74 percent of Russians have negative feelings towards the USA

“If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you,” said Calvin Coolidge, whose portrait hung in the Cabinet Room of the Reagan White House.

Among the dispositions shared by the two conservatives was a determination to stay out of other people’s wars.

Peering into 2015, there are wars into which our interventionists are eager to plunge that represent no immediate or grave threat to us.

One is the war the Islamic State group is waging in Syria and Iraq, a menace so great, we are told, it may require U.S. ground troops.

But why? Syria and Iraq are 5,000 miles away. And because of its barbarism and incompetence, the Islamic State is losing support in the Sunni lands it now occupies.

The Kurds have halted the group’s advance toward Irbil, Iraq. Shiite militias, no friends of ours, have halted its advance toward Baghdad. The Islamic State is under steady drone and air attack by the U.S. and Arab allies. Iran is providing men and materiel to Damascus and Baghdad in their battle against the group.

Now the Turks and Gulf Arabs, including the Saudis, appear to have awakened to the threat and are weighing in against the Islamic State.

Why not let them do the fighting?

By staying out of the two world wars of the 20th century until the other great powers were fully engaged and horribly bled, America emerged triumphant with the fewest casualties and least damage.

That used to be called statesmanship.

Moreover, compared with Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, Stalin’s USSR and Mao’s China, the Islamic State doesn’t even make the “JV,” to use Barack Obama’s term.

Last month, the drums were beating for an attack on North Korea for what Sen. John McCain called a “new form of warfare” and what Sen. Lindsey Graham called “cyberterrorism” aided by China.

In “A Reply to Kim’s Cyberterrorism,” The Wall Street Journal urged a “forceful response” to deter “future attacks.” Swiftly, there followed the crashing of North Korea’s Internet system.

Query: If reports are true that Sony Pictures was hacked by ticked-off ex-employees yet North Korea’s Internet was brought down by a U.S. cyberattack, who is the cyberterrorist now?

Perhaps some of those Iranian technicians in Natanz who watched their centrifuges breaking down and blowing up from the Stuxnet virus have some thoughts on this.
But the most determined push for war in 2015 will come from neocons and interventionists who want a U.S.-Putin confrontation and regime change in Russia.

And as Russia has a nuclear arsenal to match our own, this is a matter of real gravity.

Because of U.S.-EU sanctions on Russia for its role in Ukraine and the collapse in the price of oil, Russia’s principal export, the ruble has lost half its value, and the economy faces a contraction of 5 percent in 2015.

Real hardships lie ahead for the Russian people. But it seems they are not blaming Vladimir Putin for their troubles. They are blaming us.

“According to the respected Moscow ‘Levada Center,’ which measures political sentiment in Russian society,” the New York Observer reports, “74 percent of Russians have negative feelings towards the USA. … In the 1990s, 80 percent had positive attitude toward America.

“Currently, 76 percent of Russians hate Obama personally and only a meager 2 percent like him. … These are the maximum peaks of anti-American feelings in Russia in years. … Just last week Visa and MasterCard completely stopped their operations in Crimea, leaving more than 2 million people there without access to their money.”

One Moscow supermarket is using American flags as doormats, and customers are wiping their feet on them.

Before going home, Congress voted to levy new sanctions on Russia and authorized U.S. lethal weapons to be sent to Kiev to enable Ukraine to retake Luhansk and Donetsk and perhaps Crimea.

Obama signed the bill.

Credit to Common Sense

Culture of Death Leading to WWIII?

WASHINGTON -- Some people believe mankind is progressing - growing wiser, getting better. But the authors of The Race to Save Our Century point out the last 100 years were the deadliest in recorded history, and the next century may be even deadlier.

Co-authors John Zmirak and Jason Jones lay out the reasons that genocide and total war, eugenics and totalitarianism were able to triumph over the principles of humane civilization in the 20th century.

Slaughtered 133 Mllion Citizens

"Poison gas, concentration camps: nobody in 1913 - the era of Sherlock Holmes - would have imagined the evils of the 20th century. But there were reasons they came about," Zmirak told CBN News.

"And they came about because modern secular philosophy had undermined the core principles of the moral law that the Judeo-Christian civilization had relied upon for centuries," he said.

That allowed a culture of death to flourish, and a century where governments committed mass "democide" and murdered 133.1 million of their own citizens.

Americans who think their country is too civilized to commit such barbarism may want to consider how average folks all around them have killed more than 56 million of America's most vulnerable citizens through abortion.

"Abortion I would say is the rock foundation of the culture of death," Jones said.

Jones asserts that violence in the womb cannot help but spread out beyond the womb.

Your Children Will Die in the Camps?

"If we don't see full legal protection for the human person from the moment of biological beginning through natural death, you can expect your children or grandchildren to die in the gulag, to die in the concentration camp," Jones said

Jones doesn't believe this just because of his study of history. He feels it deeply in his bones, because for Jones, this is incredibly personal.

As he put it to CBN News, his life didn't bring him to the abortion issue; the abortion issue invaded his life.

It started two days before his seventeenth birthday with a visit from his high school sweetheart.

"She came over to my house and woke me up with the words, 'I'm pregnant,'" Jones said.

They then came up with a secret plot: in two days, Jones would join the Army and soon be supporting their little family.

But then while he was at basic training, his girlfriend called him, weeping uncontrollably before her dad grabbed the phone away.

"And then her father said, 'We know your secret now and you can come home. It's gone. We took Katie to get an abortion,'" he recalled.

'He Killed My Baby!'

Jones went wild and screamed at his commanding officer.

"Call the police. Call the police. He killed my baby!" Jones recalled yelling.

But Jones said the captain replied, "'Private, why would I call the police? Don't you know that abortion is legal?' And, you know, I didn't."

That same day, the young Army enlistee made a pledge to his girlfriend that has steered his entire life.

Jones recalled saying to her, "'Katie, I promise you for my child, that if it takes me the rest of my life, I'm going to end abortion in America.'"

And that is what he's been working for since, producing and promoting pro-life movies like "Bella" and "Crescendo" and writing books like this one.

Jones and Zmirak believe the culture of death that allows abortion is the same one that leads to genocide, ethnic cleansing, and governments murdering their own citizens.

But before that culture of death overwhelmed the world 100 years ago, Zmirak said most mankind believed like people today that civilization was on an upward trajectory.

One Assassination Led to Two World Wars

"A hundred years ago, the world was at peace. In western Europe you didn't need a passport to go from country to country. There was vast technological progress," Zmirak explained.

"Everyone thought that the 20th century would be an era of peace, progress, international tranquility, and wealth. Then one archduke got shot in Austria and 20 million people died," he continued. "And then 20 years later that war laid the groundwork for another war in which 60 million people died."

Jones believes humanity could be headed down the same path now.

"From Ebola to the border crisis to Russia invading Ukraine to the war in Israel to the ethnic cleansing of Christians across the Middle East, we see the same things happening today in our world that were happening 100 years ago with the Bolshevik Revolution, the Armenian genocide, and World War I," he warned.

In The Race to Save Our Century, these gentlemen propose several core principles they believe can save the world from a vast, bloody re-run.

"And there are five core principles that we think anyone, any rational good-hearted person of good will could accept," Zmirak said. "And they really correspond with the natural law that Saint Paul said is written on the human heart."

Acknowledging a Universal Law

One of those principles is acknowledging there is a natural, God-given law, or as Zmirak put it, "the existence of a transcendent moral order that is higher than any secular law, which can tell you that segregation or abortion or apartheid is intrinsically evil regardless of what the Supreme Court or the dictator or the secret police says."

Zmirak and Jones declare the U.S. Supreme Court basically threw out this transcendent moral order and made man the ultimate authority when it said in a 1992 abortion case it was up to each human to decide what is life and death.

The Court wrote in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania vs. Casey: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of human life."

So much for godly authority. If you decide a human is not a human, then they're not.

That leads to the need for this next core principle: accepting the infinite dignity and worth of each human person.

"We must reaffirm the founding truth of humanism - that every human being is important, unique, and dignified," the authors say in the book. "He or she deserves the same reverence we demand for ourselves."

"We see the rise of this beautiful civilization that we inherited," Jones said, looking across history over the last two millennia. "But with the denial of the incomparable dignity of the human person, we will see everything that we take for granted disappear."

'The Wiper of Every Runny Nose'

Among the other core principles to save humanity - and liberty - is trying to get back to small, decentralized government that's close, responsive, and accountable to its citizens -- not the kind of government that butts into everyone's lives, tries to solve every problem, and meet every need.

Zmirak characterized such government as "The wiper of every runny nose."

"Because when the government grows and steps into those roles, it invariably exerts control over people, and then you don't have a free society anymore," he said.

In the last century, vicious dictators like China's Mao Tse-Tung and the Soviet Union's Josef Stalin could squash the freedom of hundreds of millions and slaughter tens of millions. But the hi-tech world ahead will allow future tyrants close to total, computer-controlled domination of their citizens.

And it will give future warriors weapons that could actually exterminate all mankind.

"The next world war is going to be much shorter and immensely more violent. It's unimaginable," Jones stated. "To think of World War III is actually unimaginable."

That's why Jones and Zmirak say we so desperately need a Race to Save Our Century.

Credit to CBN

NBC Prediction That We Will All Have an RFID Chip by 2017

Russia's "Startling" Proposal To Europe: Dump The US, Join The Eurasian Economic Union

Slowly but surely Europe is figuring out that as a result of the western economic and financial blockade of Russian, it is Europe itself that is suffering the most. And while Germany was first to acknowledge this late in 2014 when its economy swooned and is now on the verge of a recession, now others are catching on. Case in point: the former head of the European Commission, and Italy’s former Prime Minister, Romano Prodi who told Messaggero newspaper that the "weaker Russian economy is extremely unprofitable for Italy."

The other details from Prodi's statement:

Lowered prices in the international energy markets have positive aspects for the Italian consumers, who pay less for the fuel, but the effect will be only short-term. In the long-term however the weaker economic situation in countries producing energy resources, caused by lower oil and gas prices, mostly in Russia, is extremely unprofitable for Italy, he said.

“The lowering of the oil and gas prices in combination with the sanctions, pushed by the Ukrainian crisis, will drop the Russian GPD by five percent per annum, and thus it will cause cutting of the Italian export by about 50%,” Prodi said.

“Setting aside the uselessness or imminence of the sanctions, one should highlight a clear skew: regardless of the rouble rate against dollar, which is lower by almost a half, the American export to Russia is growing, while the export from Europe is shrinking.”

In other words, just as slowly, the world is starting to grasp the bottom line: it is not the financial exposure to Russia, or the threat of financial contagion should Russia suffer a major recession or worse: it is something far simpler that will lead to the biggest harm for Europe's countries. The lack of trade. Because while central banks can monetize everything, leading to an unprecedented asset bubble which if only for the time being boosts investor and consumer confidence, they can't print trade - that all important driver of growth in a globalized world long before central banks were set to monetize over $1 trillion in bonds each and every year to mask the fact that the world is deep in a global depression.

Which is why we read the following report written in yesterday'sDeutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten with great interest because it goes right to the bottom line. In it Russia has a not so modest proposal to Europe: dump trade with the US, whose call for Russian "costs" has cost you another year of declining economic growth, and instead join the Eurasian Economic Union! From the source:

Russia has presented a startling proposal to overcome the tensions with the EU: The EU should renounce the free trade agreement with the United States TTIP and enter into a partnership with the newly established Eurasian Economic Union instead. A free trade zone with the neighbors would make more sense than a deal with the US.

It surely would, but then how will Europe feign outrage when the NSA is found to have spied yet again on its "closest trading partners?" Some more on Russia's proposal from EUobserver:

Vladimir Chizhov told EUobserver: “Our idea is to start official contacts between the EU and the EAEU as soon as possible. [German] chancellor Angela Merkel talked about this not long ago. The EU sanctions [on Russia] are not a hindrance”.

“I think that common sense advises us to explore the possibility of establishing a common economic space in the Eurasian region, including the focus countries of the Eastern Partnership [an EU policy on closer ties with Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine]".

"We might think of a free trade zone encompassing all of the interested parties in Eurasia”.

He described the new Russia-led bloc as a better partner for the EU than the US, with a dig at health standards in the US food industry.

“Do you believe it is wise to spend so much political energy on a free trade zone with the USA while you have more natural partners at your side, closer to home? We don’t even chlorinate our chickens”, the ambassador said.

The treaty establishing the Eurasian Union entered into life on Thursday (1 January).

It includes Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia, with Kyrgyzstan to join in May.

Modelled on the EU, it has a Moscow-based executive body, the Eurasian Economic Commission, and a political body, the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council, where member states’ leaders take decisions by unanimity.

It has free movement of workers and a single market for construction, retail, and tourism. Over the next 10 years, it aims to create a court in Minsk, a financial regulator in Astana and, possibly, to open Eurasian Economic Commission offices in Astana, Bishkek, Minsk, and Yerevan.

It also aims to launch free movement of capital, goods, and services, and to extend its single market to 40 other sectors, with pharmaceuticals next in line in 2016.

And as a reminder: The Eurasian Economic Union, a trade bloc of former Soviet states, expanded to four nations Friday when Armenia formally joined, a day after the union between Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan began.

So the ball is in your court, Europe: will it be a triple-dip (and soon thereafter quadruple: see Japan) recession as your Goldman-controlled central bank plunders ever more of what little is left of middle-class wealth with promises that this year - for real - is when it all turns around, or will Europe acknowledge it has had enough and shifts its strategic, and trade, focus from west (speaking of the TTIP, Germany's agriculture minister just said "We can't protect every sausage" referring to the TTIP) to east?

Considering just whose interests are represented by the unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, we won't be holding our breath.

Credit to Zero Hedge

Financial Meltdown and Confiscation of Your Money

Jim Willie 2015 New Year Special

Who Is Behind The Oil War, And How Low Will The Price Of Crude Go In 2015?

Who is to blame for the staggering collapse of the price of oil?  Is it the Saudis?  Is it the United States?  Are Saudi Arabia and the U.S. government working together to hurt Russia?  And if this oil war continues, how far will the price of oil end up falling in 2015?  As you will see below, some analysts believe that it could ultimately go below 20 dollars a barrel.  

If we see anything even close to that, the U.S. economy could lose millions of good paying jobs, billions of dollars of energy bonds could default and we could see trillions of dollars of derivatives related to the energy industry implode.  The global financial system is already extremely vulnerable, and purposely causing the price of oil to crash is one of the most deflationary things that you could possibly do.  Whoever is behind this oil war is playing with fire, and by the end of this coming year the entire planet could be dealing with the consequences.

Ever since the price of oil started falling, people have been pointing fingers at the Saudis.  And without a doubt, the Saudis have manipulated the price of oil before in order to achieve geopolitical goals.  The following is an excerpt from a recent article by Andrew Topf…

We don’t have to look too far back in history to see Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter and producer, using the oil price to achieve its foreign policy objectives. In 1973, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat convinced Saudi King Faisal to cut production and raise prices, then to go as far as embargoing oil exports, all with the goal of punishing the United States for supporting Israel against the Arab states. It worked. The “oil price shock” quadrupled prices.

It happened again in 1986, when Saudi Arabia-led OPEC allowed prices to drop precipitously, and then in 1990, when the Saudis sent prices plummeting as a way of taking out Russia, which was seen as a threat to their oil supremacy. In 1998, they succeeded. When the oil price was halved from $25 to $12, Russia defaulted on its debt.

The Saudis and other OPEC members have, of course, used the oil price for the obverse effect, that is, suppressing production to keep prices artificially high and member states swimming in “petrodollars”. In 2008, oil peaked at $147 a barrel.

Turning to the current price drop, the Saudis and OPEC have a vested interest in taking out higher-cost competitors, such as US shale oil producers, who will certainly be hurt by the lower price. Even before the price drop, the Saudis were selling their oil to China at a discount. OPEC’s refusal on Nov. 27 to cut production seemed like the baldest evidence yet that the oil price drop was really an oil price war between Saudi Arabia and the US.

If the Saudis wanted to stabilize the price of oil, they could do that immediately by announcing a production cutback.

The fact that they have chosen not to do this says volumes.

In addition to wanting to harm U.S. shale producers, some believe that the Saudis are determined to crush Iran.  This next excerpt comes from a recent Daily Mail article…

Above all, Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies see Iran — a bitter religious and political opponent — as their main regional adversary.

They know that Iran, dominated by the Shia Muslim sect, supports a resentful underclass of more than a million under-privileged and angry Shia people living in the gulf peninsula — a potential uprising waiting to happen against the Saudi regime.

The Saudis, who are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslims, also loathe the way Iran supports President Assad’s regime in Syria — with which the Iranians have a religious affiliation. They also know that Iran, its economy plagued by corruption and crippled by Western sanctions, desperately needs the oil price to rise. And they have no intention of helping out.

The fact is that the Saudis remain in a strong position because oil is cheap to produce there, and the country has such vast reserves. It can withstand a year — or three — of low oil prices.

There are others out there that are fully convinced that the Saudis and the U.S. are actually colluding to drive down the price of oil, and that their real goal is to destroy Russia.

In fact, Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro openly promoted this theory during a recent speech on Venezuelan national television…

“Did you know there’s an oil war? And the war has an objective: to destroy Russia,” he said in a speech to state businessmen carried live on state TV.

“It’s a strategically planned war … also aimed at Venezuela, to try and destroy our revolution and cause an economic collapse,” he added, accusing the United States of trying to flood the market with shale oil.

Venezuela and Russia, which both have fractious ties with Washington, are widely considered the nations hardest hit by the global oil price fall.

And as I discussed just the other day, Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to agree with this theory…

“We all see the lowering of oil prices. There’s lots of talk about what’s causing it. Could it be an agreement between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia to punish Iran and affect the economies of Russia and Venezuela? It could.”

Without a doubt, Obama wants to “punish” Russia for what has been going on in Ukraine.  Going after oil is one of the best ways to do that.  And if the U.S. shale industry gets hurt in the process, that is a bonus for the radical environmentalists in Obama’s administration.

There are yet others that see this oil war as being even more complicated.

Marin Katusa believes that this is actually a three-way war between OPEC, Russia and the United States…

“It’s a three-way oil war between OPEC, Russia and North American shale,” says Marin Katusa, author of “The Colder War,” and chief energy investment strategist at Casey Research.

Katusa doesn’t see production slowing in 2015: “We know that OPEC will not be cutting back production. They’re going to increase it. Russia has increased production to all-time highs.” With Russia and OPEC refusing to give up market share how will the shale industry compete?

Katusa thinks the longevity and staying power of the shale industry will keep it viable and profitable. “The versatility and the survivability of a lot of these shale producers will surprise people. I don’t see that the shale sector is going to collapse over night,” he says. Shale sweet spots like North Dakota’s Bakken region and Texas’ Eagle Ford area will help keep production levels up and output steady.

Whatever the true motivation for this oil war is, it does not appear that it is going to end any time soon.

And so that means that the price of oil is going to go lower.

How much lower?

One analyst recently told CNN that we could see the price of oil dip into the $30s next year…

Few saw the energy meltdown coming. Now that it’s here, industry analysts warn another move lower is possible as the momentum remains firmly to the downside.

“If this doesn’t hold, we could go back to price levels in late 2008 and early 2009 — down in the $30s. There’s no reason why it couldn’t happen,” said Darin Newsom, senior analyst at Telvent DTN.

Others are even more pessimistic.  For instance, Jeremy Warner of the Sydney Morning Herald, who correctly predicted that the price of oil would fall below $80 this year, is now forecasting that the price of oil could fall all the way down to $20 next year…

Revisiting the past year’s predictions is, for most columnists a frequently humbling experience. The howlers tend to far outweigh the successes. Yet, for a change, I can genuinely claim to have got my main call for markets – that oil would sink to $US80 a barrel or less – spot on, and for the right reasons, too.

Just in case you think I’m making it up, this is what I said 12 months ago: “My big prediction is for $US80 oil, from which much of the rest of my outlook for the coming year flows. It’s hard to overstate the significance of a much lower oil price – Brent at, say, $US80 a barrel, or perhaps lower still – yet this is a surprisingly likely prospect, the implications of which have been largely missed by mainstream economic forecasters.”

If on to a good thing, you might as well stick with it; so for the coming year, I’m doubling up on this forecast. Far from bouncing back to the post crisis “normal” of something over $US100 a barrel, as many oil traders seem to expect, my view is that the oil price will remain low for a long time, sinking to perhaps as little as $US20 a barrel over the coming year before recovering a little.

But even Warner’s chilling prediction is not the most bearish.

A technical analyst named Abigail Doolittle recently told CNBC that under a worst case scenario the price of oil could fall as low as $14 a barrel…

No one really saw 2014’s dramatic plunge in oil price coming, so it’s probably fair to say that any predictions about where it’s going from here fall somewhere between educated guesses and picking a number out of a hat.

In that light, it’s less than shocking to see one analyst making a case—albeit in a pure outlier sense—for a drop all the way below $14 a barrel.

Abigail Doolittle, who does business under the name Peak Theories Research, posits that current chart trends point to the possibility that crude has three downside target areas where it could find support—$44, $35 and the nightmare scenario of, yes, $13.65.

But the truth is that none of those scenarios need to happen in order for this oil war to absolutely devastate the U.S. economy and the U.S. financial system.

There is a very strong correlation between the price of oil and the performance of energy stocks and energy bonds.  But over the past couple of weeks this correlation has been broken.  The following chart comes from Zero Hedge…

It is inevitable that at some point we will see energy stocks and energy bonds come back into line with the price of crude oil.

And it isn’t just energy stocks and bonds that we need to be concerned about.  There is only one other time in all of history when the price of oil has crashed by more than 50 dollars in less than a year.  That was in 2008 – just before the great financial crisis that erupted in the fall of that year.  For much, much more on this, please see my previous article entitled “Guess What Happened The Last Time The Price Of Oil Crashed Like This?…”

Whether the price of oil crashed or not, we were already on the verge of massive financial troubles.

But the fact that the price of oil has collapsed makes all of our potential problems much, much worse.

As we enter 2015, keep an eye on energy stocks, energy bonds and listen for any mention of problems with derivatives.  The next great financial crisis is right around the corner, but most people will never see it coming until they are blindsided by it.

Credit to Economic Collapse