Tsvangirai will be assassinated within the next 60 days

Despite Mbeki's claim that someone out there has started a 'factory of lies', the evidence is clear that Mbeki supports Mugabe, that he sat on Scorpion's reports and that he was dishonest in his claim to 'know nothing about Thint' .
While in theory Mbeki can be credited with a singular lapse of common sense (meaning his first sensible contribution), it's debatable whether he did not oppose the disbanding of the Scorpions simply on the grounds that it benefited him personally (to the extent that it was harmful to his opponent, Zuma). In any event, the disappearance of the Scorpions occurs at an interesting juncture of the countries criminal evolution - crime is about to reach its zenith both at the highest and lowest levels.

Meanwhile, across the border an arms shipment has now reached Mugabe, the man Mbeki recently held hands with, and is it so unlikely that Mbeki didn't give a direct instruction to the SAS Drakensberg to refuel the An Yue Jiang as online newspaper Canal de Mocambique has reported? The Chinese ship was being tracked by Lloyds of London, however the Drakensberg had radar and satellite jamming equipment on board.

In any event, Mugabe now has weapons for a war, weapons to crush dissent, and he wasted no time deploying his war machine. 40 MDC activists are reported dead, and we are about to see armed military controls increasing all over Zimbabwe.

Morgan Tsvangirai has wisely changed his plans, and so did not return home on Friday, as planned, but one has to sympathise with the man - how can he ever return home given that his adversary has now armed himself? Only if Tsvangirai loses the election can he expect a smaller target on his back, because Mugabe certainly won't let him win. And if Tsvangirai does win, he will be bumped off. Either way, it appears now, he won't win.

And how can Mugabe get away with this? Because his backer in South Africa is powerful. Mbeki must be getting a lot of money from Mugabe to play ball. He probably thinks the Mbeki family dynasty will last a thousand years sort of psychology (based on the paycheck he has received). And all Mbeki has to say in defence of his erratic and frankly crazy diplomacy is 'someone is telling lies.' The question is not whether Mbeki is being honest or not; the question is why is he doing what we know he is doing? Simple. He has been offered lekker incentives to make sure Mugabe can continue giving him even more incentives.

Iraq looking at oil surplus, big profits

WASHINGTON - Iraq is looking at a potential boon in oil revenue this year, as the U.S. spends some $153 million a month in the country on fuel alone. But U.S. officials say it will take some time before Baghdad builds the capacity to manage the revenue.

The money isn't "just sitting in banks trying to get somebody rich on interest income," said Adm. William Fallon, who recently stepped down as the top U.S. military commander in the Middle East. "It's because they're in a holding position now until they can figure out how to effectively disburse these moneys."

Stuart Bowen, special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, said Baghdad in recent months has experienced its highest oil production and export levels since the war began five years ago.

Whereas Iraqi officials estimated $35 billion in oil revenue last fall, Bowen said the final number is likely to be closer to $60 billion.

By ANNE FLAHERTY, Associated Press Writer
More.

NVDL: Hmmm. Interesting. This article is code for - so the US war on Iraq was a good inverstment wasn't it. I guess an investment in Iran is next. The whole point of the exercise is not to allow competitiors to squeeze the world's largest consumer of energy - the US must secure access first and hold onto it. Whether this is sustainable (or even moral) is another question altogether.

Kunstler: Blanket Psychology and why we have more to Fear than Fear itself

The maneuvers that the big banks are making nowadays, along with their enablers at the Federal Reserve and elsewhere in Washington, really amount to little more than the old Polish blanket joke -- in which (excuse my concision) the proverbial Polack wants to make his blanket longer, so he scissors twelve inches off the top and sews it onto the bottom. Only in this case, the banks are shearing x-billions of losses off the top of their blankets and re-attching x-billions of new debt onto the bottom. This new debt, of course, goes to cover the old losses and only represents further losses-to-be-reported-later, since the banks are basically insolvent. Borrowing more money when you're broke doesn't make you less insolvent.

The banks can probably keep this gag running a little longer, but not without consequences. My guess is that it spins out of control in March sometime when some more hedge funds blow up and at least one big bank, perhaps Citi, rolls belly up like a harpooned whale. The game is really over, and all the playerz know it. The consequence of continuing to pretend the meta-fiasco of Ponzi endgame is fixable will be an even more shattering depression than the one we're already in for.

We are a much poorer nation than we thought we were and the reality is just too hard to face. Nobody from the most august banker (Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson) to the lowliest wanker (the WalMart inventory clerk who "bought" a house outside Phoenix with a no-money-down, payment-option, adjustable rate mortgage) can believe that this is happening. The candidates for president are pretty much assuming that vast financial resources will exist to be deployed against a range of problems. Everybody is going to be hugely disappointed.

When you introduce perversities into an economic system, they invariably end up expressing themselves as distortions. The economy that evolved the past two decades, driven by the perverse securitization of wishes and frauds, will now express itself in a stark cratering of American living standards. Incomes and jobs will vanish, massive quantities of stuff will collect dust on the WalMart shelves, the fragile infrastructures of daily life will go to shit, and there will be political hell to pay. Every attempt to avoid a straight-up workout of our massive losses, will represent another layer of perversity and more consequent destructive distortions.

I feel sorry for the next president. Even as he takes the oath of office, the nation will be flying apart like a seized-up engine. Since the fiasco in finance is happening in lock-step with Peak Oil (and very likely because of it at a fundamental level) we can expect one of the distortions to take the form of oil shortages. These shortages will come not just from demand bottlenecks in a stressed-out world oil allocation system, but because exporting nations will start demanding payment in Euros or something besides the depreciating currency that reflects our disintegration, and we'll have a problem coming up with payments that amount to at least fifty percent more than we're used to shelling out.

Once the US gets into serious difficulties with our oil supplies, every other sector of the economy wobbles, including especially the food-growing sector, which cannot function without copious amounts of diesel fuel and hydrocarbon-based soil "inputs." Americans will go hungry, and not just the "underclasses."

Along in this process somewhere, there is huge potential for armed conflict with other nations. If the unraveling gets traction while George W. Bush remains in charge, the US may answer bellicosity from oil-exporting nations, or energy-hungry rivals, with truculence of our own. Things can get out of control very fast in such a situation. Nations that were happily selling us salad shooters six months earlier may be targeting our naval vessels with a different sort of shooter, say a Sunburn missile. In any case, we will be acting with a bankrupt, exhausted, and over-extended military, and the best case outcome would leave us merely isolated and marooned geopolitically on our own continent, with dwindling energy and mineral resources and an angry, demoralized population.

This time around we have more to fear than fear itself. The banking executives, government officials, and candidates for president are not doing the nation a service by concealing and ignoring our losses. Finance, as the driver of an economy, is finished, but the deployment of capital is still an indispensable arm of a real economy. Sooner or later we'll get back to money that stands for something and banks that function as credible repositories of wealth. But we haven't even started down the path to that place, and the longer we pretend that we don't have to go there, the worse the journey will be.

By James Kunstler

NVDL: And so ends the spectacular phase known as the generation that 'Wanted Something For Nothing', but instead took everything for themselves leaving Generation Next with Nothing For Something. They (we?) will break their (our?) backs laboring on farms to pay the piper for a chaotic climate and the eviscerations of long term stagflation. I don't think we will get back to a money system again. Money will be invisible after this, banking will be online, but it will be based on the value of real assets that exist in the real world. We will mortgage everything in future, houses, cars, the lot. And thus commerce will finally come to resemble what it always was: trading goods (not for money, but for goods you don't have). Just a theory.