Dean Henderson: David Rockefeller: The Looting of Iran!

Under the iron-fisted rule of the US puppet Shah of Iran, who came to power after the 1953 BP sponsored Mossadegh coup, Chase Manhattan, which later merged with JP Morgan to become JP Morgan Chase, issued letters of credit for all Iranian oil exports and monopolized deposits from the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), even after Iran nationalized Four Horsemen oil interests to create NIOC. Chase controlled the Pahlevi Foundation, which owned an oil company, twelve Iranian sugar refineries, electronics firms, cemetaries, mines, industrial bakeries, the country's General Motors franchise, and a slew of banks, including the Shah's personal piggy bank, the Bank Omran. While "Omran" means development, the Pahlevi Foundation focused only on developing the fortunes of both the Shah and Chase Manhattan. David Rockefeller, whose family controls majority interest in the bank, Chaired Chase. The Rockefellers added to their fortune during the Shah's reign, taking in far more oil deposits in the country than it made in loans. By 1978, Iran had become the world's fourth largest oil producer, supplying 18% of both Japan's and West Germany's oil, 50%of Israel's and 100% of the South African apartheid regime's. Yet the average Iranian worker languished in poverty. Other Western banks behaved in similar fashion. This did not go unnoticed by Iran's Central Bank Governor Al Reza Nobari, who watched as his country sank deeper onto debt, while the Shah and his American bankers got filthy rich. Nobari declared, "All the banks knew, that the Bank Omran was the Shah's personal repository for his pocket money, but they went on lending to Bank Omran. Citibank lent, for example, $55 million to the Shah's sister, Princess Ashraf for a housing project. On the site of the housing project, she built a palace." The Shah bought a share in Krupps, the huge German arms manufacturer. He owned numerous hotels in Tehran, houses in Beverly Hills, Manhattan, Acapulco and the Swiss Alps. He bought entire islands in the Seychelles, and owned a race horse stud on a farm in Surrey, England. The standard of living of the average Iranian continued to head south.       

Global Research News: Russian Forces Protect Syria's

Chemical Weapons Stockpile against Terrorists! According to the Israeli Intelligence News outlet, DEBKA, Syria's chemical weapons stockpiles are being protected by Russian forces. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated that "Syria has consolidated its chemical weapons stockpile in one or two locations, and they are under control." Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov are training Syria's military. We have kept a close watch over its chemical arsenal, Debka, December 22, 2012.
Related content: Russian Foreign Ministry: Danger of Syria Chemical Weapons Falling into the Hands of Terrorists. Russia is concerned by the prospect of Syrian chemical weapons falling into terrorist hands. Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said on Thursday: "The greatest danger is that parts of Syria continue to fall in the hands of terrorists. We reported yesterday: 10,000 US troops, as well as French, British and NATO troops are massing off the coast of Syria for a potential invasion. "Anonymous US sources are claiming that Syria is mixing chemical weapons. US NATO Supported Syria Rebels use Chemical Weapons against Government Forces: Militants fighting against the Syrian government have used chemical weapons against the army in Daraya near the capital, Damascus, military sources say. According to a commander of the Syrian Presidential Guard, at least seven Syrian soldiers were killed on Saturday. US Defense Contractors Training Syrian Rebels to Handle Chemical Weapons. The US and some of its European allies are using defense contractors to train Syrian rebels on how to secure chemical weapons stockpiles in Syria, according to a senior US official and several senior diplomats, CNN reports. US funded training: The contents of this article are the sole responsibility of the authors. The Center of Research on Globalization grants permission to cross post original Global Research articles on community internet sites, as long as the text and title are not modified!

Michel Chossudovsky: Wiping Countries Off the Map!

Who's failing the "Failed States". Across the world, a dangerous rumor has spread, that could have catastrophic implications. According to legend, Iran's President has threatened to destroy Israel, or, to quote the misquote, Israel must be wiped off the map. Contrary to popular belief, this statement was never made. The United States has attacked, directly or indirectly, some 44 countries throughout the world, since August 1945, a number of them many times. The avowed objective of these military interventions has been to effect regime change. The cloaks of human rights and of democracy were invariably evoked to justify what were unilateral and illegal acts. This is a Pentagon memo that describes how we are going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off, Iran. I said, Is it classified? He said, Yes sir. I said, Well, don't show it to me. General Wesley Clark, Democracy Now, March 2, 2007. Washington is in the business of destroying a very long list of countries. Who is "Wiping Countries off the Map"? Iran or the United States? During a period which is euphemistically called the post war era, extending from 1945 to the present, the US has directly or indirectly, attacked more than 40 countries. While the tenets of US foreign policy are predicated on the "spread of democracy", US interventionism, through military means and covert operations, has resulted in the outright destabilization and partition of sovereign nations. Destroying countries is part of a US Imperial project, a process of global domination. Moreover, according to official sources, the US has a total of 737 military bases in foreign countries. The Washington based National Intelligence Council (NIC) in its Global Trends report, December 2012, predicts that 15 countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, will become "failed states" by 2030, due to their potential for conflict and environmental ills". The list of countries in the 2012 NIC report includes Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Chad, Niger, Nigeria, Mali, Kenya, Burundi, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Somalia, DR Congo, Malawi, Haiti, and Yemen. In its previous 2005 report, published at the outset of Bush's second term, the National Intelligence Council has predicted that Pakistan would become a failed state by 2015, "as it will be affected by civil war, complete "Talibanisation" and struggle for control of its nuclear weapons".    

Chris Hedges: The Idol Smasher!

Ishmael Reed has spent the last five decades smashing idols. Idols of race, idols of capitalism, celebrity idols, and the idols of national virtue and greatness. His essays, novels, poems, plays, songs and cartoons routinely shatter the delusions and myths of a nation stubbornly unwilling to confront its past or understand its present. He rips open a history that saw white Europeans exterminate one race and enslave another, to create the nation's prosperity, a past that includes the violent plundering of nations around the globe: Cuba, the Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan among them, to show us what we have become. He names the corrosive disease of empire. He excoriates what Alexis de Tocqueville called our "perpetual practice of self applause." He battles back against the sophisticated forms of propaganda, especially from Hollywood, that perpetuate patriotic fantasies, and pander to the dark streams of paranoia, racism and fear that run like electric currents through white society. Reed's righteous fury is a heartening antidote to the squeamishness of liberals and the lunacy of the right wing. He says the editors of The New York Times, and most other major media outlets "sound like they get their instructions from Julius Streicher, the Nazi propagandist, when it comes to blacks." He calls the HBO series "The Wire", "a Neo Nazi portrait of of black people" and dismisses the movie "Precious" as a film that makes D W Griffith look like a progressive." "Lazy, no good black people, who are welfare cheats, sitting around eating chicken, and having sex with their children, right out of Lee Atwater, Master of tactics for Bush and GOP, Paul Ryan playbook, he said of the portrayals in Precious, when I reached him by phone at his home in Oakland California, "The wonderful novelist Diane Johnson was right, when she said that largely white audiences are thrilled by images of black people as dysfunctional. This has become a billion dollar market, which led critics to assert that Black Bogeyman movies sell better than sex, according to the critic C Liegh McInnis.     

Adele M Stan: Senate Leaders Work Through Weekend

to Avoid Fiscal Spending Cuts. After a White House meeting with congressional leaders of both parties, President Barack Obama appeared in the White House press room to urge lawmakers to vote on a package that would avert the automatic across the board spending cuts and tax hikes that are scheduled to go into effect on New Year's Day, if the Congress fails to act by December 31. The cuts and hikes law, known as the sequester, and dubbed the "Fiscal Cliff" by Federal Chairman Ben Bernacke, were passed into law last year under Republican pressure, in return for a lifting of the debt ceiling that allows the government to borrow enough money to meet its obligations. Emerging from this meeting, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky, announced their plan to work through Saturday to arrive at a deal, that the Senate could take up on Sunday, December 30. Any bill passed by the Senate would then have to see a vote in the House, which has already passed two bills on spending and revenue measures that are unacceptable to Democrats and to the president. While the president wants to raise income taxes on households earning more than $250,000 per year, the bill passed by the House in August would maintain the Bush era tax cuts on all Americans, including the wealthiest. The House also passed a package of spending cuts, intended to replace the sequester cuts, including repealing sections of Obama-care, including the funding of state based exchanges for the purchase of affordable individual health insurance policies. Other cuts target Medicaid and the Child Health Insurance Program, all of them unacceptable to the White House. The bill, HR 6684, which passed the Republican led House on December 19, is clearly an ideological statement, and not a piece of legislation that would stand a chance of passage in the Democratic held Senate. Yet, because the House passed these bills, Speaker John Boehner is insisting the Senate take up the job of hammering out a workable deal. The House is also slated to vote on Sunday on any bill that Reid may bring to the Senate floor. Appearing in the White House press room on Friday afternoon, President Barack Obama demanded that congressional leaders bring a proposal, regardless of its prospects for passage, to the Senate floor for an up or down vote.  

Tony Cartalucci: The United Nations Syria "Peace Plan"

is a Fraud! UN "peace envoy" Lakhdar Brahimi is attempting to broker a transitional government ahead of proposed elections in Syria. For Brahimi, his efforts are not only in vain, they are entirely disingenuous. The proposal of a "transitional government" in the midst of what is in fact a foreign invasion, funded, armed, and perpetuated openly by foreign interests, violates both Syria's sovereignty and the UN's own founding charter. It would be not unlike a UN envoy visiting Poland at the beginning of World War II, and proposing a transitional government in the midst of the Nazi invasion. The UN would clearly be a facilitator of justice, not a broker of peace. The LA Times reports in their article, "Lakhdar Brahimi works to revive Syria peace plan". "Peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi made a new push Thursday to draw Syrian officials and rebels into negotiations, aiming to revive a plan for a transitional government and elections that faltered because of disagreements over the future of President Bashar Assad." The UN has categorically failed to delineate between legitimate opposition inside of Syria, and bands of roving armed terrorists committing wide scale atrocities against the Syrian people, many of which are not even from Syria, all of whom are heavily armed by the US, NATO, and its regional allies including Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar as part of a long standing plan to effect regime change in both Syria and Iran. The Western Press is not only supporting the UN's disingenuous efforts, it has gone through great lengths to de-legitimise any opposition in Syria that refuses to pick up arms, or that speaks out against foreign intervention. While the LA Times attempts to make the UN plan seem reasonable, with only Syrian President Bashar al Assad and Russia standing in the way of peace, in reality, the plan is yet another effort to frame the conflict as a political struggle, instead of the foreign invasion it actually is. The armed "rebels" the UN is refusing to condemn, constitute foreign Al Qaeda fighters, including the US State Department, United Nations, and the UK Home Office, listed international terrorist organization, the Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), Al Nusra, also known as "Al Qaeda in Iraq," and Syria Muslim Brotherhood extremists. None of these terrorist factions would be negotiated with by Western nations, if by some means their weapons turned around from Syria and back toward the West,yet the West demands that they not only be recognized and negotiated with, but indeed handed the entire nation of Syria to rule over.         

Mike Stathis: Solving the Mystery of America's Persistently

High Jobless Rate. In many respects, much if not all of the economic gains made in the United States from the past decade have been wiped out due to Wall Street malfeasance. Looking forward, I expect America to lose at least another decade. While some of the economic turmoil is certainly due to the biggest real estate collapse in US history, a much larger portion is the result of the weak job market, which is likely to persist for a number of years. Although the real estate market appears to have bottomed, you should not expect anything other than a very gradual rise from here. In the absence of bubble conditions, the rate of real estate appreciation generally tracks that of inflation. The biggest lift to the real estate market would come from lasting improvements in the job market. Thus, it's important to identify the real reasons for the persistently high unemployment rate so that adequate solutions can be designed. If the factors accounting for the continued weakness in the labor market are not addressed, America stands a good chance to lose much more than a decade. Establishment economists have offered some ridiculous explanations when trying to account for the high unemployment rate. The purpose of this propaganda is to distract attention away from misguided economic policies, put in place by  America's fascist government. Before we discuss the establishment's explanation of the high jobless rate, let's examine some facts about the US labor market. Since mid 2009, there have been between 3.5 and 6 unemployed Americans for every job opening. This means jobs have been in short supply. This ratio is roughly double what it was in the last recession in 2001. This data reflects, in large part, that job openings are one fourth lower now than they were in the last recovery. In the first 12 months of the so called "recovery" there were 32 million job openings. While this may sound like a large number, it was 10 million fewer openings than the first 12 months of the prior recovery, which was known for being a so called jobless recovery. The shortfall in job openings during the current "recovery" compared to the previous one is widespread. Job openings continue to be small in number in nearly every sector including labor intensive service industries, such as hospitality, entertainment, and accommodation. Layoffs during the early stages of this recovery are comparable to those in the prior recovery, and thus cannot explain the lasting high unemployment rate.