Author: Alicia

President Obama is moving the United States ever closer to global war against Russia in Europe and the Middle East and against China in Asia.  He wants to murder large numbers of people, and he’s doing it through subterfuge and mission-creep, in order to thwart any real discussion in the United States. Instead of making policy statements from the White House, Obama is doing it in the form of leaks by anonymous, lower-ranking officials to various news organizations.  If Obama is not stopped, by his Constitutional removal from office, thermonuclear war will be the result of one or more of these confrontations:

* The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that NATO is considering forward-stationing larger numbers of troops in Poland and the three Baltic states.  The plan under discussion would put a battalion, roughly 800-1,000 troops, under NATO command in each of the three countries.  A lighter version of the plan would spread one battalion across all four countries, but in any case, 15-20 percent of the troops would be American.  German officials are said to be expressing reservations, telling the allies in private discussions that they don’t want to treat Moscow as a permanent enemy, or lock it out of Europe.  Either version of the plan would be seen as a provocation in Moscow, as the Germans well know, but the article is sourced to unnamed US officials, an indication that it is Obama who has started discussion of this move towards thermonuclear war.

* Reuters, in another article based on anonymous Obama Administration leaks, reports that it has been the Pentagon pushing for the provocation in the South China Sea, during which the destroyer USS Lassen sailed to within 12 nautical miles of the artificial islands on Oct.  26 in a “freedom of navigation” exercise.  They say that Pentagon officials have been demanding such action to challenge China since last May, but that it was the White House and the State Department that “stalled” it until this week.  But the action was based on a request for “options” from Secretary of Defense Ash Carter—an Obama appointee, after all—allegedly to respond to the rapid construction of those islands. This is the same campaign towards nuclear warfare in which Obama is engaged in Europe.

* The underhanded expansion of the US war in the Middle East follows the same M.O., where Obama is considering expanding US military operations in Syria, risking a clash with Russia; and in Iraq, where the administration claims that US troops are not engaged in combat, even though one US soldier has been killed and five others wounded in combat, with Carter promising more to come.

The real problem is what is seen in Obama’s outrageous military provocation against China on Tuesday (Oct 27): Obama is determined to launch a thermonuclear war. Now, what happens to us, if we don’t say that and campaign on that? Look at the fraud of Obama’s attack against China! Look at his bloody paws! He must be removed! Under the principle of the US Presidency, he can be removed from office,— and if we don’t do that, we rapidly get into an ever-more dangerous situation.

You can’t fool around and negotiate, or say, “No! I don’t believe it!” Don’t go around and ask how to do it,— he must be restrained or we’re all dead.

We must place this at the top of the list of issues: Don’t call it anything else: murder is murder! To say otherwise is a lie. Obama is essentially a murderer, a mass murderer. The President of the United States currently is a mass murderer. If you want to save the United States, you have to say that, or you may be the next one to go. And if you don’t use that kind of language, even on the street, you’re in trouble. The truth is essential: Obama is a murderer!

Anyone who tries to minimize Obama’s war moves against China: tell them they’re brain-damaged. People are being murdered by Obama, while you whisper about and pretend not to know.

To the people who whine that “It’s not him; it’s the system,” tell them, “No, it’s Obama.” If you don’t say it’s Obama, then you have no right to have any opinion at all. Because if you’re condemning people to justify their being murdered, you don’t have any rights.

This is murder, plain murder! The evidence is conclusive, and if you don’t say it, then what are you? Wishy-washy!

People are afraid that Obama will kill them, too, if he’s displeased by them. But the only way to save yourself is: Don’t accept that! If you give in, or condone people giving in, you yourself may be writing your own ticket for death. It’s gutless wonder time!

To win a war, you must take the enemy down. Obama won’t give in unless you take him down. This is an immediate issue now, not ultimately, not over the long term. If you don’t have the guts to take that on, then your opinion is worthless. And the inaction of the Congress so far is a condemnation of their morals. They don’t understand that they, like every person, will die eventually. Will it be as worthless creatures for mankind,— or as soldiers who know that they’re mortal, and are careful how their spend that mortality to rescue mankind? Cowardice is never anything but disgusting.

Thanks to Obama’s mass-murderous wars in the Mideast,— sending millions of people fleeing for their lives from him,— Germany is on the verge of a new Hitler moment amidst the floods of refugees, especially coming into Bavaria through Austria. This is triggering a backlash which threatens to break the coalition government, and even bring into government a threatened coalition of the New Right Pegida movement with “Black Zero” Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble. Plus, Germany is already cold. It’s only a matter of time before some refugee child freezes to death in a makeshift camp. Our Friday webcast will feature dramatic footage from the crisis. We’ve presented the case against Obama,— we needn’t repeat the evidence again. We have to go for a dramatic effect which will move the audience to change and act.

A New York times editorial dated Oct. 28 rebukes the Obama administration for what it calls “the military escalation in Iraq and Syria,” denounces Congress for not objecting to the fact that Obama has gone to war without Congressional authorization, and warns that it could lead to a direct war with Russia.

The Times editorial states:

The editorial then says the Obama policy “lacks a legal framework and an attainable goal,” and adds:

Chinese Ambassador to the US Cui Tiankai yesterday directly denounced Obama’s overt threat of war on China through the provocation of sending warships into Chinese sovereign territory.

“I think what the United States is doing is a very serious provocation politically and militarily,” Cui said in an interview with the U.S. cable news network CNN. “It’s a clear attempt to escalate the situation and to militarize the region. So we’re very concerned about that.”

Cui called the U.S. action an “absurd and even hypocritical position” to ask others not to militarize the region, while the U.S., itself, is sending military vessels there so frequently, according to CNN.

He said the move was taken “in total disregard of the international law.” The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea has clear provision about the safety of navigation, freedom of navigation, and innocent transit, Cui said, noting that China has signed the UNCLOS, but the United States has not. “What the U.S. is doing is totally against the provision, the letter and spirit of the convention,” he said.

Cui said that the US move will in fact force China to deploy military forces into the region: “We have to make sure we have sufficient means to safeguard our sovereignty there, to protect our lawful rights there, and … maintain peace and stability there, and nobody will have any more illusion that it could continue to provoke,” he said.

“And it certainly will not weaken our position and commitment to developing a healthy and strong relationship with the United States. But this is a two-way track and we have to have reciprocal actions from the United States,” he added.

The U.S. press was full of vitriol and bravado, for Obama taking on the Chinese. David Ignatius of the Washington Post even ran a fantasy about Xi Jinping facing assassination threats and revolts within China because of his cleaning out the corrupt layers of the Chinese Communist Party.

Nonetheless, Japan’s NHK press reported, the commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, Admiral Harry Harris, will visit China next Monday for talks with the Chinese military. The talks were scheduled before the United States deployed the destroyer into Chinese sovereign territory.

Global Times, an official paper of the ruling Communist Party, issued a more virulent response. While advising that China “should stay calm,” it presents the necessary course: 

As President Obama herds Congressional Democrats to support across-the-board entitlement cuts in a new two-year budget, his “economic recovery” continues to collapse around him. EIR Founding Editor Lyndon LaRouche dubbed him “the President of economic collapse.”

A major New York Times piece published Oct. 19 documented widespread losses of employment, wages, and business in the United States “industrial heartland,” which in the 21st Century has come to mean the combined “oil patches.” The oil and oil service industries have lost 125,000 in employment in 2015, a plunge which is now accelerating and spreading to the steel industry, the Times reported, with steel production down 4% from 2014, according to the Commerce Department. Farm income has fallen 54% over two years, to the third-lowest level since the 1981 “Volcker” deep recession.

“The fall in prices for a variety of products, including crude oil, iron ore, and agricultural crops like corn and soybeans, is reminiscent of the collapse of the technology boom in 2000 or the bursting of the housing bubble nearly a decade ago,” which crashed in 2007-08 to worldwide economic devastation, the Times noted.

The newest report to reflect this is durable goods orders, which in September were 3.6% lower than one year earlier — the sixth consecutive month in which orders were lower than the year earlier. Business capital spending (approximated as core durable goods orders less aircraft) fell 0.3% in September and fell 1.6% (revised) in August.

U.S. Gross Domestic Product is currently estimated by the Atlanta Fed to have grown at a annual rate of just 0.9% in the third quarter and 1.7% for the year to date.

There is still no recovery in the oil price, which is actually falling further now in to the low 40s of dollars/barrel, although there are 70% fewer oil rigs than 18 months ago (594 vs. 1880 in operation), and a drop in reported total oil production for the United States of 6% from the start of 2015. Other commodities are again following the latest drop.

The crisis in commodity-related debt markets has reached the point that the seven largest fund management companies based in the United States lost a combined $725 billion in assets in the third quarter. These are BlackRock, T Rowe Price, Franklin Templeton and the fund arms of BNY Mellon, JPMorgan, Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, and State Street Bank. “Mom-and-pop” investors in energy partnerships have lost $20 billion so far this year.

Where this commodity debt crisis is headed is the subject of an analysis by the “Seeking Alpha” site, Oct. 25, of the threat of a bankruptcy of the world’s largest commodity trading company, Glencore. Analyst Brian Kelly of the usually see-no-evil CNBC-TV is quoted, that Glencore is central to a multi-trillion-dollar web of derivatives bets, its biggest counterparty being Deutsche Bank: “For investors, the most important question is the knock-on effects of a Glencore bankruptcy. Knock-on effects could be significant considering that Glencore’s biggest partner in debt/derivatives crime is none other than Deutsche Bank. So is Deutsche Bank the next AIG?”

The chairman of Standard Chartered Bank, Sir John Peace has an impassioned appeal for Britain to join China’s “One Belt One Road” policy in a commentary in the Daily Telegraph Oct. 25. Referring to the initiative comprising the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, the chairman of Britain and Europe’s most active bank in China wrote that “President Xi Jinping’s One Belt One Road initiative (OBOR), [was] referred to in a number of last week’s speeches and a driver of China’s foreign policy. It could be a game-changer for China, and it could open up new opportunities for British business. It aims to boost trade and investment growth, through better infrastructure connectivity.”

He goes on to describe OBOR as spanning 65 countries, with 4.4 billion people and 29% of the world economy, and the concentration on developing their infrastructure presents opportunities that Britain must take advantage of.  “At the U.K.-China Business Summit at Mansion House last week, one of the events in a busy week for the China delegation, I challenged the City of London to see this as an opportunity to help finance infrastructure in Asia and beyond, just as the City and British construction firms were involved in large-scale projects in Asia and Africa in the 19th century.”

Writing that his bank is already deeply involved in the “internationalization of China’s currency, renminbi,” he estimated that OBOR will need $1 trillion in investment in the next decade “and, as the preeminent financial center, London should be at the heart of that.” He added, “It is not only financial services, but a range of British business that should invest in OBOR, harnessing our expertise in PPP, engineering and supply chains.”

He also spoke of an “agreement signed by Standard Chartered and other banks with the London Metals Exchange last week as reflecting the increasing demand for commodities from OBOR projects.”

On Oct. 21, the London Metal Exchange issued a statement that, “The London Metal Exchange (LME) and LME Clear signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on 21 October 2015 with a group of Chinese and U.K. financial institutions in support of China’s ‘The Belt and Road’ initiative.

“The other parties signing the MoU were Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Ltd, China Construction Bank Corporation, Bank of China Ltd, Agricultural Bank of China Ltd, China Merchants Securities International Co Ltd, GF Financial Markets (UK) Ltd and Standard Chartered Bank. The China-Britain Business Council and China Chamber of Commerce in the U.K. also support the venture.”

A similar statement from Standard Chartered said, “Marking the State Visit to the U.K. of President Xi Jinping, Standard Chartered is delighted to have been involved in a range of events this week which underline the deeper collaboration between China and the U.K. across the financial services sector, and strengthen China-U.K. economic relations. … Standard Chartered was a signatory to the London Metals Exchange Memorandum of Understanding on the One Belt One Road initiative (OBOR), which aims to support funding for OBOR infrastructure projects as well as the internationalization of renminbi.”

The LME itself was acquired three years ago by Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing.

After pointing out that the U.K. and China signed £40 billion in deals during President Xi Jinping’s visit in Britain, he concludes, “If you haven’t looked at the OBOR routes and identified some future business development opportunities, now is the time to take a look.”

All of the rah-rah aside, China has a long historical memory, and the British Opium Wars are never going to be forgotten.  Lyndon LaRouche and Helga Zepp-LaRouche have both recently observed that China’s President Xi Jinping came to London with eyes wide open, and he knows that the British Empire is bankrupt and facing a myriad of internal conflicts.  China is moving in at a moment of maximum weakness and desperation on the part of the Empire.

On Monday, the largest drug bust in the history of seizures at Rafik Hariri airport in Beirut, Lebanon, took place with the capture of 2 tons of the amphetamine, Captagon, in a private plane bound for Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Five Saudis were detained by the Lebanese authorities, including a man whom Agence France-Presse (AFP) identified as Saudi Prince Abdel Mohsen bin Walid bin Abdulaziz. According to a veteran U.S. intelligence officer specializing in the Middle East, the name of the Saudi prince identified by AFP is still being checked out for verification.  However, the source reported, the case file on the Saudi involvement in the trade in Captagon (the brand name for fenethylline) is extensive.

According to AFP, “the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been cracking down on the smuggling of Captagon for years during the civil war,” knowing that the sales were being used to arm the rebel armies.  “The use of this drug also reportedly jacks-up the ISIS fighters in their much-vaunted suicide missions,” AFP also reported. But the use of Captagon and the ISIS fighters’ fanatical fighting behavior, including the suicide missions, has been reported for several years by investigative reporter Franklin Lamb, who resides in Lebanon, by the British Guardian, Reuters, and Time magazine.

In the last three years, intelligence and security officials in Syria, Lebanon, Russia, and the United Nations have identified Captagon—a synthetic amphetamine that is banned in the United States, but widely manufactured on the black market in Lebanon and Syria—has been the “drug of choice” for the jihadi fighters of ISIS.

In May 2015, Cuba’s Prensa Latina reported that Syrian government officials in the coastal province of Latakia had seized a large cache of smuggled drugs in the coastal waters. Some 800 kilograms of hashish paste (a compressed, potent form of cannabis) and nearly 6 million tablets of Captagon, the drug of choice by the members of the terrorist group Islamic State (IS). “Latakia Governor Ibrahim Khader al-Salem accused the countries that sponsor terrorism against Syria of being responsible for the drug,” reported Prensa Latina.

In April 2015, Yury Fedotov, Director General of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime told a Moscow conference convened by Viktor Ivanov of Federal Drug Control Service that, “The Taliban in Afghanistan, terrorists in West Africa and the Sahel and the Middle East are profiting from the drug trade…. Boko Haram in Nigeria has been involved…. ISIL/Da’esh and Al Nusra Front are also believed to facilitate the smuggling of chemical precursors for the production of Captagon.”

EIR‘s Washington intelligence sources have reported that a large percentage of “third tier” princes (grandsons of King Saud, and more distant royals) in Saudi Arabia are addicted to drugs, and Captagon is one of the most popular.

EIR and Lyndon LaRouche have “written the book” on narco-terrorism, and the Oct. 26th seizure in Beirut is a singularity in opening the Saudi file—including the release of the still-classified “28 pages” of the 2002 Joint Congressional Inquiry into the 9/11 terrorist attack. 

Jin Liqun, the chairman of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, visited Brookings Institution in Washington on Oct. 21 to explain the importance of the AIIB’s new approach to development financing. Jin tried to put aside any misconceptions about the AIIB viewing itself as a alternative to the World Bank or to the Asian Development Bank. “Both World Bank and the ADB have contributed to Asian poverty reduction over the decades,” Jin said. “But poverty reduction is hard to achieve, not so much because of a lack of funding, but because of the approach. I don’t think poverty reduction in and of itself will go far in affecting the lives of people. In most of the cases, the approach needs to be refined and needs to be improved.” He then went on to describe the situation of a community in a remote area cut off from the outside world. Whatever efforts may be made to relieve their situation will not be of much use, he said, but instead “will make them completely dependent on alms and charity from the government and from international doaners, even though the areas may be very rich in their natural resources,” Jin said. “But the locals have no way of tapping the resources for their own benefit. The only solution in my opinion is connectivity. This will bridge the gap between the local community and the outside world.” And this he explained was what the AIIB wished to accomplish, creating that connectivity.

He praised the ADB and the World Bank, saying that they had contributed greatly to the development of China through the years with its investment in infrastructure, but now that China was becoming a major economic power, it felt it also had a responsibility to begin offering the same assistance to other countries.  He said that the AIIB was formulated as a bank for Asia, an alternative to non-regional financial institutions which also imposed certain conditionalities. But when all these other non-Asian countries wanted to be a part of it, they felt they couldn’t restrict membership to Asian countries alone. The Asian countries will retain the majority holdings in the bank regardless of how many countries end up joining.

While the World Bank originally began with the title International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, with the task of helping in the reconstruction of Europe after the Second World War and then assisting in the development of the Third World countries, by the 1970s, under the combined influence of the growing financial crisis and the paradigm shift towards the zero-growth perspective, the World Bank shifted toward what was euphemistically called “poverty reduction,” income distribution and, under the guidance of Robert McNamara, population control. The “new approach” indicated by Jin Liqun is the type of paradigm shift the world needs to move forward on the road to development.

When someone asked if AIIB would finance China’s One Belt, One Road project, Jin responded that the Belt and Road project were being supported by domestic Chinese funds, including the Chinese Ex-Im Bank, with far greater resources than the AIIB. But if there were to be projects which are a part of the Belt and Road strategy, which were in line with the AIIB’s lending guideline, the AIIB would, of course, be willing to participate.

“You wouldn’t know it from the happy spin emanating from the Oval Office, but a Third World revolt in Bonn, Germany, this week almost derailed the Paris climate change negotiations in November. Although peace has been restored for now, it only happened by papering over this fundamental conundrum: The world can either avert climate catastrophe or seek ‘climate justice,’ not both.”

That is the opening to an article by Reason Foundation’s Shikha Dalmia, titled “Why ‘Climate Justice’ Has India and the West at Each Other’s Throats,” published by The Week. Dalmia does not question the scientific fraud of the whole deal, but is angry at the implications:

“There are no low-carbon energy technologies available today that can sustain the economic growth rates these countries need to lift their people out of abject poverty, let alone offer Western living standards at anything resembling an affordable cost. Over 300 million Indians still live below the poverty line, earning less than $1 per day. India’s per-capita energy consumption is 15 times less than the United States’. India has to keep boosting its energy use, and therefore carbon emissions for at least another two decades to eliminate dire poverty, which is why its reduction plan only commits to slashing ’emission intensity’— its emission rate as a percentage of its GDP— not emissions themselves.”

Focusing on the monetary cost of implementing the demanded emission cuts, Dalmia notes the challenge this would represent “for a country that has yet to offer basic sanitation, transportation, and clean-water infrastructure to all its citizens.”

Even wilder, Dalmia reports that climate hoax fanatics were debating in Bonn whether trade sanctions should be imposed on countries that refuse to kill their populations in the name of fighting carbon dioxide. She warns: “It is also conceivable that a really determined West could use the aegis of some UN-like global agency to create a standing military strike force to bomb or drone countries into compliance? Humanity’s very existence would be at stake, after all. (President Al Gore, anyone?).”

The Federal Reserve’s zero interest rate policy continues to build in a debt crash. The ZIRP policy has fostered massive lending to inefficient industries (shale), overleveraged people (auto buyers), and overindebted companies (buybacks, mergers, etc.). The bubble in U.S. corporate debt, used overwhelmingly to feed the stock market, is growing at a record rate. Just under $1 trillion in investment grade bonds have been issued through September, a 13% jump from 2014 which was a record year. High-yield, or junk bond issuance has been an additional $224.3 billion for the first three quarters, continuing the record pace of 2014, according to SIFMA, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. The junk bond bubble has reached $1.8 trillion, and now $400 billion of it is in the oil sector, plus $350 billion in high-yield, so-called “leveraged loans” to overindebted oil-related companies.

But the earnings of U.S. companies, at the same time, are down about 5% so far this year, compared to 2014; led, again, by energy, where earnings are down by two-thirds. The Wall Street Journal reported Oct. 25: “Quarterly profits and revenue at big American companies are poised to decline for the first time since the recession, as industrial firms warn of a pullback…. From railroads to manufacturers to energy producers, businesses say they are facing a protracted slowdown in production, sales and employment that will spill into next year.” The Journal estimated the S&P 500’s sales revenues would drop 4% in 2015, along with the 5% in earnings.

Manufacturing industry has been going into collapse. In addition to the drumbeat of Federal Reserve district bank reports of shrinking industrial activity and wages (the Dallas Fed just issued its 10th straight such monthly report), large manufacturers with very large numbers of business customers are reporting “recession is underway.” Caterpillar’s three years of continuous and increasing revenue losses have become infamous. Fastenal Co. — literally nuts and bolts, the largest industrial fastener distributor in North America, lost sales this year for the first time since 2009. On an investor call reported in the Wall Street Journal, Fastenal CFO Dan Florness said,  “The industrial environment’s in a recession—I don’t care what anybody says, because nobody knows that market better than we do. You know, we touch 250,000 active customers a month.”

3M Co. said it will lay off 1,500 employees, or 1.7% of its total, as sales growth sagged for a wide range of wares.

ZeroHedge.com cites Fredrik Eliasson, chief sales and marketing officer at railroad operator CSX Corp.: “If you look at …. the broad industrial-production index, you see industrial production sequentially coming down.” It reports that truckload carriers are not seeing any holiday uptick in retailer demand, because business inventories are already so large. Alex Vecchio, a transportation analyst at Morgan Stanley, is quoted: “Transportation companies are typically a leading indicator, and our data is not good.” 

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