Of Puppet-Strings and Propaganda...

Indulge me a moment to simply throw out a snapshot of things that are creating blips on my radar, wiggles on my seismograph, bubbles on my Hubble....

1) The rumor mill is churning over at Urban Survival lately.... George Ure started his working days as a reporter, and his instincts for a story haven't dulled a bit. So "today's rumor", for him, has a higher-than-normal liklihood of becoming "tomorrow's news".

Last week he pointed up the disturbing explosion of U.S. bond buying coming out of the Caribbean. Disturbing because it comes in the face of selling by almost every Central Bank worldwide...disturbing because it indicates the buyers are actually unregulated U.S. offshore hedge funds (these are investment firms wealthy people typically use to hide their assets outside the U.S., generally for tax-avoidance purposes)...disturbing because it therefore indicates that either these highly-leveraged funds have taken a brutal walloping, or much more likely, that this is simply a Ponzi scheme by the Fed to create a 'phantom market' by paying these unregulated funds to 'pretend' to be buyers.

I've been referencing stories about this for the last week over at the deconsumption news room (linked at right), the most pertinent one being this analysis from Safe Haven. If the rumors bear out, as I suspect is almost certainly the case, then we can presume that a crash in the U.S. bond market is imminent.

2) Which leads to the second round of related rumors George offered up yesterday. One is that just as soon as Congress can rush through a bankruptcy 'reform' bill, the Fed will bump rates a full 1 percentage point. (The Federal Open Market Committee raised rates another 1/4 point today--it's 7th rise in as many meetings...). Which makes sense as a desperate attempt to stave-off rampant bond selling, although it's really just "six of one, a half-dozen of the other"--pounding the nail in the mortgage and credit market coffins instead of the bond market coffin (or, shoving the civilian/consumer in front of the bullet...). All in all, this is the bed the Fed has been making for the rest of us to lie in for several years now....

The other rumor is that China will be making a power-play soon, telling Washington to either back away from Taiwan (diplomacy-wise) or they'll start dumping their bond holdings. Again, this is another hand of cards that was dealt up some time ago, so it's really not so much a question of "if" as "when".... Of course the value of Taiwan to the U.S. is at least two-fold: it's an important strategic partner for keeping the China Sea open to oil-flows (to our allies in the Philippines and Japan, for instance), and as a keystone military ally in the event of hostilities with the Chinese.

Something like this would require some incredibly adept diplomatic dance-moves...not something the Bush administration has the chops for....

Oh, and by the way, Taiwan is holding military exercises for the first time in 30 years. The U.S. and Japan will send advisors.

3) If you haven't heard, the concept (and implications) of Peak Oil were recently 'officially' laid out before Congress. Specifically, in this transcription of a report delivered before the House by Roscoe Bartlett, Chairman of the Projection Forces Subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee. I won't cover it in depth now because its probably old news to most readers, but the report seems surprisingly well-rounded and sober-minded. More importantly, I think the fact that this is being talked about openly at this level is very significant. Perhaps Peak Oil is about to go mainstream (I said "perhaps"...).

"I suspect a big percentage of the people that might read or listen to what we say this evening had not even heard of peak oil.

We really had about 30 years warning that this was going to happen. When M. King Hubbert predicted oil would peak in this country in 1970 and it did, and 5 years later, certainly by 10 years later we knew absolutely he was right, because we were well down on the curve 10 years later, we should have had some hint that he probably was right, he and Colin Campbell were probably right about world production? We paid no attention to that.

As a matter of fact, the people that were talking about this until very recently have been quickly relegated to the lunatic fringe. If I had been up here 3 or 4 years ago talking about this, someone may want to relegate the two of us this evening to the lunatic fringe.

But I think the evidence is out there. I think the evidence is out there, and the marketplace is saying that it is out there, because oil is now at $54 or $55 a barrel, they are saying we are going to see $60 before we see $50. I saw one future that was $100 a barrel."

Then Peak Oil shows up as the subject of an article in the local Star-Tribune newspaper "Worries swelling over oil shortage", complete with lines like "Amos Nur, a Stanford University geophysicist, all but predicts a war with China over oil."

And thanks to reader Jan for pointing out the rather questionable handling of Peak Oil on TV's The West Wing. Of course, TV exists to promote biased agendas for those who can afford them. On a similar note, a few months ago I watched an episode of House--solely out of respect for veteran comedic actor Hugh Laurie--but after a show subplot trashed a woman as being an irresponsible, fringe-wacko because she chose not to vaccinate her child, I've never seen it again....

4) Most deconsumption readers are probably familiar with Rigorous Intuition, and certainly Jeff Wells has been firing on all cylinders lately (he's 'between jobs' at the moment, so toss him a few coins if you enjoy the site...). Anyway, a recent short-and-pithy piece The Anti-War Institution is one of those "took the words out of my mouth" type articles, in my opinion. And it also dove-tails nicely with the Noam Chomsky excerpt I linked recently over in the deconsumption reading room.

Basically, both of these articles explore elements of the idea that American democracy has been slowly co-opted by corporate-private interests, so that what we have is actually a fascist state with a narrowly-defined social framework carefully crafted to present the illusion of freedom and choice. This interesting history of corporate coup is available courtesy of the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT). It outlines an early--and much more overt--attempt at government takeover by corporate/industrialists. The History Channel also aired this documentary about the planned coup.

5) And finally, some Things to Consider. This excerpt from an email offers some timely things to ponder on. Perhaps these might be helpful to free us from the Puppet-Strings and Propaganda we are all caught up in:

"Choquosh recently was summoned by a prestigious group of Hopi elders (she's not Hopi, but some other tribe). They told her they have a message for her to share. They said, "You've been telling people the 11th hour is approaching. Tell them it is here, and there are things to be considered." They gave her a 10-point Hopi Checklist to consider:"

1. Where do you live (not just geographically)?
2. What is it that you do?
3. How are your relationships?
4. Are you in right relation with the Earth?
5. Where is your water?
6. Know your garden (and nature around you).
7. Speak your truth; it is time now.
8. Be good to each other.
9. Don't look outside yourself for the leader.
10. This could be a good time.

Comments

[marc]

Responding to point 5) above:

I'm not sure how accurate the story about Choquosh is. I was curious as to who she is, but Google only came up with 10 results, most of them relating the same story you copied here. One of them - http://www.co-intelligence.org/y2k_hopi.html - was apparently posted in January 1999, and retained the word "recently" in the first sentence. Meanwhile, at least one version places the story "about ten years ago": http://www.mayanmajix.com/art1012.html . I don't know which, if any, of these sources are reliable.

As always, but especially in this case where the origins are unknown (at least to me), best to take the information on its own merits, whatever they may or may not be. In other words, to quote point 9 of the alleged 10-point Hopi Checklist: "Don't look outside yourself for the leader."