Cameron and co are going to incorporate 'general wellbeing' into GDP data. Whatever his motives, and they may be genuine, this surely must be good. Although judging by comments on the Guardian story, there are plenty who will be ticking the 'Mightily pissed off' box when the survey eventually appears.
Funniest comments:
"Those deemed not happy enough will be compelled to attend 4 week courses where they repeatedly have to read the Lib-Dem's election manifesto - that should have most people in hysterics.
If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands. (Cue deafening silence).
If 2010 was a Black Adder episode, this idea would have surely come from Baldric; after Black Adder ravaged the country and was looking for a way to have fun with his subjugates."
Actually I am absurdly happy, and it's got nothing to do with the ConDems or the economy. Am I alone in this? Or is it all because of my baby Amali...aah
Monday 15 November 2010
Monday 1 November 2010
Victory for left in Brazil's presidential election
A comment from someone who used to live in Brazil:
I hope that she continues the good work of Lula. I used to live in Brasil when Lula took office and i lived there for 5 years on and off. I returned in July after 3 years away to visit some friends and family and i was shocked to see how much Brasil had improved. I lived in Alagoas one of the poorest states and was shocked at the lack of begging and homeless people. At night where once there were just prostitutes on the street corners there were bars and snack bars and areas had been rejuvinated. When i first went to Brasil I was told there is just the rich and the poor. That is not true now, there is a huge middle class. I wish Dilma all the best and I hope she keeps Brasil on the right track and to be fair it is going to be a monster economy in a few years. Brasil will always have social problems but from my experience they are lessening year on year. Good to see a Presidenta!
I hope that she continues the good work of Lula. I used to live in Brasil when Lula took office and i lived there for 5 years on and off. I returned in July after 3 years away to visit some friends and family and i was shocked to see how much Brasil had improved. I lived in Alagoas one of the poorest states and was shocked at the lack of begging and homeless people. At night where once there were just prostitutes on the street corners there were bars and snack bars and areas had been rejuvinated. When i first went to Brasil I was told there is just the rich and the poor. That is not true now, there is a huge middle class. I wish Dilma all the best and I hope she keeps Brasil on the right track and to be fair it is going to be a monster economy in a few years. Brasil will always have social problems but from my experience they are lessening year on year. Good to see a Presidenta!
Housing benefit - don't let the facts get in the way!
An awful lot has been written about Housing Benefit since the government decided to cap it. So much, and yet so little light cast. Please, can we remember the basic facts - HB recipients DONT GET ANY MONEY. Landlords get the money! Fact: the reason HB has doubled in the last decade is because RENTS HAVE DOUBLED. Ergo, the problem is not the claimants, it is the lack of affordable housing. Buy to let landlords have been partying and they are still going to party once these cuts are in place because they don't solve the problem. Its like dealing with headaches through decapitation. If the headache is caused by someone punching you, would it not be better to stop the person doing the punching? I suggested to a friend yesterday that the answer - well, part of it - could be RENT CONTROL. Mrs Thatcher abolished rent boards in 1980, which used to regulate the private rented sector. Bring them back, I said. He said that would not be acceptable in the 21st century. My lord, perhaps he is right. It is acceptable that landlords get billions from the taxpayer to keep them in the money, but not to control rent. We could try LAND VALUE TAX, which is an effective way to stop owners of property from accumulating too much wealth at the expense of millions of working people. May be then wealth owners would do something more useful with their money - like invest in businesses and jobs. In Germany where they have an LVT the cost of renting is NINE TIMES CHEAPER per square foot. Just imagine that! May be we could take the money from LVT and apply it to building new homes and subsidising social housing. Landlordism is an age old vice. I know - I was a landlord once too. It's easy money. Why in an age of austerity can't we do something other than punish tenants. Because in England we live in a feudal aristocracy and no one will stand up to the landlords.
Thursday 28 October 2010
We're all in this together but some of us more than others
It's Gordon Gecko on crack. Whatever happened to shame or fear of reprisal when it comes to excessive greed? Oh yes, it disappeared with the fall of communism, which kept it in check for a few decades. Bosses have given themselves a 55% pay rise this year - so much for austerity...that's for little people on welfare, like single mums, and people looking for a job, or on disability allowance. Get with the programme! You all tighten your belts now, because some people are going to have to get a new belt, a much wider one. Their girth is expanding as ours contracts. This is the beautiful Coalition world that we live in...who needs satire? I think what we really need is the guillotine. It's due a comeback.
Tuesday 26 October 2010
Silence in the face of this onslaught
Isn't the 'Coalition' the pseudonym used to describe the invaders of Iraq? I have been silent pretty much since the general election because I have nothing to say that has not been said already. But I enjoyed - if that is the right word - this comment on Polly Toynbee's devastating piece on Coalition housing cuts:
This country, under the Coalition, is up shit creek; but Plan B does exist. After a couple of years, when it finally hits the fan, the Coalition will declare that it was always the 'workshy' and 'sick' who dragged the country down, and by then, their total demonization by the right-wing press will allow for even more draconian cuts and further disenfranchisement of these 'traitors' from society. You can see where this is going... but for the Coalition, there is no choice, because these categories are the only 'enemies' they choose to define as hampering economic progress. The Coalition has chosen its fall guys; and many of the most vulnerable people in our society will die as a direct result of this ideological nightmare we call a government.
This country, under the Coalition, is up shit creek; but Plan B does exist. After a couple of years, when it finally hits the fan, the Coalition will declare that it was always the 'workshy' and 'sick' who dragged the country down, and by then, their total demonization by the right-wing press will allow for even more draconian cuts and further disenfranchisement of these 'traitors' from society. You can see where this is going... but for the Coalition, there is no choice, because these categories are the only 'enemies' they choose to define as hampering economic progress. The Coalition has chosen its fall guys; and many of the most vulnerable people in our society will die as a direct result of this ideological nightmare we call a government.
Wednesday 1 September 2010
Get back Labour (song)
Here's my musical take on Labour leadership fight:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOMBgpwKRgg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOMBgpwKRgg
Sunday 29 August 2010
Corporate Media Dismisses Castro’s Bin Laden claim as far-fetched conspiracy theory
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Saturday, August 28, 2010
The corporate media wasted little time in seizing upon controversial Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s comments about Osama bin Laden being a U.S. spy to deride the claim as a far-fetched conspiracy theory, and yet the fact that Bin Laden was once a CIA protégé and has been used time and again to the benefit of the U.S. government’s geopolitical agenda is a documented fact.
It sounds like Fidel Castro has been reading Prison Planet.com, but the Guardian claims that the notorious revolutionary has “gone too far” in claiming Osama Bin Laden is a U.S. double agent.
The Cuban leader cites Wikileaks for his contention that Osama bin Laden is a CIA asset, but he went further in pointing out the fact that Bin Laden was routinely used by the Bush administration as a convenient boogeyman.
“Bush never lacked for Bin Laden’s support. He was a subordinate,” Castro said, according to the Communist party daily, Granma. “Any time Bush would stir up fear and make a big speech, Bin Laden would appear, threatening people with a story about what he was going to do.”
Indeed, this was a phenomenon that we documented for years, writing numerous different articles pointing out that whenever Bush was in political trouble, Bin Laden or one of his Al-Qaeda commanders would pop up at the most opportune moment to give Bush cover and allow him to grandstand as a trusted leader in the war on terror.
The most infamous example of this occurred just days before the 2004 presidential election, when Bin Laden appeared in a dubious video tape and attacked Bush, implicitly siding with his opponent John Kerry. Bin Laden’s chastisement of Bush resulted in a 6 point swing, enabling Bush to seal a second term in office. Both Bush and Kerry attributed the result to the intervention of the Bin Laden tape. Veteran newscaster Walter Cronkiteeven went as far as to charge that the whole thing smacked of a set-up orchestrated by Karl Rove.
“I thought it was going to help,” Bush told Bill Sammon, Senior White House Correspondent for the Washington Examiner. “I thought it would help remind people that if bin Laden doesn’t want Bush to be the president, something must be right with Bush.”
But it wasn’t just before the election that Bush enlisted the help of Bin Laden to boost his political capital. Before every single state of the union speech, either Bin Laden or his right-hand man Al-Zawahiri would pop up and publicly slam Bush, after which Bush would then cite their comments in his speech as a reason for why Americans need to continue to support their commander in chief.
Furthermore, the organization that released the Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri tapes, IntelCenter, is nothing more than a Pentagon-run front group for the Central Intelligence Agency, as we exhaustively documented in a series of reports spanning many years.
IntelCenter was caught adding its logo to a tape at the same time as Al-Qaeda’s so-called media arm As-Sahab added its logo, proving the two organizations were one and the same.
Pointing out that Bin Laden was used as a political tool by the Bush administration, as Castro commented, is to state the blindingly obvious – the only thing that could be judged as “far-fetched,” as the media characterizes it, would be to deny this patent fact.
Castro’s contention that Bin Laden is a U.S. spy or a CIA stooge is also backed up by a mountain of evidence.
Of course, it’s an undisputed fact that the Central Intelligence Agency trained and funded Bin Laden and the rest of the Mujahideen to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan from 1979 onwards.
Distinguished former FBI agent Ted Gunderson revealed that Bin Laden had visited Sherman Oaks, California in 1986 under his CIA code name Tim Osman as part of Bin Laden’s role in helping the U.S. government fight a proxy war with the Soviets.
According to several reports, first arising out of a leak from the French secret service, Bin Laden met with two CIA agents at the American Hospital in Dubai in July 2001, just two months before the September 11 attacks. Despite the fact that Bin Laden was already on the FBI’s most wanted list for his alleged role in the Tanzania and Kenya embassy bombings, the CIA agents didn’t apprehend him and indeed later boasted to their colleagues about the privilege of being able to speak with the terror leader.
Indeed, just last year former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds revealed that the U.S. maintained ‘intimate relations’ with Bin Laden, and the Taliban, “all the way until that day of September 11.”
The Bin Ladens and the Bush family enjoyed a decades-long close business relationship via the Carlyle Group and other oil, banking and construction ventures. Salem bin Laden invested $50,000 dollars in George W. Bush’s first business, Arbusto Energy, through his investment broker James Bath. The business connection of the two families was so tight that on the very morning of 9/11, George H.W. Bush was meeting with Osama bin Laden’s brother, Shafig bin Laden, in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington DC during a Carlyle Group function.
When all air traffic was grounded in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the whole family of Osama Bin Laden, the supposed prime suspect behind the attacks, was flown out of the United States under special U.S. government protection in total secrecy.
Given this documented history, Castro is merely invoking common sense when he dismisses Bin Laden as a U.S. asset. No matter how the corporate media try to spin the claim as the rantings of an ageing Communist leader, every possible indication clearly points to the fact that Bin Laden has been working for the Agency from the very beginning.
Prison Planet.com
Saturday, August 28, 2010
The corporate media wasted little time in seizing upon controversial Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s comments about Osama bin Laden being a U.S. spy to deride the claim as a far-fetched conspiracy theory, and yet the fact that Bin Laden was once a CIA protégé and has been used time and again to the benefit of the U.S. government’s geopolitical agenda is a documented fact.
It sounds like Fidel Castro has been reading Prison Planet.com, but the Guardian claims that the notorious revolutionary has “gone too far” in claiming Osama Bin Laden is a U.S. double agent.
The Cuban leader cites Wikileaks for his contention that Osama bin Laden is a CIA asset, but he went further in pointing out the fact that Bin Laden was routinely used by the Bush administration as a convenient boogeyman.
“Bush never lacked for Bin Laden’s support. He was a subordinate,” Castro said, according to the Communist party daily, Granma. “Any time Bush would stir up fear and make a big speech, Bin Laden would appear, threatening people with a story about what he was going to do.”
Indeed, this was a phenomenon that we documented for years, writing numerous different articles pointing out that whenever Bush was in political trouble, Bin Laden or one of his Al-Qaeda commanders would pop up at the most opportune moment to give Bush cover and allow him to grandstand as a trusted leader in the war on terror.
The most infamous example of this occurred just days before the 2004 presidential election, when Bin Laden appeared in a dubious video tape and attacked Bush, implicitly siding with his opponent John Kerry. Bin Laden’s chastisement of Bush resulted in a 6 point swing, enabling Bush to seal a second term in office. Both Bush and Kerry attributed the result to the intervention of the Bin Laden tape. Veteran newscaster Walter Cronkiteeven went as far as to charge that the whole thing smacked of a set-up orchestrated by Karl Rove.
“I thought it was going to help,” Bush told Bill Sammon, Senior White House Correspondent for the Washington Examiner. “I thought it would help remind people that if bin Laden doesn’t want Bush to be the president, something must be right with Bush.”
But it wasn’t just before the election that Bush enlisted the help of Bin Laden to boost his political capital. Before every single state of the union speech, either Bin Laden or his right-hand man Al-Zawahiri would pop up and publicly slam Bush, after which Bush would then cite their comments in his speech as a reason for why Americans need to continue to support their commander in chief.
Furthermore, the organization that released the Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri tapes, IntelCenter, is nothing more than a Pentagon-run front group for the Central Intelligence Agency, as we exhaustively documented in a series of reports spanning many years.
IntelCenter was caught adding its logo to a tape at the same time as Al-Qaeda’s so-called media arm As-Sahab added its logo, proving the two organizations were one and the same.
Pointing out that Bin Laden was used as a political tool by the Bush administration, as Castro commented, is to state the blindingly obvious – the only thing that could be judged as “far-fetched,” as the media characterizes it, would be to deny this patent fact.
Castro’s contention that Bin Laden is a U.S. spy or a CIA stooge is also backed up by a mountain of evidence.
Of course, it’s an undisputed fact that the Central Intelligence Agency trained and funded Bin Laden and the rest of the Mujahideen to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan from 1979 onwards.
Distinguished former FBI agent Ted Gunderson revealed that Bin Laden had visited Sherman Oaks, California in 1986 under his CIA code name Tim Osman as part of Bin Laden’s role in helping the U.S. government fight a proxy war with the Soviets.
According to several reports, first arising out of a leak from the French secret service, Bin Laden met with two CIA agents at the American Hospital in Dubai in July 2001, just two months before the September 11 attacks. Despite the fact that Bin Laden was already on the FBI’s most wanted list for his alleged role in the Tanzania and Kenya embassy bombings, the CIA agents didn’t apprehend him and indeed later boasted to their colleagues about the privilege of being able to speak with the terror leader.
Indeed, just last year former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds revealed that the U.S. maintained ‘intimate relations’ with Bin Laden, and the Taliban, “all the way until that day of September 11.”
The Bin Ladens and the Bush family enjoyed a decades-long close business relationship via the Carlyle Group and other oil, banking and construction ventures. Salem bin Laden invested $50,000 dollars in George W. Bush’s first business, Arbusto Energy, through his investment broker James Bath. The business connection of the two families was so tight that on the very morning of 9/11, George H.W. Bush was meeting with Osama bin Laden’s brother, Shafig bin Laden, in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington DC during a Carlyle Group function.
When all air traffic was grounded in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the whole family of Osama Bin Laden, the supposed prime suspect behind the attacks, was flown out of the United States under special U.S. government protection in total secrecy.
Given this documented history, Castro is merely invoking common sense when he dismisses Bin Laden as a U.S. asset. No matter how the corporate media try to spin the claim as the rantings of an ageing Communist leader, every possible indication clearly points to the fact that Bin Laden has been working for the Agency from the very beginning.
Osama bin Laden 'is a bought and paid for CIA agent' claims Cuban leader Fidel Castro
By Daily Mail Reporter
Cuban leader Fidel Castro has claimed Al Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden is a bought-and-paid-for CIA agent.
The country's former president has said that the world's most wanted terrorist always popped up when former US President George W Bush needed to scare the world, and argued that recently published documents on the internet prove it.
Castro told state media: 'Any time Bush would stir up fear and make a big speech, bin Laden would appear threatening people with a story about what he was going to do.
'Bush never lacked for bin Laden’s support. He was a subordinate.'
Castro said documents posted on the controversial WikiLeaks website 'effectively proved he (Bin Laden) was a CIA agent.' He did not elaborate further on the claims.
The comments were published today in the Communist party's daily newspaper, Granma.
They were the latest in a series of bold and provocative statements by Castro, who has emerged from exile to warn the planet is on the brink of a nuclear war.
Bizarrely, Castro even predicted that global conflict would mean cancellation of the final rounds of the World Cup in South Africa. He later apologised.
And last week, the 84-year-old began highlighting the work of Lithuanian investigative journalist Daniel Estulin, who he was meeting with when the Bin Laden comments came to light.
During the meeting, Estulin told Castro that the real voice of bin Laden was last heard in late 2001, not long after the September 11 attacks.
He said the person heard making warnings about terror attacks after that was a 'bad actor.'
Mr Estulin, is a well-known conspiracy theorist and wrote a trilogy of books highlighting the Bilderberg Club, whose prominent members meet once a year behind closed doors.
The secretive nature of the meetings and prominence of some members - including former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and senior U.S. and European officials have led some to speculate that it operates as a kind of global government, controlling not only international politics and economics, but even culture.
Read more:
Cuban leader Fidel Castro has claimed Al Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden is a bought-and-paid-for CIA agent.
The country's former president has said that the world's most wanted terrorist always popped up when former US President George W Bush needed to scare the world, and argued that recently published documents on the internet prove it.
Castro told state media: 'Any time Bush would stir up fear and make a big speech, bin Laden would appear threatening people with a story about what he was going to do.
'Bush never lacked for bin Laden’s support. He was a subordinate.'
Castro said documents posted on the controversial WikiLeaks website 'effectively proved he (Bin Laden) was a CIA agent.' He did not elaborate further on the claims.
The comments were published today in the Communist party's daily newspaper, Granma.
They were the latest in a series of bold and provocative statements by Castro, who has emerged from exile to warn the planet is on the brink of a nuclear war.
Bizarrely, Castro even predicted that global conflict would mean cancellation of the final rounds of the World Cup in South Africa. He later apologised.
And last week, the 84-year-old began highlighting the work of Lithuanian investigative journalist Daniel Estulin, who he was meeting with when the Bin Laden comments came to light.
During the meeting, Estulin told Castro that the real voice of bin Laden was last heard in late 2001, not long after the September 11 attacks.
He said the person heard making warnings about terror attacks after that was a 'bad actor.'
Mr Estulin, is a well-known conspiracy theorist and wrote a trilogy of books highlighting the Bilderberg Club, whose prominent members meet once a year behind closed doors.
The secretive nature of the meetings and prominence of some members - including former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and senior U.S. and European officials have led some to speculate that it operates as a kind of global government, controlling not only international politics and economics, but even culture.
Read more:
Friday 27 August 2010
Land value tax - Andy Burnham joins the advocates
Why a land value tax is a sound socialist policy:
[An] immense financial and economic crisis into which the world has fallen. So what lay behind it? The answer is the credit-fuelled property cycle. The people of the US, UK, Spain and Ireland became feverish speculators in land. Today, the toxic waste poisons the entire world economy.
In 1984, I bought my London house. I estimate that the land on which it sits was worth £100,000 in today’s prices. Today, the value is perhaps ten times as great. All of that vast increment is the fruit of no effort of mine. It is the reward of owning a location that the efforts of others made valuable, reinforced by a restrictive planning regime and generous tax treatment – property taxes are low and gains tax-free.
So I am a land speculator – a mini-aristocrat in a land where private appropriation of the fruits of others’ efforts has long been a prime route to wealth. This appropriation of the rise in the value of land is not just unfair: what have I done to deserve this increase in my wealth? It has obviously dire consequences.
Martin Wolf, FT, July 8 2010
[An] immense financial and economic crisis into which the world has fallen. So what lay behind it? The answer is the credit-fuelled property cycle. The people of the US, UK, Spain and Ireland became feverish speculators in land. Today, the toxic waste poisons the entire world economy.
In 1984, I bought my London house. I estimate that the land on which it sits was worth £100,000 in today’s prices. Today, the value is perhaps ten times as great. All of that vast increment is the fruit of no effort of mine. It is the reward of owning a location that the efforts of others made valuable, reinforced by a restrictive planning regime and generous tax treatment – property taxes are low and gains tax-free.
So I am a land speculator – a mini-aristocrat in a land where private appropriation of the fruits of others’ efforts has long been a prime route to wealth. This appropriation of the rise in the value of land is not just unfair: what have I done to deserve this increase in my wealth? It has obviously dire consequences.
Martin Wolf, FT, July 8 2010
Friday 20 August 2010
Israel's Facebook racist: "I would gladly kill them all"
Remember Lynndie England - the US GI who posed with brutalised Arab prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, exposing the dark heart of America's war in Iraq?
Now Israel, once again, shows its own dark racist heart on Facebook, in the pictures of IDF poster girl Eden Abergil. She posted loads of pictures on Facebook with her smiling and making fun of blindfolded and bound Palestinian prisoners.
Her blog embarrassed the IDF but Eden has no regrets. Here she shows why she doesn't get it - basically she hates Arabs.
Ms. Abergil responded to criticism, making it clear that she’s not taking the issue too seriously.
“No honey, they didn’t ruin my life. I can’t afford to have Arab—lovers ruin the perfect life I’m leading!!! I am not sorry and I do not regret it.”
Another surfer, Shai, responded to Ms. Abergil and claimed that she failed to grasp the meaning and implication of her actions.
“It’s called humanism,” he wrote, prompting Ms. Abergil to respond: “I’m not humane towards murderers.”
“In war there are no rules,” she wrote.
She later became more explicit, “I hate Arabs and wish them all the worst. I would gladly kill them all and even butcher them; one cannot forget their actions.”
Referring to the possibility that the images could injure Israel’s image in the international arena, Ms. Abergil said, “We will always be attacked. Whatever we do, we will always be attacked.”
IDF described the former soldier’s behaviour “shameful” which brings to disrepute the country and the army. But a Facebook support group has also been established calling itself ‘We are all with Eden Abergil’, and currently numbering 600 people.
The members have demanded that other soldiers post pictures similar to the ones uploaded by Ms. Abergil.
The former soldier has also approved hundreds of new Facebook friend requests that have been pouring in since the story broke causing a storm worldwide.
This kind of racist hate speak has been seen a lot on Facebook in Israel. When a human rights activist Edna Kanti appeared on Israel's Big Brother earlier this year, 100,000 Israelis joined a Facebook group against her, with posts full of violence against her as an 'Arab lover'.
100 days that shook the world
With the first 100 days of the Coalition marked by a blitzkrieg approach to tax and spend policies, David Cameron must rank as one of history's more unlikely revolutionaries. Cameron was elected as Tory leader in the mould of a Blairite reformer. He certainly gave the jaded Conservative brand a makeover, returning the party to electability. Of course, after a decade of Blair, many asked, do we need another snake oil salesman offering us sunshine and apple pie? The last time we went along with such promises, we got Iraq and government by spin doctor.
Leaving aside whether or not one approves of the Coalition government's policy agenda, the contrast with the early Blair years is remarkable. Blair had a thumping majority and could, if he had been so inclined to, have used his massive majority to usher in a new socialist dawn. Instead the party, steeled through 18 years of opposition and four election defeats, spent the first two years sticking tightly to the previous government's spending policies, and declaring loudly its economic prudence and orthodoxy. Of course 2010 is not 1997, and the global economic crisis presents a very different backdrop for a new government. But it is very difficult to argue that the government has a mandate for a massive shrinking of the welfare state. The Tories went into bed with the Liberals, and one might have expected a cautious centrism and a gradualist approach to deficit reduction. Instead we have Osborne's fire and brimstone warnings over deficit disaster - which are more by way of assertion than any proof of a Greek style crisis - and a full frontal assault on Gordon Brown's expanded welfare state.
Cameron and Osborne have taken their approach out of the Lenin and Trotsky school of turning a crisis into an opportunity for revolutionary change. It will be recalled by historians that the Bolsheviks were the minority party in the 1917 constituency assembly, with the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries winning the majority of seats. In the end, though, Lenin's agenda was the one that triumphed. The parallel may seem crazy, and one has to hope that Britain won't descend into its own civil war when the cuts begin to bite.
Turning the clock forward to the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008, and the contrast between Cameron-Osborne and Gordon Brown is clear. Brown, the man who penned the Red Book of Socialism in the early 1970s, saw his primary role in the biggest crisis of the system in 80 years, to save it. The nationalisations that took place were not the kind advocated by his younger self. The state-owned banks were not turned into people's cooperatives, rather, they were left to their own devices, with some mild exhortations to lend to small businesses, but now saved from collapse through a massive injection of taxpayers' money. Brown did not want to shake up the system, he did not see an opportunity for a once in a lifetime makeover of capitalism into a new model of tamed finance. No, he saw to it that the status quo survived. This cautious, conservative approach was lauded by markets and the IMF. However, it did not save him. Neither the electorate nor the Tory press thanked him for his efforts, and he was history.
A lot of people on the left saw the financial crisis as a clear sign that the 'neoliberal' era that started with Margaret Thatcher had come to an end. But something was missing. There was no plan or will to seize the opportunity to overhaul the system in a radical way. That task has now been handed to the Conservatives, and they have seized it with gusto. Except their version of revolution is very different. They aim to break up most of what remained of the welfare state that has grown steadily since 1945 and, from a certain pro-market perspective, has become so bloated that it is undermining the foundations of an entrepreneurial society. They aim to do nothing less than restore Britain to its entrepreneurial roots by finishing the work begun by Margaret Thatcher and taking an axe to welfarism. Thatcher was too busy fighting the trade unions and privatising state-owned industries to get round to that.
Cameron has made it abundantly clear, in the pages of The Sun and elsewhere, that he understands how limited the opportunity is to remake Britain. Political goodwill is a time-limited commodity. Labour doesn't have a new leader until September. Unless the Coalition splits, Labour will not have a crack at taking power again until 2015. And the record shows that Labour is fundamentally unwilling to reverse the structural changes brought in by successive Conservative governments. Cameron and Osborne must be betting on that, and that once the forces of entrepreneurship are unleashed, there will be no going back.
Leaving aside whether or not one approves of the Coalition government's policy agenda, the contrast with the early Blair years is remarkable. Blair had a thumping majority and could, if he had been so inclined to, have used his massive majority to usher in a new socialist dawn. Instead the party, steeled through 18 years of opposition and four election defeats, spent the first two years sticking tightly to the previous government's spending policies, and declaring loudly its economic prudence and orthodoxy. Of course 2010 is not 1997, and the global economic crisis presents a very different backdrop for a new government. But it is very difficult to argue that the government has a mandate for a massive shrinking of the welfare state. The Tories went into bed with the Liberals, and one might have expected a cautious centrism and a gradualist approach to deficit reduction. Instead we have Osborne's fire and brimstone warnings over deficit disaster - which are more by way of assertion than any proof of a Greek style crisis - and a full frontal assault on Gordon Brown's expanded welfare state.
Cameron and Osborne have taken their approach out of the Lenin and Trotsky school of turning a crisis into an opportunity for revolutionary change. It will be recalled by historians that the Bolsheviks were the minority party in the 1917 constituency assembly, with the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries winning the majority of seats. In the end, though, Lenin's agenda was the one that triumphed. The parallel may seem crazy, and one has to hope that Britain won't descend into its own civil war when the cuts begin to bite.
Turning the clock forward to the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008, and the contrast between Cameron-Osborne and Gordon Brown is clear. Brown, the man who penned the Red Book of Socialism in the early 1970s, saw his primary role in the biggest crisis of the system in 80 years, to save it. The nationalisations that took place were not the kind advocated by his younger self. The state-owned banks were not turned into people's cooperatives, rather, they were left to their own devices, with some mild exhortations to lend to small businesses, but now saved from collapse through a massive injection of taxpayers' money. Brown did not want to shake up the system, he did not see an opportunity for a once in a lifetime makeover of capitalism into a new model of tamed finance. No, he saw to it that the status quo survived. This cautious, conservative approach was lauded by markets and the IMF. However, it did not save him. Neither the electorate nor the Tory press thanked him for his efforts, and he was history.
A lot of people on the left saw the financial crisis as a clear sign that the 'neoliberal' era that started with Margaret Thatcher had come to an end. But something was missing. There was no plan or will to seize the opportunity to overhaul the system in a radical way. That task has now been handed to the Conservatives, and they have seized it with gusto. Except their version of revolution is very different. They aim to break up most of what remained of the welfare state that has grown steadily since 1945 and, from a certain pro-market perspective, has become so bloated that it is undermining the foundations of an entrepreneurial society. They aim to do nothing less than restore Britain to its entrepreneurial roots by finishing the work begun by Margaret Thatcher and taking an axe to welfarism. Thatcher was too busy fighting the trade unions and privatising state-owned industries to get round to that.
Cameron has made it abundantly clear, in the pages of The Sun and elsewhere, that he understands how limited the opportunity is to remake Britain. Political goodwill is a time-limited commodity. Labour doesn't have a new leader until September. Unless the Coalition splits, Labour will not have a crack at taking power again until 2015. And the record shows that Labour is fundamentally unwilling to reverse the structural changes brought in by successive Conservative governments. Cameron and Osborne must be betting on that, and that once the forces of entrepreneurship are unleashed, there will be no going back.
Friday 30 July 2010
The true nature of 'Al Qaeda'
Al Qaeda was merely a “list” of arms dealers, mercenaries, drug dealers, financiers, and terrorists used by the CIA and Saudis during the Afghan Mujaheddin War against the Soviets. The source also iterated that all the 911 hijackers had fake IDs. During a joint CIA-FBI operation against lead hijacker Mohammed Atta in Fort Lee, New Jersey in 2000, the CIA and FBI team leaders complained to their superiors that their operation was being photographed by Israeli agents, thus compromising the operation. The CIA source affirmed that the Israelis in New Jersey were providing cover for the future hijacker teams.
John O’Neill had discovered that some of his Al Qaeda targets were involved in some very un-Islamic fundamentalist activities, including drug smuggling, teenage prostitution, and blood diamond dealing. The financial trail led O’Neill to a network of bank accounts in London, Dubai, the Isle of Man, Guernsey, and Jersey. The network investigated coincided exactly with the activities being carried out by the Russian-Israeli Mafia and its links to diamond, drug, and weapons dealers that was especially active in New York and Florida. The future 911 hijackers and their Israeli “shadows” had more than living in the same neighborhoods and frequenting the same bars, video rental stores, and rental mailbox stores in common.
Read more from The Truth Seeker
John O’Neill had discovered that some of his Al Qaeda targets were involved in some very un-Islamic fundamentalist activities, including drug smuggling, teenage prostitution, and blood diamond dealing. The financial trail led O’Neill to a network of bank accounts in London, Dubai, the Isle of Man, Guernsey, and Jersey. The network investigated coincided exactly with the activities being carried out by the Russian-Israeli Mafia and its links to diamond, drug, and weapons dealers that was especially active in New York and Florida. The future 911 hijackers and their Israeli “shadows” had more than living in the same neighborhoods and frequenting the same bars, video rental stores, and rental mailbox stores in common.
Read more from The Truth Seeker
Why working less makes sense
André Gorz´s Critique of Economic Reason, apparently a brilliant book, as it happens.
http://www.antenna.nl/~waterman/gorz.html
The main points as far as this article is concerned are:
a. reduction of working time is necessary to maintain anything like full employment, when productivity growth outstrips economic growth every year.
b. reduction of working time is the only possible meaning we can give to an industrial society. Fulfillment INSIDE work is impossible; the modern division of labour separates us inevitably from fully comprehending what we make and expressing ourselves fully in it. We should spend continuously less time inside the alienated, opaque industrial machine, in order to have a full and human life OUTSIDE of work.
c. "wages for housework" campaigns miss the point, which is that "work" is the problem not the solution. Couching women´s interests in the language of the employment contract destroys the difference between home and work that makes one´s home life worth living. Doing stuff without getting "paid" is intrinsically rewarding and human. We should do more of this, and spend less time in the office to have the chance to. With a 20 hour week men would lose the excuse to doing equal childcare and housework.
Read the book... it´s great.
http://www.antenna.nl/~waterman/gorz.html
The main points as far as this article is concerned are:
a. reduction of working time is necessary to maintain anything like full employment, when productivity growth outstrips economic growth every year.
b. reduction of working time is the only possible meaning we can give to an industrial society. Fulfillment INSIDE work is impossible; the modern division of labour separates us inevitably from fully comprehending what we make and expressing ourselves fully in it. We should spend continuously less time inside the alienated, opaque industrial machine, in order to have a full and human life OUTSIDE of work.
c. "wages for housework" campaigns miss the point, which is that "work" is the problem not the solution. Couching women´s interests in the language of the employment contract destroys the difference between home and work that makes one´s home life worth living. Doing stuff without getting "paid" is intrinsically rewarding and human. We should do more of this, and spend less time in the office to have the chance to. With a 20 hour week men would lose the excuse to doing equal childcare and housework.
Read the book... it´s great.
Tuesday 6 July 2010
Incapacity tests in crisis thanks to Labour
I have just read last weekend's report in the Times (now not linkable due to tthe wall) about the new ESA benefit that Labour brought in in October 2008. The private company doing the tests is judging all kinds of severely ill people fit for work after an interview. 40% of these win on appeal, 70% if they get advice support on their appeal. What a disaster from New Labour and now the LibCons are planning to introduce another new system to get 500,000 people of ESA out of the 2.5m claiming it. If you set a target for getting people off one benefit and into the job market, a private company will find a way to deliver that target, regardless if it's right for any individual. Labour did this. I am really getting sick of their crocodile tears over the coalition cuts. They set the ground for this, and they would have done something similar if they'd won. Its a pantomine. We don't have a choice with the three main parties. Will the non-neoliberals stand up please.
PS I hope this pain in my left lower arm isn't RSI....
PS I hope this pain in my left lower arm isn't RSI....
Thursday 1 July 2010
What is waste?
We are hearing a lot about cutting waste in the public sector and reducing the welfare bill by getting people back to work. These are on the face of it laudable goals. But we need to look a bit more deeply at what is waste in the public or private sector and how do you identify it. Economists don't always help here as in market economics, an activity that does not make money is automatically wasteful. This does not help you determine what should be cut in the public sector as almost none of it is profit making. So there is a market value - and then there is social value, the value that society assigns to an activity. Education, health, policing, defence, welfare, pensions, all these are expensive. They are paid for by taxpayers. But are they wasteful? I have never worked in the public sector but I have heard many horror stories about non-jobs and mad procurements that must to some extent be true. What I find strange is that little is made of waste in the private sector. I work in it and I know there is plenty of waste, both in economic activity - what people do or don't do - and in production of unused materials. Marketing is arguably the most wasteful of activities, since its focus is on convincing people to buy something regardless of merit or usefulness, rather than providing useful information on what is available at what cost (although market participants also do this).
We have just been through the worst ever banking crisis that, thanks to dodgy deals and blind speculation, cost taxpayers some trillions and nearly wrecked the economy. This is a big market failure. The market wastes resources all the time - in fact the market requires waste. If you did not throw out clothes and gadgets, you would not buy new ones. Food rots and is thrown out. No kind of socialism can ever have achieved the level of systemic waste of capitalism. Socialism as practised often left people in poverty and lacking access to basic goods. Sometimes they starved. This was a problem of production and distribution.
Capitalism produces vast quantities of goods for the market but it does not automatically go to those who need it most. As long as buyers can be found, no matter how silly or quickly obsolete the product, it will be produced for profit. If not, it will be just so much more landfill, even if there are people crying out for the thing being binned.
But we need to look beyond the consumer end of the market to what people do. Capitalism's greatest gift to mankind even more than wealth and access to lots of consumer goods, is labour-saving technology. A few centuries ago, the majority of people were engaged in agriculture in order to feed themselves and others. Today a mere fraction of the workforce can feed the other 99%. This is something of a miracle. The same thing has happened in industry. Most of our basic needs can be met by a fraction of the workforce.
This leads to the next question - how many people does it take to keep a country housed, clothed, fed, educated and kept warm? If the answer to this is just 20% of the working age population, the question is what do we do with everyone else.
We already know that eight million working age adults don't work, compared to 29 million who do. Another few million are in education, which we mostly think of as a good thing. But how many of 29 million working are doing something that we could not do without? This may be impossible to answer. Or we could just ask them.
I seriously wonder what the reply would be. What would happen if you asked people 'Is your job useful to (1) you (2) your employer (3) society? By answering these questions, or some version of them, we might begin to get a sense of how useful all this work is, and how much of this activity is in fact a waste of time and effort. Of course this question only partly relates to the monetary value of any individual's work, which is the point. The immediate money value of a job is not very illuminating. It depends what the outcome of the activity is and who pays for it, as much as what it is 'worth' financially to the employee or the employer.
Of course people work for money, but mostly not only. They also work for status, for the value of their work to them and others, for something to do, and for the people they work with. There may be other reasons. If we only measure the money value, we don't really know the true value. This goes back to the point that people are not merely economic beings, as economics and most of our politics assume. People are not merely consumers or workers. I am what I do, but it depends what I do and how I value it.
These questions should be asked. Then we might know which jobs to cut. Which is worse - working in a pointless job, or being paid to do something else with your time? What would you do if you could be paid a basic wage to do anything you wanted? I know I could make myself busy. I might of course just waste my time....
We have just been through the worst ever banking crisis that, thanks to dodgy deals and blind speculation, cost taxpayers some trillions and nearly wrecked the economy. This is a big market failure. The market wastes resources all the time - in fact the market requires waste. If you did not throw out clothes and gadgets, you would not buy new ones. Food rots and is thrown out. No kind of socialism can ever have achieved the level of systemic waste of capitalism. Socialism as practised often left people in poverty and lacking access to basic goods. Sometimes they starved. This was a problem of production and distribution.
Capitalism produces vast quantities of goods for the market but it does not automatically go to those who need it most. As long as buyers can be found, no matter how silly or quickly obsolete the product, it will be produced for profit. If not, it will be just so much more landfill, even if there are people crying out for the thing being binned.
But we need to look beyond the consumer end of the market to what people do. Capitalism's greatest gift to mankind even more than wealth and access to lots of consumer goods, is labour-saving technology. A few centuries ago, the majority of people were engaged in agriculture in order to feed themselves and others. Today a mere fraction of the workforce can feed the other 99%. This is something of a miracle. The same thing has happened in industry. Most of our basic needs can be met by a fraction of the workforce.
This leads to the next question - how many people does it take to keep a country housed, clothed, fed, educated and kept warm? If the answer to this is just 20% of the working age population, the question is what do we do with everyone else.
We already know that eight million working age adults don't work, compared to 29 million who do. Another few million are in education, which we mostly think of as a good thing. But how many of 29 million working are doing something that we could not do without? This may be impossible to answer. Or we could just ask them.
I seriously wonder what the reply would be. What would happen if you asked people 'Is your job useful to (1) you (2) your employer (3) society? By answering these questions, or some version of them, we might begin to get a sense of how useful all this work is, and how much of this activity is in fact a waste of time and effort. Of course this question only partly relates to the monetary value of any individual's work, which is the point. The immediate money value of a job is not very illuminating. It depends what the outcome of the activity is and who pays for it, as much as what it is 'worth' financially to the employee or the employer.
Of course people work for money, but mostly not only. They also work for status, for the value of their work to them and others, for something to do, and for the people they work with. There may be other reasons. If we only measure the money value, we don't really know the true value. This goes back to the point that people are not merely economic beings, as economics and most of our politics assume. People are not merely consumers or workers. I am what I do, but it depends what I do and how I value it.
These questions should be asked. Then we might know which jobs to cut. Which is worse - working in a pointless job, or being paid to do something else with your time? What would you do if you could be paid a basic wage to do anything you wanted? I know I could make myself busy. I might of course just waste my time....
Wednesday 23 June 2010
Too much information!
You know those crime stories where police investigate a suspicious death and discover that somebody very close to the deceased, usually a spouse, had taken out an insurance policy prior to the death. This usually leads to a police investigation and murder charges. The insurance claim is the focus of suspicion and a key piece of evidence in the case against the partner of the deceased.
Now Larry Silverstein took out an insurance policy one month before the World Trade Centre was hit by two planes and collapsed. To be exact, three buildings collapsed, of which only two were hit by planes. Building 7 or WTC 7 collapsed just as if it had been demolished in a controlled explosion. Silverstein was seen by a number of witnesses to have called his insurer on the morning of 9/11 to ask if he could authorise the demolition of the building because allegedly it was in danger of collapsing due to fire. This was widely reported. The building fell soon afterward. Why would he have asked such a question unless the building was already rigged to be demolished? It takes at least 8 days to lay charges for a demolition. And if it was rigged to be demolishedd, which the phone call would strongly suggest, why do mainstream media channels like Fox, which have reported Mr Silverstein's phone call, not ask him about this? Was WTC 7 rigged with explosives for demolition, Mr Silverstein? And if so, why?
It's nearly a decade since this all happened. All the most compelling questions around these events are unearthed by following the money. And we are talking about a great deal of money. Silverstein collected $4.5 billion insurance money on a lease of only $145 million (for which he was repaid - so effectively he made $4.5 billion on an investment of nothing)! Silverstein did not actually own the building. Imagine that! Since then Lucky Larry has made several subsequent insurance claims for damages caused by 9/11. The World Trade Centre is a honey pot that just keeps giving. Surely that alone is cause for investigation, since the claim was for an event that killed 3000 people.
Now Larry Silverstein took out an insurance policy one month before the World Trade Centre was hit by two planes and collapsed. To be exact, three buildings collapsed, of which only two were hit by planes. Building 7 or WTC 7 collapsed just as if it had been demolished in a controlled explosion. Silverstein was seen by a number of witnesses to have called his insurer on the morning of 9/11 to ask if he could authorise the demolition of the building because allegedly it was in danger of collapsing due to fire. This was widely reported. The building fell soon afterward. Why would he have asked such a question unless the building was already rigged to be demolished? It takes at least 8 days to lay charges for a demolition. And if it was rigged to be demolishedd, which the phone call would strongly suggest, why do mainstream media channels like Fox, which have reported Mr Silverstein's phone call, not ask him about this? Was WTC 7 rigged with explosives for demolition, Mr Silverstein? And if so, why?
It's nearly a decade since this all happened. All the most compelling questions around these events are unearthed by following the money. And we are talking about a great deal of money. Silverstein collected $4.5 billion insurance money on a lease of only $145 million (for which he was repaid - so effectively he made $4.5 billion on an investment of nothing)! Silverstein did not actually own the building. Imagine that! Since then Lucky Larry has made several subsequent insurance claims for damages caused by 9/11. The World Trade Centre is a honey pot that just keeps giving. Surely that alone is cause for investigation, since the claim was for an event that killed 3000 people.
Adam's Calender: The oldest stone settlements in Africa
75,000 years ago early humans built a stone calendar that predates all other man-made structures found to date. This ‘African Stonehenge’ has for the first time created a link to the countless other stone ruins in southern Africa and suggests that these ruins are much older than we thought. The complex that links Waterval Boven, Machadodorp, Carolina and Dullstroom, covers an area larger then modern-day Johannesburg.
Six years of research by a group of independent scientists and explorers has delivered what may be the crucial missing elements in our understanding of the lives and development of early modern humans. Their discovery has been released in a book they call Adam’s Calendar. But the research has also shown that these stone settlements represent the most mysterious and misunderstood structures found to date. It points to a civilisation that lived and dug for gold in this part of the world for thousands of years. And if this is in fact the cradle of humankind, we may be looking at the activities of the oldest civilisation on Earth.
This remarkable stone structure of Adam’s Calendar was originally a large circular structure resembling but predating Stonehenge by many thousands of years. Its original shape is still clearly visible from satellite images. Adam’s Calendar is built along the same 31 degree longitudinal line as Great Zimbabwe and the Great Pyramid of Giza. Three of the monoliths are aligned with the rise of Orion’s belt when it rose horizontally on the horizon some 75,000 years ago. A recent observation is that the fallen monolith on the outer circle that marks the vernal equinox sunrise is shaped like the Horus hawk head from Egypt and the resembles the Zimbabwe ruins birds. This is the oldest statue of the Horus hawk by a long shot and should attract great interest in the years to come. Adam’s Calendar takes us further back in time closer to the emergence of Homo sapiens, than any other structure ever found to date, and it will force historians and archaeologist to reconsider ancient human activity and consciousness.
The first signs of human intelligence and consciousness only appeared around 75 000 years ago, when the Khoisan people of southern Africa started leaving behind an array of spectacular cave paintings all over this part of the continent. Finely crafted beads and bracelet fragments found in a cave at Blombos in the Western Cape, South Africa, show that these early humans had already developed a feel for the arts and crafts.
Read more
Fox News report on 'pulling' Building 7
Is this recent claim from Fox News's Scott Shapiro about WTC owner Larry Silverstein's call to insurers on 9/11 credible? - it does not add up:
"Governor Jesse Ventura and many 9/11 “Truthers” allege that government explosives caused the afternoon collapse of Building 7. This is false. I know this because I remember watching all 47 stories of Building 7 suddenly and silently crumble before my eyes.
Shortly before the building collapsed, several NYPD officers and Con-Edison workers told me that Larry Silverstein, the property developer of One World Financial Center was on the phone with his insurance carrier to see if they would authorize the controlled demolition of the building – since its foundation was already unstable and expected to fall.
A controlled demolition would have minimized the damage caused by the building’s imminent collapse and potentially save lives. Many law enforcement personnel, firefighters and other journalists were aware of this possible option. There was no secret. There was no conspiracy."
Now readers, please remember that 'Lucky' Larry Silverstein only acquired WTC six months previously from the New York Port Authority. Before then it had been a publicly owned building. He had taken out an insurance policy in July 2001 for the World Trade Centre, which included a clause that would reimburse the leaseholders for the whole value of the WTC site in the event of a terrorist attack. Silverstein and Company only paid $124 million for the lease but the insurance payout was for the whole value of the site. Coincidentally, it was destroyed on September 11 and he collected a cool $4.5 billion. WTC7 was worth $500 million alone! He was even repaid the initial $124 million.
But if he was speaking to his insurer on 911 about demolition, it means the building must already have been rigged for demolition. Demolitions take at least a week or two to prepare.
Shapiro's refutation of Jesse Ventura actually raises as many questions as his claim to know that there was no conspiracy answers.
Source:
"Governor Jesse Ventura and many 9/11 “Truthers” allege that government explosives caused the afternoon collapse of Building 7. This is false. I know this because I remember watching all 47 stories of Building 7 suddenly and silently crumble before my eyes.
Shortly before the building collapsed, several NYPD officers and Con-Edison workers told me that Larry Silverstein, the property developer of One World Financial Center was on the phone with his insurance carrier to see if they would authorize the controlled demolition of the building – since its foundation was already unstable and expected to fall.
A controlled demolition would have minimized the damage caused by the building’s imminent collapse and potentially save lives. Many law enforcement personnel, firefighters and other journalists were aware of this possible option. There was no secret. There was no conspiracy."
Now readers, please remember that 'Lucky' Larry Silverstein only acquired WTC six months previously from the New York Port Authority. Before then it had been a publicly owned building. He had taken out an insurance policy in July 2001 for the World Trade Centre, which included a clause that would reimburse the leaseholders for the whole value of the WTC site in the event of a terrorist attack. Silverstein and Company only paid $124 million for the lease but the insurance payout was for the whole value of the site. Coincidentally, it was destroyed on September 11 and he collected a cool $4.5 billion. WTC7 was worth $500 million alone! He was even repaid the initial $124 million.
But if he was speaking to his insurer on 911 about demolition, it means the building must already have been rigged for demolition. Demolitions take at least a week or two to prepare.
Shapiro's refutation of Jesse Ventura actually raises as many questions as his claim to know that there was no conspiracy answers.
Source:
What about the Robin Hood tax?
Osborne could have raised £20 billion from a Robin Hood tax. The Conservative Party responded positively to the calls for a tax on financial transactions before the election and said it was looking into it. Ozzie's Bank levy will only raise £2 billion, which is peanuts compared to the £150 billion British taxpayers put into the collapsing banks. Instead we have welfare cuts and a VAT hike that will hit the poor and the consumer sector.
Monday 21 June 2010
How to watch the World Cup - go Slovenia!
The World Cup is a fantastic way to see nations of the world at play in a competitive and friendly environment - like international relations without guns and bullying. If the refs sometimes get it wrong, the players still have to abide by their decisions.
I have decided that it is best not to watch the competition simply as a patriotic supporter of the national side. That way disappointment and anguish lie. Much better to enjoy watching it as a celebration of talent from around the world and to enjoy seeing underdogs upset the hierarchy of winners and losers. There has been plenty of that in this world cup, with most of western Europe dramatically underperforming. You can then give your passion to outsiders like Slovenia and Paraguay - without all the hand wringing and head banging that goes with supporting a national side that is doomed to always disappoint. Go Slovenia! Go Paraguay!
I have decided that it is best not to watch the competition simply as a patriotic supporter of the national side. That way disappointment and anguish lie. Much better to enjoy watching it as a celebration of talent from around the world and to enjoy seeing underdogs upset the hierarchy of winners and losers. There has been plenty of that in this world cup, with most of western Europe dramatically underperforming. You can then give your passion to outsiders like Slovenia and Paraguay - without all the hand wringing and head banging that goes with supporting a national side that is doomed to always disappoint. Go Slovenia! Go Paraguay!
Friday 18 June 2010
China comes to the rescue of Greece
This is a bold move by the Chinese, and is part of the tectonic shift of power away from the West to China and other new BRIC countries. Some see it as sinister - but it is really a win-win for China and Greece and a wake-up call that 'we' are no longer the only players in town anymore and that things are changing fast. I believe we should welcome China's 'peaceful rise' rather than assume aggressive intent. The West's own history of militarism and imperialism is too easily projected on the new powers in the world, who themselves have long memories of being subject to colonialism, in particular China, India and Brazil.
The recent attempt by Brazil and Turkey to break the impasse over Iran's nuclear development was another sign that its no longer a unilateral game of the West dictating terms to developing countries. On that occasion, the move was rejected by the main powers, including Russia and China. But if the West won't deal with Iran, China and Russia probably still will.
People tend to have an emotional reaction to China and focus on its human rights abuses, which there are of course many, but fail to note its achievements and the fact that unlike the USA, it is not a plutocracy run by and for millionaires pretending to be a democracy. Treating China like a uniquely evil dictatorship is wrong - all large developing countries have serious human rights issues, including India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh etc. All have margnalised minorities too. Tibet has a very long history of being a satellite state of China, long before the 1949 revolution.
In China even rich people can go down for corruption and some of them even end up being executed. Harsh, but perhaps some exemplary punishment of the ripoff merchants would be good in the West too. Unfortunately, the foxes are inside the coop and have taken us for a ride already, and are now back to business as usual. In China, the national interest means something - eliminating poverty, building industry, even greening the economy, whereas in the US and UK, the national interest is what suits the banks and the military industrial complex and never mind the rest.
Here are some comments on a very Cold War style scaremongering article in The Guardian from security correspondent Simon Tisdall, who just spouts spook speak from the West's security agencies.
Quote:
I love the way Chinese business investment is always 'aggressive and expansionist'! As opposed to the uniformly benign American or UK business presence around the world?
"The Chinese are hard-headed realists..." says Breffni O'Rourke - as opposed to the utopian idealists of the West, who never fail to leave behind them a trail of happy, healthy, wealthy people of all creeds and colours wherever their business goes?
'Greece is probably safe for now. But it wouldn't do to be complacent.' Beware the Yellow Peril! Kaiser Bill, come back, all is forgiven, you were right all along!
I'm no fan of the Chinese regime - most of my family on my mother's side fled China during the Revolution of 1949 - but I find this kind of innuendo-laden, biased scaremongering preposterous in the extreme. The sheer hypocrisy of such a piece is breathtaking.
Second Quote:
Both the comments and the article show just how much non-Chinese do NOT know about China.
- The government today may be called communist, but it has far more in common with the traditional Chinese governments over the last 5000 years than it does with the communist image in westerner's minds. thinking the government is "communist" only helps the Chinese distract and confuse westerners.
- The government is centralized under a semi-elected group that controls many aspects of the economy and society. They are semi-elected because only a subset of the population gets a vote, although that subset is actually quite large.
- China has no intention or desire to project military power as they learned long ago (4000 years ago) that that is a waste of time and wealth. Read the Art of War (it is free on the internet at http://www.sonshi.com/index.html). China knows that entangling alliances work far, far better than military aggression (and are a lot cheaper and more profitable).
- As long as China has existed, it has been entrepreneurial. This was suppressed for a while under the British and the early Communist rulers, but it has come fully back.
- Because China has more centralized rule, it is able to better address situations that could go into the mud real quick in the west. So yes, China has some excesses in their economy, but they are well aware of them and are making changes to tamp the excesses down. Unlike the US and UK where bankers can easily pay off people to remove restrictions on their raping and pillaging, this can not happen in China where for the most part the central control tries to do what is best for society overall (doing the best for society instead of the best for the individual is deeply ingrained in their culture). Some fine examples of the value of central control are: (1) investing in rebuilding their passenger and freight rail systems so they are more energy efficient and run on non-oil energy so when Global Peak Oil happens, the trains will still be able to run, (2) Investing in the development and implementation of non-oil energy so when global Peak Oil happens, China will still have the energy it needs to function as a modern country, (3) Implementing massive roll out of high-speed broadband so the intellectual capitol of China can continue to be freely tapped.
- For all practical purposes, Taiwan is now completely integrated with China in a manner similar to Hong Kong. While both sides keep up the fiction of separation, the reality is there is next to none and a vast majority of Taiwanese have no problem with the current defacto arrangement and have no desire to go back to the bad old days when the two were separate.
- As for Tibet, a good analogy would be the old south trying to break away from the Union during the US civil war. Tibet has been controlled by China for hundreds of years and like the US does not look favorably on part of the country trying to break away, especially when the US financed the revolution. Just as the Union did in the US civil war, China is putting down a rebellion of a minority of Tibetans. To help integrate Tibet more closely with China and share China's economic success, China has invested huge sums in making transportation available to Tibet. If the people in the US didn't like the south trying to break away how can we say anything about Tibet?
The bottom line is China is NOT the west. It does NOT think like the west. China plays its own game with its own rules. China does NOT want to rule the world. but trade with it (as profitably as possible). China has enough issues ruling the people of China, it has no desire to rule anymore. Note that China's military spending is minuscule compared to the west and the spending is mostly defensive.
The bottom line is unless a westerner has studied China's 5000 years of history, culture and philosophy AND has lived and worked in China for several years, they are totally unqualified to even discuss China (most westerner are in this category which is why western governments make so many mistakes).
And yes, I have studies Chinese history, culture and philosophy and have lived and worked in China. I am now back in the US but still work closely with Chinese companies.
Most of what is written about China in the west is flat out wrong and full of misinformation. Tisdall is just as wrong as the rest.
The recent attempt by Brazil and Turkey to break the impasse over Iran's nuclear development was another sign that its no longer a unilateral game of the West dictating terms to developing countries. On that occasion, the move was rejected by the main powers, including Russia and China. But if the West won't deal with Iran, China and Russia probably still will.
People tend to have an emotional reaction to China and focus on its human rights abuses, which there are of course many, but fail to note its achievements and the fact that unlike the USA, it is not a plutocracy run by and for millionaires pretending to be a democracy. Treating China like a uniquely evil dictatorship is wrong - all large developing countries have serious human rights issues, including India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh etc. All have margnalised minorities too. Tibet has a very long history of being a satellite state of China, long before the 1949 revolution.
In China even rich people can go down for corruption and some of them even end up being executed. Harsh, but perhaps some exemplary punishment of the ripoff merchants would be good in the West too. Unfortunately, the foxes are inside the coop and have taken us for a ride already, and are now back to business as usual. In China, the national interest means something - eliminating poverty, building industry, even greening the economy, whereas in the US and UK, the national interest is what suits the banks and the military industrial complex and never mind the rest.
Here are some comments on a very Cold War style scaremongering article in The Guardian from security correspondent Simon Tisdall, who just spouts spook speak from the West's security agencies.
Quote:
I love the way Chinese business investment is always 'aggressive and expansionist'! As opposed to the uniformly benign American or UK business presence around the world?
"The Chinese are hard-headed realists..." says Breffni O'Rourke - as opposed to the utopian idealists of the West, who never fail to leave behind them a trail of happy, healthy, wealthy people of all creeds and colours wherever their business goes?
'Greece is probably safe for now. But it wouldn't do to be complacent.' Beware the Yellow Peril! Kaiser Bill, come back, all is forgiven, you were right all along!
I'm no fan of the Chinese regime - most of my family on my mother's side fled China during the Revolution of 1949 - but I find this kind of innuendo-laden, biased scaremongering preposterous in the extreme. The sheer hypocrisy of such a piece is breathtaking.
Second Quote:
Both the comments and the article show just how much non-Chinese do NOT know about China.
- The government today may be called communist, but it has far more in common with the traditional Chinese governments over the last 5000 years than it does with the communist image in westerner's minds. thinking the government is "communist" only helps the Chinese distract and confuse westerners.
- The government is centralized under a semi-elected group that controls many aspects of the economy and society. They are semi-elected because only a subset of the population gets a vote, although that subset is actually quite large.
- China has no intention or desire to project military power as they learned long ago (4000 years ago) that that is a waste of time and wealth. Read the Art of War (it is free on the internet at http://www.sonshi.com/index.html). China knows that entangling alliances work far, far better than military aggression (and are a lot cheaper and more profitable).
- As long as China has existed, it has been entrepreneurial. This was suppressed for a while under the British and the early Communist rulers, but it has come fully back.
- Because China has more centralized rule, it is able to better address situations that could go into the mud real quick in the west. So yes, China has some excesses in their economy, but they are well aware of them and are making changes to tamp the excesses down. Unlike the US and UK where bankers can easily pay off people to remove restrictions on their raping and pillaging, this can not happen in China where for the most part the central control tries to do what is best for society overall (doing the best for society instead of the best for the individual is deeply ingrained in their culture). Some fine examples of the value of central control are: (1) investing in rebuilding their passenger and freight rail systems so they are more energy efficient and run on non-oil energy so when Global Peak Oil happens, the trains will still be able to run, (2) Investing in the development and implementation of non-oil energy so when global Peak Oil happens, China will still have the energy it needs to function as a modern country, (3) Implementing massive roll out of high-speed broadband so the intellectual capitol of China can continue to be freely tapped.
- For all practical purposes, Taiwan is now completely integrated with China in a manner similar to Hong Kong. While both sides keep up the fiction of separation, the reality is there is next to none and a vast majority of Taiwanese have no problem with the current defacto arrangement and have no desire to go back to the bad old days when the two were separate.
- As for Tibet, a good analogy would be the old south trying to break away from the Union during the US civil war. Tibet has been controlled by China for hundreds of years and like the US does not look favorably on part of the country trying to break away, especially when the US financed the revolution. Just as the Union did in the US civil war, China is putting down a rebellion of a minority of Tibetans. To help integrate Tibet more closely with China and share China's economic success, China has invested huge sums in making transportation available to Tibet. If the people in the US didn't like the south trying to break away how can we say anything about Tibet?
The bottom line is China is NOT the west. It does NOT think like the west. China plays its own game with its own rules. China does NOT want to rule the world. but trade with it (as profitably as possible). China has enough issues ruling the people of China, it has no desire to rule anymore. Note that China's military spending is minuscule compared to the west and the spending is mostly defensive.
The bottom line is unless a westerner has studied China's 5000 years of history, culture and philosophy AND has lived and worked in China for several years, they are totally unqualified to even discuss China (most westerner are in this category which is why western governments make so many mistakes).
And yes, I have studies Chinese history, culture and philosophy and have lived and worked in China. I am now back in the US but still work closely with Chinese companies.
Most of what is written about China in the west is flat out wrong and full of misinformation. Tisdall is just as wrong as the rest.
Thursday 17 June 2010
Correction to previous post on Bush Bin Laden links
I have corrected a previous post in response to an email from representatives of Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Al-Amoudi.
In the post it was claimed that there were connections between the Sheikh and The Capitol Trust Bank, which was untrue. I was happy to correct this and remove the inaccuracy from the article, which was reproduced from American Free Press.
The corrected post is now the one published.
Sheikh Al-Amoudi's representatives believe the article to be "tendentious and derives ultimately from politically motivated sources" and to be as a whole "dubious". They are of course entitled to their opinion.
In the post it was claimed that there were connections between the Sheikh and The Capitol Trust Bank, which was untrue. I was happy to correct this and remove the inaccuracy from the article, which was reproduced from American Free Press.
The corrected post is now the one published.
Sheikh Al-Amoudi's representatives believe the article to be "tendentious and derives ultimately from politically motivated sources" and to be as a whole "dubious". They are of course entitled to their opinion.
Wednesday 16 June 2010
And now for some deficit humour: Mark Steel
How long will this government keep their trick going, of announcing every few days: "Oh my goodness, the books are even worse than we thought. It turns out Alistair Darling left a whole year's VAT on a bus. But he didn't put it on the accounts thingy so never mind, we'll just have to make even more cuts I suppose"? The day before the budget George Osborne will make a statement that: "This morning I had a call from Blockbusters, and they informed me that Jack Straw neglected to pay the late return fee on Call of Duty, a game he took out for use on his Xbox. As a result the Treasury owes £4m more than was previously believed to be the case, which makes it a necessity that we sell off the Post Office."
They could keep it going for years, telling us before the 2013 Budget that they've just discovered Margaret Beckett was a junkie and secretly sold off the M4 as far as Bristol to pay for her habit, so now they'll have to scrap the fire service. Or they were told there was some money in a Co-op account, but when they went to draw it out to pay the army, the lady behind the counter said John Prescott had already taken it and spent it all on crisps.
Every commentator on almost every programme informs us every day that the deficit is so awful we have to make unprecedented cuts, so it wouldn't be surprising if the World Cup panellists said: "England's back four can't be expected to keep their shape while there's a record £1.7 trillion debt on their minds, Gary. If we don't take immediate measures to get that down they're bound to get caught out of position."
For example, a poll in this week's Sunday Times asked whether you agree or disagree that the government could save money by "eliminating unnecessary non-jobs in the public sector". As if anyone would say: "No – we must keep those unnecessary non-jobs. They're vital to us all." You might as well have the headline: "Public supports austerity measures. An overwhelming majority answered 'yes' to the question, 'Do you agree people who do nothing, I mean nothing, except smoke dope and torture mice out of boredom, should be funded by you personally by having to sell your child to a cockle-picking gang'?"
But the government is obviously concerned that when the actual cuts are announced, that consensus might crack. So at the moment they're still being vague about what they're planning, and carry on telling us they're going to scrap "waste". But if there was a genuine pile of waste that could save billions if it was scrapped, they could be more specific, couldn't they? And say: "We've found a whole office in the Department of Transport dedicated to memorising the scripts of Last of the Summer Wine. They're all on fifty grand a week as well. It was set up by Harold Wilson apparently, when he was going a bit funny, so that's a start."
They seem to realise that, when they announce which areas will be cut, it doesn't sound so convincing that we're all in it together. For example they've cancelled plans to extend free school dinners for children from poorer backgrounds, which affects everyone equally, I suppose, as without studying the figures, who can say whether Cameron and Osborne's family would qualify for that payment? One group that might just escape that category are the richest 1,000 people in Britain whose wealth, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, has increased by 30 per cent in the last year. That amounts to £77bn, or half the entire annual deficit.
So they could contribute perhaps. But more likely is the government's plan to get people to accept massive cuts in public services as unavoidable, then happily watch people squabble over if it should be someone else battered rather than them. Eventually it will turn out the books are so bad they have to make each service appear on a television show and plead to be saved by public vote, with a tense announcement at the end by Graham Norton that "only one of you will be here next week and that is... disability benefit. Sorry, social services, you've got to go now, but you've been a great contestant. Byeeee".
Source: The Independent
They could keep it going for years, telling us before the 2013 Budget that they've just discovered Margaret Beckett was a junkie and secretly sold off the M4 as far as Bristol to pay for her habit, so now they'll have to scrap the fire service. Or they were told there was some money in a Co-op account, but when they went to draw it out to pay the army, the lady behind the counter said John Prescott had already taken it and spent it all on crisps.
Every commentator on almost every programme informs us every day that the deficit is so awful we have to make unprecedented cuts, so it wouldn't be surprising if the World Cup panellists said: "England's back four can't be expected to keep their shape while there's a record £1.7 trillion debt on their minds, Gary. If we don't take immediate measures to get that down they're bound to get caught out of position."
For example, a poll in this week's Sunday Times asked whether you agree or disagree that the government could save money by "eliminating unnecessary non-jobs in the public sector". As if anyone would say: "No – we must keep those unnecessary non-jobs. They're vital to us all." You might as well have the headline: "Public supports austerity measures. An overwhelming majority answered 'yes' to the question, 'Do you agree people who do nothing, I mean nothing, except smoke dope and torture mice out of boredom, should be funded by you personally by having to sell your child to a cockle-picking gang'?"
But the government is obviously concerned that when the actual cuts are announced, that consensus might crack. So at the moment they're still being vague about what they're planning, and carry on telling us they're going to scrap "waste". But if there was a genuine pile of waste that could save billions if it was scrapped, they could be more specific, couldn't they? And say: "We've found a whole office in the Department of Transport dedicated to memorising the scripts of Last of the Summer Wine. They're all on fifty grand a week as well. It was set up by Harold Wilson apparently, when he was going a bit funny, so that's a start."
They seem to realise that, when they announce which areas will be cut, it doesn't sound so convincing that we're all in it together. For example they've cancelled plans to extend free school dinners for children from poorer backgrounds, which affects everyone equally, I suppose, as without studying the figures, who can say whether Cameron and Osborne's family would qualify for that payment? One group that might just escape that category are the richest 1,000 people in Britain whose wealth, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, has increased by 30 per cent in the last year. That amounts to £77bn, or half the entire annual deficit.
So they could contribute perhaps. But more likely is the government's plan to get people to accept massive cuts in public services as unavoidable, then happily watch people squabble over if it should be someone else battered rather than them. Eventually it will turn out the books are so bad they have to make each service appear on a television show and plead to be saved by public vote, with a tense announcement at the end by Graham Norton that "only one of you will be here next week and that is... disability benefit. Sorry, social services, you've got to go now, but you've been a great contestant. Byeeee".
Source: The Independent
Deficit? Solution could be a land value tax
Filling the gaping hole in the Government’s finances is, in George Osborne’s words, the “great national challenge of our generation”. Unwise spending cuts and tax rises could sap economic growth; unfair ones provoke political unrest; inaction a market panic.
Faced with a national crisis, who better to turn to for advice than Winston Churchill? A century ago, the great man — who, like the present coalition, was both Liberal and Conservative — advocated introducing a land tax as part of a bold package of fiscal reforms. In his emergency Budget on June 22, the Chancellor should set up a commission to consider how best to implement that recommendation.
Taxing land values would be a fair way to help to plug the budget gap while stabilising — and even boosting — the economy. Land is routinely valued each year as property changes hands. With all the land in Britain worth perhaps £5 trillion, a 0.5 per cent levy could raise £25 billion a year — as much as a five-point rise in income tax.
Neither tenants nor leaseholders would pay a penny; only freeholders and landlords would, with the owner of a large estate paying a higher rate than someone who owns a small suburban semi. The proceeds could be used to cut the deficit and national insurance, creating jobs, boosting take-home pay and stimulating growth. Over time, the aim would be to shift the tax burden off hard-working families and on to idle landlords — as in Hong Kong, where revenues from land taxes keep income tax low, there is no VAT or capital gains tax, and enterprise flourishes.
When the Government taxes successful effort, people strive less — some work less, others don’t bother setting up a business, a few relocate overseas — and since hiring is more expensive, fewer jobs are created. But taxing land wouldn’t crimp economic activity, as Adam Smith explained in The Wealth of Nations. It wouldn’t reduce the supply of land, which can’t be spirited away to a tax haven. And it wouldn’t push up rents, which depend on what tenants are prepared to pay rather than landlords’ expenses.
A land tax would actually encourage development. Since it would be payable irrespective of how land is used, it would stimulate the regeneration of derelict sites — such as Battersea power station, where David Cameron launched his election campaign and which has lain idle since 1982. Infrastructure investment that raises surrounding land values, such as Crossrail or a high-speed rail network, would pay for itself and thus escape short-sighted budget cuts. And unlike property taxes, people who do up their homes would not be penalised.
Taxing land values could also limit property bubbles — and the inevitable busts — without discouraging mobility (unlike stamp duty) or business investment (unlike interest rate rises). Relaxing planning restrictions, as Policy Exchange, the Prime Minister’s favourite think-tank, has suggested, would help too. The notion that we can all get rich by swapping more or less the same stock of houses at ever more inflated prices is a dangerous delusion. Property speculation diverts funds from productive investment in promising companies — and when the bubble bursts, the economy plunges into recession, home-owners are stranded with huge debts and banks laid low by bad loans seek bailouts from taxpayers. Isn’t it time we learnt from our mistakes?
Above all, a land tax would be fair. Land in Britain is parcelled out more unequally than in Brazil: 0.3 per cent of the population owns 69 per cent of the land. The country’s biggest private landowner, the Duke of Buccleuch, owns 277,000 acres, not because of his talent or industry, but because his ancestors seized vast swaths of Scotland.
These “land monopolists” — as Churchill dubbed them — get richer not through their own efforts, but that of others. The Duke of Westminster owns 300 acres of what was once fields and is now London’s priciest real estate — Mayfair and Belgravia. And because so many people have established thriving businesses in the capital, that inheritance is now worth billions of pounds. Surely it would be better to tax that windfall gain, rather than the employees and entrepreneurs who generate it?
For sure, farmers and big landowners would kick up a mighty fuss. But since the typical family of four shells out £750 a year to farmers in higher taxes and food prices because of the Common Agricultural Policy, which also inflates land prices, it’s only fair to claw some of that back. And while landowners would point to the impact on a poor granny in a big house — a bogus argument that Churchill called the “poor widow bogey” — she wouldn’t be forced out of her home; her tax bill could be deferred, or she could even be exempted.
Source: Philippe Legrain, The Times
Faced with a national crisis, who better to turn to for advice than Winston Churchill? A century ago, the great man — who, like the present coalition, was both Liberal and Conservative — advocated introducing a land tax as part of a bold package of fiscal reforms. In his emergency Budget on June 22, the Chancellor should set up a commission to consider how best to implement that recommendation.
Taxing land values would be a fair way to help to plug the budget gap while stabilising — and even boosting — the economy. Land is routinely valued each year as property changes hands. With all the land in Britain worth perhaps £5 trillion, a 0.5 per cent levy could raise £25 billion a year — as much as a five-point rise in income tax.
Neither tenants nor leaseholders would pay a penny; only freeholders and landlords would, with the owner of a large estate paying a higher rate than someone who owns a small suburban semi. The proceeds could be used to cut the deficit and national insurance, creating jobs, boosting take-home pay and stimulating growth. Over time, the aim would be to shift the tax burden off hard-working families and on to idle landlords — as in Hong Kong, where revenues from land taxes keep income tax low, there is no VAT or capital gains tax, and enterprise flourishes.
When the Government taxes successful effort, people strive less — some work less, others don’t bother setting up a business, a few relocate overseas — and since hiring is more expensive, fewer jobs are created. But taxing land wouldn’t crimp economic activity, as Adam Smith explained in The Wealth of Nations. It wouldn’t reduce the supply of land, which can’t be spirited away to a tax haven. And it wouldn’t push up rents, which depend on what tenants are prepared to pay rather than landlords’ expenses.
A land tax would actually encourage development. Since it would be payable irrespective of how land is used, it would stimulate the regeneration of derelict sites — such as Battersea power station, where David Cameron launched his election campaign and which has lain idle since 1982. Infrastructure investment that raises surrounding land values, such as Crossrail or a high-speed rail network, would pay for itself and thus escape short-sighted budget cuts. And unlike property taxes, people who do up their homes would not be penalised.
Taxing land values could also limit property bubbles — and the inevitable busts — without discouraging mobility (unlike stamp duty) or business investment (unlike interest rate rises). Relaxing planning restrictions, as Policy Exchange, the Prime Minister’s favourite think-tank, has suggested, would help too. The notion that we can all get rich by swapping more or less the same stock of houses at ever more inflated prices is a dangerous delusion. Property speculation diverts funds from productive investment in promising companies — and when the bubble bursts, the economy plunges into recession, home-owners are stranded with huge debts and banks laid low by bad loans seek bailouts from taxpayers. Isn’t it time we learnt from our mistakes?
Above all, a land tax would be fair. Land in Britain is parcelled out more unequally than in Brazil: 0.3 per cent of the population owns 69 per cent of the land. The country’s biggest private landowner, the Duke of Buccleuch, owns 277,000 acres, not because of his talent or industry, but because his ancestors seized vast swaths of Scotland.
These “land monopolists” — as Churchill dubbed them — get richer not through their own efforts, but that of others. The Duke of Westminster owns 300 acres of what was once fields and is now London’s priciest real estate — Mayfair and Belgravia. And because so many people have established thriving businesses in the capital, that inheritance is now worth billions of pounds. Surely it would be better to tax that windfall gain, rather than the employees and entrepreneurs who generate it?
For sure, farmers and big landowners would kick up a mighty fuss. But since the typical family of four shells out £750 a year to farmers in higher taxes and food prices because of the Common Agricultural Policy, which also inflates land prices, it’s only fair to claw some of that back. And while landowners would point to the impact on a poor granny in a big house — a bogus argument that Churchill called the “poor widow bogey” — she wouldn’t be forced out of her home; her tax bill could be deferred, or she could even be exempted.
Source: Philippe Legrain, The Times
Tuesday 15 June 2010
Gulf oil chasm - 'a cavern the size of Mount Everest'
This is the most frightening thing I have read in a long time:
The Obama Administration and senior BP officials are frantically working not to stop the world’s worst oil disaster, but to hide the true extent of the actual ecological catastrophe. Senior researchers tell us that the BP drilling hit one of the oil migration channels and that the leakage could continue for years unless decisive steps are undertaken, something that seems far from the present strategy.
In a recent discussion, Vladimir Kutcherov, Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and the Russian State University of Oil and Gas, predicted that the present oil spill flooding the Gulf Coast shores of the United States “could go on for years and years … many years.” 1
According to Kutcherov, a leading specialist in the theory of abiogenic deep origin of petroleum, “What BP drilled into was what we call a ‘migration channel,’ a deep fault on which hydrocarbons generated in the depth of our planet migrate to the crust and are accumulated in rocks, something like Ghawar in Saudi Arabia.” Ghawar, the world’s most prolific oilfield, has been producing millions of barrels daily for almost 70 years with no end in sight. According to the abiotic science, Ghawar like all elephant and giant oil and gas deposits all over the world, is located on a migration channel similar to that in the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico.
As I wrote at the time of the January 2010 Haiti earthquake disaster, Haiti had been identified as having potentially huge hydrocasrbon reserves, as has neighboring Cuba. Kutcherov estimates that the entire Gulf of Mexico is one of the planet’s most abundant accessible locations to extract oil and gas, at least before the Deepwater Horizon event this April.
“In my view the heads of BP reacted with panic at the scale of the oil spewing out of the well,” Kutcherov adds. “What is inexplicable at this point is why they are trying one thing, failing, then trying a second, failing, then a third. Given the scale of the disaster they should try every conceivable option, even if it is ten, all at once in hope one works. Otherwise, this oil source could spew oil for years given the volumes coming to the surface already.”
He stresses, “It is difficult to estimate how big this leakage is. There is no objective information available.” But taking into consideration information about the last BP ‘giant’ discovery in the Gulf of Mexico, the Tiber field, some six miles deep, Kutcherov agrees with Ira Leifer a researcher in the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara who says the oil may be gushing out at a rate of more than 100,000 barrels a day.5
What the enormity of the oil spill does is to also further discredit clearly the oil companies’ myth of “peak oil” which claims that the world is at or near the “peak” of economical oil extraction. That myth, which has been propagated in recent years by circles close to former oilman and Bush Vice President, Dick Cheney, has been effectively used by the giant oil majors to justify far higher oil prices than would be politically possible otherwise, by claiming a non-existent petroleum scarcity crisis.
Read more
The Obama Administration and senior BP officials are frantically working not to stop the world’s worst oil disaster, but to hide the true extent of the actual ecological catastrophe. Senior researchers tell us that the BP drilling hit one of the oil migration channels and that the leakage could continue for years unless decisive steps are undertaken, something that seems far from the present strategy.
In a recent discussion, Vladimir Kutcherov, Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and the Russian State University of Oil and Gas, predicted that the present oil spill flooding the Gulf Coast shores of the United States “could go on for years and years … many years.” 1
According to Kutcherov, a leading specialist in the theory of abiogenic deep origin of petroleum, “What BP drilled into was what we call a ‘migration channel,’ a deep fault on which hydrocarbons generated in the depth of our planet migrate to the crust and are accumulated in rocks, something like Ghawar in Saudi Arabia.” Ghawar, the world’s most prolific oilfield, has been producing millions of barrels daily for almost 70 years with no end in sight. According to the abiotic science, Ghawar like all elephant and giant oil and gas deposits all over the world, is located on a migration channel similar to that in the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico.
As I wrote at the time of the January 2010 Haiti earthquake disaster, Haiti had been identified as having potentially huge hydrocasrbon reserves, as has neighboring Cuba. Kutcherov estimates that the entire Gulf of Mexico is one of the planet’s most abundant accessible locations to extract oil and gas, at least before the Deepwater Horizon event this April.
“In my view the heads of BP reacted with panic at the scale of the oil spewing out of the well,” Kutcherov adds. “What is inexplicable at this point is why they are trying one thing, failing, then trying a second, failing, then a third. Given the scale of the disaster they should try every conceivable option, even if it is ten, all at once in hope one works. Otherwise, this oil source could spew oil for years given the volumes coming to the surface already.”
He stresses, “It is difficult to estimate how big this leakage is. There is no objective information available.” But taking into consideration information about the last BP ‘giant’ discovery in the Gulf of Mexico, the Tiber field, some six miles deep, Kutcherov agrees with Ira Leifer a researcher in the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara who says the oil may be gushing out at a rate of more than 100,000 barrels a day.5
What the enormity of the oil spill does is to also further discredit clearly the oil companies’ myth of “peak oil” which claims that the world is at or near the “peak” of economical oil extraction. That myth, which has been propagated in recent years by circles close to former oilman and Bush Vice President, Dick Cheney, has been effectively used by the giant oil majors to justify far higher oil prices than would be politically possible otherwise, by claiming a non-existent petroleum scarcity crisis.
Read more
Kyrgyzstan - drug money behind violence
Kyrgyzstan is a country lacking any notable resource, living mostly on transfers from relatives who work in Russia (1 out of 5.5 million Kyrgyzs are doing unskilled jobs in the former metropolis). However since the crisis of 2008, remittances from Kyrgyz working in Russia have slowed to a trickle.
For some time the US rental payment for the base in Manas provided almost half of the national budget of the country. Ascar Akaev, the first president of Kyrgyzstan, once said: "Our mission is to survive until Russia gets richer".
Kyrgyzstan became the most notable hub for distribution of the Afghan drugs to Eurasian ‘markets’, a business that had multiplied in times under the NATO guardianship in Afghanistan since 2001. The town of Osh, the 'southern capital of Kyrgyzstan’ where the recent violence has been concentrated, has long ago become a major cross-point for the Great Heroin Way through non-controllable mountainous Tajik-Kyrgyz border and route to the north-west. Most likely the illicit profits proceeding from narco-trafficking were the main sources of spectacular enrichment of former President Bakiev’s clan during his presidency in 2005-2010. There were numerous signs that the very arrival of Kurmanbek Bakiev to power in March 2005 as a result of 'Tulip revolution’ was financed and supported by prosperous international narco-mafia. It is also notable that while in office Bakiev liquidated the Kyrgyz Anti-Drug Agency.
Rioters in Bishkek have been photographed armed with advanced US weaponry, which suggests somebody has been paying top dollar for equipment that is supposed to be for US forces in Afghanistan.
[Not sure if this is true]. It was only logical for the US establishment to use the services of narco-barons to overthrow Bakiev, who demanded from the US more and more pay-offs for his loyalty while engaging with Chinese and Russians on multimillion investments in Kyrgyz economy.
Source: Oriental Review
Monday 14 June 2010
BBC answers my complaint
Here is my reply from the BBC Complaints' Philip Young in relation to Today report on the massacre of nine activists on the Gaza flotila the day after the event. It does show that it is worth complaining, although by not saying when the reports he mentions were broadcast, he is not answering my specific complaint. If you do complain, use the BBC Trust guidelines.
Dear Mr Gill Reference 114615 Thank you for your e-mail. I understand you’re unhappy because you believe we didn’t feature a balanced report on BBC Radio 4 regarding the Freedom Flotilla aid convey after it was boarded by Israeli troops. The BBC strongly rejects allegations of bias for or against either Israel or the Palestinians. Impartiality is a cornerstone of our reporting and our editors and reporters are committed to achieving the highest of standards for our coverage of the Middle East. On this story we have been careful to report a range of perspectives. We have broadcast a number of interviews with both Palestinian and Israeli contributors and our correspondents have, for example, reported from Gaza and West Jerusalem as well as Istanbul. BBC News has given considerable coverage to the point of view of the activists on board the flotilla and that of Palestinians. For example, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mairead Corrigan was interviewed from one of the ships in the flotilla as well as relatives of people on board the ships. The founder of the Free Gaza movement, Dr Eyad Sarraj and Claudio Cordone from Amnesty International have also featured in our output. We carried an interview with Hasan Noworah, a British citizen (originally from Ramallah) and chairman of the Justice for Palestine Centre in Glasgow. He was on one of the ships in the convoy and after he returned to the UK he told us of the moment his ship was confronted by Israeli officials in international waters. Interviews with Palestinians have included the Palestinian human rights lawyer, Diana Buttu, the adviser to the Palestinian President ,Sabri Saidam; presidential aide Nabil Sha'ath; the Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council and senior member of Hamas, Aziz Duwaik; and Palestinian Legislative Council members Hanan Ashwarai and Mustafa Barghouti. Also to highlight the importance of the flotilla, the very departure of the aid vessels bound for Gaza was a global news story and we first covered it in the early hours of the morning on 27 May jointly on the BBC News Channel and World TV coverage. The script that morning read as follows: "The organisers of a flotilla of ships trying to deliver aid to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip say the boats have set sail from Cyprus. Between them, the boats are carrying about ten thousand tons of aid. Gaza has been under an Israeli blockade for the past three years, and Israel says it's ready to intercept the convoy and deport the activists. Jon Donnison reports from Gaza City." An hour later we interviewed our correspondent Jon Donnison live from Gaza about the flotilla. We can’t agree with your concerns of bias on this report, however I'd like to assure you that I've registered your complaint on our Audience Log. This is daily report of audience feedback which is circulated to BBC staff, including members of the BBC Executive board, channel controllers and other senior managers. The Audience Logs are seen as important documents that can help shape decisions on future BBC programmes and content. Once again, thank you for contacting us. Kind Regards Philip Young
Dear Mr Gill Reference 114615 Thank you for your e-mail. I understand you’re unhappy because you believe we didn’t feature a balanced report on BBC Radio 4 regarding the Freedom Flotilla aid convey after it was boarded by Israeli troops. The BBC strongly rejects allegations of bias for or against either Israel or the Palestinians. Impartiality is a cornerstone of our reporting and our editors and reporters are committed to achieving the highest of standards for our coverage of the Middle East. On this story we have been careful to report a range of perspectives. We have broadcast a number of interviews with both Palestinian and Israeli contributors and our correspondents have, for example, reported from Gaza and West Jerusalem as well as Istanbul. BBC News has given considerable coverage to the point of view of the activists on board the flotilla and that of Palestinians. For example, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mairead Corrigan was interviewed from one of the ships in the flotilla as well as relatives of people on board the ships. The founder of the Free Gaza movement, Dr Eyad Sarraj and Claudio Cordone from Amnesty International have also featured in our output. We carried an interview with Hasan Noworah, a British citizen (originally from Ramallah) and chairman of the Justice for Palestine Centre in Glasgow. He was on one of the ships in the convoy and after he returned to the UK he told us of the moment his ship was confronted by Israeli officials in international waters. Interviews with Palestinians have included the Palestinian human rights lawyer, Diana Buttu, the adviser to the Palestinian President ,Sabri Saidam; presidential aide Nabil Sha'ath; the Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council and senior member of Hamas, Aziz Duwaik; and Palestinian Legislative Council members Hanan Ashwarai and Mustafa Barghouti. Also to highlight the importance of the flotilla, the very departure of the aid vessels bound for Gaza was a global news story and we first covered it in the early hours of the morning on 27 May jointly on the BBC News Channel and World TV coverage. The script that morning read as follows: "The organisers of a flotilla of ships trying to deliver aid to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip say the boats have set sail from Cyprus. Between them, the boats are carrying about ten thousand tons of aid. Gaza has been under an Israeli blockade for the past three years, and Israel says it's ready to intercept the convoy and deport the activists. Jon Donnison reports from Gaza City." An hour later we interviewed our correspondent Jon Donnison live from Gaza about the flotilla. We can’t agree with your concerns of bias on this report, however I'd like to assure you that I've registered your complaint on our Audience Log. This is daily report of audience feedback which is circulated to BBC staff, including members of the BBC Executive board, channel controllers and other senior managers. The Audience Logs are seen as important documents that can help shape decisions on future BBC programmes and content. Once again, thank you for contacting us. Kind Regards Philip Young
Friday 11 June 2010
Dutch election results - right wins
As ever with news reports about foreign elections, they tend to focus on the mainstream parties' results and the far right. The far right has been big news at least since the NF in France began its rise in the early 90s. By contrast, upswings on the far left tend to be ignored. In France in 2002 the far left candidates won 20% of the vote between them. In Germany Die Link ("The Left") was on almost 10% until recently - they were actually big news for a while. By contrast the rise of the Dutch Socialists has never really become a 'sexy' story, perhaps because Holland's new rightwing anti-immigrant politicians were better at grabbing headlines. The assassination of Pim Fortyn was obviously a very big story in 2002. Now we have the Freedom Party and another charismatic rightwing leader, Geert Wilders, who was banned from Britain a couple of years ago because of his extreme views. Now the Freedom Party has the third largest number of seats, 24, while the third party in the last parliament, the Socialists, lost ten seats, falling back to 15. Although the Christian democrats lost 20 seats, overall the right won 50% of the vote, with the rightwing Liberals now on 31 seats. Labour did pretty well for opposing further commitment to the war in Afghanistan and breaking up the Labour-Christian Democrat coalition. However they probably will not be happy with this result, and may have to form a coalition with the Liberals. The Greens gained 3 seats, meaning overall the leftwing parties got 28 seats, down from 35 in 2006. Labour got 31, down 3. The social liberals, Democrats66, gained 7 seats giving them 10 seats, a massive upswing in support.
Results
Partij Afk. Aantal % +/- Zetels
Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie VVD 1902891 20,45% +5,78% 31 +9
Partij van de Arbeid PvdA 1823542 19,60% -1,60% 30 -3
Partij voor de Vrijheid PVV 1438706 15,46% +9,57% 24 +15
Christen-Democratisch Appèl CDA 1273839 13,69% -12,82% 21 -20
Socialistische Partij SP 918150 9,87% -6,71% 15 -10
Democraten 66 D66 641529 6,89% +4,93% 10 +7
GroenLinks GrLinks 617352 6,63% +2,03% 10 +3
ChristenUnie CU 303529 3,26% -0,71% 5 -1
Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij SGP 163034 1,75% +0,19% 2 0
Partij voor de Dieren PvdD 120490 1,29% -0,53% 2 0
Totaal geldige stemmen 9305647 150
Results
Partij Afk. Aantal % +/- Zetels
Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie VVD 1902891 20,45% +5,78% 31 +9
Partij van de Arbeid PvdA 1823542 19,60% -1,60% 30 -3
Partij voor de Vrijheid PVV 1438706 15,46% +9,57% 24 +15
Christen-Democratisch Appèl CDA 1273839 13,69% -12,82% 21 -20
Socialistische Partij SP 918150 9,87% -6,71% 15 -10
Democraten 66 D66 641529 6,89% +4,93% 10 +7
GroenLinks GrLinks 617352 6,63% +2,03% 10 +3
ChristenUnie CU 303529 3,26% -0,71% 5 -1
Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij SGP 163034 1,75% +0,19% 2 0
Partij voor de Dieren PvdD 120490 1,29% -0,53% 2 0
Totaal geldige stemmen 9305647 150
Thursday 10 June 2010
Iran, WMDs and the Green movement
This comment on a Guardian article about the Iranian Green movement makes a lot of sense. You would have thought that the Iraq war had taught the neocons and their media friends something about imposing sanctions for non-existent WMDs or alleged support for democracy in the Middle East. Apparently not. One can be opposed to the brutal repression by Iran's regime without supporting the policy of sanctions over Iran's nuclear development. Iran does not have a bomb, unlike Israel, the USA and the UK, who all fail to comply with the NPT treaty.
"The stolen election"
Even Robert Fisk finally admitted that Ahmadinejad won:
"But few news organisations have the facilities or the time or the money to travel around this 659,278 square-mile country – seven times the size of Britain – and interview even the tiniest fraction of its 71 million people. When I visited the slums of south Tehran on Friday, for example, I found that the number of Ahmadinejad supporters grew as Mousavi's support dribbled away. And I wondered whether, across the huge cities and vast deserts of Iran, a similar phenomenon might be discovered. A Channel 4 television crew, to its great credit, went down to Isfahan and the villages around that beautiful city and came back with a suspicion – unprovable, of course, anecdotal, but real – that Ahmadinejad just might have won the election.
"This is also my suspicion: that Ahmadinejad might have scraped in, but not with the huge majority he was awarded."
When will you people learn that these lies will get you nowhere? Where are the media shills who peddled the WMD lies about Iraq now? Disgraced and discredited, forced to bench their media careers and sell their services on the right-wing talk circuit. Is that where Timothy Garton Ash wants to end up?
Iran has no nukes - it was tempted, but decided it wasn't worth it. Iran's leader has popular support. Mousavi - nobody knows who he is outside of Tehran. The Yanks' real beef with Iran has nothing to do with either nukes or democracy. The neocons were warned before they went ahead and demolished Iraq that doing so would empower Iran, which it has. Now the Yanks and Arab states are terrified of a Shiite revolution, one that has already taken place in Lebanon (thanks to Israel's serial invasions) and Iraq (thanks to the Yanks), where Sunnis have been ethnically cleansed out of power and their homes. That's why the Yanks, Israel, and Sunni Arab states all see eye-to-eye when it comes to putting the screws on Iran and its proxies, like Hamas and Hezbollah.
"The stolen election"
Even Robert Fisk finally admitted that Ahmadinejad won:
"But few news organisations have the facilities or the time or the money to travel around this 659,278 square-mile country – seven times the size of Britain – and interview even the tiniest fraction of its 71 million people. When I visited the slums of south Tehran on Friday, for example, I found that the number of Ahmadinejad supporters grew as Mousavi's support dribbled away. And I wondered whether, across the huge cities and vast deserts of Iran, a similar phenomenon might be discovered. A Channel 4 television crew, to its great credit, went down to Isfahan and the villages around that beautiful city and came back with a suspicion – unprovable, of course, anecdotal, but real – that Ahmadinejad just might have won the election.
"This is also my suspicion: that Ahmadinejad might have scraped in, but not with the huge majority he was awarded."
When will you people learn that these lies will get you nowhere? Where are the media shills who peddled the WMD lies about Iraq now? Disgraced and discredited, forced to bench their media careers and sell their services on the right-wing talk circuit. Is that where Timothy Garton Ash wants to end up?
Iran has no nukes - it was tempted, but decided it wasn't worth it. Iran's leader has popular support. Mousavi - nobody knows who he is outside of Tehran. The Yanks' real beef with Iran has nothing to do with either nukes or democracy. The neocons were warned before they went ahead and demolished Iraq that doing so would empower Iran, which it has. Now the Yanks and Arab states are terrified of a Shiite revolution, one that has already taken place in Lebanon (thanks to Israel's serial invasions) and Iraq (thanks to the Yanks), where Sunnis have been ethnically cleansed out of power and their homes. That's why the Yanks, Israel, and Sunni Arab states all see eye-to-eye when it comes to putting the screws on Iran and its proxies, like Hamas and Hezbollah.
Dutch elections
You don't have to look as far as Latin America for an example of a successful radical left party. Just hundreds of miles from the UK, the Dutch Socialist Party became the third biggest party in Parliament in the last 2006 elections. Since then the Dutch Labour party has had to constantly look to its left, something that New Labour in Britain hardly ever had to do. There maybe a lesson here for the British Greens, who now have an MP. The Dutch Socialists were formed from the New Left of the late 1960s/early 1970s. In this week's election it is likely they will lose seats. Their current 25 may fall as low as 9 as the Dutch far right make gains. However, the lesson is there that extrparliamentary social movements, which is what the DSP is, can make inroads into mainstream politics as long as they don't forget their roots and become simply a parliamentary talking shop.
Read more
Read more
Wednesday 9 June 2010
He who pays the piper - the payback
Prior to 1988, President George W. Bush is a failed oilman. Three times, friends and investors have bailed him out to keep his business from going bankrupt. However, in 1988, the same year his father becomes president, some Saudis buy a portion of his small company, Harken, which has never performed work outside of Texas. Later in the year, Harken wins a contract in the Persian Gulf and starts doing well financially. These transactions seem so suspicious that the Wall Street Journal in 1991 states it “raises the question of… an effort to cozy up to a presidential son.” Two major investors in Bush’s company during this time are Salem bin Laden and Khalid bin Mahfouz. Salem bin Laden dies in a plane crash in Texas in 1988. [Intelligence Newsletter, 3/2/2000; Salon, 11/19/2001] Salem bin Laden is Osama’s oldest brother; Khalid bin Mahfouz is a Saudi banker with a 20 percent stake in BCCI, the bank that uses Saudi and drug money to fund terrorism and the CIA also uses to fund covert operations. The bank will be shut down a few years later and bin Mahfouz will have to pay a $225 million fine (while admitting no wrongdoing) (see October 10, 2001)). [Forbes, 3/18/2002].
October 10, 2001: A 70-page French intelligence report claims: “The financial network of [Osama] bin Laden, as well as his network of investments, is similar to the network put in place in the 1980s by BCCI for its fraudulent operations, often with the same people (former directors and cadres of the bank and its affiliates, arms merchants, oil merchants, Saudi investors). The dominant trait of bin Laden’s operations is that of a terrorist network backed up by a vast financial structure.” The BCCI was the largest Islamic bank in the world before it collapsed in July 1991 (see July 5, 1991). A senior US investigator will later say US agencies are looking into the ties outlined by the French because “they just make so much sense, and so few people from BCCI ever went to jail. BCCI was the mother and father of terrorist financing operations.” The report identifies dozens of companies and individuals who were involved with BCCI and were found to be dealing with bin Laden after the bank collapsed. Many went on to work in banks and charities identified by the US and others as supporting al-Qaeda. About six ex-BCCI figures are repeatedly named, including Saudi multi-millionaire Ghaith Pharaon (see October 10, 2001). The role of Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz in supporting bin Laden is emphasized in the report. In 1995, bin Mahfouz paid a $225 million fine in a settlement with US prosecutors for his role in the BCCI scandal. [Washington Post, 2/17/2002] Bin Laden lost money when BCCI was shut down, but may have benefited in the long term as other militants began relying on his financial network instead of BCCI’s (see July 1991 and After July 1991).
October 10, 2001: A 70-page French intelligence report claims: “The financial network of [Osama] bin Laden, as well as his network of investments, is similar to the network put in place in the 1980s by BCCI for its fraudulent operations, often with the same people (former directors and cadres of the bank and its affiliates, arms merchants, oil merchants, Saudi investors). The dominant trait of bin Laden’s operations is that of a terrorist network backed up by a vast financial structure.” The BCCI was the largest Islamic bank in the world before it collapsed in July 1991 (see July 5, 1991). A senior US investigator will later say US agencies are looking into the ties outlined by the French because “they just make so much sense, and so few people from BCCI ever went to jail. BCCI was the mother and father of terrorist financing operations.” The report identifies dozens of companies and individuals who were involved with BCCI and were found to be dealing with bin Laden after the bank collapsed. Many went on to work in banks and charities identified by the US and others as supporting al-Qaeda. About six ex-BCCI figures are repeatedly named, including Saudi multi-millionaire Ghaith Pharaon (see October 10, 2001). The role of Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz in supporting bin Laden is emphasized in the report. In 1995, bin Mahfouz paid a $225 million fine in a settlement with US prosecutors for his role in the BCCI scandal. [Washington Post, 2/17/2002] Bin Laden lost money when BCCI was shut down, but may have benefited in the long term as other militants began relying on his financial network instead of BCCI’s (see July 1991 and After July 1991).
The drugs-intelligence-terror complex
I should apologies for all this faintly 'old' stuff about 911 and George Bush, but I want to record it in one place, as one of millions trying to understand the last decade. This memo from FB whistleblower Coleen Rowley to FBI director Robert Mueller is part of the jigsaw.
I have followed the various 911truth arguments and I have moved away from the missing planes and the demolition theories toward a more plausible conspiracy. It does not deny that WTC7 still looks very much like a controlled demolition. But a flaw in the claims that the Towers could not have collapsed due to fire only, is that they didn't. Both were hit by large jet aircraft, so to compare like with like, one has to compare the collapse of the Towers with like incidents of steel-frame buildings being hit by planes - that's right, there are very few!
Moreover, it seems to me that a lot of the energy has been expended to little effect in trying to prove the highly improbable - that Flight 77 at the Pentagon was 'disappeared' or that buildings were demolished without any eyewitnesses, evidence or whistleblowers coming forward.
On the other hand, following the money to Florida flight schools, the Saudis and Bush family history, you come to the conclusion that a criminal conspiracy involving an intricate global network was behind 911, and it involved a lot of people besides VP Cheney. The Saudi-Bush-Cheney links go back a long way, as does a history of US complicity and involvement in a network supporting global terrorism.
Rowley's memo suggests that elements of the FBI wanted to prevent the terrorist plot from being foiled. This has happened many times before, dating back to the stymying of investigations into BCCI and terrorism in the 1980s and the Bosnia connection in the 1990s.
The probable conspiracy is that senior government officials knew of the plot and did nothing, because the network behind it is 'untouchable' and is closely connected to the US intelligence agencies and their shadows in the underworld of international criminal finance. Perhaps the whole thing should be called the drugs-intelligence-terror complex. There is also the fact that Saudi pilots were being trained on US military facilities and flight schools in the run-up to 911 - and that all the remaining high-level Saudis connected to this programme and plot were then flown out of the country in the wake of 911, bypassing the flight ban in place. Meanwhile the Pakistani ISI was implicated in terrorist funding and training while their boss was hanging out in Washington with the intelligence and security establishment and was embraced by them.
According to the other well-known FBI whistleblower Sibil Edmonds, Condoleeza Rice lied about the US not knowing a terror plot involving hijacked aircraft was imminent. Most of the world intelligence community seemed to know about it, including the Israelis, the French and Russians. Nothing was done, even after the authorities knew hijacked planes were in the air.
This, combined with the known ties between the President and Saudis, including the Bin Ladens, at Riggs Bank and going back to BCCI, is the substance of a credible conspiracy that has never been answered by an independent investigation. The 'too many must have known' argument does not hold with this conspiracy since some have already bravely come forward, while comparatively few people would need to be involved, and most of them are either foreign nationals or people directly involved in the criminal-drug-terror network behind the attacks. People made millions out of this - and were also culpable directly or indirectly for the attacks - and so have good reasons, alongside fear of reprisals, for remaining silent.
And this has happened before. Look at how our security services stood by while Pakistanii-Saudi-CIA criminal bank BCCI funded terrorism all over the world until it collapsed in 1991.
I have followed the various 911truth arguments and I have moved away from the missing planes and the demolition theories toward a more plausible conspiracy. It does not deny that WTC7 still looks very much like a controlled demolition. But a flaw in the claims that the Towers could not have collapsed due to fire only, is that they didn't. Both were hit by large jet aircraft, so to compare like with like, one has to compare the collapse of the Towers with like incidents of steel-frame buildings being hit by planes - that's right, there are very few!
Moreover, it seems to me that a lot of the energy has been expended to little effect in trying to prove the highly improbable - that Flight 77 at the Pentagon was 'disappeared' or that buildings were demolished without any eyewitnesses, evidence or whistleblowers coming forward.
On the other hand, following the money to Florida flight schools, the Saudis and Bush family history, you come to the conclusion that a criminal conspiracy involving an intricate global network was behind 911, and it involved a lot of people besides VP Cheney. The Saudi-Bush-Cheney links go back a long way, as does a history of US complicity and involvement in a network supporting global terrorism.
Rowley's memo suggests that elements of the FBI wanted to prevent the terrorist plot from being foiled. This has happened many times before, dating back to the stymying of investigations into BCCI and terrorism in the 1980s and the Bosnia connection in the 1990s.
The probable conspiracy is that senior government officials knew of the plot and did nothing, because the network behind it is 'untouchable' and is closely connected to the US intelligence agencies and their shadows in the underworld of international criminal finance. Perhaps the whole thing should be called the drugs-intelligence-terror complex. There is also the fact that Saudi pilots were being trained on US military facilities and flight schools in the run-up to 911 - and that all the remaining high-level Saudis connected to this programme and plot were then flown out of the country in the wake of 911, bypassing the flight ban in place. Meanwhile the Pakistani ISI was implicated in terrorist funding and training while their boss was hanging out in Washington with the intelligence and security establishment and was embraced by them.
According to the other well-known FBI whistleblower Sibil Edmonds, Condoleeza Rice lied about the US not knowing a terror plot involving hijacked aircraft was imminent. Most of the world intelligence community seemed to know about it, including the Israelis, the French and Russians. Nothing was done, even after the authorities knew hijacked planes were in the air.
This, combined with the known ties between the President and Saudis, including the Bin Ladens, at Riggs Bank and going back to BCCI, is the substance of a credible conspiracy that has never been answered by an independent investigation. The 'too many must have known' argument does not hold with this conspiracy since some have already bravely come forward, while comparatively few people would need to be involved, and most of them are either foreign nationals or people directly involved in the criminal-drug-terror network behind the attacks. People made millions out of this - and were also culpable directly or indirectly for the attacks - and so have good reasons, alongside fear of reprisals, for remaining silent.
And this has happened before. Look at how our security services stood by while Pakistanii-Saudi-CIA criminal bank BCCI funded terrorism all over the world until it collapsed in 1991.
Capitalist Destruction or New Civilization?
The most serious aspect of the crisis facing the global capitalist system is not the bankruptcy of financial corporations, or the global economic downturn, or the discrediting of its institutions of political control. The greatest threat to the continuity of the capitalist mode of production is the environmental crisis caused by the irrational destruction of nature, to the point of jeopardizing the ability of self-regeneration of the ecosystems on which our survival depends.
For many analysts, however, a new long cycle of economic growth would be able to take off thanks to the efforts of countries like China and India, now converted into more desirable markets for transnational capital because of their abundant and “unregulated” cheap labor.
What analysts often do not reveal is that the high rate of GDP growth in China is misleading if one takes into account that the figures do not include the serious environmental and social liabilities generated by the “market socialism” adopted by this nation since 1979. Indeed, since the late nineties, “the World Bank estimated that pollution cost the country the equivalent of 8% of its annual production. That is, the enviable growth in China (...) is almost offset by hidden environmental [and social] costs, such as reduced life expectancy and declining arable land.”[1]
The economies of China and India will be forced to include in their accounting, sooner or later, the huge economic losses caused by global warming and climate disasters, depletion and water pollution, deforestation and desertification of soils, chemical pollution of food, declining wild fish stocks, the mass extinction of plant and animal species, depletion and scarcity of renewable energies, overpopulation and pollution in cities, migration and pandemics. Each and every one of these environmental liabilities must be paid, on time, for all humanity.
The invoices generated by climate change, for example, have already begun to alarm some sectors of financial capitalism, such as insurance companies. In 2000 a group of researchers led by Andrew Dlugolecki, belonging to CGMU Insurance Group (the largest insurance group in Britain), published a report according to which the property damage caused by global climate change showed a growth rate of 10% annually. If this trend continues, by the year 2065 the upward curve of losses will surpass Gross World Product growth, estimated at 3% annually. This means that the magnitude of the damage caused by the greenhouse effect that year will be identical to the volume of all the wealth produced on the planet. According Dlugolecki, long before the two lines intersect, the global economy will become bankrupt.[2]
Given this evidence, there is increasing uncertainty as to the possibility that capitalism (powered by China, the U.S., or both) will reach a new cycle of expansion similar to what occurred between 1945 and 1970. Similarly, it is absurd to think that it is feasible to transform the prevailing social relations of production and build a new society that is truly equitable, participatory, and sustainable, using the same energy patterns, technology and products developed over the past three centuries by the system of domination it aims to transform.
This apparent impasse does not mean that we are doomed to barbarism or that we reject outright the entire scientific and technological legacy of modernity. What corresponds to this dilemma is to be cautious against the risk of shipwreck, which would be any alternative socio-political project, to be led by the compulsive desire for reproduction of productive forces deployed by capitalism, without a critical assessment of its ecological, social, political and cultural effects. Do not forget that the stranglehold on political democracy and workers’ management caused by giving priority to technology and arms competition with the West was one of the fundamental causes of the collapse or involution of the most important trials of the Twentieth Century socialists.
Read more
For many analysts, however, a new long cycle of economic growth would be able to take off thanks to the efforts of countries like China and India, now converted into more desirable markets for transnational capital because of their abundant and “unregulated” cheap labor.
What analysts often do not reveal is that the high rate of GDP growth in China is misleading if one takes into account that the figures do not include the serious environmental and social liabilities generated by the “market socialism” adopted by this nation since 1979. Indeed, since the late nineties, “the World Bank estimated that pollution cost the country the equivalent of 8% of its annual production. That is, the enviable growth in China (...) is almost offset by hidden environmental [and social] costs, such as reduced life expectancy and declining arable land.”[1]
The economies of China and India will be forced to include in their accounting, sooner or later, the huge economic losses caused by global warming and climate disasters, depletion and water pollution, deforestation and desertification of soils, chemical pollution of food, declining wild fish stocks, the mass extinction of plant and animal species, depletion and scarcity of renewable energies, overpopulation and pollution in cities, migration and pandemics. Each and every one of these environmental liabilities must be paid, on time, for all humanity.
The invoices generated by climate change, for example, have already begun to alarm some sectors of financial capitalism, such as insurance companies. In 2000 a group of researchers led by Andrew Dlugolecki, belonging to CGMU Insurance Group (the largest insurance group in Britain), published a report according to which the property damage caused by global climate change showed a growth rate of 10% annually. If this trend continues, by the year 2065 the upward curve of losses will surpass Gross World Product growth, estimated at 3% annually. This means that the magnitude of the damage caused by the greenhouse effect that year will be identical to the volume of all the wealth produced on the planet. According Dlugolecki, long before the two lines intersect, the global economy will become bankrupt.[2]
Given this evidence, there is increasing uncertainty as to the possibility that capitalism (powered by China, the U.S., or both) will reach a new cycle of expansion similar to what occurred between 1945 and 1970. Similarly, it is absurd to think that it is feasible to transform the prevailing social relations of production and build a new society that is truly equitable, participatory, and sustainable, using the same energy patterns, technology and products developed over the past three centuries by the system of domination it aims to transform.
This apparent impasse does not mean that we are doomed to barbarism or that we reject outright the entire scientific and technological legacy of modernity. What corresponds to this dilemma is to be cautious against the risk of shipwreck, which would be any alternative socio-political project, to be led by the compulsive desire for reproduction of productive forces deployed by capitalism, without a critical assessment of its ecological, social, political and cultural effects. Do not forget that the stranglehold on political democracy and workers’ management caused by giving priority to technology and arms competition with the West was one of the fundamental causes of the collapse or involution of the most important trials of the Twentieth Century socialists.
Read more
Unlearnt lessons from 13 years of Labour
From Ross McKibben in London review of Books:
Brown accepted as proven what he was told by the City and its spokespersons in the media. He moved from what was perceived to be an electoral necessity – you can’t win elections if you alienate the City – to a belief that prevailing City opinion was right, that it was on the side of history. Much followed from this: light-touch regulation, a culture of remuneration that scandalised most of the country, a banking crisis, dithering in response to that crisis, a colossal bail-out of the banks with consequences that hang over the country’s finances, and then a failure to make the banks behave responsibly even when they were owned by the government. Brown, and Blair, and their colleagues, forgot a lesson most Labour leaders once learned at their mothers’ knee: when the ideologues of finance capital and the market come calling, you keep the door shut.
The next mistake was to embrace ‘choice’. The belief in choice followed naturally from a belief in the efficacy of the market, which was taken for granted by the people Labour ministers listened to. This had very damaging consequences both in education and in health. In education it predicated parental choice as the foundation of policy. It gave parents unique rights. But why should parents have such rights? In the jargon, education is a ‘social good’ not a ‘private good’. How and where our children are taught must be a collective not an individual decision; and that is the view of most parents. They want their children to get a good education, but they are prepared to let the professionals do it, as surveys have repeatedly confirmed. Despite this, the right to choose was thought paramount by New Labour and was to be encouraged by creating an array of different kinds of school where efficient parents could find what they wanted. Except, of course, that they couldn’t. Only some got their choice, and they were often the best connected, best informed. Attempts to correct this via lotteries only outraged the losers even more. Far from encouraging social harmony, choice encouraged a war of all against all. Far from solidifying the Labour vote, choice undermined it. And it left the way open for the Conservative Party’s silly proposals for ‘free schools’: parent-run, state-financed independent schools spuriously claimed to empower the poor.
...Labour now has time to repent at leisure. What should it do? Disowning its immediate past would be a good first step, but it has to elect a new leader and all the serious candidates are heavily implicated, for better or worse, in the New Labour ‘project’. One thing it is in no danger of doing is retreating into socialist rhetoric of the early 1980s variety, which is a relief. It could, of course, do nothing, since as the only opposition party it might expect to be the inevitable beneficiary of the coalition’s unpopularity. That would be risky. The coalition need not become unpopular, and even if it does the smaller parties could also benefit. Rather, Labour should emphasise the extent to which it is the party of public provision and collective life. It should also accept that the obsession with choice was a dead end, that the middle classes, aspirational or otherwise, do not always demand choice or pursue their own interests at the expense of everything else. All that choice has done is to create false markets in which there are as many losers as winners. Such markets do nothing to consolidate the Labour vote.
Then their is constitutional reform....Fundamentally, Labour has a Tory conception of the British state, which is why a Con-Lab government is not as mad an idea as it sounds. Bit by bit over its history Labour has come to accept the political institutions of the imperial state: monarchy, aristocracy, primitive electoral systems, independent nuclear weapons, the intelligence services (once thought the class enemy), the special relationship.
Read more
Brown accepted as proven what he was told by the City and its spokespersons in the media. He moved from what was perceived to be an electoral necessity – you can’t win elections if you alienate the City – to a belief that prevailing City opinion was right, that it was on the side of history. Much followed from this: light-touch regulation, a culture of remuneration that scandalised most of the country, a banking crisis, dithering in response to that crisis, a colossal bail-out of the banks with consequences that hang over the country’s finances, and then a failure to make the banks behave responsibly even when they were owned by the government. Brown, and Blair, and their colleagues, forgot a lesson most Labour leaders once learned at their mothers’ knee: when the ideologues of finance capital and the market come calling, you keep the door shut.
The next mistake was to embrace ‘choice’. The belief in choice followed naturally from a belief in the efficacy of the market, which was taken for granted by the people Labour ministers listened to. This had very damaging consequences both in education and in health. In education it predicated parental choice as the foundation of policy. It gave parents unique rights. But why should parents have such rights? In the jargon, education is a ‘social good’ not a ‘private good’. How and where our children are taught must be a collective not an individual decision; and that is the view of most parents. They want their children to get a good education, but they are prepared to let the professionals do it, as surveys have repeatedly confirmed. Despite this, the right to choose was thought paramount by New Labour and was to be encouraged by creating an array of different kinds of school where efficient parents could find what they wanted. Except, of course, that they couldn’t. Only some got their choice, and they were often the best connected, best informed. Attempts to correct this via lotteries only outraged the losers even more. Far from encouraging social harmony, choice encouraged a war of all against all. Far from solidifying the Labour vote, choice undermined it. And it left the way open for the Conservative Party’s silly proposals for ‘free schools’: parent-run, state-financed independent schools spuriously claimed to empower the poor.
...Labour now has time to repent at leisure. What should it do? Disowning its immediate past would be a good first step, but it has to elect a new leader and all the serious candidates are heavily implicated, for better or worse, in the New Labour ‘project’. One thing it is in no danger of doing is retreating into socialist rhetoric of the early 1980s variety, which is a relief. It could, of course, do nothing, since as the only opposition party it might expect to be the inevitable beneficiary of the coalition’s unpopularity. That would be risky. The coalition need not become unpopular, and even if it does the smaller parties could also benefit. Rather, Labour should emphasise the extent to which it is the party of public provision and collective life. It should also accept that the obsession with choice was a dead end, that the middle classes, aspirational or otherwise, do not always demand choice or pursue their own interests at the expense of everything else. All that choice has done is to create false markets in which there are as many losers as winners. Such markets do nothing to consolidate the Labour vote.
Then their is constitutional reform....Fundamentally, Labour has a Tory conception of the British state, which is why a Con-Lab government is not as mad an idea as it sounds. Bit by bit over its history Labour has come to accept the political institutions of the imperial state: monarchy, aristocracy, primitive electoral systems, independent nuclear weapons, the intelligence services (once thought the class enemy), the special relationship.
Read more
Tuesday 8 June 2010
Bush's former oil company linked to Bin Laden family
In 2001 after 911, President Bush signed an executive order to freeze the US financial assets of corporations doing business with Osama bin Laden. He described the order as a "strike on the financial foundation of the global terror network."
"If you do business with terrorists, if you support or succor them, you will not do business with the United States," said President Bush.
He didn't say anything about doing business with a terrorist's brother - or his wealthy financier.
When President George W. Bush froze assets connected to Osama bin Laden, he didn't tell the American people that the terrorist mastermind's late brother was an investor in the president's former oil business in Texas. He also hasn't levelled with the American public about his financial connections to a host of Saudi characters involved in drug cartels, gun smuggling, and terrorist networks.
Doing business with the enemy is nothing new to the Bush family. Much of the Bush family wealth came from supplying needed raw materials and credit to Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. Several business operations managed by Prescott Bush - the president's grandfather - were seized by the US government during World War II under the Trading with the Enemy Act.
On October 20, 1942, the federal government seized the Union Banking Corporation in New York City as a front operation for the Nazis. Prescott Bush was a director. Bush, E. Roland Harriman, two Bush associates, and three Nazi executives owned the bank's shares. Eight days later, the Roosevelt administration seized two other corporations managed by Prescott Bush. The Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation, both managed by the Bush-Harriman bank, were accused by the US federal government of being front organizations for Hitler's Third Reich. Again, on November 8, 1942, the federal government seized Nazi-controlled assets of Silesian-American Corporation, another Bush-Harriman company doing business with Hitler.
Doing business with the bin Laden empire, therefore, is only the latest extension of the Bush family's financial ties to unsavory individuals and organizations. Now that thousands of American citizens have died in terrorist attacks and the nation is going to war, the American people should know about George W. Bush's relationship with the family of Osama bin Laden.
Salem bin Laden, Osama's older brother, was an investor in Arbusto Energy, the Texas oil company started by George W. Bush. Arbusto means "Bush" in Spanish. Salem bin Laden died in an airplane crash in Texas in 1988.
Sheik Mohammed bin Laden, the family patriarch and founder of its construction empire, also died in a plane crash. Upon his death in 1968, he left behind 57 sons and daughters - the offspring he sired with 12 wives in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. About a dozen brothers manage Bin Laden Brothers Construction - one of the largest construction firms in the Middle East.
Fresh out of Harvard Business School, young George W. Bush returned to Midland, TX, in the late 1970s to follow his father's footsteps in the oil business. Beginning in 1978, he set up a series of limited partnerships - Arbusto '78, Arbusto '79, and so on - to drill for oil.
One of President Bush's earliest financial backers was James Bath, a Houston aircraft broker. Bath served with President Bush in the Texas Air National Guard. Bath has a mysterious connection to the Central Intelligence Agency.
According to a 1976 trust agreement, Salem bin Laden appointed James Bath as his business representative in Houston. Revelation about Bath's relationship with the bin Laden financial empire and the CIA was made public in 1992 by Bill White, a former real estate business partner with Bath. White informed federal investigators in 1992 that Bath told him that he had assisted the CIA in a liaison role since 1976 - the same year former President George Herbert Walker Bush served as director of the CIA.
During a bitter legal fight between White and Bath, the real estate partner disclosed that Bath managed a portfolio worth millions of dollars for Sheik Khalid bin Mahfouz and other wealthy Saudis. Among the investments made by Bath with Mahfouz's money was the Houston Gulf Airport.
A powerful banker in Saudi Arabia, Mahfouz was one of the largest stockholders in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. BCCI was a corrupt global banking empire operating in 73 nations and was a major financial and political force in Washington, Paris, Geneva, London, and Hong Kong. Despite the appearance of a normal banking operation, BCCI was actually an international crime syndicate providing "banking services" to the Medellin drug cartel, Panama dictator Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, terrorist mastermind Abu Nidal, and Khun Sa, the heroin kingpin in Asia's Golden Triangle.
The BCCI scandal implicated some of the biggest political names in Washington - both Democrats and Republicans - during the first Bush White House. The bank was accused of laundering money for drug cartels, smuggling weapons to terrorists, and using Middle Eastern oil money to influence American politicians.
The chief of the Justice Department's criminal division under former President Bush was Robert Mueller. Because the major players came out of the scandal with slaps on the wrists, many critics accused Mueller of botching the investigation. Mr. Mueller was appointed by President George W. Bush as the Director of the FBI, replacing Louis Freeh.
The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a division of the Justice Department, reviewed allegations by Bill White in 1992 that James Bath funneled money from wealthy Middle Eastern businessmen to American companies to influence the policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations. Robert Mueller, the new FBI chief, was in a senior position at the Justice Department at the time of the review.
White told a Texas court in 1992 that Bath and the Justice Department had "blackballed" him professionally and financially because he refused to keep quiet about his knowledge of an Arab conspiracy to launder Middle Eastern money into the bank accounts of American businesses and politicians.
In sworn depositions, Bath admitted he represented four wealthy Saudi Arabian businessmen as a trustee. He also admitted he used his name on their investments and received, in return, a five- percent stake in their business deals.
Indeed, Texas tax documents revealed that Bath owned five percent of Arbusto '79 Ltd., and Arbusto '80 Ltd. Bush Exploration Company controlled the limited partnerships, the general partnership firm owned by young George W. Bush.
Although George W. Bush's Texas oil ventures were financial failures, his financial backers recovered their investments through a series of mergers and stock swaps. He changed Arbusto's name to Bush Exploration, then merged the new firm into Spectrum 7 Energy Corporation in 1984.
The Bush-controlled oil business eventually ended up being folded into Harken Energy Corp., a Dallas-based corporation. Mr. Bush joined Harken as a director in 1986 and was given 212,000 shares of Harken stock. Bush used his White House connections to land a lucrative contract for the obscure Harken Energy Corp. with the Middle Eastern government of Bahrain. On June 20, 1990, George W. Bush sold his Harken stock for $848,000 and paid off his loan he took out to buy his small share in the Texas Rangers. The Bahrain deal was brokered by David Edwards, a close pal to Bill Clinton and a former employee of Stephens Inc. Shortly after Bush sold his stock, Harken's fortunes nose-dived when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Some critics claim young George was tipped off in advance by his father about the soon-coming Gulf War.
George W. Bush, however, worked wonders for Harken Energy Corp. before the stock collapse. Using the Bush family name, he managed to bring much-needed capital investment to the struggling firm. George W. Bush traveled to Little Rock, AR, to attend a meeting with Jackson Stephens - a powerful Arkansas tycoon who help bankroll the state campaigns of young Bill Clinton. He first gained political prominence as a fund-raiser for President Jimmy Carter. Stephens was also deeply involved in the BCCI scandal by helping the corrupt bank take control of First American Bank in Washington, DC.
Jack Stephens didn't need an introduction to young George W. Bush. Mary Anne Stephens, his wife, managed Vice President George Bush's 1988 presidential campaign in Arkansas. Stephens Inc., the well connected brokerage firm owned by Jack Stephens, donated $100,000 to a Bush campaign fundraising dinner in 1991. When George W. Bush won the contested Florida election in 2000, Jack Stephens made a substantial contribution to the Bush inauguration. Former President Bush played golf on April 11, 2001, with Jack Stephens at the Jack Stephens Youth Golf Academy in Little Rock. The former president told Stephens, "Jack, we love you and we are very, very grateful for what you have done."
Perhaps the former president was thanking him for the money Stephens provided young George W. Bush. Stephens arranged for a $25 million investment from the Union des Banques Suisses. The Swiss Bank held the minority interest in the Banque de Commerce et de Placements, a Geneva-based subsidiary of BCCI.
Both Stephens and Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, a wealthy and well-connected Saudi real estate investor, signed the financial transaction. The Geneva transaction was paid through a joint venture between the Union Bank of Switzerland and its Geneva branch of BCCI.
The BCCI connection, therefore, linked George W. Bush with Saudi banker Khaled bin Mahfouz. Known in Arab circles as the "king's treasurer," Mahfouz held a 20 percent take in BCCI between 1986 and 1990. Mahfouz is no stranger to the Bush family. He was a big investor in the Carlyle Group, a defense-industry investment group with deep connections to the Republican Party establishment. Former President Bush is a former member of the company's board of directors. George W. Bush also held shares in Caterair, a Carlyle subsidiary. Sami Baarma, a powerful player in the Mahfouz-owned Prime Commercial Bank of Pakistan, is a member of the Carlyle Group's international advisory board.
President Bush certainly is aware that his former Saudi funder is still financing Osama bin Laden's terrorist network. USA Today newspaper reported in 1999 that a year after bin Laden's attacks on US embassies in Africa, Khaled bin Mahfouz and other wealthy Saudis were funneling tens of millions of dollars each year into bin Laden's bank accounts. Five top Saudi businessmen ordered the National Commercial Bank to transfer personal funds and $3 million taken from a Saudi pension fund to the Capitol Trust Bank in New York City. The money was deposited into the Islamic Relief and Bless Relief - Islamic charities operating in the US and Great Britain as fronts for Osama bin Laden.
Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, the Saudi who cosigned the $25 million cash infusion into George W. Bush's Harken Energy Corporation, appointed Talat Othman to manage his 17.6 percent share in Harken Energy Corp. Othman, a native Palestinian, is president and CEO of Dearborn Financial Inc, an investment firm in Arlington Heights, IL.
Bakhsh also bought a 9.6 percent stake in Worthen Banking Corporation, the Arkansas bank controlled by Jack Stephens. Abdullah Bakhsh's share was the identical percentage as the amount of shares sold by Mochtar Riady, the godfather of the wealthy Indonesian family with close ties to the Chinese communists, Bill Clinton and evangelist Pat Robertson.
Independent investigative reporter David Twersky reported in the early 1990s that Othman had a seat on Harken's board of directors and met three times in the White House with President George Herbert Walker Bush. Organized by Chief of Staff John Sununu, Othman's first meeting with President Bush at the White House was in August 1990, just days after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.
There exist to this day a Saudi-Texas connection. Khalid bin Mahfouz, financier of both George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden, still maintains a palatial estate in Houston, TX. Former President George Bush also lives in Houston. James Bath, Texas political confidant of George W. Bush, managed to obtain a $1.4 million loan from Mahfouz in 1990. Bath and Mahfouz, along with former Secretary of Treasury John Connally, were also co-investors in Houston's Main Bank. Bath was also president of Skyway Aircraft Leasing Ltd, a Texas air charter company registered in the Cayman Islands. According to published reports in the early 1990s, the real owner was bin Mahfouz. When Salem bin Laden, Osama' brother, died in 1988, his interest in the Houston Gulf Airport was transferred to bin Mahfouz.
Since the attacks on America on September 11, the federal government has moved quickly to freeze bank accounts connected to Osama bin Laden, Khalid bin Mahfouz, and a host of Islamic charities.
Perhaps federal agents should freeze the financial assets of the Bush family too. It would not be the first time Bush-family assets were seized by the US government for trading with the enemy.
Copyright 2001 American Freedom News
"If you do business with terrorists, if you support or succor them, you will not do business with the United States," said President Bush.
He didn't say anything about doing business with a terrorist's brother - or his wealthy financier.
When President George W. Bush froze assets connected to Osama bin Laden, he didn't tell the American people that the terrorist mastermind's late brother was an investor in the president's former oil business in Texas. He also hasn't levelled with the American public about his financial connections to a host of Saudi characters involved in drug cartels, gun smuggling, and terrorist networks.
Doing business with the enemy is nothing new to the Bush family. Much of the Bush family wealth came from supplying needed raw materials and credit to Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. Several business operations managed by Prescott Bush - the president's grandfather - were seized by the US government during World War II under the Trading with the Enemy Act.
On October 20, 1942, the federal government seized the Union Banking Corporation in New York City as a front operation for the Nazis. Prescott Bush was a director. Bush, E. Roland Harriman, two Bush associates, and three Nazi executives owned the bank's shares. Eight days later, the Roosevelt administration seized two other corporations managed by Prescott Bush. The Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation, both managed by the Bush-Harriman bank, were accused by the US federal government of being front organizations for Hitler's Third Reich. Again, on November 8, 1942, the federal government seized Nazi-controlled assets of Silesian-American Corporation, another Bush-Harriman company doing business with Hitler.
Doing business with the bin Laden empire, therefore, is only the latest extension of the Bush family's financial ties to unsavory individuals and organizations. Now that thousands of American citizens have died in terrorist attacks and the nation is going to war, the American people should know about George W. Bush's relationship with the family of Osama bin Laden.
Salem bin Laden, Osama's older brother, was an investor in Arbusto Energy, the Texas oil company started by George W. Bush. Arbusto means "Bush" in Spanish. Salem bin Laden died in an airplane crash in Texas in 1988.
Sheik Mohammed bin Laden, the family patriarch and founder of its construction empire, also died in a plane crash. Upon his death in 1968, he left behind 57 sons and daughters - the offspring he sired with 12 wives in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. About a dozen brothers manage Bin Laden Brothers Construction - one of the largest construction firms in the Middle East.
Fresh out of Harvard Business School, young George W. Bush returned to Midland, TX, in the late 1970s to follow his father's footsteps in the oil business. Beginning in 1978, he set up a series of limited partnerships - Arbusto '78, Arbusto '79, and so on - to drill for oil.
One of President Bush's earliest financial backers was James Bath, a Houston aircraft broker. Bath served with President Bush in the Texas Air National Guard. Bath has a mysterious connection to the Central Intelligence Agency.
According to a 1976 trust agreement, Salem bin Laden appointed James Bath as his business representative in Houston. Revelation about Bath's relationship with the bin Laden financial empire and the CIA was made public in 1992 by Bill White, a former real estate business partner with Bath. White informed federal investigators in 1992 that Bath told him that he had assisted the CIA in a liaison role since 1976 - the same year former President George Herbert Walker Bush served as director of the CIA.
During a bitter legal fight between White and Bath, the real estate partner disclosed that Bath managed a portfolio worth millions of dollars for Sheik Khalid bin Mahfouz and other wealthy Saudis. Among the investments made by Bath with Mahfouz's money was the Houston Gulf Airport.
A powerful banker in Saudi Arabia, Mahfouz was one of the largest stockholders in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. BCCI was a corrupt global banking empire operating in 73 nations and was a major financial and political force in Washington, Paris, Geneva, London, and Hong Kong. Despite the appearance of a normal banking operation, BCCI was actually an international crime syndicate providing "banking services" to the Medellin drug cartel, Panama dictator Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, terrorist mastermind Abu Nidal, and Khun Sa, the heroin kingpin in Asia's Golden Triangle.
The BCCI scandal implicated some of the biggest political names in Washington - both Democrats and Republicans - during the first Bush White House. The bank was accused of laundering money for drug cartels, smuggling weapons to terrorists, and using Middle Eastern oil money to influence American politicians.
The chief of the Justice Department's criminal division under former President Bush was Robert Mueller. Because the major players came out of the scandal with slaps on the wrists, many critics accused Mueller of botching the investigation. Mr. Mueller was appointed by President George W. Bush as the Director of the FBI, replacing Louis Freeh.
The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a division of the Justice Department, reviewed allegations by Bill White in 1992 that James Bath funneled money from wealthy Middle Eastern businessmen to American companies to influence the policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations. Robert Mueller, the new FBI chief, was in a senior position at the Justice Department at the time of the review.
White told a Texas court in 1992 that Bath and the Justice Department had "blackballed" him professionally and financially because he refused to keep quiet about his knowledge of an Arab conspiracy to launder Middle Eastern money into the bank accounts of American businesses and politicians.
In sworn depositions, Bath admitted he represented four wealthy Saudi Arabian businessmen as a trustee. He also admitted he used his name on their investments and received, in return, a five- percent stake in their business deals.
Indeed, Texas tax documents revealed that Bath owned five percent of Arbusto '79 Ltd., and Arbusto '80 Ltd. Bush Exploration Company controlled the limited partnerships, the general partnership firm owned by young George W. Bush.
Although George W. Bush's Texas oil ventures were financial failures, his financial backers recovered their investments through a series of mergers and stock swaps. He changed Arbusto's name to Bush Exploration, then merged the new firm into Spectrum 7 Energy Corporation in 1984.
The Bush-controlled oil business eventually ended up being folded into Harken Energy Corp., a Dallas-based corporation. Mr. Bush joined Harken as a director in 1986 and was given 212,000 shares of Harken stock. Bush used his White House connections to land a lucrative contract for the obscure Harken Energy Corp. with the Middle Eastern government of Bahrain. On June 20, 1990, George W. Bush sold his Harken stock for $848,000 and paid off his loan he took out to buy his small share in the Texas Rangers. The Bahrain deal was brokered by David Edwards, a close pal to Bill Clinton and a former employee of Stephens Inc. Shortly after Bush sold his stock, Harken's fortunes nose-dived when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Some critics claim young George was tipped off in advance by his father about the soon-coming Gulf War.
George W. Bush, however, worked wonders for Harken Energy Corp. before the stock collapse. Using the Bush family name, he managed to bring much-needed capital investment to the struggling firm. George W. Bush traveled to Little Rock, AR, to attend a meeting with Jackson Stephens - a powerful Arkansas tycoon who help bankroll the state campaigns of young Bill Clinton. He first gained political prominence as a fund-raiser for President Jimmy Carter. Stephens was also deeply involved in the BCCI scandal by helping the corrupt bank take control of First American Bank in Washington, DC.
Jack Stephens didn't need an introduction to young George W. Bush. Mary Anne Stephens, his wife, managed Vice President George Bush's 1988 presidential campaign in Arkansas. Stephens Inc., the well connected brokerage firm owned by Jack Stephens, donated $100,000 to a Bush campaign fundraising dinner in 1991. When George W. Bush won the contested Florida election in 2000, Jack Stephens made a substantial contribution to the Bush inauguration. Former President Bush played golf on April 11, 2001, with Jack Stephens at the Jack Stephens Youth Golf Academy in Little Rock. The former president told Stephens, "Jack, we love you and we are very, very grateful for what you have done."
Perhaps the former president was thanking him for the money Stephens provided young George W. Bush. Stephens arranged for a $25 million investment from the Union des Banques Suisses. The Swiss Bank held the minority interest in the Banque de Commerce et de Placements, a Geneva-based subsidiary of BCCI.
Both Stephens and Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, a wealthy and well-connected Saudi real estate investor, signed the financial transaction. The Geneva transaction was paid through a joint venture between the Union Bank of Switzerland and its Geneva branch of BCCI.
The BCCI connection, therefore, linked George W. Bush with Saudi banker Khaled bin Mahfouz. Known in Arab circles as the "king's treasurer," Mahfouz held a 20 percent take in BCCI between 1986 and 1990. Mahfouz is no stranger to the Bush family. He was a big investor in the Carlyle Group, a defense-industry investment group with deep connections to the Republican Party establishment. Former President Bush is a former member of the company's board of directors. George W. Bush also held shares in Caterair, a Carlyle subsidiary. Sami Baarma, a powerful player in the Mahfouz-owned Prime Commercial Bank of Pakistan, is a member of the Carlyle Group's international advisory board.
President Bush certainly is aware that his former Saudi funder is still financing Osama bin Laden's terrorist network. USA Today newspaper reported in 1999 that a year after bin Laden's attacks on US embassies in Africa, Khaled bin Mahfouz and other wealthy Saudis were funneling tens of millions of dollars each year into bin Laden's bank accounts. Five top Saudi businessmen ordered the National Commercial Bank to transfer personal funds and $3 million taken from a Saudi pension fund to the Capitol Trust Bank in New York City. The money was deposited into the Islamic Relief and Bless Relief - Islamic charities operating in the US and Great Britain as fronts for Osama bin Laden.
Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, the Saudi who cosigned the $25 million cash infusion into George W. Bush's Harken Energy Corporation, appointed Talat Othman to manage his 17.6 percent share in Harken Energy Corp. Othman, a native Palestinian, is president and CEO of Dearborn Financial Inc, an investment firm in Arlington Heights, IL.
Bakhsh also bought a 9.6 percent stake in Worthen Banking Corporation, the Arkansas bank controlled by Jack Stephens. Abdullah Bakhsh's share was the identical percentage as the amount of shares sold by Mochtar Riady, the godfather of the wealthy Indonesian family with close ties to the Chinese communists, Bill Clinton and evangelist Pat Robertson.
Independent investigative reporter David Twersky reported in the early 1990s that Othman had a seat on Harken's board of directors and met three times in the White House with President George Herbert Walker Bush. Organized by Chief of Staff John Sununu, Othman's first meeting with President Bush at the White House was in August 1990, just days after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.
There exist to this day a Saudi-Texas connection. Khalid bin Mahfouz, financier of both George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden, still maintains a palatial estate in Houston, TX. Former President George Bush also lives in Houston. James Bath, Texas political confidant of George W. Bush, managed to obtain a $1.4 million loan from Mahfouz in 1990. Bath and Mahfouz, along with former Secretary of Treasury John Connally, were also co-investors in Houston's Main Bank. Bath was also president of Skyway Aircraft Leasing Ltd, a Texas air charter company registered in the Cayman Islands. According to published reports in the early 1990s, the real owner was bin Mahfouz. When Salem bin Laden, Osama' brother, died in 1988, his interest in the Houston Gulf Airport was transferred to bin Mahfouz.
Since the attacks on America on September 11, the federal government has moved quickly to freeze bank accounts connected to Osama bin Laden, Khalid bin Mahfouz, and a host of Islamic charities.
Perhaps federal agents should freeze the financial assets of the Bush family too. It would not be the first time Bush-family assets were seized by the US government for trading with the enemy.
Copyright 2001 American Freedom News
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