The FRB’s “Operation Twist”: Europe and America Grim Economic Prospects

Seven months after the official announcement on 9/21/11 of “Operation Twist” not much progress has been made at the long end of the market to reduce yields.The yield on the 10-year T-note has gone from 1.88% to 2.3% and the 30-year bond went from 3.03% to 3.41%. The episode has been marred by hedge fund and sovereign selling, which has left the short end a little higher, but the long end much higher. The question now is how much did this cost the Fed for such disappointing results? Or in fact was this really their objective? We may never know, because the Fed hides what they do not want anyone to know. These results might not seem important but US Treasury instruments are the foundation of the global monetary system.

US Resource War Against China: Further Militarization of The African Continent

Coincidently, the US military is now attempting to increase its presence in what is widely considered the world’s most resource rich nation, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The DRC has suffered immensely during its history of foreign plunder and colonial occupation; it maintains the second lowest GDP per capita despite having an estimated $24 trillion in untapped raw minerals deposits. During the Congo Wars of the 1996 to 2003, the United States provided training and arms to Rwandan and Ugandan militias who later invaded the eastern provinces of the DRC in proxy. In addition to benefiting various multinational corporations, the regimes of Paul Kagame in Rwanda and Yoweri Museveni in Uganda both profited immensely from the plunder of Congolese conflict minerals such as cassiterite, wolframite, coltan (from which niobium and tantalum are derived) and gold. The DRC holds more than 30% of the world’s diamond reserves and 80% of the world’s coltan, the majority of which is exported to China for processing into electronic-grade tantalum powder and wiring.

2012: George Washington helping America

AT THE CROSSROADS: America 2012: What Would George Washington Do? So much water has passed under the bridge of history since George Washington helped to cut a young nation out of the fraying fabric of the British…

Murder Which Happens Every Day in Afghanistan Is Not an Anomaly in War

The war in Afghanistan—where the enemy is elusive and rarely seen, where the cultural and linguistic disconnect makes every trip outside the wire a visit to hostile territory, where it is clear that you are losing despite the vast industrial killing machine at your disposal—feeds the culture of atrocity. The fear and stress, the anger and hatred, reduce all Afghans to the enemy, and this includes women, children and the elderly. Civilians and combatants merge into one detested nameless, faceless mass. The psychological leap to murder is short. And murder happens every day in Afghanistan. It happens in drone strikes, artillery bombardments, airstrikes, missile attacks and the withering suppressing fire unleashed in villages from belt-fed machine guns.

Amnesty and the NATO Cover-Up of War Crimes in Libya

Yesterday, on 19 March 2012, Amnesty International was calling on NATO to “investigate the killing of dozens of civilians during it`s air campaign last year and to provide reparations to the people affected”. Amnesty further…