Why Are We Going To Syria?
I've gotten a lot of questions from folks asking my opinion of what the real reason is that we're going into Syria. Well, I've held off for the most part because it won't read well to the main stream media sort of folks that think we're doing it for humanitarian reasons, and some times I get tired of dealing with the stupid emails people send. We are NOT going to Syria for humanitarian reasons. Sorry to bust that fairy bubble.
War has been raging between religions and sects and tribes in the Mid East for a zillion years. In Africa there were horrific genocides where MILLIONS of folks were butchered and raped and hung. Yet we didn't hear any President "draw a red line". What a crock of hooey. I guess it is okay to have armed bandits plunder a Christian village and rape the women in front of their husbands and then force the woman to watch as they castrate the man and burn his skin off? That's okay, but oh woe is to you if you use chemicals to kill everyone? Are you kidding me?
Forget all the liberal "feel goody" baloney about humanitarianism. Our involvement in Syria has nothing what so ever to do with "helping the good people". It's a sound bite, a good cover story and it's bogus as a free lunch. Okay, so if it isn't because of our big hearts and loving caring compassion for our fellow man, then why on earth would a broke nation tired of a decade of war in God awful places want to get involved with yet another nightmare? It's always the same folks. Money and power. Nothing else. Never was.
I don't believe there's any one single reason behind our push to get involved, I tend to think it's a series of reasons that they can gel together and further their agenda's. So let's look at the first one and see how that plays out.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar are the big dogs in the energy patch. But it is Russia that is making billions by supplying Europe with natural gas. Qatar has the biggest liquid natural gas operation on the planet and they tried for years to get a pipeline through Syria so they could blow the doors off Russia's prices and take over supplying the area. But there was a problem. Assad (whom Obama wants out) said no way to Qatar and instead tried to pen its own deal with Iran to take some of their gas from the Southern border and pipe that on through.
Saudi Arabia is also against Assad because they have lobbied many times and many billions to get a puppet Government installed in Syria so they too could use it as a transportation hub of sorts and control the energy flow to the southern European region. Thus you have Qatar AND Saudi Arabia supplying billions of dollars and arms to these rebel factions to take out Assad and replace him with a very pliable puppet that will allow them to make untold billions while shutting out the Russians.
As you can imagine Putin and his boys' aren't too keen on this. They know full well that if Syria falls to the "wrong" people it will be just a matter of a couple years where Russia's income will fall like a rock because the Sauds and Qatari's will be supplying all the LNG and gaseous Natural gas they could ever use. So, Russia's a firm ally for Assad. They need him there to keep the Qatari's and Sauds out of the action. Not to mention knowing full well that it will strengthen the US if all this comes to pass. Thus they are not amused when the US says they have all this proof of Assad using chemical weapons as their reason to get involved.
But why would the US want to get involved in the first place? Simple. Because of Saudi oil, Obama's relationships with Saudi royalty, and the deal Qatar has with shipping LNG around the globe; the US stands to win on two fronts. First off, we have discovered that we are rich beyond belief in Natural gas. So much we have to export it. But we're not set up for it. Qatar however IS set up for it. Right now Exxon has a deal where they're shipping Texas gas to the Mediterranean via an agreement with Qatar's petroleum international folks. Thus is a double win for the US. Russia gets crippled and we stand to make billions selling discount gas.
But there was a problem brewing. How on earth could we get involved without looking like we're going to war AGAIN for oil, energy and power?? It would be a very very hard sell to the public. They needed a big cover story, but one that also solves more than just one problem. See, they were desperate to get in there and topple Assad... but didn't have a sellable story to the gullible citizens.
Maybe as important as screwing Russia and making billions selling NatGas... sending in our military helps them solve another very massive problem. Our Central banker has been making noise about "tapering" his buying of Treasuries. Benji is having a hard time justifying this pace of 85 billion a month because they've mopped up so much available supply, that if they keep this pace up they can't hide it as "sterilized" money. It would then just be flat out "money printing" instead of their sleight of hand "quantitative easing". In other words, right now the line of baloney is that Bernanke is not really printing money that gets injected into the system; he's simply buying enough treasuries that are issued to keep the demand high enough that rates stay low. But if there's not enough supply of these treasuries to suck up... then why would he need to spend 85 billion a month? See the problem? The US needs to INCREASE it's debt to keep Bernanke buying and thus keeping rates low.
So what would cause the US to have to offer up more treasuries? What sort of spending scheme could they hatch to put us billions more in debt without presenting another useless social program or work program?? What could they conjure up that won't be mocked down by the political "right?" Well....How's about a nice big fat military bill for lobbing hundreds of million dollar missiles? Hows about the flight times, energy costs and the whopper of a bill that comes with moving a huge portion of the Navy fleet to the area? War costs money, big big money. Uncle Sam would have to sell a lot of debt notes to finance it, and once again Bernanke would have his reason to suck it all up, supplying the banksters and the military complex with umpteen billions of dollars. As has been oft quoted in the past, "war is a racket" and the biggest money maker of all time. Bankers create wars just to finance them. To hell with the kids blown to bits and the VA hospitals treating our soldiers like crap. They don't care about that. Banker kids don't go to war. Politicians kids don't go to war. Just the peons.
So they've wanted to get rid of Assad since the sickeningly called "Arab Spring" fiasco, but the stars weren't aligned. Now, with interest rates here in the states starting to rise, and killing housing, and the so called recovery.... all they needed to kill three birds with one stone was to get involved in Syria. The military bills would keep Bernanke busy buying up billions in Treasuries, and we could help Saudi Arabia and Qatar get what they want AND create a pure pathway for our Natural gas reserves to flood the Euro zone AND cripple Russia. The perfect trifecta.
But they still needed a reason. They had to have something they could point to as a "red line" that if crossed would drag us in on humanitarian principles. Teach them a stern lesson. What a crock of steaming crap all that is. They whom ever you wish to call they... from the royal house of Saud to some lunatic Qatari's, planted the right rebels with the right missiles and the chemicals "went off". It was easy peasy for us to then 'make up" some evidence that it was Assad who did it and we need to get in there and kick him out.
So when you ask... why are we desperate to get involved in Syria, now you know.
But that then brings up part two. At what point does something go horribly awry and this escalates into the real deal WWIII? Don't laugh that off as paranoid talk. Putin is no joke and is not going to take kindly to the US helping cripple his energy deals. Iran could easily look at this as a reason to strike Israel. Israel could easily retaliate and obliterate Damascus and half of Iran. What happens if one of these US missiles hits a Syrian nuclear energy depot and radiation alarms spread for 200 miles? Does some lonesome general in some rebel offshoot decide he's got to now lob mustard gas into US bases and Israel?
Usually even in times of World Wars there's at least the appearance of civilized humans sitting at the conference tables. Things like the "rules of war" and Geneva Convention come to mind. But consider what we're dealing with here folks. This region is full of absolute barbarians. Virtually every day we hear of horrors being done by people with not the slightest hint of conscience. People are beheaded for mocking Allah. Families burned for contrived insults to Islam. These aren't people you can reckon with. If things start to escalate, you can't count on "cool minds" to simmer things down.
Thus I'm against the US getting involved in this mess. I don't want our boys getting shot at so some oil monarch can run pipelines. I don't want to enrich the war machine. Yet as we all know, all us peon's don't amount to a hill of beans. They're going to do what the elites have always done... enrich their agenda on the blood of innocent civilians.
Maybe, just maybe we don't go in. But I doubt it. I think it's written in stone and the dog and pony show of going through Congress is just to mute the brain dead that think things run like they're supposed to in Washington. I think we'll start with the missile attacks, find that it "wasn't enough" and sure enough... we'll send in our ground troops yet again. This is not a pleasant thought.
The Market....
Friday was the all important non farm payroll report and frankly it stunk like five day fish. Not only did it come in lame and miss estimates, the last two months reports were revised lower by tens of thousands of jobs. It was horrid no matter how you looked at it and the "participation rate" which is those folks trying to find a job... fell to 30 year lows. Yes you read right, 30 year lows.
But Friday wasn't just about a lousy report on jobs as we also had Obama on TV talking about the G20 meeting in Russia and the Syria situation. It was a disgraceful TV appearance because frankly he has no idea what to say. He's in a box and he knows it, so each question brought on a slew of "uhm, and aah's, and hmm's" as he tried to quickly come up with something that made sense. It was horrible to watch.
The market didn't like what it saw at first and soon after the open we had fallen 150 DOW points. But then like usual the plunge patrol stepped in, and there was all sorts of new speculation that the report was so lousy Bernanke couldn't possibly taper on the 18th. So, from down 150 we were actually green with 35 DOW points by noon. Some of it hope, some Bravado and some "a prayer".
Welcome to the world in 2013. All day every day you're told that the global recovery is in full swing and yet we know it is all main stream baloney. Over in Poland word has it that they are scrambling to cover up a report that says their Government is going to nationalize pension funds in state, transferring all bond holdings immediately and stock holdings in the coming years. This is what passes today as a recovery... Governments stealing private pensions. Going to war to create stimulus for the military complex and give bankers more to finance. 48 million of our citizens on food stamps and untold millions more on some form of Government hand out.
In China they build cities that can house 1 million folks, but there's no one there. Ghost towns only put up so they can put on the illusion of expansion. Japan's gone crazy pushing more stimulus over 2 years than we did in 5. India's broke and trying their best to confiscate the citizens holdings of gold. Shall I go on??
This is NOT recovery, this is the death throes of the end game of 40 years of Fiat money printing and "Government's gone wild". There's no way this leads to "leave it to Beaver" 1950's style economic good times. Sorry they're gone. Look at us here in the States. We don't even invest based on earnings which are bogus, or financial statements. We invest on QE programs and other such non sense. The world's gone nuts.
In the next 12 days we've got some serious challenges. Mr. Putin said on Friday that if we bomb Syria, he's going to back Syria. That puts Obama in a bind I'd say. You really don't want to have a true stand off with the Russian bear. Which leads to Bernanke. I'm still slightly in the camp that says they don't taper and if we do lob missiles by then, there's NO WAY we'll see a taper in fact.. we'll see an increase in accommodation. Consider this.. while not a voter... read this.....
Fed's Kocherlakota Says Economy Needs More Accommodation
Thursday, 05 Sep 2013 07:22 AM
Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis President Narayana Kocherlakota, who has backed the Fed's $85 billion in monthly bond buying, said the central bank's outlook for inflation and unemployment calls for more accommodation.
If they do taper, I don't think it's as priced in as folks think. I think it rattles the market. If they don't... we'll probably see the market soar on all the bogus printing. How sick is that? Very.
It is a very difficult time out there right now and there's no shame in leaning into the cautious camp. We have been hunting and pecking some short term trades, but it isn't easy trading. Each day brings new worries. Sure I've heard that the market climbs a wall of worry, what they don't tell you is that sometimes the market falls off that wall like Humpty Dumpty and crashes. Until some form of normality creeps in, just keep your wits about you.
I'll see you on Wednesday.
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