Affichage des articles dont le libellé est globalization. Afficher tous les articles
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est globalization. Afficher tous les articles

lundi 23 mai 2011

America 2011

The American Dream
May 23, 2011

What kind of place is America in 2011?  Sadly, it is one giant sea of conformity.  If you traveled across the United States 40 or 50 years ago, you would encounter a vast array of cultures and you would meet a wonderful mix of people.  But today America is slowly but surely becoming standardized.  It seems like wherever you go you will find a Wal-Mart and a McDonald’s.  Thanks to Hollywood and the mass media, people all over the country dress the same and look the same and talk the same.  Sure there are various subcultures out there, but even many of those subcultures are virtually the same on one coast as they are on the other.  The things that gave flavor to our local communities are dying off in favor of greater conformity and greater profit.  Today, most retail stores and most restaurants are corporate owned.  Most small businesses that attempt to go up against the Wal-Marts, the Targets, the Burger Kings or the Home Depots of the world have already been stomped out of existence or are in the process of being stomped out of existence.  Eventually, if we are not careful, corporate conformity is going to dominate everything from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  Some may view this as “progress”, but is this really what the American Dream is supposed to be all about?  Is this really the “America” that we want to pass down to future generations?

Our society has become so homogenized that we don’t really question it anymore.  We all watch American Idol, we all buy the same boring looking cars we see advertised on television and we all buy the same mass-produced corporate products down at Costco.

For many Americans, doing something “exotic” means going out to Applebee’s on Friday night.

If you are under 40 years of age and you have never been out of the country you should really make it a point to do that. Today there are millions upon millions of young Americans that have no idea what “another culture” even looks like.  All they know is how America does things and they have been taught that the American way of doing things is always the best.

Sadly, sometimes we think our way is so superior that it should be forced upon the rest of the world.

When this nation was founded, our founding fathers were extremely suspicious of large concentrations of power.  Corporations did not dominate early America.  Instead, millions of individuals and small businesses worked together to make this country great.  Back in those days a “family store” could be started without fear that a corporate giant like Wal-Mart would come waltzing in to crush it.

When Wal-Marts started to spread across the United States, almost everyone loved them.  The prices were lower, the selection was much greater and Wal-Mart brought jobs to the community.

When I would visit family or friends they would always excitedly talk about the new Wal-Mart that was going up somewhere nearby.  They saw Wal-Mart as a sign of progress and something that would make their lives better.

  • A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Unfortunately, we now know that all of that corporate conformity comes at a very high price.

When Wal-Mart moves into a community, often dozens of local businesses can’t compete and are forced to close.

Wal-Mart does bring jobs, but they are really crappy jobs.  A very, very small percentage of Wal-Mart jobs will even come close to enabling someone to support a family.

But Wal-Mart is making a ton of money.  So where does all of that money go?

It goes out of the local community and into the pockets of the Wal-Mart shareholders.

Wal-Mart is like a giant vacuum cleaner.  It sucks the wealth out of our local communities and it transfers it into the hands of the very wealthy.

But don’t all of the products sold at Wal-Mart support American businesses and American jobs?

No.

Just go into a Wal-Mart some time and start picking up products.  You will notice that the vast majority of them are made outside of the United States.

Americans love to buy stuff made in China.  And the big corporations love that because they are more than happy to pay slave labor wages to workers in places like China and India.

But I don’t want to just pick on Wal-Mart.  The vast majority of our retail establishments are now owned by huge corporations.  They all crush small businesses and they all suck wealth out of our local communities.

Most of us have enjoyed the “low, low prices” that the mega-corporations have brought in, but as inflation has gone up faster than our wages, large numbers of Americans have had to go into debt in order to enjoy all of these cheap products.

Today, what the average American family owes is equivalent to 136% of what an average American family makes each year.

We have a national addiction to debt.  To the corporations and the banks we are viewed as “consumers” and the goal is to drain as much money out of us as possible.  They want us to be completely dependent on them so that we will be snared in the trap of “consumerism” forever.

The fact that corporations have become so dominant in our society is a huge reason why wealth has become so concentrated at the top.  Today, the bottom 50 percent of all Americans own just 2.5% of the wealth.  In a true capitalist society this would not happen because individuals and small businesses would be able to compete fairly in the marketplace and would be thriving.

But unfortunately, our system greatly favors giant corporations today.  In fact, what we have in our country today is much more aptly called “corporatism” rather than “capitalism”.  The vast majority of Americans work for either a giant corporation or for the government.    We even teach our children that they should go to college and study hard so that they can “get a job” rather than telling them that they should endeavor to “start a business” someday.

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If nothing changes, wealth and power will continue to become even more concentrated in the hands of the few.  Meanwhile, America will just continue to become a giant sea of corporate conformity and a very boring place.

“America 2011″ is not nearly as interesting as America was 50 years ago.  We are becoming defined by our greedy corporate overlords.  We just blindly conform and we let others do our thinking for us.

If our founding fathers could see us today, they would be absolutely horrified.


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mardi 22 février 2011

Obamas and Ultra-Wealthy Live High Life as Most Americans Go Through Economic Hell

Obamas and Ultra-Wealthy Live High Life as Most Americans Go Through Economic Hell
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The Economic Collapse
February 22, 2011

Barack Obama recently made the following statement to American families that are struggling to survive in this economy: “If you’re a family trying to cut back, you might skip going out to dinner, or you might put off a vacation.” A few days after making that statement Obama sent his wife and children off on yet another vacation, this time to a luxury ski hotel in Vail, Colorado.  But the Obamas are not the only ones enjoying the high life.  Wealthy corporate executives and greedy Wall Street fatcats insist that profit margins are too tight to hire more American workers, and yet sales of luxury cars, private jets and vacation homes are soaring.  Meanwhile, most American families are going through economic hell right now.  In 2010, more Americans than ever before were living below the poverty line.  Over 4 million Americans have been unemployed for more than a year, and over 5 million Americans are at least two months behind on their mortgage payments.  As the Obamas and wealthy corporate executives jet off to fancy ski resorts, half of all American workers are earning $505 or less per week and 55 percent of American families are living paycheck to paycheck.  Something is very wrong with this picture.

So is there anything wrong with working hard and enjoying the fruits of success?  Of course not, as long as it was done honestly and not on the backs of the American taxpayers.  But the truth is that many of the corporate executives that are enjoying luxury vacations right now would not even have companies to run if the American taxpayers had not stepped in and bailed them out during the financial crisis.  Thanks to the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve, Wall Street bankers and top corporate executives are once again enjoying bonuses that most of us would consider obscene.

Meanwhile, most of the rest of the country is suffering very deeply.

Over the past several decades, the biggest financial institutions and the biggest corporations have worked really hard to “fix” the rules of the game in their favor.  The truth is that our economy is no longer a “free market” capitalist system.  Rather, what we have now is more accurately described as “corporatism” or “neo-feudalism”.  The big corporations dominate almost everything, and whatever they don’t dominate the government does.

One of the key features of a “corporatist” system is that it tends to funnel all the wealth to the very top.

Back in 1976, the top 1 percent of earners in the United States took in 8.9 percent of all income.  By 2007, that number had risen to 23.5 percent.

Ouch.

There are two different Americas today.  There is the America of the gated communities, the private planes and the good life, and there is the America of declining wages, thrift stores and rising desperation.

What is saddest of all is that the most vulnerable people in society often suffer the most from all of this.

According to one recent study, approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States were living below the poverty line in 2010.

Do you think that the Obamas are thinking about any of this while they are enjoying their stay at a luxury ski hotel in Vail, Colorado?

The truth is that leadership is not just about words.  Leadership is about setting an example.

Back in August, Michelle Obama took her daughter Sasha and 40 of her friends for a vacation in Spain.

So what was the bill to the taxpayers for that little jaunt across the pond?

It is estimated that vacation alone cost U.S. taxpayers $375,000.

Hey, Barack Obama won the most votes in 2008 and so if he wants his family to get as much enjoyment out of these four years as they can that is his prerogative.

However, if he wants to tell American families that they “might put off a vacation” after all the vacations that the Obamas have taken over the past two years then he is just being a massive hypocrite.

According to the New York Post, Barack Obama enjoyed a total of 10 separate vacations that stretched over a total of 90 vacation days during the years of 2009 and 2010.

During his first two years in office, he also managed to play 29 rounds of golf.

Oh, but it is the rest of us that have to cut back on our vacations.

But it is not just the Obamas that are enjoying the high life right now.

The wealthy have recovered nicely from the “recession” and now they are spending money by the gobs once again.

According to Moody’s Analytics, the wealthiest 5% of households in the United States account for approximately 37% of all consumer spending.

Life is very good in America if you have got enough money.

A recent article in USA Today detailed some of the things that wealthy corporate executives are spending money on in 2011….

Luxury and high-end marketers have picked up on what they hope is a growing trend, offering products that bank on a looming spending spree. Germany’s PG-Bikes is rolling out the $80,000 Black Trail, a battery-powered bicycle. Swiss watchmaker Richard Mille is selling $525,000 timepieces. Steinway has launched a John Lennon-themed grand piano — at $90,000 and up. After selling out a $245,000 model, automaker Porsche is planning the 918 Spyder, a hybrid car that could sell for more than $630,000.

Nearly all luxury brands experienced a resurgence in 2010.  Just check out some of the sales increases for luxury car brands….

Porsche: 29%

Cadillac 36%

Rolls-Royce 171%

At the exact same time, however, life is getting really, really hard for the rest of America.

As I wrote about yesterday, the U.S. middle class continues to be decimated even in the midst of this “economic recovery”.

There are tens of millions of Americans that would like to have a full-time job that are not able to get a full-time job.  The number of Americans on food stamps has gone from about 26 million at the start of 2007 to 43 million today and it continues to set a brand new record every single month.  One out of every six Americans is now enrolled in at least one anti-poverty program run by the federal government.

  • A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Our economy has become a complete and total nightmare.

Over the past couple of days some of the readers of this column have been sharing some of their economic horror stories.  But they are far from alone.  There are literally millions of Americans with economic horror stories out there.  It is just that we don’t get to hear too many stories from the “other America” on our televisions.

The following stories of economic pain are from people just like you and me.  Times are incredibly hard for most of America right now, and they are only getting harder with each passing month….

Colin:

My mother is unemployed. She is 61 years old, has 25 years of experience working for a major telecommunications corporation, and has a four-year degree. I watch her send application after application to employers with no response. I watch her get contacted by recruiters who say she is a ‘perfect fit’ for a job and never deliver. I watch her slide into depression and staying in bed many hours of the day.

I am 38 years old, I have mental illness, and I recently lost my job as a delivery driver because the owner sold his business to a competitor.

I don’t believe that either my mother or I will ever be employed again. I am beginning to feel that I am permanently in the world of the unemployed.

Jeff:

I graduated college in May 2000 with a Bachelors degree in Broadcasting/Minored in History. I have worked for major corporations as an Enterprise Sales Consultant selling Servers. I was a Network Engineer for Qwest Communications. I even worked for the Federal Government and held a Security Clearance for 4 years. I also won Dell Small Business Sales Consultant of the quarter as well. But since I don’t have an active clearance anymore no one wants to hire me in D.C. I lost my job in 07/2010 and from 07/2010-Present I have been unemployed. My food stamps were also recently cut off last month since the State of Virginia decided that for a household of 1 you can’t make more than $1178 a month. I make $1250 a month in Unemployment compensation before taxes so according to the Government I am too rich to receive Food stamps now. My Rent, Gas and Car insurance is $1000 a month and I am holding on for dear life. I am currently in the process of declaring Chapter 7 Bankruptcy and using my tax return to pay the attorney $1500 to file. That leaves me with only #250 a month for food, water and cell phone.

I have a list compiled in my Google email with approximately 784 applications I have filled out for every government agency, defense contractor and job available in the Washington, DC area. I even applied to Carmax and my old job in college waiting tables at red Lobster and the moving company I used to work at during the summers in college. If its bad for someone like me with over 10 years of Sales, Server/computer experience, Investigations and Network Engineering than I can’t imagine how bad it is for people that just have a high school diploma. I have been on one interview out of the almost 1000 jobs I have applied to (It takes about 2 hours to apply to one job). The one interview I went on offered me less than my unemployment gives me at $8 an hour. I can sit at home and make more money on unemployment than 80% of the jobs that I have applied too and even those jobs don’t call me. Is this what America has become? Is this what I sacrificed 5 years of my life in college from 17 years old to 21 years old and spent $40,000 to get a worthless degree that won’t even get you hired?

Todd:

Well, My family has been ripped to shreds alright.

Overall combined (My father, and myself) make about 60k a year. We can barely survive we keep looking to cut things, and make things cheaper but it’s just not working fast enough.

My wife can’t find a job, and now student loans are starting to become issues. (won’t go in to further details).

Tax returns taken, and various other things, Can’t even afford dental care. We don’t even get to go out anymore, and lucky to get any type of snacks. Just so you know there are 5 people living in this house.

Sharonsj:

The only reason I am not out on the street is that when I had money I paid off my mortgage.

However, because I did that, my food stamp allotment is only $25 a month. The heating assistance I get only paid for less than one months’ heat out of the six months I need here in Pennsylvania. All other expenses use up what’s left, so you learn to eat at home; I try not to leave the house because it’s going to cost me money.

I blame Congress for destroying America. They have given tax breaks to themselves and their rich friends at our expense. Did you know that anybody who serves 5 years in Congress gets a FULL pension at age 62? Us peasants work for 45 years and then if we retire at age 62 we are forced to give up 25% of what we earned.

Niles:

I lost my house, my family was split, and all my savings is gone.

I have lost hope. I served in the military, went to college and have high tech skills. My country doesn’t give a ***** about me. The bankers are as evil as the communists and I hate them.

Michael:

I’m also 38, and have worked in IT since the mid 90s. I lost my full time job in April ’03, and have only been able to find short term temporary work since. The contracts started to get shorter and fewer as the years went on, so in spring ’10 I retrained to be an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) but have not been able to find work in the last 9 months. An ambulance company I applied with said that they have hundreds of applications in several Northern CA counties but no job openings. And health care jobs are supposed to be on the the only areas of growth. I deliver pizzas for cash on and off and am getting unemployment.

Mondobeyondo:

I lost track of how many resumes I’ve sent out during the past several months. My neighbors think I’m trying to win the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes or something (yeah, that would help too! Ha!)

Maybe I should go back to school and become an RLP (Rejection Letter Professional).

Dorothy:

The rent at the place I lived was so high that I couldn’t afford it on a school bus driver’s salary, which I was doing for the past few years, because in spite of 30 years clerical experience, where I performed every function from clerk typist to executive legal secretary, I could not find employment. So I applied for subsidized housing and was forced to move back to Chicago, where the crime rate is very high in certain areas.

Before I moved I was getting $200 in food stamps, but now that I am in subsidized housing, I have to go and reapply and if I get anything at all, I have heard that it will be about $52 a month! Although the rent is subsidized, I have to pay for my own heat, and the building in which I live is completely electric! Energy assistance doesn’t cover it. They give with one hand and take away with the other.

All of the people above are still “surviving”, but what do you think is going to happen to many of them as the cost of living goes up dramatically?  Brent crude just hit $108 a barrel and the UN says that the global price of food recently hit a new all-time high.

Americans on fixed incomes or that are on government assistance are going to be absolutely devastated if prices for basics such as food and gas rise substantially.

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Not only that, but budget cuts on the federal, state and local levels are also going to hurt many of these people deeply.

But this is where we are at as a nation.  A small privileged class is enjoying the high life while a rapidly growing poverty class pleads for the government to toss them some more crumbs.

The American people deserve better than this.  They deserve an economy that will provide them with good jobs which will enable them to pay their mortgages and feed their families.

Unfortunately, the U.S. economy is dying.  The number of good jobs is actually declining.  The middle class is being systematically wiped out.

The answer is not to “tax the rich” so that we can toss the rapidly growing poverty class a few more crumbs.  The answer is to radically transform our economy back into the kind of economy our founding fathers originally intended.

But wealthy corporate executives and politicians such as Barack Obama are not going to have any of that.  Those sitting on top don’t want any real change to happen.  Sadly, the general population has become so dumbed-down that they don’t even know the questions that they should be asking.

So unfortunately it appears we are going to keep heading down the exact same economic path that we have been heading for decades.  The middle class will keep being ripped apart and politicians like George W. Bush and Barack Obama will just keep on smiling.

samedi 19 février 2011

The Middle East and Then the World

The Middle East and Then the World
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Tony Cartalucci
Infowars.com
February 19, 2011

Beginning in North Africa, now unfolding in the Middle East and Iran, and soon to spread to Eastern Europe and Asia, the globalist fueled color revolutions are attempting to profoundly transform entire regions of the planet in one sweeping move. It is an ambitious gambit, perhaps even one born of desperation, with the globalists’ depravity and betrayal on full display to the world with no opportunity to turn back now.

To understand the globalists’ reasoning behind such a bold move, it helps to understand their ultimate end game and the obstacles standing between them and their achieving it.

The End Game

The end game of course is a world spanning system of global governance. This is a system controlled by Anglo-American financiers and their network of global institutions ensuring the world’s consolidated nations conform to a singular system they can then perpetually fleece. As megalomaniacal oligarchs, their singular obsession is the consolidation and preservation of their power. This will be achieved through a system of population control, industrial control, and monetary control, which together form the foundation of their Malthusian policies.

These policies are on full display in the UN’s “Agenda 21,” and by policy wonks like the current White House Science Adviser John Holdren in his book titled “Ecoscience.”

Malthusian as their policies may be, they surely do not believe the world is in danger due to over-population or the environmental hazards posed by industrial progress. Instead, like all tyrants in history, they are establishing a convincing narrative to defend the immense concentration of undue power within their elitist hands and the implementation of measures to ensure such power stays in their hands indefinitely.

The immediate dangers posed to their plans are numerous, including an alternative media increasingly exposing the true nature of their agenda, and thus awakening a vast number of people who simply refuse to go along with it. There is also national sovereignty, where nations are openly challenging this Anglo-American centric world order and refusing to implement the conditions of their own enslavement.

These sweeping color revolutions, and coordinated military operations, both overt and covert, are dealing with the latter of these two challenges, while censorship, cognitive infiltration, and a tightening police state spanning the Western world under the very false premise of a “War on Terror” confronts the former.

The Middle East

With the globalist fueled destabilization in progress, concessions and regime changes are being made from Jordan to Egypt, all in the name of “democratization.” The protesters’ calls are verbatim repeats of the their local US funded NGOs’ mission statements. Skeptical as many may be that all of this is being orchestrated by the West, one needs only read the RAND Corporation’s 2007 report titled “Building Moderate Muslim Networks” where breathtaking confessions are made to not only reorder the Muslim world according to the West’s interests, but how they would follow the same model of “civil society networks” they have already used for decades during the Cold War.

Egypt’s recent “transition” played out as a direct translation of RAND’s blueprint for meddling in the Muslim world. From the protest organizers and NGOs to the protest leaders, to the behind-the-scenes meddling by America’s military leadership, the Egyptian uprising was entirely a US production. Even the drafting of the new Egyptian Constitution is being carried out by organizations funded by George Soros and the US National Endowment for Democracy.

The regional destabilization is resetting the geopolitical board in favor for a renewed effort to affect regime change in Iran. It has been extensively covered that the globalists have intricate and extensive plans, in the form of Brookings Institute’s “Which Path to Persia?” report, to fund color revolutions, support terrorism inside of the Islamic Republic and even provoke war with a nation they concede would rather avoid conflict. No sooner did North African and Arab regimes begin to crumble did the “Green Revolution” in Iran start up again. As if reiterating the summation of Brookings’ report, the globalist Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has recently and overtly called on the US to back the “Green Revolution.”

Iran’s fall to the globalists, the extraction of its wealth, and the end of its support for Chinese and Russian economic and military ambitions would isolate the so-called Shanghai Cooperative Organization further.

Russia’s Encirclement

Russia, along with China appear to be the two biggest blocs of opposition to the Anglo-American establishment. Indeed there are plenty of people and organizations within each nation gladly working hand-in-hand with the globalists, who in turn, are overtly trying to tempt and coerce the two nations to integrate themselves into their global world order.

Men like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who rose to power in Russia amongst an era of immense corruption, began building networks of NGOs modeled directly after those of the Anglo-Americans in the West, even naming this network the “Open Russian Foundation” after George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. According to geopolitical researcher William Engdahl, this Open Russian Foundation included Henry Kissinger and Lord Jacob Rothschild on its board of directors and its goal was to transform Russia from a sovereign state and into something more palatable for globalist consumption.

Whatever Khdorkovsky’s early successes may have been, they were cut short by Russian Prime Minister Vladamir Putin, who has safely confined Khodorkovsky behind the bars of a Siberian prison. Today, Khdorkovsky receives lobbying and legal services from notorious globalist lawyer Robert Amsterdam who leads international efforts to vilify Russia and justify the nation’s encirclement by NATO.

After Tunisia fell and protests began brewing in Egypt, Foreign Policy magazine published the Freedom House’s list of “Who’s Next?” On the list was Belarus’ Aleksandr Lukashenko, leader of a European nation directly bordering Russia’s western border, staring Moscow in the face. NATO itself admits the reluctance of Belarus to join its now unjustified organization, while the mainstream media berates the Belarusian government for putting down protests launched after the results of recent elections that saw the Western-backed opposition defeated.

Looking at a map of Russia, not a nation touching its borders has been spared the globalist treatment, from the Ukraine and their US-backed Orange Revolution, to Georgia and its US-backed invasion of South Ossetia. For Russia, they seem more than prepared to fight back, humiliating the US-trained and equipped Georgian military on the battlefield and overseeing the results of the US-funded Orange Revolution overturned, with Ukrainian talks to join NATO halted.

By targeting the Middle East, and in particular Iran, which both China and Russia have been using to check the West’s world domineering ambitions, the globalists’ hope is to renew political unrest in Russia’s satellite regions and complete its campaign of encircling Russia, thus forcing it to concede to its place amongst the new global order.

China’s String of Pearls

It is no secret China depends on oil imports to not only keep its economy growing, but to keep its vast population busy and prosperous, thus keeping the ruling government in power. This has been a long known realism by both China and the West. For China’s part, they have begun building a presence on continental Africa, especially in Sudan where they have established a 1,000 mile oil pipeline from the vast nation’s heartland to Port Sudan on the Red Sea. They have also provided relief to the country from UN sanctions and buys the majority of Sudan’s oil exports.

China also imports an immense amount of oil from Iran. In fact, the Islamic Republic represents the world’s second largest exporter of oil to China, behind Saudi Arabia.

From Sudan and Iran, across the Indian Ocean, and back to China’s shores in the South China Sea, represents a “String of Pearls,” or a series of geopolitical assets China is developing to protect this vital logistical route. This “String” includes a Chinese port in Pakistan’s Baluchistan region, another facility in Myanmar (Burma), and expanded facilities in the South China Sea off the coast of Vietnam. China is also building up the size and capabilities of its fleet, including submarines which now shadow America’s carrier groups, and the outfitting of their first aircraft carrier which is nearing completion.

The term “String of Pearls” was used as the title of the US Strategic Studies Institute’s (SSI) 2006 report “String of Pearls: Meeting the challenge of China’s rising power across the Asian littoral.” In this report, China’s ambitions to project its power along this route is viewed as a direct challenge to American supremacy as well as a threat to the West’s unipolar vision of a “new world order.”

While China may not be a champion of human freedom, they do appear to favor a multipolar world where sovereign nations coexist instead of the Anglo-American unipolar world where, unsurprisingly, the British and American oligarchs dominate the planet.

To prevent such a multipolar world from coming into existence, the SSI report suggests several strategies regarding China, from engaging and enticing it to become what globalist pusher Robert Zoellick calls a “responsible stakeholder” in the “international system,” to outright military confrontation and containment.

Of course this report was written in July 2006, and the ink hadn’t even dried before Israel suffered a humiliating defeat in its war with Lebanon, the war with Iran stalled, and globalist minion Thaksin Shinawtra was ousted from power in Thailand in a display of jealously defended sovereignty in Southeast Asia.

It appears that the globalists, over the following years, would present China with a flattering role to play in their global order while simultaneously destabilizing nearly every nation along the “String of Pearls.” The US has expanded its war in Afghanistan and is attempting to balkanize Pakistan in the process, specifically the Baluchistan region where China is establishing a naval presence. Pakistan’s Baluchistan region is also the seaside starting point of an energy and logistical conduit running northward through the Himalayas and into Chinese territory. The US is also heavily involved in destabilizing Myanmar (Burma) to affect regime change and subsequently establishing a Washington dependent government.

Thailand neighbors Myanmar to the east and possesses the narrow Kra Isthmus China would like to develop into a Suez/Panama Canal-like project to shorten trips for its oil laden, China-bound tankers. Thailand also serves as an overland conduit, running north and south as in Pakistan, with a developed rail system connecting Singapore’s shipping yards to Laos’ capital of Vientiane. China has begun the development of a rail system through Laos and the upgrading of Thailand’s rail system. Thailand also is one of the world’s largest rice exporters, which makes the nation vital to China’s future growth.

It is no surprise then, that Thailand, like Myanmar, has suffered multiple attempts by the US to affect regime change. Their man, Thaksin Shinawatra is an overt globalist, having formally served as an adviser to the Carlyle Group, and since his ousting from power in 2006, has been lobbied for by everyone from James Baker’s Baker Botts, to ICG’s Kenneth Adelman and the Edelman PR firm, to his current lobbyist and lawyer, Robert Amsterdam.

It is quite clear that Washington is using its control of the Middle East and its control of the seas, albeit challenged control, to check China’s vastly superior financial and economic position. It is also clear that Washington is investing a great amount of military resources and intelligence assets to destabilize the entire “String of Pearls” to confound, contain, and leverage concessions from China, with the ultimate goal of folding the emerging Asian giant into the unipolar Anglo-American global order.

How well this strategy is working is debatable, however, the US military is politically hobbled, strategically stretched, and led by vastly incompetent leaders in Washington who have lost the faith and trust of their own population, not to mention the world. The bold and perhaps desperate gambit the US is playing out in the Middle East could be a bid to rectify years of failure against China and the Shanghai Cooperative since the SSI wrote their report in 2006. Regime change in Iran is still the linchpin in making this latest bid a success.

South America

Even South America is not spared. There has been a lull in overt American meddling, allowing South America to become a bastion of sorts against the agents of globalization, however, covert operations and staging has been ongoing.

Troubling reports coming from South America’s Argentina, no stranger to the ire of Anglo-American ambitions, indicate that tension is building up between Buenos Aires and Washington. It has culminated in a diplomatic row over a recently seized US C-17 transport chalk full of suspicious equipment and an even more suspicious explanation. This is leading many, including the government of Argentina, to believe the US is staging another round of destabilization efforts in South America.

Venezuela and Bolivia have been overtly targeted by the West in recent years by efforts to undermine and even overthrow their respective governments. The muted-confused response over the coup in Honduras also raises suspicions that America has begun striking back against the wave of regional nationalism sweeping South America. A visit over to Movements.org reveals that the US State Department/corporate funded organization is backing dissidents in Venezuela and encouraging the spread of “civil society,” gleefully noting the insidious effects it is having on bolstering the anti-Chavez opposition.

Conclusion

The recent US-backed wave of revolution sweeping the Middle East is just the beginning of a greater move to dislodge Iran and begin regaining ground against Russia and China after several years of disappointing results geopolitically. The ultimate goal in mind is to force Russia and China to accept their role as “responsible stakeholders” in the unipolar Anglo-American “new world order.” The unipolar world of Anglo-American financier domination requires that all competition be eliminated, all nations become interdependent, and most importantly, all governments conform to the globalists’ model of “civil society” which in turn answers to centralized global institutions.

Understanding the overarching plan reveals the danger of being apathetic or complacent about the current unrest in the Middle East. It will surely spread, and depending on the Shanghai Cooperative’s response and their determination to remain the masters of their own destiny, greater confrontation may ensue. For the United States and its dwindling power, its meaningless offers to the world’s nations to join their bankrupt, one-sided model of world governance, and their growing economic mire, there is no telling what their desperation may transform into. This unpredictability and desperation may be perhaps the only card they have left in their hand worth playing, and one that should trouble us all.

Tony Cartalucci’s articles have appeared on many alternative media websites, including his own at Land Destroyer