Ahmadinejad says US can no longer dictate world policy

Today, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that the United States' time has passed.

"It's better to respect nations than to scare them and colonize them. The time of imperialism has long gone. Those who do not learn from the mistakes of history will be punished."
-Reuters

Speaking at a regional conference on Afghanistan, Ahmadinejad also called for the immediate withdrawal of foreign troops from the country and proposed that NATO use part of its military budget to help revive the Afghan economy.

The U.S. delegation to the conference, headed by Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia Robert Blake, left the hall when Ahmadinejad began to speak and returned after the conclusion of his speech.
-Reuters

Gas thefts on the rise

Cities dealing with more and more vacant land

Here's a excerpt from a great read about collapse in Chicago. This section touches on the most important reason why land becomes vacant.

Meanwhile, hundreds of properties are being deposited every month into the city’s land bank by foreclosure-minded mortgage companies and banks who are seeking to rid their books of delinquent homes and apartments.

The process typically starts with abandonment, boarding up, and then foreclosure. But the blight and foreclosed properties are far from forgotten by the neighbors and the community.

With no hope for a resale to recoup the investment, the banker’s neglect results in abandonment of the property. The weeds grow, the windows are smashed, and the building becomes an unsafe place for homeless people to squat, a drug house, or the site of a fire.

Eventually, this scenario forces the city to raze the property and reduce the bank’s real estate tax classification from improved property to vacant land, which is taxed at a much lower level. Often the land is just donated to the city for back taxes, or picked up in the tax scavenger sale.

Typically, the abandoned building also becomes a resource for Chicago’s underground economy and is stripped of its valuable appliances, furnaces, light fixtures, copper pipe and electrical wire. Often, the urban pirates even take the hardwood floors, fireplace mantels and doors.

Even if an investor buys the abandoned building, secures it with guard dogs to protect the building’s improvements and begins to renovate the property, it sometimes isn’t a happy ending. It is not uncommon for the dogs to be poisoned and killed by the urban pirates to scavenge the profits within.
Chicago Journal

Mike Ruppert addresses cops

A Message to All Police Officers From Occupy Wall Street from CollapseNet.com on Vimeo.

Mike brings it in this video. It's a lengthy one, but well worth the view.
He breaks down the warrior mentality, and challenges cops to be warriors, not cowards who abuse their authority in exchange for the crumbs that fall off the bankstas table.

"When the budget cuts come, you can bet that the first to be let go will be those showing any signs of honor, of compassion, of remorse...showing any signs of humanity, because the only ones that the infinite growth monetary paradigm can afford to pay will be the most ruthless, the most brutal, the sociopathic, the psychotic.

World Revolution Update

Cops got evicted from Occupy Oakland

So this week, the mainstream media and Oakland City Hall ramped up their campaign against the Occupy Oakland encampment with stories about rats, drug use, sexual harassment, graffiti, yadda yadda yadda...
They claim that the protestors don't have any demands, but the protestors have been unified in their main demand: "Join us."
Please don't believe the lies.
Occupy Oakland, like the city itself, is unlike any other. It is diverse, political, organized, and a little crackhead-y too (You can't win them all).
The most notable thing about the now two-week-old protest is that it is an unparalleled experiment in human civilization. They have toilets, food, shelter, roads, educational workshops,informational booths, political discussions, a full entertainment schedule, a family zone, and a first-aid tent too. They even have their own pedal-powered media tent. Every night, the general assemblies are vibrant and chaotic....and somehow effective. Last night, under the threat of eviction from the city, they approved a no-smoking no-drinking policy. Oh yeah, and they collectively thumbed their noses at the eviction notice.
This ain't no burning man. This is democracy at its best/worst.
Everything is free, and everyone is welcome in this utopia.
Well, everyone but the mainstream media and the cops.


Since the City has sent out an eviction notice, this link might be useful to anyone hanging around the camp over the next few days.

Also, here's a good read from the Huffington Post which lists 10 ways you can suport the Occupy Everywhere movement wherever you might be.

Murder is terror

2003: "Hey, you're Al Qaeda, we're gonna kill you and steal your oil."
2011: "Hey Al Qaeda, can you help us kill this other guy and steal his oil?"

Moral of the story: If you get in bed with the CIA, you'll prolly end up dead.

World Revolution Update

World Revolution Update

We face a "Worldwide Banking Meltdown"

IMF advisor Robert Shapiro warns of a meltdown worse than 2008.
So what’s a country to do when faced with sovereign default?
Well in the birthplace of democracy, as the Greek government circles ever-increasingly down the toilet of fiscal insolvency, it apparently has found enough money to purchase 400 M1A1 Abrams tanks from the United States.
Well, I guess if they can’t afford to provide the Greek people with good governance, I guess they will NEED 400 tanks to keep the Greek people in line.

To the west, Spain tops that by offering Uncle Sam a navy base.

Under the agreement, four U.S. Aegis ships will be based at the Rota naval base near Cadiz in Spain. The agreement is part of U.S. President Barack Obama's phased adaptive approach to missile defense, under which ship-based, anti-ballistic missiles are being deployed in the eastern Mediterranean followed by ground-based systems in Romania and Poland.
The agreement "reflects a commitment of both countries to the alliance" and marks "an important step forward to protect NATO territories against missile threats," Rasmussen said. "It is smart defense at its best," he said, describing it as "countries working together and sharing together to provide something that benefits us all."
-Defense News

Come to think of it, considering that 169,000 Americans lost their job in September, Uncle Sam might need some more tanks and missile boats too.

People are pissed

Good ol Paul Farrell.

Occupy Wall Street is a virus spreading rapidly as Occupy Everything, a reform movement that will overshadow the GOP/Tea Party as the voice of the people, leading to an Occupy America.
-MarketWatch

And Jesse La Greca explains it another way:

The men who crashed the world

Meltdown is a four-part investigation that takes a closer look at the people who brought down the financial world. It can be seen on Al Jazeera English from Tuesday, September 20, at the following times GMT: Tuesday: 2000; Wednesday: 1200; Thursday: 0100; Friday: 0600; Saturday: 2000; Sunday: 1200; Monday: 0100; Tuesday: 0600.

In the first episode of Meltdown, we hear about four men who brought down the global economy: a billionaire mortgage-seller who fooled millions; a high-rolling banker with a fatal weakness; a ferocious Wall Street predator; and the power behind the throne.

The End of Suburbia

Two interesting reads from Yahoo! of all places, although I totally disagree with the title of the quoted article. We've been here for a couple of years now.

In the years following World War II, the United States experienced an unprecedented consumption boom. Anything you could measure was growing. A Rhode Island-sized chunk of land was bulldozed to make new suburbs every single year for decades. America rounded into its present-day shape.

Along the way, there were three inexorable trends at the base of the societal pyramid. First, we plowed more energy into our homes each and every year. We cooled and heated our houses more (sometimes wastefully, sometimes not), brought in more and more appliances, added televisions and computers and phones. Per capita electricity shot up from about 4,000 kilowatt-hours per US resident to over 13,000 kilowatt-hours by the 2000s. Second, we needed more electricity because our houses got huge. The median home size shot up from about 1,500 square feet in the early 1970s to more than 2,200 square feet in the mid-200s. Third, we drove more and more miles every year to get around and between our sprawled-out cities. Back in 1960, Americans drove 0.72 trillion miles. By 2000, that number had reached 2.75 trillion miles. In 2007, vehicle miles traveled hit 3.02 trillion.

Now, though, the relentless growth in those figures is coming to an end. The AP's Jonathan Fahey reported last week that the utility company research consortium, the Electric Power Research Institute, projected that residential electricity demand would drop over the next ten years.
-Yahoo! Finance

Dying Detroit Looting Itself

Detroit's automakers were given handouts from the federal government, but the people of Detroit are even worse off. Once the epitome of America's technological advancement and innovative manufacturing, Detroit now relies on looting itself for scrap.
This is collapse.

"The whole system will collapse"

Mark Faber tells CNBC that the global economy needs a reboot.

"The next time we have a global economic crisis, it will be much worse than 2008. Before this happens there will be money printing and there will be war. The whole system will collapse," he said. "That's why I'm advising people that they have to think it through. In a total collapse you don't want to own government bonds and cash."
-CNBC

Oakland city job cuts announced

It turns out that fewer jobs will be cut than were officially projected last week, but still more are likely on the chopping block for later in the year.

56 city employees are headed out the door in the next couple weeks, with unions reporting that the deepest impacts will be seen in the physical maintenance of the city.
-Inside Bay Area

Here are some of the casualties:
- The city's long-dwindling Litter Enforcement Program, which enforced illegal dumping laws, is now completely gone.
- The police department will be budgeted for 636 officers this year and 588 next year.
- Starting July 2012, the fire department will close two fire houses per day on a rotating basis.
- The Live Oak Pool at Oakland High School will no longer be open in the summer.
- Elected officials will take a 15% pay cut.

Given that some fuzzy math was used to pass the budget last month, we'll revisit this same situation (or likely an even more dire one) next year, in an even dirtier, more blighted, more overgrown city.

Recycling collapse

The city of Dayton, Ohio is fighting crime and blight by tearing down thousands of vacant homes, and they're creating jobs in the process.
Surrounded by blighted properties where families once lived, some for generations, I'm a huge fan of this program.

Case against DSK might collapse?

“It is a mess, a mess on both sides.”

The case against former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn is aparently not going so well. Forensic evidence confirms that there was a sexual encounter between DSK and the Sofitel Hotel housekeeper, but her credibility is eroding.

According to the two officials, the woman had a phone conversation with an incarcerated man within a day of her encounter with Mr. Strauss-Kahn in which she discussed the possible benefits of pursuing the charges against him. The conversation was recorded.

That man, the investigators learned, had been arrested on charges of possessing 400 pounds of marijuana. He is among a number of individuals who made multiple cash deposits, totaling around $100,000, into the woman’s bank account over the last two years. The deposits were made in Arizona, Georgia, New York and Pennsylvania.

According to the two officials, the woman had a phone conversation with an incarcerated man within a day of her encounter with Mr. Strauss-Kahn in which she discussed the possible benefits of pursuing the charges against him. The conversation was recorded.

That man, the investigators learned, had been arrested on charges of possessing 400 pounds of marijuana. He is among a number of individuals who made multiple cash deposits, totaling around $100,000, into the woman’s bank account over the last two years. The deposits were made in Arizona, Georgia, New York and Pennsylvania.
-New York Times

DSK might be freed from house arrest, and the felony charges may be dismissed. Too bad Christine Lagarde already has his old job already.

Empire in collapse

"It was not a home, it was not a block, it was not a neighborhood, it was an entire town..."

When a gypsum mine and drywall factory in Empire, Nevada closed due to the collapse of the fraudflipping industry, so did the entire town. The zip code has been discontinued. Someone stole the town's sign. Done.

The New World Order

China, meet Russia.
Russia, meet China.

So Saudi Arabia is the king of OPEC, and they say they're gonna open up the pumps, but it ain't that easy.

Khalid al Falih, chief executive officer of state-owned Saudi Aramco, recently warned in April that at the country’s current rate of growth in domestic oil consumption, Saudi Arabia would burn a staggering 8.3 million barrels a day of its own oil by 2028. That is almost its current level of production.
-Globe and Mail

So much for OPEC.
Pumps in Russia, on the other hand, have already been flowing freely.

Russia, the one country actually capable of producing 10 million barrels a day, isn’t even at the table at the OPEC meeting. And it’s been Russia that has been adding the most to world exports over the better part of the last decade as OPEC exports have faltered.

Oil production in Russia, the world’s largest producer, rose to a near post-Soviet high of 10.26 million barrels a day in May. Unlike Saudi Arabia, which has been hard pressed to maintain even a nine million barrel a day production level, Russian production has been north of ten million barrels a day since September 2009.
-Globe and Mail

Interesting.
Invading, occupying, and stealing all of the oil out of Russia won't be such an easy task for the United States (the world's largest consumer of oil). Russia actually has a military. Oh yeah, AND a shitload of nuclear missiles. I guess we'll actually have to purchase it.
Speaking of which...
China has become the world's largest consumer of energy, but still uses up only half as much oil as the US. That could certainly change if Russia wanted it to, and why wouldn't they want it to? They know Beijing's new aircraft carriers weren't built to attack Moscow. Oh yeah, and the two countries just opened up a direct oil pipeline between Russia's East Siberia and China's city of Daqing.

So Russia has all the oil, and China owns everyone's debt, but the banking cartel is run by Europeans and Americans.
I'm bearish on the latter two.

UPDATE: Apparently, a couple of Chinese guys were invited to this year's Bilderberg meet.