George Friedman and Stratfor – How to survive with a bad track record

Shadow CIA Using Boogeyman Scare Tactics to Make Money

… from  Sputnik News, MoscowG

[ Editor’s Note:  The main reason VT has always been suspicious of George is seeing Stratfor continue to get so much coverage when it has such a horrible track record. That sets all the bells and whistles off for controlled opposition. As for the huge network there, a call years ago revealed a two man operation with the phone guy saying that George is never there.

The CIA has always hugely been involved in “public perception management” via media penetration and manipulation, something that is quite illegal for it to do inside the US, but not a single case has ever been brought to court as tearing that whole operation down would deemed to be hurting the national security.

That little civic lesson usually takes folks a few minutes to wrap their head around, and there are many more such riddles waiting in line. Hyping threats is an industrial scale modern business.

Just in the area of market manipulation alone the amounts of money are huge by those who can plug into a chain of offshore trusts to make trades and a dead end trail back to the insider. That often can be a major intelligence agency branch making some black ops funding, or someone retired from such career stops before moving on to a lucrative career in market analysis and predictions if you get my drift.

So it was a treat to see George get lightly toasted in Sputnik today. He has certainly earned the attention, not that he cares about that at all. But we like to use him as a teaching tool so readers can bone up on reading between the lines to know when they are being primed for something… Jim W. Dean ]

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– First published  …  March 11,  2016 –

Stratfor’s founder George Friedman has recently claimed that the world should get ready for a major 21st century war that will most likely break out in Eastern Europe, the Middle East or Asia. But experts have taken these predictions with a pinch of salt, citing ulterior motives behind the “Shadow CIA’s” forecasts.

The expert dismissed Stratfor’s predictions as a form of “saber-rattling” and “boogeyman scare tactics.” For instance, the group, in his opinion, is trying to scare China and North Korea and provoke an arms race by saying that Japan would rise as a maritime power.

“It is just a way to create a Cold War in that part of the world so that both use each other to build up their navies,” Dawson explained. These predictions justify military spending and “that’s all it’s for.” There is “absolutely no chance” that a war would break out between China and Japan, because their economies are too intertwined.

Friedman also asserted that Poland and Russia could clash since the former is one of the emerging powers and the latter is supposedly declining. “I just have to laugh at that. That’s not going to happen,” Dawson noted.

“Poland is going nowhere. Russia is not going to collapse. And there is definitely not going to be a war with Japan. This is ridiculous. No one should be paying attention to these people,” he said laughing. Stratfor analysts “have been wrong over and over again.”

For his part, political scientist Alexey Martynov maintains that Stratfor’s founder is intentionally exaggerating current trends. This approach seems to point to the fact that the think tank is having financial trouble

“Stratfor is a private firm, which is trying to sell its predictions to major international corporations, business communities and even some small states that are ready to pay for this kind of analytics. They act as if they were part of the US intelligence agencies. Of course, they are not,” he told Radio Sputnik. Friedman is trying to “scare those, who are ready to pay for their scribblings,” he added.

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Jim W. Dean

Jim W. Dean is VT Editor Emeritus.  He was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022.  He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews.  He now writes and posts periodically for VT.

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