Timeline of an anonymous journey

It doesn't take long or a lot of work to find dots and snippets of the past that give us glimpses of what was to come.

Merchants of Death

September 4, 1934 "Merchants of Death": On a hot Tuesday morning following Labor Day in 1934, several hundred people crowded into the Caucus Room of the Senate Office Building to witness the opening of an investigation that journalists were already calling "historic." Although World War I had been over for 16 years, the inquiry promised to reopen an intense debate about whether the nation should ever have gotten involved in that costly conflict. To lead the seven-member special committee, the Senate’s Democratic majority chose a Republican—42-year-old North Dakota Senator Gerald P. Nye. Typical of western agrarian progressives, Nye energetically opposed U.S. involvement in foreign wars. He promised, "when the Senate investigation is over, we shall see that war and preparation for war is not a matter of national honor and national defense, but a matter of profit for the few.

It's the oil, stupid!

Oil and the Outcome of the Iran-Iraq War

An article with excerpts from a report by Thomas McNaugher and William Quandt of the Brookings Institution, published on May 14, 1984 by Cambridge Energy Research Associates. These excerpts appeared in Arab Oil and Gas (Paris), June 1, 1984.

The Iran-Iraq war is reaching a critical phase. As a result, there is more of a chance today than ever before that a major change in the war is at hand. This could have both major consequences for the flow of oil in the near term, and broader implications for power and influence in the region over the longer term. Although we are not yet convinced that the Iran-Iraq war threatens a major disruption in the flow of oil, the odds are beginning to change in the direction of greater danger for Western interests -- meaning that the threat to the world oil market could become larger in this new phase. But the gravest threat could come not during the war itself but from the outcome of the war.

Mentioned are three scenarios: Scenario One: Balance of Power; Scenario Two: Iranian Hegemony; Scenario Three: Continuing Attrition and Oil Disruption.

Occidental Petroleum and the U'wa

An ongoing story since 1990:

Occidental Petroleum, a U.S. based petroleum company, has had its sights set on the 1.5 billion oil barrels that lie beneath the ground in the Samoré Block (the name for the entire cloudforest region within which the U’wa territory lies) since the early 1990s. The oil company’s history is linked to human rights violations and environmental destruction. Occidental (or “Oxy” as it is commonly referred to) was the parent company of Hooker Chemical, which is the company responsible for the “Love Canal” disaster of the 1940s and 1950s. [...] More recently, Oxy has set up an oil pipeline north of U’wa territory in the Arauca region, which has been responsible for the displacement of many native people and rendered the water in the region too polluted for human consumption.

Oil and the Gulf War

In a 1991 article in the Middle East Research and Information Project :

The arrangements that will follow the US defeat of Iraq will likely produce a kind of joint “oil dominion” between major consumer countries and a core of oil exporters which will override the interests of the poorer oil importers and exporters alike. At the center of this new alignment will no longer be the “seven sisters” -- the major private companies that dominated the industry before the 1970s -- but what South magazine has dubbed the “four stepsisters” -- Saudi Aramco, PDV, and Exxon and Shell, the two largest private firms. But OPEC will have to confront some serious conflicts within its ranks which may well split the organization. Producers like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela are investing huge amounts of capital to expand their production capacity: Will they be ready to scale back their market share once Iraq and Kuwait resume production? The new world order of oil could bring unprecedented producer-consumer cooperation for the privileged states and companies, and increasingly harder times for the rest.

Defending oil supplies

In 1998, in Fueling Global Warming: Federal Subsidies to Oil in the United States :

The United States needs oil. Despite some progress on alternatives, oil continues to fuel our transportation fleet and our military. However, much of the nation’s oil is transported through fairly precarious means. Approximately, 25 percent of our domestic crude flows through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, and about 45 percent of our total petroleum consumption is transported through a limited number of oil tanker channels.

These delivery systems are vulnerable to disruption. Markets react in three primary ways to vulnerable supplies. First, they demand a higher price to reflect the higher risks. Second, they invest in approaches to make the supply less risky. This includes diversification of suppliers, the development of new supplies, the establishment of stockpiles to cover demand if supply is interrupted, and the attempt to reduce the likelihood of supply disruptions. Third, markets develop substitute materials and ways to use the limited supplies more efficiently.

In the oil industry, corporations have invested in diversifying their supply base across countries. However, it has been the United States government, rather than private firms, that has developed the largest stockpiles (such as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, described later in this chapter) and spent billions of dollars in defense costs to reduce the likelihood of supply interruptions and price shocks. Because the government has borne these costs of securing supply, they are not reflected in the current price of oil. Thus, producers and consumers lack important price signals that would encourage investment in substitutes. The government’s costs act as a subsidy to oil. We estimate the costs of defending oil shipments and stockpiling reserves for our base year, 1995. This estimate has two elements: defending oil shipments from the Persian Gulf and the costs of building and maintaining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. We also qualitatively discuss oil-related military activities within Alaska. In order for markets to make well-informed decisions between energy types, these costs should be reflected in the price we pay for oil.

Glimpses of planned information operations

In 2005 the BBC reports that the US military is planning to win the hearts of young people in the Middle East by publishing a new comic in order to "achieve long-term peace and stability in the Middle East" and reveals in 2006 US plans to 'fight the net': A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military's plans for "information operations" - from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks .

The Raw Story reports in 2007 that CENTCOM sent emails to "bloggers who are posting inaccurate or untrue information, as well as bloggers who are posting incomplete information" .

More alarming seems to be the article from the Register on wargame simulations: Sentient world: war games on the grandest scale informing us that the US DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual "nodes" to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and artificial reality to see how long you can go without food or water, or how you will respond to televised propaganda .

2009 is the year the US Air Force releases ‘Counter-Blog’ marching orders to its airmen as part of an Air Force push to "counter the people out there in the blogosphere who have negative opinions about the U.S. government and the Air Force" .

Libya is "freed"

The tension was tangible through linguistic patterns in the IRC channels of the anonymous hives in 2011. An anonymous operation was starting up . Photos and messages kept appearing on atrocities commited by Ghadafi. Do-gooders jumped in, farts saw an opportunity for leadership. But all was not what it seemed as we'd learn later. Human rights investigations reported NATO bombing the Great Man-Made River , RT reported on the plundering of Libya by Goldman Sachs and two weeks later again, with the numbers . O aye, and many more lies behind the West's war on Libya appeared . It is not as if the anonymous operation made any real difference, but still the old adage goes, fool me once shame on you, fool me twice ...

Spin and Occupy Wallstreet

Also in 2011, Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist and a US expert on crafting the perfect political message, said, "I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death. They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism." Next Luntz offered tips on how Republicans could discuss the grievances of the Occupiers, and help the governors better handle all these new questions from constituents about "income inequality" and "paying your fair share." Yahoo News sat in on the session, and counted 10 do’s and don’ts from Luntz covering how Republicans should fight back by changing the way they discuss the movement . And young turks followed up on that .

Banning Golden Dawn

In September of 2013 there was talk of banning Golden Dawn . This target could not have been chosen better if authorities wanted to introduce people to banning and proactive arrests becoming "normal" in Greece and Europe.