Sybil Edmonds - whistleblower who revealed 'Gladio B' link to 9/11

Tweet

Sunday Times journalists confirmed earlier this year that their investigation into direct criminal-jihadi links to US intelligence immediately prior to 9/11 was suppressed under pressure. This is a very indepth piece by Guardian writer and blogger Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed that goes to the heart of the US role in 9/11. I recommend a detailed read of this thorough article. This is the real conspiracy and it's not just a theory. FBI whistleblower unveils the deep state operation Gladio B - a strategy of tension using links to Al Qaeda and other groups to advance US and NATO Goals, leading all the way up to the terror attacks. 

Hugo Chavez - a dazzling light goes out

Tweet

It is a sad day, no doubt about it. Millions around the world are mourning the death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. I first saw him on television around 1996 when I was living in Caracas. He was a charismatic young army officer who had recently been released from prison after his failed coup attempt of 1992. He became a national figure in early 1992, when he told his men to return to barracks and that the struggle against a corrupt government was called off 'Por ahora' (for now).
Twenty one years later, after winning power and leading a 'Bolivarian revolution', he is gone. He was an educator and an enabler of his people, the majority poor of Venezuela, to whom he gave a unique voice in the presidency. While in the rich north, the working class have been largely excluded from political debate since the rise of Thatcherism and neoliberalism, in Venezuela the president unashamedly spoke for the toilers and the poor. For the privileged and highly educated, it is hard to imagine what this kind of articulation means.
I remember seeing Chavez work his way meticulously through the national accounts and the international reports of ratings agencies, explaining to the audience of Alo Presidente what all this elite language meant. He did not dismiss it, he explained it. I could never imagine such a scene on British television where politicians speak in soundbites and patronising cliches.
I remember going on holiday to the beach in 2006 where a Dutchman and his Venezuelan wife ran a small hotel. While the owner complained about Chavez, his Venezuelan cook explained in detail why his boss was wrong. This man may have slept in a modest room adjacent to the kitchen, but he understood Chavez's transport strategy and was able to articulate his view clearly and confidently. The Dutchman's half-baked complaints did not stand a chance. This for me was an object example of what the Bolivarian revolution meant. A people armed with ideas and facts, able to defend their own advancement and their own government. They could criticise it too, but not based on the lies and distortions of a capitalist media, which they were able to see through.
Viva Chavez!

The thrill of the alien

Tweet

I prayed last night for the return of my passport in order to be reunited with my family. At about 6 this morning, woken by the cacophony which is the night in the Seeb souk, and the idiot opposite who has the TV on really loud then starts playing Arabic disco at 3am. I went into the corridor and shouted to little effect.

Waking again at 5pm with the call to prayer amid strange and vivid dreams, I went online and saw cryptic messages from T sent while I was asleep boiling down to ‘You owe me big time’ and ‘Get you bag, you’re pulled’ which I had to assume meant she had found the passport. Another email from my mum this morning confirmed this although I will have to wait for a video call to confirm this. I walked along the beach today after spending an hour and a half in the office doing a bit of work to lessen the load tomorrow. P and K came in just as I left at midday.

The thrill of the alien. That is one way to describe the feeling of disorientation mixed with excitement, or rather a heightened sense of awareness, when one is in a strange country with very little that is familiar. There are ugly things about Oman – the shop signs, the scrabble roads, the litter on the beach, the industrial noise and endless traffic. In a sense it is both developed– in the sense of infrastructure and traffic – and underdeveloped in the commercial western sense. Where as we have endless sophisticated advertising and branding, they have brash, ugly shop signage that is all of the same ilk. They have endless ‘coffee shops’ that don’t sell coffee. If was to put on my entrepreneurial hat I would say two lines for tourism would be – a decent, Omani coffee chain to take on the limited inroads of Costa and Starbucks. Secondly, boutique western friendly hotels at reasonable prices. Oman is pitching at the high end market which makes perfect sense but means that many will not come here. For Oman, that of course could be a great blessing. But rather than leave the mid price hotels to Indian chains, an Omani-European chain could cater to those who don not like gloomy rooms and indifferent service. But then of course, you would need trained staff as well as well designed hotels.

My new room has what seems to be a permanent generator hum just outside the window. I am guessing it will continue into the night. Strange that when I came to look at the room earlier I did not hear it. We will see tonight whether it makes sleeping impossible. Shouting and the water truck, and perhaps less disco pounding would be nice, but I am suddenly aware of this incessant jangle. This part of town is the epitome of the hell of rapid modernization without thought for the peace of the people who are supposed to be benefiting from it. 

Zizek, Zabala and the communist horizon

Tweet

Santiago Zabala is ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona. he wrote an opinion piece on Al Jazeera - in response to the Slovenian marxist critic Slavoc Zizek. Zizek is a mischievous iconoclast who still claims to be a communist even though allegedly he lives in Dubai. 

This was my response to Zabala's piece and the comments below it:

As an 'anti-capitalist' by nature - gosh, I must be lazy preferring not to slave away for 50 hours a week for someone else! - I don't see the 4 points presented by the author as actually signifying fundamental obstacles to capitalist reproduction. The most important trends that can lead to capitalist breakdown in the longer term are:

1) the substitution of technology for human labour, leading to wage suppression, mass unemployment and a slowdown in economic growth. This is the most fundamental challenge to capitalism. When agriculture advanced through new capitalist techniques, the proportion of the labour force in agriculture fell from 70% to 2% in countries like the UK; the same will happen to industry. Industrial workers have fallen to 10% of the workforce in some countries; human services are the remaining sector where employment growth lies.

However technology is removing the need for skilled labour - and has been for some time. Once the reproduction of society is separated from productive employment, capitalism breaks down because capitalism is based on the labour-capitalist relationship. If the wage labour class - all those who live primarily through paid work - is diminished beyond a certain point, capitalist growth becomes impossible UNLESS an agency outside the market relationship - ie the state (or the people's collective will) steps in to revive the process of circulation by putting money into people's pockets. We have seen this recently with bank bailouts, quantitative easing etc BUT this is putting money into the hands of finance capitalists, rather than ordinary people. 

Capitalism has to be reproduced artificially because wages are insufficient to consume the economy's new output. The state or some other non-market agency must step in to ensure the circulation of capital. Free marketeers believe that by cutting back the state and welfare the market will automatically right itself and everyone will make hay, but there is very little evidence for this now or in the past.

2) Uncontrolled fiat money growth, debt expansion and deflation caused by a decline in the rate of profit in advanced countries, combined with financial monopolisation of the economy. For 15 years western governments allowed debt - public and private - to replace income growth. This economic model is now bust and so we have austerity and government money creation. Austerity can exacerbate point (1) by further cutting wages and increasing unemployment. We now have a dictatorship of finance, which to my mind, is as totalitarian as any other kind of dictatorship.

I believe that a non-capitalist solution to these problems could be found that is far more sustainable and humanistic than the artificial reproduction of capitalism through state manipulation and taxpayer debt bailouts. This would require measures to restrict asset bubble growth, redistribute liabilities to bond holders, writing off debt, introducing such measures as citizen's income, and returning large parts of our social life - and land - to the commons - deprivatisation but via democratic means so that bureaucrats do not take charge of assets.

3) As a point of historical accuracy, the mythology of capitalism ignores the fundamental role of the state as handmaid of market development, expropriation of the commons, and the creation of a wage labour force. This false view of history as presented here by Dave Small is what prevents an understanding of how we got here and where we might go. Would the 'free market' exist in America if the US and colonial governments had not systematically expropriated native common land and handed it over to capitalists and private farmers? Of course not!

Future alternatives are possible, once we abandon the prison of neoliberal ideology. Crucially, we must develop new ways to revive the commons and revive democratic control of the economy. The internet means we can get rid of the monopoly of career politicians and put the decision making directly in the hands of the people through a real time permanent democracy - replacing the plutocratic 18th century model now dominant in the US, Europe and elsewhere. Parliaments should, in my view be made up of people's tribunes chosen at random like juries, with fixed paid terms to prevent capture by lobbyists. See Iceland banking and democratic reform as an example we should all follow.

Staying calm while the world goes crazy

Tweet

Oman, my current location, is an oasis of calm in a region that seems to be convulsing with violence. Bombs by Sunni extremists and mass killings by security services in Pakistan trigger a new form of protests - refusing to bury the dead; Syria each day a horror story; Iraq still hit by daily bombings and protests. 

Further away in Mali a war with France against ‘terrorists’ is underway, with Britain in a supporting role; in Algeria militants seize hundreds at an oil installation in retaliation against the French. Weapon stockpiles looted from Libya after the fall of Qaddafi are now put to deadly use.  

The Muslim world is in a process of violent and revolutionary change. America under Obama is like America under Clinton – reluctant to engage in conflicts in far flung places after a decade of wars. So Britain and France step into the breach. France is gung ho after staying out of Iraq and playing a small part in Afghanistan. But they have been humiliated 'Black Hawk Down' style in their botched rescue of a hostage in Somalia. It is truly extraordinary, exactly 20 years after Bill Clinton got burnt with a simliar operation to hear that French forces met with 'unexpected resistance' in Somalia.  Meanwhile the Mali escapade already looks like it could escalate into something much more difficult. France would probably like to intervene in Syria, its former colony, but Russia stands in the way.

Meanwhile life here seems to go serenely on. Even when locals look at me strangely, I don’t detect hostility. But perhaps under the surface there is something there. Clients of the West like Jordan and Oman have to be nervous. That role of being stuck between big players is familiar to both – Oman between Saudi Arabia and Iran; Jordan between Israel and Egypt. If you don’t play it right, you end up like Lebanon or Syria. 

Oman is what a friend called the Switzerland of the Middle East – it remains resolutely neutral and stays friendly with all its neighbours. It’s a small country and it pays not to take sides. Perhaps this commonality is partly why there are so many Palestinians and Jordanians here – but may be more because here there are paying jobs and prospects and in Jordan there aren’t. 

A well connected Palestinian from Jordan living here told me that one in three Jordanian men were informers to the security services. I wonder what the proportion is here in the Sultanate? It’s not an accident that taxi drivers’ licence plates belong to the Royal Omani Police. And it may explain why cabbies are often so curious.

How we subsidise the banks - Positive Money

Tweet

From Positive Money:

By creating the UK’s entire money supply as loans, the banking sector is able to collect interest at an average rate of around 5% per annum on very nearly every pound in existence. This means in order for the non-banking economy (the other 98% of the UK’s population) to have a money supply with which it can trade, it must pay around 5% of all the money in existence to the banking sector each year. This results in a regular and ongoing transfer of wealth from the non-banking sector to the banking sector.

This generates huge income for the banking sector (imagine if you were able to charge interest at an average of 5% a year on all the money in the UK!). This system creates three re-distribution effects:

1. From the Poor to the Rich:

All money is created as debt by the banking system. This shifts the ‘baseline’ of poverty down to zero or negative, rather than a low but positive bank balance. Because it is those on below average incomes that end up with much of the debt, they end up paying interest to the banking sector, in effect meaning that the poor subsidise the rich.

2. From the ‘Real’ Economy to the Financial

Businesses are also in a similar situation. The ‘real’ (non-financial), productive economy needs money to function, but because all money is created as debt, that sector will also end up paying interest to the banks. This means that the real-economy businesses - shops, offices, factories etc – end up subsidising the banking sector.

3. From the Rest of the UK to the City of London

Because this debt-based system redistributes money to the banking sector, and the bulk of the banking sector’s salary payments are concentrated within the City of London, this means that there is redistribution of income from the rest of the UK back to the City of London.

All of these re-distribution effects are inherent to the system and will continue year after year as long as the money supply is issued by commercial banks as debt. It is very possible that the ‘upwards-and-inwards’ redistribution of income caused by this system of issuing money cancels out any downwards-and-outwards redistribution of income through the welfare state. Looked at another way, the welfare state may only be necessary thanks to the design of the banking system, and could be significantly scaled back if the method of creating money was reformed.

China bashing and the myth of democracy

Tweet

Listening to Damian Gramaticus, the BBC's man in Beijing, describing the Chinese system as authoritarian, secretive and corrupt on Radio Four this morning, I once again felt the power of our media to tell us what to think about the world.
The propaganda message is unrelenting. In the run-up to the People's Congress in China, which will anoint the new party leaders, we are being constantly reminded how flawed and undemocratic their system is. It is as if they need to keep telling us that the Chinese desperately want our democracy and are being cruelly denied it by the Communist party. So Cold War, it's like the 1980s all over again.
Are BBC journalists telling the truth? I don't think so, not when they so assiduously paint a picture of a 'regime' denying its people's aspirations. For when it comes to aspirations, I find it hard for any Western government to claim that it is democratic in the sense as representing the people's will. In Europe, Britain and North America, we have a system that constantly enriches the 1% richest, while imposing austerity on the majority.
This is done in the wake of a financial crisis caused by the deregulation of the banking system over many years, carried out on 'our' behalf, but which the 'people' never asked for.
An economic system built on debt was hoisted on western electorates without it ever being put to the electorate. Of course, we can easily see the faults of China's model of 'democratic people's dictatorship' in which a pyramid of bodies each chooses their leaders, giving the people little or no say in who rules them.
But democracy is not, as our media would have us believe, simply a matter of having a choice of personalities at an election every four years. Americans just 'chose' Barack Obama over Mitt Romney, but this was the 'choice' between two candidates backed by the millions of dollars donated by corporations, and from two parties that each uphold a system of debt-based capitalism that has seen the gains of growth go into the hands of the 0.1% for the last three decades.
So the question isn't as facile as how you choose your president or parliament. It is how accountable are these representatives. If they are hardly accountable at all, then how real is the democracy we have? Yes, to some extent we have 'freedom of speech' - mostly thanks to the internet - but media is controlled by billionaires, whose message is overwhelmingly in favour of the system as it is. We do not have a free flow of ideas accessible to the majority about what kind of system they would like to live in. Education is increasingly a matter of privilege and birth - money buys access to the best schools for the wealthy.
I would wager that for most countries, the higher the liabilities of the banking system, and the more 'open' it is to the free flow of capital in and out of the country, the more likely that conditions for the masses will stagnate, the more inequality will intensify, the more indebted the state will become, and the more eviscerated and elite-manipulated will become the system of democracy.
If you live in a country where capital movement is restricted, and banks' liabilities cannot exceed a certain amount, that is a country whose wealth is based on real economic activity, where the state has a reasonable degree of control over the flow of finance and over the ownership of assets within the country's borders, it is more likely that state policy will have a beneficial impact on the majority of the population.
China has adopted many elements of capitalism, including fee payment for public services such as education and healthcare, private housing developments and massive wealth inequality. Billionaires are now integral to the Communist elite, which means that potentially they can exert a stranglehold over policy, as the party moves further away from socialism and marxism. But for more than three decades reform and growth did raise millions out of poverty in a way not witnessed in that splendid democracy, India.
However, the clamour from the west is now for 'reform' in China - and when they say reform they mean a combination of mass privatisation of state assets and the introduction of the western system of representative democracy. The thing about the latter, it is not government of the people for the people, but it is mostly government of the rich for the rich. Look how it worked out in Russia to get an idea of what China could have in future - how different it would be from now is questionable. The people simply get to choose which representatives of the owning class they prefer. This is what the BBC - as the state broadcaster under a monarchichal democratic oligarchy - will never tell you.
Further, the social contract under a dictatorship may well be more honest than under a democracy, since the deal is 'we will let you continue to rule if you provide benefits for the people, but if you simply enrich your elite families and leave us in poverty we will rise up and attempt to overthrow you'.
This is what happened in Syria - the ruling family forgot the deal and the people rose up. This is why in dictatorships there has to be a deal, because the stakes are very high, whereas in democracies, the deal breaks down because the leaders leave office every four years and thus avoid accountability - and take cushy directorships in industry. While in office, they are under no obligation to do what they said during the elections since 'representative' does not mean delegate, and most members of parliament are placemen under the thumb of party whips and hacks. Rather like in China.