Weathering the Storm
Mark Sircus Ac., OMD

Dear IMVA,

Today and tomorrow I am stepping away from my obsession with all things medical and health related to communicate about important world issues and current events. As in medicine and as in all things, nothing ultimately is separate from anything else though we live deeply in the illusion that separations exist. On a practical level, crisis in economics, finance, political and environmental levels will have and do have an effect on our health and future medical decisions.

For instance, if we know a huge storm is blowing in it is wise to stock up on survival items. Survival medicine concerns us with what we would invest in if we were to be cut off from supplies of basic medical items essential for good health or medical recovery.

In the next weeks I will be presenting not only more work in the magnesium area but new writings from Minerals for Life. I will be publishing a lot about natural chelation and detoxification. In a diverse field full of discord I plan to bring some light and some sense to the fact that minerals are what drives the process and what make chelation effective and safe. Miracles of medicine are certainly possible when minerals find their home in our medicine cabinets.

Ok now for the bad news. 

Weathering the Storm
Financial Warfare - Part One

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was
 and never will be. The People cannot be safe without information.
When the press is free, and every man is able to read, all is safe.
                                                                                            Thomas Jefferson

     There are topics that are so painful to address that we will want to quickly dismiss them by shoving them off our computer screens and out of our minds. To say that this essay (and the next on American domestic finances) will be somewhat discouraging, would be putting it mildly. It would behoove my readers though to get out their comfort zones and stop denying the gravity of the times, which are shortly to confront us. My real motive in writing this essay is to help people I care about to begin to formulate plans that will help them weather the storms that are coming. Riders of the Storm we must be for ourselves and our loved ones.

Since the overthrow of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein,
 Iran has become the most important power in the Gulf.

     For many who do not read too far and wide alternative versions to the mainstream of economics and international affairs the following will come as a shock for the politicians and the media are taking it upon themselves to delude us into believing everything and anything they want us to. At this point, it should be painfully obvious that things are not always what they seem to be.

Financial warfare has now officially come to war’s center stage
 – a stage that for thousands of years has been occupied only by
 soldiers and weapons, with blood and death everywhere.
We believe that before long, “financial warfare” will undoubtedly be
 an entry in the various types of dictionaries of official military jargon.
                                                        Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui
                                                                      People’s Liberation Army, China 1999.

     On March 20, 2006, a historic occurrence will take place. On that date, Iran is scheduled to open an Oil Bourse (Exchange) that will trade in Euros. This represents a frontal assault on the dollar as the international currency and the special status it has as the reserve currency of the world. When oil trades on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) or the London International Petroleum Exchange (IPE), all of the transactions are made exclusively in dollars. This means that every country in the world has to exchange their currency for U.S. dollars in order to buy or sell oil. Again, if Russia, Argentina, or Iran wants to sell oil to China, India, or France, they must do so in U.S. dollars. Because of this, each country keeps an ample supply of dollars on hand, hence the term “reserve currency”. News about this vital development will be repressed as are most threatening news like the ending this week of the Federal Reserves reporting on M3 money supply statistics. (Covered in part two)

Without a doubt, a successful Iranian oil bourse may create a
 shift away from U.S. dollars and towards euros in the oil market. 
The drop in demand for petrodollars would cause the value
 of the dollar to plummet further, thereby undermining
 the U.S. position as the global economic leader.[i] 
                                                                       William Clark.

     “Contemporary warfare has traditionally involved underlying conflicts regarding economics and resources.  Today these intertwined conflicts involve not only control over oil supplies, but also international currencies. Current events appear to be revolving around the complex nexus of the imminent peak in global oil production, and the erosion of the U.S. dollar as the World’s International Reserve currency. Once the petrodollar recycling system begins to erode via the emergence of a broad-based petroeuro transaction exchange, the Federal Reserve will no longer be able to effortlessly expand its debt-financing via issuance of Treasury bills, and the dollar’s international demand/liquidity value will begin to fall. This will ultimately force the U.S. to significantly change its current tax, debt, trade, and energy policies, all of which are severely unbalanced,” writes William Clark.

An updated version of the Bush administration's national
security strategy identifies Iran as the country likely to
present the single greatest future challenge to the United States.[ii]
                                                                                      New York Times
                                                                                         March 16, 2006

     In public this issue though is all about nuclear power and weapons of mass destruction. In a continent where Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea and China all have a nuclear capacity, Iran sees that as a matter of status and basic right. But if Israel believes its essential safety is sufficiently under threat, nothing will stop it taking action of some sort. Some feel that the atomic issue will be used as a cover for the real issue of the threat of American interests losing great economic power. Meaning the Americans and Israel might attack not because of the nuclear threat but because of the financial one.

European governments are already worried that President
 Bush's advisers will see this crisis as a way of restoring
 his fortunes in time for the US mid-term elections in November.
                                                                                        John Simpson

                                                                                                            BBC World Affairs Editor

      The U.S. has enjoyed certain economic advantages since the ending of WWII that have allowed American leaders to get away with the financial domination of the world. The United States dominates other countries through its currency, and through the superiority of the dollar against other hard currencies, it monopolizes global trade. The current U.S. Trade Deficit is obscene by all standards and yet the American government and people get away with it only because of the dollar’s role as the international reserve currency. It is equivalent to the financial rape of the world, which the world cooperates in, but not without deep resentment. Obviously not everyone has liked it and Iran’s Oil Bourse is a broadside attack against the dollar signals the first major salvo in what will one way or another change everything.

President Bush could bomb Iranian nuclear and military and oil installations,
 but there would be outrage around the world, and American interests would be seriously damaged.
Don’t doubt for a minute he would do it on behalf of those he works for.

     This is no joke coming from the world’s second largest oil producer and from people like Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who sees Israel as a product of an ideological war between the ‘Arrogant World Order’ and ‘Islamic rule.’ Ahmadinejad adds quite matter of factly that the Jewish state has to be wiped off the face of the earth and is a firm believer that war is already happening between the ‘World Arrogance’ and the Islamic world. The world of Arrogance for Iranians mostly represents Great Britain and the United States. Both countries have betrayed the Iranian people repeatedly so they nor we have any reason to feel secure that they will not do so again. Interestingly enough both countries could be considered democratic so if war breaks out it would be the first time democracies would be fighting each other. (It is easy to throw stones at the quality of democracy in either country.)

     “In my interviews with former high-level intelligence officials, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran. Everyone is saying, ‘You can’t be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,” wrote Seymour Hersh’s in The New Yorker.[iii] There are titanic forces at play here with the greatest of them being economic. It has been said over and over again that wars are mostly fought for economic reasons. Those reasons have never been greater than they are today. After toppling Saddam, after Iraq started selling oil in Euros, Bush and those behind him might decide that Iran's disloyalty to the dollar qualifies them as the next target in the `war on terror.' The issue of weapons of mass destruction is an excuse and this is seen in that the American administration is not and will not go against North Korea who has also been processing and enriching uranium as the Iranians area now doing.

     The strangeness of the American position that has it ready to attack Iran but not Korea was underscored this week when North Korea suggested Tuesday it had the ability to launch a pre-emptive attack on the United States, according to the North's official news agency. A Foreign Ministry spokesman said the North had built atomic weapons to counter the U.S. nuclear threat. "As we declared, our strong revolutionary might put in place all measures to counter possible U.S. pre-emptive strike," the spokesman said, according to the Korean Central News Agency. "Pre-emptive strike is not the monopoly of the United States."

The United States economy is intimately tied
 to the dollar's role as reserve currency.

     The United States sent a clear message to Iran in mid March of 2006, in the latest four-yearly National Security Strategy published by the White House, which declares that the US “may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran” The document makes it clear that if all attempts fail at a diplomatic solution to the current stand-off, it is prepared to use force to end Tehran’s perceived nuclear threat and its role as a fomentor of international terrorism.[iv]

     Under the guise of the perpetual `war on terror' the Bush administration has been manipulating the American people about the unspoken but very real macroeconomic reasons for its invasion of Iraq. No weapons of mass destruction were found because that war, and any future war against Iran, was a war over the global currency of oil. A war intended to prevent oil from being priced in euros. As we shall see below internal economic forces in the United States will rip the entire international system apart anyway sooner or later. War allows the sooner to come later - that is all. The founding fathers of America would turn in their graves if they knew how close to the below the American government has become.

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

                                                                                         Joseph Goebbels  
                                                                               German Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945

     President Eisenhower warned everyone on public television in 1961 about the Military-Industrial Complex and the obvious corporate elites that control it. The current crop of the super elite have created the world’s first truly global empire and they have managed this primarily through economics, but have not been shy about using the military when necessary. Through many means the elite have coerced leaders around the world into creating policies favorable to the corporate banking elites and when they have not cooperated they have been rubbed out. They have been very intelligent in doing all things selfish and bad.

     War is in the wind, its in the world, it is part of the basic makeup, not of mankind itself but of its top leadership which is badly handicapped when it comes to intelligence about leading humanity in good directions. Knowing little more than wealth creation and the accumulation of power - war, subterfuge, deceit, the manipulation and poisoning of the public - they are crippled when it comes to heart intelligence. Many speak of conspiracies and century old secret societies and we have always had kings and barons and now super CEOs who just take it upon themselves to run the human show.

     Sadness runs like a river and that will turn into an ocean of tears as the very fabric of civilization is ripped asunder. Love will cope but governments and these super leaders will just do what they always do and that is lead humanity back into the stupidity and tragedy of war.

Weathering the Storm – Part Two

Internal Economic Forces in the United States
(And the Ending of M3 Money Supply Reporting.)
International Medical Veritas Association

Now, you may think that I have become insane. That is partially true
 because I am convinced that the US Fed’s monetary policies will
 lead to exponentially widening wealth inequity and impoverish
 the majority of US households, which will then lead to social strife, protectionism, war, and the breakdown of the capitalistic system.

                                                                                             Dr. Mark Faber
                                                                              Called the Crash of 1987, the crash of 1990,
                                                                                           and the Asia –Pacific crisis of 1998.

     Dr. Faber is not alone in thinking badly about bankers. President Andrew Jackson said of them, "You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the Eternal God, I will rout you out." On May 23, 1933, Congressman Louis T. McFadden, brought formal charges against the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Bank system, The Comptroller of the Currency and the Secretary of United States Treasury for numerous criminal acts including treason.[v]

"Mr. Chairman, we have in this Country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks, hereinafter called the Fed. The Fed has cheated the Government of these United States and the people of the United States out of enough money to pay the Nation's debt.

"This evil institution has impoverished and ruined the people of these United States, has bankrupted itself, and has practically bankrupted our Government. It has done this through the defects of the law under which it operates, through the maladministration of that law by the Fed and through the corrupt practices of the moneyed vultures who control it.”

"Some people think that the Federal Reserve Banks are United States Government institutions. They are private monopolies which prey upon the people of these United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers; foreign and domestic speculators and swindlers; and rich and predatory money lender. In that dark crew of financial pirates there are those who would cut a man's throat to get a dollar out of his pocket; there are those who send money into states to buy votes to control our legislatures.”

"These twelve private credit monopolies were deceitfully and disloyally foisted upon this Country by the bankers who came here from Europe and repaid us our hospitality by undermining our American institutions.”

The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace, and
conspiracies against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than
 monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy.
                                                                                                  Abraham Lincoln

     After Lincoln's death, Otto Von Bismark made the following statement, "The death of Lincoln was a disaster for Christendom. There was no man in the United States great enough to wear his boots. I fear that foreign bankers with their craftiness and torturous tricks will entirely control the exuberant riches of America, and use it systematically to corrupt modern civilization. They will not hesitate to plunge the whole of Christendom into wars and chaos in order that the Earth should become their inheritance." 

     As Managing Director, Chief Economist, and Director of Global Economic Analysis of Morgan Stanley, Stephen Roach is a man to listen to. “America’s income-short, consumer-led recovery is the aberration – not the norm – in this Brave New World. It is all about ever-declining personal saving rates, ever-widening current account deficits, mounting debt burdens, and increasingly wealth [asset] dependent consumers. It personifies what I believe is one of the most precarious macro models that has ever existed for a major economic power. In my view, income-short growth models are not sustainable – the only question pertains to the circumstances of their demise.  The endgame is not in doubt, in my view. The American consumer will ultimately cave. It is the only means by which the US will ever “fix” its twin saving and current account problems. It is the timing and circumstances of that fix that we endlessly debate. Excess consumption is on a collision course with sub par labor income growth. Courtesy of an unrelenting global labor arbitrage, the “big squeeze” is getting tighter and tighter on the world’s only real consumer.”

Altogether the circumstances seem to me as dangerous and
 intractable as any I can remember, and I can remember quite a lot.
 What really concerns me is that there seems to be so little
 willingness or capacity to do much about it.
                                                                                    Paul Volcker
                                                                      Fed Chairman from 1979 to 1987.

     “Despite the complete absence of coverage from the five U.S. corporate media conglomerates, these foreign news stories suggest one of the Federal Reserve’s nightmares may begin to unfold in the spring of 2006, when it appears that international buyers will have a choice of buying a barrel of oil for $60 dollars on the NYMEX and IPE - or purchase a barrel of oil for €45 - €50 euros via the Iranian Bourse,” writes William Clark in his startling essay Petrodollar Warfare: Dollars, Euros and the Upcoming Iranian Oil Bourse.[vi]

The Federal Reserve's greatest nightmare is that OPEC will switch its international transactions from a dollar standard to a euro standard.
The USA would no longer be able to run its huge current account trade
 deficits or continue to wage open-ended global war on terrorism or evil.

     This would actually be a good thing for it is easily argued that the good old USA is enforcing its own form of terrorism, not only on the world but on its own people. Never has a government so full heartedly embraced the poisoning of its own citizens (through many means) and never has a government stolen so much money. When Americans wake up to the fact that their Social Security has been pilfered and their retirements threatened, only then will they know the true nature of their own government and what it has been doing for decades to the rest of the world.

When government steals the fruits
of your labor, you are a slave.
                                                Devvy Kidd

     The funds in the Social Security system contain nothing but “electronic chits” that measure government obligations to itself, according to Doglas Holzt-Eakin of the Congresional Budget Office. Carolyn Lochhead, in September of 2004, in the Chronicle Washington Bureau wrote, “Traditional budget measures used by politicians and the press give what Walker and many others call a highly misleading view of the U.S. debt. These focus on publicly held debt already incurred, now at $4.5 trillion, or 10-year budget forecasts like the one released last week by the Congressional Budget Office showing a record $422 billion deficit this year and a $2.3 trillion 10- year deficit. But these figures, worrisome enough, are deceptive because they ignore future liabilities such as Social Security and Medicare payments to the Baby Boomers. An array of government and private analysts put the actual U.S. “fiscal gap,” which means all future receipts minus all future obligations, at $40 trillion (Government Accountability Office) to $72 trillion (Social Security Board of Trustees). These are not sums, but present-value figures, heavily discounted to show in today’s dollars what it would cost to pay off the debt immediately. The International Monetary Fund estimates the gap at $47 trillion, the Brookings Institution at $60 trillion. “To give you idea how big the problem is,” said Laurence Kotlikoff, economics chairman at Boston University, who has written extensively on the subject, to close a $51 trillion fiscal gap, “you’d have to have an immediate and permanent 78 percent hike in the federal income tax.”

      In July of 2005, Kurt Richebacher notes, “The Federal Reserve’s Flow-of funds statistics for the first quarter are just out. Evidently, credit creation has been completely taken over by the printing press. In the quarter, overall credit skyrocketed by $2,976.1 billion, close to $3 trillion, at an annualized rate. Nonfinancial credit was up $2,411.5 billion. This compares with an increase of $1.943.2 billion in the fourth quarter of 2004 and $836.2 billion in 2000. Over those four years, credit growth in the non-financial sector has literally tripled. To us, this looks more like monetary lunacy than monetary policy.”

The elites understand that the strength of the dollar
does not rest on economic or financial fundamentals.
The reality is that the strength of the dollar rests on
 it being the international reserve currency and
that is what is threatened by oil sold in Euros.

     “If the US does not take policy steps to reduce its need for external financing before it exhausts the world’s central banks willingness to keep adding to their dollar reserves – and if the rest of the world does not take steps to reduce its dependence on an unsustainable expansion in US domestic demand to support its own growth – the risk of a hard landing for the US an global economy will grow,” writes Nouriel Roubini, Professor of Economics and International Business at New York University.

United States Balance Sheet

We are borrowing about $1.9  billion a day from strangers
 (nearly half from China and her neighbors) to fund not
 only massive tax cuts, but our massive military as well.

     “Despite desires by U.S. elites to enforce the monopoly petrodollar recycling system, the geopolitical risks of a U.S. aerial attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities – while simultaneously attempting to prevent the Iranian oil Bourse from initiating a euro-based system for oil trades – would surely create a crisis between Washington and Beijing. Given the Bush administration’s complete lack of interest or skill regarding “soft power” diplomacy, it seems unlikely they could use the U.N. Security Counsel to thwart the opening of the Iranian bourse in 2006,” continues William Clark.

The Federal Reserve money supply
 report is about to fall into the abyss.

     On March 23, 2006, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System will cease publication of the M3 monetary aggregate. The Board will also cease publishing the following components: large-denomination time deposits, repurchase agreements (RPs), and Eurodollars. Notice the inclusion of the Eurodollar. For those not familiar with this term, it is not the same as the Euro even though some erroneously call the Euro a Eurodollar. The Eurodollar is an American dollar held by a foreign institution outside the U.S., usually a bank in Europe. Every dollar in foreign hands is an IOU against the USA.

    M3 is the broadest measure of how much money is circulating in the U.S. at any one time. Unlike M2, M3 is the big stuff, the super-size deposits. The M3 money supply measure is one of the most basic economic stats published by the Fed. Basic college macro economics college courses always cover this along with the definitions of M1 and M2. This statistic has been published since 1959 and is widely followed by economists and investors all over the word giving an idea at what speed the (electronic) printing press is running.

Looking back into history economic data was only kept
 a secret in failing economies, e.g. the Soviet Union.
                                                                              Toni Straka

    At the end of the day the freely floating dollar is a tradable commodity just like any other currency or commodity. When demand for it drops then its value will fall and it will buy less in the way of other goods and services. The only resolution to that problem will be that the US either has to consume less or else it will print more of its currency to compensate. Should it adopt the second course then inflation takes off.

The Federal Reserve obviously will not stop collecting the data, after all, who would plan monetary policy for a nation without all the available data they could get. So why stop publishing it unless it was really bad news?

     M3 is one way to monitor inflation in both currency and credit markets. Measured in billions of dollars, M3 has more than doubled since 1995, and it has increased approximately $250 billion this year alone or about 9% annualized. Or put another away, the policies of the Federal Reserve will create almost $1 trillion (you read that correctly) this year alone to the broad money supply. It’s not a great leap to guess that someone does not want others to know what they are doing as they virtually print money in escalating amounts to keep the entire system afloat. Counterfeiting is illegal except when the Federal Reserve does it

M3 has been growing at an annual rate of 7.5 percent or double
 the most recent rate of GDP growth (subject to a revision.)
Since Bush took office money supply M3 has risen 39.2%.

      “Since the establishment of the Federal Reserve, in 1913, the U.S. dollar has lost over 95% of its purchasing power. Hence, it is not surprising that the Federal Reserve’s reckless inflation has led to the common man’s expectation for the dollar to lose value over time. As the Federal Reserve intensifies the rate at which it creates money out of thin air, the common man’s behavior (in the sphere of personal finance) tends to change for the worse,” writes Eric Englund, a surety bond underwriter in Bellevue, WA..

     Why? How? The government sells bonds to the central bank to pay for things it does not have the political will to raise taxes to pay for, but the bonds are purchased with money the central bank creates out of nothing. More money in circulation makes your money worth-less. The government gets as much money as it needs and the people pay for it with "Inflation". Almost all money ($1 debt = $1 money somewhere)  from new debt once used (for war for example) migrates very quickly to the investment sector. Since it has to be "spent" on something it goes to inflate the "value" of existing assets. Thus the hugely rising tide of debt has raised many “boats,” creating huge bubbles in financial and real estate areas. For many it has offered a nice ride but what is going to happen when the day of reckoning arrives and the balloons burst? Immortality is not something we can expect from the present system though it is what most of us secretly hope for.     

      The Federal Reserve is obviously getting ready to push the accelerator past the floor with massive increases in M3. With no published figures it will make it easier to disguise the new (counterfeit) money's journey from the printing press to the bond markets. Someone has got to buy these bonds and if the Chinese, Japanese and other foreign banks won’t the Federal Reserve will. They just print the money and hand it over to the government in exchange for T-Bills. Ever wonder how Bush got away with a trillion dollar tax-cut or how a bankrupt government and country continues on and on?

If total debt expands quickly under relatively
constant interest rates while the brakes are held
 on inflation, the economy will continue to "grow".  
                                                                            Lowell Manning

     The Federal Reserve gave the following for the reason to eliminate M3 reporting: Our searching of the economic literature revealed that very few economists used that aggregate." "M3 does not appear to convey any additional information about economic activity that is not already embodied in the M2 aggregate. Further, the role of M3 in the policy process has diminished greatly over time. Consequently, the costs of collecting the data and publishing M3 now appear to outweigh the benefits."

     Some financial analysts disagree violently with the above statements from the Federal Reserve. "They know what's coming -- massive amounts of dollar creation to fund the worsening trade and federal government budget deficits," says James Turk in the Free Market Gold & Money Report. "There is only one reason for the Fed to conceal important monetary component information," The King Report says. It's "to cover up the truth about what the Fed, central banks, and the really big money are doing." McHugh surmised this in October, "Because of the M3 numbers we would see there was too much money being created. M3 was being pumped at three times the rate of growth" of the Gross Domestic Product.

     The Federal Reserve stopping its decades old reporting on M3 would be similar to a public company stops reporting their balance sheets - how do you know what their stock is worth when you don't know how much they earn? Or, like when Saudi Arabia stops reporting accurate oil reserves - how do you know how much is left?

     There are two definitions for inflation. The one the layman is most familiar with is an increase in prices. Another definition is an increase in the money supply in excess of the real increase in the size of the economy (which tends to raise prices, either of assets such as real estate or of consumer goods). Hyperinflation is just when inflation spirals out of control, like in Germany in the 1920s, when housewives pushed shopping carts full of paper money to the bakery to buy a loaf of bread. Today we have a new situation with both deflation and inflation threatening simultaneously.

     The bankers at the Fed seem to think that if they can keep the public from knowing about alarming developments in the money supply, they will be able to keep the party going at least long enough for the big players to buy up gold or other real assets, leaving ordinary consumers, and probably countries that rely on the US consumer market (e.g. China), to deal with the wreckage.

    History has shown that Americans prefer to pay for their wars through cranking up the printing press/inflation rather then bearing the burden through taxes and decreased consumption. And since the United States seems committed to be in a state of perpetual warfare from now until bankruptcy we can bet our last dollars that they will be worth less and less until the dollar collapses completely. Not a pretty picture but when there is more debt and more dollars floating around then stars in the universe we can pretty much envision the end of the current money system sooner or later.

General Motors Corp. late last week revised its reported loss for
 2005 to $10.6 billion, or $18.69 a share, a steeper loss
 than the $8.6 billion, or $15.13 a share, it reported in January.

     When we consider that in 1960 the entire federal budget was only sixty billion dollars the numbers found above and in this entire essay are more than frightening. Clark sees the 21st century being very much different from the previous century, with one possible exception. “The first half of the 20th century was filled with unprecedented levels of violence and warfare on a global scale (15 million killed in WW I, 55 million in WW II). The first two decades of the 21st century present challenges that could also result in the unleashing of another period of catastrophic human suffering and destruction. The Chinese government may fear the same fate awaits their oil investments in Iran if the U.S. were able to attack and topple the Tehran government. Despite U.S. desires to enforce petrodollar hegemony, the geopolitical risks of an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would surely create a serious crisis between Washington and Beijing.”

If the Democrats are the firewall between
 a proto-fascist regime leading us backward
 into neo-feudalism, then God help us.
                                                                                  Steve Bhaerman

    What we are witnessing is a battle for oil currency supremacy. If Iran’s oil bourse becomes a successful alternative for international oil trades, it would challenge the hegemony currently enjoyed by the financial centers in both London (IPE) and New York (NYMEX). The chances of this going to happened unchallenged is slim so the chances are high again for a world at war. Certainly China and Russia will not be happy with Americans bombing strategic targets in their backyards. It should not be overlooked how deep the oil ties are between China and Iran or how easily Iran can block oil tankers from leaving the Persian Gulf. A world at war will touch everyone today like no other. There are over six billion of us to be affected. No doubt to those neoconservative fanatics who are dedicated to massive population reductions around the world this is not a problem. 

No nation could preserve its freedom
 in the midst of continual warfare.
                                                                    James Madison, 1795

      Americans have the most to lose in the world; their fall will be the hardest. We tend to think that everything is happening a new or that the worst is not going to happen when it has happened many times throughout history. Over two hundred years ago men like President James Madison was looking at these issues and seeing how fragile democracy and individual freedoms were. A nightmare is just waiting to happen on earth. We are all going to pay for the lunacy and total arrogance of those who lead and those who control those who lead.

My guess is that the US administration is evil enough
to nuke Iran rather than face up to that inevitable
 loss of living standards and political annihilation.
                                                                      Lowell Manning

     War is already aflame in Iraq and Afghanistan so for some it’s a short step in expanding that against Iran. There are some crimes that can never be admitted so war is the easier choice. Actually, as current events in the United States demonstrate, war is psychologically more acceptable and easier to digest than honest self evaluation of our government and society. At heart most of us have a basic cowardice to work in earnest toward fundamental change inside of ourselves thus we become vulnerable to the vultures who fear not to dominate the world and everyone in it.

Once upon a time, I loved my country.
Now I am very afraid of it.
                                            John Kaminski