Russia will build an alternative to the system of Domain Name Servers, sanctions-proofing its internet

RT

The Russian Security Council has asked the country’s government to develop an independent internet infrastructure for BRICS nations, which would continue to work in the event of global internet malfunctions.

The initiative was discussed at the October meeting of the Security Council, which is Russia’s top consultative body on national security. President Vladimir Putin personally set a deadline of August 1, 2018 for the completion of the task, the RBC news agency reported.

While discussing the issue, members of the council noted that “the increased capabilities of western nations to conduct offensive operations in the informational space as well as the increased readiness to exercise these capabilities pose a serious threat to Russia’s security.”

They decided that the problem should be addressed by creating a separate backup system of Domain Name Servers (DNS), which would not be subject to control by international organizations. This system would be used by countries of the BRICS bloc – Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa.

The issue of excessive dependency on global DNS has previously been addressed by Russia. In 2014, the Russian Communications Ministry conducted a major exercise in which it simulated the “switching off” of global internet services and used a Russian backup system to successfully support web operations inside the country.

However, when reporters asked Vladimir Putin’s Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov if the country’s authorities had been considering disconnecting from the global internet in 2014, Peskov dismissed these allegations as false.

“Russia’s disconnection from the global internet is of course out of the question,” Peskov told the Interfax news agency. However, the official also emphasized that “recently, a fair share of unpredictability is present in the actions of our partners both in the US and the EU, and we [Russia] must be prepared for any turn of events.”

“We all know who the chief administrator of the global internet is. And due to its volatility, we have to think about how to ensure our national security,” said Peskov. It’s not about disconnecting Russia from the World Wide Web, he added, but about “protecting it from possible external influence.”

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Patrick Buchanan: The US-Saudi Starvation Blockade

By Patrick J. Buchanan | November 27, 2017 |

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (Screenshot)

Our aim is to “starve the whole population — men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound — into submission,” said First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill.

He was speaking of Germany at the outset of the Great War of 1914-1918. Americans denounced as inhumane this starvation blockade that would eventually take the lives of a million German civilians.

Yet when we went to war in 1917, a U.S. admiral told British Prime Minister Lloyd George, “You will find that it will take us only two months to become as great criminals as you are.”

After the Armistice of Nov. 11, 1918, however, the starvation blockade was not lifted until Germany capitulated to all Allied demands in the Treaty of Versailles.

As late as March 1919, four months after the Germans laid down their arms, Churchill arose in Parliament to exult, “We are enforcing the blockade with rigor, and Germany is very near starvation.”

So grave were conditions in Germany that Gen. Sir Herbert Plumer protested to Lloyd George in Paris that morale among his troops on the Rhine was sinking from seeing “hordes of skinny and bloated children pawing over the offal from British cantonments.”

The starvation blockade was a war crime and a crime against humanity. But the horrors of the Second World War made people forget this milestone on the Western road to barbarism.

A comparable crime is being committed today against the poorest people in the Arab world — and with the complicity of the United States.

Saudi Arabia, which attacked and invaded Yemen in 2015 after Houthi rebels dumped over a pro-Saudi regime in Sanaa and overran much of the country, has imposed a land, sea and air blockade, after the Houthis fired a missile at Riyadh this month that was shot down.

The Saudis say it was an Iranian missile, fired with the aid of Hezbollah, and an “act of war” against the kingdom. The Houthis admit to firing the missile, but all three deny Iran and Hezbollah had any role.

Whatever the facts of the attack, what the Saudis, with U.S. support, are doing today with this total blockade of that impoverished country appears to be both inhumane and indefensible.

Almost 90 percent of Yemen’s food, fuel and medicine is imported, and these imports are being cut off. The largest cities under Houthi control, the port of Hodaida and Sanaa, the capital, have lost access to drinking water because the fuel needed to purify the water is not there.

Thousands have died of cholera. Hundreds of thousands are at risk. Children are in danger from a diphtheria epidemic. Critical drugs and medicines have stopped coming in, a death sentence for diabetics and cancer patients.

If airfields and ports under Houthi control are not allowed to open and the necessities of life and humanitarian aid are not allowed to flow in, the Yemenis face famine and starvation.

What did these people do to deserve this? What did they do to us that we would assist the Saudis in doing this to them?

The Houthis are not al-Qaida or ISIS. Those are Sunni terrorist groups, and the Houthis detest them.

Is this now the American way of war? Are we Americans, this Thanksgiving and Christmas, prepared to collude in a human rights catastrophe that will engender a hatred of us among generations of Yemeni and stain the name of our country?

Saudis argue that the specter of starvation will turn the Yemeni people against the rebels and force the Houthi to submit. But what if the policy fails. What if the Houthis, who have held the northern half of the country for more than two years, do not yield? What then?

Are we willing to play passive observer as thousands and then tens of thousands of innocent civilians — the old, sick, weak, and infants and toddlers first — die from a starvation blockade supported by the mighty United States of America?

Without U.S. targeting and refueling, Saudi planes could not attack the Houthis effectively and Riyadh could not win this war. But when did Congress authorize this war on a nation that never attacked us?

President Obama first approved U.S. support for the Saudi war effort. President Trump has continued the Obama policy, and the war in Yemen has now become his war, and his human rights catastrophe.

Yemen today is arguably the worst humanitarian crisis on earth, and America’s role in it is undeniable and indispensable.

If the United States were to tell Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that we were no longer going to support his war in Yemen, the Saudis would have to accept the reality that they have lost this war.

Indeed, given Riyadh’s failure in the Syria civil war, its failure to discipline rebellious Qatar, its stalemated war and human rights disaster in Yemen, Trump might take a hard second look at the Sunni monarchy that is the pillar of U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.”

“Gentlemen, comrades, do not be concerned about all you hear about Glasnost and Perestroika and democracy in the coming years. They are primarily for outward consumption. There will be no significant internal changes in the Soviet Union, other than for cosmetic purposes. Our purpose is to disarm the Americans and let them fall asleep. We want to accomplish three things:

One, we want the Americans to withdraw conventional forces from Europe. Two, we want them to withdraw nuclear forces from Europe. Three, we want the Americans to stop proceeding with Strategic Defense Initiative.”

Quote by: Mikhail Gorbachev (1931- ) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the last head of state of the USSR (1985-1991) Date: November 1987 Source: speech to the Soviet Politburo, November 1987

“The most puzzling development in politics during the last decade is the apparent determination of Western European leaders to re-create the Soviet Union in Western Europe.”

– Mikhail Gorbachev

Net neutrality and the drive to censor the internet

Andre Damon, WSWS, Nov 25 2017

25 November 2017

Wednesday’s move by the Trump administration to end net neutrality marks a milestone in the offensive by the US government and major corporations to put an end to the free and open internet, paving the way for widespread government censorship of oppositional news and analysis.

Under the current law, upheld by numerous court decisions and reaffirmed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 2015, companies that provide internet access to users, known as internet service providers (ISPs), cannot block or impede their users’ access to any website or service.

But the draft proposal published by FCC chairman Ajit Pai Wednesday, and expected to sail through the approval process next month, would put an end to the decades-long treatment of internet services as a public utility, allowing the internet monopolies Comcast, Charter, AT&T and Verizon full ability to block, throttle and promote internet traffic at will.

This will allow them to block or limit access to websites, such as the World Socialist Web Site, WikiLeaks and other sources of politically critical news, entirely at their discretion, as well as peer-to-peer file sharing networks, which were used by news outlets to bypass censorship in the past.

The ending of net neutrality will also have a substantial economic impact. By scrapping most government regulation of the internet giants, the ISPs will be able to use their monopoly power to jack up prices for consumers. While most people will be relegated to a slow and largely censored internet, the ability to communicate information freely will be reserved for those who can pay exorbitant premium rates.

Moreover, by forcing content providers to pay for premium access, the ending of net neutrality threatens to massively entrench existing communications monopolies, while restricting access to smaller businesses and user-supported sites and services, which will not have the financial resources to compete with the technology and media giants. ISPs will be free to increase costs for smaller sites and services, potentially driving them out of business.

Major media outlets, which have for years been inveighing against the independent blogs, websites and other news outlets that gained readership at their expense, will no doubt seek to use the ruling to bring to bear their economic leverage to regain their former control over the political discourse.

The power that is being handed to a few corporations is staggering. The four largest telecommunications companies control more than 75 percent of high-speed internet service. More than half of American households have only one ISP to chose from, and most other households have only two providers to choose from.

Now, these giant monopolies, which have already demonstrated that they act as proxies for the government by collaborating in the NSA’s illegal mass surveillance programs, will be able to block access to entire websites.

While the major social media and content distribution companies, including Facebook and Google, have claimed to oppose the move, they do so entirely from the standpoint that ending net neutrality will give internet service providers greater power to compete with their businesses.

Facebook, Twitter, and Google, which owns YouTube, have made clear that they fully support internet censorship, which is the essential content of the ending of net neutrality.

This week, Facebook announced that it would notify users when they read content from accounts accused by US intelligence agencies of spreading “Russian propaganda,” creating a backlist of outlets presenting critical sources of news and analysis.

This followed the announcement by Google executive Eric Schmidt that the company would “de-rank” RT, Sputnik and what it called “those kinds of sites,” in its search and news products. This is an open-ended statement of intent to censor not just Russia-connected news sites, but effectively all political opposition. Schmidt’s comments were a confirmation of statements by the World Socialist Web Site that Google is seeking to limit access to sites based on political criteria.

Google’s YouTube, meanwhile, has gone on a censorship spree, taking down videos and banning and demonetizing channels it claims are spreading “extremist” views.

The ending of net neutrality plays a key role in this censorship drive. Under conditions that existed prior to the ending of net neutrality, users were able to bypass these forms of heavy-handed censorship by turning to smaller and more open platforms to find and share information.

But with the ending of net neutrality, the social media and streaming monopolies will be able, by cutting deals with the ISPs, to strangle their upstart competitors, keeping users locked into platforms that increasingly serve as little more than distribution networks for state-approved propaganda.

Billions of people all over the world have embraced the internet precisely because it promised a free and unimpeded way to access and share information. Oppositional and socialist organizations, excluded for decades from the public discourse by the effective monopoly exercised by major newspapers, TV, and radio stations, found an audience hungry for information suppressed by the increasingly discredited establishment media.

The government’s lies—from the “weapons of mass destruction” that justified the invasion of Iraq, to government complicity with Islamist organizations it was supposedly fighting in the “war on terror,” to mass surveillance and the corrupt and oligarchic nature of American politics—have been exposed by internet publications.

Now, under conditions of a mounting war threat and soaring social inequality, public access to alternative sources of information is seen as an intolerable threat, to be shut off and suppressed.

Internet communications are not a luxury, but a vital social need and should be treated as a public utility. However, under conditions in which three billionaires control as much wealth as half the US population, and all of social and economic life is controlled by a shrinking number of powerful corporations, the provision of all social rights, from communications to the most basic necessities of public infrastructure, are treated as privileges available only to the increasingly small sliver of the population that is able to pay for them.

The demand for the most basic social rights, including the freedom of the press and the freedom of speech, comes into conflict with the capitalist system.

The defense of a free and open internet is inseparably bound up with the struggle against capitalism, based on the independent and international mobilization of the working class around a socialist program.

The massive and bloated technology monopolies, who now see their primary function as being the blocking, not the dissemination, of information, must be seized and turned into publicly owned utilities, with the aim of providing the entire world’s combined knowledge to the whole global population.

Andre Damon

Senator MarkWarner is well aware of the rising social tensions in the United States which form the backdrop and impetus to the anti-Russia campaign. In May 2016, speaking before an audience of business and political elites at the Milken Institute’s 2016 Global Conference, Warner warned: “If you don’t think the frustration of Americans with our overall system—not just our political system, but our business system, our tax code—is at the boiling point, then Katy bar the door! The walls that are gonna have to be built, may not be at borders, they may be around neighborhoods the way they are in many Third World countries around the world.

http://russia-insider.com/en/democrat-mark-warner-auditions-role-grand-inquisitor-anti-russia-campaign/ri21594

Department of Veterans Affairs Reports 73 Thousand U.S. Gulf War Deaths

By Gary Vey for viewzone

More Gulf War Veterans have died than Vietnam Veterans. This probably is news to you. But the truth has been hidden by a technicality. So here is the truth.

The casualties in the Vietnam War were pretty simple to understand. If a soldier was dead from his combat tour, he was a war casualty. There are 58,195 names recorded on the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC.

Some of these brave men died in the jungles of Vietnam while others died in Medivac units or hospitals in Japan and America. A dead soldier can surrender his life anywhere in service to his country. It really doesn’t matter where this happens. The location of a soldier’s death in no way colors his sacrifice.

But something odd has happened with the Iraq War. The government, under the Bush administration, did something dishonest that resulted in a lie that’s persisted since the war began — and continues to this very day. They decided to report the war deaths in Iraq only if the soldier died with his boots on the ground in a combat situation.

What’s the difference, you might ask?

The combat in Vietnam was in rural areas, far removed from medical treatment centers. Injured soldiers were treated by a Medic. Most died at the scene of the battle before they could be evacuated. Many died on route or were declared dead at the medical treatment facilities. The situation in Iraq is vastly different.

Fighting in Iraq is mainly in urban areas. Soldiers who are injured are quickly evacuated with armored personnel carriers or helicopters. It’s a much more efficient system than what was possible in Vietnam, but for those that are seriously injured it means that death is more likely to happen while they are in transit or at the treatment facility.

Under the new reporting system, deaths that happen en route or post evacuation are not counted as combat deaths. This is why the number seems unusually low — a little over four thousand as of 2009.

The actual figures have been hidden from the American public just like the returning, flag draped coffins were censored from the press. But the figures are now available and we can only hope that the American people will be outraged when they learn how they have been misled.

According to The Department of Veterans Affairs, as of May 2007, reports in the Gulf War Veterans Information System reveal these startling numbers:

Total U.S. Military Gulf War Deaths: 73,846
* Deaths amongst Deployed: 17,847
* Deaths amongst Non-Deployed: 55,999

The stastics for non-lethal injuries are likewise staggering:

Total "Undiagnosed Illness" (UDX) claims: 14,874
Total number of disability claims filed: 1,620,906
* Disability Claims amongst Deployed: 407,911
* Disability Claims amongst Non-Deployed: 1,212,995

Percentage of combat troops that filed Disability Claims 36%

I know you probably will think this is another conspiracy theory — I did when I first heard about this — so please read the original report for yourself. [Source: http://www1.va.gov/rac-gwvi/docs/GWVIS_May2007.pdf Note: Sometimes this link is not active so we have posted the pdf file on viewzone 393 kb.]

More deaths and mysery to follow…

More than 1,820 tons of radioactive nuclear waste (i.e. depleted uranium) were exploded in Iraq alone in the form of armor piercing rounds and bunker busters. This represents the worlds worst man made ecological disaster ever. 64 kg of uranium were used in the Hiroshima bomb. The U.S. Iraq Nuclear Holocaust represents far more than fourteen thousand Hiroshima’s.

The nuclear waste the U.S. has exploded in the Middle East will continue killing for hundreds of years! That’s how long these particles of radioactive dust will continue to blow around, get lodged in someone’s lungs or be ingested. Scientists calculate that there is now enough radioactive material in Iraq to wipe out a third of the world’s current population.

While we never found any WMD’s (Weapons of Mass Destruction) in Iraq, we sure made up for it by importing our own! Birth defects among Iraqi newborns are up a whopping 600% from before the war. The defects are typical of the kind produced by exposure to radioactive poisons. And these injuries are happening to the civilian population of Iraq — the people we were supposedly "liberating."

This writer happened to visit Iraq back in 2001, at the time Saddam Hussein was still in power. The world’s nations were imposing an embargo on all imports in an attempt to punish the nation for invading the neighboring nation of Kuwait. I remember the good people of Iraq who treated me with kindness and hospitality — even while knowing I was an American. Despite the embargo on such vital things as medicine and hospital supplies, the markets were thriving with local produce. Children freely played in the streets and there was laughter. To see what this war has done to Iraq is especially painful and speaks loudly of the immorality that has caused these innocent people to suffer. And now, to see that this same immorality extends to the American people in the form of deception and lies crosses the line.

I live in a small town in New England. We have known of many casualties from Iraq — too many. Yet the numbers being reported in the media make it seem that this is a rare occurrence. Just over 4,000? How can this be? In short — it’s NOT.

What will it take to awaken people and make them angry enough to hold our government responsible for these lies? A democracy is only good if its people are well informed. How else can we make decisions about what’s best for us? If we are fed s*** and kept in the dark we truly are a nation of mushrooms.

Before I end this I want to say a big THANK YOU to all the vets who put their country and its people before themselves. We are proud of you and believe that you put your lives on the line for something a little better than what we are currently experiencing with our government. Thanks to you we’re still a democracy. So it’s up to us, the people you fought for, to make your effort worthwhile.

What do you think about this? Do you care

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

Once upon a time the leftwing of the political spectrum was committed to the advancement of the working class and its protection from political and economic abuse by the owners of the means of production. Consequently, the leftwing was politically potent and reached a pinnacle of power when Henry Wallace was selected by Franklin D. Roosevelt as his third term vice president. Despite his wealth from the company he founded, Wallace stood for the farmer and the working class.

The Democratic Party power brokers refused to accept Wallace as the vice president candidate until FDR told them he otherwise would decline the presidential nomination.

Wallace was Roosevelt’s and the Democratic voters’ choice for vice president in Roosevelt’s fourth term. But Wallace’s progressive views had alienated the party bosses, Wall Street bankers, anti-union businesses, and America’s British and French allies with his support for labor unions, women, minorities, and victims of colonialism. When he called for the emancipation of colonial subjects and for working with the Soviet Union in the cause of peace and working class justice, he sealed his fate. Despite a Gallup Poll released during the Democratic national convention in July 1944 showing that Wallace was the favorite with 65% of the vote and Roosevelt’s announcement that if he were a delegate, he would choose Wallace, the party bosses chose Harry Truman who was preferred by only 2% of Democratic voters.

This was a turning point in US politics and world history. If the people had prevailed over the corrupt Democratic party bosses, Wallace instead of Truman would have become the first postwar US president. Most likely, there would have been no Cold War, no Korean War, no Vietnam War, no NATO, and no decades of mutual distrust between the US and Russia that today threatens life on earth.

Moreover, in place of today’s highly skewed income and wealth distribution toward the very rich fraction of one percent, there would be an equitable distribution that would support a strong consumer market instead of declining real incomes and debt expansion that threatens economic growth, business profits, employment, and high equity values.

Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick in their best seller, The Untold History of the United States, describe the Clinton-style Democratic Party corruption that was used to block Wallace as the vice presidential candidate:

“Party insiders made sure they had an iron grip on the convention. Yet the rank-and-file Democrats would not go quietly, staging a rebellion on the convention floor. The groundswell of support for Wallace among the delegates and attendees was so great that despite the bosses’ stranglehold over the proceedings and strong-arm tactics, Wallace’s supporters almost carried the day as an uproarious demonstration for Wallace broke out on the convention floor. In the midst of the demonstration, Florida Senator Claude Pepper realized that if he got Wallace’s name into nomination that night, Wallace would sweep the convention. Pepper fought his way through the crowd to get within five feet of the microphone when the nearly hysterical Mayor Kelly, purporting that there was a fire hazard, got the Chairman, Senator Samuel Jackson, to adjourn the proceedings. Had Pepper made it five more feet and nominated Wallace before the bosses forced adjournment against the will of the delegates, Wallace would have become president in 1945 and the course of history would have been dramatically altered.”

The next day Senator Jackson apologized to Senator Pepper:

“I had strict instructions from Hannegan not to let the convention nominate the vice president last night. So I had to adjourn the convention in your face.”

Thus was the power of interest groups to prevail over democracy 73 years ago when there was still a press that would on occasion speak for the people. Dave Kranzler and Brett Arends describe the power of the interests and the degeneration of the media today:

“It’s been my view since circa 2003 that [the oligarchs] would hold up the system with printed money and credit creation until every last crumb of middle class wealth was swept off the table and into the pockets of those in position to do the sweeping.

“Obama delivered nothing on his original campaign promises. He was going to “reform” Wall Street. But the concept of Too Big To Fail was legislated under Obama, and Wall Street indictments/prosecutions fell precipitously from the previous Administration.

“Obama left office and entered into a world of high six-figure Wall Street-sponsored speaking engagements and to live in a $10 million estate in Hawaii paid for by the Chicago elite (Pritzkers etc). Now Obama will be paid off $10’s of millions for his role in aiding and abetting the transfer of trillions from the middle class to the elitists. Look at Bill and Hillary – need I say more? Trump has reversed course on his campaign promises twice as quickly as Obama. Almost overnight after his inauguration, Trump became a war-mongering hand-puppet for the Deep State’s ‘Swamp’ creatures.

“The media has been willingly complicit in this big charade. Much to my complete shock, Brett Arends has published a commentary on Marketwatch which, from an insider, warns about the media:

‘Do you want to know what kind of person makes the best reporter? I’ll tell you. A borderline sociopath. Someone smart, inquisitive, stubborn, disorganized, chaotic, and in a perpetual state of simmering rage at the failings of the world. Once upon a time you saw people like this in every newsroom in the country. They often had chaotic personal lives and they died early of cirrhosis or a heart attack. But they were tough, angry SOBs and they produced great stories.

‘Do you want to know what kind of people get promoted and succeed in the modern news organization? Social climbers. Networkers. People who are gregarious, who “buy in” to the dominant consensus, who go along to get along and don’t ask too many really awkward questions. They are flexible, well-organized, and happy with life. And it shows.’

“This is why so many reporters are happy to report that U.S. corporations are in great financial shape, even though they also have surging debts, or that a ‘diversified portfolio’ of stocks and bonds will protect you in all circumstances, even though this is not the case, or that defense budgets are being slashed, when they aren’t, or that the U.S. economy has massively outperformed rivals such as Japan, when on key metrics it hasn’t, or that companies must pay CEOs gazillions of dollars to secure the top ‘talent’ when they don’t need to do any such thing and such pay is just plunder.”

The American leftwing has been transmogrified. The left, which formerly stood for “peace and bread,” today stands for Identity Politics and war. The working class has been redefined as “the Trump deplorables” and splintered into separate “victim groups”—women, racial minorities, homosexuals, transgendered. The oppressors are no longer oligarchs who own the means of production. The oppressor is the sexist, misogynist, homophobic, heterosexual, fascist, white supremacist male working class.

The rise of Identity Politics has brought with it politically controlled speech. Primarily white people, especially heterosexual white males, are subject to this control. The limits on their free speech are growing ever more severe, and no one has to be concerned about white heterosexual males being offended by offensive or threatening speech. White males can be called anything and they are.

By splintering the working class into victim groups, Identity Politics has made opposition to war and income inequality impossible. In place of unity, Identity Politics has dismembered the working class and directed its energies into internal disputes. We now have fistfights in London’s Hyde Park between radical feminists and transgendered activists.

Diana Johnstone has shown how Antifa, the violent arm of Identity Politics, has turned the leftwing into a suppressor of free speech and a supporter of war.

A splintered society cannot recognize or resist its oppression by a ruling elite.

Feminism turns wives and husbands from complements into rivals. Indeed, Sarah Knapton, science editor for the London Telegraph, reports on the rise of “bromance,” strong emotional relationships between heterosexual men. Feminist attacks on men and political correctness have reduced millennial heterosexual males’ relationships with women to sex only. Their emotional commitments are to their male friends. This doesn’t seem like a victory for women.

The cultivated hyper-sensitivity of political correctness, which arises from Identity Politics, is destroying language, history, and free speech. The UK government opposes the term “pregnant woman” because it excludes and offends transgender people.

The British Medical Association has issued guidelines that doctors should not use the word “mother” to refer to a pregnant woman as the term could offend transgender people. Instead, the term “pregnant people” should be used.This has led to more conflict between feminists and the transgendered. Feminists see it as a plot to make “women” unmentionable. British National Health Service doctors are no longer to use the term “expectant mother” because it is “non-inclusive.”

Identity Politics, together with the rising American police state, have just about destroyed the First Amendment. A professor at one of America’s research universities told me that he was dressed down by a dean because he used the word “girls” in class and a woman was offended. Google fired one of its senior software engineers because he wrote a memo that men and women have different traits that make them suitable for different kinds of jobs. This statement of ordinary common sense got the engineer fired for “gender stereotyping.”

Economic commentator Marc Faber was removed from the board of the investment company, Sprott, and banned from CNBC and the Fox Business Network for expressing his views against monument removal and that white Americans have done a better job of building an economy than black Zimbabwe.

Free speech is not supposed to be limited to words that give no offense to anyone. What this definition of free speech does is to eliminate all criticism of wrong or criminal activity and all dissent against war, police brutality, and political, social, and economic programs. In other words, political correctness silences a population. Silencing is permitted regardless of whether the “offensive” statement is true or false. Just expressing a truth, as the Google engineer did, can destroy a person’s career. There is no freedom in such a system. As George Orwell said, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

Universities themselves, traditionally dependent on free speech, are now themselves banning free speech. Controversial speakers likely to offend some “victim group” are simply prevented from speaking at universities. For example, speakers in favor of multiculturalism are welcomed even though the speech might offend those who believe the US is a white Christian society, but a white supremacist, whose speech at the University of Florida could not be blocked, caused the Florida governor to declare a state of emergency.

It seems simple enough that if a person doesn’t want to be offended by a speaker, don’t go to the speech. On the other hand, if a person wants to learn what the opposition is up to, why miss the chance? In the end, political correctness is about regulating what can be said and controlling explanations, not about protecting the hyper-sensitive from hurtful words.

What Identity Politics and political correctness are doing is demonizing white people and heterosexual males. Only white people are racists. Only heterosexual males – essentially white gentile ones except for Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein – commit sexual violence. As David Rosen writes in CounterPunch, “Male sexual violence: as American as cherry pie.”

Rosen defines sexual abuse as “a form of sexual terror, an all-American male sport” that is “as old as the country.” In other words, all or most American males practice sexual terror on women. We have reached the point where a wife who gets angry at her husband can accuse him of rape and have him imprisoned, a far departure from the days when husband and wife were legally regarded as one and neither could testify against the other. When the most intimate personal relationship is subject to outside intervention, how does marriage prosper?

It doesn’t. According to the American Psychological Association, “about 40 to 50 percent of married couples in the United States divorce. The divorce rate for subsequent marriages is even higher.”

If husband and wife, mother and father, can’t stay together, how does society stay together?

How does society stay together when Identity Politics teaches hate and inflames social divisiveness?

How does society stay together when thugs claiming to be offended offend others by destroying historical monuments that are associated with the memory or identity of others?

How does society stay together when its history is erased, its schools, streets, and public buildings are renamed?

As George Orwell said, “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” The next monuments to be removed are those of the Founding Fathers, racists all who adopted a Constitution that permitted slavery, an inherited institution that they had no power to reform.

In the United States history is being rewritten and language corrupted in order to foster hatred of white “oppressors,” especially white heterosexual males.

Little wonder Russia responds diplomatically to Washington’s aggression. No need to reply in kind when an enemy is destroying itself.

Authored by Valentin Katasonov via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Saudi Aramco (the Saudi Arabian Oil Company) is the world’s largest petroleum business. It owns more than 100 oil and gas fields in Saudi Arabia with reserves of at least 264 billion barrels of oil, which is estimated to be approximately one-fourth of the world’s known reserves of this raw material. The company’s production figures do not give the full picture, as data exists only for a few years. But as an example, in 2013 Saudi Aramco produced 3.4 billion barrels of crude oil. Analysts calculate that every year the Saudi company extracts about twice as much oil and gas, in terms of barrels of oil equivalent, as the largest US company ExxonMobil. Interestingly, Saudi Aramco never appears in the rankings of the world’s largest oil producers, since it does not publish financial information such as profit, sales, assets, or market capitalization. Therefore America’s ExxonMobil and Chevron, China’s Sinopec and PetroChina, the Anglo-Dutch company Royal Dutch Shell, Great Britain’s BP, and France’s Total top the rankings. But everyone knows perfectly well that these leaders in the global oil industry are mere dwarfs compared to Saudi Aramco.

Saudi Aramco’s management set off a real bomb in early 2016 when they announced their plans to privatize part of the company through a stock market IPO. The proposal was to sell shares in Saudi Aramco equal to about 5% of the company. But an estimate of the company’s potential market price is needed in order to understand how much this would be in absolute terms. Almost the next day after the announcement of the potential sale of part of the company (in January 2016), the global media published a stunning evaluation by the independent oil analyst Mohammad Al Sabban, a former senior adviser to the Saudi Arabian oil ministry. He estimated the company’s worth at $10,000,000,000,000 (ten trillion USD). For comparison I should add that in 2016 the largest US oil company, ExxonMobil, barely exceeded $350 billion in share capital. And yes, It’s true that later on some of the hype in the assessments died down and more rational numbers were cited, most often $2 trillion. This meant that Saudi Arabia would be able to rake in approximately $100 billion from the sale of 5% of the company. But the company’s biggest trump card isn’t even the current record levels of oil production, but rather the reserves of hydrocarbon raw materials at Saudi Aramco’s disposal. And that’s a number that none of the companies named in the rankings of the global oil industry can even begin to approach.

At present, Riyadh adjusts and verifies the data on the hydrocarbon reserves in the fields owned by Saudi Aramco.Financial reports are painstakingly drafted in the needed formats for a public offering of shares. The company is being restructured to optimize the way it is organized and managed. And finally, a crucial step was taken to lower the taxes on the company’s profits. The traditional tax rate has been 90%, but this year it was set at 50%, which roughly corresponds to the level at which the leading Western oil companies are taxed. Lowering the tax rate raises dividends and makes the company a more attractive target for investment.

But beginning in early 2017, the estimates of Saudi Aramco’s market value have unexpectedly begun to decline. Appraisals began to surface that claimed the company’s share capital was only worth $1.5 trillion, then $1 trillion. The consulting firm Wood Mackenzie estimated Saudi Aramco’s worth at $400 billion overall, bringing it closer to US-based ExxonMobil. And suddenly Western consultants began talking about the need to “discount” the value of the Saudi company, since it is state-owned, and in the securities markets all government issues are by convention sold “at a discount.” They point out that although Saudi Aramco currently pays 50% of its profits in taxes, since the government owns the company anyway it could restore the 90% tax rate tomorrow with a simple stroke of the pen. There is also the fear that oil prices could be low for the next few years, and Saudi Aramco might not be able to generate big profits. But none of that can remotely explain why the valuations of the Saudi company have dropped so precipitously in the past year.

Analysts blame this on the pressure Washington is putting on Riyadh, for reasons that have as much to do with the currency market as the oil market. And the pressure coming from Washington is, in turn, a response to the pressure also being exerted on Riyadh by China, which wants to buy oil from Saudi Aramco in renminbi instead of dollars. China is currently the world’s biggest oil importer, knocking the US out of its former first-place position. China is also the Saudi oil industry’s biggest customer, and Beijing does not want to pay extra for that black gold using American currency. A number of oil exporters that sell to China have already partially or entirely transitioned to settling their accounts in renminbi. Topping that list are Nigeria and Iran. Russia has also recently begun to sell some oil to China for renminbi (although only small percentage as yet).

Saudi Arabia, however, is heavily dependent on the US and has thus far refused to settle its accounts in renminbi. And that rebuff is costing the country dearly: Beijing is gradually finding other suppliers to take Riyadh’s place. The Saudis used to be China’s biggest foreign supplier of oil, but recently Russia has squeezed them out for that number-one spot. If this continues, Saudi Aramco might lose its Chinese market altogether.

Riyadh now finds itself caught between a rock and a hard place. It’s hard to imagine what Saudi Arabia could be hit with from across the Atlantic, should it sell even one barrel of oil for Chinese currency. After all, that would be a direct challenge to the petrodollar, which was born right there in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s, midwifed by the negotiations between Henry Kissinger and King Faisal.

Washington has sternly warned Riyadh to refrain from any ill-considered move to replace the dollar with the renminbi in its transactions with China, lest other players in the oil market follow suit (oil might then be traded for rubles, rupees, rials, etc.) And tomorrow that epidemic of transitioning to national currencies could infect other commodity markets. Incidentally, this year Beijing will begin to trade oil futures priced in renminbi on its commodity exchanges and claims that this is only the first step.

Voices have already been heard within the US president’s entourage that suggest blocking the listing of Saudi Aramco shares on the New York Stock Exchange. Signs have emerged of an organized campaign to short-sell the Saudi oil company. In light of that development, Riyadh has announced that it will put off its share listing until a later date. But its problem isn’t going to go away – Saudi Arabia will still have to make a choice between the dollar and the renminbi.

Although Beijing is upping its pressure on Riyadh, it is also simultaneously offering to directly buy out 5% of Saudi Aramco, while allowing the Saudis to forgo the usual ritual of listing shares on Western stock markets. And China is prepared to shell out a “fair” price (about $100 billion). The Chinese government has already announced that it is forming a consortium of energy and finance companies, plus China’s sovereign wealth fund, in order to purchase a “chunk” of the Saudi company. The Chinese media reports that that consortium is ready to become a cornerstone investor in Saudi Aramco.

Beijing’s winning move in its chess game against Washington has neutralized the US threat to disrupt the sale of Saudi Aramco, while simultaneously pushing Riyadh toward a decision to transition Saudi oil sales to the renminbi.

And so the plot thickens inside the Beijing-Riyadh-Washington triangle of intrigue.

CEOoftheSOFA Nov 3, 2017 2:42 AM

Saudi Aramco is selling reserves that don’t exist:

It is well known that in 2011 Wikileaks reported that the Saudi Aramco oil reserves were overstated by as much as 40%. As reported in the Guardian, Sadad al Hussini, former Saudi Aramco exploration chief, stated that “recoverable reserves are overstated by 300 billion barrels (Bbbl)” Many other oil analysts concur with this view. Saudi Aramco disputes this statement and insists that recoverable reserves are much higher than the skeptics contend. This paper will attempt to explain, in laymen terms, the oil reserve situation in Saudi Arabia.

This information is now critical because Saudi Aramco has recently announced that they intend to sell a portion of the company in an IPO. Proven reserves are typically a significant source of value for an oil company, despite the Wall Street Journal article of 24 January, 2016 which stated “Saudi Arabia’s potential sale of shares in its state-owned oil giant wouldn’t include the kingdom’s oil reserves”. The Journal article also stated that the company would be “valued in the trillions of dollars”. The only way to achieve a value in the “trillions” would be to include the reserves, so it is necessary to ignore the fiction being peddled by the Wall Street Journal.

Reserves Calculation

Oil reserves are calculated by this simple equation:

Present Reserves = Initial Reserves – Production + Discoveries.

Initial Reserves

The last audited, published production and reserve calculation for Saudi Aramco was done in 1980 by BP. Production and reserve figures have been secret since then. BP calculated the proven recoverable reserves to be 260 billion barrels in 1980. This will use for the Initial Reserves. Saudi Aramco states that the current, proven, recoverable reserves are still 260 billion barrels.

Production

Figure 1, below, from the USEIA, lists the annual and total oil production from Saudi Arabia from 1980 to 2015. The production since 1980 totals 110 billion barrels.

Two of the three variables in the equation are now known with reasonable certainty:

Current Reserves = 260 – 110 + Discoveries

Discoveries

There has only been one significant oil discovery in Saudi Arabia since the 1960’s, the Hawtah Trend. The problem is that the primary producing formation, the “Arab D” formation, does not exist outside the immediate Gulf area.

Hawtah Trend

The Oil Drum reports that the only oil discovery in Saudi Arabia since the 1960’s is the Hawtah (Najd) Trend, discovered in 1988, which reportedly had an initial production rate of 400,000 barrels per day (BPD) from a group of nine small fields. Saudi Aramco added 30 billion barrels to their reserves in 1988 for the Hawtah Trend. It would take 2 centuries to produce 30 billion barrels at 400,000 BPD, and the field production had already declined by 50,000 BPD by the early 1990’s. Extrapolating this decline rate, I estimate the field had initial reserves of 5 billion barrels.

Other Reserve Additions

Other reported reserve additions are as follows (from World Oil Magazine):

Shaybah: Discovered in 1968 but was not brought online until 1998 at 500,000 BOPD. Production was increased to 750,000 BOPD in 2009. Reserves are reportedly 14 billion barrels. Using typical decline curves, I estimate the field has proven recoverable reserves of 2 billion barrels.

Khurais: The Khurais field was discovered in 1957 and shut down in 1961. The oil reservoir had little pressure and required water injection to initiate production. In 2009, water injection was initiated which increased production to 1.2 million BOPD. Aramco assigned 19.4 billion barrels of reserves to Khurais. Using a typical decline curve, I estimate the proven, recoverable reserves of this field to be 3 billion barrels.

Manifa: Discovered in 1957 but shut down almost immediately because the oil was extra heavy and contaminated with H2S and vanadium. The field was put on line in April 2013 and was reportedly producing 900,000 BOPD in 2014. Aramco states that the production rate will increase to 1.4 million BOPD. Aramco assigned 11 billion barrels of reserves to Manifa. Using a typical decline curve, and an initial production rate of 1.4 billion BOPD, I estimate that this field has proven, recoverable reserves of 8 billion barrels.

Technology Improvements

In 1988, Saudi Aramco increased their reserves by 70 Billion barrels for “technology improvements”, like horizontal drilling. The reserve number is suspect and politically motivated, according to the Oil Drum. Horizontal drilling in the KSA oil fields would only increase the short term production rate, not the reserves. It is more likely that the reserve increase was politically motivated since Aramco was negotiating with OPEC for an increased share of production. I estimate the reserve additions due to technology improvements to be zero.

All of my reserve estimates are very rough since there is very little public information available. However, I think my estimates are closer to reality than the numbers released by Aramco. Reserve additions since 1980 are therefore 5+2+3+8=18 billion barrels.

Remaining reserves for Aramco should therefore be in the neighborhood of:

Remaining reserves = 260 – 110 + 18 = 168 Billion barrels

Aramco still estimates the remaining proven, recoverable reserves to be 260 billion barrels, despite producing 110 billion barrels since 1980 and having few reserve additions. My rough estimate is therefore 35% less than the stated Aramco reserves. This is close to the reserve number reported by Wikileaks, who stated that reserves were overstated by 40%.

Production Rate

A number that is more important than reserves is the sustainable production rate. The sustainable production rate has a problem called “Ghawar”.

Ghawar Field

The Ghawar field was discovered in 1948, and is by far the largest oil field in the world and is 3 times the size of the second largest oil field in the world. The field has had a water production problem since the 1970’s and is nearing the end of its’ producing life.

The producing formation is a carbonate (limestone) called the “Arab D” formation, with a thickness of 250 feet. The formation is in the shape of an elongated dome with a length of 174 miles. Oil occupies the higher elevations of the dome. Salt water occupies the lower elevations. The field is underlain by an active aquifer which fills the lower elevations of the reservoir with water as the oil is produced from above. This helps to sustain the reservoir pressure. The Ghawar field has produced 5 million BOPD for decades and continues to produce 6% – 8% of the world’s oil production.

The Aramco engineers employed a unique method of injecting water into the aquifer along the periphery of the field during the primary production phase. Water injection rates are 8 million BWPD in Ghawar to sustain oil production of 5 million BOPD. A total of 12 million BWPD is injected into all Saudi oil fields in this manner to sustain reservoir pressure, according to the book, “Twilight In the Desert”.

Most Saudi oil fields were producing large volumes of water by the end of the 1970’s. The Aramco engineers began an aggressive recompletion program to reduce the water production. When a well starts producing water, the water has a tendency to “crowd out” the oil due to waters’ lower viscosity. Most of the producing wells had an “open-hole” completion, where there is no production casing across the producing formation. Aramco ran production casing into many wells and then perforated the upper levels of the oil reservoir in an effort to produce the oil without water. This resulted in water cuts being reduced only slightly, according to “Twilight in the Desert”.

In the 1990’s, the original vertical oil wells were abandoned and replaced by new horizontal wells. The new wells were drilled horizontally in the upper elevations of the oil reservoir, to keep the wells away from the encroaching aquifer.

Aramco engineers had published articles through the Society of Petroleum Engineers for decades, outlining the production problems and their remedies for controlling the problems. Each article in itself does not indicate a significant, country-wide problem. Matt Simmons was the first to read all the articles and piece together the puzzle of the Saudi Arabian oil fields. He realized that maintaining the oil production has been a constant struggle, over a period of decades, involving the deployment of substantial capital and the employment of state-of–the-art technology. This was covered in detail in the book “Twilight In the Desert”.

The Oil Drum also estimated a decade ago that the aquifer was beginning to encroach into the upper levels of the reservoir. When the water level reaches the horizontal wells, the individual wells will “water out” in a short period of time. As the water level works its’ way up to the upper elevations of the reservoir, the production rate will exhibit steep declines. It is of utmost importance to know the rate of decline that is expected, and when the decline will begin.

Ghawar Decline Rate

One way to estimate the production decline rate for Ghawar is to examine the decline rates for other similar fields. Oil fields completed in limestone formations tend to have higher decline rates than sandstone formations. Limestone tends to have a lot of fractures, which become super highways for water.

According to “Twilight in the Desert”, The Yibal field in neighboring Oman has the most in common with Ghawar. This carbonate reservoir also has an active aquifer, with additional water injected into the lower elevations, in the periphery of the field. When the original vertical wells began producing excessive water, the wells were abandoned and replaced with horizontal wells. Engineers were shocked at the steepness of the decline rates and had to substantially reduce the expected remaining reserves of the field. The annual decline rate from peak production is 22%.

Zero Hedge reported that the Haradh field in Saudi Arabia declined by 60% between 2006 and 2010. This decline rate is 20% per year.

If Ghawar declines at a rate of 22%, production declines could be similar to the table below:

Daily

Production

Year

BOPD

Current

5,000,000

1

3,900,000

2

3,042,000

3

2,372,760

4

1,850,753

In 4 years, 3.2 million BOPD of production will be lost, just from the Ghawar field. This problem will be replicated in many Saudi fields, and many others in the Arab Gulf area. There are no new oil fields in Saudi Arabia large enough to replace this production.

When will the production rate begin to decline?

If this were a conventional oil reservoir, this question could have been answered accurately in the 1960’s. The active aquifer complicates the reserves calculation, because the production rates and pressures have remained constant for decades. This is further complicated by the existence of the horizontal wells. If the wells were vertical, the increases in the water cuts could be extrapolated to the point where the well becomes uneconomic. When the water level reaches a horizontal well, production from that well will “water-out” completely in a short period of time. When the lower elevation horizontal wells start watering out, the water level will continue to rise and eventually water out the higher elevation wells. As the water level works its’ way up to the higher elevation wells, the field will experience steep production declines. One way to determine when this will happen is to drill observation wells to measure the water level. This data has to be input into a sophisticated computer reservoir model. Aramco has observation wells and a reservoir model that was developed in-house. Complicating the reserves calculation is the fact that field production data has been secret since 1982, as are the results of the computer model. This leaves us with having to make a guess.

The Oil Drum reported that there are indications that the level of the aquifer is starting to encroach into the upper levels of the reservoir but it’s anyone’s guess when the production rate will begin to decline. My hunch is that it is no longer a long term problem, it is now a short term to medium term problem. If the production rate begins to decline in 10 years, the remaining reserves for Ghawar would be in the range of 25 billion barrels and not the 70 billion estimated by the IEA.

Conclusions

·

There is ample evidence which indicates the Aramco oil reserves are significantly overstated.

·

Proven, recoverable oil reserves are closer to 168 billion barrels than the 260 billion barrels claimed by Saudi Aramco.

·

The sustainable production rate will decline rapidly when the level of aquifer in the Ghawar field approaches the higher elevations of the reservoir. It is not known when this will occur, but it is reasonable to assume that this is a short term to medium term problem.

·

In order to properly price an IPO, reserves must be audited by an independent engineering firm.

·

Individual investors should ignore the Wall Street Hype Machine that will be in overdrive if this IPO becomes a reality.

CEO of the Sofa