five in 9 Day's Falling, and the bells are tolling. Whether this is a turning point for all the kickbacks, Ponzi schemes and trading games of Wall Street remains to be seen. Let's wait and see whether or not there are any real prosecutions and convictions, and any real reform from the kabuki theater in congressional hearing rooms.

Acquisitions

2010-04-08T10:02:00.000-07:00

Day IV of the novel 9 Days Falling concludes with a scene that knits back to scene 9 of Day 2, and explains the strange tunneling and drilling operation of Ian Thomas in Bladon, Oxfordshire. It also introduces a new character, the prominent Duke Ellington, as he contemplates what most wealthy people still seem to constantly fixate on--his next acquisition. In this case, his aspirations extend beyond the collection of precious stones he has been busy creating, and intersects the plot line of Elena Fairchild and company. It seems the Duke has taken an unhealthy business interest in the dilemma Fairchild is now wrestling with, and one that promises to further complicate her struggle to save the oil aboard her largest fleet tanker, the Princess Royal, now endangered even more with the onset of military maneuvers in the Persian Gulf.

Day IV - Scene 20

Main 9 Days Falling Index

Upgrades

2010-03-28T09:23:00.000-07:00

Pardon my expectations, but hey, it's 2010 and computers have been around for nearly 30 years now, at least in the PC models. So why is it still so difficult to move from one PC to the next?

We've been upgrading on a regular basis, usually every three years or so. The fabled tech algorithm of Moore's Law asserts itself to double computing power every two years, and I've seen it all. My first PC was a Commodore 64, and the 64 was for the whopping fat 64 kilobytes of RAM, double the amount of other rivals like the Radio Shack TRS-80, dubbed the "Trash-80" by computer geeks of that day. To load a program you had to plug in your Dataset cassette player and play it to the computer on a normal tape cassette. It took all of 20 to 30 minutes to load a program until the first 1541 Floppy Drive was available for the C-64, which reduced program load times to a blazing 3 to 5 minutes.

Ah, those were the days. My desktop rig progressed quickly to an Amiga 1000 running in the neighborhood of 1.5 mhz, (yes, one and a half megahertz!) After a few years, I sold it and bought an IBM clone because it had something new that was unavailable for my Amiga, a 20 megabyte hard drive! The now legendary path was taken through the 286, 386, 486, Pentium 90, Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium IV, with my average upgrade resulting in about three to five times the power of its predecessor every three to four years. And the average cost of those early x86 systems was in the range of $3000, a lot of money back in the days they were bought, though the price kept dropping as the power kept increasing to keep me on the never ending staircase of upgrades. Along for the ride with all that hardware was the inevitable move from Windows 2.0, to Windows 3.0, 3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT2000, Windows XP, service pack this or that, several hundred critical security updates, and thank god I jumped over Vista and went straight to Windows 7 this time.

Now I've gone and made the biggest jump in computing power in my life, leaping from Pentium IV processor that benchmarked at about 486 to a new Core-i7 rig that delivers over eleven times the power, (benchmark 5680), and for less money than the old computer cost! There's nothing like taking a shiny new Dell out of the case for the very first time, but your elation is quickly quashed when the monumental task of data migration begins.

One question... Why did it take me all of two days before I could function again, in any normal sense of the word, on my new computer? Perhaps the upgrade path in the OS department accounted for the hours and hours of file transfers, software installations, and simply time discovering how Windows 7 did things differently than Windows XP. As I hooked up my Belkin Easy Transfer cable I found myself thinking about those days with my Dataset Cassette on the C-64. Easy? The transfer took much longer this time to feed new data to my machine! Sure, I was moving about 250 gigabytes of data, files, photos mp3s, and then re-installing all my applications again, hoping they would still work. But my basic experience had not changed since the days of the Dataset and C-64. I was still sitting there waiting for data to feed my new machine, though it would have taken me just under four million Commodore-64s to hold that amount of data, so I guess I shouldn't complain.

A long day later it was finally done, with the assistance of an external hard drive and an 8 gig memory key to move little things I had forgotten. The Windows “Easy Transfer Utility” had moved over my favorites from the much unused ie6 browser, but conveniently ignored all the favorites in my main browser, Firefox. After restoring those, I plugged in the Ethernet cable and prayed that Windows 7 could finally configure a network and establish an Internet connection all by itself. Alleluia! It did. So I settled back with a cup of coffee on my new rig and decided to set up any PC user's most critical application, my email.

Surprise! Windows 7 did not ship with any pre-installed email client. Imagine that! After twenty minutes searching the web about this gaf, I went online to download Mozilla Thunderbird, but its setup wizard was so screwed up that it just would not connect to my mail server. It kept insisting my server was IMAP, (when it was POP3), and trying to get it to configure correctly was a real fun game called “can you hit the manual install button faster than your new Core-I7 starts the automatic installation routine?” Oh, it imported all my old contacts and emails OK, but without access to the mail server, who cares? Sadly, I uninstalled Thunderbird and turned to Pegasus. It connected to the server with no problems, but could not import my old Outlook Express .dbx archives without me searching out how on the net and having to follow step 1, step 2, step 3 in some tech forum. I just did not have the time for major hassles like this. So I bit the bullet and went over to Microsoft, unable to believe there wasn't an email application for Windows 7. I found it in Windows Live Mail, which connected to my server just fine, and imported my contacts and most of my .dbx archives. (Some it just would not load.) Sigh... four hours later I finally had restored email service, and brother, I sure missed my old Commodore-64.

That accomplished I tested out all my new software installs and it was time to haggle with Adobe software that all wanted to phone home and tattle on me because it sensed my computer configuration had changed. So what? Hasn't Adobe ever heard of an upgrade before? I bought the darn software. Just install, if you please. And then kindly run! Is that to much to ask without having to do the Adobe serial number charade fifteen times, and find out Adobe doesn't support older versions of the software any longer, and that they wanted more money than my new rig cost me just so I could upgrade Photoshop, and Acrobat?

People, its 2010, and there was nothing easy at all about my file transfers or upgrade process. In fact, I would venture to say that the average person would have probably been stopped in their tracks innumerable times during the 48 hours my old faithful XP machine handed off mission critical data and software to my new rig. I was lucky that I had over 20 years of upgrades behind me to get me through the process, and still remain sane.

But all that accomplished I can now settle in in front of my dual monitor screen setup and strain to hear the sound of that new terabyte RAID-0 configuration as I contemplate what I hope will be another five years of computing before I have to do any of this again. What in the world will Microsoft be serving up in 2015, I wondered? To my horror, I discovered they are already working on the bugs in the early version of Windows 8!

Something tells me this “upgrade thing” is one part natural evolution and one part racket. We all just went through this with the HDTV conversion. Imagine if our washing machines all had to be upgraded every three years as well. Can you contemplate having to download the new “Maytag Easy Scrubware” utility to get your new washer to work, or to find out that your new machine was no longer compatible with your favorite laundry soap? And imagine having three choices when it came time to hook up your washer to the plumbing, like the three choices on the back of my new monitor, VGA, DVI and HDMI! (And of course, none of the required hookups were included with your new Machine).

I guess, as the Godfather once said: “This is the price you pay for the life you choose.” One thing I discovered about my new rig that didn't require a download or a patch...I still make the same old typos on the new computer. I can't wait to try out the new built in voice commands in Windows 7. I say "Open Sesame" and Windows opens my garage door instead.

With a smile,

John

Hurricane Goldman

2010-03-21T16:02:00.000-07:00

9 Days Falling continues with the onset of more trouble in the world's financial systems in the scene Hurricane Goldman. Taking up where the scene Dark Matter began, the character Rob awakens to more bad news in his Quantum Sleeper. The serious problems in the securities markets make a well deserved end for the badly overleveraged Goldman Sachs. And this time the Ex-Goldman executives that virtually run the US government are unable to assure the rescue of the nefarious firm by raiding the public purse. The basic insolvency of the banking system is now exposed again, as so called "assets" hidden off balance sheet can no longer be assigned any worth at all. As the trouble happens concurrent with the hurricane that knocks down most of the US Gulf of Mexico oil production and damages major terminals in Houston, the fragility of the systems we depend upon for energy and finance is clearly evident.

Scene 19: Hurricane Goldman

Main 9 Days Falling Gateway

Stand Ready

2010-03-16T09:57:00.000-07:00

9 Days Falling continues with three scenes that illustrate how easy it would be to cause mayhem in the world's major oil producing regions. In Thunder Horse Down we see the effects of a really bad hurricane in our own vital gulf region of the Caribbean Sea. This time the damage exceeds that of hurricane Katrina, and several major oil platforms are seriously damaged, including the world's largest semi-submersible off shore oil platform, named "Thunder Horse."

Next the boiling kettle in the Nigerian Delta region erupts suddenly in "Barbarrosa," the code name given to a new MEND offensive against Western oil facilities there. This, of course, poses more challenges for Ben Flack on Robertkiri platform, but the Fairchild operation is close at hand as these two plot lines finally meet and join as one.

In the Persian Gulf the situation involving the Fairchild tanker Princess Royal follows a predictable path of escalation. U.S. assets in the region quickly surmise the source of the attack and deploy, and Iran is now to be faced with a difficult decision. If American forces occupy Abu Musa, technically violating Iranian soil, what will the response be? The commander of Iran's aging air force muses on his options before receiving the order to "stand ready." The events that will follow will have profound implications, and the oil industry will never quite recover from the chaos about to be simultaneously unleashed in two of the world's major oil production centers.

Scene 16 - Thunder Horse Down
Scene 17 - Barbarossa
Scene 18 - Stand Ready
Main 9 Days Falling Gateway

Dark Matter

2010-03-01T19:08:00.000-08:00

9 Days Falling concludes Day III with two scenes. ASPRON-4 becomes the initial focus of U.S. military response to the incident involving Princess Royal on her ill fated journey through the Straits of Hormuz. But the much longer scene Dark Matter deals with the real threat to the U.S., not one posed by hostile nations, but due to the malfeasance and greed of her own banking system. As such, it is a summation of much of what I have been writing about the last two years in my non-fiction articles. Consider it "ripped from yesterday's headlines," with a little spin in that now it is Goldman Sachs that must face the consequences of their enormous leverage in the nebulous derivatives trading markets. When China finally calls the schemes what they often are--fraud--the world of Dark Matter securities begins a disorderly unwinding that will have enormous effects.

The character Robert, an investment broker by trade, finds his own small world will be rocked as well, as his positions with Goldman cannot be easily liquidated. He'll be spending a long and troubled night in the Quantum Sleeper, but the damage is not something that his self contained fallout shelter can forestall of protect against in any way. Ask anyone who has lost a job or home the last two years due to this crisis, both created and delivered to the nation by the banks, and they will surely agree.

Day III Scene 14 - ASPRON-4

Day III Scene 15 - Dark Matter

Main 9 Days Falling Intro Page

Maneuvers

2010-02-22T08:29:00.000-08:00

9 Days Falling continues with Day III, Scene 13

It's about to be a very bad day aboard the tanker Princess Royal, as the veiled threat revealed during the recent Fairchild negotiations materializes in the Persian Gulf. In part, this scene is meant to show just how easily, and suddenly, the vital oil traffic can be disrupted in the Persian Gulf region, in spite of a heavy US military presence there. And any disruption would have immediate consequences that would be difficult to predict.

The situation that will soon unfold will bring the seafaring enterprise of Elena Fairchild & Company into quick collision with the plot lines featuring Ben Flack on his Nigerian Delta oil platform. Stress in one major market area is usually compensated for by increased production effort in others. When the hurricanes shut down US terminals in recent years, and gasoline prices spiked, European reserves were graciously sent to help keep Americans "happily motoring" as James Howard Kunstler might say.

But what would happen if two major market areas were to come under stress, where events suddenly impeded normal oil flows to the West? And what would happen if these events occured in tandem with more bad weather in hurricane country here in our own hemisphere? The fragile nature of our present energy system is clearly accented by the simple events depicted here, and it amazes me to this day that our nation is content to rely on this house of cards where our energy future is concerned, as if we could continue on with our present petroleum based model indefinitely.

The main scene index of 9 Days Falling is here

9 Days Falling - Day III

2010-02-17T09:42:00.000-08:00

Day III begins with a bad morning for oil man Ben Flack at his Nigerian Delta platform in scene 11 "Delta Blues." Few people know the growing importance of Nigeria in the US energy picture, and they would be surprised to learn that more oil arrived at US terminals from Nigeria than from Saudi Arabia as 2010 began. These next scenes, while continuing two of the major plot lines, also serve to relate key facts in the background concerning the oil industry.

Scene 12 returns to Fairchild & Company aboard their flagship Argos, where we learn more of their dealings and impending operations in "Contracts." Events are about to bring these two plot lines into collision, as the dealings of CEO Elena Fairchild suddenly run in tandem with those of Ben Flack's Nigerian operation.

SCENE LINKS:

Scene 11 ~ Delta Blues
Scene 12 ~ Contracts
9 Days Falling Main Page

BlackDog & Gh0stRAT

2010-02-10T14:35:00.000-08:00

From Scene 10 in the ongoing novel 9 Days Falling...

...Images of 9/11 still played in his mind as he considered the situation the country was in now. It was a perfect metaphor for what has happened. JP Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo were the four great steel beams at the core of our World Trade Center economy. The investment banks like Lehman, Bear Stearns and others were the truss system that was strung between these four great pillars. All the other smaller banks, thrifts, and S&Ls were like the floors of this great financial edifice. Now, when the first subprime airliner struck the system and ripped apart three of the four major investment houses, immolating them in a thousand degree fire of overleveraged securities, Custodian Hank Paulson, ran to congress in a panic and said that if something wasn't done to put out this fire the central core pillars would collapse and the entire building would come crashing down.

It was therefore decided to do whatever was necessary to prevent any of these four large banks from failing. They were simply deemed "too big" to fail. And what was done was one of the greatest exercises in duplicity, denial, and sleight of hand the financial world has ever seen....

Scene 10 concludes the second day in our descent, with most of the major plot lines and principle characters now established in the story. BlackDog is a real device, initially named "Big Dog" by the DARPA researchers who created the monster. In like manner Gh0stRAT is a real virus on the stealthy "GhostNet." Together the two make for a very bad day for attorney Jim Banes.

Please join us for scene 10 here

Link to Main scene index here

9 Days Falling: Scenes 8 and 9

2010-02-05T10:01:00.000-08:00

Today's update introduces two additional characters and subplots of the novel. Aaron Brock is an industrious Internet blogger who has been writing critical articles on world events. His bad typing mechanics and propensity to extend metaphors are the least of his real troubles, though he does not know that yet.

This character could be any of a hundred popular bloggers that may be on your reading list each day. Their incisive commentary and critical thinking have skewered the patently false offerings of the government statistics machine and the main stream media that regurgitates these numbers. (As in today's "announcement" all the BLS job loss numbers for 2009 conveniently overlooked an additional 824,000 more jobs that were lost.)

The bloggers root out truth with a consistent application of common sense, honesty and considerable analysis. They have taken on the assumptions of the powers that be and largely discredited them in article after article, and they have had a vision and uncanny knack for predicting the inevitable outcome of events that most government politicians, academics, news outlets, and "economists" have failed to see. Aaron Brock is one such voice on the Internet, and his vision and writing will serve as a way of narrating coming events in the future.

In the brief scene 9, "Drilling" takes on a new meaning with the introduction of Ian Thomas, who has been patiently, (and secretly), excavating a tunnel in a remote hamlet in England--but to what end? The fun in this scene is trying to figure out what in the world he is doing, and what this nefarious subplot has to do with the other plot lines of the story. Future scenes will make this more apparent, and show how Mr. Thomas serves to deviously lead us to other important characters down the road.

Here are the Scene Links:

9 Days Falling Project Gateway Page with all scene links

Scene 8 - Bad Metaphors

Scene 9 - Drilling

Enjoy!

Day II - 9 Days Falling

2010-02-01T13:23:00.000-08:00

The on-line presentation of John Schettler's near future novel 9 Days Falling continues as the opening scenes of Day II are now on-line.

Scene 6- Porto Grande begins another major plot line that will weave its way into that begun in Scene 4. Meet the principles of Fairchild & Company, an independent sea faring oil conveyor navigating the ever more turbulent seas of the energy business. This plot line will play out in tandem with that of Ben Flak and the scenes depicting the insurrection underway in Nigeria, and this line continues this morning in scene 7 "Bunker Bust."

The term "bunkering" refers to the Nigerian locals illegally tapping in to Western oil company pipelines to siphon off oil and sell it on the black market. Few U.S. readers will know much about our presence in the Niger delta, where companies like Chevron and many others are drilling away the wealth of the Nigerian nation, while little of the revenue ever goes to help the impoverished people of that nation. Understandably, this has led to more and more dissent, which has taken violent forms in recent years. All of the incidents depicted in these scenes have a doppelganger of reality darkening their path. I have included numerous "supporting links" to news items and articles that underpin the story and anchor it in the very real news of the region playing out today. These story lines serve as one of many possible flash points in the ever more stressed energy producing regions of the world.

Out of Chicken

2010-01-29T09:24:00.000-08:00

I ran across this video today and just had to post about it. Apparently Popeye's, the popular fast food chicken outlet, had advertised heavily about a $4.99 special. People were disappointed to arrive and find many stores had completely run out of food!

CLICK HERE to watch a brief 2 minute video of what customers had to say about this, and note the customers... Every one is in a nice car, some wear suits and ties, many have cell phones, which they were using to call and find other Popeye stores in the vicinity...and they need a $4.99 special on Popeye's chicken to stay fed! Some even stated they had "looked forward" to the sale event for weeks, and others that they needed it to keep their family and children fed. Still thinking we have unlimited resources at our disposal, one customer complained: "They should have had a tractor trailer here with chicken on ice." The thought that the owners of the franchise simply couldn't afford to do that does not seem to have registered.

Draw your own conclusions from this...I'll draw mine. The apparent normalcy of our lives is but a thin shell. Many still have their cars, clothes, and cell phones because they bought them when times were good. But beneath this shell of normalcy the egg has been gutted. Money is tight. People have lost access to credit and can no longer spend. Equity has evaporated, and anyone well off enough to have a 401k or "portfolio" is worried about it, particularly since the government is now considering a plan to change those funds to an annuity so they can draw on your nest egg to help fund the enormous debt they've been running up, which will complete the massive theft of private money that has been underway the last year.( That's right, your 401ks and IRAs are about to help pay for the bailouts. ) In short, no level of our society is unaffected by the economic crisis we have been living through. But the need for a $4.99 special to stay fed is a telling sign of things to come in this country.

As a nation we are simply "out of chicken" just now, and the blue light special is a bust. All we have for consolation are the last few words on the sign posted at the drive through window: "Sorry for the inconvenience."

9 Days Falling Update

2010-01-24T09:58:00.000-08:00

Scene 5 - Stormfront

This scene introduces Ben Flack, supervisor on an oil drilling platform in the Niger Delta, and starts what will become a major plot line for the story. Nigeria has been a slowly boiling kettle for years now, with rising social unrest and wide scale scavenging and looting of oil industry assets there. Security is thin, and local militias, angry at Western oil companies stripping off the wealth of the land while the people live in poverty, have been organizing stronger and more violent episodes of resistance in recent years. Added to ethnic and religious tensions in the hinterland of the country, Nigeria is fast becoming a lawless region and a major potential flash point for a conflict involving major powers.

Of course, outside interests only concern themselves with oil. Little news of the region ever filters through the pop ridden seive of the U.S. media. But when anything happens to upset the fragile balance of supply and demand on the world oil markets, a crisis can emerge like a rapidly building storm front.

Scene 5 Direct Link Here
9 Days Falling Project Intro Page here

9 Days Falling - Scene 3 and 4 Now Posted

2010-01-20T12:46:00.000-08:00

The sharp contrast of lives in the developed and undeveloped worlds continues through these latest scenes, as I set the background for important thematic elements in the story and kindle plot lines that will develop in the chapters ahead.

In scene 3, "The Gober Men" we see the violence in lawless provinces of Nigeria start to spread. A look at today's headlines from the city of Jus in Nigeria should be instructive as to how easily violence can escalate in this region. The important thing about it, from a western perspective, is not the fate of people like Kuba, but the fate of the operations of men like Ben Flack, who will be introduced as a main character this weekend in scene 5. The Niger Delta is a major oil producing region in a world of increasing energy adversity. Kuba's fate is representative of the lives on countless millions, but the West seldom takes notice of them unless something threatens its own "interests." In this case, and in real life, the great threat to Western interests in Nigeria is the fragile state of the oil recovery business there in a setting of increasing civil strife.

But for now, enjoy these background scenes, one setting the stage for future story events in Nigeria and another reprising the character Robert from scene 2 as he muses about the late great financial system and the collapse we have recently lived through.

The link to the main 9 Days Falling project page is here

Here are the latest scene releases:
Scene 3 Gober Men
Scene 4 Bad Weather

A New Direction

2010-01-17T13:24:00.000-08:00

As 2010 dawns I have decided to take a new direction with the content presented on the Writing Shop main web site, for a number of reasons, some personal and some related to new business opportunities I will be exploring this year. For the last several years I have faithfully used this publishing place to present my thoughts, observations, predictions, ideas and criticisms of crucial events. In recent years this coverage has been dominated by articles ruminating on the inevitable consequences of our economic schemes, and commenting on the enormous bailout engineered to rescue the bad investment deals concocted by the wealthy banking sector. But in reviewing the numerous articles I wrote on the subject the last several years, I have concluded that there is really very little more to say. I have already said it five times over. So I’m just not going to write about these issues any longer—at least not in biweekly articles threaded by weekly blog posts on the subject. Enough said.
Instead I am going to begin presenting more creative fiction here at the Writing Shop, and also invite contributions from the reading audience. To let those down easy who have come to enjoy my regular rants, the subject matter of the first fiction release is much akin to the topics discussed in the main article index. 9 Days Falling is a fictional look at the road we have been walking on these last several years, and where I think it will inevitably lead. I hope it will educate as much as it strives to also entertain, and I offer it in serial release free of any charge, as all content at this site has always been presented as a free service to readers.

In closing I would like to thank all the thousands of readers, 50,000 or more, who visit my site to read my monthly articles. I hope you learned something, or at least were moved to deeply consider the implications of the things I was writing about. And I hope you will join me as I roll out 9 Days Falling in the months ahead.

The key question in all of this remains to each of us: how can we retain our humanity and build that new world ahead as we pass through this time of crisis and forced change? We will each answer it in different ways, some with courage, ingenuity, assertive innovation, and deep compassion, others with vile thievery and continued selfishness. But no one in this generation will be able to remain indifferent. Like the people in Cormac MacCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Road, we must either be the bad guys on the road of life, or the good guys, and carry the fire. We all must choose, one road or another.

   I have tried to carry the fire all these years with the only weapon I had to bring to the fight--the power of the pen. Many thanks to all the thousands of readers who have spent valuable time reading my articles. Knowing you were out there was one great motivation that kept me writing, and I hope you will join me on this next turn in the road as I present 9 Days Falling. Just click on the chapter links to read any given scene. The story will update each week with new scenes. So come back often!
    You can read about this project here, and to get things started, the first two scenes are on-line now. Taken in tandem they portray a glimpse of the vast difference in life style between the developed and undeveloped world. Half of humanity lives in utter squalor, while the other half indulges in trivial materialism to such an extreme that the very avarice of the wealthy power centers there have triggered the onset of a cascading collapse.
   This is a novel of that crisis, as it has unfolded to date and as it may unfold in the days ahead. It is the time we live in now, and the choices we make in facing it will be the history written about tomorrow.

May we choose wisely.

John Schettler

Who Owns The Debt?

2010-01-15T09:27:00.000-08:00

Back after a long and well deserved vacation, which I will write about in a longer article soon. In the meantime, I return to my regular commentary on current events with this post about the massive debt being carried by all the world's nations...My question: Who do they owe all this money to?

News about the debt problems of Dubai, Greece, Spain and so many other countries prompted me to look up the debt situation in the world this morning. Wikipedia was quick to provide the answer with a nice table showing the indebtedness of all nations and listing debt as a percentage of their GDP.

It was no surprise to learn that the U.S. was the world's greatest debtor, with over $13.7 trillion owed. (95% of our GDP). The UK was in second place owing $12.6 trillion, a staggering 374% of their annual GDP! The list went on and on...Germany, France, Spain...the Western nations simply awash in debt. But India and China, where most people live, only had a combined debt of half a trillion, just a tad over 5% of their respective GDPs. The only nations who were not in debt were tiny states: Brunei, Leichtenstein and Macau, where neither country reported any outstanding national debt or budget deficit.

So all this begs the question in the title of this post: If the whole world is carrying these massive amounts of debt, with huge budget deficits to boot, to whom is all this money owed? The answer: they owe the money to each other! (The U.S. borrows billions each day, from states like China and Japan. But how did China and Japan get themselves into debt then? Again the answer is simple: Banks, and the whole system of fictional money creation we call "banking."

Loans, you see, are not made with real money that banks take from their vaults, money held there in safekeeping from all your deposits. When a loan is made the bank simply creates the money, and the debt, by keystroke on a computer. They have created loans and debt that exceed their actual deposit base by at least ten times.This is the sleight of hand magic trick now called "fractional reserve lending." It also means that all the money you presently think you have in your bank account simply isn't there--it was lent out long ago.

Since all these loans are made with an interest fee due, there is never really enough money in the system for them to ever be paid back. The banks create the loan money, but not the interest money. The net result of this shenanigans is what you will find on the national debt table in Wikipedia. Every nation owes money to someone else, but none reports a positive balance! Amazing! It's as if the entire debt burden of the world, and all the attendant misery it has caused, is simply nothing more than a shady gentlemen's agreement, nothing more than numbers in a computer...pixels.

So the odd thought occurred to me, strange as it may sound--why have this big economic crisis? Why don't we all just start over? Let's have a big meeting at the UN instead and simply declare that all debts, public and private, are hereby absolved. No one owes anyone anything. We all start fresh. Then we tell the banks that fractional reserve lending was fun while it lasted, but now it's over. We only allow them to lend actual deposits. The end.

The simple reason this will never happen is that the wealthy would not like it. Wealthy people are simply folks who have more money owed to them than most others. Repudiating debt would also erradicate their pixelated "wealth," so they would never want this to happen. The wealthy depend on debt, and debtors, to remain wealthy. End of story. And this is why we have the "system" we have...and why most people live hand to mouth in this world, largely impoverished, so the tiny fraction at the top can play with the balances in their spreadsheets.

We call this "The miracle of capitalism."

Voices from the Wilderness

2010-01-13T09:14:00.000-08:00

As a follow up to yesterday's post, I thought I would share some brief quotes from a few of the blogs I read each morning, the voices crying from the wilderness out there in a gallant effort to present a real picture of what is happening. Here are minds that "get it" and say it well. Consider as you read this commentary how different it is from anything you will hear tonight on TV news...

Looking at how we got here, Jeff Nielson of Seeking Alpha comments:

"To be sure, there are many other contributing factors. Excessively low U.S. interest rates, the abolition of lending standards, and the abolition of regulation were also horrible mistakes. However, since all three of those previous mistakes were undertaken through orders from Wall Street, the real cause of the current, U.S. housing catastrophe was Wall Street's scheme to fleece the world out of trillions of dollars through marketing “toxic” mortgage products, and Ponzi-scheme derivatives – based upon the U.S. housing bubble."

My Budget 360 noted the strange disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street realities:

"It is a site to behold that the stock market is rallying since the March 2009 low even though we have officially lost an additional 2,700,000+ jobs since that time. That is right, the system is so upside down right now that somehow nearly 3 million jobs lost is worthy of a nearly 70 percent rally in the S&P 500. I sit back and can only watch amazed as the stock market is converted into a full-fledge casino for the corporatocracy while the real economy is still hemorrhaging from multiple financial wounds. We have lost over 7.2 million jobs officially (8 million once the February revision is put in) and yet the market keeps moving up. Why? Because the banking system is using every ill gotten penny to gamble in futures, derivatives, and every other financially toxic product while the average American continues to bailout their gambling ways."

Michael Panzner of Financial Armageddon weighed in on the debate about the efficacy of the so called "Recovery."

"For months now, there's been considerable debate about whether the U.S. economy is on the road to recovery. Bulls point to the massive monetary and fiscal stimulus that's been pumped into the economy, the sharp rebound in share prices, and the relative improvement in certain indicators as a reason for optimism. Bears -- like me -- note the persistent negative sentiment on Main Street and in many corporate boardrooms, the steady increase in foreclosures, personal bankruptcies, and the ranks of the long-term unemployed, and the numerous imbalances -- including still-very-high levels of public and private debt -- that remain unresolved. So who's right? ...One way to get a sense of where things stand is to look at how things are playing out relative to the past. On that basis, the notion that the economy is back on track leaves a lot to be desired."

To illustrate his point he published 7 excellent charts showing that current employment, retail sales, housing starts, industrial production, durable good orders, consumer credit outstanding, and the relative value of the S&P 500 are all tracking well below every other recession since WWII. To view the charts click here.

Speculating on the future direction of oil and energy prices, The Business Insider suggested big money traders were getting ready for a spike:

"The total net long positions by large speculators showed record bets on energy prices. Crude prices have risen 17% over the last month and over 100% in the last year as big money has poured into oil as the dollar has weakened and the global economy has strengthened. Unlike small speculators, who lack the firepower to move prices and have generally been on the wrong side of trades the large speculators tend to be the market movers. This latest data shows a continued allocation into energy by large hedge funds and institutional traders." Link here

Jim Quinn's take on the market rally in his Daily Dose of Reality:

""I truly believe that back in March 2009 at the market lows, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, and the criminal mega banks met and decided they were going to create a recovery by manipulating the stock market. The government gave these banks $700 billion of TARP funds and the Federal Reserve loaned them money at 0% and told them to have their traders buy the market. The mega-banks did so with gusto. All of the profits generated from these banks have come strictly from trading stocks. They will now take home hundreds of millions in bonuses for doing the bidding of the Federal Reserve with no risk of losing. They are losing money out the yazoo from mortgage lending, credit cards, and commercial lending. They have been able to generate a stock market rally of 60% using free money. The banks then issued hundreds of billions in new stock in order to improve their insolvent balance sheets. Who were the buyers of this new stock? It was the financial institutions who were told to buy it by the Federal Reserve using free money. Do you get it? This is a gigantic ponzi scheme fraud."

Chris Martenson commented on the absurdity of the Fed announcing its "earnings" of $45 billion last year:

"First of all, the word 'earnings' implies that value was created and/or something was at risk. Neither applies to the Fed. Let's review the process by which they 'earned' money in 2009. We'll simplify this by examining just one of their activities, the purchase of Treasury debt.

Step 1: Using keystrokes, create $300 billion out of thin air.
Step 2: Buy Treasury notes and bonds with the $300 billion.
Step 3: Collect interest from the US government on those notes and bonds.
Step 4: Report record 'earnings.'
Step 5: Wash, rinse, repeat.

What is the meaning of 'earnings' in that series of steps? What value was created? Where was the risk? In this context the word 'earnings' has no meaning or any relevance at all. It's the exact same thing as if the Fed had printed $49 billion dollars put them on the income statement and called them 'earnings.'"

And MISH Shedlock had these questions about the supposed Fed profits:

"Does that count the $185 billion the NY Fed crammed down taxpayers throats over AIG?
Does that count the real cost of any of its other inane off-balance-sheet recommendations approved by Congress at taxpayer expense? Does that include a marked-to-market accounting of Mortgage Backed Securities on its balance sheet?"

Karl Denninger noted that in spite of the cheery news about recovery, only 9% of Americans now think the economy is improving:

"Consumer confidence this week sustained one of its steepest one-week drops in the last quarter century, (-47) following last week's troubling jobs report with an all-hands retreat from what had been a tentative positive trend in consumer attitudes. There's no good news embedded in here. Personal finances and the buying climate dropped by amounts matching their largest one-week change ever, possibly spurred by people getting their credit-card statements from Christmas (or simply reflecting on what they spent - and determining it was too much. Only nine percent rate the economy positively."

See how the mysterious world of high finance goes merrily on with its $23.7 trillion dollar heist while a handful of bloggers consistently expose the fallacy of everything they do and say?

You want to know what's really going on? Read the blogs.

A Bodyguard of Lies

2010-01-12T12:50:00.000-08:00

Winston Churchill had a lot to say about truth in his day. Any number of famous quotes derive from his opinion on that topic. "There are a lot of lies going around," he once said, "and half of them are true." And further he noted: "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." And "in wartime," he said, "truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies."

The last few months some of the most respected minds in the blogosphere have labored to expose the lies that mask the truth about what has happened to the economy, and why. Forsaking mainstream media news, their own research has exposed a phalanx of lies and deception, from fudged employment numbers by the BLS, to clever accounting rules changes at the banks, to sly Fed programs to buy up treasuries and even secretly purchase stock futures to bolster and manipulate the market. Details of the TARP bailouts and other Fed programs remain hidden. The results of the AIG investigation are quietly to be sealed for 12 years. On and on it goes--one cover-up after another, one lie used to conceal another.

There is no question that some of the assertions made by bloggers like MISH, Karl Denninger, Charles Hugh Smith, Jim Quinn, Chris Martenson, Matt Tabbi, Ilargi, James Kunstler and so many others have their diligent minds around a nub of the truth. They have bravely challenged what might be called the prevailing wisdom of the mainstream media, which is really nothing more than an agenda serving the corporations who own the news shows. They have shown, statistically, that the so called "recovery" trumpeted by the mainstream is false.--nothing more than a concoction of government spending and well doctored reports. And over recent months more noted minds from academia have shown solidarity in voicing similar opinions. Pulitzer Prize winning economist Joseph Stilgitz recently noted the strange divergence of opinion between those talking up the market and the reality of the Main Street economy. Bill Gross, the managing director of Pimco, the world's largest bond fund, went so far as to call the whole economy a "Ponzi scheme."

Yet, in spite of their efforts at exposing lies and uncovering truth, much of the web discourse that gets such heated debate in the blogosphere remains largely unknown to the public at large. As influential as they might be, the blogs only command the attention of a small percentage of the population. Sadly, most people simply don't read. They don't read newspapers,or magazines in the mainstream media, and they certainly don't read the blogs. Instead of digesting news on what I consider to be the salient issues of our time, the great heist of public funds to bailout the wealthy, most people have little understanding of what has happened, and little interest in the subject. They much rather prefer to muse on who will be the next American Idol, or what will happen to Tiger Woods, or some other aspect of our ridiculous pop culture. And you will note that the opinions and general world view of those who read the blogs daily will differ sharply from those who do not.

Thus the whole effort of blogging on these serious economic topics out of some notion that the truth matters has become a kind of exercise in futility at times. Bloggers expose the lies, skewer them with charts, statistics, rational arguments. But the bottom line is that nothing really changes. The Bloggers are tilting at windmills. Their followers are really a small group of the intelligencia that is basically of like mind. In short, they are preaching to the choir. Bloggers call for prosecutions, investigations, audits, the abolition of the Fed. They want Geithner's head on a platter and would happily tar and feather Bernanke if they could. At the proverbial "end of the day," however, the powers that be, those who really control the money, do what they please. Let's face it: The Fed is not going to permit an audit, and it certainly won't be abolished. The "too big to fail" banks are not going to be broken up. Goldman Sachs will go merrily on with its predatory trading model. The BLS is not going to suddenly report real unemployment figures, and MSNBC and Fox are not going to report real news either. So why bother? I write 24 articles per year, (one every two weeks), and in recent years these have mainly been about the economy. Why bother? No one pays me a nickel for this work.

I suppose the bloggers continue to fight the good fight because their own intellect and character commands that they do this, and oppose the ubiquitous falsehood, fraud and deception out there. It was well said that all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. One Blogger leads his daily soap box post with this quote: "As long as certain twisted souls feel the need to lie, cheat and murder to achieve their ends, some of us need to keep pointing it out." So, like well meaning agents, they aim to break through that bodyguard of lies and find the truth. Because in the end there is no version of the truth...it is not a matter of anyone's opinion. It is simply what is. Finding that truth is what blogging is all about for many, thankless job that it often is, and perhaps they take heart from one other thing Churchill said on the subject:

"Truth is incontrovertible, ignorance can deride it, panic may resent it, malice may destroy it, but there it is."

Make It So

2010-01-08T09:38:00.000-08:00

The Government wants to present the appearance of an ongoing recovery so, in true Captain Picard fashion, they simply give the order: "Make it so." Today's employment report from the BLS is a typical example. Jobs contracted for the 24th consecutive month. The BLS admitted that we lost 85,000 jobs from payroll reports in December. But the news that never gets reported is that the actual labor force shrinkage was ten times that!

The numbers are there, right in the BLS tables themselves, but they are just quietly ignored. The "Civilian Labor Force" shrunk by another 661,000. These are workers who haven't met the strict guideline the BLS holds for being considered "unemployed." You have to be actively looking for work to be counted as unemployed by the BLS. If you get discouraged, and haven't put an application in in recent weeks, you are simply not counted as being out of a job any longer. You are therefore "dropped from the labor force." This is statistical delusion at best, statistical fraud at worst. The BLS is guilty of both.

Beyond this, the total of all people no longer counted in the labor force for December, (which includes all categories, not just civilian) came to 843,000. And Marketwatch reported: "The number of people who've been unemployed for longer than six months rose by 229,000 to 6.13 million, representing a record 39.8% of 15.3 million who are classified as unemployed." Requests for emergency unemployment assistance funds are skyrocketing. People are just not able to find productive employment.

So the headline U-3 unemployment number of 10% really just tracks what percent of the work force are out of a job AND actively seeking a new job by putting in applications. Add in the folks out of work who have given up looking and you get the U-6 number of 17.3% unemployed. Throw out the manipulated "birth / death" calculation where the BLS just estimates how many new jobs are created or lost, and you get the real unemployment number as we end 2009, a whopping 22.7%.

This unemployment curve is now the deepest of any post WWII recession. In fact, it is Depression era pain, and it arrived much sooner than in the 1930s. It took three years for the unemployment number to break 20% after the crash of 1929. We are now just 15 months beyond the crash of 2008.

Those familiar with statistical charting will easily see the real story of our unemployment picture in this excellent chart provided by Calculated Risk:

The red line is our current "Recession," and the remaining lines show all previous recessions. Note the recovery trajectories. Now mentally draw in the red line, assuming it makes a gradual approach to the mean of zero, where it was before the recession began. Job recovery to that level would take at least another 24 months, but to achieve that we have to add at least 100,000 new jobs per month. We are still losing jobs and shrinking the work force by droping unemployed people from the rolls to fudge that data.

This is not an Op Ed. It is not my "opinion." The statistics tell the tale in simple math. While we may be at the bottom of our current job loss cycle for this downturn, we are still very far from "recovery" to normal levels. But if you want to think otherwise you can join the ranks of Winston Smiths at the BLS and simply "Make It So." (I refer, of course, to the famous main character of Orwell's landmark novel 1984, who's job it was to rewrite news items so they accorded with current government views.) Me? I'd rather be an "unperson" and simply tell the truth.