© Patriotwars.org
Markets could soon face a fall of up to 60 percent, two experts told CNBC on Wednesday. A jolt to international confidence in central banks will lead to a 30 to 60 percent market decline, David Tice, president of Tice Capital and founder of the Prudent Bear Fund, told CNBC's
Power Lunch. When this happens, he said, markets will face a "period of extreme turmoil." This crash will be precipitated, he said, by a disillusionment with the Federal Reserve's "confidence game," which will then see inflation rise, and the Fed scramble to raise rates. At that point, Tice added, "the Fed starts to lose control."
Another market watcher also called for an impending fall. The Fed's low interest rates could bring a "scary" 50-60 percent market correction, said technical analyst Abigail Doolittle. "Unfortunately, I think it could come on a crash similar to what happened in 2007," Doolittle, the founder of Peak Theories Research, said on "Squawk Box" a day after the S&P 500 closed above the 2,000 level for the first time ever. "It's tough to know what the exact catalyst will be. But that's the very nature of that kind of selloff. They start slowly and then happen very suddenly."
© Reuters - Brian NguyenA University of California Davis police officer pepper-sprays students during their sit-in at an "Occupy UCD" demonstration in Davis, California in this 18 November 2011 file photo.
In October, the Alameda County Sheriff's Department turned parts of the campus of the University of California in Berkeley into an urban battlefield. The occasion was Urban Shield 2011, an annual SWAT team exposition organized to promote "mutual response," collaboration and competition between heavily militarized police strike forces representing law enforcement departments across the United States and foreign nations.
At the time, the Alameda County Sheriff's Department was preparing for an imminent confrontation with the nascent "Occupy" movement that had set up camp in downtown Oakland, and would demonstrate the brunt of its repressive capacity against the demonstrators a month later when it attacked the encampment with teargas and rubber bullet rounds, leaving an Iraq war veteran in critical condition and dozens injured. According to
Police Magazine, a law enforcement trade publication, "Law enforcement agencies responding to...Occupy protesters in northern California credit Urban Shield for their effective teamwork."
Training alongside the American police departments at Urban Shield was the Yamam, an Israeli Border Police unit that claims to specialize in "counter-terror" operations but is better known for its extra-judicial assassinations of Palestinian militant leaders and long record of repression and abuses in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Urban Shield also featured a unit from the military of Bahrain, which
had just crushed a largely non-violent democratic uprising by opening fire on protest camps and arresting wounded demonstrators when they attempted to enter hospitals. While the involvement of Bahraini soldiers in the drills was a novel phenomenon, the presence of quasi-military Israeli police -
whose participation in Urban Shield was not reported anywhere in US media - reflected a disturbing but all-too-common feature of the post-9/11 American security landscape.
© ITAR-TASS/EPA/Sergei Ilnitsky
The prime minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), Alexander Zakharchenko, has vowed that the DPR will not remain a territory of Ukraine under any circumstance.
The Novorossiya news agency says he dropped the remark in view of the on-going negotiations in Minsk by the heads of state of the Customs Union countries, Ukraine and EU representatives. Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko said at the meeting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine must be preserved.
"Federalization does not suit us," Zakharchenko said.
He said the DPR now saw only one possible option - its total independence from Ukraine.
Zakharchenko speculated that armistice talks, even if they begin after the Minsk meeting, "will not change anything in principle."
"Of course, negotiations may get underway and some kind of armistice may be achieved, but it will be fragile and not real. Novorossiya no longer agrees not only to federalization, but to the preservation of Ukraine as such," Zakharchenko said.
America's spanker-in-chief is at it again - threatening to bomb Syria owing to the uncivilized actions of its inhabitants. And when it comes to Syria, Washington avers that there are punishable malefactors virtually everywhere within its borders.
Exactly one year ago Obama proposed to take Bashar Al Assad to the woodshed because he had allegedly unleashed a vicious chemical attack on his own citizens.
That was all pretext, of course, because even the CIA refused to sign-off on the flimsy case for Assad's culpability at the time - -a reluctance corroborated since then by the considerable evidence that hundreds of Syrian civilians were murdered during a false flag operation staged by the rebels with help from Turkey. The aim of the rebels, of course, was to activate American tomahawk missiles and bombers in behalf of "regime change", which was also the stated goal of the Obama Administration.
Now the White House is threatening to bomb Syria again, but this time its "regime change" objective has been expanded to include both sides! In 12 short months what had been the allegedly heroic Sunni opposition to the "brutal rule" of the Assad/Alawite minority has transmuted into the "greatest terrorist threat ever", according to the Secretary of Defense.
So Obama has already unleashed the drones and surveillance apparatus to identify targets of attack that will help bring down a regime in northern and eastern Syria - the so-called Islamic State - which did not even exist a year ago. And a regime that is now armed to the teeth with America's own latest and greatest weaponry as previously supplied to the disintegrated Iraqi army and the Syrian rebels trained by the CIA in Jordan.
© beforeitsnews.comCounterterrorism drill in progress.
The Pentagon might have to retool its
$555 billion 2015 budget proposal to account for the threats posed by and actions taken against the Islamic State, US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Thursday.
"[Y]ou're constantly shaping a budget to assure that resources match the mission and the mission and the resources match the threat," Hagel said during a briefing at the Pentagon."[Y]ou're shifting [money] all the time on what you think is going to be required," Hagel said.
"We've had to move assets over the last couple of months...to accomplish what we accomplished in Iraq. That costs money, that takes certain monies out of certain funds. So it's a constant, fluid process as you plan for these."
Since Aug. 8, US forces have conducted
89 airstrikes against Islamic State militants, Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the briefing.
Dempsey said US forces have delivered 636 bundles of food, water and medical supplies to Iraqis. As well,
manned and unmanned military aircraft are flying more than 60 intelligence missions each day. "I think we're fine for fiscal year '14 and we'll have to continue to gather the data and see what it does in '15," Dempsey said.
Comment: The Counterterrorism Partnerships Fund, requested by Obama, May 2014, is a network of partnerships from S. Asia to the Sahel. Funding of $5B allows the U.S. to train, build capacity, facilitate partner countries on the front lines, add flex to missions, includes training security forces in Yemen on offensive against al-Qaida, peacekeep force in Somalia, work with EU allies for security force and border patrol in Libya, French operations in Mali, Syrian crisis, push back against extremists, support Jordan and Lebanon, work with Turkey and Iraq with refugees and confront terrorists.
This seems like a lot of speculative spending on perhaps unjustified, unauthorized and unequal "partnerships." What this really may be is a way to circumvent spending caps imposed by Congress on the base military budget. With draw downs in Afghanistan and other such limiting activity, it is a question of how much longer the Pentagon will have access to the OCO accounts (Overseas Contingency Operations) and the inherent DOD reliance on them. The Counterterrorism Fund is a less obvious way to disguise the U.S. hand in foreign affairs and maintain military spending. Washington has created a military industrial complex that needs constant feeding, thereby its existence has become its excuse.
RTTue, 26 Aug 2014 13:41 UTC
© ReutersIslamist fighters taking part in a military parade along the streets of Syria's northern Raqqa province June 30, 2014.
In order to stop the Islamic State from gaining more power, the United States is prepared to use a variety of options,
including airstrikes in Syria without Damascus' consent, if backed by regional and European partners, US officials said.The border between Iraq and Syria is "essentially non-existent" at this point, General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week, hinting the US would eventually need to strike the Islamic State positions in both states.
"With Central Command, (Dempsey) is preparing options to address ISIS both in Iraq and Syria with a variety of military tools including airstrikes,
" Dempsey's spokesman, Col. Ed Thomas, confirmed on Monday.
Comment: Vladimir Putin made it a point to to protect Syria from airstrikes that would produce results similar to those seen in
Libya. ISIS has since been functioning as the US' right hand in Syria, and now serves as an excuse to attempt to attack the country yet again.
Putin's words still stand:
The potential strike by the United States against Syria, despite strong opposition from many countries and major political and religious leaders, including the pope, will result in more innocent victims and escalation, potentially spreading the conflict far beyond Syria's borders. A strike would increase violence and unleash a new wave of terrorism. It could undermine multilateral efforts to resolve the Iranian nuclear problem and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and further destabilize the Middle East and North Africa. It could throw the entire system of international law and order out of balance.
RTTue, 26 Aug 2014 13:41 UTC
© AFP Photo / Mahmud TurkiaIslamist fighters after capturing the Tripoli international airport on August 24, 2014
Egypt and the United Arab Emirates have been joining forces in secret to carry out air strikes on Libya, anonymous high-ranking US officials told the media. The two countries have reportedly coordinated and launched the attacks twice in the last week.
Both Egypt and the UAE launched the strikes without informing the US or seeking its consent, the officials told the New York Times.
"We don't see this as constructive at all,
" one of the officials told the newspaper, which reported that diplomats were
"livid
" about the strikes. Libya is a conflict-torn area with both the UN and Western powers seeking to quell the violence.
Comment: The results of the West's "humanitarian intervention" in Libya have been
horrifying:
A relatively safe country in close proximity to Europe has become a playground for radical Islamists and terrorists. There is no progress in the national dialogue. There are no law enforcement agencies. All the government agencies that matter are paralyzed. There are more human rights violations now than under Colonel Gaddafi. Civilians are killed every day, infrastructure is being destroyed, not even a semblance of order exists, and economic development is absolutely out of the question. The latest parliamentary elections did not help to stabilize the situation. The situation in Tripoli has deteriorated so far that the first session of the new parliament had to be held far from the capital of the country.
RTThu, 28 Aug 2014 07:14 UTC
Liar, liar, pants on fire
The chorus of allegations about a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine has President Poroshenko calling for an emergency meeting of the country's security and defense council, while the Prime Minister Yatsenyuk is calling for a Russian asset freeze.
"I have made a decision to cancel my working visit to the Republic of Turkey due to sharp aggravation of the situation in Donetsk region, particularly in Amvrosiivka and Starobeshevo, as Russian troops were brought into Ukraine," Petro Poroshenko said in a statement on his website.
The Russian representative to the OSCE Andrey Kelin has given a firm response to the allegations, saying that
"We have said that no Russian involvement has been spotted, there are no soldiers or equipment.""Accusations relating to convoys of armored personnel carriers have been heard during the past week and the week before that," he said. "All of them were proven false back then, and is being proven false again now."
"There is no sense in these accusations," he said.
Picture this scenario. A brother and sister squabbling with one another. Something's gone wrong, they're blaming each other, fighting, and generally at each other's throats. Along comes the boy from next door who pokes fun at one of them and starts pestering them. Brother and sister rapidly put aside their differences, join forces and deal with the boy from next door.The saying, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" has played itself out many times throughout history and, while geo-political relationships may not be as close as siblings, the forming of alliances and the repercussions from having joint enemies can be profound.
During the second World War Stalin realized that he needed the Allies to defeat a Nazi invasion, and in turn the Allies realized that the Soviets were necessary for the war effort. In any other scenario the Allies would have been arch enemies of Stalin and vice versa.
During the Cold War a similar setup occurred with the Soviets and Chinese aiding North Korea during the Korean War, and then aiding the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War.
On a country specific basis many a dictator has been propped up and supported by Governments pretending to their citizens that they in fact abhor the acts of such people. A controlled media and messaging ensure that the vast majority of citizens don't think too much or dig too much. Government, after all, is largely in the business of marketing. Mobuto Sese Seko, Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, and currently the Saudi Royal family. All strategic at some point in time.
Comment: As Matthew Raphael Johnson argues in his book,
Russian Populist: The Political Thought of Vladimir Putin, the West have been using Putin and Russia as the scapegoat onto which they project all of their own problems. But blaming Putin doesn't change the fact that those problems are internal to the West, and no matter whom they blame, the collapse will come sooner or later. Wishful thinking, and lies, will get you every time.
Prime-minister of the Donetsk People's Republic, Alexander Zakharchenko
As you all know, a week ago we announced our plan to attack. We started it yesterday. Until yesterday we have been preparing for the attack, examining trophy equipment, arming the crews, and testing communication between different military formations.
I can now proudly announce that
we formed 2 tank battalions, 2 full artillery brigades, 2 Grad divisions, 1 mechanized infantry battalion, 3 infantry brigades and a special purpose assault airborne brigade. All these units have now received Army numbers. The communication system has been regularized and 2 field hospitals and 1 maintenance brigade have been formed.
We have begun testing all these units in battle. Yesterday we began an attack on the Amvrosiyivka enemy group. According to our data, in the course of the offensive,
the enemy lost about 45 units of military equipment, we captured 14 units of military equipment, and about 1,200 people were killed and wounded.
There are two cauldrons at the moment, in Amvrosiyivka and Starobeshevskaia. We started to advance at 4 a.m. on Elenovka, where the fighting is still going on. 2/3 of Elenovka is under our control. We hope to clean up these areas before nightfall. However, the offensive will not end at that.
We will continue until we free all populated areas in the Donetsk National Republic. The army is ready and we have the support of the people. There will be more and more prisoners.
Comment: Is the U.S. stock market rigged? You betcha!