Press**Watch for May 20, 2010
There's trouble in the pipeline. New analysis of the BP gusher video shows that the Gulf of Mexico is being poisoned at the rate of four million gallons of sludge per day, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says that the crap will be circulating around Florida. Meanwhile the Afghan War and the occupation of Iraq are going south fast, and the patches on the economy that supposedly stopped the progress of the new Great Depression are pulling apart. To Washington planners, this can only mean one thing: it's time to start a new war. The War on Terror isn't doing the job of distracting people well enough, because the most the corporate-owned media can come up with is the Shoe Bomber and the Butt Bomber and the occasional berserker. Even the big story of the Several Scary Not-White Guys Who Thought About Bombing The Sears Tower After The FBI Bought Them Boots –well, it turned out not to be so big. Fortunately there are the old favorites, North Korea and Iran, to scare people with.
Here's what North Korea says about the Big Underwater Kablooey that sank a South Korean patrol boat. (They do their own stumbly English translation, so you may have some difficulty understanding this, but it's a response to the accusation as framed by a reunification group that North Korea sunk the boat with a torpedo).
KCNA:
The smear campaign launched by the puppet group against the DPRK in the wake of the sinking of its warship reached the height of its confrontation and war moves.
When the above-said accident occurred, the group regarded it as a golden opportunity for pushing the north-south relations to a catastrophe. Making the fiction that the accident "was caused by the north" a fait accompli from its beginning, the group cried out for "countermeasure" and "retaliation". It even went the lengths of talking about not ruling out a war.
The puppet group is seriously mistaken if it thinks it can weather crisis and prove successful in the upcoming "elections to local self-governing bodies" by misleading the public opinion through such trite campaign as straining the situation and bedeviling the inter-Korean relations.
The DPRK sets store by the north-south relations but will never tolerate the puppet group's confrontation and war moves. Should the group of traitors ignite a war together with the U.S. at any cost, the DPRK will mete out merciless and resolute punishment to the warmongers, warns the indictment.
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If I may translate a bit from the translation, North Korea is saying it's all a scam and that they want to go back to negotiations, but they aren't going to be pushed around and if it comes to it they still have all those long-range artillery pieces in the mountains north of Seoul and they'll by cracky pull the lanyards if they have to. This is standard stuff for the last sixty years and won't do for scaring Americans any more, so Washington had best cook up something scarier if a proper distraction is to work; otherwise We the People might start really talking about taking action against BP and banksters and the war industry, and of course that won't do. We can't have democracy breaking out in the United States, for gods' sake. It would screw up everything.
If people start talking about millions of gallons of oil spilling into the Gulf from BP's gusher, they might also start wondering aloud why the hole wan't bombed shut right away by the Navy, as the Russians did when they had that sort of problem. Could it be that the shut-it-off option wasn't considered merely because BP's profits might have suffered from the loss of oil recovery options? Could it be that the greatest human-made disaster since the Chernobyl nuclear melt-down in Ukraine should have been stopped weeks ago with a simple barrage of navy depth charges? If people caught on to that there might be calls for the corporate death penalty against BP, and once that sort of precedent gets set, there could be all sorts of rebellion. People could challenge corporate authority generally. No, it's best we start another war. Right?
That said, it's a damned good show that the North Korean torpedo was so cooperative in revealing itself. The Sidney Morning Herald printed an article by Kirsty Needham that explained it all with the help of a little show-and-tell by the South Korean military. It turns out that the torpedo was a special sort of trick munition that leaves its signature inside its target. Devious, isn't it? Unlike other torpedos which explode in the front, this one actually exploded in such a way that the propeller, which was presumably on the back of the thing, flew into the remains of the patrol boat, instead of away off into the depths of the ocean like the propellers of non-devious torpedos always have. Sure, you'd expect it to go ther other way, since it was a high-explosive torpedo, or anyway that's what the article says, so that you wouldn't confuse it with a low-explosive torpedo. But that's how devious and evil those North Koreans are, that they can make something explode backward. It also left intact steering parts in case anyone was confused or doubtful as to its North Korean origins, and the propeller was damnably stamped “#1,” too, just like the one that the South Koreans already had their hands on. So clearly, the North Koreans made that backwards torpedo, because you just can't fake evidence like that, can you?
Good thing the US occupation troops in South Korea were moved away from the reach of those long-range artillery pieces in North Korea. Too bad for the millions of people in Seoul, should a couple of thousand antique long-range artillery bombs arrive via air mail. But if you want to make an omelet, you have to crack a couple of eggs, that's what I've heard. It should be a fine war and our boys will make us proud I know.
And it's a good thing that war is brewing up, because as I said people might otherwise get to talking, maybe about the fact that it seems no one can get a good paying job any more. Here in Oregon nearly one in five people are on food stamps. One in five of us are lazy bums who just won't get out there and take advantage of the recovery. Or maybe there is no recovery, and when one in five people are on assistance it means that the economy is actually in a Great Depression, and maybe it means that instead of priming the pump this time around our politicians actually shifted the biggest give-away in world history into the bank accounts of the already-super-rich banksters who caused the Depression in the first place. Maybe one in five on food stamps means that there is a vast army of people right now who are so disenfranchised that they might as well all get together and march on the centers of power and camp out until the rich and their wholly-owned government collaborators give in to a more rational distribution of wealth and work. But wait, that's crazy talk. We need a war.
People might otherwise talk. Zach Carter interviewed Nouriel Roubini in an article on Alternet.org, saying in part:
ZC: A lot of economic observers in the U.S. seemed to be saying recently that the financial sector was finally out of the woods. But what does the developing crisis in Europe say about the state of the global banking system?
Roubini: First of all, we're not out of the woods. The definition of a crisis is when you have a bunch of policymakers who need to spend all day Saturday and Sunday to devise some last-minute rescue before markets open on Monday morning. By that standard, we had that crisis in Bear Stearns, AIG, TARP, you name it. We thought that was over, but just the other weekend, we had all of the finance ministers of Europe getting together a rescue package before markets opened on Monday morning.
These packages are becoming larger—the latest one is $1 trillion. To me, that says that policymakers are desperate, the European Union is in crisis, a lot of the countries using the euro are insolvent, and $1 trillion is not going to be enough. The euro is weakening again, going toward 1.75 times the value of the U.S. dollar. It's not enough because the fundamental problem is that these countries need to do a massive amount of fiscal conservation. It will be politically and socially painful, and this conservation, necessary as it may be, is going to reduce economic output. When you raise taxes and cut spending, in addition to public debt and deficit problems, all of these countries have massive problems in terms of loss of competitiveness. Already a decade ago, they were losing market share to China and Asia, then wages and productivity have been leveled off for a decade, and the final nail in the coffin was the appreciation of the euro between 2002 and 2008.
So in order to stabilize the economy to resume growth, in order to resume competitiveness, that requires real depreciation of the euro against other currencies. That's a separate problem from the fiscal problem and the other structural problems. So I think Europe is going to be a mess and very difficult, regardless of whether you have $1 trillion on the table or $2 trillion on the table. All of this money is conditioned on painful fiscal austerity and on painful structural reforms. So I see it being very difficult for countries to find an effective way to solve all of these issues.
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That's THE Nouriel Roubini who predicted the crash in the first place, and he's using the word “difficult” here in its diplomatic conjugation, which you should interpret as meaning “impossible,” and that the next part of the crash, coming soon to a wallet near you, is going to make 2008 look like a walk in the park with an ice cream cone and an attractive companion. In the sun. With a roll of money in your pocket.
We can't have people talking about that, as I was saying, so it's a good thing that the Iranians are arming their tuna fleet and enriching uranium to low levels and only cooperating with the International Atomic Energy Agency a little bit, which is to say a lot more than Israel ever did, excuse me for pointing out that impolite little fact. Yes, we could all be frightened of the Iranians, especially if they were to be linked to –say— one of those Fruit of the Boom bombers, say with an explosive underwear tag that somehow flew backwards into the airplane bits. That would do it.
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By Jim Polson and Jessica Resnick-Ault
May 20 (Bloomberg) -- BP Plc took steps toward attempting to cap its leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico yesterday as it increased the amount of crude it’s capturing and thick oil began to appear in Louisiana’s wetlands.
BP will try as early as May 23 to inject heavy drilling fluids and cement into the well to seal it, a tactic known as “top kill,” Doug Suttles, chief operating officer of exploration and production for the company, said on a conference call with reporters yesterday.
“Let’s all keep our fingers crossed, let’s all say our prayers,”
...........horseshit..........................