The attacks of September 11th, 2001 didn’t happen in isolation. The interventionist ambitions of American empire abroad not only laid the foundations for 9/11 to occur, but set the stage to usher in an unparalleled era of violence and exploitation.

Around this time of year we are told to “Never Forget”. To never forget the tragedy of the over 2,977 people who lost their lives on that fateful Tuesday morning on September 11, 2001. And yet, for the astute observer, the slogan “Never Forget” rings hollow. For a quarter of a century the phrase has been used as a propaganda tool to promote constant war, excessive government overreach, and blatant racism.

We are told to never forget, while the commemoration of the attacks are used as convenient cover to purposefully obfuscate the historical record and induce a collective amnesia as to forget the most pivotal inconvenient truths.

Never forget the nearly 3000 people who died that day, but definitely make sure you forget that roughly three times that many people have died in the years since due to exposure to toxins after New York City officials deliberately lied to the public when they assured them that the air was safe to breathe.

Definitely make sure you forget the estimated 4.5 million people that have been senselessly murdered and another 38 million displaced as a result of the so called “War on Terror” (war of terror) waged in the years sense.

Pay no mind to the fact that for two and a half decades afterwards, the national security state ushered in under post 9/11 emergency powers has trampled on every civil liberty and constitutional protection we have.

Totally disregard the numerous whistleblowers that have come forward in the years since refuting the official story.

Certainly forget that over two decades of study conducted by hundreds of architects, engineers, and other reputable scientists has conclusively debunked the official narrative and determined that the World Trade Center collapsed as a result of controlled demolition.

Don’t bring up the fact that declassified internal documents prove that US officials were aware of, and covered up, the fact that several of the hijackers were aided by Saudi intelligence, or that released court documents show at least two of the hijackers were confirmed to be Saudi-managed CIA assets.

And no matter what you do, make sure to completely ignore the fact that operatives of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad were arrested shortly after the attacks and found to have had advanced knowledge of it taking place as evidenced by their admissions of being tasked with documenting the event.

In short, the real message behind the slogan is “Never Forget the tragedy, but only remember what we want you to. Always forget how and why it happened, and what occurred afterwards.”

The how, and the why, and the what came after can generally be summed up with one word. Imperialism. To truly understand 9/11 in its broader scope, how it came about, and its destructive ramifications thereafter, one has to understand the nature of US imperialism.

It is rightly pointed out that 9/11 was in part the result of blowback ― A term coined by US Intelligence to describe unintended consequences of reckless foreign policy decisions.

As The Nation pointed out in its October 15th, 2001 issue of the same name, the radical fervor that helped to foment the deep seated discontent necessary for such an attack to take place did not arise out of a vacuum. It was the result of excessive US meddling in the Middle East.

From the very outset the United States has been a project of imperial ambitions built upon the destructive nature of colonialist expansionism. From the genocidal extermination of this land’s indigenous peoples, to the ruthlessness of the Monroe Doctrine, the aim of the American experiment has been that of every empire that has come before it: To use unprecedented levels of violence to attempt to be the most dominant force on the planet.

Prior to the 9/11 attacks the US empire had already been hard at work destabilizing the Middle East. From facilitating a coup in Iran in 1953, another in Iraq in 1963, and again in 1968 helping to bring Saddam Hussein to power. In 1979 imperialist ambitions would lead to the creation of Operation Cyclone in which the US would back jihadist militants to provoke the Soviet Union into an invasion of Afghanistan. It was precisely this operation providing assistance to Islamic fundamentalists, including Osama bin Laden who worked as a key CIA asset, that led to the creation of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Meanwhile, due to Western interference in the 1979 Iranian revolution backfiring spectacularly, the managers of American Empire gave the go ahead for its Iraqi proxy Saddam Hussein to go to war with Iran, with chemical weapons supplied by the CIA.

All of this to say that the United States had spent decades turning the Middle East into a conflagration of immense proportions, it is of course no wonder that this kind of recklessness would eventually make its way back home with disastrous consequences. 

However, such blowback is only one aspect of the why and how that 9/11 occurred. It wasn’t just arrogance and ignorance that led to this attack taking place, as noted earlier there was also a strong degree of complicity from our very own government, not simply to allow it to happen, but to deliberately orchestrate it as the most prominent false flag attack of our time.

False flag attacks used to be considered a conspiracy theory, until just some years ago the existence of these provocation operations was finally subtly acknowledged as a reality by the ruling class and corporate media, amid the US empire’s instigated conflict between Ukraine and Russia.

For our part, TFTP has thoroughly documented several of these historical events including the infamous Reichstag fire and Operation Himmler of the Third Reich, to the deliberately provoked attack against Pearl Harbor, and many more events used to manufacture the pretext necessary for waging war.

One of the best known among these operations, despite ironically being one that never actually made it past the planning phase, was Operation Northwoods. 

Northwoods, among many proven plots by our government to carry out terrorist attacks against its own population, was a plan devised by the Joint Chiefs of Staff along with coordination from the Central Intelligence Agency in 1962 which would have seen CIA assets carry out a series of bombings and mass shootings throughout central Florida and Washington DC, along with plane hijackings and the use of drones disguised as commercial airliners to simulate a mass casualty event to be blamed on Cuba as justification for war.

It goes without saying, when one looks at the plethora of available evidence, that the attacks of September 11, 2001, was one of these events.

It is a matter of public record, albeit seldom acknowledged, that the plans for the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks had already been laid well in advance.

According to George W Bush’s former ghostwriter Mickey Herskowitz, the would-be president was dreaming of invading Iraq as early as 1999. Whereas investigative reporting from late 2001 revealed that plans to attack Afghanistan had already been established long before 9/11.

The intentions to use a mass casualty event as an “opportunity of the ages” to expand US global hegemony were explicitly detailed in the internal documents of the neocon think tank the Project for The New American Century (PNAC), founded by several Reaganite imperialists the likes of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Scooter Libby who later found themselves firmly nestled within the Bush Administration.

In September of 2000, almost exactly a year to the day of the 9/11 attacks, PNAC would publish Rebuilding America’s Defenses — a plan for strengthening and expanding America’s global military preeminence by waging multiple simultaneous campaigns of war. The documents noted on page 51, however, that undertaking such ambitious aims would be arduous “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”

As award-winning journalist John Pilger wrote in 2002,

Two years ago a project set up by the men who now surround George W Bush said what America needed was “a new Pearl Harbor”. Its published aims have, alarmingly, come true.

For the last twenty five years 9/11 has served as the excuse for imperialists to wage forever wars of death and destruction as a means to maximize power and profit.

The United States spent 20 years ruthlessly pillaging and occupying Afghanistan, only for the Taliban to immediately regain control after the American withdrawal. Afghanistan was left remarkably worse after the occupation ended. And for its efforts in the 20 year quagmire, all the American people got out of it was skyrocketing debt and thousands of dead American service members.

Similar fates have befallen numerous countries throughout the global south, each one a deliberately calculated and targeted effort of Imperial psychopathy. Just as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were planned ahead of time, so were all of the subsequent conflicts that arose from the expanded global War on of Terror.

In 2007, former NATO supreme allied commander U.S. Army general Wesley Clark revealed the overarching agenda of the ruling elite in what he describes as a “foreign policy coup”. Clark recalls being informed of the pre planned agenda to topple the govern of seven nations; Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, Lebanon, and finally Iran.

Of course it should be noted that Clark is still a committed imperialist, his reasons for revealing such startling information at the time are his own, but ultimately in the decades since Wesley Clark has continued to display a track record of fervent support for the American militarist ruling class, including calls for “disloyal” Americans to be placed into internment camps. Clark’s continued hawkishness speaks for itself, revealing he serves the role of a controlled opposition mouthpiece still promoting the interests of empire.

Still, the information revealed by Clark in 2007 speaks volumes to the depths of depravity which permeate imperial premeditation.

Iraq has been destroyed. Sudan has become ravaged by US-backed civil war. The assassination of Muammar Gaddafi turned Libya into a failed state and a hub for terrorism and open air slave trading. Similarly, Somalia has all but collapsed into a haven for piracy and CIA backed terrorists. The Syrian government was toppled, replaced with a US supported al Qaeda affiliate, and Trump’s war with Iran wages on.

This administration hasn’t been shy about its imperialist ambitions either. While maintaining every conflict initiated by his predecessors around the globe, Trump himself has launched an Illegal assault against Venezuela, continues to aid and abet the genocide in Gaza, and has initiated the disastrous war with Iran. Meanwhile he continues to publicly opine fantasies of annexing and colonizing all of the United States neighboring nations.

Just recently, Trump has once again renewed the post 9/11 emergency powers for the 25th year in a row, demonstrating just how paramount the false pretenses of a quarter of a century ago remain to maintaining the perniciousness of American global conquest.

The post The Post 9/11 Era: 25 Years of Revisionist History and Imperial Terrorism appeared first on Activist Post.

THAAD is one of the military-industrial complex’s most expensive boondoggles—and most Americans have never heard of it.

The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system ranks among America’s most advanced ballistic-missile defenses. It aims to intercept ballistic missiles during their terminal phase, as their warheads reenter the atmosphere from space and descend toward their targets.

According to the GAO, it took decades and roughly $12.5 billion in research and development to get THAAD off the drawing board. Today, each interceptor costs an eye-watering $13 million. So every time the US military fires a THAAD interceptor at an incoming ballistic missile, taxpayers spend at least $13 million—and each engagement can require more than one interceptor.

The system had troubled origins.

After a string of failed tests in the 1990s, THAAD looked like it might become an expensive embarrassment.

The failures triggered reviews, redesigns, and mounting questions over whether the Pentagon was throwing good money after bad.

After years of improvements, THAAD entered operational service. Yet despite the billions spent developing it, the US military has acquired just eight batteries—not much of a vote of confidence in the system.

In short, THAAD is expensive—and it is no panacea against ballistic missiles.

Yet THAAD remains a key part of the front-line defense protecting US forces and allies in the Middle East from Iranian ballistic missiles. Few systems can do what THAAD attempts: track and destroy an incoming warhead as it reenters the atmosphere from space and plunges toward its target.

THAAD can intercept conventional ballistic missiles, but maneuvering hypersonic weapons pose a much tougher challenge. Iran has developed missiles that can maneuver at hypersonic speeds during the final stage of flight, making them harder for missile-defense systems to track and destroy. Even the Houthis in impoverished Yemen claim to field missiles with similar capabilities.

At the start of the June 2025 war, analysts estimated that the US had around 534 THAAD interceptors in its global inventory. By the end of the conflict, some estimates put the stockpile near 400, though the US military does not disclose the actual number for obvious reasons. In less than two weeks of fighting, the US burned through roughly 25% of its THAAD interceptor stockpile.

In other words, the US fired around 134 THAAD interceptors during the June 2025 conflict. At roughly $13 million per interceptor, that puts the cost above $1.7 billion—despite an interception rate well below 100%.

It’s also crucial to understand the state of THAAD production. The US will not receive new interceptors until 2027. Even then, current production capacity stands at just eight per month.

That was the state of THAAD—a crucial part of US and allied missile defense—when war with Iran erupted again in February 2026. That war continues today.

The US military does not disclose its THAAD inventory, but months of combat appear to have pushed the stockpile to dangerous levels. The 12-Day War in June 2025 consumed around a quarter of the US supply, with no new deliveries to replace those losses. Since February 2026, a longer and more intense war has drained the stockpile further.

And interceptor losses tell only part of the story. Iran has demonstrated that it can strike US missile-defense infrastructure across the Middle East with precision missiles and drones, putting THAAD batteries, radars, and other equipment at risk.

When you put it all together, it’s not hard to see the problem. Even if THAAD performs as intended, the US cannot sustain this rate of interceptor consumption for long. Months of combat have strained the missile defenses protecting US forces and allies in the region. If another round of intense fighting starts, there is a real possibility they could find themselves almost naked in front of Iranian ballistic missiles.

Iran still has thousands of long-range drones and ballistic missiles in its arsenal—and can replenish them at a much faster rate than the US can replace the interceptors needed even to try to shoot them down.

And that brings us to the real problem.

The bottleneck isn’t money.

As the leader of the world order and issuer of the world’s reserve currency, Washington can print or borrow more than any other country on the planet.

The real bottleneck is physical production capacity—factories, skilled labor, rocket motors, electronics, and the critical minerals needed to build the interceptors.

Congress can appropriate another $10 billion overnight. It cannot build a rare-earth processing plant, missile factory, or trained industrial workforce overnight.

That is where rare earths enter the story.

Modern weapons systems like THAAD depend on small quantities of rare earths and other critical minerals for high-performance magnets, guidance systems, sensors, actuators, electronics, and other components.

The amounts involved can look trivial next to the cost of the finished weapon.

A missile-defense system worth $150 million can depend on critical-mineral components worth only tens of thousands of dollars. But take away those materials, and the $150 million system becomes an expensive collection of parts that cannot do its job.

That makes rare earths one of the strangest choke points in the global economy. In short, rare earths have become indispensable to the US military and the modern American economy.

Measured in dollars or tonnage, the rare-earth market looks small. Yet this tiny physical market sits underneath trillions of dollars of economic value—from advanced weapons and aircraft to semiconductors, electric motors, robotics, data centers, and other high-tech industries.

Think of it as an inverted pyramid.

At the top sit trillions of dollars of military hardware, technology companies, industrial equipment, and economic output.

At the bottom sits a sliver of obscure elements that most investors could not name.

Remove that sliver and parts of the pyramid start falling apart.

And China controls much of it.

That dominance did not happen by accident. China spent more than three decades building mines, processing capacity, engineering expertise, equipment, supply chains, and manufacturing know-how around rare earths.

The West went in the opposite direction.

For decades, the US and Europe embraced the cheapest available supply while environmental restrictions, permitting obstacles, high costs, and public opposition made domestic production less attractive. China built the industrial base while the West consumed its output.

Now Washington wants to reverse that process.

But opening a mine solves only one piece of the problem.

The US also needs processing facilities to separate rare-earth elements from ore. It needs plants that turn those materials into metals and alloys. It needs factories that manufacture high-performance permanent magnets. It needs specialized machinery, engineers, metallurgists, chemists, technicians, and workers who know how to operate the entire chain.

In some cases, China also leads in the equipment and processes needed to perform those steps.

You cannot recreate 30 years of accumulated industrial knowledge with an executive order and a pile of money.

And China has shown that it understands the leverage this gives Beijing.

During its trade confrontation with Washington, China tightened controls over exports of critical minerals and processed materials. The message was hard to miss: the US may control the world’s reserve currency, but China controls physical inputs that parts of the American industrial and military machine cannot function without.

That exposes a weakness few investors appreciated until recent years.

The US can create dollars. It cannot create dysprosium, terbium, neodymium magnets, processing plants, or experienced engineers with a keystroke.

Washington now understands the problem. The Pentagon has poured money into domestic critical-mineral projects, and the US government has pushed defense contractors to remove Chinese materials from their supply chains.

That will create opportunities, but it will not solve the shortage in time to meet today’s military needs. Building a Western rare-earth supply chain will take years, while war is consuming weapons faster than American factories can replace them.

That mismatch between what Washington can spend and what American industry can produce is the heart of the problem.

The THAAD shortage exposes a much larger problem. Washington can create as many dollars as it wants, but it cannot print the resources, factories, or skilled workers.

The consequences will reach far beyond the battlefield. Inflation, shortages, and political turmoil could threaten your savings and personal freedom.

That’s why I prepared a free report explaining what is coming and the three most important strategies you can use to prepare.

Click here to get your free copy of The Most Dangerous Economic Crisis in 100 Years… the Top 3 Strategies You Need Right Now.

The post America Can Print Money—But It Can’t Print the Missiles It Needs appeared first on Activist Post.

The Titanic was ‘unsinkable’. 

The Towers were ‘indestructable’. 

The world’s energy supply was ‘unshakable’. 

You know who’s laughing their asses off at these statements? 

J.P. Morgan and the other Jekyll Island creatures who miraculously ‘missed the boat’ in 1912. 

Larry Silverstein and Howard Bootlick, both of whom just happened to not be at the office on 9/11 but still reaped the billions of benefits. 

Donald Trump, Bibi Netanyahu, their Saudi friends, and the gay, coke-sniffing comedian in eastern Europe. 

And, the Producers and Directors of the Globalist Production Company who produce the smoking guns and passports… This time, in the form of a bunch of guys running around the desert in Jesus sandals with machine guns and ISIS-converted Toyota pick-up trucks who have allegedly blown up the world’s most important alternative route energy supply… Forcing a complete shutdown of Saudi Arabia’s crucial East–West Crude Oil Pipeline across the Riyadh and Medina regions. 

If you didn’t know, which most people seem not to, this 1,200-kilometer line was the single major escape route engineered to bypass Hormuz and pump 5 millions of barrels of crude straight to the Red Sea every day. 

This is what I wrote in the Dollar Vigilante newsletter’s September issue which is going out tonight: 

“The Saudis did nothing.  The US did nothing.  And many of the pumping stations look like they have been hit with directed energy weapons.

Worse than that, the Saudi military didn’t attempt to fight the Houthis… instead the  Saudi military actually attacked their own “allies”!

Now, why would that happen?  Well, the Saudi royal family are what are called ‘crypto-jews’ and they, along with groups like the Lebanese government, are doing the bidding of Israhell.

And, just like I’ve been saying since March, this is all part of a massive operation to bring in a worldwide oil crisis, move forward most of Agenda 2030’s objectives and depopulate the Earth.

With the shutdown of the Strait of Whormuz, then the Bab El-Mandeb Strait on the Red Sea, the destruction of the East-West pipeline was the last straw (no pun intended) to completely paralyze oil coming out of the Middle East.

With Russian oil facilities being blown up constantly and even US oil facilities like ExxonMobil’s 275,000 barrel per day Joliet oil refinery in Illinois just suffering a “total power outage,” with heavy black smoke from emergency flaring visible for miles, the agenda is becoming more and more clear.”

It’s the biggest news of the moment and hardly anyone seems to be noticing it. 

Yet. 

Bet they’ll notice as soon as the Mad Max oil, gas and diesel wars start. And the water wars. And the food wars. 

In short, we’re now standing at four (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Russia and Iraq) of the top six oil exporting countries who are either not exporting, are exporting in limited capacity or are at risk of issues.  Combined, that is 41.8% of the world’s oil exporting capacity.

Let’s look at the physical reality of this psyop. It starts with your wallet. US jet fuel prices have surged to $4.35 a gallon. That is a 61% increase over just ten weeks. You think that’s a market fluctuation? No. That is a chokehold. 

Most people are going to get wiped out. Not by a recession. Not by a stock market crash. By the cost of existence. By the gas you can’t afford to drive to work. By the flight you can’t afford to take. By the light bill you can’t pay.

But not us. Not if you see it.

I want to be clear: I am not here to sell you fear. I am here to sell you competence. In this oil crisis, informed Dollar Vigilante insiders are not suffering. They are profiting. Check it out for yourself, totally free of charge. 

We traded the oil contracts. We bought in the eighties. We sold near $112. Last week, we made a 220% return. Then another 40%. Why? Because we didn’t believe the “random chaos” narrative. We looked at the shipping rates. We looked at the tankers. We looked at the historical precedent of the 1912 fraud and the 1997 scenarios. We saw the pattern.

You are currently in the pattern. The question is: are you inside it, or are you outside it? Are you stuck in the Matrix letting the system grind you down? Or are you a Vigilante, taking control of your financial destiny?

Watch on:
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The post Burning Oil… Burning Man… The Mad Max Matrix Plot Accelerates As World’s Energy Supply Go Up In Flames appeared first on Activist Post.

Our imperial overreach began 25 years ago with the War on Terror. It is being brought to a grim conclusion by Donald Trump’s war on Iran.

And Now a Word From Our Monster – by Mr. Fish

Donald Trump, whose war on Iran is the greatest strategic blunder in United States history, is not responsible for triggering the decline of the American Empire, but he is responsible for its fatal denouement.

This is the end.

U.S. bases in the oil-rich Persian Gulf have been damaged or destroyed and I expect will not be rebuilt. Our allies, even those in Europe, are abandoning us. The decadence and immorality of American society, embodied in the vulgarity, stupefying ignorance and cruelty of Trump, are the defining characteristics of the Empire. The Global South, horrified at the Empire’s flagrant disregard for international humanitarian law, including the enabling of genocide in Gaza, sees us as the enemy. Abu Ghraib Prison may have receded from our consciousness, but for the rest of the world, its images of U.S. soldiers and contractors sadistically humiliating and torturing imprisoned Iraqis has replaced the Disneyfied version of America we once exported. The war on Iran, which has disrupted the world’s oil supply, is rapidly pushing the global economy over the cliff.

We are going down. And we will bring many with us.

Osama Bin Laden may be in a watery grave in the North Arabian Sea. Al-Qaeda may be a shadow of itself. But Bin Laden’s most fervent dreams have been realized in the last twenty-five years of gross miscalculations of the Empire — its squandering of trillions of dollars on military debacles and the ascendancy of our version of Ubu Roi, Donald J. Trump.

Rather than defeating supposed enemies, the U.S. has swelled their ranks. It and its colony, Israel, are the most reviled nations on the planet. Every advance by Iran in its asymmetrical war against the Empire is cheered across the globe.

The humiliating defeats, the diversion of resources and at least $8 trillion to mount one war after another, which has killed an estimated 4.5 to 4.8 million people, has hollowed the Empire out. Its infrastructure is crumbling. Its democratic institutions are impotent. It survives on an unsustainable $ 40 trillion debt. The jewels of its democracy, including its education system, fair elections and a free press, are discredited and degraded.

An abandoned working class, crippled by economic insecurity and a government that steadily strips away social programs that keep those in distress afloat, is propagandized to believe the palpable decline is the work of traitors and enemies within. It has led Trump supporters to turn on the very institutions and ideals designed to sustain democracy. The usual targets of fascism — the “radical left,” Muslims, migrants, intellectuals, artists, people of color and journalists — are persecuted under laws such as The Espionage Act. Lies permeate the airwaves buttressing the self-delusion that once internal enemies are silenced, or eradicated, the glory days of the Empire, defined by hyper-nationalism, patriarchy, stable jobs and white supremacy, will return.

Violence against internal enemies along with election fraud are openly advocated by Trump and his court of sycophants, buffoons, grifters and Christian fascists. Attempting to bribe voters by promising them $5,000 if Republicans win the midterms, along with Trump’s contempt for the constitutional order, is the transparent admission that U.S. democracy is a farce.

George W. Bush, who was appointed to the presidency by judicial fiat, planted these seeds of lawlessness and impunity. Trump has brought them to floraison.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) goons, masked and offered the kind of impunity that allowed the torture and killing of innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorize U.S. cities. They carry out military-style raids against unarmed civilians that look no different than those the Empire carried out in Fullujah or the Helmand Province in Afghanistan. They are setting up a network of squalid internal concentration camps.

The tools of subjugation the Empire used abroad, including the stripping of civil liberties and the implementation of mass surveillance, were legalized at home with the passage of The Patriot Act, with its watchlists, informants and racial and religious profiling.

Empires in decay impose the tyranny familiar to those subjugated abroad on their own citizens.

I was in the Middle East when it all went wrong. Nearly all of the Muslim world was appalled by the attacks of 9/11. There were massive public expressions of solidarity, including candlelight vigils in Iran. If we had built on this empathy rather than demonizing Muslims and inflicting suffering and death on millions in the Middle East, we would be far more secure today.

Instead, we drank deep from the poisonous elixir of nationalism. We foolishly believed we were attacked, as Bush said, because “they hate our freedoms,” not because of our support for the apartheid and genocidal state of Israel, our callous indifference to human life beyond our borders, including the killing of over a million people in Iraq by U.S. sanctions, and our propping up of brutal Arab dictatorships.

The wreckage we have left behind from our forever wars include the obliteration of whole cities, along with 940,000 direct deaths in post-9/11 war zones, 3.6 to 3.8 million indirect deaths and 38 million people displaced.

The hijackers chose massive death and destruction on a city skyline to send a message. They spoke the language we taught them. It is the message our warplanes, missiles and drones have delivered from Vietnam to Iraq. We did not listen. We naively believed we could use our military to remake the Middle East in our own image.

The failure of the War on Terror is not simply a moral failure. It is a strategic failure. We refused to ask the obvious question. Why did many outside our borders feel so much hostility towards us that they were willing to kill themselves and thousands of our fellow citizens?

Those of us who dared to raise these questions twenty-five years ago were vilified as supporters of terrorism and silenced.

The only way to defeat terrorism is to isolate those who carry out acts of terror within their own societies. It is to build networks of understanding and solidarity. We did the opposite. We became the terrorists we claimed we were seeking to defeat. We did what Bin Laden wanted us to do. We defeated ourselves.

Trump is presiding over the last act.

The post Osama Bin Trump appeared first on Activist Post.

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed to forfeit $61 million in crypto it says was generated from Iranian black-market oil sales.

The U.S. Department of Justice said Monday it is seizing and seeking to forfeit $61 million in cryptocurrency that it alleges came from black-market sales of sanctioned Iranian oil.

That sum is a fraction of the operation prosecutors describe in the civil forfeiture complaint. A cluster of self-custodied wallets received and distributed more than $1.5 billion in oil proceeds, routing funds to Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-linked businesses, other crypto addresses and an Iranian exchange, according to the filing. Two China-based firms, Blessed Trust and Hexa Whale, allegedly used trading accounts at Binance to launder proceeds and funnel them to the Iranian government and its proxies.

It comes after the U.S. tries to crack down on Iran’s use of the leading cryptocurrency: the U.S. in July said that it had frozen crypto linked to the Iranian regime, mostly in the form of Tether’s stablecoin; Iran started a bitcoin-backed insurance service for its counties shipping companies earlier this year.

There was no mention of bitcoin in Monday’s claim — but the Iranian government is also using bitcoin to skirt around sanctions. Bitcoin has no issuer, so no blacklist function and bitcoin held without intermediaries can’t be frozen

“The Government of Iran relies on black-market sales of sanctioned crude oil to fund its military and foster terrorism in the Middle East and around the world, along with other malign efforts to develop a nuclear program and ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear payloads,” Deputy U.S. Attorney Sean S. Buckley said in a statement. 

“As alleged in the complaint filed today, the Government of Iran used a network of cryptocurrency actors in China and elsewhere to launder more than $1.5 billion in illicit oil money intended to benefit the Iranian military and the terror-designated IRGC.”

The filing alleges that the illicit oil money was laundered via Chinese companies Blessed Trust Limited and Hexa Whale Trading Limited.

Once the money was laundered, it was funneled back to Iran’s government, its agents, and its proxies, feds said. 

The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control in July said Iran had been dodging sanctions by accepting pay in bitcoin from ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz. 

OFAC said at the time that Hormuz Safe, developed by Iran’s Ministry of Economy, “accepts payment in bitcoin and other digital assets” so it can bypass sanctions. 

The Financial Times last week reported that the Middle Eastern country was using bitcoin to settle cross-border transactions through Iranian crypto exchanges after the central bank advised its countrymen to do anything necessary to help the economy.

The post DOJ Seeks $61M in Iranian Oil Proceeds Laundered Through Binance Accounts appeared first on Activist Post.

Chalk another one up for the ethno-nationalists!

That’s right, as I’m sure you’ve heard by now, the Alternativ für Deutschland party (AfD) won an election last Sunday in Saxony-Anhalt, one of Germany’s sixteen federal states. They won it convincingly, overwhelmingly, despite (or maybe due to) the fact that the establishment parties have been maintaining a “firewall” of total non-cooperation with them, Germany’s federal domestic intelligence agency has designated them a “confirmed right-wing extremist endeavor,” and the mainstream media have been calling them “Nazis.”

Which they are, kind of…or, okay, not literally. There are no literal Nazis these days. Instead, there are ethno-nationalists, or Identitarians, which are a specific species of neo-nationalists that are obsessed with cultural identity and race, and which people tend to refer to as “Nazis.” People tend to refer to them as “Nazis” … well, for a lot of reasons.

For one thing, many of them are former neo-Nazis, or they attend meetings held by neo-Nazi groups, or they are otherwise friendly with actual neo-Nazis. Also, some of them spout Nazi slogans at their political rallies, or embed Nazi symbols in their campaign artwork…which, of course, is all in good fun.

And then there was that gathering that some of them attended at the Adlon Mansion in Potsdam in 2023, where Martin Sellner, an Austrian Identitarian movement leader who used to be an actual neo-Nazi, described his plans for the “remigration” of non-Aryan persons from Western nations (a gathering that was also attended by members of the CDU, the mainstream German conservative party).

Sellner’s solution to the “migrant problem” has been embraced by ethno-nationalist fanatics in Europe, the UK, the USA, and elsewhere, and, infamously, by Elon Musk, the military-industrial-complex-contracting billionaire who literally saved free speech by assembling a consortium of investment firms, global-capitalist behemoths, and Saudi royals to buy Twitter, rebrand it as “free-speech X,” and transform it into a neo-Goebbelsian ethno-nationalist propaganda organ.

Naturally, Elon and his self-appointed PR flacks are capitalizing on the AfD’s historic victory over the woke globalist elites that have been importing swarthy gang-raping foreigners into the West to gang-rape attractive Aryan women, and stab people, and otherwise “replace” the white race.

As Mike Shellenberger pointed out in a recent article, after conducting an interview with a “leading German politics reporter” from “NIUS,” an ethno-nationalist media outfit owned by a German billionaire tech mogul, if not for Elon, no one would even know about those gang-raping foreigners!

But, seriously, credit where credit is due to Elon Musk, MAGA, the AfD, and the rest of the ethno-nationalist movement. The ease with which they captured the energy of the “populist” backlash against globalization that started circa 2015 and redirected it into mindless racial hatred is truly impressive, if totally unsurprising.

Yes. Globalization. Global-capitalist globalization. Which is what has been steadily restructuring the planet, dissolving national borders, dismantling national cultures, commodifying identity, commodifying everything, and transforming the world into one big supranational marketplace since the end of the Cold War.

I’m sorry to upset some of my conservative readers, but it isn’t those swarthy gang-raping foreigners who are dissolving your borders, erasing your cultures, ramming “wokeness” down your throat. It is global capitalism that is doing that. It has been doing that for the past thirty years.

It is going to continue doing that … because it doesn’t have anything else to do.

The ethno-nationalists are going to help it do that. They’re going to help it do that by becoming exactly the official enemy it needs at the moment … the enemy it needs to “defend democracy” from, the one it needs to continue on its totalitarian trajectory.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about … you will, but it might take a while.

I’ll try to cover events and make it a little clearer as the next phase of this develops. I just finished a book, so I hope to be able to get back to publishing my columns more regularly. However, I need to end this column here and go get me one of those Hitler haircuts.

I still live here in Germany, so I have to blend in!

The post The Enemy of My Enemy appeared first on Activist Post.

When a semi-anonymous social media user declared that the federal government had targeted her in a bizarre entrapment scheme, the paranoid claim snowballed into a more disturbing revelation: the Pentagon appears to be breaking the law by paying conservative influencers to track, surveil, and propagandize Americans. Who else is involved in the covert scheme?

In mid-August, a conservative activist using the digital moniker “Datarepublican” quietly admitted she was employed by the Pentagon as a “special government employee.” For months, she’d been pocketing a government paycheck while intensely lobbying for President Trump’s imperialist misadventures online and tracking their most vocal critics in a digital database.

Datarepublican was identified in 2025 as Jennica Pounds, a Utah-based mother with nearly a million followers whose stated raison d’etre is “fighting communists” – a moniker she applies liberally to anyone perceptibly to the left of Barry Goldwater. 

And she’s not alone. Pounds has emerged as the face of a new wave of right-wing influencers who are being covertly employed by the US Department of War to spread pro-government propaganda. On August 29th, Washington Post reporters revealed at least three more digital activists are surreptitiously working for the Pentagon, which designates them as either special government employees (SGEs) or as what the US military calls “highly qualified experts” (HQEs).

Named in the Pentagon’s army of influencers were retired Air Force colonel Rob Maness, and retired Army colonels Kurt Schlichter and Thomas Anderson. Like Pounds, Anderson also operated in relative anonymity until recently, posting under the Twitter handle “Cynical Publius.” Schlicter, for his part, is a prolific right-wing troll who has frequently fantasized about the ethnic cleansing and extermination of Palestinians.

The operation appears to be in breach of two federal laws, the Hatch Act and the Smith-Mundt Act, which prohibit government employees from engaging in political activities while on the clock, and forbid them from directing their propaganda efforts at the US population, respectively.

The aforementioned right-wing activists are the only ones known to have been working secretly for the Department of War. But the revelations about paid Pentagon propaganda posters come as the US military pursues a flurry of murky partnerships with prominent conservative influencers like top TPUSA widow Erika Kirk, who was appointed to the Air Force Academy Board of Visitors by Trump in March in an effort to further slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s “legacy.” 

Then there’s Laura Loomer, the obsessively anti-Muslim Trump ally, who is producing de facto press releases for self-proclaimed “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth, enjoying Pentagon press credentials, and earning references as an “informal advisor to the Department of War.”

A propagandist accidentally outs herself as secret Pentagon employee

Like previous unflattering military disclosures, an apparently disgruntled employee was responsible for the revelation that Hegseth’s Department of War has quietly begun paying off online influencers.

In a since-deleted thread originally published on Twitter/X, Pounds – posting under the pseudonym Datarepublican – claimed that Trump’s undersecretary for public diplomacy at the State Department, Sarah B. Rogers, attempted to “set [her] up” by leaking documents to her in what she described as an effort to induce her to carry out a criminal act.

“It’s not okay when the Deep State sets you up to commit a crime,” Datarepublican fumed, adding, “I have never been more angry in my life.”

Pounds, posting as Datarepublican, complained bitterly: “I consulted people and if this were a sanctioned leak – they would have just sent over email. They tried to entrap me.”

An hour and a half later, the source mentioned by Pounds revealed herself as Trump’s Undersecretary of State, writing “lol, these are my text messages and documents.” Rogers had decided to reward Pounds by giving her exclusive access to the files, she explained: “I wanted to give you the option of ‘breaking’ the story as sort of a gift.” But since Pounds rejected the gift horse in a fit of paranoia, Rogers announced, “I will happily disclose the documents myself.”

The documents in question related to the Global Engagement Center (GEC), an Obama-era agency at the State Department officially meant to counter foreign “propaganda and disinformation efforts” aimed at Americans. Critics say that the GEC violated the spirit – if not the letter – of the Smith-Mundt Act, because it openly targeted American audiences, and merely offloaded its domestic ‘counter-disinformation’ efforts onto a variety of outside NGOs and data platforms. 

As the State Department’s Rogers explained, the files showed the GEC effectively blaming foreign powers for the dissolution of Biden’s short-lived Disinformation Governance Board (DGB), claiming that the resignation of the board’s erstwhile director, Nina Jankowicz, was an instance in which “gendered disinformation” had a “substantial direct impact in the United States.” When it was unveiled in 2022, the DGB, a subsidiary of the Department of Homeland Security, was roundly mocked on social media, where it quickly earned the nickname “Ministry of Truth.” 

Jankowicz, an overgrown theater kid who publicly targeted this outlet on multiple occasions, baselessly accusing The Grayzone of spreading “incredibly damaging disinformation,” was pilloried as the “Mary Poppins of Disinformation” after publishing a cringe-worthy, pro-censorship parody of the classic film’s  most memorable song, “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” 

The DGB was shut down just months after its creation in 2022 amid widespread censorship concerns, Rogers wrote, and the GEC wasn’t far behind. The State Department agency was effectively defunded in late 2024 when Congress declined to reauthorize funds for the GEC, and its closure was made permanent when Trump’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, fully disassembled the office in April 2025.

As the heated confrontation between the two right-wing women simmered, the far-right AF Post advanced the theory that Pounds was secretly working for the Pentagon, describing her as a “Department of War employee” in an August 21 post on Twitter. Three days later, the US military corroborated that hypothesis, confirming to a Pentagon reporter that “Ms. Pounds serves at the Department of War as a Special Government Employee.”

SGEs for a hiring freeze 

Prior to the current administration, the Special Government Employee designation was used primarily to hire temporary specialized workers who served the government in limited, short-term advisory roles while still employed by another party. But under Trump, who instituted a federal hiring freeze immediately upon taking office in January 2025, the federal government has effectively stopped accepting applications from normal would-be government workers. Now, watchdogs have warned of an “unprecedented” shift away from hiring formal government employees and towards SGEs to sidestep federal regulations on conflicts of interest.

That strategy was first tested with Elon Musk, who was designated a Special Government Employee when he pursued spending cuts as head of the newly-formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Around that time, Pounds emerged from the right-wing media ecosystem as a vocal supporter of Musk’s efforts.

When Pounds was finally exposed as a Special Government Employee in August, her proximity to the Pentagon had been hinted at for several months, beginning in April 2026, when she took to Twitter to boast that she’d become an “officially credentialed Pentagon press corps” member. This arrangement was made possible by Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Joel Valdez, whom she credited with having “[moved] mountains to make this unique arrangement possible.”

Months later, when outrage grew following Pounds’ exposure as a government-paid propagandist, The Pentagon attempted to douse the flames by pointing out that Pounds’ press credential “expired in June 2026, and she did not seek a renewal.” Instead, she simply “began working for the Department in July 2026.”

Left unaddressed was the fact that this incredibly unusual arrangement saw a Trump advocate being given credentials to cover Pentagon affairs up close as a nominally-independent reporter, before being brought on board to defend US military conduct as an official government employee just one month later.

A flattering piece by Deseret News suggested that Pounds’ shift to government employment was not an aberration, however. Instead, her new gig was apparently in the works since at least early 2025: 

“Pounds said she is unable to “discuss details about potential employers,” but she hinted at a future “working within the government,” and previously said she is waiting on a federal “background check,”” the outlet stated in an article dated March 11, 2025.

After Pounds was outed as an employee of the federal government, her relatives and coworkers took to social media to defend her honor.

“Being a “fed” used to be a negative thing only to law breakers,” Pounds’ mother fumed on Twitter, complaining that “now people are using it as a slur” against her daughter. The post has since been deleted.

Others sought to defend their part-time Pentagon gigs by turning the tables on their accusers. Writing as “Cynical Publius,” Anderson embraced classic DARVO tactics and immediately went on the offensive, accusing “some federal employee” of having “committed a criminal misdemeanor in violation of the Privacy Act of 1974 by leaking my Personally Identifiable Information” to the Washington Post.

In the end, though, being exposed as a government employee has done little to impede the Pentagon propagandists from their regularly-scheduled posting. Apparently unconcerned with the optics, all four have continued using social media to advocate for imperial aggression in the Middle East. For most, the workload appears to consist largely of posting comments praising Trump and Hegseth and belittling their detractors. 

In the case of Pounds, however, her online activity has proven significantly more disturbing, raising further questions about legality. 

Tracking antiwar activists, raising further questions about legality

On August 28, the Pentagon special government employee unveiled a new digital database tracking those she accused of “orbiting the anti-imperialist spine,” called “DSA Explorer.”

Alongside the Democratic Socialists of America, the page displays a vast, near-impenetrable web of connections between groups like Black Lives Matter, CODEPINK, Pastors for Peace, Greek’s Syriza Party, and the NAACP. The site, Pounds wrote, catalogues the people and organizations comprising “the wider anti-imperialist solidarity network.”

Individuals listed include such disparate figures as the British Labour Party’s Dianne Abott, former Colombian President Gustavo Petro, and conscious rapper Talib Kweli. Clearly hoping to prompt investigation by federal authorities, Pounds accuses dozens of those listed of operating as “potential unregistered foreign agents.”

In an ironic twist of fate, Pounds’ efforts to censor and blacklist her opponents closely mirror those of the former disinformation czar Nina Jankowicz, who was also officially empowered by the US government to target the perceived political enemies of the regime. Desperate to criminalize leftists for imagined crimes, Pounds is now emulating the Deep State censors she once railed against.

But in pursuing American citizens by name with a McCarthyite surveillance scheme, Pounds could be opening herself up to litigation by her targets. Perhaps sensing the legal delicacy of her clumsy name-and shame project, she placed a fine-print legalese “disclaimer” on the page, claiming the material was for “research, educational, and journalistic purposes only.”

Her blacklist, Pounds wrote, was “offered “as is” without warranty of any kind” because it “may contain errors or omissions and is not represented as complete, current, or 100% accurate.” The connections she alleges are a work of creative fiction, the text suggests: “Inferred, ideological, and patron/sphere associations are analytical interpretations, not statements of fact.”

Despite claiming many of her targets were “potential unregistered foreign agents,” Pounds’ disclaimer insists that “nothing here alleges unlawful conduct by any named person or organization.” To drive the point home, the text concludes, “The author disclaims all liability for any use of, or reliance on, its contents.”

While such a waiver might hold water when issued by a private citizen, it’s unclear whether the same standards apply to government employees. But Pounds was seemingly unconcerned with the prospect of facing consequences for her actions.

Days after launching “DSA Explorer,” Pounds published a nearly-identical database focusing on anarchists and antifascist activists in the Americas and Europe who’d been using the “Noblogs” platform, showcasing information which appeared to have been stolen and handed to her by the US government.

The “Noblogs” files were seized from the Italian anarchist collective Autistici Inventati, or A/I, which provided email and hosting services to thousands of leftist web pages on both sides of the Atlantic before it was hacked by a US government faction – just days after the State Department declared A/I a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist group.” When it was overtaken on August 26, the page was defaced with a message telling users that all their information had been “saved and given to the United States government.”

That claim was immediately validated by Pounds, who stated that she had inside information about the hack: “Can confirm the authorities have everything that was on the NoBlogs servers.” The statement strongly suggests she was using her government access to draw up her blacklists, and implies that Washington is at least tacitly supporting the surveillance project.

Who is else secretly working for the Pentagon?

While Pounds, Maness, Schlichter, and Anderson have been forced to admit to having partnered with the Pentagon without prior public disclosure, It’s still unknown whether the Department of War is employing other special employees, or whether Pentagon may be paying others through third parties. But one extremely influential MAGA personality who appears to be close to the Pentagon – so close she hitched a ride to Guantanamo Bay with War Secretary Pete Hegseth – is Laura Loomer.

In addition to making headlines for accusing lawmakers of African descent of being “ghetto Black bitches,” Loomer has also recently launched a crusade against The Grayzone and its editor-in-chief, Max Blumenthal. While Blumenthal was reporting from Iran on the funeral of slain Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, Loomer demanded his arrest, writing on social media:

“If Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin is worth anything, he will order that Blumenthal be taken off the plane [upon return to the U.S.], detained, and revoke his passport.”

Five days after her post, Blumenthal was stripped of his electronic devices by Customs and Border Patrol agents at Dulles International Airport after an interrogation which hewed closely to the deranged narrative outlined by Loomer. Loomer immediately took credit for the incident, boasting that she had “reported him to the authorities,” and declaring to Blumenthal: “You are subhuman to me. I look at you as a piece of political taxidermy that I can put on my wall.”

Jenin Younes, the President of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee – which is representing Blumenthal in an ongoing lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security – later summarized the incident: “In Max’s case, Laura Loomer, a close ally of President Trump, called for Max to be arrested while he was still abroad because of his journalism and viewpoints. Loomer boasted about reporting Max to federal authorities, and effectively took credit for the seizure of his phones. Given Loomer’s well-documented influence over President Trump, there is a strong likelihood that her targeting led to the unlawful search and seizure.”

When Hegseth tried to force longtime Pentagon correspondents to sign draconian loyalty oaths in October 2025, prompting a mass walkout by military reporters, Loomer immediately stepped in to fill the void. Just days after the media offices were vacated, she was among a hodgepodge of conservative influencers who were issued press passes. When the group sat down for its first press briefing in December, Loomer was one of the first to be called on.

Months later, Loomer hit a new low when she publicly declared that Americans may “need another 9/11” so they understand that “it’s not such a great idea to allow for Muslims to be involved in our political process in America.” This remark apparently caused no concerns for Hegseth or his Department of War, which invited Loomer to tour the US military’s concentration camp on occupied Cuban territory in Guantanamo Bay just days later.

In an October 2025 interview with former Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene, who’s been targeted with vitriolic attacks by Loomer, Tucker Carlson referred to Loomer as “some kind of informal advisor to the Defense Department, wandering around the Pentagon.”

To this day, Loomer’s proximity to Pentagon leadership remains on full display, surfacing most recently when the self-styled “White advocate” claimed in early September to have the inside story about Hegseth’s recent disappearance from the airwaves at Fox News, where he worked prior to the Department of War. Citing an unnamed “senior Department of War source,” Loomer dutifully reported Hegseth’s side of the story, claiming that Fox was angered by his refusal to give the outlet special treatment when assigning press passes.

So far, there’s no concrete proof that Loomer is working as a Special Government Employee of the Pentagon. But her activities strongly resemble those seemingly assigned to SGEs/HQEs like Pounds, Maness, Schlichter, and Anderson.

Today, Loomer is calling for a government investigation of Max Blumenthal and demanding he be criminalized for his journalism. The question must be asked: who is she actually working for?

The post Covert Pentagon propagandists are tracking anti-war Americans, skirting the law appeared first on Activist Post.

Patrick De Haan has been tracking fuel prices for GasBuddy since 2011. He has worked through refinery fires, hurricanes, COVID and the 2022 diesel spike, and he is the guy reporters call when pump prices start going crazy and they need somebody to explain what is actually happening.

This week he pulled up the diesel spot market and posted a meme that said MOTHER OF GOD. Then he said he was speechless.

After that, he got specific. De Haan warned on X that $7 a gallon diesel is now a real possibility in the days ahead, and he named where it hits first: Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Illinois, with Wisconsin a little better off because of lower fuel taxes. That is the industrial and farming heart of the country, in the middle of harvest, a few weeks before heating season starts pulling on the same fuel supply.

The exact date diesel hits $7 matters less than what the warning tells you about timing. Spot prices are what traders pay today. Wholesale prices follow within a day or two, and the sign at your local truck stop follows that. When the most quoted fuel analyst in the country says the spot market just broke, he is describing what retail prices look like next week, and that gap is the window you have to act before the rest of the country notices.

We warned Friday that the attack on Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline could make the fuel crisis a lot worse. In the four days since, just about everything that could go wrong has.

Diesel Set Another Record Monday and the Midwest Is Next in Line

AAA put the national average for diesel at $6.23 a gallon on Monday, according to The Hill. A year ago it was just under $3.70.

That is a 68 percent jump in twelve months. If your farm, business or pickup burned 1,000 gallons of diesel last year, you spent about $3,700. The same 1,000 gallons now costs about $6,230, which means $2,500 gone for the same work and the same miles. At $7, that bill hits $7,000, nearly double what it was a year ago.

California is already past the line the Midwest is worried about. CNBC reported diesel averaging $7.98 there, and De Haan has since posted that California crossed $8 for the first time. De Haan also told CNBC that Americans are spending about $700 million more per day on gasoline and diesel than a year ago, and he called diesel at these levels a “silent killer” for the economy.

Why this matters to you: even if you drive a gas car and have never owned a diesel in your life, you are paying for this. California grows about a third of the country’s vegetables and two thirds of its fruit, and every crate of it rides a diesel truck to your store. Construction equipment, garbage trucks, school buses, freight trains and the tractors that plant your food all burn it. Fuel inflation moves slowly through that chain, so today’s diesel spike can keep pushing up grocery prices, delivery fees and repair bills for months after the headlines fade.

The Trucker Gets the Bill First, and You Get It Last

Robert Bujdoso runs operations for Diversified Logistic Solutions in Girard, Ohio, a 14-truck company hauling cooking oil, corn oil and chicken fat. He told WYTV that checking diesel prices is the first thing he does every morning, and the fuel bill shows up every Thursday.

“I just about like to chuck a brick when you see it,” Bujdoso said.

His trucks carry 300-gallon tanks, so a single fill-up already runs close to $2,000. Last year that same tank cost about $1,100. Spread that across 14 trucks filling up again and again all month, and a small Ohio company is hunting for tens of thousands of dollars it did not have to find a year ago. The company has already added a fuel surcharge, because there is nowhere else for the money to come from.

Follow that surcharge down the line. The processor who buys the corn oil pays more and raises its price. The food company that uses the oil raises its price. The grocery store pays more to get the finished product delivered and passes as much of that as it can to the person at the register. Truckers do not cause diesel inflation. They just get the invoice first.

Why this matters to you: if diesel stays above $6 or climbs toward $7 in major freight corridors, fuel surcharges are going to get more aggressive, and products will cost more even when nothing about making them changed. The things hit hardest are heavy, bulky and shipped long distances: canned goods, bottled water, animal feed, lumber, auto parts and generators. Those are also the things people suddenly need after a storm or breakdown, which is why it makes sense to buy them before the surcharges show up on the shelf.

Farmers Are Buying Record Fuel in the Middle of Harvest

The Associated Press reported that the diesel records landed right as growers need fuel to run combines, tractors and grain trucks to bring in corn and soybeans. Those same farmers already paid more this year for fertilizer, seed and equipment.

A farmer cannot wait six months for a better fuel price. When the crop is ready, it has to come in, and leaving it in the field risks weather damage and lost yield. So he pays whatever the fuel dealer charges that week, often while selling that crop into a soft market. Farms can borrow, delay equipment purchases and cut corners for a season or two, but eventually some operations stop making the numbers work and sell out.

Why this matters to you: food security is not only about whether there is enough corn in Iowa. It depends on whether farmers can afford to grow it and truckers can afford to haul it. Farmers are deciding right now what they can afford to plant next spring, so high fuel costs this fall can shrink next year’s harvest before most shoppers notice anything. Every independent farm that disappears leaves the food supply more dependent on a handful of giant producers, and a system with fewer players has fewer places to absorb the next shock.

The Export Ban Being Floated in Washington Would Not Put More Diesel in Your Tank

With the midterms about 50 days out, the White House is under heavy pressure to do something about fuel prices. The idea that keeps coming back is banning American exports of diesel and gasoline.

Bloomberg reported Friday that a ban is still a long shot but no longer unthinkable. Ag Bull Trading, citing the Bloomberg report, noted that Rapidan Energy Group puts the odds of export restrictions around 35 percent. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has not ruled it out. The United States has never banned exports of refined fuel, and nearly 3 million barrels a day of transportation fuels are currently shipped overseas.

On television, a ban sounds simple: keep American diesel in America and the price comes down. The people who actually work in fuel markets mostly say it does not work that way. Analysts told S&P Global that banning product exports would damage refinery economics without clearly freeing up more supply.

The problem is capacity. Trading Economics reported that U.S. refineries were running at 97.8 percent in early September, with distillate inventories, which include diesel and heating oil, sitting 13 percent below the five-year average. There is no warehouse of spare diesel waiting to be released. A ban would reshuffle who gets the supply that already exists, gut the export business Gulf Coast refiners built their operations around, and give those refiners a reason to cut runs, which means less fuel gets made.

Russia, the other giant diesel exporter, already shut off its diesel exports after months of Ukrainian drone strikes on its refineries, CNBC reported. If the United States follows, the two biggest suppliers in the world are off the market at the same time, prices overseas spike, and allied countries holding huge amounts of U.S. debt start scrambling for fuel. We already covered what happens when bond yields start climbing, and an energy panic abroad is the last thing that market needs.

Why this matters to you: a system running at 98 percent has no cushion. When there is spare refining capacity and full storage tanks, a refinery fire or a hurricane in the Gulf is a local headache. With no spare capacity and inventories this low, the same outage can turn into a nationwide price spike, or into stations running dry in the region where it happens. The fact that Washington is even discussing a measure this country has never used tells you how few normal tools are left, and you should plan as if a single refinery outage this fall could hit your area hard.

Saudi Oil Is Running Out of Ways to Leave the Kingdom

On Friday, the big question was how long the East-West pipeline would stay down. Now there are answers, and none of them are good.

Two regional officials told the Associated Press, via ABC News, that the pipeline will be mostly out of service for weeks, and PBS put the repair estimate at three to five weeks. Vortexa tanker data cited by OilPrice.com shows no Saudi crude has left Yanbu since September 11. Aramco has canceled or delayed late-September cargoes to at least three European refiners, some pushed out to November, with two more refiners expecting similar notices. Poland’s Orlen, which gets about 40 percent of its crude from Aramco, is already buying replacement barrels from the North Sea, Kazakhstan and the United States.

The other half of Saudi Arabia’s workaround got worse Monday. On Friday we reported that the Houthis had taken the port of Mokha and Perim Island at the mouth of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Now they have seized Greater and Lesser Hanish, two more islands in the southern Red Sea, PBS NewsHour reported. According to the AP, the United Arab Emirates had held those islands with its Yemeni allies until it pulled its military setup out after a falling-out with Saudi Arabia earlier this year, and the Houthis walked right into the gap.

The pipeline and the Red Sea were never two separate backup plans. Saudi crude crossed the desert by pipeline to Yanbu, then left by tanker through the Red Sea. The pipeline is down for weeks, and the southern exit is now overlooked from the coast and the islands by the same militia firing missiles into Saudi cities. AGBI reported, citing Kpler data, that no Saudi-flagged ship has even tried the crossing since July 19, and analysts warned the risk could spread to any tanker that stopped at Yanbu.

Why this matters to you: oil trades on a world market, so a refinery in Poland that loses its Saudi crude becomes a direct competitor for American barrels and American diesel. That demand pulls more supply overseas in the same week politicians are arguing about stopping exports. And when a market is already this tight, it does not take losing all the world’s oil to cause damage. Losing a few more percent forces buyers to bid against each other for what is left, and the buyers who get squeezed out first are the ones with the least money.

Heating Oil Is Already Past $5 and the First Frost Has Not Hit Yet

Heating oil and diesel come from the same part of the barrel and compete for the same shrinking supply. When diesel sets records, heating oil follows.

In Connecticut, heating oil climbed above $5 a gallon, WFSB reported, roughly $2 more per gallon than this time last year. In Maine, the statewide average hit $5.39 as of September 8, according to Maine Public. An Axios markets reporter said his own oil company in the New York suburbs quoted him $6.86.

In Friday’s piece, we put a typical Northeast oil-heat home at 800 to 1,050 gallons for a winter. At $2 more per gallon, that works out to between $1,600 and $2,100 in extra heating costs this season, for the same house at the same thermostat setting. That assumes prices stop climbing and the winter stays mild.

Tommy Cole Jr. is a Marine Corps veteran raising a family of five in a rental in Winchester, Massachusetts. He told CNN that last winter, with oil under $4, he still needed federal heating assistance several times and ran space heaters that sent his electric bill through the roof. The oil he is about to have delivered will cost $5.56 a gallon. A community action agency in Fall River told CNN its average assistance grant last winter was just over $1,000, enough for a little more than one tank, and this year’s state awards have not even been announced.

Why this matters to you: the real danger is not a painful bill. It is what people do when they cannot afford the next delivery in January. They run space heaters around the clock, drag old kerosene heaters out of the garage, heat with the oven and let the tank run dangerously low. That is how a fuel price problem turns into frozen pipes, house fires and carbon monoxide deaths. And these prices are showing up before winter demand even starts, so when cold weather arrives, home heating and diesel trucks will be bidding for the same short supply at the same time.

Costco Rationing Motor Oil Is the Same Crisis Showing Up Somewhere Else

As we covered Monday, Costco is now limiting Kirkland full-synthetic motor oil to two boxes per member per week, and the price has nearly doubled from about $30 to $58. Mobil 1 is capped at five per membership. The current limits still cover normal household maintenance, so nobody needs to panic over their next oil change.

Why this matters to you: a warehouse chain built on bulk buying does not ration a product unless the people running its inventory are worried about supply, price or both. Refiners make far more money turning crude into diesel and gasoline right now than into lubricants, and the same pressure can tighten plastics, packaging, tires and other petroleum-based products. Not every one of those will show up as an empty shelf. Some will just cost more, come in smaller packages or quietly disappear from store inventory, and you will not get a warning when it happens.

What to Watch Over the Next Few Weeks

The question is not whether diesel moves another 20 cents this week. The question is whether several of these pressure points move the wrong way at the same time, because that is when an expensive fuel problem becomes an availability problem.

Watch the EIA’s weekly petroleum report, which comes out on Wednesdays. If distillate inventories keep falling while refineries are already near 98 percent, there is nothing left to cover an outage. Watch for any refinery fire, hurricane or unplanned shutdown, especially in the Gulf Coast or Midwest, because the system has no slack to absorb one right now.

Watch the Saudi pipeline restart date and any further Houthi moves around the Bab el-Mandeb. Watch whether the White House actually announces export restrictions. And watch heating oil prices as the weather turns, because cold weather in the Northeast adds a whole new group of buyers competing for the same distillate.

Why this matters to you: none of these items alone means the pumps go dry. Several of them hitting at once is how regional shortages happen, and regional shortages trigger the panic buying that makes them worse. We saw it with gasoline after the Colonial Pipeline hack and with toilet paper in 2020. The time to act is before the public decides something is running out, not after.

What to Do Before $7 Diesel Shows Up at Your Pump

If you have not read it yet, Friday’s article covers the basics: locking in heating costs, storing fuel safely and legally, stocking the pantry, cutting fuel waste and building local relationships. Everything in it still applies. What changed this week is the timeline, and that calls for a few more moves on top of that list.

If you run diesel in the Great Lakes states, fill up now. De Haan’s warning is based on spot prices that have not reached retail yet, so the price at the pump in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois is likely lagging behind what the market has already done. If you have a farm tank, work truck, tractor or diesel generator, topping off this week beats paying $7 next week. Store only what you can legally and safely keep, and treat anything going into long-term storage with a stabilizer, because fuel that goes bad in the tank is money burned for nothing.

If you heat with oil, call your dealer this week. Ask whether they still offer a price lock or pre-buy program. Dealers can pull those offers when wholesale prices move this fast, and the first cold snap is when every one of your neighbors will be making the same call. If a lock is off the table and you have room in the tank, filling it now at $5 is likely cheaper than filling it in December with winter demand stacked on top of an already tight supply.

Apply for heating assistance early if you qualify. LIHEAP money is limited, and agencies are already warning that the same grant will buy fewer gallons this winter. People who apply in October are generally served before the funds run thin, and people who wait until January take their chances.

Get your backup heat plan right before you need it. If a kerosene heater, propane heater or wood stove is part of your plan, make sure it is rated for how you intend to use it, you have enough fuel stored safely, and you have working carbon monoxide detectors on every level of the house. When heating bills spike, people start heating with ovens, grills and generators in the garage, and every winter some of them do not wake up. A detector costs less than a tank of heating oil.

Buy the motor oil and filters for your next two oil changes. That is not hoarding. It is maintenance you were going to do anyway, bought before the price rises again. A breakdown is far more expensive when towing, parts and shipping costs are all climbing with fuel, so keep the vehicles in good shape now.

Stock food before the fuel surcharges reach the grocery store. Trucking companies like the one in Girard are already adding surcharges, and those take weeks to show up in shelf prices. Buy extra of what your family already eats, plus pet food, medications, batteries and hygiene supplies you know you will use. A deeper pantry lets you wait out a price spike instead of buying at the top alongside everyone else. Our guide on long-term food storage breaks down what actually lasts and what goes bad in the basement.

Do not wait for an export ban announcement. If the White House restricts fuel exports, expect price swings in both directions and a lot of confusion about what it means. The people who topped off and stocked up before that headline will be sitting comfortably while everyone else crowds the stations. For the bigger financial picture, start with our guide to preparing for an economic collapse.

None of this requires believing the country is about to collapse. You do not need a national fuel shortage for $7 diesel to wreck your budget, and you do not need empty stores for a jump in grocery prices to hurt. Maybe the pipeline comes back early, Hormuz improves and prices ease, and everybody should hope that happens. If it does, you used everything you bought. If it does not, you are the household that does not have to panic.

Working Families Are Paying for Decisions Made Far Above Their Heads

The trucker in Girard did not start a war with Iran. The farmer bringing in corn did not burn out a Saudi pump station or hand the Houthis the islands guarding the Red Sea. The Marine veteran in Winchester did not decide that federal heating assistance should buy fewer gallons every year while oil prices climb.

Those decisions were made by governments on both sides of the Atlantic and both sides of the aisle, over decades, by people who let fuel inventories run thin and refining capacity max out while assuming cheap energy would always be there. Now the bill has arrived, and it is not landing on them.

And instead of a real plan, Washington is spending the last 50 days before an election debating an export ban that most of the people who actually understand fuel markets say will not lower prices at all. It is a political stunt while diesel heads for $7, heating oil tops $5 before the first frost, and working Americans are left to figure out on their own how to keep their trucks running, their crops coming in and their kids warm this winter. Nobody in Washington is coming to fill your tank. They had years to prepare for this, they did not, and now they expect you to pay for it and keep quiet.

Related Reads

• Saudi Pipeline Attacked, Diesel at $6: The Fuel Crisis That Could Upend Economy
• Here We Go Again: Costco Starts Rationing Motor Oil as Supply Chain Cracks
• Your Dollar Is About to Lose Half Its Buying Power and the National Debt Just Hit $40 Trillion
• Bond Yields Soar as Global Panic Builds: Is a Stock Market Crash Imminent?
• Long-Term Food Storage: What Actually Lasts 25 Years (And What Rots in Your Basement)
• OFFGRID Survival Family Preparedness Manual

The post $7 Diesel Is Coming: America’s Fuel Crisis Is About to Get Much Worse appeared first on Activist Post.

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Earlier this year, James Corbett delivered a presentation on Applied POSIWID to the Approaching Humanity conference organized by Larken and Amanda Rose. This is the video of that presentation.

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WATCH ON:  /  /  /  / /  or DOWNLOAD THE MP4

TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES:

Thank you, Larken and Amanda, and thank you everyone for coming to this Approaching Humanity celebration today.

In case you don’t know me, I’m James Corbett of corbettreport.com and Amanda and Larken were kind enough to invite me here to join you today to discuss an important topic: POSIWID.

What? Never heard of POSIWID before? Then you haven’t been following The Corbett Report!

If you want to get caught up to speed on POSIWID, you can see Episode 499 of The Corbett Report podcast, “The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does.”

But come with me and I’ll give you the long story short:

This is Stafford Beer.

Actually, to be more accurate, that’s Stafford Beer in full-on professional business manager mode.

This is what Stafford Beer looked like most of the time.

You could say he was a pretty … unconventional guy.

The bastion of truthiness (Wikipedia) describes him as a “British theorist, consultant and professor at Manchester Business School,” but that really only begins to scratch the surface of his esoteric explorations in the field of “management cybernetics.”

In fact, his involvement with Project Cybersyn in Allende’s Chile, complete with a Star Trek-inspired retro-futuristic command room for technocrats to oversee the Chilean economy in real time is probably worth an exploration in and of itself.

…But today we’re going to discuss something different: POSIWID.

POSIWID comes from Stafford Beer’s 1979 book, The Heart of Enterprise.

It stands for “the Purpose Of a System Is What It Does.”

You see, as a researcher in cybernetics management, Beer was fundamentally interested in systems and how they work…or how they fail to work.

He gives the example of a time he was living in London and bought a luxury car…that promptly proceeded to fall apart piece by piece as soon as he drove it off the lot. First a door handle came off, then a windshield wiper, next the odometer gauge.

Despite all the servicing stations for this car having a mutual agreement to supply each other with spare parts, he was unable to get the last missing part before the next one broke off. And as a good systems engineer, Beer decided to take his complaint to the source:

I wrote to the managing director of the manufacturing company to point out that the System for spare-part provisioning did not work. He disagreed. He said that there was nothing the matter with the system. […] ‘I am of the opinion that our system is efficient and that it only fails to maintain availability, due to manufacturing conditions or outside deficiencies.’ […]

What is the nature, and what is the purpose, of a spare parts provisioning System—and what are its boundaries? And if we may know the purpose of a System by WHAT IT DOES, then what did this System actually do? From my point of view it was a System for not supplying spare parts. From the managing director’s point of view, it must have had a different purpose: minimizing the capital tied up in spare parts, perhaps. In any case, the nature of the System was certainly a subjective affair.

Beer’s observation is deceptively simple.

Determining the nature of a system is a subjective affair. The manager of the manufacturing company might have one explanation of a system’s purpose, but that isn’t necessarily reflective of any observable reality.

If we COMPLETELY IGNORE what the system’s designer or its owner or its defender or its proponent has to say and look at what the system ACTUALLY DOES, we can see the objective reality of that system.

OK, alright, you get the idea, but who cares about car parts suppliers? Let’s look at some more consequential systems.

Like the War on Terror. You know, the wars of aggression waged primarily in the Middle East in the name of 9/11.

What was the purpose of the War on Terror?

George W. Bush tried to define it by its supposed end goal:

BUSH: Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there.

It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.

SOURCE: Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People

…But let’s not take his word for it. Instead: POSIWID. The Purpose of a System is What it Does.

So, what did the war on terror actaully do?

It killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. It cost the US over $8 trillion. And it actually led to the rise of more violent and extreme terror groups.

So, the purpose of the war on terror was to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, transfer $8 trillion from US taxpayers to the military-industrial complex and increase violent terrorism.

The Purpose of a System is What it Does.

Or, let’s look at the War on Drugs.

Everyone remembers when Nixon declared the War on Drugs in 1971.

NIXON:  America’s public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive.

SOURCE: President Nixon Declares Drug Abuse “Public Enemy Number One” 

So, the purpose of the War on Drugs was to fight and defeat the enemy of drug abuse?

But what has the War on Drugs actually done?

It has incarcerated nearly one million people per year for drug offenses. It has cost an estimated one trillion dollars. And it has resulted in an increase in drug abuse.

Thus, the purpose of the system called “The War on Drugs” is to incarcerate a million people a year, divert a trillion dollars into the prison-industrial complex and increase drug abuse.

The Purpose of a System is What it Does

OK. One more example.

How about the War on Poverty?

JOHNSON: …and this Administration today here and now declares unconditional war on poverty in America. [Applause]

[…]

Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it. [Applause]

SOURCE: President Johnson’s 1964 State of the Union address, 1/8/64. MP503

So the stated purpose of the war on poverty was to cure and prevent poverty.

But what has it actually done?

It has created a web of nearly 100 interrelated welfare programs, spread across 14 government departments and agencies, and nine budget functions that spend over a trillion dollars a year on various federal welfare programs.

The result of these programs is that there is a greater percentage of the American population living in poverty than there was when the war was launched.

So, the purpose of the war on poverty is to create a vast bureaucratic infrastructure, transfer a trillion dollars a year from taxpayers to bureaucrats, middlemen and welfare recipients and to keep a greater and greater percentage of the population dependent on those handouts.

The Purpose of a System is What it Does

Simple, right? And straightforward. It takes the guesswork and the subjectivity and the “but we had good intentions” out of the equation and it gets to the heart of the matter.

So, are you ready to try it yourself?

Alright, come with me.

So, let’s test:

What was the purpose of the American Revolution?

Did it lead to freedom, prosperity and happiness, as the founding fathers supposedly intended?

Or has it resulted in the creation of the largest, most deadly, most data-hungry, privacy-invading, technocratically empowered empire in the history of the world?

What was the purpose of MAGA?

Did it Make America Great Again?

Or has it resulted in an EVEN STUPIDER and MORE MEANINGLESS war in the Middle East on the behalf of Israel, the expansion of the technocratic surveillance state, the growth of the military-industrial-artificial-intelligence complex, increased government protection for Monsanto and Bayer in their poisoning of Americans and the world, the hard wiring of the stablecoin scam and the Polymarket scam into law, and the systematic cover-up of the Epstein network?

The Purpose of a System is What it Does.

What is the purpose of voting?

Is it to make the people’s voice heard, as the Hope and Changers believed when they voted for Obama in 2008 or the MAGA die hards believed when they voted for Trump in 2024 or the pacifists believed in 1916 when they voted for Wilson because “He Kept Us Out of War”?

Or is it to provide the populace of the state with the comforting idea that they have any control whatsoever  over a system that is fundamentally made by and for oligarchs?

Finally, here’s the most important question of all, and I invite you to apply everything you’ve learned here today : What is the purpose of the state?

While you ponder that, I’m going to assert my freedom as an unbound individual and I’m going to start approaching humanity.

I hope you’ll join me soon.

James Corbett, corbettreport.com

The post Applied POSIWID – #SolutionsWatch appeared first on Activist Post.

Late last week sudden, unexpected developments in the Middle East forced me to refocus my attention to the ongoing conflict in that region.

The Houthi forces of Yemen—the widely used name for Ansar Allah–launched a sweeping ground offensive against the Saudi proxies deployed against them, quickly putting the latter to flight, as they abandoned their military equipment in a wild panic. Within a couple of days, the Houthis had successfully seized a long stretch of important coastline as well as the local islands. This allowed them to completely consolidate their control of the Red Sea shipping lanes around the narrow Bab al-Mandab Strait, banning all Saudi cargo traffic.

The de facto leader of Saudi Arabia is Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). According to media reports he became so desperate at these successful Houthi advances that on Thursday he personally called President Donald Trump two separate times, pleading for American airstrikes that might turn the tide of battle and rescue the situation. But Trump rejected his requests.

Trump is so erratic, mercurial, and dishonest that his motives are seldom clear. But Mike Whitney noted that at a Friday news conference, Trump seemed to claim that he didn’t want America to get in the middle of the conflict between the Houthis and the Saudis, so he decided to abandon the latter to their fate:

“The Houthis called us. They don’t want to fight with us. They let us know they don’t want to fight with us. They don’t want us to go after them. They would much prefer not having us involved, and they are letting most ships go through. There’s just one country they’re not too happy with.

Despite his words, I think a far more plausible explanation is that Trump and his advisors recognized that they lacked any effective means of stopping the Houthi forces and they were extremely reluctant to demonstrate such total military impotence by trying to do so.

When the Houthis had previously interdicted Red Sea shipping a couple of years ago, Trump had boastfully promised to crush them, and he deployed an aircraft carrier task force to do so. But after weeks of combat and large numbers of airstrikes, the Houthis had remained unbowed, while Trump’s forces had lost several aircraft and many advanced $30 million Reaper drones to Houthi missiles, forcing Trump to withdraw in failure.

In the wake of our unsuccessful war against Iran, America’s military forces in the region are now far, far weaker than what they had been at the time. Our local bases have mostly been destroyed by Iranian missile strikes, our antimissile interceptors are severely depleted, and only a sole aircraft carrier is currently enforcing its distant blockade of Iran while stationed hundreds of miles away from the Iranian coast.

Constant attacks by Iranian missiles and drones had already forced us to withdraw our aircraft from the Persian Gulf region, redeploying them to air bases in Jordan.

But just a day or two before the Houthi ground offensive began, our main Jordanian base also came under very heavy Iranian attack, bombarded by 20 or more Iranian ballistic missiles. Initial news reports claimed that all these missiles had been shot down or missed their target, but sources then revealed that an A-10 aircraft had been destroyed and some eight F-15s were damaged.

Even that less than successful defense against that volley of missiles had required us to further deplete our supply of advanced munitions. By some estimates, we had fired off as many as 100 Patriot interceptors, amounting to a very significant fraction of the dwindling global stockpiles that would take us many years to replenish.

We could not cope with such continuing expenditures, whereas the Iranian supply of ballistic missiles seemed inexhaustible. So we would probably soon be forced to abandon our Jordanian bases and shift our forces to Israel or even back to Europe. And as both our land- and sea-based aircraft were steadily moved farther and farther away, their effectiveness in striking any targets in the Persian Gulf region was greatly diminished.

If we wouldn’t or couldn’t protect the Saudis from the Houthi military advances that could block the Red Sea oil shipments then the value of the longstanding American military alliance became increasingly doubtful.

Soon after they were attacked by American and Israeli forces, the Iranians had closed the Strait of Hormuz to oil traffic by American allies including the Saudis, but the latter had used a long east-west pipeline to successfully send their crude to a port on the Red Sea and export it from there.

However, on Thursday, a wave of drones allegedly fired by Iraqi forces aligned with Iran severely damaged that pipeline. This completely eliminated those oil shipments, striking a huge financial blow against the Saudis, and once again America could do nothing to defend them against that crippling attack.

The combination of the pipeline attack and the Houthi blockade has now drastically reduced Saudi oil exports. Those rapid Houthi advances and the American inaction may also have broader implications, as was discussed by a number of knowledgeable experts.

Col. Larry Wilkerson served as the longtime chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, spending decades as a pillar of the government establishment and a participant in the innermost circles of national security matters. He has closely followed events in the Persian Gulf region and discussed the current situation in a Friday interview.

He explained that when the Yemen civil war had broken out a dozen years ago, the Saudis had foolishly decided to become directly involved, supporting the weak and corrupt government forces against the much stronger and more effective Houthis.

Powerful Saudi political clout had led the Obama administration to also become heavily involved, with Wilkerson claiming that America had actually provided everything in the war except the soldiers on the ground, who were Saudi mercenaries. But despite such overwhelming advantages, the Saudi-backed forces had still mostly been defeated.

And now that a new Saudi attack has reignited the conflict, Wilkerson believed that the balance of power now favored the Iranian-aligned Houthis to a much greater extent. Remarkably enough, he even speculated that the Houthis might attempt to invade Saudi Arabia itself and overthrow the Saudi government, something that would have been inconceivable before Iran had successfully driven American military forces out of the region. Such a Houthi invasion would obviously challenge the recent defensive alliance that the Saudis had established with Turkey and Pakistan.

Others who lacked Wilkerson’s many years near the top of our national security establishment were naturally much more cautious in their predictions, but many of them also regarded these developments as extremely important.

As the co-founder and executive vice president of the very respectable Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Trita Parsi is a fully mainstream figure, hardly given to exaggerated, partisan assessments. But in an important interview on Saturday with Prof. Glenn Diesen, he also saw the sweeping military advances of Iran’s Houthi allies as a transformational event that would drastically reshape the geopolitics of the region. The Houthi victories would enormously strengthen Iran’s hand in its ongoing conflict with the Trump administration, and Parsi explored the various ramifications.

He also believed that the accuracy and striking power of Iran’s missiles probably meant that they could easily sink or at least severely damage all of our warships in the region, killing thousands of Americans in an afternoon. However, they had refrained from doing so and instead merely fired warning shots, forcing our ships to relocate to much greater distances. They did this because they were concerned that any such mass casualty event might provoke Trump into a nuclear attack, but they still retained that escalation option in their toolkit.

Then on Sunday, American-born Iranian Prof. Mohammed Marandi also discussed these important developments at length, describing some of the factors behind the Houthi success.

Although the Western media always portrayed the Houthis as rebels in the longstanding Yemen civil war, this was an extremely distorted perspective. The Houthis had gained control of the Yemeni capital a dozen years ago and the territory they held included some 70-80% of the total population, so they had obviously long since become the government of Yemen. The Houthi victory led the Saudis and the other hostile Gulf Arab states to impose a state of siege against Yemen, with their blockade against imports probably leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Yemenis.

But despite all these years of massive pressure and the large mercenary forces funded by the Saudis and the UAE, the Yemeni forces had actually grown steadily stronger over time. With America having been so greatly weakened, the most recent Saudi attacks finally caused the Houthis to begin a full counter-attack. They intended to block Saudi oil shipments and attack Saudi oil industry facilities until the Saudis met their demands to abandon the economic siege of Yemen and finally make peace.

Marandi also emphasized that the considerable reductions in oil revenue were now putting the Saudis and other Gulf Arabs states under severe and growing financial pressure. As a result, they might seek to liquidate some of their enormous American holdings. This could negatively impact the American economy and interest rates so it was unclear whether our government would permit such asset sales. But if it didn’t, the credibility of America as a reliable destination for wealth might suffer a fatal blow. Banks that refuse to return the money of their depositors may find it difficult to attract new ones.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Collapse of the Saudi-American Alliance? appeared first on Activist Post.