Arab Spring Fever Turns To Bahrain

Reported as an after thought in the U.S. media, Bahrain, which is effectively a banking puppet of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf oil sheiks, cracked down about as hard on protesters as any goon state in the Middle East. The U.S. showed its hypocrisy concerning the turmoil by issuing a few calls for restraint and little else. President Hopium chided Bahrain to release jailed opposition leaders and, like so many of his going through the motions drills, there is no result. A Wall Street Journal article describes the intense Arab lobbying around the Bahrain issue. The bottom line is that the U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet is stationed there and the country buys about $130 million a year in weapons from the U.S. military industrial machine. Naturally, Bahrain has become a key pawn in the regional power struggle with Iran. They are just one more that is "too big to fail."



Just a month before all this carnage, the Heritage Foundation, which is often mentioned with the hijacked term "conservative" before its name, issued what they called "an analysis" ranking Bahrain as the 10th "most free economy" in the world. We think we know what free economy means to the plutocrat-backed, paid-for-hire Heritage Foundation -- a country wide open for the elites to exploit, loot, steal and live high on the hog. Barry Goldwater would be rolling over in his grave.

The Bahrain Center for Human Rights is the key source for tracking conditions in this corrupt oligarchy.  There have been hundreds of arrests, dozens of known fatalities and the government is jamming Internet service in an attempt to isolate resistance. One trick used is cyber thuggery or crowding out Twitter with large misinformation attacks. This map shows Twitter's density anywhere in the world, in this case centered on the Ministry of Interior. The YouTube clip shows protesters being fired upon.






Besides supporting U.S. military dealings in the heart of the Middle East, Bahrain's economy is heavily oriented around finance and the recycling of Gulf petrodollars for global plutocrats and their cronies. They are a small producer of oil but handle processing and refining for the region and for export. A whopping 537,000 of its 675,000 labor force are non-citizens, mostly Asians, lending another element of insecurity. The U.S. State Dept. wrote a critical report on labor conditions and trafficking, including prostitution. Promises were made by the Bahrain government to reform. Once again, true to pattern, the Obama administration has been mostly about rhetoric rather than action. This is clearly not a priority.

This Zawya article gives an excellent overview of just how vulnerable Bahrain's finance-based economy is. Just this week, Moodys downgraded Bahrain to BAA with a negative outlook. Given how slow the rubber-stamping U.S. credit agencies are to act, this would seem to be serious. Relative to its GDP, bank assets are enormous. The retail banking portfolio in Bahrain is highly exposed to the real estate and construction sector and households (28 percent in each) of which together constitute around 56 percent of banks' loan portfolio.



This country's role as a key Gulf States banker may also be crucial to enabling the U.S. government in its ceaseless borrowing at nearly free rates, bankrupting itself and staying overly dependent on oil while allowing the military industrial complex, government insiders and dynamite-strapped bailout kings on Wall Street to loot with impunity. Since democracy and the political process in the U.S. is shattered,  I suggest that the common interests of the American Tar 'n Feathers resistance is closely aligned with those being arrested and oppressed in Bahrain. At minimum, this is because we should be friendly to liberty lovers everywhere. And if we can throw a monkey wretch into the plans of corrupt global kleptocrats, so much the better.

The intelligent talking points for protest and resistance are direct:
1. U.S. dependence on foreign oil and failure to take correct measures.
2. Imperial overstretch in defending oil supplies and supporting "allies" in key areas of the world no matter how awful or contrary to true American principles.
3.Leads to excuses to create rackets with expensive weapons, wars, security, bloated government military and diplomatic branches and all matter of think tanks, consultants and hundreds of billions of dollars of looting and handouts for the favored elite of our once great nation.
4. Too much parasitic finance to fund aforementioned numbers 1, 2 and 3. The question to all politicians is why support so many "too big too fails"? We should say knock this shit off or we'll bring out the tar 'n feathers. If I were a bettin' man, I'd wager tar and feathers.