Afghanistan

“We are seeking to understand the risk that corrupt foreign officials, or transnational criminals, may be using premium U.S. real estate to secretly invest millions in dirty money,” said FinCEN Director Jennifer Shasky Calvery. “Cash purchases present a more complex gap that we seek to address. These GTOs will produce valuable data that will assist law enforcement and inform our broader efforts to combat money laundering in the real estate sector.”

As the towering forces that are prevailing against failing global economic architecture and the pit of debt beneath that structure, as laid out below, it is clear that the 'Epocalypse' - encompassing the roots "economic, epoch, collapse" and "apocalypse" - is here, and it is everywhere. The Great Collapse has already begun. What follows are the megatrends that will increasingly gang up in the first part of 2016 to stomp the deeply flawed global economy down into its own hole of debt.

• Oil slips toward $30, traders bet on more falls (Reuters)
• Oil Plunge Sparks Bankruptcy Concerns (WSJ)
• RBS cries 'sell everything' as deflationary crisis nears (Telegraph)
• World stocks drop but Europe shrugs off oil slide, China money market surge (Reuters)
• Canadian Stocks Fall in Longest Slump Since 2002 as Oil Slides (BBG)
• "Murderous" Yuan Rate Jolts Hong Kong as Top Currency Hub (BBG)

“I’m not going to answer that. No, no, no. I don’t want to talk to you”...

The state of our nation under Obama has become more bureaucratic, more debt-ridden, more violent, more militarized, more fascist, more lawless, more invasive, more corrupt, more untrustworthy, more mired in war, and more unresponsive to the wishes and needs of the electorate. Most of all, the government, already diabolical and manipulative to the nth degree, has mastered the art of "do what I say and not what I do" hypocrisy.

Unique among the countries on earth, the US government insists that its laws and dictates take precedence over the sovereignty of nations. Neoconned Washington claims that as History chose America to exercise its hegemony over the world, no other law is relevant. Only Washington’s will counts.

The mainspring of Islamic extremism and militancy isn’t the moderate and democratic political Islam, because why would people turn to violence when they can exercise their right to choose their rulers? The mainspring of Islamic militancy is the despotic and militant political Islam of the Gulf variety. The Western powers are fully aware of this fact, then why do they choose to support the same forces that have nurtured jihadism and terroris?

Reports now suggest the string of sex assaults allegedly perpetrated by asylum seekers on New Year's Eve wasn't confined to Germany as women in Switzerland, Austria, and Finland say they experienced similar attacks to those which occurred in Cologne. Germany now says it's prepared to deport those responsible, while little by little, Angela Merkel's rheotric is shifting.

For more than four decades Washington’s middle eastern policy has been dead wrong and increasingly counter-productive and destructive. Washington’s Mideast policy is predicated on the assumption that the answer to high oil prices and energy security is deployment of the Fifth Fleet to the Persian Gulf. And that an associated alliance with one of the most corrupt, despotic, avaricious and benighted tyrannies in the modern world is the lynch pin to regional stability and US national security. Nothing could be further from the truth. The House of Saud is a scourge on mankind that would have been eliminated decades ago, save for Imperial Washington’s deplorable coddling and massive transfer of arms and political support.

We don’t have a dog in this fight.  San Bernardino doesn’t change the calculation.  ISIS will eventually collapse under its own homicidal and parasitical weight, probably with the help of one or more of its neighbors, whose inactivity and divisiveness we currently underwrite. Then ISIS will be replaced by something better... or worse... it is impossible to know in this region.  In the interim, we and our European friends should focus our efforts on isolating ourselves from the madness.  And we certainly should not go out of our way to draw further fire.

"The United States should do everything possible to avoid choosing sides in an intensifying proxy war between the dominant Shiite and Sunni powers in the Middle East. Though history tells us we should tilt toward Saudi Arabia, our old ally, if we look toward the future, Iran is the more logical partner. The reasons are simple: Iran’s security interests are closer to ours than Saudi Arabia’s are."

It doesn’t matter what the issue is - whether it’s a rancher standing his ground over grazing rights, a minister jailed for holding a Bible study in his own home, or a community outraged over police shootings of unarmed citizens - these are the building blocks of a political powder keg. Much like the heated protests that arose after the police shootings in Ferguson and Baltimore, there’s a subtext to the Oregon incident that must not be ignored, and it is simply this: America is a pressure cooker with no steam valve, and things are about to blow. Now all that remains is a spark, and it need not be a very big one, to set the whole powder keg aflame.

Because the sectarian divide is set to become the key geopolitical issue in the weeks and months ahead, we thought it an opportune time to present the following map from Goldman which does a nice job of delineating the Sunni-Shiite split in the Mid-East.

There’s really one supreme element of this story that you must keep in view at all times: a society (i.e. an economy + a polity = a political economy) based on debt that will never be paid back is certain to crack up. Its institutions will stop functioning. Its business activities will seize up. Its leaders will be demoralized. Its denizens will act up and act out. Its wealth will evaporate. Given where we are in human history - the moment of techno-industrial over-reach - this crackup will not be easy to recover from. Things have gone too far in too many ways. The coming crackup will re-set the terms of civilized life to levels largely pre-techno-industrial. How far backward remains to be seen.

Earlier in 2015, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that he found it difficult to understand what Russia was doing in Syria, since "it does not even border Syria." By that logic, Turkey should not be "doing anything" in the Palestinian territories, Somalia, Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan or any of the non-bordering lands into which its neo-Ottoman impulses have pushed it.