This morning’s key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com:

Britain sends warships to Gibraltar over border conflict with Spain

It’s for a previously scheduled naval exercise in the Mediterranean,but Britain’s dispatch of warships to the coast of Gibraltar couldn’thave happened at a more significant time. Gibraltar is located on thetip of Spain, but it’s British territory, thanks to the 1714 Treaty atUtrecht that settled the War of the Spanish Succession. Since then,it’s been the source of unending tension between Britain and Spain,but tensions really soared last month when Gibraltar created dumpedcement blocks into the waters around the enclave, in order to preventSpanish boats from fishing there. This infuriated Spanish officials,who retaliated by partially blocking the border checkpoint betweenSpain and Gibraltar, making it almost impossible for people to travelthere from Spain, with some officials calling for a return of thethreatening legal action, saying that the border controls are aviolation of European Union rules. The Spanish Armada and the Britishwarships are a show of force, but we don’t believe that this will turninto a shooting war.

Spain has announced that it’s going to team up with Venezuela, andtake the case to the United Nations, where they’ll demand thatGibraltar be returned to Spain, and that the Falkland Islands bereturned to Venezuela. Gibraltar Chronicle and Spiegel

The War of the Spanish Succession keeps coming back

Most people, I’ve discovered, have never heard of the War of theSpanish Succession (1701-14), but it’s one of the most significantwars of the last millennium. WSS made Scotland a part of Britain, butas we wrote last year (see “16-Oct-12 World View — England and Scotland agree to a referendum on Scottish independence”), that agreement may nowbe unraveling. 

You can enumerate just a few “world wars” that affected all of westernEurope in the last few centuries. There was the Spanish Armada waragainst Britain that climaxed with Spain’s defeat in 1582, and thenthe Thirty Years War that climaxed in 1848 with the Treaty atWestphalia (called the “Peace of Exhaustion”), settling the boundariesbetween European countries. 

The War of the Spanish Succession broke out 52 years after the treatyat Westphalia was signed. It was triggered when the King of Spaindied childless in 1700, and because of numerous marriage alliances, itfinally turned out that Spain was bequeathed to the grandson of theKing of France, who then became King of Spain, and so Spain becameallied with France, where previously it had been allied with Germany.This led to the WSS “world war,” with the two sides led by England andFrance. England miraculously and unexpectedly defeated the Frencharmy in the Battle of Blenheim in 1704. France’s final defeat came inAugust 1709, at the battle of Malplaquet, the bloodiest battle inEurope for the entire eighteenth century. 

Once again, the boundaries of the European countries were set byagreement, this time by the Treaty at Utrecht in 1714, and one of thespoils of war was Britain’s acquisition of Gibraltar from Spain. Thetreaty held until the next “world war,” Napoleon’s conquest of Europefollowing the French Revolution, almost a century later. But theagreements coming out of the War of the Spanish Succession that madeboth Scotland and Gibraltar part of Britain are both still beingdisputed today. 

Your mortgage documents are fake!

Thanks to information from a newly unsealed lawsuit, it turns out thatmany people reading this articles have mortgages with banks that can’tprove ownership of your property. We haven’t written aboutreason that robo-signing was used was because the banks wanting toforeclose properties could not prove they had the right to foreclose,and so they used robo-signing to forge fraudulent documents, and thenlied to the courts and government about them. 

Tens of millions of home mortgages worth trillions of dollars have nolegitimate underlying owner that can establish the right toforeclose. This hasn’t stopped banks from foreclosing anyway withfalse documents, and they are often successful, a testament to thebreakdown of law in the judicial system. Homeowners trying to selltheir properties find that their properties are impossible to sell. 

Banks who committed this fraud include: JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo,Citigroup, Bank of America, HSBC, the Bank of New York Mellon,Deutsche Bank and US Bank. 

As usual, the Obama administration adamantly refuses to investigateand prosecute these crimes, because these banks are all big donors toAdministration campaigns and programs, with the result that no one hasgone to jail for trillions of dollars of criminal fraud that causedthe financial crisis. The level of criminality going on in Washingtonis incredible, and nobody gives a shit. That’s why I keep referringto Hannah Arendt and Nazi Germany, where respectable people wereactually gangsters, and gangsters were treated as respectable people.Salon

Egypt backs down on ‘dispersal’ of pro-Morsi supporters


How do you ‘disperse’ tens of thousands of protesters in a sit-in?

Egypt’s interim government backed down on plans to “disperse” tens ofthousands of protesters in a sit-in in two large squares in Cairo.The protesters are demanding that ousted president Mohamed Morsi, whohas been held in detention at a secret location since July 3, bereleased and restored to the presidency, and that his MuslimBrotherhood government be restored to power. No reason was given forbacking down, but various conjectures have been put forth: theU.S. pressured them to stand down; or it’s a strategy to confuse theprotesters; or the “dispersal” will occur later when the element ofsurprise is available; or some people hope that negotiations are stillpossible; or some people fear that the violence will end up killinghundreds of people. Al-Ahram (Cairo) and Foreign Policy

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