#Trump Ups #Nuclear Ante with #MiniNukes

Duh, Jared! So Who Built the PA as a ‘Police State’? By Jonathan Cook, February 05, 2020 Maybe something good will come out of the Trump plan, after all. By pushing the Middle East peace process to its logical conclusion, Donald Trump has made crystal clear something that was supposed to have been obscured: that no US administration has ever really seen peace as the objective of its “peacemaking”. The current White House is no exception – it has just been far more incompetent at concealing its joint strategy with the Israelis. But that is what happens when a glorified used-car salesman, Donald Trump, and his sidekick son-in-law, the schoolboy-cum-businessman Jared Kushner, try selling us the “deal of the century”. Neither, it seems, has the political or diplomatic guile normally associated with those who rise to high office in Washington.    Trump’s SOTU ‘Red Meat’ Speech: US Political Crisis Now Deepens By Dr. Jack Rasmus, February 05, 2020 The visual personification of this intensifying conflict was evident at the close of Trump’s speech: He turned to vice president Pence and House of Representatives leader, Pelosi, both sitting behind him on a dais. Trump handed them his speech, as is the tradition. He then abruptly turned away from Pelosi refusing to shake her extended hand—as traditional decorum has always required. Pelosi, shocked by the snub, in turn took the written speech…and tore it up. All this was caught on national TV. The event was symbolic of the fight will now escalate and get even more vicious in the run up to November.   US Deploys New Low-Yield Nuclear Submarine Warhead By William M Arkin and Hans M. Kristensen, February 05, 2020 The W76-2 warhead was first announced in the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) unveiled in February 2018. There, it was described as a capability to “help counter any mistaken perception of an exploitable ‘gap’ in U.S. regional deterrence capabilities,” a reference to Russia. The justification voiced by the administration was that the United States did not have a “prompt” and useable nuclear capability that could counter – and thus deter – Russian use of its own tactical nuclear capabilities.

US Policy Vs. Iran: Apex Desperation By Tony Cartalucci, February 05, 2020 In Washington’s losing battle to maintain hegemony in the Middle East at the expense of the actual people and nations that exist there – it has resorted to high-level assassinations, unilateral strikes against targets within sovereign nations against the expressed will of the governments presiding over them, all while exposing what appears to be growing American military, political, and economic impotence.   Trump Ups Nuclear Ante with ‘Mini-Nukes’ Deployed on Subs to “Deter Russia” By Zero Hedge, February 05, 2020 Some Congressional Democrats have argued that the warhead, which is less powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, alarmingly lowers the threshold whereby the US would be willing the deploy a nuclear warhead against an enemy. Critics also see that the W76-2 is redundant given the current arsenal of lower-yield air-launched nuclear weapons.   Exxon’s Exploitative Oil Deal in Guyana Will Deprive the Country of Up to $55 Billion By Global Witness, February 05, 2020 Exxon’s exploitative oil deal with Guyana will cause the country to lose up to US$55 billion, according to a new Global Witness investigation based on an OpenOil analysis. The new report, Signed Away, shows how the oil major used aggressive tactics and threats to pressure inexperienced Guyanese officials to sign the deal for the Stabroek license – one of the world’s largest oil finds in years.   More Bad Brexit News as Main Driver of Economy Continues to Slump By True Publica, February 05, 2020 There’s a fundamental belief amongst many well-known economists that the bank-led financial crisis in 2008 that brought austerity then led to societal wide anger that brought us Brexit. The recovery from that crash is now well known to have been the longest on record. Britain’s economy officially shrank by more than 6% between the first quarter of 2008 and the second quarter of 2009, and it took another five years to get back to the size it was before the recession – and even that is not accounting for inflation (stats ONS). In 2011/12, over 2.7 million people were unemployed. The Conservative government kept the pressure up with its austerity drive with huge cuts to public services, pay caps and benefits freezes. Despite the fall in unemployment in recent years, real wages are lower than they were in 2008 – but everything else in life is more expensive.