Middle East

Financial fraud is any method by which deception or duplicity induces those with money to "invest" in a scheme...   

"Things took off beginning in September. Since then, our dealers have been totally overrun. We have never experienced anything like this in the 21 years of our corporate history. Fear: This is not rational. The important term is: 'refugee crisis'."

Today we get another confirmation just how bad Apple end-demand has become, with news out of India that Apple has cut prices of its latest iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus by up to 16% just two months after their launch in India to boost flagging sales in what is historically its most crucial quarter as demand for the flagship devices nosedived from a Diwali high.

The American people are asleep at the wheel. The blame is not totally their’s, but they do bare the brunt of the blame. The mainstream media does not report what is happening within our economy or the geopolitical arena, unless they can spew on and on about the endless rainbows, unicorns and how “America is the greatest and Putin is the devil." As Paul Craig Roberts warns, we are facing a world in change and the pace is quickening.

"I am not confirming or denying anything to do with this matter, but it is good that people like Samir Qantar will not be part of our world.

"Such acts of the Zionist regime, which have become a consistent method, are the most dangerous forms of state terrorism."

Al-Qaeda inspired terrorism is a threat to the Western countries but the Islamic countries are encountering a much bigger threat of inter-sectarian conflict. For centuries the Sunni and Shi’a Muslims have coexisted in relative peace throughout the Islamic World but now certain vested interests are deliberately stoking the fire of inter-sectarian strife to distract attention away from the Home Front: that is, the popular movements for democracy and enfranchisement in the Arab World.

The basic policy-difference on Syria has been between U.S. President Barack Obama’s insistence that Syria’s legal President must be ousted before any peace-process starts, versus Russian President Vladimir Putin’s insistence that no foreign power possesses the right to determine whom the leader of Syria or any other country will or won’t be - only the residents there do, via free and fair democratic elections. Putin proposes an internationally monitored and verified election in Syria to determine the identity of Syria’s President; Obama has rejected that proposal - until now.

“To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious, but the stupid have an answer for everything.” ~Edward Abbey

One could be forgiven to hypothesize that there would be some negative response in the travel to the Middle East.  Instead as shown below, this regional hotbed continues to see a stunning record growth in passenger traffic from America.  And this unusual growth stands out as the highest of any destination.

The announcement of the restoration of Israel-Turkish relations should be seen in the context of Turkey having nowhere else to go.

"The new rounds of rate cutting and Quantitative Easing that the Fed will have to unleash will echo the military "surge" in Iraq in 2007. Those fresh troops were needed to roll back the chaos that the Administration had ignored for so long. But just as that surge only bought us a few years of relative calm, look for the gains brought about by our next monetary surge to be even more transitory. That is a development for which virtually no one on Wall Street is preparing."

"Turkey and Qatar face common problems and we are both very concerned about developments in the region and uncertain policies of other countries. We confront common enemies. At this critical time for the Middle East cooperation between us is vital."

Economic warfare aims to capture or otherwise control the supply of critical economic resources or destroying a country’s currency.  The US understands better than anybody else that a country can sometimes be hurt more by doing this than by bombing its infrastructure. The tool of exclusion from the dollar-denominated global financial system is described as a 'neutron bomb' constituting a more potent bomb than any military weapon. But recent developments signal the first stages of the US dollar’s decay.

It was recently written in the Washington Post that many Shia Iraqis harbor the conspiratorial belief the US created the Islamic State to destroy Iraq.  Conspiracy theory becomes conspiracy fact. 

In the latest sign that the world is simply running out of capacity when it comes to coping with an inexorable supply of commodities, three diesel tankers en route from the Gulf to Europe did something rather odd on Wednesday: they stopped, turned around in the middle of the ocean, and headed back the way they came.