Duck And Cover...What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

I can still remember being in elementary school and the alarm going off in the middle of class, it was time to practice "duck and cover."  Another practice drill was when all six grades would march to the basement of the building and huddle in the boiler room, a potential nuclear war at any time was very real to us in the old days.  It's different today, everyone "knows" a nuclear war can nor will ever happen.  It can't happen because our leaders driving the bus are too smart to ever go down that road ...right?  

In case you have only been watching mainstream media, you may not be aware  another "little war" has broken out in the Middle East between Saudi Arabia and Yemen.  I mentioned "mainstream media" above because ...there is almost NO MENTION of this.  More coverage has been given to an airliner crashed by a depressed pilot and Mr. Obama's recent golf trip. What is happening is so complicated it boggles the mind.    The underlying cause can be said to be religious, between the Sunnis and Shiites but this line is quite blurred because of other alliances. 

To bring you up to speed, Saudi Arabia is predominantly Sunni, Iran is predominantly Shiite.  This pits the two against each other.  Yemen had a Shiite president until 2012 and he was replaced by a Sunni.  The country is split, mostly Shiite in the north and Sunni in the south.  A new name (Al Qaeda, ISIL, ISIS etc.), the Shiite (Iranian backed) "Houthi" have sprung up from the north and forced the president out of the capital, his whereabouts are unknown.  Yemen has been and is going through a civil war.

The problems as I see them are: first, Yemen controls a choke point of oil transportation from the Red Sea, logistically they can prevent a goodly percentage of oil from reaching world markets.  This in my mind is secondary to what potentially could be "drawn in".  If this expands and truly becomes Saudi Arabia versus Iran then assuming our ties with the Saudis remain (remember they just joined China's competing infrastructure bank against U.S. wishes), it will become the U.S. versus Russia backing Iran.  A side oddity is the U.S. providing airstrikes in support of Iranian fighters against the ISIS advance in Iraq.  Could we support Iranian troops in one country yet cut them down in another conflict?  I suppose yes and should not be surprising given our foreign policy thought process, it could be said it is even probable?  This is the danger in the Middle East, it is religious and thus the hardest type of fire to put out.   

This is not the only place the U.S. and Russia are facing off, don't forget Ukraine and other borders to Russia.  NATO (the U.S.) has been amassing hardware all around the Russian border and our Congress just overwhelmingly voted 348-48 to supply Ukraine with military hardware.  Mr. Putin and Russia have previously said if we arm Ukraine, they will consider it an act of war. 

This is insanity!   It was reported yesterday the U.S. is sending 50 Abrams class tanks to Ukraine, not smart in my opinion.  Sending arms to Ukraine will not work to defeat Russia, it will however get a war started which is exactly what the U.S. has been trying to do over the last several years.   

I don't want to write a book about either the Middle East situation or the direct aggression on the Russian border, rather we should look at "why".  Why is the U.S. pushing so hard for a war which cannot be won and can only go nuclear with all the follow on repercussions?  In short, because we "have to".  The game is over and Washington knows it.  The game of course is dollar hegemony.  The game of "reflation" is lost and gone until we can reset the system with a new currency.  You see, each time we had a recession in the past, the Fed would (could) reflate the economy and thus the markets.  It did not work this time as you know because we reached "debt saturation" levels in the economy back in 2007 and now finally on the Fed and Treasury levels.  Adding more debt no longer works as a medicine, rather, it is lethal.

It is my opinion that war is necessary and will be used to "cover up" what has really been done.  Will people even care about their 401K's in the middle of a world war?  Will they care if the dollar implodes in value?  Of course they will but, these and any other bad events will be blamed on "the war".  You will hear "our plans would have worked and were working if not for the war".  Will investigations of anything be demanded?  No, "it was the war's fault"! 

There are a couple of possibilities still left for the world to avoid war.  First, and seemingly possible in light of recent actions, our allies could simply abandon us.  They might even join together and demand the U.S. just stop.  Europe could turn away and tell us they do not want war with Russia.  Until this week I thought it was possible for Saudi Arabia to turn toward China and thus Russia, I may have been wrong as demonstrated with their attacks on Yemen with U.S. support. 

Another possibility is somehow the rest of the world makes it financially impossible for the U.S. to wage war.  It is possible for our markets to be "crashed" and our ability to borrow denied.  This could be a concerted effort or even in the form of some sort of "truth bomb".  Our entire system is a lie.  The banking system is a lie where mark to fantasy is the rule, our economic reporting is false and so are all markets.  Our rule of law is breaking down.  Should the lie of the "American way" be somehow exposed, allies would not back us nor will there be any support internally to aggress further overseas. 

The U.S. has worked very hard over the last year(s) to isolate Russia in nearly every way imaginable and to war with them, we have succeeded in isolating ourselves more and more.  The question is whether we have isolated ourselves to the point where the entire world will no longer support us and instead stand against us.   

As I started this piece with "duck and cover", it was foolish then and of course still foolish.  What we so feared then, and maybe even irrationally, we should absolutely fear today.  Our leaders of the past were rational, they also had options and a viable system to live in.  Today, our leaders are irrational with no options available in a system which must be changed and cleaned up.  If you ask the question, "what could possibly go wrong?", the answer is, it already has, and unfortunately we will bear the consequences.  As good and easy as it was in the past to live as an American, I believe it will be an unpleasant and hard (if not impossible) task from here.   

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Courtesy of www.milesfranklin.com