February , 2011 -- America takes to the streets and its against the Tea Party corpo-fascists and their puppet governors...
Last November 24, We reported that when the massive anti-corporate protests that swept Iceland, Ireland, Greece, the United Kingdom, France, and other countries -- keeping in mind our report was well in advance of the "Arab Wave" revolt -- would come to the United States, it would be due to a state-by-state economic collapse... Based on the worker and student revolts that began in Madison, Wisconsin and are now spreading to Columbus, Ohio; Lansing, Michigan; Tallahassee, Florida, and soon, other states, it now appears that the prognostication of a former top White House economic adviser is coming to pass...
We reported: "A top economic adviser to the Democratic Party, speaking on deep background, told us that the domino-like collapse of the economies of Iceland, Greece, Ireland, and, now, possibly Spain, is coming also to the United States... One of the triggering mechanisms will be at the end of this month when two million idled workers, now collecting unemployment, will be dropped from the rolls. At the end of December, another two million workers will join the ranks of those who have exhausted their unemployment benefits and a total of 4 million Americans will be without unemployment checks and face destitution...
Four million Americans will put financial pressure on municipalities and state governments already facing bankruptcy... Unlike Iceland, Ireland, Greece, Portugal, and, to some extent, Spain, which have strong central government control, the United States is a federal republic and, as such, the collapse of the economy will be state-by-state and begin at the municipality level, according to our source who has contacts within the Obama White House and the Democratic leadership of the Congress."
In Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, and Florida, Republican governors elected with Koch Industries and other corporate funding through the Republican Party contrivance known as the "Tea Party," began slashing state budgets at the expense of state employees and students while handing huge tax breaks to corporate fat cats and the super-wealthy...
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/02/18/syed-zaidi-raymond-davis-an-american-tweetie-bird/
The always complicit corporate media is doing its best to downplay the impact of the first wave of state-by-state revolts across the country.... And it now should come as no surprise why Senator Joe AIPAC Lieberman, who represents the uber-rich elites of tony Connecticut towns like Greenwich, Darien, and New Canaan, and his West Virginia colleague, Senator Jay Rockefeller of the American robber-baron clan, backed the idea of an Internet "kill switch." Just as occurred with the Mubarak regime in Egypt, the oligarchs will cut off Internet and cell phone-based social media communications if they feel that their entrenched interests are threatened by a massive revolt by the American people...
Currently, on the CIA-influenced Google search engine, articles, such as those on labor union websites, linking the events in Madison, Columbus, Lansing, Trenton, and planned protests in other state capitals, are not easy to find... After news that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the law firm Hunton & Williams, HBGary Federal, Pentagon contractor Palantir Technologies (which has taken over the walls and floors of the Pentagon Metro station with its advertisements -- photographs prohibited), and Berico Technologies conspired to infiltrate activist groups and their websites, with Justice Department approval, the writing is on the wall for America's workers, students, and middle class. It is a warning sign of things to come...
Now that the Supreme Court has ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that corporations are people and they have the right to donate as much money as they want to candidates for office, it should come as no surprise that corporate-backed Tea Party Republican governors now sit in office in Madison, Columbus, Lansing, Tallahassee, Augusta, Harrisburg, and other state capitals. Now that the Supreme Court has sanctioned corporations owning the electoral process in the United States, it was no surprise to hear protester calls in Madison for budget-slashing-for-the-working class and tax cuts-for-the-wealthy Governor Scott Walker to be removed from office, just like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt...
And in Wisconsin, we have witnessed, for the first time, reluctance by the National Guard to put down protests while seeing the state police and firemen joining protesters. Without the fire power of the Guard and the police at their disposal, corporate lickspittle governors like Scott Walker in Wisconsin, John Kasich in Ohio, Rick Snyder of Michigan, Rick Scott of Florida, and others of their ilk are mere "paper tigers." The Tea Party fanatics are calling for governors to declare the protests a "law and order" issue and call out the Guard and police... It is instructive that most Tea Party Republicans in the Congress voted to renew three provisions of the Patriot Act, a law that protects the interests of corporate America and its military-industrial complex and infringes on the constitutional rights of the American people. The Tea Partiers are the same military service-dodging cowards, who masterminded the Infamous White House Murder INC, in the Levant and elsewhere....and, who called for U.S. military action in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now call for it in Iran... Given a popular revolt, they, like their comrades in Cairo and Tunis, will be the first to flee to the safety of their gated communities and off-shore time-share condominiums...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=US&feature=player_embedded&v=yZjPCJfvV0M
Without the Guard and police at their disposal, the Tea Bag state leaders, installed by corporate bags of cash, are ripe to be physically hauled out of their offices and de-throned as governor by the popular will. And after Main Street, the next stop on the itinerary is Wall Street. And that puts Washington in a bind: will it disengage U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan to fight state revolts at home or maintain the neocon fool's errand of fighting a phony war on terrorism against poverty-stricken people in some of the most remote areas on the planet?
Either way, the spreading of the anti-elite European, African and Arab revolts to Main Street America will turn Washington, DC into a capital city without a country to govern -- it will be another Brussels, a capital in name only and a quaint tourist attraction with no real power. And that will be a great event for America and all the world's people and other living things, yearning to free themselves fro lies, deceit and wars of oppression globally....America can no longer afford wars around the world. Period... Time to bring the troops home to add to the unemployment rolls....
Yesterday, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan said "It's like Cairo's moved to Madison these days."
Noam Chomsky said that the Wisconsin protests might be the start of a "democracy uprising".
Indeed, top American and international military commanders have warned for years that the financial crisis could lead to revolution.
If it turns out that [the banks] are hoarding, you’ll have a revolution on your hands. People will be so livid and furious that their tax money is going to line their pockets instead of doing the right thing. There will be hell to pay.
A group of European economists are now predicting an "Oil price shock" for America as a consequence of the destabilization of Middle Eastern regimes and continued depreciation of the American dollar.
Their belief is that the post 1945 world order is crumbling very quickly now and will be replaced by a new arrangement. Their view is that Governments, the media, punditry and commentators have been deliberately avoiding talking about the increasing instability of international financial systems that they believe has been evident for the last Five or more years.
There are elements of schadenfreud or European snark in their depiction of Western Governments caught flat footed by developments in the Middle East. They paint the West, lead by America, as "backward looking."
In my opinion, the death grip that corporate interests (including AIPAC) have on all the American legislatures precludes rational analysis of Americas best interests, both domestic and foreign, let alone a coherent set of strategies to address them. The Obama Administrations ongoing late and lukewarm response to Middle Eastern events being a case in point.
I also suspect that there are leaders outside the Middle East who are disconcerted by what has happened in Egypt. The longer Washington remains paralyzed, the worse the eventual disruption will be. Events in Madison, Wisconsin are a tiny harbinger of what must eventually come.
http://www.leap2020.eu/GEAB-N-52-is-available-Global-systemic-crisis-World-geopolitical-breakup-End-of-2011-Fall-of-the-Petro-dollar-wall-and_a5927.html
AIPAC is already working its wonders on behalf of the fatherland and the junior senator from NY has started the march:
http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/national/bipartisan_push_congress_tougher_iran_sanctions
They seem to forget that two Israeli nuclear subs were allowed to transit through the Canal from Israel in 2009 to patrol the sea lanes near the coast of Iran....and that Israel has a huge MOSSAD listening station in Sharjah...across from Iran....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Fifth_Fleet
By Vladimir Socor
The Nabucco pipeline consortium has discreetly postponed its final investment decision by another year, this time until early 2012, with construction to start in 2012 "at the earliest". The investment decision had previously been postponed in October 2010 for 2011, targeting this year's first or second quarter.
Counter-offers from Russian gas monopoly Gazprom with its South Stream project, and its political allies in Europe, have only minimally and indirectly contributed to Nabucco's latest postponement. The main reasons behind it include: a significant challenge to Nabucco's official cost estimate, tardiness in accessing Turkmen gas, and unresolved competition between Nabucco and two other transportation projects over priority access to Azerbaijani gas.
On February 21, BP's challenge to Nabucco's official cost estimate became public via The Guardian, whether through a scoop or a leak. BP is the project operator at Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz gas field, whose Phase Two of production is the designated source for Nabucco's first stage. BP apparently evaluates the Nabucco pipeline's construction costs at 14 billion euros (US$19 billion), a far cry from the Nabucco project management's estimate of 7.9 billion euros.
BP and Nabucco's Austrian-led management had intensely debated their conflicting estimates behind closed doors, in preparation for investment decisions and gas procurement tender. During those backstage debates, BP complained that the Nabucco management's cost estimate was insufficiently substantiated.
Nabucco's Viennese management dismisses BP's estimate as "pure speculation", and defends its own cost estimate, citing feasibility studies. Meanwhile, the Nabucco management is preparing a re-evaluation through the ongoing phase of detailed engineering work. Its figure of 7.9 billion euros dates back to May 2008 (at which point it surpassed the previous cost estimate by some 50%).
For its part, BP cites the surge in steel prices since 2010 as a factor driving up the pipeline's costs. According to BP, "the Shah Deniz Consortium is keen to work with the Nabucco and other pipeline groups to make sure that a viable pipeline brings Azerbaijani gas to Europe in the near future."
All this seems to position BP rather suddenly as a Nabucco-skeptic, with hints at other possible choices. A Nabucco cost increase of the magnitude suggested by BP would (if substantiated) render the Nabucco project unbankable and moot.
By the same token it would transfer the advantage to Nabucco's rival, the Interconnector Turkey-Greece-Italy (ITGI, led by Italian Edison), for access to Shah Deniz gas. If the price of steel becomes the main argument in assessing cost effectiveness, ITGI wins simply because it would use the existing Turkish pipelines (with some upgrades), rather than building its own pipeline through Anatolia as the Nabucco project would.
In addition to its originally planned trunkline, Nabucco needs a feeder line in southeastern Turkey for gas from Iraq's Kurdish region. Building that 550-kilometer line would increase the Nabucco project's overall costs. According to the Nabucco company's chief executive, Reinhard Mitschek, leasing the existent Turkish pipelines along that route, instead of building a new line, would avoid that hefty cost increase. The company would only build its own feeder line from the Iraqi border to the Nabucco trunkline if a lease agreement cannot be reached with Turkey's state pipeline operator Botas.
The European Commission has all along treated Nabucco as the strategic pipeline and funding priority, within the Southern Corridor. Compared with Nabucco's planned annual capacity of 31 billion cubic meters, ITGI's 10 bcm targeting a cul-de-sac Italian destination is a non-strategic add-on.
However, ITGI and yet another Italy-bound, 10 bcm project, the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP, driven by Norway's Statoil), are each competing against Nabucco over priority access to Azerbaijani gas. The Shah Deniz consortium is preparing a tender to choose the buyer, or buyers, for the planned Phase Two of that field's production.
The European Commission cannot officially take sides between the competing pipeline consortia, nor directly influence the choice to be made by the producers' consortium. Moreover, given the possible upward revision of Nabucco's project costs, the commission now encourages the three rival pipeline projects to consider options for working with each other.
According to Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger, the "European Commission would welcome any cooperation that contributes to achieving the objectives of the Southern Corridor." The forms of such cooperation, however, remain unspecified, and are far from being self-evident. The Nabucco consortium regards its project as a stand-alone and does not discuss any kind of merger with another project.....
South Stream may disappear
Russia's South Stream project to transport gas via the Black Sea to Serbia and Europe has undergone numerous rethinks over the years. Outright disappearance is the latest possibility, although the project's head is still in the dark on that one. - Robert M Cutler