Monthly Archives: November 2012
Scandal Rocks Washington by Eric Margolis
Scandal Rocks Washington
by Eric Margolis
The US has lost one war and is fast losing a second, yet what really upsets Americans seems to be a juicy sexual scandal; beautiful female general groupies; US brass in Tampa, Florida, living like potentates; the FBI investigating CIA; and the fall of America’s most important intelligence official, former top general, David Petraeus.
After America’s ugly, dreary election, it’s fun seeing the great and good caught with their pants down. Petreaus’ slinky paramour, the ambitious femme fatale, Paula Broadwell, is easy on the eyes. So are voluptuous Tampa temptresses Jill Kelley and her sister who ignited this scandal by sending catty emails to the FBI.
What business has FBI in monitoring extra-marital escapades of the military brass – provided they are not bedding Chinese or Russian agents?
This combined boudoir farce and inter-governmental feud raises serious questions about the emergence of America’s surveillance state.
We see the FBI reading thousands of Petraeus’ emails and those of another senior officer dragged into the scandal, Marine Gen. John Allen, the US commander in Afghanistan. This is the same FBI long locked in bitter institutional rivalry with CIA.
Meanwhile, CIA is being transformed from an intelligence gathering and analysis agency into a militarized outfit with its own fleets of lethal drones and combat units that will rival that other top secret military organization, the Joint Special Operations Command – America’s version of Britain’s elite killers, the SAS.
Thanks to legal changes made by the Bush administration during the post-9/11 hysteria, the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency can read emails and text messages of anyone vaguely termed a “threat to national security.” Anyone who has ever sent a message to the person of interest can also be investigated, and anyone who has sent them email, and so on.
Welcome the era of Big Internet Brother.
There’s an even bigger question. Every war produces generals glorified into heroes by government, media and their own public relations efforts. Gen. Petraeus, who commanded US occupation forces in first Iraq, then Afghanistan, continues to be hailed as a “military genius” and “war hero.”
Look again. Petraeus and his fellow generals used every weapon in the US arsenal against Iraq’s eleven resistance groups (deceptively misnamed “al-Qaida” by Washington), including the mass ethnic cleansing of two million Sunni Iraqis, death squads, torture, and brutal reprisals.
UN officials assert that some 500,000 Iraqis, mostly children, died due to the US-led blockade under Saddam Hussein. At least another half million died from the US 2003 invasion until 2011. Yet after all this, the US forces were forced pull out of Iraq at the end of what Saddam Hussein vowed would be the “Mother of All Battles.”
Cost of Iraq: $1.6-2.4 trillion; almost 5,000 US soldiers dead, 35,000 seriously wounded. Some triumph. America has yet to accept the painful fact that while it won all the tactical engagements in Iraq, it lost the bigger war.
Petraeus was then sent to work his magic in Afghanistan before returning to Washington to head CIA. There, the brainy general, who had a knack for self-promotion and public relations, tried again to crush the Pashtun resistance by massive bombardments, billions in high tech gear, reprisals that wiped out entire villages, search and destroy missions. Torture and executions were as common as during the Soviet occupation.
A disgusted American public now wants out of the endless 11-year conflict, the longest in US history. Most of the US garrison is supposed to withdraw by 2014. Petraeus and other senior US commanders had the audacity to publically criticize President Barack Obama’s withdrawal plans. They should have been dismissed at once, but the president lacked the nerve to stand up to the ever-more powerful military establishment. The incoming US commander in Afghanistan just said he wants to keep US troops there after 2014.
Cost of Afghan War: $1 trillion and rising. Afghan dead unknown. US military, some 2,100 dead, 17,000 wounded.
The US military has clearly been fought to a standstill in Afghanistan by medieval tribesmen with AK-47’s, reconfirming its name – “graveyard of empires.”
As for the military genius of Gen. Petraeus, recall the famous cry of King Pyrrhus, “one more such victory and we are lost.”
Ron Paul’s Farewell Address: An Anomaly in American History by Gary North
Ron Paul’s Farewell Address: An Anomaly in American History
by Gary North
GaryNorth.com
On Wednesday, November 14, Ron Paul delivered his final speech at the podium of the United States House of Representatives. It was covered by C-SPAN live, and was later posted on C-SPAN’s site. It was soon posted on YouTube, and from there was posted on numerous sites.
Within hours, various media outlets began to comment on it, both from the Right and from the Left. From the ones that I saw, all of them were generally favorable. This was remarkable. In thinking about it over the weekend, I began to perceive just how remarkable it was.
I searched Google for “Ron Paul” and “farewell address.” I got almost 200,000 hits.
In the history of American politics, I can think of only four farewell addresses that ever got into the textbooks, and one of them was a fake. The most famous one was George Washington’s 1796 farewell address, and it was not an address. It was a newspaper article. The second came in 1961, which was Dwight Eisenhower’s famous military-industrial complex speech. The third one was Richard Nixon’s announcement after his defeat in 1962 when he ran for governor of California against Edmund G. “Pat” Brown. I’m not sure that it should be regarded an address; it was more of a press conference, but it counted as a farewell address . . . for six years. In it, he uttered the immortal words, “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.” It was aimed at the media. Then, a dozen years later, he gave a real farewell address, the day before he resigned in disgrace from the presidency.
Ron Paul’s farewell address was the fifth. This is extraordinary. The media did not ridicule him as arrogant for having delivered such an address. On the whole, the media seemed interested in what he had to say. Yet his speech began with a statement of the fact, namely, that he had never had any measurable political influence in the House in his entire 22 years. He had never had one of his bills passed into law.
His farewell address was taken seriously as a statement of principles, precisely because he never had any direct political influence in passing legislation. He stood as a representative of a constitutional tradition that has had only two other representatives at the national level ever since the end of the Civil War: President Grover Cleveland and Congressman Howard Buffett, who served in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Virtually nobody remembers Buffett, although almost everybody in the financial world has heard of his son Warren.
Whatever the impact of Ron Paul’s farewell address, it is safe to say that no other congressman has ever delivered such an address at his retirement, at least not where the media took him seriously. It is unheard of that any Congressman would deliver such an address, and especially a Congressman who had no political power or the ability to spread election money around to his colleagues.
I regard this as a major historical indicator. I don’t know if it would be legitimate to call it a turning point. We don’t know at this time whether his career will be marked as an ideological turning point. What we do know is that he had a great deal of publicity, despite the fact that nobody believed that he would ever exercise direct political power. For a nationally known politician to build a career based on his never having attained political power, never wanting to attain political power, and never having anybody suggest that he was going to attain political power, is one of the great anomalies in the history of American politics. His career deserves a brief mention in the textbooks for the reasons I have just outlined. Who ever heard of a politician who received widespread publicity precisely because he never had any political power? This is a unique case.
via Ron Paul’s Farewell Address: An Anomaly in American History by Gary North.
My Adventures in Second-Hand Smoke by Thomas Ruppenthal
Giant Sun Eruption Captured in NASA Video | Space.com
The sun unleashed a monster eruption of super-hot plasma Friday (Nov. 16) in back-to-back solar storms captured on camera by a NASA spacecraft.
The giant sun eruption, called a solar prominence, occurred at 1 a.m. EST (0600 GMT), with another event flaring up four hours later. The prominences was so large, it expanded beyond the camera view of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which captured high-definition video of the solar eruption.
Continued:
Keiser Report: ‘Crash JP Morgan’ – 2nd Anniversary Special (E368) – YouTube
In this episode, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert present the two year anniversary special of their Crash JPM, Buy Silver campaign. They discuss JP Morgan doing everything to protect the Queen of their massive silver short position – a position that has DOUBLED in the past two years according to Rob Kirby of GATA and Kirby Analytics. They also discuss Central Banks pullling on their own little bungee cords by printing money. In the second half, Max Keiser talks to James Turk of Goldmoney.com about the link between liberty and gold and the shooting war to follow the currency war. The also discuss the gold/silver ratio and why silver today is like gold at $600.
Guest Post: So How Many Ounces Of Gold (Or Silver) Should You Own? | ZeroHedge
Submitted by Adam Taggart of Peak Prosperity,
This week, Chris talks with Jeff Clark, Senior Precious Metals Analyst at Casey Research, where he serves as editor of their Big Gold newsletter.
They tackle head-on many of the questions weary precious metals investors are wondering after enduing the volatile yet range-bound price action of gold and silver over the past year:
- Have the fundamentals for owning gold & silver changed over the past year? No
- What are they? currency devaluation/crisis, supply-chain risk, ore grade depletion
- How should retail investors own gold? Mostly physical metal, some quality mining majors (avoid the indices), and ETFs only for trading
- Is gold in a bubble? No
- Could gold get re-monetized? Quite possibly
- Where is gold flowing? From the West to the East. At some point, capital controls will be put in place
What the politicians are doing is the exact opposite of what they need to be doing. We continue adding to our debt, we continue raising the debt ceiling, we continue deficit spending, we continue borrowing money, and, of course, we continue printing money. We are doing the exact opposite of all the things that would lead us away from inflation. So yes, I think that is an important point.
I will add that inflation has occurred very quickly, very rapidly, very suddenly many times in the past, just in recent history. If you look back at the high inflationary times, just in the past 100 years here in the U.S., many of those that hit 12%, 14%, 15% — two years prior to then, the CPI was completely benign. It was 1%, 2% – I think at one point it was 4% – and then all of a sudden within 24 months, it was 12%, 14%. So it can happen very suddenly, and my fear is that is what is going to happen this time. People are in a lull; no one is expecting it: the CPI is low; nothing is really happening with all this money printing; there has been no fallout. But I think that is the critical point. You cannot do these kinds of things we are doing forever and not experience any consequences. Sooner or later there are going to be consequences to what we are doing, and my fear is that it is going to be nasty, catch a lot of people off guard, and really hurt our society. The bottom line for me is, that is why I am buying gold and silver, still, to this day.
For these reasons and others, Jeff strongly believes everyone should have exposure to gold and silver as a defense for preserving the purchasing power of their wealth. The key question is: how much exposure?
You want to focus on how many ounces you own, not necessarily looking at whether the price is $5 higher today than it was yesterday. How many ounces do you own? That is really the question you want to ask yourself, so you can focus on how much you are really going to need, and the amount really comes down to this.
For me, I am probably going to use some of this gold if we get high inflation. How are you going to protect your standard of living if we get some kind of runaway inflation? And let’s say it’s not runaway hyperinflation; let’s just say it’s high inflation, 10%, 15%. Remember it was 14% in 1980, so the odds of us getting high inflation are realistic. So if I am going to use that gold to cover my standard of living, you are going to need about two thirds of an ounce of gold for every thousand dollars of monthly expenses. If you want to protect your standard of living and not have your house be ravaged by inflation, so to speak, so that is a good guideline to follow.
So if inflation lasts a couple years, well, you are going to need 15 ounces of gold for every thousand dollars of monthly expenses. That is a good guideline to think about. And if your expenses are more per month, you are going to need more gold than that. If inflation lasts longer than two years, you are going to need more than that, but you can actually use the sales of gold and silver to protect your standard of living. You sell some gold and silver, you are going to get U.S. dollars or Canadian dollars with it and you can use the increase in the gold and silver price to offset the increase in the goods and services you are buying.
So I think that is the way to view it, to look at how you are going to use it. And so the focus again comes back to how many ounces do you own? So if you do not have any, you need to obviously start buying.
Here are two tables — one for gold and the other for silver — Jeff offers in his newsletter to help investors calculate the requisite ounces needed to protect against rising inflation over time:
The point here is that you’re probably going to need more ounces than you think. Look at your bank statement and assess how much you spend each month – and do it honestly.
The other part of the equation is how long we’ll need to use gold and silver to cover those expenses. The potential duration of high inflation will dictate how much physical bullion we need stashed away. This is also probably longer than you think; in Weimar Germany, high inflation lasted two years – and then hyperinflation hit and lasted another two. Four years of high inflation. That’s not kindling – that’s a wildfire roaring through your back yard.
So here’s how much gold you’ll need, depending on your monthly expenses and how long high inflation lasts.
Ounces of Gold Needed to Meet Expenses During High Inflation Monthly expenses in US dollars Monthly expenses in gold, oz* Inflation Duration 6 months 1 year 18 months 2 years 3 years 4 years 5 years *Based on $1,600 gold price
If my monthly expenses are about $3,000/month, I need 45 ounces to cover two years of high inflation, and 90 if it lasts four years. Those already well off should use the bottom rows of the table. How much will you need?
Of course many of us own silver, too. Here’s how many ounces we’d need, if we saved in silver.
Ounces of Silver Needed to Meet Expenses During High Inflation Monthly expenses in US dollars Monthly expenses in silver, oz* Inflation Duration 6 months 1 year 18 months 2 years 3 years 4 years 5 years *Based on $28 silver price
A $3,000 monthly budget needs 1,285 ounces to get through one year, or 3,857 ounces for three years.
I know these amounts probably sound like a lot. But here’s the thing: if you don’t save now in gold and silver, you’re going to spend a whole lot more later. What I’ve outlined here is exactly what gold and silver are for: to protect your purchasing power, your standard of living.
Jeff discusses the Hard Assets Alliance as a solution worth considering when purchasing bullion. For more information on the HAA can be found here.
Click the play button below to listen to Chris’ interview with Jeff Clark (46m:01s):
What's happening? 