That plot “shows that some Iranian officials — probably including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — have changed their calculus and are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived U.S. actions that threaten the regime,” Clapper said in the testimony, which was submitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee in advance of a threat assessment hearing Tuesday. “We are also concerned about Iranian plotting against U.S. or allied interests overseas.”

The assessment signals a potentially dire new direction in the adversarial relationship between the United States and Iran, at a time when there are indications that a covert campaign is already underway to thwart Iran’s alleged ambition to develop a nuclear weapon.

Clapper’s warning about Iran was delivered as part of the U.S. intelligence community’s annual overview of the nation’s most serious national security concerns. As the hearing got underway, Clapper signaled that the United States is seeking to avoid a violent confrontation with Iran, instead pushing for more and more sanctions while also monitoring the possibility of a preemptive strike by Israel.

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Over and over again in the Middle East, we see the same pattern
repeating itself:

An oil-rich country takes control of its own oil fields and cuts out
the Western oil companies.

What follows as the night the day, the western countries overthrow the
offending government and reinstall their favorite oil companies.

This has happened in both Iran and Iraq.

Right now, the U.S. is threatening Iran with war on grounds that it is
making a nuclear weapons.

To begin with, Iran is a peaceful country. It hasn’t started a war in
hundreds of years.  It only fought when Iraq invaded it in 1980.

In that war, Iraq used chemical weapons that it got from the United
States—so here we have an example of an American attack by proxy on
Iran without any provocation.

But the United States attacked Iran on its own without using
intermediaries in 1953 and overthrew the legitimate government.

Most Americans don’t know about that overthrow. It was engineered by
the Central Intelligence Agency.

Since Iran did not even have a nuclear facility in 1953, what could
have been the excuse for the attack?

The answer is oil. Iran kicked out the British oil company it felt was
cheating it out of a fair profit for the oil it was extracting and
took the oil field over from the British.

The British tried to overthrow the “insolent” Iran government but
failed. Iran kicked the British spies out of the country.

So Britain asked the American CIA to overthrow the government and the
U.S. did, deposing Prime Minister Mossadegh and putting a king on the
throne.

And guess who got the contracts? The western oil companies:  Gulf,
Standard Oil of New Jersey, Texaco and Mobil—got a 40 percent share
of the new National Iranian Oil Company.

And what happened in Iran in 1953 was also going to happen in Iraq in
2003—- the U.S. attacked Iraq after which the western oil companies
got the plum contracts.

“Prior to the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, US and other
western oil companies were all but completely shut out of Iraq’s oil
market,” industry analyst Antonia Juhasz told Al Jazeera wire service.
“But thanks to the invasion and occupation, the companies are now back
inside Iraq and producing oil there for the first time since being
forced out of the country in 1973.”

And, adds Business Week magazine, “Western producers like BP,
ExxonMobil, and Shell are enjoying their best access to Iraq’s
southern oil fields since 1972,” 1972 was the year Saddam Hussein
nationalized Iraq’s oil fields. Another big winner of the U.S.
invasion: Hunt Oil Co., of Dallas, Tex., run by  Ray Hunt,  President
George W. Bush’s friend and fund-raiser.

Oil industry analyst Juhasz says that ExxonMobil, BP, and Shell
aggressively lobbied their governments “to ensure that the invasion
would result in an Iraq open to foreign oil companies” and that “they
succeeded.” Sure they succeeded. Because the Pentagon works
hand-in-glove with the oil industry.

So what we have here is history repeating itself. Whenever Iraq or
Iran have been attacked by the U.S. in the past it’s been over oil.
That’s the record. Those are facts. But if you like you can believe
the U.S. and Israel are threatening to attack only because they’re
trying to stop Iran from getting a nuke. That’s an echo of President
George Bush’s lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

There’s an inscription from Shakespeare etched on the National
Archives building in downtown Washington, D.C.  It says, “What’s past
is prologue.”  Shakespeare was right. Better believe it. And history
will repeat itself with a new U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran unless the
American people rise up and declare: “No blood for oil.”   I’m
Sherwood Ross. Good night to every one of you—and, oh, good
luck.

These days, with a crisis atmosphere growing in the Persian Gulf, a little history lesson about the U.S. and Iran might be just what the doctor ordered.  Here, then, are a few high- (or low-) lights from their relationship over the last half-century-plus:

Summer 1953: The CIA and British intelligence hatch a plot for a coup that overthrows a democratically elected government in Iran intent on nationalizing that country’s oil industry.  In its place, they put an autocrat, the young Shah of Iran, and his soon-to-be feared secret police.  He runs the country as his repressive fiefdom for a quarter-century, becoming Washington’s “bulwark” in the Persian Gulf — until overthrown in 1979 by a home-grown revolutionary movement, which ushers in the rule of Ayatollah Khomeini and the mullahs.  While Khomeini & Co. were hardly Washington’s men, thanks to that 1953 coup they were, in a sense, its own political offspring.  In other words, the fatal decision to overthrow a popular democratic government shaped the Iranian world Washington now loathes, and even then oil was at the bottom of things.

1967: Under the U.S. “Atoms for Peace” program, started in the 1950s by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Shah is allowed to buy a 5-megawatt, light-water type research reactor for Tehran (which — call it irony — is still playing a role in the dispute over the Iranian nuclear program).  Defense Department officials did worry at the time that the Shah might use the “peaceful atom” as a basis for a future weapons program or that nuclear materials might fall into the wrong hands.  “An aggressive successor to the Shah,” went a 1974 Pentagon memo, “might consider nuclear weapons the final item needed to establish Iran’s complete military dominance of the region.”  But that didn’t stop them from aiding and abetting the creation of an Iranian nuclear program.

The Shah, like his Islamic successors, argued that such a program was Iran’s national “right” and dreamed of a country that would get significant portions of its electricity from a string of nuclear plants.  As a 1970s ad by a group of American power companies put the matter: “The Shah of Iran is sitting on top of one of the largest reservoirs of oil in the world.  Yet he’s building two nuclear plants and planning two more to provide electricity for his country.  He knows the oil is running out — and time with it.”  In other words, the U.S. nuclear program was the genesis for the Iranian one that Washington now so despises.

Read the rest at this link.

As the Greek default (and it is a default no matter what they end up calling it) is finalized this week, the consensus seems to be that failure to reach a deal would cause a global financial apocalypse.

That may be true. And if it is, why aren’t we more worried about Illinois? It’s more or less the same size as Greece, its finances are in the same generally catastrophic shape, and its leaders are just as feckless and dishonest. It owes tens of billions of dollars to various investors and stakeholders and will clearly have to stiff many of them at some point. The following article captures the “failed state” dilemma perfectly:

Dripping with red ink: Will anyone fix Illinois’ budget mess?

The question isn’t whether Illinois’ finances are in dreadful shape, it’s how to fix the problem. Or perhaps more accurately, will legislators have the political will to fix it when they return to Springfield for their spring session?

Even though the legislature and Gov. Pat Quinn last year imposed a temporary 67 percent state income tax increase, Quinn’s office expects to have a $500 million budget deficit this year.

Quinn is calling for a 9 percent cut in most areas of state government, except education and health care. But even with cuts at that level, the state would have a projected $800 million budget deficit for fiscal 2015, the year when most of the tax hike expires.

Quinn’s budget spokesman, Kelly Kraft, said the state’s fiscal situation is not pretty.

Read more here.

For General Electric Co., hawking subprime mortgages was a long way from making light bulbs and jet engines.

That didn’t stop the industrial giant from jumping into the subprime business in 2004, lending blue-chip respectability to the market for risky home loans by paying roughly half a billion dollars to buy California-based WMC Mortgage Corp.

What GE got in the bargain, former WMC employees say, was a place where erstwhile shoe salesmen, ex-strippers and even a former porn actress could sign on as sales reps and make big money pushing home loans. WMC’s top salespeople earned a million dollars a year or more and lived fast, swigging $1,000 bottles of Cristal and wheeling around in $100,000 Ferraris and Bentleys.

In pursuit of these riches and perks, several ex-employees claim, many WMC sales staffers embraced fraud as a tool for pushing through loans that borrowers couldn’t afford.

Dave Riedel, a former compliance manager at WMC, says sales reps intent on putting up big numbers used falsified paperwork, bogus income documentation and other tricks to get loans approved and sold off to Wall Street investors.

One WMC official, Riedel claims, went so far as to declare: “Fraud pays.”

How well did GE address WMC’s fraud problems?

GE says it did plenty to deal with the issue. Some ex-employees counter that GE officials didn’t do enough to rein in illicit practices, despite warnings from Riedel and other whistleblowers inside the lender. GE dispatched emissaries to look into the problem, the ex-employees say, but their efforts were too little, too late.

“They sent in people we thought were going to bring us back in the right direction,” Victor Argueta, a former risk analyst at WMC, says. “But it just never happened.”

By 2007, WMC was bleeding bad loans and red ink. General Electric shut the lender and reported related losses totaling more than $1 billion.

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The country’s biggest banks are overwhelmingly supporting Mitt Romney’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination, an Observer analysis of federal campaign contributions shows.

Employees at the five largest U.S. banks by assets, including Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co., gave Romney about $600,000 through the first three quarters of 2011, according to the most recent filings available from the Federal Election Commission.

The second-largest recipient of bank employee contributions, President Barack Obama, had far less, about $200,000, the analysis showed. The Republican presidential hopeful with the second-highest total, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, dropped out of the race in mid-August.

Romney received more from employees of those top five banks than all the other candidates combined, helping make the former Massachusetts governor the best-financed candidate in the Republican nomination battle, which is heating up in South Carolina ahead of Saturday’s primary.

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Western oil producers have emerged as the big winners of the Iraq war.

“Prior to the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq US and other
western oil companies were all but completely shut out of Iraq’s oil
market,” industry analyst Antonia Juhasz told Al Jazeera wire service.
“But thanks to the invasion and occupation, the companies are now back
inside Iraq and producing oil there for the first time since being
forced out of the country in 1973.”

“Western producers like BP, Exxon Mobil, and Shell are enjoying their
best access to Iraq’s southern oil fields since 1972,” Business Week
noted in its issue of March 4th of last year.  (1972 was the year
Saddam Hussein nationalized Iraq’s oil fields.)

Business Week quotes Andy Inglis, BP’s chief executive for exploration
and production as saying, “We see this as the beginning of a long-term
relationship with Iraq and will continue to look for further
opportunities.”

Dr. Abdulhay Yahya Zalloum, an international oil consultant and
economist, agrees the western firms have won contracts despite “a lack
of transparency and clarity of vision regarding the legal issues.” The
Iraqi government “gave a little piece of the cake for China and some
of the other countries and companies to keep them silent.”

A group led by BP will receive $2 billion per year to develop Iraq’s
Rumalia field and a Shell-led group is to get $913 million per year.
An Exxon-led group is to get $1.6 billion per year, Bloomberg News
reports. Each calculation is based on the agreed-to per-barrel fee
times the maximum production level, Bloomberg explains.

David Bender, a Middle East analyst at Eurasia Group, Washington,
D.C., told Bloomberg, “Iraq is one of the most attractive oil markets
in the world. The international oil companies may feel that getting in
at the beginning improves their long-term prospects.”

The only area of Iraq where oil firms fare better than fee-for-service
work is in the northern Kurdish autonomous region(KRG) where
businesses including Norway’s DNO International ASA are pumping crude
under production-sharing agreements “not recognized by the central
government,” Bloomberg reports.

It also turns out Hunt Oil Co., of Dallas, Tex., clinched a separate
deal in Sept., 2007,  with Iraq Kurdistan Regional Government. Hunt
might not have won if its chief officer, Ray Hunt,  was not President
George W. Bush’s friend and a major fund-raiser. Some folks think,
according to a front page New York Times report July 3, 2008, the deal
“runs counter to American policy and undercut Iraq’s central
government.” Apparently, Bush didn’t think so. Baghdad reportedly is
furious over it.

Hunt got this free pass to explore Kurdistan’s oil riches in Sept.,
2007, when it inked an exploration pact likely to give the firm a
share of the boodle of any future gushers. “Hunt would be the first
U.S. company to sign such a deal,” a State Department official told
the New York Times. And according to reporter Jay Price of McClatchy
News Service, the Iraqi oil minister, speaking for Baghdad, “called
the Hunt deal illegal.”

A State Department cable dated Sept. 12, 2007, and made public by
Wikileaks, “detailed official warnings from the U.S. government that
the contract, regardless of lease location, is legally risky due to
unresolved land and oil disputes between Baghdad and the KRG—and
that such a contract could further amplify conflicts between the
central and regional governments,” wrote Ben Lando of the
authoritative “Iraq Oil Report” Aug. 25, 2011. Hunt seemingly would
not have to press Bush hard for the insider’s deal.

Juhasz says that ExxonMobil, BP, and Shell aggressively lobbied their
governments “to ensure that the invasion would result in an Iraq open
to foreign oil companies” and that “they succeeded.”

She added that the U.S. and western oil companies and their
governments has been lobbying for a new national Iraq Oil Law that
would largely privatize the oil market along the lines of the old
Production Sharing Agreements—although such PSA’s have been rejected
in most countries because they provide “far more benefits to the
foreign corporation than to the domestic government.” Hunt’s deal with
KRG was of the PSA sort.

“The public is against privatization,” Juhasz told al-Jazeera, “which
is one reason the (Iraqi Oil Law) has not passed. The contracts are
enacting a form of privatisation without public discourse and
essentially at the butt of a gun. These contracts have all been
awarded during a foreign military occupation with the largest
contracts going to companies from the foreign occupiers’ countries. It
seems that democracy and equity are the two largest losers in this oil
battle.”

Note: the Obama regime “continues to pressure Baghdad to pass the Iraq
Oil Law” over the wishes of the majority of the Iraqi people. “Thus
far,” Juhasz said, “it has required a massive foreign military
invasion and occupation to grant the foreign oil companies the access
they have thus far garnered.”

Meanwhile, back at the pump, the boost in oil supplies has not reduced
the price of oil being extracted from American motorists. The laws of
supply and demand no longer appear to be working. According to
business writer John Egan of Technorati, the average price for a
gallon of gas last Feb. 26th climbed to $3.33, compared with $2.70 the
previous year. And wire service Agency France Presse(AFP) reports in
the Waynesville, Va., Augusta Free Press  that “Average U.S. gasoline
prices began 2012 just under $3.28 gal, the highest number ever to
mark the beginning of a year and the fifth straight weekly increase in
price.”

As for the profit-taking of the big oil firms, Egan on Feb. 26, 2011,
wrote: “While we’re paying more to fill up, the three largest publicly
traded oil companies based in the United States have been filling up
on profits. Those three companies – ExxonMobil, Chevron and
ConocoPhillips – collectively pulled in an eye-popping $58.3 billion
in profits in 2010, according to financial figures announced in
January 2011. Mind you, that’s profit – the amount of money that
companies pocket after covering their expenses.”

Gas prices reached the point last year that, according to “The
Washington Post” of last April 30th, President Obama “blasted oil
companies for enjoying gangbuster profits while pump prices surged to
nearly $4 a gallon this week, and he again urged Congress to end $4
billion a year in subsidies for the oil and gas industry.”

“When oil companies are making huge profits and you’re struggling at
the pump, and we’re scouring the federal budget for spending we can
afford to do without, these tax giveaways aren’t right,” Obama said.
“They aren’t smart. And we need to end them,” the president added.

And Greg Palast points out in his book, “Armed Madhouse”(Plume), the
oil majors are not simply passive resellers of OPEC production but
have reserves of their own which rise in tandem with oil prices.

“The rise in the price of oil after the first three years of the
(Iraq) war boosted the value of the reserves of ExxonMobil Oil alone
by just over $666-billion,” Palast wrote. What’s more, Chevron Oil,
“where (Secretary of State) Condoleezza Rice had served as a director,
gained a quarter trillion dollars in value.”

Iraq’s experience mirrors the prior overthrow in 1953 of the Iranian
government by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. This is recounted
in “An Enemy of The People”(Doukathsan) by Lawrence Velvel, dean of
the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover. He notes that after CIA
Mideast Operations Chief Kermit Roosevelt created a state of anarchy
in Iran that toppled the elected government, the U.S. oil companies
cashed in.

“Our oil companies—Gulf, Standard of New Jersey, Texaco and
Mobil—received a 40 percent share of the new National Iranian Oil
Co., and the shah established a tyrannical dictatorship, with the
dreaded Savak (secret police) doing dirty work for him,” Velvel
writes.  By the way, it may be noted that Iran in 1953 could not be
said to have the beginning of any nuclear weapon development as to
constitute a threat to Israel or any other country.

So what was the 1953 overthrow of Iran all about if not oil? The
pattern that has emerged over the past 60 years is that the
Pentagon/CIA have bullied their way into seizing the oil fields of the
Middle East, from which Western oil companies just happened to enrich
themselves. The history of past events in Iran and Iraq casts a
dubious light on the contemporary claims of U.S. politicians today
that Iran represents a mortal danger to Israel. The CIA overthrow of
Iran and the Pentagon attack on Iraq reveal it’s all about oil.

Though Americans far and away identify economic problems as the biggest issue facing the nation, according to Gallup, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) has been gaining support by talking about the need to restrict the military industrial complex and end what he terms “war profiteering” — most recently in his victory speech after the New Hampshire primary.

By contrast, former governor Mitt Romney (R-MA), currently leading the pack of GOP candidates, called for a strong America and a strong relationship with Israel — rhetoric that has most often accompanied robust military spending. Meanwhile, back in Washington, President Obama thought last year that the prospect of automatic defense spending cutswould be enough to pressure the supercommittee into a deal on the debt: it wasn’t, and now he may be stuck with them.

Given all of that, and Romney’s pro-business platform, you would think he’d be the favored son of the defense industry, even in the early stages of the 2012 race. You’d be wrong.

President Obama is leading the pack in donations from the defense industry: according to the Center for Responsive Politics, he’d taken in almost $112,000 from defense industry donors through December 2011, despite not accepting any donations from super PACs or lobbyists. (Complete fourth quarter numbers were only released yesterday, so break-downs aren’t yet available by industry.)

By comparison, Romney only got $56,000 for his campaign from defense-industry donors. Former Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) — who, notably, was far behind in fundraising when the figures were compiled — took in a paltry $4,900 from defense industry employeesdespite previously representing a state with a sizable defense industry (Pennsylvania) and currently residing in a state with an even larger defense industry (Virginia).

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Terrorist: (noun) a person, usually a member of a group, who uses or advocates terrorism.

Click here for the story.