What the fuck just happened in Libya? Conspiracies pleeze.

[nowonmai]

In the meantime, my Harley needs fuel and lubrication. Why should I go without?

cos Harleys make your arse ache and go slower than steam engines. Get a decent bike gramps.

[The Tourist]

Obviously, you haven't seen my bikes. Driving plastic isn't a step up for me.

But to be fair, we should look at another aspect of my postulate. Granted, we cannot control these tribal lunatics, but we can control ourselves.

Our soldiers and our resources are being wasted. In fact, our modern involvement in these flights of fancy doesn't adhere to our Constitution or The War Powers Act. Our military isn't an adjunct of UN peace keeping, it's for our national defense. The history demonstrates this, as SEATO was a disaster spanning decades and costing tens of thousands of our boys.

Our Framers warned us about adventurism and treaties. Our military should be doing something useful for us, like shoring up our borders or hunting down illegal aliens. That benefits American citizens, not shooting up goat shepherds. If foreign governments want American gunfighters I'm sure we have ample mercenaries at some very competitive pricing for that job.

In fact, there was a theory espoused years ago that foreign intervention makes regional wars last longer than needed. Without foreign support, an area can only fight as long as its own men and materials last. Once they have blown up all of their own resources the war cannot continue. However, if the USA keeps pumping new money and new war materials into that region, the conflict continues endlessly. Our taxes go up, and our boys return in body bags, crippled or emotionally fragile. For what? If we stop this lunacy, let the warlords fight their own battles and attend to our own affairs then our country will have piles of money to buy all the oil it needs at any price.

In a scant few years they will have killed each off, and peace will exist because there is no one left to fight these insane wars.

[nowonmai]

Okay I admit it, I'm just jealous on the bike front. All that space, weather and accents that go with riding a Harley.

As isolationism, I get all that but it has a long and honourable history of failure. It is the national equivalent of putting your head under the duvet and hoping the mortgage will pay itself.

[lok8]

It's still a simple lawn mower engine. Any company that cannot grasp the basics of mass production, shouldn't get bailout money period, least of all to offshore their production.

So that must be the Immelt American Dream

[coldharvest]

Several writers have noted the odd fact that the Libyan rebels took time out from their rebellion in March to create their own central bank - this before they even had a government.
I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising. This suggests we have a bit more than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty sophisticated influences.
"Is this the first time a revolutionary group has created a central bank while it is still in the midst of fighting the entrenched political power? It certainly seems to indicate how extraordinarily powerful central bankers have become in our era."

Another anomaly involves the official justification for taking up arms against Libya. Supposedly it's about human rights violations, but the evidence is contradictory.
As the United Nations works feverishly to condemn Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi for cracking down on protesters, the body's Human Rights Council is poised to adopt a report chock-full of PRAISE for Libya's human rights record.

The review commends Libya for improving educational opportunities, for making human rights a "priority" and for bettering its "constitutional" framework. Several countries, including Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia but also Canada, give Libya positive marks for the legal protections afforded to its citizens - who are now revolting against the regime and facing bloody reprisal?
Libyans are entitled to free treatment and their hospitals provide the best in the world of medical equipment. Education in Libya is free, capable young people have the opportunity to study abroad at government expense. When marrying, young couples receive 60,000 Libyan dinars (about 50,000 US dollars) of financial assistance. Non-interest state loans and as practice shows, undated. Due to government subsidies the price of cars is much lower than in Europe and they are affordable for every family. Gasoline and bread cost a penny, no taxes for those who are engaged in agriculture. The Libyan people are quiet and peaceful, are not inclined to drink and are very religious.

Another provocative bit of data circulating on the net is a 2007 Democracy Now! interview of US Gen. Wesley Clark (Ret.). In it he says that about ten days after September 11, 2001, he was told by a general that the decision had been made to go to war with Iraq. Clark was surprised and asked why. "I don't know!" was the response. "I guess they don't know what else to do!" Later, the same general said they planned to take out seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.
What do these seven countries have in common? In the context of banking, one that sticks out is that none of them is listed among the 56 member banks of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). That evidently puts them outside the long regulatory arm of the central bankers' central bank in Switzerland.

The most renegade of the lot could be Libya and Iraq, the two that have actually been attacked.

[nowonmai]

IMO it was a kneejerk populist call made by lightweights who thought it would put them on the right side of history for little cost. Having committed they had to follow through, governance advisory support to the NTC, hence Central Banks et al, was openly conducted.

[The Tourist]

As isolationism, I get all that but it has a long and honourable history of failure. It is the national equivalent of putting your head under the duvet and hoping the mortgage will pay itself.

It's not isolationism, it's an overdue adjustment.

For a very long period the USA had a tremendous financial engine. The WWII generation was still working, and the 'boomers (fully 1/3 of the population, that's 78 million people) had now entered the work force. No matter how the politicians whined, vast amounts of taxes were collected. The government could build or buy anything it wanted.

For good or ill, it promoted adventurism on foreign soil. We could also help our allies and crush our enemies. It's how the notion of the "world's policemen" came to originate.

Well, folks, that time has passed. The WWII generation is gone, and the 'boomers are retiring in droves. I retired early. I feel like many folks. Why support the world and the lazy louts of my own country? I bought two Harleys and told you all to go to hell. And that attitude is echoed by all 78 million of us. You're left with the 'cyber generation' who either works at McDonalds or lives in their mom's basement. More than half of my country pays no taxes at all.

And much of the world wonders why the tit went dry. So now we hear two things. When there's a tsunami or an earthquake, we hear, "Where are the Americans?" When a sniveling little warlord get's too big for his britches we hear, "America go home."

I'm tired of the whining, and frankly, we don't have the money to do anything. I suggest the world go ask China for help, they have all of our money. I hear they're friendly, treat their own people like kings, and their prisons are like a luxury hotel.

[nowonmai]

Can't disagree with much of that, it does appear to be the trajectory America is on. The transition is going to be bumpy as fuck. I wish I could live to see the whole thing play out, I think the 2050s onwards are going to be well tasty.

[The Tourist]

Can't disagree with much of that, it does appear to be the trajectory America is on. The transition is going to be bumpy as fuck. I wish I could live to see the whole thing play out, I think the 2050s onwards are going to be well tasty.

I agree with your overall opinion, however I think the timetable is more urgent. I think the present Social Security system is all smoke and mirrors. Money that has been paid in was always put into "the general fund," not a separate lockbox. It's been looted. The white lie was that we had plenty of time to fix this Ponzi scam and replace the money.

The reality is that we ran out of productive workers to tax.

I used to work in finance, and the only real way out for America is to default on the debt. Granted, we will have to watch China starve out millions of their own people and risk a civil war. The alternative is to watch our own people starve while we risk a civil war.

There simply isn't enough money, food or strength-of-will to feed and preserve +6 billion people and climbing. Someone, usually the innocents, is going to die. Sadly, many in my own country are fiddling while Rome is being laid with kindling.

[Sri Lanky]

Critical mass might actually be attained on that cosmological date....Dec 21,2012. Wouldn't that be a kicker. Nobody knows what's going to happen and my only advice is to embrace the chaos and get used to it. It's the way it's always been. Humans were never in control. That's the biggest fraud.

[Sri Lanky]

For example who would have thought that the American Civil War would ultimately change world political economics by precipitating the formation of unions in the UK.

[lok8]

The Unions do little more than sell advertising space round headlines anymore.

When the world got smaller, corruption became standardized as any other methodology in running a conglomerate.

"Is this the first time a revolutionary group has created a central bank while it is still in the midst of fighting the entrenched political power? It certainly seems to indicate how extraordinarily powerful central bankers have become in our era."

The adverts glossed over that fact.

[roach coach]

I believe this as much as I believed Baghdad Bob or Dick Cheney... but you all asked for conspiracies.

http://afro.com/sections/news/national/story.htm?storyID=72369

Walter Fauntroy, Feared Dead in Libya, Returns Home—Guess Who He Saw Doing the Killing
It wasn't the Libyans
by Valencia Mohammed
Special to the AFRO

Former U.S. Congressman Walter Fauntroy, who recently returned from a self-sanctioned peace mission to Libya, said he went into hiding for about a month in Libya after witnessing horrifying events in Libya's bloody civil war -- a war that Fauntroy claims is backed by European forces.

Fauntroy's sudden disappearance prompted rumors and news reports that he had been killed.

In an interview inside his Northwest D.C. home last week, the noted civil rights leader, told the Afro that he watched French and Danish troops storm small villages late at night beheading, maiming and killing rebels and loyalists to show them who was in control.

"'What the hell' I'm thinking to myself. I'm getting out of here. So I went in hiding," Fauntroy said.

The rebels told Fauntroy they had been told by the European forces to stay inside. According to Fauntroy, the European forces would tell the rebels, "'Look at what you did.' In other words, the French and Danish were ordering the bombings and killings, and giving credit to the rebels.

"The truth about all this will come out later," Fauntroy said.

While in Libya, the former congressman also said he sat down with Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi for a one-on-one conversation. Gaddafi has ruled Libya since 1969, when he seized power in a military coup.

Fauntroy said he spoke with Gaddafi in person and that Gaddafi assured him that if he survived these attacks, the mission to unite African countries would continue.

"Contrary to what is being reported in the press, from what I heard and observed, more than 90 percent of the Libyan people love Gaddafi," Fauntroy said. "We believe the true mission of the attacks on Gaddafi is to prevent all efforts by African leaders to stop the recolonization of Africa."

Several months ago, Gaddafi's leadership faced its biggest challenge. In February, a radical protest movement called the Arab Spring spread across Libya. When Gaddafi responded by dispatching military and plainclothes paramilitary to the streets to attack demonstrators, it turned into a civil war with the assistance of NATO and the United Nations.

Fauntroy's account could not be immediately verified by the Afro and the U.S. State Department has not substantiated Fauntroy's version of events. Fauntroy was not acting as an official representative of the U.S. in Libya. He returned to Washington, D.C. on Aug. 31.

When rumors spread about Fauntroy being killed he went underground, he told the Afro in an interview. Fauntroy said for more than a month he decided not to contact his family but to continue the mission to speak with African spiritual leaders about a movement to unify Africa despite the Arab uprisings.

"I'm still here," Fauntroy said, pointing to several parts of his body. "I've got all my fingers and toes. I'm extremely lucky to be here."

After blogs and rumors reported Fauntroy had been killed, the congressional office of Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) announced on Aug. 24, that she had been in touch with authorities who confirmed Fauntroy was safely in the care of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Inside his home, Fauntroy pulled out several memoirs and notebooks to explain why he traveled to Libya at a time when it was going through civil unrest.

"This recent trip to Libya was part of a continuous mission that started under Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when he gave me orders to join four African countries on the continent with four in the African Diaspora to restore the continent to its pre-colonial status," Fauntroy said.

"We want Africa to be the breadbasket of the world," he said. "Currently, all the major roads in every country throughout Africa lead to ports that take its natural resources and wealth outside the continent to be sold to the European markets."

[lok8]

I see some one else likes Boots

[roach coach]

I see some one else likes Boots

Liked. I like them but don't take too kindly to the wild claims with a lack of evidence. Same with Cynthia McKinney... I guess "fighting the power" doesn't count when The Man is on the rebels' side.