Thursday, January 19, 2017

Countdown to Trumpstag: Entering the Endgame, Swelling the Shock Doctrine

"With the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which have become costly guerilla conflicts, and with the exposure of the Bush administration's deceptions about 9/11 and the threats posed by Saddam Hussein, we have seen the seeds for new conflicts being planted in West Africa, Venezuela, and Columbia, as well as in the Far East, Indonesia and Korea.  In each of these places, there are reserves of oil and gas or strategic transit routes that can help to meet supply needs for whoever controls them.

The Endgame for all this struggle is China, whose oil imports were recently predicted by the Japan Times to increase by 500% before the year 2030."

-Michael C. Ruppert from The Truth and Lies of 9-11 Introduction filmed in 2004



The interregnum of infamy is coming to a close.  With the presidential election of 2016 now officially stolen, there have been numerous pieces written about the numerous ways this transition clearly delineates the end of Obamanation and the start of Abomination.  Pieces about the repeal of Obamacare, the building of "The Wall" and mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.  Pieces about the ban on Muslim immigration to the US and registry for Muslims in the US.  Pieces about domestic policy that try to demonize Trump as something 'other' than a conservative Republican, as the ill-fated Clinton campaign tried to do, but which inevitably, from my perspective, illustrate him as just the inevitable hypocritical Tea Party poster child for government mismanagement at the highest level in the name of a political temper tantrum summed up in a two word mantra: "no compromise."

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Donald J. Trump  Photo credit: Flickr


This is not going to be one of those pieces.  My focus will be on foreign policy.  Sure, there's plenty of columns out there on Trump's foreign policy, covering the upcoming 'tearing up' of the Iran nuclear deal, making nice with Russia and "bomb the shit out of ISIS."  But not many cover the situation from the American Judas perspective: documenting the Deep State and other conspiracies through consciousness of the Carbon Crisis.  I've already presented a hypothesis prior to the general election that the overworld might consider President Trump a useful tool to facilitate a transition of Operation Gladio B under NATO control to an Operation Gladio C that decentralizes NATO responsibility (as recently as January 15 he called them "obsolete")and privatizes wherever possible to obscure accountability.  Anyone familiar with history knows that wherever Operation Gladio goes, false flag attacks follow.  And there have certainly been no shortage of columns exploring the possibility of a 'Reichstag fire' event during Trump's time in office.  Where I hope to be different in my exploration of a 'Trumpstag' event requires revisiting an old subject the overworld pimping privatization would prefer we all forget about: Peak Oil.


Michael C. Ruppert, author of Crossing the Rubicon  Photo credit: Wikipedia


I happen to concur with the late Michael Ruppert, whom I quoted earlier, that one of the motives for the Gladio B attacks on September 11, 2001 was Peak Oil.  Contrary to what pundits have proclaimed, Peak Oil is not "dead"; it never was a question of if, but when it would occur.  "Maestro" Dick Cheney certainly didn't have a crystal ball to foresee how technological improvements in hydraulic fracking could forestall its imminence when, as CEO of Halliburton in 1999, he demonstrated his knowledge of Peak Oil in a speech at the London Institute of Petroleum.  I don't claim to have a crystal ball either as to whether a peak in total liquid fuel global production (the real Peak Oil, not just light sweet crude) will happen before the end of the decade, or in the 20s or 30s.  But it is axiomatic that unless there is massive global deindustrialization (highly unlikely) or massive global depopulation (scarily likely), it will happen before the end of the century.  No other liquid fuel on the planet comes close to the energy density or energy return on energy invested as oil.  So control of these resources is paramount; not just in securing supplies where they are produced but securing access to transport them for consumption.  More on that later.

I think if we want to try to understand why a new 9/11 could occur, it also helps to look back and understand the economic motives behind the original 9/11.  Not September 11, 2001, but September 11, 1973.  That was the day that General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile in a violent coup.  He rolled out firing tanks into the streets and had fighter jets assault government buildings.  Allende was killed and his cabinet rounded and locked up.  About 13,500 civilians were arrested in the days that followed and imprisoned, many sent to the two main football stadiums in Chile where hundreds were tortured and murdered, including popular folk singer Victor Jara.  In all, more than 3,200 were disappeared or executed, 80,000 imprisoned and 200,000 fled Chile to avoid political persecution.  While much has been written about the assistance that Pinochet received from the CIA, ITT and Henry Kissinger, there is a deeper economic examination by Naomi Klein in her well-researched and compelling book The Shock Doctrine which shows collaboration between the military and a small group of neo-liberal privatization extremists called the Chicago Boys, who were disciples of laissez-faire economist Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago.  From page 86:


For a time, the coup planning proceeded on two distinct tracks: the military plotted the extermination of Allende and his supporters while the economists plotted the extermination of their ideas.  As momentum built for a violent solution, a dialogue was opened between the two camps, with Roberto Kelly, a businessman associated with the CIA-financed newspaper El Mercurio, acting as the go-between.  Through Kelly, the Chicago Boys sent a five-page summary of their economic program to the navy admiral in charge.  The navy gave the nod, and from then on the Chicago Boys worked frantically to have their program ready by the time of the coup.

Their five-hundred-page bible - a detailed economic program that would guide the junta from its earliest days - came to be known in Chile as "The Brick."  According to a later U.S. Senate Committee, "CIA collaborators were involved in preparing an initial overall economic plan which has served as the basis for the Junta's most important economic decisions.64  Eight of the ten principal authors of "The Brick" had studied economics at the University of Chicago.65


While I used the word 'neo-liberal' above to describe this economic approach, I think it's important to point out, considering how often the words 'liberal' and 'conservative' are used as labels to describe political polar opposites, that neo-liberals and neo-conservatives are really the same team in terms of the expansion of the Military-Industrial Complex into what Klein terms the "disaster capitalism complex."  Whether it's the Friedmanite Chicago Boys sweeping across the governments of the Southern Cone in the 70s in which 100,000 to 150,000 were tortured and tens of thousands killed to protect the "free" market, or the IMF and World Bank offering aid with major strings attached to Poland and South Africa in the 90s, it all turns out the same in each country: a crisis is used (or manufactured) as a pretext for economic restructuring predicated on massive privatization and eradicating the public sector, resulting in a permanent underclass of anywhere from 25 to 60 percent of the population and the rich becoming super-rich.  Exacerbating this Dickensian disconnect in the 21st century are the multi-national corporations profiting off this arrangement: heavy construction, high-tech security, arms dealers, private health care companies treating wounded soldiers, the oil and gas sector, and defense contractors.  This paradigm is designed to avoid being voted out of existence.  Designating it neo-con or neo-lib obfuscates its real nature: corporatist.  As Klein writes on page 105:


Corporatism, or "corporativism," originally referred to Mussolini's model of a police state run as an alliance of the three major power sources in society - government, businesses and trade unions - all collaborating to guarantee order in the name of nationalism.  What Chile pioneered under Pinochet was an evolution of corporatism: a mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations, joining forces to wage all-out war on the third power sector - the workers - thereby drastically increasing the alliance's share of the national wealth.


While I can certainly visualize Trumpstag being used as a pretext for just this sort of war on workers in the USA, I can also see the gaping hole in the analogy: Trump won't be starting a violent coup to seize power, he's already got it.  But there's another country that underwent the "Pinochet option" in a reverse manner.  I'm talking about what happened to Russia under Boris Yeltsin during the 1990s.  As the Russian president, he first gained international attention in August 1991 when, in response to a group from the Communist old guard in tanks threatening to bomb the Russian parliament building called the White House in a bid to stop democratization, Yeltsin stood on one of the tanks amid a crowd of pro-democracy protestors denouncing them.  When the tanks retreated, Yeltsin was a hero for democracy.  Four months later, Yeltsin formed an alliance with two other Soviet republics to dissolve the Soviet Union.  Yeltsin then tried to institute a 'Chicago School' economic program lifting price controls.  The average Russian consumed 40% less in 1992 than in 1991 and a third of the population fell below the poverty line.  When parliament brought forth a budget bill in 1993 to try to slow down the Shock Doctrine, the IMF leaked to the press that it would rescind a $1.5 billion loan.

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Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine  Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons


The day after the IMF leak, Yeltsin initiated the first step of the "Pinochet option" by issuing decree 1400, which abolished the constitution and dissolved parliament.  Two days later, a special session of parliament voted 636-2 to impeach Yeltsin for this decree, which would be the equivalent of the U.S. president unilaterally dissolving Congress.  Though Russia's Constitutional Court ruled Yeltsin's behavior unconstitutional, President Clinton backed Yeltsin and Congress voted to give Yeltsin $2.5 billion in aid.  Pro-democracy protesters demonstrated for two weeks, once again surrounding the White House parliament building.  Only this time, instead of defending the building as he did two years earlier, Yeltsin did the opposite: on October 4, 1993, Yeltsin ordered a reluctant army to storm the Russian White House and set it on fire!  Approximately 500 people were killed and almost 1,000 wounded in the worst violence Moscow had seen since 1917.  As Klein summed it up on page 289 of The Shock Doctrine:


But Russia wasn't a repeat of Chile - it was Chile in reverse order: Pinochet staged a coup, dissolved the institutions of democracy and then imposed shock therapy; Yeltsin imposed shock therapy in a democracy, then could defend it only by dissolving democracy and staging a coup.  Both scenarios earned enthusiastic support from the West.


The postscript to this tyranny was a law-making binge that entrenched a corrupt casino capitalism in Russia during the 90s.  It made their market highly speculative and thus highly vulnerable: when the Asian financial crisis of 1998 hit, the Russian economy tanked.  Yeltsin's approval rating dropped to six percent and his alcoholism made him increasingly dysfunctional.  What turned this disastrous situation around?  Another shock, this time in the form of a false flag attack on Russian soil.  In September 1999, four apartment buildings were blown up in the middle of the night, killing almost three hundred people.  Newly appointed prime minister Vladimir Putin placed the blame on Chechen rebels trained by Osama bin Laden and launched air strikes on Chechnya later that month.  While Putin has never allowed a formal investigation into the apartment bombings, independent research into these attacks, as well as a flimsy excuse for a "training exercise" that implicated the FSB that Putin previously headed, prove the attacks were an inside job.  Sadly, the job worked as Russians rallied around the KGB veteran Putin to protect them from terror.  On December 31, 1999, several oligarchs engineered a quiet handover of the presidency from Yeltsin to Putin, no elections necessary.

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Vladimir Putin  Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons


On the subject of Putin, let's explore him a little more deeply in the context of recent events, the first event being the US presidential election of 2016.  I have already published pieces with multiple sources to back up my claims that the DNC stole the primaries for Clinton and the GOP stole the general election for Trump.  It was a slick trick that put Hillary in the same position that Robert Shaw's character Doyle Lonnegan in The Sting was in when Paul Newman beat him at poker with a deck switch: "What was I supposed to do - call him for cheating better than me, in front of the others?"  Of course, it's too much to ask our Justice Department (there's a glaring misnomer) to investigate to what extent software corruption stole the general election for Trump or for Clinton in the primaries to verify that the management of our fake democracy is a perennial shell game. So instead we got a feel-good donation-driven request for a hand recount - but even that paltry bread crumb posed too much of a threat to the Deep State. Rather than having the headline across the media be that the recount was stopped, that story was buried with bipartisan approval so that we could, yet again, demonize Russia. That's not to say there is absolutely no truth in this bipartisan-approved, REM-friendly story - just that it is a convenient distraction so the sheeple will stop focusing on how elections are actually stolen in this country and look at how it might possibly have been stolen but which, upon closer, time-wasting examination, will at best prove an attempt to influence the election as opposed to direct theft. It's not that Putin didn't have the motive - he certainly preferred Trump to Clinton. It's not that he didn't have the means - Russian computer hackers do exist whether you believe they hacked the DNC (and RNC) or not. But how could Putin have had the opportunity to steal the general election when it was already being stolen by the GOP and the machinery they've had in place for over a decade now? Say what you will about Putin - he's not dumb enough to try to steal something if he saw it was already being stolen for him by someone else!

But there is another recent event concerning Putin that I think provides even deeper insight into the machinations of the Deep State and how geopolitical imperatives look to shape up in the future.  That event is the Syrian Civil War.  I think it should be clear by now what happened there in light of the recent ceasefire: Putin checkmated the West.  Despite all attempts to outmaneuver those supporting the Assad government, including assisting rebels aligned with ISIS, Putin's intervention put the Deep State in a bind where the only way to undermine him would be through direct armed conflict, nuclear power vs. nuclear power.  Is that avenue a legitimate consideration by the Deep State?  It's important to point out, especially because they are so powerful, that the CIA is not a monolith, the FBI is not a monolith, NATO is not a monolith and our military is not a monolith.  By extension, I think it's safe to say the Deep State is not a monolith either; there are factions competing for direction in all of these powerful groups.  Some of those factions are still hanging on to the confrontation with Russia; those factions by and large supported Clinton for president.  The other factions, many of which supported Trump, saw the writing on the wall that change was in the wind, that a more economically inviting challenger for global primacy was waiting in the wings.  The prospect of World War III to the overworld exists only as a method of last resort in their Shock Doctrine, when all other avenues for commanding control of resources have been exhausted and profits can no longer be maximized.

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Fiery Cross Reef, Spratly Islands, South China Sea  Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons


That more economically inviting challenger is China.  Is the Endgame that Michael Ruppert warned us about over a decade ago approaching?  There are a couple of highly indicative factors that we might be entering the initial phase.  One factor is the dispute over islands in the South China Sea.  Foreign Policy had a excellent examination of why this geographical area is so important.  These paragraphs are particularly informative:

The South China Sea joins the Southeast Asian states with the Western Pacific, functioning as the throat of global sea routes. Here is the center of maritime Eurasia, punctuated by the straits of Malacca, Sunda, Lombok, and Makassar. More than half the world’s annual merchant fleet tonnage passes through these choke points, and a third of all maritime traffic. The oil transported through the Strait of Malacca from the Indian Ocean, en route to East Asia through the South China Sea, is more than six times the amount that passes through the Suez Canal and 17 times the amount that transits the Panama Canal. Roughly two-thirds of South Korea’s energy supplies, nearly 60 percent of Japan’s and Taiwan’s energy supplies, and about 80 percent of China’s crude-oil imports come through the South China Sea. What’s more, the South China Sea has proven oil reserves of 7 billion barrels and an estimated 900 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, a potentially huge bounty. 

It is not only location and energy reserves that promise to give the South China Sea critical geostrategic importance, but also the coldblooded territorial disputes that have long surrounded these waters. Several disputes concern the Spratly Islands, a mini-archipelago in the South China Sea’s southeastern part. Vietnam, Taiwan, and China each claim all or most of the South China Sea, as well as all of the Spratly and Paracel island groups. In particular, Beijing asserts a historical line: It lays claim to the heart of the South China Sea in a grand loop (widely known as the "cow’s tongue") from China’s Hainan Island at the South China Sea’s northern end all the way south 1,200 miles to near Singapore and Malaysia. 

The result is that all nine states that touch the South China Sea are more or less arrayed against China and therefore dependent on the United States for diplomatic and military support. These conflicting claims are likely to become even more acute as Asia’s spiraling energy demands — energy consumption is expected to double by 2030, with China accounting for half that growth — make the South China Sea the ever more central guarantor of the region’s economic strength. Already, the South China Sea has increasingly become an armed camp, as the claimants build up and modernize their navies, even as the scramble for islands and reefs in recent decades is mostly over. China has so far confiscated 12 geographical features, Taiwan one, Vietnam 25, the Philippines eight, and Malaysia five.

While Trump made a number of statements during the presidential campaign indicating that under his administration there might be a trade war with China, his actions during the interregnum have only increased the tension of that prospect.  Most prominent, of course, was the controversial call from Trump to the president of Taiwan in December.  But the inflammation of tension comes not just from Trump himself, but from his cabinet picks.  During his confirmation hearing before Congress, Trump's pick for Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (the former CEO of ExxonMobil whose selection is probably the best evidence Putin has dirt on Trump, considering Tillerson received the Order of Friendship, one of the highest awards Russia gives to foreign citizens, from Putin in 2013 for negotiating an offshore oil exploration partnership with Exxon and Rosneft that would be worth half a trillion dollars if not for Obama's sanctions on Russia) declared that China's activity in the South China Sea islands is "extremely worrisome" and that "we're going to have to send China a clear signal that first, the island-building stops, and second, your access to those islands also not going to be allowed."

Another factor that we might be entering the initial phase of the Endgame is terrorism.  The connection with China is through the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP), a group also called the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) and is predominately comprised of ethnic Uyghurs from China's Xinjiang province.  Like most Islamic jihadist movements, they have roots in Operation Gladio Plan B.  I stumbled upon these roots four years ago in Synopsizing Sibel Edmonds: The Evolution of Operation Gladio Part One:


Edmonds also lists another big player in the Gladio B network, Yusuf Turani.  Turani was actually given US citizenship in 1997 and called the President of Turkestan in absentia.  Again, Turkestan is an area of West China known as the Xinjiang province.


It should be noted that Yusuf Turani's picture is prominently displayed in the "Sibel Edmonds' State Secrets Privilege Gallery" related to her case.  Given this connection, it should not be surprising that TIP joined the global jihadist movement of the Caliphate in 2013 and have been fighting in the northwest part of Syria.  One of their biggest allies in aid and training has been Turkey, or more specifically, the NATO-sponsored Grey Wolves of Turkey.  In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Grey Wolves set up training camps for youths from Turkic language groups in Central Asia, including Uyghur.  They provided material support and commando training for the East Turkestan Independence Movement (ETIM).

But while the ostensible purpose for such a terror group within the auspices of Gladio might be to encourage separatism to create a buffer region to isolate China from Central Asia, such a precarious arrangement might also be used, in the hands of a skilled propagandist, to place the blame for their actions on the government of China.  This might explain why the government of Turkey was quick to spread the story that the prime suspect in the New Year's Eve attack on the Reina nightclub in Istanbul is a Uyghur.  More indicative of the propagandistic sleight-of-hand needed to pull off this sort of switcheroo on par with the Saddam/al-Qaeda alignment that the neo-cons alleged in the buildup to war with Iraq is the recent statement by Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Trump's pick for National Security Adviser, that China is allied with "radical Islamists."  While I certainly am wary of the influence such bellicose rhetoric can have coming from the cabinet, I don't consider Flynn to be the skilled propagandist.  That designation would go to the co-writer of the book Flynn wrote in July titled “The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies.”  That propagandist is Michael Ledeen.









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Michael Ledeen, author of Universal Fascism  Photo credit: rightweb.irc-online.org


Ledeen's lifetime career of propaganda has been explored in numerous posts on this blog.  The most comprehensive one is American Judas 2nd Edition: INVESTIGATE CHENEY & UNRAVEL THE CABAL.  Highlights: Ledeen is the conduit of the Niger yellowcake forgery the Bush administration used to buttress their case to go to war against Iraq in 2003.  He was involved in the early stages of the Iran/Contra scandal.  Finally, but most important in light of the subject of this post, he was allegedly tied to the Italian P2 Masonic Lodge, a violent right wing group that was involved in a number of terrorists attacks in Italy in the 1970s and the 1980s.  P2 was involved with Operation Gladio in those attacks known as the Strategy of Tension, a false-flag campaign where P2 organized terror attacks to blame on left-wing groups.  As Josh Marshall said in a recent column on the Ledeen-Flynn partnership, "Basically, if you see an idea and it looks sensible but find out Ledeen is involved, it's definitely not sensible and is in fact probably some harebrained plan half crazy, half evil that you want nothing to do with. When Ledeen's involved, there's always trouble...Seriously, if Flynn's in with Ledeen, he's trouble."

As I said before, I don't claim to have a crystal ball.  I don't know if Trumpstag will happen this year or next, or what exact form it will take.   The only certainty I have that the event is coming is that the motives of the principal actors who stand to profit the most are all too clear.