Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Updates: Earthquakes Updates And U.S./EU Globalism



Below is a very interesting article on the EU and the U.S. along with the highly secretive TTIP which is pushing the globalist agenda into hyperdrive:






U.S.-EU Merger?




President Barack Obama and leaders of the European Union (EU) issued a Joint Statement at their March 26 meeting in Brussels declaring, among other things, their coordinated position on assistance to the Ukraine, as well as their continued flogging of the discredited “climate change” alarmism, and commitment to conclude the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreement between the EU and the United States.

The Joint Statement also reiterated support for the World Trade Organization and the United Nations, as well as support for UN/NATO military intervention in Africa, and implementation of various disarmament treaties, including the UN Arms Trade Treaty that targets the Second Amendment and the rights of individual U.S. citizens to keep and bear firearms.


President Obama, meeting with European Council President Herman Van Rompuy and European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, emphasized that “Europe, including the European Union, is the cornerstone of our engagement around the world. We are more secure and we are more prosperous, the world is safer and more just, when Europe and America stand as one.”



"We, the leaders of the European Union and the United States, met today in Brussels to reaffirm our strong partnership,” the trio declared in opening paragraph of their Joint Statement.  They continued: “We seek a landmark Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership to build our common prosperity. We undertake joint efforts to build security and stability around the globe and to tackle pressing global challenges like climate change.”

However, if President Obama and his EU colleagues were truly interested in “conducting these negotiations with clarity” and building genuine public support for the TTIP, they would end the secrecy that has enveloped the TTIP process from the beginning. As we have reported  (“Secretly Trading Away Our Independence” and “EU/U.S. — Transatlantic Convergence”), the TTIP process has been kept secret not only from the press and the American public, but even from our elected representatives in the U.S. Congress, while privileged corporate and activist NGO representatives have been allowed not only to see the text, but to provide input to the negotiation process.

The TTIP proposes to extend the political-economic “integration” process, by which the central EU authority in Brussels is swallowing up the sovereignty of its member states, across the Atlantic, to entangle the United States in the same independence-crushing process.

Several days before President Obama headed to Brussels, his point man on the TTIP, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman (shown above), said that he wants a trans-Atlantic trade deal to be as strong as the longstanding NATO alliance between the United States and Europe, “We want for TTIP [Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership] to help build an economic and a trade relationship that is as strong as the strongest military alliance in the world, but fundamentally it has to be driven by the underlying economics,” Froman said at The Atlantic’s annual Economy Summit in Washington.


In announcing his desire to craft a TTIP that would be the equivalent of an economic NATO, Froman was not speaking only (or even primarily) for the Obama White House, but also for Pratt House, the headquarters of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the globalist brain trust that has been the guiding subversive force behind U.S. administrations (both Democrat and Republican) for much of the past century. Froman is a CFR member, as is his boss, Secretary of State John Kerry, Under Secretary of State Robert D. Hormats, and many of the other top officials at State and other Cabinet departments. (See: “CFR Applauds European Union’s ‘Real Subversion of Sovereignty.’”)



In a previous article we provided more background on Froman:
The man leading Team Obama’s trade offensive is Michael Froman, assistant to the president of the United States and deputy national security advisor for international economic affairs. A Wall Street insider, Froman was a managing director at Citigroup, and also served as president and chief executive officer of CitiInsurance before joining the Obama administration. No doubt his previous service in Brussels with the Forward Studies Unit of the European Commission also figured in his appointment, though to Americans in the know this entry on his résumé would be recognized as at least cause for concern, if not an outright negative. 


Froman is not only a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the more exclusive Trilateral Commission, but also a member of that super-secret, super-elite annual gathering known as the Bilderberg Group. 


Arthur Thompson, CEO of The John Birch Society, warns that the Joint Statement by President Obama and the EU leaders should sound very loud alarm bells for the American people. “It should be very apparent to all who take the time to read the Joint Statement that President Obama, Barroso and Van Rompuy are exposing their real, hidden intentions,” he told The New American. “They are holding out the carrot of ‘trade’ with all its false promises of prosperity and jobs, but they are also tying it together with global-warming regulations, Ukraine aid, the EU banking union, NATO military intervention around the globe, and UN disarmament treaties, including the very dangerous Arms Trade Treaty. They are trying to tie our hands down in all of these areas, so that we will not be able to act independently in our own interests, as a free, sovereign, independent nation.”









Chilean officials are assessing the damage after a magnitude-8.2 earthquake struck the country's north coast Tuesday night, leaving at least six people dead, triggering landslides and fires, and cutting off electricity to thousands of residents.


The event struck along a 7,000-mile-long boundary between two plates in the Earth's crust – the Nazcaplate beneath the eastern Pacific Ocean and the South American plate. The Nazca plate is sliding underneath the South American one at an average rate that ranges from three inches a year along its southern half to 2.6 inches a year along its northern extent.

While the quake was large by any measure, seismologists remain concerned that it could have been a foreshock to a much larger quake that could strike this region – a section of plate boundary that hasn't seen a major rupture in 137 years.

Although the quake affected a major port city, the region as a whole is sparsely populated. And while the quake generated a tsunami, the highest reported tsunami along the coast was a seven-footer that reached Iquique. Had the quake occurred beneath deeper water, the tsunami could have been much larger, Dr. Allmendinger says.

The quakes along subduction zones tend to be more powerful than quakes along faults such as California's San Andreas one because subduction ruptures involve faults that have much larger surface areas along which stress can build, so they release more energy when they snap. And the segments that rupture tend to be relatively shallow, between six and about 40 miles deep, according to the US Geological Survey.

Tuesday's quake struck a 300-mile section of the plate boundary known as the Iquique seismic gap. The last quake to occur in this gap ruptured it in 1877.
Seismologists have known for decades that this section of the plate boundary was due for action in the relatively near future, says Cornell's Allmendinger.
In fact, Tuesday's quake was preceded by a magnitude-6.7 quake about two weeks ago "with a lot of little, what we thought were then, aftershocks," he says. "It turns out that those were the foreshocks" for Tuesday's rupture.
The temblor Tuesday struck a small segment of the gap. If the entire segment were to snap all at once, it would produce a much bigger quake, he explains.
Indeed, "one of the possible scenarios that we're monitoring right now is that it is still possible that the earthquake we had last night is actually a foreshock to a much bigger earthquake," he says. "For the sake of our Chilean friends, we hope that it doesn't happen."









LOS ANGELES
It’s not so much the magnitude-5.1 earthquake – centered in nearby La Habra with well over 150 aftershocks over five days – that has residents here most rattled.

Rather, what seems to be throwing residents and business owners more off balance than the shaking is this: Seismologists are saying that the little-known geological fault responsible for the quake could do more damage than the much feared – and celebrated – “Big One” that one day will be generated by the more famous San Andreas.

This other fault, called the “Puente Hills thrust fault,” could do more damage than the “Big One” even with a lower-magnitude quake, the seismologists say, because it is located under the skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles and a population of 4 million people. The fault, discovered in 1999, runs from the suburbs of northern Orange County through the San Gabriel Valley under downtown and ends in Hollywood.

The fault line runs under thousands of older buildings, many made with concrete and never properly 
retrofitted. What’s worse, the softer soil in the Los Angeles Basin would enhance a quake’s ripple effect like a stone in water. As a result, a magnitude-7.5 earthquake on this fault could kill 3,000 to 18,000 people and cause as much as $250 billion in damage, says the US Geological Survey (USGS).


Officials say the recent seismic activity is a necessary wake-up call for residents and businesses to pay more attention to safety contingency plans and to retrofit their properties. Because of the long intervals between earthquakes, people tend to forget the state is crisscrossed by several fault lines, they say. Friday’s 5.1 temblor was the strongest in California since the 1994 Northridge 6.7 magnitude quake, which killed 57 people and caused $25 billion in damage.

“When an earthquake happens on this fault, it’s just about the worst one we can imagine,” Ms. Jones told ABC News. “It’s long enough to generate an earthquake greater than magnitude 7 – and even as big as 7.5 – and is located under the oldest parts of our city. We have hundreds of thousands of very bad buildings that will be exposed to very strong shaking, so we put this all together and it’s just about the worst earthquake we can think of as happening.”









For those that are not familiar with the Ring of Fire, it is basically a giant ring around the Pacific Ocean. It contains approximately 75 percent of the volcanoes in the world, and approximately 90 percent of all earthquakes occur inside of it. Here is some more about the Ring of Fire from a recent Global Post article

Known as the Ring of Fire, its fault lines run up the entire western coast of the Americas, from Patagonia to Alaska, and then heading southward again below the eastern Pacific, eventually ending between Asia and Australia. Of the 10 most powerful quakes listed by the US Geological Survey (USGS), all but one took place around the Ring of Fire. That accurately reflects the numbers, with 90 percent of all the world’s tremblers taking place here. The Ring of Fire is also home to most of the world’s active volcanoes.

People were becoming extremely worried, because during the month of March there were hundreds of significant earthquakes along the coast of Chile. The concern was that this was leading up to something big. And sure enough, a massive 8.2 earthquakestruck the other night.

Since the 8.2 quake, there have been dozens of aftershocks measuring magnitude 4.0 or greater.
But of course Chile is not the only area along the Ring of Fire that has been unusually active.
There have been several dozen significant earthquakes in Peru over the past month, including a 6.3 earthquake that made headlines all over the planet. And as I mentioned above, a major volcano in Peru that has been dormant for about 40 years is now roaring back to life.
And the west coast of North America has also been witnessing some very strange seismic activity lately.
In early March, northern California was shaken by a 6.9 earthquake. It was the worst earthquake to hit northern California in about four years.
Later in March, a 5.1 earthquake rattled Los Angeles pretty badly. It had been a long time since L.A. had seen anything like that.
Further north, Mount Hood up in Oregon has experienced more than 100 earthquakes in recent days. Scientists are becoming increasingly concerned that an eruption may be coming.
But as I discussed in my article about the Yellowstone supervolcano the other day, it would be foolish to willingly ignore the warning signs.
Many of the experts would have us believe that seismic activity is completely “random” and that there is no pattern to it.
However, history has shown that seismic activity tends to happen in waves. When there is one event, the probability that there will be another event becomes greater. And when things have been quiet for an extended period of time, the probability that things will continue to be quiet becomes greater.
Unfortunately, it appears that we have now entered a period of heightened seismic activity in North and South America – particularly along the Ring of Fire.
Hopefully this particular wave of seismic activity will be short-lived and will soon cool down.
But I wouldn’t count on it.






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