All posts tagged: oil

Making Globalism Great Again

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CJ Hopkins Maybe Donald Trump isn’t as stupid as I thought. I’d hate to have to admit that publicly, but it does kind of seem like he has put one over on the liberal corporate media this time. Scanning the recent Trump-related news, I couldn’t help but notice a significant decline in the number of references to Weimar, Germany, Adolf Hitler, and “the brink of fascism” that America has supposedly been teetering on since Hillary Clinton lost the election. I googled around pretty well, I think, but I couldn’t find a single editorial warning that Trump is about to summarily cancel the US Constitution, dissolve Congress, and proclaim himself Führer. Nor did I see any mention of Auschwitz, or any other Nazi stuff … which is weird, considering that the Hitler hysteria has been a standard feature of the official narrative we’ve been subjected to for the last two years. So how did Trump finally get the liberal corporate media to stop calling him a fascist? He did that by acting like a fascist (i.e., …

What the Press Hides From You About Venezuela

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A Case of News-Suppression All Across the Mainstream Media Eric Zuesse INTRODUCTION This news-report is being submitted to all US and allied news-media, and is being published by all honest ones, in order to inform you of crucial facts that the others — the dishonest ones, who hide such crucial facts — are hiding about Venezuela. These are facts that have received coverage only in one single British newspaper: the Independent, which published a summary account of them on January 26th. That newspaper’s account will be excerpted here at the end, but first will be highlights from its topic, the official report to the UN General Assembly in August of last year, which has been covered-up ever since. This is why that report’s author has now gone to the Independent, desperate to get the story out, finally, to the public. THE COVERED-UP DOCUMENT On 3 August 2018, the UN’s General Assembly received the report from the UN’s Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order, concerning his mission to Venezuela and …

Oil, Agriculture and Imperialism: Averting the Fast-Track to Armageddon?

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US global hegemony depends on Washington maintaining the dollar’s leading role. Engaging in petrodollar recycling and treasury-bond ‘super-imperialism’ are joined at the hip and have enabled the US to run up a huge balance of payments deficit (a free ride courtesy of the rest of the world) by using the (oil-backed) paper dollar as security in itself.

WATCH: Robert Newman’s History of Oil

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Philip Roddis The best comedians are the cleverest people on the planet. I’m grateful to a BTL comment on OffGuardian, below a piece of mine on Venezuela, for linking to this forty-five minute video. It has Robert Newman saying exactly what I try to say, but with vastly greater wit and panache, on the history of oil and, more generally, a materialist perspective on history. Performed in 2006, it could have been yesterday given the clueless way we insist on viewing each “pro-democracy” intervention – Iraq, Libya, Syria and now Venezuela – on a case by case basis. Given too the criminal way ‘our’ media ignore the material drivers of war. In both my two posts this week on Venezuela, I described corporate media as having “abdicated a core duty in their refusal to explore motives that cast a very different light on Western interventions sold to us as humanitarian”. Newman treads the same ground but here too – damn the man – he does it better.

Guardian Reports More “Good News”, Kids are Dying in Venezuela

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The Guardian’s Tom Phillips’ article “Venezuela Crisis Takes Deadly Toll on Buckling Health System” (January 06, 2019) is more good news for US psychopaths, such as Trump, Bolton and Pompeo. Children are dying in Venezuela. Sanctions are working!

I Propose Americans Wear Gas Pumps on Veteran’s Day

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In the Commonwealth of Nations, the people get to wear poppies on Remembrance Day. I’m jealous. Poppies are beautiful.

In the United States, we get military glorification and propaganda. I don’t know how many marches and war stories we’ve endured over the years. This is not fair.

I think Americans need their own symbolic lapel pin for Veteran’s Day. I propose it be a gas pump.

So DID the Guardian back war on Iraq?

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Philip Roddis If I and a hundred likeminded others devoted ourselves 24/7 to rebutting the drivel above and below the line in the Guardian, we couldn’t make a dent. It would be like despatching midges, in August on a Highland bog, by crushing them one by one between thumb and forefinger. So I seldom bother. But a few instances this year have seen me obliged to make some sort of response to twaddle too egregious to let pass. One was Matthew d’Ancona’s smug desire to see market forces rein in the purveyors of ‘fake news’ via the kitemarking of such online crusaders for truth as Full Fact, led by tory party donor Michael Samuels. The other two were below the line. In an exchange with one btl commentator, back in April and over – what else? – Syria, I was told the idea of oil being a factor in the invasion of Iraq had been ‘thoroughly debunked’. I felt it incumbent, though it’s generally easier on such matters to spout nonsense than refute it, to put him straight on this …

‘Exorbitant Privilege’ Under Siege

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Frank Lee It was the French politician Valery Giscard D’Estaing who first coined the phrase ‘Exorbitant Privilege’ – a reference to the many advantages enjoyed by the US ownership and control of the world’s reserve currency. This was a situation dating back to the agreement reached in 1944 between the allied powers and established in Bretton Woods a town in New Hampshire; it was to become known as the Bretton Woods Agreement. During the conference key negotiators, most famously John Maynard Keynes for Britain, and Harry Dexter White chief US delegate, hammered out a blueprint for a new global and currency and trading system. Keynes was not entirely satisfied with the outcome and White mostly got his own way despite JMK’s misgivings about possible problems further down the road. But then the UK in the shape of Keynes, was also angling for a sizeable US loan in the not too distant future which circumscribed Keynes’ room for manoeuvre; and the loan of course came with strings – viz., the ending of British imperial preferential trading …

Let’s talk about the Golan Heights

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Yesterday an Al-Monitor piece by Akiva Eldar contrasted Netanyahu’s success in getting Trump out of the Iran deal, and ‘recognising’ Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, with his failure to pull off the same with Europe.

The Bizarre Explanation For Why The U.S. Has Avoided Bombing ISIS Oil Wells

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by Michael Snyder from The Economic Collapse Why hasn’t the U.S. bombed the oil wells that ISIS controls into oblivion by now? Would you believe that it is because the Obama administration “didn’t want to do environmental damage”? Former Deputy Director of the CIA Michael Morell has publicly admitted that we have purposely avoided damaging the main source of income for ISIS, and his explanation for why we were doing this is utterly bizarre. But at this point what could the Obama administration say that would actually make sense? Everyone now knows that ISIS has been making hundreds of millions of dollars selling oil in Turkey, and that this has been done with the full knowledge and complicity of the Obama White House. This is potentially the biggest scandal of the entire Obama presidency, and yet so far the Republicans have not jumped on it. If you or I even gave five bucks to ISIS, we would be arrested and hauled off to Guantanamo Bay. And yet Barack Obama is allowing ISIS to funnel massive …

Turkish MP to reveal evidence linking Erdogan to Daesh oil

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The President of Turkey, Recep Erdogan. Sputnik International reports Eren Erdem [pictured below], a lawmaker from the Republican People’s Party, Turkey’s largest opposition party, says that he may have found the evidence linking President Recep Erdogan’s son-in-law to the dirty oil trade with Daesh. Commenting on the sensational allegations put forth by Russia on Wednesday that Turkish President Recep Erdogan and his family are directly connected to the trade of dirty oil, Erdem revealed that he is ready to publicize information next week linking Berat Albayrak, President Erdogan’s son-in-law and the Turkish Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, to the Daesh oil trade. In the course of his press conference, covered by Sputnik Turkey, Erdem explained that on the basis of his investigation, which is still in progress, “I have been able to establish that there is a very high probability that Berat Albayrak is linked to the supply of oil by the Daesh terrorists.” The lawmaker told media that “there is one company, headquartered in Erbil, which in 2012 acquired oil tankers, and which …

Video: Russian military reveals details of ISIS-Turkey oil smuggling

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An image released today by the Russian MoD allegedly showing 3,000 tankers and light trucks parked in Silopi, Turkey, near the borders with Iraq and Syria. Russia’s Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov at a press conference in Moscow today: According to our data, the top political leadership of the country – President Erdogan and his family – is involved in this criminal business. Russia presents proof of Turkey’s role in ISIS oil trade (RT)

Erdogan: “I will leave office” if proven Turkey bought oil from terrorists

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Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Photo Burhan Ozbilici/AP RT reports Russia has received additional intelligence confirming that oil from deposits controlled by Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) goes through Turkey on an industrial scale, President Vladimir Putin said speaking on the sidelines of the climate change summit in Paris. Moscow has grounds to suspect that the Su-24 was downed by Turkish jets on November 24 to secure illegal oil deliveries from Syria to Turkey, he said. “At the moment we have received additional information confirming that that oil from the deposits controlled by Islamic State militants enters Turkish territory on industrial scale,” he said. “We have every reason to believe that the decision to down our plane was guided by a desire to ensure security of this oil’s delivery routes to ports where they are shipped in tankers,” Putin said. Speaking in Paris on Monday, President Recep Erdogan said that he will leave office if there is proof of Turkey’s cooperation with IS. “We are not that dishonest as to buy oil from terrorists. If …

Analysis: Russian airstrikes stop NATO’s terrorist convoys in their tracks

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Oil trucks destroyed by Russian airstrikes in Syria. Sott.net writes: For years, NATO has granted impunity to convoys packed with supplies bound for ISIS and Al Qaeda. Russian airstrikes have stopped them dead in their tracks. If a legitimate, well-documented aid convoy carrying humanitarian supplies bound for civilians inside Syria was truly destroyed by Russian airstrikes, it is likely the world would never have heard the end of it. Instead, much of the world has heard little at all about a supposed “aid” convoy destroyed near Azaz, Syria, at the very edge of the Afrin-Jarabulus corridor through which the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) and Al Qaeda’s remaining supply lines pass, and in which NATO has long-sought to create a “buffer zone” more accurately described as a Syrian-based, NATO-occupied springboard from which to launch terrorism deeper into Syrian territory. The Turkish-based newspaper Daily Sabah reported in its article, “Russian airstrikes target aid convoy in northwestern Syrian town of Azaz, 7 killed,” claims: “At least seven people died, 10 got injured after an apparent airstrike, reportedly by …