Here we are, New Year’s Eve 2011, and a whole lot of folks on this planet believe that the World is going to End – one way or another (again) – sometime in December of the coming year: 2012. All I can think is “Geezus! Here we go again!”

Back in 1996 and 1997, there was the Hale-Bopp Flopp that resulted in the mass suicide of 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate Cult. I was out there at the time desperately trying to convince people that most of what was flying around the internet was a load of Horse Hockey, and all I got for my trouble was flamed and defamed. But I was right.

Then, there was the Millennial Madness that was gaining steam in 1999. By this time, we had a website and I wasn’t just doing battle on discussion lists, so I published an article in November of that year trying to calm things down a bit. Things were so weird then that even my cousin, who was (at that moment) an aerospace engineer employed by NASA, told me in full confidence that things WOULD get squirrely because there was a flaw in computer dating systems and the global computer systems would glitch up in unpredictable ways, causing chaos. Not even that happened! Anyway, the take-home message of my article at that time was pretty clear:

I hope that the reader has by now already figured out that there is, very likely, some vast “program” designed to create mass confusion on the planet by spreading lies and rumors. …

If anybody is being manipulated and ‘controlled’ by the ‘Secret Government’, whatever it may be, it is the spreaders of rumors without proof, and ‘millennial groups’ propagating imminent ‘End of The World’ scenarios. It is also those who attack the ones who are asking for something more than a rumor or a ‘confidential informant’ who they claim is reliable, but who is unable or unwilling to be identified with their statements. In SOME cases, this CAN be the case, but it has become a cheap excuse for lack of responsibility in recent times. [...]

The problem lies in the RESULTS of all this Rumor Mongering. What if the agenda is to ‘Divide and Conquer,’ whether it comes through legislation to ‘protect’ us from our own selves which results in mandating restrictions on free speech via the internet? Or, what if all of this rumor spreading results in acts of violence that ushers in Martial Law as a necessity?

What, exactly, are we doing to ourselves here? It is not just a question of being skeptical or doing our research carefully; our very lives could depend on taking responsibility for what we say and do!

Next came the May 15th 2003 Planet Nibiru event predicted by Nancy Leider and her ‘Zetas’, inspiring the Pana Wave cult in Japan to new heights of lunacy. See my article about that one here. Again, I pointed out what was really happening:

But what is even more worrisome about this is the apparent COINTELPRO at work here. What better way to prevent and/or marginalize legitimate scientific inquiry into ‘alternative’ subjects than to create cults such as the Pana Wave Laboratory, Zetatalk, the Guardian Alliance, and so forth, speed them up like a train running on a thermo-nuclear power plant, and crash them so that everyone can see how ‘crazy’ any ideas that are not handed down from the powers that be truly are.

We do, indeed, see the planned results of COINTELPRO at work in the commentary on the Pana Wave cult:

“Crazy? Let’s hope so. But in Japan, recent history has shown that to ignore such cults can have devastating consequences. In 1995 the Aum doomsday cult made its sarin gas attack on Tokyo’s subway system, killing 12 and injuring thousands. Japanese authorities came in for severe criticism for failing to act against Aum before the attack. This time, they are taking no chances with Pana Wave, which, police say, is similar to Aum in its early stages. The concern is partly based on the cult’s doomsday warnings. ‘People with the ears to hear will face death’, a recent statement declared. One pamphlet said that if the guru died members should ‘exterminate all humankind’. Pana Wave is not only strange, but clearly scary.”

Well, heck yeah, it’s SCARY!

The Pana Wave Cult drives around in a “caravan of white vehicles… draping the roadside in white cloth wherever it halts. The white is supposed to offer protection from electromagnetic waves the cult members say are directed at their guru by a communist group that wants her dead. Their mountain odyssey is a search for a haven from the waves.”

Oh boy! Anybody who thinks that there are electromagnetic waves out there that can produce any numbers of effects mustbe a CULT! Never mind that there is reams of evidence – including testimony in Congressional Records – that this is exactly what the ‘National Security State‘ is doing. In fact, a careful analysis of the Timeline of Secret Government Projects strongly suggests that such groups as the Pana Wave Cult, Zetatalk, the Guardian Alliance, Heaven’s Gate, and so on, are all products of such experiments – designed to do just what they are doing – making these groups ‘scary’.

There are a lot of similarities between the attack on the World Trade Center - blamed on the dangerous ‘cult’ of Islam – and other cults that ‘attack’ righteous, God Fearing people – of the Christian or Jewish ilk, that is. And you can take it to the bank that the Jewish religion is marked for the next COINTELPRO marginalization, which will leave the Christians in charge of the planet; good Christians like George Bush, that is.

The fact is, there have been numerous ‘Cult Tragedies’ that we suspect were deliberately engineered for the very purpose of driving masses of people back into the corral of the Control System of the National Security State, even including the Jim Jones’ ‘People’s Temple’. In fact, in March of 2002, we reported on this very subject: Jonestown Dismantling the Disinformation.

Curiously, the claim made in this article, written by an insider who later did some extensive research on Jim Jones’ connections, and proposes that the real agenda behind the COINTELPRO activated against the People’s Temple – including the ‘cult’ label – was to destroy a potential influential voice in American Politics.

Jonestown – prepping the people for ‘Islamic terrorism’ and ‘cults’

Well, I’m not sure that this is entirely true, but it certainly laid the groundwork for the acceleration of the ‘cult train’. And, for all we know, all we have come to believe about the People’s Temple consists of media controlled lies, such as the lies currently being promulgated about “terrorists” in the U.S.A.

What IS of some interest in relation to this is the book Who Killed John Lennon? by British lawyer/journalist Fenton Bresler who writes:

“Mark David Chapman is in many ways as much the victim of those who wanted to kill John Lennon as Lennon himself.”

Arthur O’Connor, the detective who spent more time with Chapman immediately following the murder than anyone else, said: “It is definitely illogical to say that Mark Committed the murder to make himself famous. He did not want to talk to the press from the very start. It’s possible Mark could have been used by somebody. I saw him the night of the murder. I studied him intensely. He looked as if he could have been programmed.”

Well, don’t that just beat all?! Must be those pesky EM waves again.

Bresler’s thesis, that Chapman was a mind-controlled assassin manipulated by right-wing elements in the “secret government,” goes beyond speculation into the realm of actual investigation:

“Bresler established some key points that put the lie to any “Who would want to kill an aging rock star?” brush-off. Richard Nixon, his administration and other right-wing politicians (including ultraconservative ancient Senator Strom Thurmond, who personally memoed Attorney Gerneral John Mitchell on the matter) were fixated on what they saw as the Lennon problem. To them, the politically outspoken singer-songwriter was an insidious subversive of the worst kind, the famous and beloved kind. [...]

Lennon’s FBI file – at nearly three hundred pages as chubby as Hoover himself – reveals that he was under “constant surveillance.” Nor did the G-men keep a particularly low profile around the ex-Beatle, apparently attempting to harass him into silence or at least drive him nuts, similar to the tactic they had used on Martin Luther King, Jr., a few short but eventful years earlier.

In late 1972, when the “surveillance” was at its peak, Lennon told humorist Paul Krassner, ‘Listen, if anything happens to Yoko and me, it was not an accident.’”

And in the present day, we can Imagine what John Lennon would have done to face down George Bush.

In our psychopath-controlled world, high-profile and sincere pleas to ‘give peace a chance’ can get you killed

And we find it so interesting that just about anybody who would have a prayer of a chance of rallying support against the Bush Reich is dead, including, recently, Senator Wellstone. As we reported back on October 26, 2002:

Shortly after the news was announced, speculation broke out on Indymedia that his death was no accident. On a post to the Twin Cities site, the question is asked, “If Bush had died in a plane crash, would there not be immediate open speculation about the possibility of assassination?

Wellstone held the balance in the Senate for the Democrats; he was as opposed to Bush policies as any Senator could be, in issues of war, health policy, and labor issues. His death has great political and social significance.”

So far, corporate media has not raised the possibility of assassination and is pointing to bad weather conditions as the cause of the crash. There is much doubt about this story, though. – ‘Paranoid Observer’ notes that a key detail in an ABC news story was changed: A quote: “The pilot had reported no problems before and there was no severe weather in the area at the time, the Federal Aviation Administration said.” Now the same story says this: “The cause of the crash was not immediately known, but sources (which sources? – P.O.) told ABCNEWS that during the pre-flight weather briefing, the pilots were told they they would have “adverse icing conditions throughout the flight.”

Sherlock Holmes solved at least one case by noticing that something that should be present was missing. In The Silver Blaze, he solved the case by noticing that no one reported a barking dog.

“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
“To the curious incident of the dog in the night time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night time.”
“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Silver Blaze

So what’s missing in terms of the Wellstone plane crash? For the last 14 months, anytime there has been a plane crash, the media go waaay overboard in assuming that this must somehow be a terrorist incident. The initial reaction of the media in the first hours of the event is always now ‘oh my, I hope this isn’t happening again. I hope this isn’t another terrorist attack.’

Just a few days ago, there was a news story that ‘al-Qaeda’ may be targeting US Senators. The story referred to the possibilities of sniper attacks on golf courses. Just a few days later, a US Senator dies. So, what’s missing?

Anti-war, pro-sanity, was Senator Paul Wellstone murdered?

Sen. Wellstone’s plane crashes, and there is absolutely no speculation that this is a terrorist attack. Somehow the media immediately knows that this plane crash was caused by bad weather, and this is in no way a terrorist attack.

The media dog has been barking ‘terrorist’ steadily for 14 months. Today the dog didn’t bark.

Back to the End of the World on Thursday. The dogs are NOW indeed barking, but they are barking up the wrong tree.

Then in the spring of 2004, along came another ‘End of the World’ propagated – again – by Nancy Leider and her Zetas: the imminent arrival of a giant planet careening into the inner solar system, kicking up dust and bringing civilization to its knees. I wrote about that, too, here. By this time, having been accused loudly and vociferously for a couple of years, by a Black Magician named Vincent Bridges and his band of slimy cohorts, of starting a cult myself, I was gaining way more insight into the problem. I wrote:

What struck me as so interesting was the fact that any number of whacked out ideas about the ‘End of the World’ have been promulgated freely and with great vigor; the individuals behind these ideas have no trouble whatsoever getting on radio shows, television, getting big name publishers to publish and promote their books, making and marketing high quality videos, and so on. Sure, they are marginalized by the ‘serious academics’ and ignored, for the most part, by the mainstream media and general public, but they almost NEVER (I haven’t found one yet) come under extensive, prolonged, relentless attacks such as we have experienced here at Cass.org and Signs Central.

This is even more evident today than ever before. On December 15 of this year, I was interrogated for 6.5 hours by the Police Judiciare in Toulouse as a result of those ‘cult’ accusations created out of thin air by Vincent Bridges and gang, re-packaged and passed on like a pig in a poke to a weird French organization known as MIVILUDES. It never occurred to them that Bridges couldn’t sell his blather to any authorities in the U.S. because it was evident in the U.S. that Bridges was a nutcase and official records and documents were easily available to any who would avail themselves of them. Bridges was just hoping and praying he could sell his lies to somebody stupid and that seems to have been the Right Wing Authoritarians with ties to Big Pharma, Big Agra, and the CIA, over at MIVILUDES. And they, of course, have been busy trying to ‘export’ their model to the rest of the world, starting with medical, legal, police authorities in France who have bought the pig. (acheter (un) chat en poche)

As time was passing, it was becoming more and more obvious who the REAL Cults were, the psychopaths in power in governments and religions all over the world. I wrote about that here.

So, back to the current “End of the World.” Is the world going to end this year?

Probably; just not the way anybody thinks.

A member of our Discussion Forum posted an interesting article from the Russia Today website (published on 26 December), entitled:“2012: Year of the World Government”.

Interesting that they picked up on the same idea that SOTT.net presented in an article dated 22 Dec: “This is Where the American Illusion Comes to an End – 2012 The End of the World As We Know It”. That article, by SOTT editor Andrés Perezalonso, stated at the end:

“Now you see why I am in such a pessimistic mood lately. The US has reached yet another milestone – this one is a point of no return, I would say, after which events can easily escalate into a nightmare more rapidly than any of us ever dreamed possible. As tyranny is formalized out in the open, this is where all remaining illusions about its democratic principles or moral higher ground come to a definite end. Since we are talking about the global military superpower and a country that for good or for ill – mostly for ill – sets the example for the rest of the world, the implications will reach far beyond its borders.

It looks like 2012 will, indeed, be the End of the World; just not the way anyone ever imagined.”

I confess to being the editor who added that last line; it’s an idea that I’ve been suggesting here and there – on our forum, on Facebook – for some time. The RT journalist, Adrian Salbuchi did a pretty good job on this though there are some niggling points that SOTT readers make on our forum worth considering such as the failure to mention possible cometary bombardment of Earth (an ever-increasing danger, it seems, based on the scientific evidence). The following would be my list of probable events for 2012, adapted from the list produced by Salbuchi:

1) Climate Change is the driver of nearly everything else that is happening on the planet. As the UK Guardian reported back in 2004, the Pentagon told Bush that Climate Change was going to destroy us. Not “Global Warming”, as RT implies, though Global Warming precedes Ice Ages; Global Warming is just a ruse to impose greater controls.

2) Financial Meltdown and resulting Economic Crises. As RT points out, this has been in process since 2008 (actually long before that, but not much reviving going on since then though official reports keep trying to beat that dead horse). The reasons behind the Financial Crises are mainly because the psychopathic Elite of the world are working very hard to gain control of the resources of the planet exactly as predicted in the above mentioned Pentagon report.

3) Financial Crises will lead to Social Upheavals. There is more to the social upheavals as well. Again, it goes back to Climate Change. When the weather goes bonkers and the crops don’t come in, people get hungry. Meanwhile, the Elite are working like crazy to gain control of the resources which compounds the social problems.

4) Pandemics. There can be several reasons for the pandemics, not the least of which is Climate Change which weakens populations and makes them susceptible to illness. And a greater number of susceptible individuals – whether human or other species – means more opportunities for mutations of viruses.

Then, there is the possibility of comet dust borne disease pathogens bringing viruses unknown-as-yet to the human immune system. The possibility of a repeat of a scenario similar to the Black Death is better than average.

Of course, we can’t forget the Psychopathic Elite wanting to eliminate millions, if not billions, of individuals competing for the resources they are trying to gain control of, so let’s add in genetically engineered bugs released on the human population by Covert Ops. As RT today pointed out, such events provide opportunities for mandatory vaccinations and an opportunity to slip RFID chips into our bodies They also mention the possibility of testing “intelligent viruses” targeting specific DNA strains. Racially and ethnically selective viruses as part of mass depopulation campaigns? Indeed, SOTT.net pioneered exposure of Ethnic Specific Weapons back in 2003. (See here.)

5) I agree with RT that ‘Terrorist’ ‘False Flag’ ‘Mega-Attacks’ are a possibility, though I tend to think they are less probable. “The Elite have this wildcard up their sleeve to jump-start new “crises” as short-cuts towards world government. Will new “attacks” dwarfing 9/11 justify further global wars, invasions and genocide? A nuclear weapon over a major city to be blamed on the Elite’s ‘enemies’?” There is also the possibility of overhead cometary explosions being blamed on terrorism. The more I think about it, the less I would give this any high probability. More likely is the above-mentioned pandemics. When a population is laid low by something that kills on the scale of the Black Death, not much else is needed.

6) RT writes: “Generalized War in the Middle East. As we speak, naval forces, bombers, entire armies are poised to attack and invade Syria, Iran…” I actually think that one of the Psychopathic Elite’s agendas is to destroy all truly Semitic peoples (which most people going by the name “Jews” nowadays are most decidedly NOT, though most Arabs are.) More than that, I think that the generalized war-mongering is mostly an activity designed to keep the masses in a state of anxiety and to distract them and induce them to agree to even more draconian measures.

7) Ecological/Environmental “Accidents” are just a by-product of Psychopaths in power. It’s a consequence of greed and stupidity so, sure, something like that is possible

 I’m not too sure I think that some sort of staged religious or alien contact event will take place. It’s possible, but rather low on my list of probabilities. I don’t think such things will be necessary to justify the “One World Government” as RT suggests. As I’ve already mentioned, Climate Change and Pandemics will do quite nicely for their plans. After all, we already have a One World Government as anybody with their eyes open can see. Just notice what countries have instituted a smoking ban and you can be sure that they are members of the “Club.”

The fact is, the peoples of the Earth are already so traumatized, so ‘Transmarginally Inhibited‘, in Pavlov’s terminology, that it really isn’t going to take much to make the New World Order official.

As for those of you looking for the world to end in more traditional terms, don’t hold your breath. The truth is, the World that we knew, and the world that COULD have been, ended on 9-11. You can trace the influences for 9-11 to the day John Kennedy was assassinated and the American People did not rise up and demand an accounting.

“As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression…. There is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such a twilight that we must be most aware of change in the air — however slight — lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.” – William O. Douglas, US Supreme Court Justice from 1939 – 1975

We’ve been sleep-walking through the twilight for the past ten years; I think that the Darkness will fall in 2012.

But remember: It is always Darkest just before the Dawn. In Cosmic terms, that can take a little while, so don’t lose hope.

‘Life is religion. Life experiences reflect how one interacts with God. Those who are asleep are those of little faith in terms of their interaction with the creation. Some people think that the world exists for them to overcome or ignore or shut out. For those individuals, the world will cease. They will become exactly what they give to life. They will become merely a dream in the ‘past.’ People who pay strict attention to objective reality right and left, become the reality of the ‘Future.’
– Cassiopaeans, 09-28-02

“Meantime, the world in which we exist has other aims. But it will pass away, burned up in the fire of its hot passions: and from its ashes will spring a new and younger world, full of fresh hope, with the light of morning in its eyes.”
~ Bertrand Russell

It seems America’s bankers are tired of all the abuse. They’ve decided to speak out.True, they’re doing it from behind the ropeline, in front of friendly crowds at industry conferences and country clubs, meaning they don’t have to look the rest of America in the eye when they call us all imbeciles and complain that they shouldn’t have to apologize for being so successful.

But while they haven’t yet deigned to talk to protesting America face to face, they are willing to scribble out some complaints on notes and send them downstairs on silver trays. Courtesy of a remarkable story by Max Abelson at Bloomberg, we now get to hear some of those choice comments.

Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, for instance, is not worried about OWS:

“Who gives a crap about some imbecile?” Marcus said. “Are you kidding me?”

Former New York gurbernatorial candidate Tom Golisano, the billionaire owner of the billing firm Paychex, offered his wisdom while his half-his-age tennis champion girlfriend hung on his arm:

“If I hear a politician use the term ‘paying your fair share’ one more time, I’m going to vomit,” said Golisano, who turned 70 last month, celebrating the birthday with girlfriend Monica Seles, the former tennis star who won nine Grand Slam singles titles.

Then there’s Leon Cooperman, the former chief of Goldman Sachs’s money-management unit, who said he was urged to speak out by his fellow golfers. His message was a version of Wall Street’s increasingly popular If-you-people-want-a-job, then-you’ll-shut-the-fuck-up rhetorical line:

Cooperman, 68, said in an interview that he can’t walk through the dining room of St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida, without being thanked for speaking up. At least four people expressed their gratitude on Dec. 5 while he was eating an egg-white omelet, he said.

“You’ll get more out of me,” the billionaire said, “if you treat me with respect.”

Finally, there is this from Blackstone CEO Steven Schwartzman:

Asked if he were willing to pay more taxes in a Nov. 30 interview with Bloomberg Television, Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman spoke about lower-income U.S. families who pay no income tax.

“You have to have skin in the game,” said Schwarzman, 64. “I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.”

There are obviously a great many things that one could say about this remarkable collection of quotes. One could even, if one wanted, simply savor them alone, without commentary, like lumps of fresh caviar, or raw oysters.

But out of Abelson’s collection of doleful woe-is-us complaints from the offended rich, the one that deserves the most attention is Schwarzman’s line about lower-income folks lacking “skin in the game.” This incredible statement gets right to the heart of why these people suck.

Why? It’s not because Schwarzman is factually wrong about lower-income people having no “skin in the game,” ignoring the fact that everyone pays sales taxes, and most everyone pays payroll taxes, and of course there are property taxes for even the lowliest subprime mortgage holders, and so on.

It’s not even because Schwarzman probably himself pays close to zero in income tax – as a private equity chief, he doesn’t pay income tax but tax on carried interest, which carries a maximum 15% tax rate, half the rate of a New York City firefighter.

The real issue has to do with the context of Schwarzman’s quote. The Blackstone billionaire, remember, is one of the more uniquely abhorrent, self-congratulating jerks in the entire world – a man who famously symbolized the excesses of the crisis era when, just as the rest of America was heading into a recession, he threw himself a $5 million birthday party, featuring private performances by Rod Stewart and Patti Labelle, to celebrate an IPO that made him $677 million in a matter of days (within a year, incidentally, the investors who bought that stock would lose three-fourths of their investments).

So that IPO birthday boy is now standing up and insisting, with a straight face, that America’s problem is that compared to taxpaying billionaires like himself, poor people are not invested enough in our society’s future. Apparently, we’d all be in much better shape if the poor were as motivated as Steven Schwarzman is to make America a better place.

But it seems to me that if you’re broke enough that you’re not paying any income tax, you’ve got nothing but skin in the game. You’ve got it all riding on how well America works.

You can’t afford private security: you need to depend on the police. You can’t afford private health care: Medicare is all you have. You get arrested, you’re not hiring Davis, Polk to get you out of jail: you rely on a public defender to negotiate a court system you’d better pray deals with everyone from the same deck. And you can’t hire landscapers to manicure your lawn and trim your trees: you need the garbage man to come on time and you need the city to patch the potholes in your street.

And in the bigger picture, of course, you need the state and the private sector both to be functioning well enough to provide you with regular work, and a safe place to raise your children, and clean water and clean air.

The entire ethos of modern Wall Street, on the other hand, is complete indifference to all of these matters. The very rich on today’s Wall Street are now so rich that they buy their own social infrastructure. They hire private security, they live on gated mansions on islands and other tax havens, and most notably, they buy their own justice and their own government.

An ordinary person who has a problem that needs fixing puts a letter in the mail to his congressman and sends it to stand in a line in some DC mailroom with thousands of others, waiting for a response.

But citizens of the stateless archipelago where people like Schwarzman live spend millions a year lobbying and donating to political campaigns so that they can jump the line. They don’t need to make sure the government is fulfilling its customer-service obligations, because they buy special access to the government, and get the special service and the metaphorical comped bottle of VIP-room Cristal afforded to select customers.

Want to lower the capital reserve requirements for investment banks? Then-Goldman CEO Hank Paulson takes a meeting with SEC chief Bill Donaldson, and gets it done. Want to kill an attempt to erase the carried interest tax break? Guys like Schwarzman, and Apollo’s Leon Black, and Carlyle’s David Rubenstein, they just show up in Washington at Max Baucus’s doorstep, and they get it killed.

Some of these people take that VIP-room idea a step further. J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon – the man the New York Times once called “Obama’s favorite banker” – had an excellent method of guaranteeing that the Federal Reserve system’s doors would always be open to him. What he did was, he served as the Chairman of the Board of the New York Fed.

And in 2008, in that moonlighting capacity, he orchestrated a deal in which the Fed provided $29 billion in assistance to help his own bank, Chase, buy up the teetering investment firm Bear Stearns. You read that right: Jamie Dimon helped give himself a bailout. Who needs to worry about good government, when you are the government?

Dimon, incidentally, is another one of those bankers who’s complaining now about the unfair criticism. “Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it,” he recently said, at an investor’s conference.

Hmm. Is Dimon right? Do people hate him just because he’s rich and successful? That really would be unfair. Maybe we should ask the people of Jefferson County, Alabama, what they think.

That particular locality is now in bankruptcy proceedings primarily because Dimon’s bank, Chase, used middlemen to bribe local officials – literally bribe, with cash and watches and new suits – to sign on to a series of onerous interest-rate swap deals that vastly expanded the county’s debt burden.

Essentially, Jamie Dimon handed Birmingham, Alabama a Chase credit card and then bribed its local officials to run up a gigantic balance, leaving future residents and those residents’ children with the bill. As a result, the citizens of Jefferson County will now be making payments to Chase until the end of time.

Do you think Jamie Dimon would have done that deal if he lived in Jefferson County? Put it this way: if he was trying to support two kids on $30,000 a year, and lived in a Birmingham neighborhood full of people in the same boat, would he sign off on a deal that jacked up everyone’s sewer bills 400% for the next thirty years?

Doubtful. But then again, people like Jamie Dimon aren’t really citizens of any country. They live in their own gated archipelago, and the rest of the world is a dumping ground.

Just look at how Chase behaved in Greece, for example.

Having seen how well interest-rate swaps worked for Jefferson County, Alabama, Chase “helped” Greece mask its debt problem for years by selling a similar series of swaps to the Greek government. The bank then turned around and worked with banks like Goldman, Sachs to create a thing called the iTraxx SovX Western Europe index, which allowed investors to bet against Greek debt.

In other words, Chase knowingly larded up the nation of Greece with a crippling future debt burden, then turned around and helped the world bet against Greek debt.

Does a citizen of Greece do that deal? Forget that: does a human being do that deal?

Operations like the Greek swap/short index maneuver were easy money for banks like Goldman and Chase – hell, it’s a no-lose play, like cutting a car’s brake lines and then betting on the driver to crash – but they helped create the monstrous European debt problem that this very minute is threatening to send the entire world economy into collapse, which would result in who knows what horrors. At minimum, millions might lose their jobs and benefits and homes. Millions more will be ruined financially.

But why should Chase and Goldman care what happens to those people? Do they have any skin in that game?

Of course not. We’re talking about banks that not only didn’t warn the citizens of Greece about their future debt disaster, they actively traded on that information, to make money for themselves.

People like Dimon, and Schwarzman, and John Paulson, and all of the rest of them who think the “imbeciles” on the streets are simply full of reasonless class anger, they don’t get it. Nobody hates them for being successful. And not that this needs repeating, but nobody even minds that they are rich.

What makes people furious is that they have stopped being citizens.

Most of us 99-percenters couldn’t even let our dogs leave a dump on the sidewalk without feeling ashamed before our neighbors. It’s called having a conscience: even though there are plenty of things most of us could get away with doing, we just don’t do them, because, well, we live here. Most of us wouldn’t take a million dollars to swindle the local school system, or put our next door neighbors out on the street with a robosigned foreclosure, or steal the life’s savings of some old pensioner down the block by selling him a bunch of worthless securities.

But our Too-Big-To-Fail banks unhesitatingly take billions in bailout money and then turn right around and finance the export of jobs to new locations in China and India. They defraud the pension funds of state workers into buying billions of their crap mortgage assets. They take zero-interest loans from the state and then lend that same money back to us at interest. Or, like Chase, they bribe the politicians serving countries and states and cities and even school boards to take on crippling debt deals.

Nobody with real skin in the game, who had any kind of stake in our collective future, would do any of those things. Or, if a person did do those things, you’d at least expect him to have enough shame not to whine to a Bloomberg reporter when the rest of us complained about it.

But these people don’t have shame. What they have, in the place where most of us have shame, are extra sets of balls. Just listen to Cooperman, the former Goldman exec from that country club in Boca. According to Cooperman, the rich do contribute to society:

Capitalists “are not the scourge that they are too often made out to be” and the wealthy aren’t “a monolithic, selfish and unfeeling lot,” Cooperman wrote. They make products that “fill store shelves at Christmas…”

Unbelievable. Merry Christmas, bankers. And good luck getting that message out.

Here we are, almost at the end of the year 2011. After eight and a half long years, millions of lives lost, leaving a country visibly unrecognizable from 2003, trillions of dollars gone, Obama has called an end to the Iraq war, so that must be it then?

How it all began

After the 9/11 attacks, spun by the Powers That Be (PTB) as “terrorist attacks” by Muslim extremists, the War on Terror™ began. As a ‘subwar’, the invasion and occupation of Iraq was initiated after the governments of US and UK accused Iraq of employing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that it imposed a threat to their “sovereign nations”. Of course, the claim that Iraq was harboring WMDs was later completely dismissed and no such weapons were ever found. After the questionable capture and execution of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the Western governments began justifying their occupation of Iraq as “bringing democracy” to the country.

Now, almost nine years later the US army are exiting the country after being asked to leave by the Iraqi government for several years. One would assume that if the Iraqi government wasn’t so adamant that the US leave Iraqi soil, the US would probably never leave. But this “leave” is only on the surface and most likely a political stunt by the Obama administration before the 2012 presidential elections; so as to state that Obama actually ended the war. But in actuality the US has no intention of leaving Iraq and they are most definitely maintaining a presence there.

Is it really over?

As it stands, the US is planning on keeping roughly 15,000 personnel in the US embassy located in Baghdad which is as big as Vatican City. This number does not include several thousands of private security contractors and mercenaries nor hundreds if not thousands of undercover CIA agents who are also staying in Iraq.

Upon calling the troops home, Obama stated that, “history would judge the US decision to invade Iraq and of course what has been achieved from this war.”

Well history doesn’t have to, because anyone with a conscience could tell you that the Iraq invasion was – as with any invasion – a crime; but this one especially since the reason for the invasion (presence of WMDs in Iraq) was a complete fabrication brought about by the Neo-Cons and their lackeys.

In fact, just in November of this year, George W. Bush and Tony Blair were found guilty of war crimes by a Tribunal in Malaysia. So no, we don’t have to look too far into history to understand the invasion of Iraq was a heinous crime committed by psychopathic men without conscience. But of course none of that means anything in the Western world, bombarded by mainstream propaganda news, who are themselves owned by such men. Even so, the atrocities committed in Iraq were so great that the MSM couldn’t keep the lid shut for long. And even after all this, most of the people in the US cannot admit to themselves that their government that promised to protect them from “terrorists” were the terrorists.

The Iraq war cost the US trillions of dollars. As a result of it and other illegal acts committed by the US, the American – and even the global – economy is in dire shape with little hope of recovery. The veterans returning home from Iraq face a lot ofhardships as the unemployment rate in the US is much higher than the purported 8.6 percent that the pathocratic government admits.

They are also returning to a different country. A country that has completely lost its liberty, and now considers its own citizens enemies of the state for questioning the government. I can’t help but see the irony in this. These veterans went to Iraq to ‘save people from “terrorists”‘ and yet the terrorists were their own government, bankers, and the corporate elite. And now, should even they question what has become of their country, they may end up in Guantanamo Bay for posing questions that are not supposed to be asked.

The future is uncertain for these veterans but not so for the psychopathic government of US. They have already set the table for what may be their next target, but which one will it be?

Who’s Next?

So now that the Iraq war is “over”, who in the Middle East will be next on Santa’s list of invasion? Will it be Syria or Iran?

Iran is a good possibility. As with Iraq, the US seems to be following the same pattern of accusing Iran of harboring WMDs – or intentions of having WMDs – or thoughts of intentions of having WMDs. The US is also being pressured to start a war with Iran byIsrael, with whom they have more than close ties. If you think of those “ties” as puppet strings, you’ll get a better picture of the relationship.

Reports are also coming in that US and NATO troops have entered Jordan right next to the Syrian border. Could this be a platform from which to invade Iran?

Wherever is the next target, one thing is certain, the US’s reign of tyranny over the Middle East is far from over; and it won’t be over until the American people rise up against their own government. Not only to protest their own domestic losses, but that of the world the US has trampled on for far too long. Refuse to participate in the elections, refuse to pay taxes, refuse to give to the corporate machine. Demand that all those responsible for war crimes be put into prison and figure out once and for allwho was really behind 9/11. Then and only then, will we have some hope of salvation. You may say that’s a dream; a dream too far to seem real, but there have been others who’ve had greater dreams than I.