How Hedge Funds are Blood-Funneling the Life Out of Argentina

NYTimes |  PERHAPS the most complex trial in history between a sovereign nation, Argentina, and its bondholders — including a group of United States-based hedge funds — officially came to an end yesterday when the Argentine Senate ratified a settlement.

The resolution was excellent news for a small group of well-connected investors, and terrible news for the rest of the world, especially countries that face their own debt crises in the future.

In late 2001, Argentina defaulted on $132 billion in loans during its disastrous depression. Gross domestic product dropped by 28 percent, 57.5 percent of Argentines were living in poverty, and the unemployment rate skyrocketed to above 20 percent, leading to riots and clashes that resulted in 39 deaths.

Unable to pay its creditors, Argentina restructured its debt in two rounds of negotiations. The package discounted the bonds by two-thirds but provided a mechanism for more payments when the country’s economy recovered, which it did. A vast majority of the bondholders — 93 percent — accepted the deal.

Among the small minority who refused the deal were investors who had bought many of their bonds at a huge discount, well after the country defaulted and even after the first round of restructuring. These kinds of investors have earned the name vulture funds by buying up distressed debt, then, often aided by lawyers and lobbyists, trying to force a settlement.

The companies involved included some of the best-known vulture funds, including NML Capital, a subsidiary of Elliott Management, a hedge fund co-led by Paul Singer, a major contributor to the Republican Party, as well as Aurelius Capital and Dart Management. NML, which had the largest claim in the Argentina case, was the lead litigant of a group of bondholders in New York federal courts.

For a long time, Argentina refused to pay the holdouts. The funds tried all sorts of ways to change the country’s position, including, at one point, having an iconic Argentine ship seized in Ghana.

Then a 2012 ruling by Judge Thomas Griesa of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York threw the game in the vulture funds’ favor, ruling that Argentina had to pay them back at full value, a cost to Argentina of $4.65 billion. NML, for example, would get a total return of 1,500 percent on its initial investment, according to our calculations, because of the cheap prices it paid for the debt and because of a “compensatory” interest rate of 9 percent under New York law.

The ruling, which became effective in 2014, did something else: Judge Griesa issued an injunction blocking Argentina from paying anything to the creditors who had accepted the deal until it had paid the vultures in full.

The judge gave the vultures the weapon they needed: Argentina had to either pay them off or renege on the default they had negotiated, ruining the country’s credit in the future and threatening its recovery.

Granny's such an outrageous liar, you expect her pantsuit to catch on fire...,

thefederalist |  During the Democratic town hall that aired on CNN Wednesday night, Hillary Clinton completely fell apart onstage when Anderson Cooper asked her about $675,000 she received for delivering three speeches at Goldman Sachs.

Throughout the campaign, her opponent Bernie Sanders has criticized Clinton’s ability to deliver on her promises to crack down on Wall Street after taking more than $600,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs in a year.

“Was that a mistake? Was that a bad error in judgement?” Anderson asked.

“Well, I dunno,” Clinton said. “That’s what they offered. Every secretary of State that I know has done that.”

Clinton’s remarks during the televised town hall may have given off the impression that she wasn’t very involved when negotiating speaking deals, but the truth is, she is actually a heavy-handed negotiator.

The Washington Post reported that when Clinton agreed to deliver a speech at the University of California Los Angeles in 2014, she charged the publicly-funded school $300,000. When school administrators asked for a discounted rate, Clinton’s handlers informed UCLA that $300,000 was the special, discounted rate for public universities.

suffocating the economy and rewarding the molluscs WAS the objective

counterpunch |  The chart suggests that the Fed’s primary objective was to reflate stock and bond prices to help the banks grow their way out of insolvency and avoid government takeover. Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner alluded to this in an interview with CNBC in 2009 when he said: “We have a financial system that is run by private shareholders, managed by private institutions, and we’re going to do our best to preserve that system.” Unfortunately, the banking system was insolvent at that point in time, a fact that was confirmed in sworn testimony before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission by Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. Here’s what he said:

“As a scholar of the Great Depression, I honestly believe that September and October of 2008 was the worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression. If you look at the firms that came under pressure in that period. . . only one . . . was not at serious risk of failure. So out of maybe the 13 of the most important financial institutions in the United States, 12 were at risk of failure within a period of a week or two.”

Think about that for a minute. Not only was the US banking system hopelessly underwater, but also the world’s most lucrative and powerful industry was about to be removed from private hands and “nationalized”. Shareholders would be wiped out, bondholders would take severe haircuts, management would be replaced, and credit production would be returned to the representatives of the American people, US government officials.

Do you think the prospect of nationalization might have scared the hell out of Wall Street? Do you think the banksters might have concocted some crazy plan along with Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to precipitate a crisis by euthanizing Lehman Brothers so they could extort $700 billion from Congress (TARP) before launching round after round of money printing under the deliberately-opaque moniker, Quantitative Easing?

Of course, they would. These are the same guys who had already stolen trillions of dollars from credulous investors in a fraudulent mortgage laundering scam that crashed the economy and brought the financial system to the brink of ruin. Does anyone seriously think that they’d wince at the prospect of dinging the public a second time by shifting their toxic assets onto the Fed’s balance sheet or by accessing free liquidity to fuel their illicit derivatives trades or their other pernicious high-risk activities?

Keep in mind, the Fed never could have carried off this massive looting operation without the help of both the Congress and the president. This simple fact seems to escape even the most vehement critic of the Fed, that is, that the Fed needed policymakers to strangle the economy while it implemented its plan or it would have had to abandon its reflation strategy.

Why??

Well, because if the economy was allowed to rebound, then higher employment would push up wages and raw material costs which in turn would boost inflation. Higher inflation would force the Fed to raise short-term interest rates which would put the kibosh on the cheap money Wall Street needed to buy-back its own shares or engage in other risky speculation. So the real economy had to be sacrificed for Wall Street. Hence, “austerity”.

The fact that Obama’s economics team, led by Lawrence Summers, was trying to lift the economy out of recession without creating conditions for a strong recovery was evident from the very beginning. We know now that chief White House economist Christy Romer wanted a much bigger fiscal stimulus package than the $800 bil that was eventually approved.

FTO school: what's occurring in the economy

It's the debt, and it goes a little something like this.

A corporation has a large debt to service.

Debt is overhead, net is what is left after the debt is paid.

Debt increases as players attempt to stay in the game in an environment of declining net.

Banksters also must attempt to stay in the game. Their products also decline in price (interest).

Negative interest rates are a punishment for those who refuse debt. It's a new rule enacted to keep  the game going.

Are you now burning the furniture to stay warm? The roof and walls? Your clothes?

This cycle works more strongly for private housing and mortgage debt. Most bank assets (i.e. loans) are made against real estate (household and commercial).

Once consumers start to reduce the consumption of corporation's products,  corporations *must* cut prices in an attempt to increase sales, because they *must* service their debt.

Less profit causes corporations to layoff employees, which reduces consumption still further.

Other corporations selling the same product *must* also cut prices.

It's a race down into widespread bankruptcy and bank failure.

Once this process starts, only widespread bankruptcy, debt forgiveness, or inflation can arrest it.

This cycle is a *systemic* property of capitalism.

why do you all allow these parasites to play dice with your species existence?

democracynow |   Black Monday is how economists are describing Monday’s market turmoil, which saw stock prices tumble across the globe, from China to Europe to the United States. China’s stock indices fell over 8 percent on Monday and another 7 percent today. On Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average initially fell a record 1,100 points before closing down nearly 600 points. The decline also caused oil prices to plunge to their lowest levels in almost six years. To make sense of what’s really behind the fluctuations in the market, we are joined by economist Michael Hudson, president of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends, a Wall Street financial analyst and author of the book, "Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy."

looks like a great matinee..., (viacom vs. the vampire squid?)

theburningplatform |   Ultimately, it is a highly entertaining movie with the right moral overtone, despite non-stop profanity that captures the true nature of Wall Street traders. This is a dangerous movie for Wall Street, the government, and the establishment in general. They count on the complexity of Wall Street to confuse the average person and make their eyes glaze over. That makes it easier for them to keep committing fraud and harvesting the nation’s wealth.

This movie cuts through the crap and reveals those in power to be corrupt, greedy weasels who aren’t really as smart as they want you to think they are. The finale of the movie is sobering and infuriating. After unequivocally proving that Wall Street bankers, aided and abetted by the Federal Reserve, Congress, the SEC, and the mainstream media, destroyed the global financial system, put tens of millions out of work, got six million people tossed from their homes, and created the worst crisis since the Great Depression, the filmmakers are left to provide the depressing conclusion.

No bankers went to jail. The Too Big To Fail banks were not broken up – they were bailed out by the American taxpayers. They actually got bigger. Their profits have reached new heights, while the average family has seen their income fall. Wall Street is paying out record bonuses, while 46 million people are on food stamps. Wall Street and their lackeys at the Federal Reserve call the shots in this country. They don’t give a fuck about you. And they’re doing it again.

Every American should see this movie and get fucking pissed off. The theater was deathly silent at the end of the movie. The audience was stunned by the fact that the criminals on Wall Street got away with the crime of the century, and they’re still on the loose. I had a great discussion with my 16 year old son on the way home. At least there is one millennial who understands how bad his generation is getting screwed.

chromatophoric panoptopus

rifters |  I once spoke to a man who’d shared consciousness with an octopus.

I’d expected his tale to be far less frightening than those I’d studied up to that point. Identity has a critical mass, after all; fuse with a million-brain hive and you become little more than a neuron in that network, an insignificant lobe at most. Is the Olfactory Bulb self-aware? Does Broca’s Area demand the vote? Hives don’t just assimilate the self; they annihilate it. They are not banned in the West without reason.

But octopi? Mere invertebrates. Glorified snails. There’s no risk of losing yourself in a mind that small. I might have even tried it myself, for the sheer voyeuristic thrill of perceiving the world through alien eyes.

Before I met Guo, at least.

We met at lunchtime in Stanley Park, but we did not eat. He could not stomach the thought of food while reflecting on his own experience. I suspect he reflected on it a lot; talking to Guo was like interviewing a scarecrow.

It had been, he told me, a simple interface for a simple system: a Pacific Octopus liberated from the captive colony at Yaquina Bay, outfitted with a B2B wrapped around its brain like a spiderweb. Guo had one of his own, a force-grown lattice permeating his corpus callosum in service of some Cloud-killing gig he’d held in Guangdong. The protocols weren’t completely compatible, but could be tweaked.

“So what’s it like to be an octopus?” I asked him.

He didn’t speak for a while. I got the sense he wasn’t so much gathering his thoughts as wrestling with them.

“There’s no such thing as an octopus,” he said at last, softly. “They’re all— colonies.”

“Colonies.”

an obsequious fawning barnacle attacks mr. miracle on behalf of the molluscs....,

fp |  As you drive in through Queens, where LaGuardia Airport and the World’s Fair grounds once stood, you see emerging amid the cranes and the scaffolding the outlines of the Trump Presidential Resort and Casino. Gambling has been legal across America since shortly after his election, providing most of the funding for many of the new president’s signature major projects, from the gilding of customs halls to extending health insurance coverage to include free Hair Club for Men and most forms of plastic surgery for women (or as the new president called it, his “Be Kind to Dogs Act”) to ensuring that every public high school in America has the “Trump bare essentials,” including a heliport, cafeteria cocktail waitresses, and laser teeth whitening for disadvantaged students.

Through all the glitz, however, you notice that the city is starting to take on many of the other grimmer hallmarks of past Trump development projects. Like Atlantic City, it seems full of busloads of the elderly being led past assorted hookers, small-time hoods, and Elvis impersonators. Yakov Smirnoff is the toast of Broadway. And, of course, the city has embraced one of Trump’s favorite financing techniques — bankruptcy. (Just “taking advantage” of the country’s laws, as he likes to put it. Or as he memorably put it in his first inaugural, “Only a schmuck wouldn’t use those laws to cancel the nation’s debt. Serves those Chinese investors who bought U.S. Treasurys right. Am I the nation’s best deal-maker, or what?”)

It is not very luxe on the southern border either. There, a 30-foot-high wall dressed up with the finest gilded barbed wire on top (“I have the biggest heart. The biggest.”) extends from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific. There is just one small door situated between Juárez and El Paso. Over it a sign reads “Servant’s Entrance.” Next to it is a small stand with copies of what has become known as the Trump Constitution, available in “English and Mexican.” One notable alteration is that the 14th Amendment has been deleted. (“Some top legal minds think you can fix the whole problem with white-out. So, that’s what I did. If someone wants to sue, they can sue. Good luck winning now that I can print my own money. Am I the world’s best problem solver, or what?”)

The place where the shine has really come to America, however, is clearly in the White House. Everybody in the country remembers the hourlong television special that featured first lady Melania Knauss-Trump taking Americans on a Jackie Kennedy-like tour of the renovated grounds and “world class” executive mansion. With fountains like those at Las Vegas’s Bellagio (“only classier, much, much classier”), the actual Hall of Mirrors from Versailles (“I made Hollande an offer he couldn’t refuse”), and monitors/screens in every room that stream an around-the-clock live broadcast of a presidential reality show that now is showing on every C-SPAN channel (“And the ratings are killer! I am crushing Dancing with the Stars.), it is not the first Trump Palace, but is now certainly the biggest. (Admittedly, it nearly burned down during Trump’s first state dinner when well-known hothead turned Secretary of State John Bolton actually spontaneously combusted, setting Chinese President Xi Jinping on fire while he was eating the “double” Big Mac the president had promised him. But as the president said, “Fire, what fire? Next question.”)

mr. miracle says "tax the molluscs and help the people!"

WaPo  |  Here's what he told Bloomberg Politics in a television interview Wednesday:

"I would say that the hedge fund people make a lot of money and they pay very little tax. I'm about the middle class. I want the middle class to be thriving again. We're losing our middle-class. ... I would let people that are making hundreds of millions of dollars a year pay some tax, because right now they're paying very little tax, and I think it's outrageous. I want to lower taxes for the middle class."

Asked if he was proposing to raise taxes on himself, Trump replied: "That's right. That's right. I'm okay with it, ready, willing. And you've seen my statements. I mean I do very well. I don't mind paying some tax. The middle class is getting clobbered in this country. The middle class built this country, not the hedge fund guys. But I know people in hedge funds, they pay almost nothing, and it's ridiculous, okay?"

That doesn't sound like a Republican candidate for ... almost anything, really. It sounds like Warren Buffett, the billionaire who became a public spokesman for President Obama's efforts to raise taxes on the rich.

Economic policymaking in the Obama era has been dominated in part by a knock-down partisan fight over whether couples earning $450,000 or more should pay a top tax rate of 35 percent or 39.6 percent. The next Democratic nominee will almost certainly propose raising that rate even more. The Republican nominee will almost certainly propose to cut it.

Unless, that is, the GOP nominates the richest candidate in its field.

blm cathedral acolytes painfully naive to imagine they could faze granny goodness....,

NYTimes |  (Good magazine pointed out: “Hillary Clinton lobbied lawmakers to back the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. Bill Clinton signed the act into law in 1994. The largest crime bill in history, it provided $9.7 billion in prison funding. From 1992 to 2000, the amount of prisoners in the U.S. increased almost 60 percent.”)

Clinton pointed to her record on civil rights work, but she never apologized for, or even acknowledged, her and her husband’s role in giving America the dubious distinction of having the world’s highest incarceration rate.

To me, the diversion was stunning, and telling.

Maggie Haberman noted in The New York Times that the exchange “showed Mrs. Clinton as even her admirers lament that she is seldom seen: spontaneous, impassioned and seemingly unconcerned about potential repercussions.”

Politically, that may be true. She was agile and evasive, for sure. She bobbed and weaved like Floyd Mayweather. But there was a moral issue, an accountability issue, that still hung rotting in the ring: What in her has changed, now that she has seen the devastation a policy she advocated has wrought?

(Last month, at the annual convention of the N.A.A.C.P., Bill Clinton did apologize, saying, “I signed a bill that made the problem worse.” He continued, “And I want to admit it.” His contrition makes Hillary’s nonapology all the more vexing.)

This is the part of the Black Lives Matter political protests that I love so much: The idea that you must test the fealty of your supposed friends in addition to battling the fury of your avowed foes.

The truth of America is that both liberals and conservatives alike have things for which they must answer, sins for which they must atone, when it comes to how the criminal justice system has been aimed at and unleashed upon black people in this country.

And it’s not just the Clintons who have things they must answer for on criminal justice and black people. As I have written about before, toward the end of his tenure, President George W. Bush drastically reduced funding for the Byrne Formula Grant Program, which had been established by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act to supercharge the war on drugs — a disastrous boondoggle that would come to be a war waged primarily against marijuana use by black men.

As the American Civil Liberties Union pointed out in 2011, “The racial disparities are staggering: despite the fact that whites engage in drug offenses at a higher rate than African-Americans, African-Americans are incarcerated for drug offenses at a rate that is 10 times greater than that of whites.’”

A group of senators, mostly Democrats, wrote a letter demanding that the funding be restored. Barack Obama ran on a promise to restore that funding, and once elected, he did just that. As I wrote in 2010:

“The 2009 stimulus package presented these Democrats with the opportunity, and they seized it. The legislation, designed by Democrats and signed by President Obama, included $2 billion for Byrne Grants to be awarded by the end of September 2010. That was nearly a 12-fold increase in financing. Whatever the merits of these programs, they are outweighed by the damage being done. Financing prevention is fine. Financing a race-based arrest epidemic is not.”

And these sins exist not only at the federal level, but also at the local level.

Many of the recent cases have been in some of our most liberal cities — cities that, as Isabel Wilkerson brilliantly pointed out in January, were the very ones to which black Americans flocked during the Great Migration.

puerto rico tied up by cephalopod mollusc with its tentacles in the hon.bro.preznit's pants...,

thenation |  Marc Lasry is perhaps the kind of benefactor—someone who raised $500,000 for Obama’s last campaign—the president and the Democrats think they should keep happy. After all, Lasry was Obama’s choice for ambassador to France in 2013, but unfortunately “had to remove his name from consideration after a close friend was named in a federal indictment for playing in a poker ring with alleged ties to the Russian mafia.” Just last May, Lasry threw a $2,700-a-head fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, while assuring MSN viewers that she is “moving a little bit to the left.” 

Lasry’s ties to big Democratic politics go back many years. A March 2010 feature in The Wall Street Journal (titled “Avenue Capital’s Investor in Chief—He’s Prescient. He’s Well-Connected. Just Don’t Call Marc Lasry a ‘Vulture.’”) describes him lunching with then–White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, in part to advise Emanuel on whether banks would resume lending again in the wake of the 2008 crisis. A 2012 New York Times article said “About 50 people paid $40,000 each to crowd into an art-filled room” in Lasry’s apartment to hear Obama and Bill Clinton speak. Last decade, Lasry’s Avenue Capital even famously employed Chelsea Clinton, whose husband has more recently flopped in making bad investments in Greece while heading his own hedge fund. 

Lasry, who was once a humble UPS driver whose parents convinced him to go to law school, seems to be at heart a gambler capable of rolling the dice with anyone in the global Wall Street hedge-fund casino dice game—as well as actual casino owners, like Republican candidate and anti-Mexican bigot/misogynist Donald Trump. This partnership, which stretches back to Trump’s Atlantic City casino bankruptcy in 2009, eventually resulted in Lasry buying him out and becoming the chairman of Trump Entertainment Resorts in 2011, a post Lasry eventually resigned. 

The stories about Lasry in the business press describe him as the “don’t call him that” vulture-fund investor; the optimistic gambler who “bets” on economies like those of Spain or Greece to “recover,” and then profits from that. This 2012 Bloomberg story describes a regular poker game he has with other hedge-fund managers; one colleague assesses him as “good at figuring out what the odds are. He’s willing to take moderate risk.” 

Yet it’s pretty hard to believe that someone who is worth $1.87 billion, according to Forbes—presumably an indication of good business sense—would believe that economies that are in a “death spiral” would miraculously recover. It’s more likely that rather than believing in a Puerto Rican economy that had shown no signs of growth for so long, and whose economy was largely driven by government employment, Lasry bet that its inability to declare bankruptcy would yield a higher return once it defaulted. Avenue Capital was one of many vultures that began hovering over Puerto Rico in late 2013, when its junk-leaning bonds caused credit analyst Richard Larkin to say of the vultures, “They can smell the blood and the fear.”

the mollusc saying "austerity won't work in America" doesn't make it so...,

archdruidreport |  Stories in the media, some recent, some recently reprinted, happen to have brought up a couple of first-rate examples of the way that resources get locked up in unproductive activities during the twilight years of a failing society. A California newspaper, for example, recently mentioned that Elon Musk’s large and much-ballyhooed fortune is almost entirely a product of government subsidies. Musk is a smart guy; he obviously realized a good long time ago that federal and state subsidies for technology was where the money was at, and he’s constructed an industrial empire funded by US taxpayers to the tune of many billions of dollars. None of his publicly traded firms has ever made a profit, and as long as the subsidies keep flowing, none of them ever has to; between an overflowing feed trough of government largesse and the longstanding eagerness of fools to be parted from their money by way of the stock market, he’s pretty much set for life.

This is business as usual in today’s America. An article from 2013 pointed out, along the same lines, that the profits made by the five largest US banks were almost exactly equal to the amount of taxpayer money those same five banks got from the government. Like Elon Musk, the banks in question have figured out where the money is, and have gone after it with their usual verve; the revolving door that allows men in suits to shuttle back and forth between those same banks and the financial end of the US government doesn’t exactly hinder that process. It’s lucrative, it’s legal, and the mere fact that it’s bankrupting the real economy of goods and services in order to further enrich an already glutted minority of kleptocrats is nothing anyone in the citadels of power worries about.

A useful light on a different side of the same process comes from an editorial (in PDF) which claims that something like half of all current scientific papers are unreliable junk. Is this the utterance of an archdruid, or some other wild-eyed critic of science? No, it comes from the editor of Lancet, one of the two or three most reputable medical journals on the planet. The managing editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, which has a comparable ranking to Lancet, expressed much the same opinion of the shoddy experimental design, dubious analysis, and blatant conflicts of interest that pervade contemporary scientific research.

Notice that what’s happening here affects the flow of information in the same way that misplaced government subsidies affect the flow of investment. The functioning of the scientific process, like that of the market, depends on the presupposition that everyone who takes part abides by certain rules. When those rules are flouted, individual actors profit, but they do so at the expense of the whole system: the results of scientific research are distorted so that (for example) pharmaceutical firms can profit from drugs that don’t actually have the benefits claimed for them, just as the behavior of the market is distorted so that (for example) banks that would otherwise struggle for survival, and would certainly not be able to pay their CEOs gargantuan bonuses, can continue on their merry way. 

 

....

These days, despite a practically endless barrage of rhetoric to the contrary, the great majority of Americans are getting fewer and fewer benefits from the industrial system, and are being forced to pay more and more of its costs, so that a relatively small fraction of the population can monopolize an ever-increasing fraction of the national wealth and contribute less and less in exchange. What’s more, a growing number of Americans are aware of this fact. The traditional schism of a collapsing society into a dominant minority and an internal proletariat, to use Arnold Toynbee’s terms, is a massive and accelerating social reality in the United States today.

As that schism widens, and more and more Americans are forced into the Third World poverty that’s among the unmentionable realities of public life in today’s United States, several changes of great importance are taking place. The first, of course, is precisely that a great many Americans are perforce learning to live with less—not in the playacting style popular just now on the faux-green end of the privileged classes, but really, seriously living with much less, because that’s all there is. That’s a huge shift and a necessary one, since the absurd extravagance many Americans consider to be a normal lifestyle is among the most important things that will be landing in history’s compost heap in the not too distant future.

At the same time, the collective consensus that keeps the hopelessly dysfunctional institutions of today’s status quo glued in place is already coming apart, and can be expected to dissolve completely in the years ahead. What sort of consensus will replace it, after the inevitable interval of chaos and struggle, is anybody’s guess at this point—though it’s vanishingly unlikely to have anything to do with the current political fantasies of left and right.

the men with guns work for the cephalopod molluscs...,

globalresearch |  "Once again a country “liberated” by the West is sinking deeper and deeper into chaos.” Global Research. 

This could be anyone of the countries in conflict, where Washington and its Western and Middle Eastern stooges sow war – eternal chaos, misery, death – and submission.

This is precisely the point: The Washington / NATO strategy is not to ‘win’ a war or conflict, but to create ongoing – endless chaos. That’s the way (i) to control people, nations and their resources; (ii) to assures the west a continuous need for military – troops and equipment – remember more than 50% of the US GDP depends on the military industrial complex, related industries and services; and (iii) finally, a country in disarray or chaos, is broke and needs money – money with hardship conditions, ‘austerity’ money from the notorious IMF, World Bank and other associated nefarious ‘development institutions’ and money lenders; money that equals enslavement, especially with corrupt leaders that do not care for their people.

That’s the name of the game – in Yemen, in Ukraine, in Syria, in Iraq, in Sudan, in Central Africa, in Libya…. you name it. Who fights against whom is unimportant. ISIS / ISIL / IS / DAISH / DAESH / Al-Qaeda and whatever other names for the mercenary killer organizations you want to add to the list – are just tags to confuse. You might as well add Blackwater, Xe, Academi and all its other successive names chosen to escape easy recognition. They are prostitutes for the Zionist-Anglo-Saxon Empire, prostitutes of the lowest level. Then come elite prostitutes, like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and other Gulf States, plus the UK and France, of course.

President Hollande has just signed a multi-billion euro contract with Qatar for the sale of 24 Rafale fighter jets. He is now heading to Riyadh for talks with the Saudi King Salman, and to sell more Rafale planes – it’s good business and helps killing off the fabricated enemies; and also to attend a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) summit on 5 May. Topics of discussions at the meeting are the ‘crises’ of the region including in Yemen, planted by the west on behalf of Washington (and its Zionist masters) and blamed on the ‘rebels’ who are seeking merely a more just government.

The west has invented a vocabulary so sick, it’s like a virus ingrained in our brains – or what’s left of it – that we don’t even know anymore what the words really mean. We repeat them and believe them. After all, the MSM drills them into our intestines day-in and day-out. People who fight for their freedom, for survival against oppressive regimes, are ‘terrorists’, ‘rebels’. – The refugees from Africa, from the Washington inflicted conflict-stricken countries, the refugees of whom more than 4,000 have already perished this year trying to cross the Mediterranean for a ‘better life’ – they have been conveniently renamed ‘immigrants’. Often the term ‘illegal’ is added. Thus, the west’s conscience is whitewashed from guilt. Immigrants are beggars. Illegal immigrants belong jailed. They have nothing to do with unrest and chaos planted by the west in the ‘immigrants’ home countries. – Shame on you, Brussels!