STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
DB Briefs: Americans Like Gold – A Lot / Big Prison for Afghanistan / Disturbing Reports From Libya
By Staff News & Analysis - September 22, 2011

Americans Like Gold – A Lot … Gallup: Americans Choose Gold as the Best Long-Term Investment … Men, seniors, middle-income Americans, and Republicans are more enamored with gold … Thirty four percent of Americans say gold is the best long-term investment, more than say so about four other types of investments. Real estate (19%) and stocks (17%) are distant second choices. – Gallup

Big Prison for Afghanistan … What withdrawal? Obama wants $100 million prison in Afghanistan … While President Obama insists that the US will save $1 trillion over the next decade by pulling out of the Afghan War, he has devoted little time to discuss his plans to build a new prison in Afghanistan — at a cost of $100 million. Whether or not Obama wants to talk about it during his ongoing, indulgent pleas for Congress to pass his American Jobs Act, the US is looking towards spending upwards of $100 million on the construction of a prison in the city of Bagran, Afghanistan. – RT

Disturbing Reports From Libya … What Really Happened in Libya? … This week GRTV talks to Mahdi Nazemroaya, a research associate of the Centre for Research in Globalization who spent two months in Libya before escaping after the rebel siege of Tripoli. We discuss what really happened in Libya, including the war crimes perpetrated by NATO in support of the rebels, and how the media helped to enable those war crimes by covering up for the perpetrators. – Global Research TV

Americans Like Gold – A Lot

Gallup: Americans Choose Gold as the Best Long-Term Investment … Men, seniors, middle-income Americans, and Republicans are more enamored with gold … Thirty four percent of Americans say gold is the best long-term investment, more than say so about four other types of investments. Real estate (19%) and stocks (17%) are distant second choices. – Gallup

Dominant Social Theme: Gold is on a minor uptrend. When it drops back down to US$250 an ounce, the interest it has created will subside.

Free-Market Analysis: Another dominant social theme is increasingly shaky. The great Anglosphere families that run the world's central banking (fiat money) must not be happy about news such as this. One reason the West – and especially America – is deluged by such surveys is because the elites like to take, regularly, the pulse of the middle class to determine how malleable and misguided it is. And the news on this front is gradually degrading to the dismay, we figure, of the powers-that-be.

Hitherto malleable middle classes are angry about unemployment, upset about taxes, irritated with their faux-leadership and worried about their eroding savings and pension accounts. Gold ties right into this larger frustration. Yet the elites have invested endless time and energy into ensuring that people see gold and silver as (as John Maynard Keynes put it) a "barbarous relic."

Not anymore. People are well aware of the amazing run-up of gold (and silver). Gold began the decade at US$250 an ounce and today is at US$2000, almost. What other asset class (outside of silver) can boast a similar track record? Decades of propaganda have been vitiated by gold's extraordinary run. Instead of trusting in the power elite's false economy, its jumble of bankrupt banks, impoverished "sovereign" countries and stumbling stock markets, people are once again attracted to the glittering allure of the "yellow metal."

The hold of the power elite over the economy – and thus the citizens working within this economy – is grievously weakened. The prize, of course, is central banking, the ability (jealously guarded by the elites) to print money from nothing to fund a variety of programs leading to world government – including political, economic and military processes. They will do anything, quite literally, to maintain this privilege. And one effort they make consistently is to continually portray gold as a useless investment.

The Aug. 11-14 Gallup poll was the first to inquire about gold, at least of late. Gallup apparently, so the article tells us, asked a similar question from 2002 to 2010, but that question did not include gold. "Real estate, savings accounts, and stocks jockeyed for the top spot during that time … Gold is Americans' top pick as the best long-term investment regardless of gender, age, income, or party ID, but men, seniors, middle-income Americans, and Republicans are more enamored with it than are other Americans … After gold, low-income Americans are most likely to pick savings accounts as the best option for long-term investing."


Big Prison for Afghanistan

What withdrawal? Obama wants $100 million prison in Afghanistan … While President Obama insists that the US will save $1 trillion over the next decade by pulling out of the Afghan War, he has devoted little time to discuss his plans to build a new prison in Afghanistan — at a cost of $100 million. Whether or not Obama wants to talk about it during his ongoing, indulgent pleas for Congress to pass his American Jobs Act, the US is looking towards spending upwards of $100 million on the construction of a prison in the city of Bagram, Afghanistan. – RT

Dominant Social Theme: The Afghan war is under control and the perpetrators will be punished.

Free-Market Analysis: In several articles recently, DB has tracked the creation of a kind of Middle East and African gulag being erected by the Anglosphere. This planned Bagram prison fits right into that larger pattern. The larger effort, apparently, is to maintain some level of control over an increasingly fractious and rebellious region of the world.

NATO and America wish to convince the public-at-large that its military presence is modest and growing smaller. But the prison network the US (in particular) is setting up abroad to contain and control "captured terrorists" continues to enlarge.

Having helped create the "Arab Spring," NATO and the US now face the hard work of keeping it under control. The idea apparently has been to create a large, low-impact war between a resurgent Islam and the West. To this end, a number of secular regimes have been removed in the Middle East and Africa and if we are correct in our perspective, these regimes will be replaced by Islamic Republics. Most of these republics may be influenced by Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, which is penetrated by the CIA at the top. This is how controlled wars are waged.

A war is a war. And wars spin out of control or, as in the case of Afghanistan, don't work out so well. The Anglosphere is doing what it can to maintain control. It already has in place a kind of gulag for the Middle East's population of religious young men, many of whom are radicalized by their involuntary incarcerations. But in many places, the US (in particular) is dependent on prisons and staffing over which it is has no direct control.

For this reason, perhaps, the US has embarked on its own prison-building effort. One such prison is going up in Somalia and now another one is being planned for Afghanistan. According to RT, "A call-for-work posted on a federal government website last week revealed that the US is intending on erecting a facility which will feature accommodations for as many as 2,000 detainees with an estimated construction cost of $25,000,000 to $100,000,000."

RT points out that the United States is "still imprisoning more than 2800 men outside the United States without charge or trial." And these prisons ensure that even if thousands of soldiers return home, the "footprint of the American military will live on in Afghanistan for years to come."


Disturbing Reports From Libya

What Really Happened in Libya? … This week GRTV talks to Mahdi Nazemroaya, a research associate of the Centre for Research in Globalization who spent two months in Libya before escaping after the rebel siege of Tripoli. We discuss what really happened in Libya, including the war crimes perpetrated by NATO in support of the rebels, and how the media helped to enable those war crimes by covering up for the perpetrators. – Global Research TV

Dominant Social Theme: Muammar Gaddafi has been deposed. Collateral damage is to be expected, but it is the result of the "fog of war" and nothing more.

Free-Market Analysis: This interview with Mahdi Nazemroaya by GR Internet TV is a disturbing one. He visited Libya and was there during the downfall of Tripoli. He makes numerous allegations that the US and NATO are using mercenaries, or at least shadowy special forces, to fight against Muammar Gaddafi and that Tripoli in particular was invaded with the help of these mercenaries. He also indicates that the bombing campaign against Gaddafi was a purposefully broad one, intended to terrorize Libyan citizens and make Gaddafi's rule untenable.

NATO air power has purposefully bombed hospitals, schools and various other civilian buildings – bombings that Nazemroaya claims were intended to create the damage they did. From Nazemroaya's standpoint, these bombings were neither necessary nor appropriate. Instead, they were cruel and their consistency was unwarranted.

NATO leaders had once estimated that Gaddafi would topple in only days or weeks. But it has been at least six months since action was taken against Gaddafi and he is still defiant. Obviously, he had more support within the populace than NATO anticipated.

Some 30,000-50,000 Libyans are estimated to be dead now as a result of the war, and while the reason NATO went in originally was supposedly to prevent Gaddafi from hurting civilians, one can legitimately ask if the antidote was a good deal more severe than the disease it was intended to cure.

The deaths are compounded by the lawlessness of NATO's actions, and the disinformation that has been spread about the war and its goals. The real danger of these sorts of military actions – beyond the horror being inflicted on Libyans – is that such lawlessness feeds on itself. What is being visited on Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Iraq and numerous other countries can surely be visited on the West itself. History shows us this is often the case.

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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