Escalating war threats against Russia, the Obama administration on Aug. 17 sent four Abrams tanks, three artillery cannons, and six light-armored reconnaissance vehicles to Bulgaria, Military Times reported. The tanks, artillery, and vehicles were sent to the Novo Selo training range in eastern Bulgaria, where they will join 160 US Marines stationed at the base as part of US operations in the country. The US has previously announced plans to stockpile growing volumes of equipment, including tanks and artillery, in the Baltic states which border Russia, Military Times reported. Heritage Foundation fellow Luke Coffey, a former Army captain, called the deployment a “message to Russia,” Military Times noted.

In addition, the Military Times said the tanks, artillery, and vehicles are meant for a “new Bulgaria-based unit designed to deter Russian aggression” and the deployment is part of the first of three US Marine Corps rotations in Bulgaria. The Marine Corps deployment in Bulgaria will see the U.S. soldiers training with their counterparts from Bulgaria and Romania. In the future, soldiers from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Republic of Georgia could also join the group, reports the paper.

“The transportation of a Marine Corps combined arms capability in the Black Sea region has fostered improved communication and coordination with the allied force and its partners,” Lt. Col. John Sattely, director of logistics for U.S. Marine Corps Forces Europe and Africa, said in a press release, cited by News Max website Tuesday. 

On Obama White House orders, the Pentagon, according to various media reports from “a senior defense official” Tuesday morning, is planning to increase drone flights by half again over the next four years.

The Obama Administration has killed at least 3,000 people by drone attacks, and perhaps as many as 6,000 — the majority civilians — all to no effect, or negative effect, in eliminating terrorist groupings. But Obama is evidently not satisfied with increasing drone use in what remains of his Presidency; he wants a “legacy” of escalating drone flights through at least 2019.

The senior defense official told the Wall Street Journal about the upcoming plan. The increase in daily drone flights will allow for more surveillance and intelligence to be gathered from Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, the South China Sea, and North Africa. But the military will also increase its lethal airstrikes. The number of drone surveillance flights currently operated by the Pentagon is 61 per day. Under the new plan, the Obama administration is planning to reach 90 daily by 2019.

The last significant drone escalation by Obama took place in 2011, at the time Britain and the United States launched the Libya War and assassinated Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. After that escalation, terrorist activities have vastly increased in Libya, Mali, Nigeria, Kenya, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Jordan, and other nations.

The London Telegraph headlines, “Doomsday Clock for Global Crash Strikes One Minute to Midnight, as Central Banks Lose Control” on Aug. 17.

The analysis under this headline, like the companion article by Daily Telegraph International Business Editor Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, scans the combined collapses which are signalling another 2008-type financial blowout and/or another “Great Recession.”

The continuing plunge in prices of oil and virtually all other important commodities, particularly metals — a copy of the commodity collapse preceding the 2008 crash — has driven the Bloomberg Commodity Index below its lowest levels of this century to date.

Along with this has gone a drop in world trade of now more than 4% year-over-year, emphasized by Pritchard as meaning a contraction of world economic activity. There is a series of currency crises occurring in newly industrialized countries — Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Brazil — and stock market collapses in more than 20 nations.

The New York Federal Reserve report on industrial and manufacturing released Aug. 17 showed a shocking contraction.

“The New York state manufacturing index for July,” writes Pritchard, “plummeted to a recessionary low of minus 14.9, the lowest since the Great Recession and one of the steepest one-month drops ever recorded. The new shipments component fell to -13.8, and new orders to -15.7. [this] comes at a delicate moment for the world economy. There is now a full-blown August storm sweeping through global markets.”

The financial blog of economists Pam and Russ Martens Aug. 17 also reports the startling plunge in real economic activity reported by the New York Fed, but is called, “Keep Your Eye on Junk Bonds: They’re Starting To Behave Like ’08.” “The biggest cautionary warnings — rising junk bond yields and the rising spread in yields between junk and U.S. Treasuries—are commanding far less attention than they should be. Widening credit spreads served as an early red flag to the 2008 financial crash and implosion of iconic Wall Street firms.”

Oil and gas junk debt in the U.S. economy is now being issued for average interest rates of 11-12%, but ranging up to 20-30% as defaults and bankruptcies appear in the oil/gas sector. But worse, as the Telegraph‘s “doomsday clock” analysis notes, this debt continues to issue, and be bought, at tremendous rates, running at $325-350 billion of junk from the U.S. oil patch in 2015, for the fifth straight year.

The common denominator of all these crash elements — massive Wall Street/London exposure to derivatives losses — has triggered an intense campaign by big banks to get Basel and Washington to remove “cleared derivatives” — only about $150 trillion worth! — from their allowed leverage ratios. FDIC vice chairman Thomas Hoenig takes this on in a Wall Street Journal column Aug. 17, as a warning of the next crash.