The title above comes from a quote taken from this first article as presented by Freedom Outpost:
Of course, Greece is only the most recent and most visible example of this "kick the problem down the road" farce. Central banks worldwide are engaged in desperate and increasingly futile efforts to rejuvenate growth and price inflation through quantitative easing and other stimulus measures.
The wholesale failure of these policies worldwide places central banks in a real bind. You can be sure that Alexis Tsipras won't be the only politician from a small, heavily indebted EU country to ask for further handouts, at the same time resisting the demanded reforms.
Even in the US, the one country where some sluggish real economic growth has resumed, the Federal Reserve is under attack. The "audit the Fed" movement has, for the first time, real bipartisan support. No less an authority than Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen warned last week of the dire consequences of auditing a central bank.
What is it that the central bankers fear most? Here it is: The policies they have put in place to encourage one asset bubble after another can no longer be sustained. Having inflated the biggest financial bubble in history, they are terrified that it will pop, with devastating economic consequences, leading to a global deflationary depression that will make the recession of 2008-2009 look mild by comparison.
The beneficiaries of central banks' largesse – governments, money center banks, and stock market investors worldwide – are equally terrified. And if they're not, they should be.
I don't know when it will happen, but there will be, as my former boss Bill Bonner says, a "day of reckoning."
Only this debacle will not be sorted out in a day. Ordinary citizens who realize that central banks are powerless to stop the unraveling of the bubbles created by quantitative easing and similar measures won't be happy. They will elect men like Alexis Tsipras who promise an end to austerity. But without a greater fool – central banks creating money out of thin air – they won't be able to deliver on their promises.
Things could get really ugly for a while, as all the fiat money-created bubbles in real estate, stocks, and commodities collapse. Political and social unrest will become part of daily life in many countries, as it already is in Greece.
In August of 2013, even as the words came out of US President Barack Obama’s mouth regarding an “impending” US military strike against the Syrian state, the impotence of American foreign policy loomed over him and those who wrote his speech for him like an insurmountable wall. So absurd was America’s attempt to once again use the canard of “weapons of mass destruction” to justify yet another military intervention, that many believed America’s proxy war in Syria had finally reached its end.
The counterstroke by Russia included Syria’s immediate and unconditional surrendering of its chemical weapons arsenal, and with that, so evaporated America’s casus belli
Few would believe if one told them then, that in 2015, that same discredited US would be routinely bombing Syrian territory and poised to justify the raising of an entire army of terrorists to wage war within Syria’s borders, yet that is precisely what is happening. President Obama has announced plans to formally increase military force in Iraq and Syria “against ISIS,” but of course includes building up huge armies of “rebels” who by all other accounts are as bad as ISIS itself (not to mention prone to joining ISIS’ ranks by the thousands).
All it took for this miraculous turn in fortune was the creation of “ISIS,” and serial provocations committed by these Hollywood-style villains seemingly engineered to reinvigorate America’s justification to militarily intervene more directly in a war it itself started in Syria beginning in 2011.
ISIS could not be a more effective part of America’s plans to overthrow the Syrian government and destroy the Syrian state if it had an office at the Pentagon.
Having failed to achieve any of its objectives in Syria, it inexplicably “invaded” Iraq, affording the US military a means of “easing into” the conflict by first confronting ISIS in Iraq, then following them back across the border into Syria. When this scheme began to lose its impact on public perception, ISIS first started executing Western hostages including several Americans. When the US needed the French on board, ISIS executed a Frenchman. When the US needed greater support in Asia, two Japanese were beheaded. And just ahead of President Obama’s recent attempt to formally authorize the use of military force against “ISIS,” a Jordanian pilot was apparently burned to death in a cage in an unprecedented act of barbarity that shocked even the most apathetic.
The fighters are real. Their atrocities are real. The notion that they’ve sprung out of the dunes of Syria and Iraq, picked their weapons from local date trees and have managed to wage war regionally against several collective armies is entirely fantasy. Required to maintain ISIS’ ranks would be billions in constant support. These are billions ISIS simply cannot account for from hostage ransoms and black market oil alone. The only source that could prop ISIS up for as long as it has allegedly existed and to the extent it allegedly exists, is a state or collection of states intentionally sponsoring the terrorist enterprise.
Those states are of course the chief benefactors of ISIS’ atrocities, and we can clearly see those benefactors are the US and its partners both in Europe and in the Middle East. The US would claim that the threat of ISIS necessitates them to intervene militarily in Syria (when lies about WMDs were flatly rejected by the American and international public). Of course, before the serial headline atrocities ISIS committed, the US attempted to sell this same lie but without affect. Now that sufficient blood has been split and the public sufficiently riled, the US is once again trying to move forward its agenda.
Don’t be surprised, if the US manages to succeed, that everything in Syria is left destroyed except for ISIS. A Hollywood villain this popular and effective is surely destined for a sequel in neighboring Iran or southern Russia, coincidentally where the US would like to create strife and carnage the most.
When Netanyahu spoke to the joint houses of Congress on Tuesday, he directly advanced the first two paths toward preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and indirectly advanced the third.
Netanyahu provided a sober-minded, carefully constructed argument for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. He then demonstrated why Obama’s nuclear negotiating strategy enables Iran to become a nuclear power. In so doing, Netanyahu built sufficient bipartisan Congressional support for an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear weapons to protect Israel from the Obama administration.
Whether Netanyahu will order such a strike, or when such a strike could be most effective, is impossible to judge. But he did secure Congressional support for it.
Netanyahu also created an opening for lawmakers who are frightened by the deal Obama is now negotiating to prevent him from completing it. Whether or when they will use the opportunity is still unclear. Obama has tremendous power and leverage over Democratic lawmakers and he has no compunction about using it to get his way.
On the other hand, buoyed by Netanyahu, Republicans also have power. If they use it judiciously, they will be able to secure 67 votes in favor of legislation that would require Obama to receive Senate approval for his nuclear deal, and would place harsh economic sanctions on Iran if it doesn’t meet the behavioral benchmarks of ending its sponsorship of terrorism, ending its meddling in the internal affairs of other states, and ending its threats to annihilate Israel that Netanyahu laid out.
Beyond that, by making clear that it is pure folly to assume that Iran will magically transform itself into a responsible actor on the international stage after securing the deal, Netanyahu provided the rationale for a strategy of regime change. Whether a future administration will adopt this option or not is unclear, but it is now evident that given the fact that Iran has the technological and scientific capacity to develop nuclear weapons, the only way in the long term to prevent that from happening is to overthrow the regime.
Obama and his advisers argue that there are only two options – their agreement, that enables Iran to build a nuclear arsenal in the coming years, or war. What Netanyahu made clear is that this is a false choice. The US is stronger than Iran. It has more leverage than Iran. All it needs to get a better agreement is a massively diminished desire to conclude one.
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