Author Archives: circleof13

Ed Dowd: It Has Begun — Housing, Credit and FCF Have Cracked … Stocks Are Next

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Ed explained that the math just isn’t mathing. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, needs something like $900 billion of annual subscription revenue at 25% margins just for a 10% ROI.

Nope, not going to happen.

And certainly not before their first waves of chips wear out and have to be replaced at enormous cost.

So, what happens when this bubble bursts? Ed believes that a serious market crash is in the cards. Of course, this means stocks will drop in price, but the main action is going to be in the credit markets.

Treasuries will continue to advance in price (fall in yield), making them an attractive option to ride out the storm, while other forms of lesser credit will implode, as is already happening across the subprime lender space (TriColor, PrimaLend, First Brands).

When will this happen? According to Ed, it already is.

https://www.activistpost.com/ed-dowd-it-has-begun-housing-credit-and-fcf-have-cracked-stocks-are-next/

Operation Gladio: The CIA’s Secret Army In Europe

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Throughout Operation Gladio, the CIA relied heavily on the Vatican. According to “The Declassified History of American Intelligence Operations in Europe,” the CIA used sources in the Vatican to gather information not only about Italy, but about countries behind the Iron Curtain as well, such as Poland or Ukraine. Under James Jesus Angleton, the CIA created a “Vatican desk,” which reviewed reports sent to the Holy See from papal diplomats behind the Iron Curtain. Cardinal Domenico Tardini, one of the top aides to Pope Pius XXII and the head of the Foreign Section of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State was “one of the CIA’s top sources.”

In “Operation Gladio,” Paul L. Williams also details the extent to which the CIA funneled money through the Istituto per le Opere di Religione (IOR), also known as the Vatican Bank. The Vatican Bank keeps no records or paper trail of any kind. And as a result, “millions can be deposited into the IOR on a continuous basis and channeled into numbered Swiss bank accounts without the possibility of detection,” which is exactly what the CIA did. The Truman Administration funneled over $350 million into the Vatican Bank, and in 1948, the CIA “dumped $65 million of its black money into the Vatican Bank.”

It’s impossible to know exactly how much money the CIA channeled through the Vatican Bank, but the Christian Democratic Party alone received “more than $20 million in annual aid from the CIA.”

https://www.grunge.com/717106/operation-gladio-the-cias-secret-army-in-europe/

The Mythology of Work — Eight Myths that Keep Your Eyes on the Clock and Your Nose to the Grindstone

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Capitalists and socialists have always taken it for granted that work produces value. Workers have to consider a different possibility—that working uses up value. That’s why the forests and polar ice caps are being consumed alongside the hours of our lives: the aches in our bodies when we come home from work parallel the damage taking place on a global scale.

https://crimethinc.com/2018/09/03/the-mythology-of-work-eight-myths-that-keep-your-eyes-on-the-clock-and-your-nose-to-the-grindstone

Democratic decline in the Maldives: will the world wake up?

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Civil resistance has been one means by which many Maldivians have waged a struggle to establish and defend basic political, civic, and human rights. In 2008 a mass movement culminating in free and fair elections successfully ended the authoritarian presidency of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who prior to his ouster had stayed in office for 30 years, long enough to become South Asia’s longest standing dictator. But this new period of democratic leadership was short-lived. In 2012 democratically elected president Mohamed Nasheed, was ousted in a coup so swift and bloodless that the international community could scarcely figure out what happened much less develop an appropriate response. Following the coup, lingering old regime influence over the nation’s judiciary allowed the dregs of the dictatorship to ‘legally’ affirm the transfer of power, and later to ensure that its presidential candidate, the former dictator’s younger brother Abdulla Yameen Gayoom, achieved victory in an irregular sequence of balloting that took place in November of last year.

The old/new regime’s raison d’être has been to ensure that a generous share of the hundreds of millions of dollars generated annually through tourism revenues are diverted to the pockets of the elite. This was almost surely the driving force behind the putsch against Nasheed in 2012, and is likely behind several new disturbing developments that have occurred since the second coming of the Gayoom group. To apply those resources to the needs of the people is the chief rallying cry of democratic forces, which continue to adhere to nonviolent action to challenge the stunting of justice and promote a more transparent government.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/civilresistance/democratic-decline-in-maldives-will-world-wake-up/

How Bankers Triggered World War II to Collect WWI Debts

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The textbooks tell a simple story about World War II — Hitler was evil, he invaded Poland, the Allies stopped him. But the records reveal something they don’t teach in school: American banks funded Hitler’s rise, profited from Nazi Germany’s rearmament, and treated World War II as a debt collection operation to recover unpaid World War I loans. From the Versailles Treaty of 1919 that created unpayable German debts, to American corporate investment in the Third Reich, to the Bretton Woods system that emerged from the war, this wasn’t a conflict about ideology — it was the world’s largest financial consolidation disguised as military combat.

From 1919 when Germany was burdened with 132 billion gold marks in reparations, to 1944 when American banks formalized global financial dominance at Bretton Woods, World War II followed the exact pattern of World War I: create debt crisis → fund both sides → collect through conquest → emerge more powerful. This video uses banking records, corporate documents, and government archives to reveal how World War II served the same function as World War I — transferring wealth from taxpayers to international creditors:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_0n6CvjDMk

Economic Update: Capitalism Equals Class Warfare

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The totality of today’s Economic Update is devoted to exploring (1) the multiple ways that capitalism imposes class warfare on its people, and (2) how class warfare shapes the capitalist system’s impact on employers and employees. Specific examples show (1) what kind of class struggle is involved in tariffs such as those imposed by Trump, (2) how inflation exemplifies class war, and (3) how unemployment reflects and includes class war. A question addressed throughout today’s program is “Why establish and maintain an economic system that produces and reproduces class war across its history?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZWBtEp7WMA

Trump Organization requested record number of foreign workers in 2025

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The Trump Organization requested 184 foreign workers to work across various company properties, a record number that has increased over the years.

The company sought to hire workers through H-2A and H-2B visas for temporary positions at Mar-a-Lago, two golf clubs and at Trump Vineyard Estates in Charlottesville, Va., according to data from the Department of Labor.

Over the course of Trump’s first term and the first nine months of his second term, the Trump Organization’s visa requests increased from 121 in 2021 to 184 in 2025, according to Forbes. Overall, the company has filed to hire 566 foreign laborers, primarily to work as servers, farm workers, kitchen staff, clerks and housekeepers.

https://thehill.com/business/5603478-trump-organization-foreign-workers-2025/

‘Imperialist Agenda’: Critics Don’t Want Tony Blair in Post-War Gaza

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Critics say the former British leader should be in prison over the Iraq war. Instead, he’s enjoying a political revival.
[…]
For those who worked at the highest levels in Blair’s government, his sudden return to diplomacy in Gaza has evoked a deep sense of dismay. Writer and consultant Carne Ross served as head of Middle East issues at the UK Mission to the United Nations, working extensively on Iraq and matters related to weapons of mass destruction before the war began in 2003. “These days, nothing should surprise one, but I was pretty appalled to see him mentioned in this context, given his history in the Middle East, but also particularly given his history on Israel-Palestine, where I have particular experience,” Ross said.
[…]
In 2016, Blair founded the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and positioned himself as a consultant-entrepreneur mingling easily with heads of state and big business. The Institute bills itself as a think tank and consultancy and says its vision is “open, inclusive, and prosperous countries for all.”

In 2023, it emerged that the Institute continued to advise the Saudi Arabian government despite the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018 by agents at the behest of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salaman. “The renewed engagement of the US and Western nations with Saudi Arabia and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman illustrates why this decision was correct,” the Institute said in a statement at the time. Still, it continues to weather accusations that have ranged from advising authoritarian governments to being swayed by large donations from tech billionaires.

https://inkstickmedia.com/imperialist-agenda-critics-dont-want-tony-blair-in-post-war-gaza/

Ecuador freezes bank accounts of Indigenous leaders, land defenders

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President Daniel Noboa has repeatedly accused Indigenous protesters and land defenders of being financed by organized crime and called the protests “acts of terrorism.” During the recent protests, interior minister John Reimberg spoke directly about account freezes, saying in an interview with local journalist Jimmy Jairala, “the issue of the accounts is fundamental,” as protesters are receiving financial backing from people trying to “destabilize the country and create chaos,” he says.

The bank freezes have been criticized by several human rights organizations, with Juanita Goebertus, Human Rights Watch’s director of the Americas, warning the Ecuadorian government to increase transparency and ensure peoples’ rights to defense be respected.

The United Nations Human Rights Office also called the account freezes part of a “pattern of attacks [that] seems designed to silence civil society organizations and Indigenous peoples,” it wrote in a special report released in October. Experts of the report go on to say the adoption of the Law of Social Transparency “stigmatizes and criminalizes the social sector.”

https://news.mongabay.com/2025/11/ecuador-freezes-bank-accounts-of-indigenous-leaders-land-defenders/