How the financial “Big Players” gained their power

The international financial elites wield enormous powers on governments, both in developing as in developed industrial countries.

Legislation in many parliaments favors large corporations and puts ordinary citizens and small businesses at disadvantage.
Wealth is being systematically transferred from the middle classed to the super-rich. The poor are getting poorer and are joined in their ranks by more and more former members of the middle-classes.

Large banks, which had brought themselves and the whole world economy on the verge of bankruptcy by their fraudulent speculations, are being bailed out with tax-payer money, while small banks with honest business practices are being swallowed by those who just needed bailouts.

The power by which the financial elites create these process, is the power they have over the money issuing process of nations and over the worlds resources.

Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.

said Mayer Amschel Rothschild, founder of the first international banking empire, about 200 years ago.

With the invention of fractional reserve banking, private bankers became the de facto money-issuing entities which nowadays control the money supply of all capitalist nations.
With the establishment of private or partially private central banks, like the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank, the largest private banking establishments became interconnected cartels, with monopoly powers.
The history of money creation and the consequences of the process today are explained in the videos:
Money as Debt and with more details on the influence of interest payments in Money as Debt II

Today this ever more consolidated banking cartel, which has pushed most independent banks out of the market, controls and issues not only the money of individual nations, but also the money transfer lines between nations all over the globe.
It also controls through speculation with exotic financial instruments the prize of all international traded resources, as well as most services and goods and even the value of real estate.

In order to control prizes and availability of vital resources, the financial elites do not actually need to own those very resources. It is far more efficient for them to gain control over the trade of raw-materials among nations.
In gaining trade-control the physical trade-lines using ships, airliners, trucks or railways are comparatively unimportant. What actually counts in international trade nowadays are the money-transfer lines.

When in October 2008 the Icelandic banking-system crashed, the most important physical industry of Iceland, the fishing industry, was still doing well. Fish, the most important source of income for the Icelandic economy, was still being caught, processed and transported to retail markets abroad.

However, the whole western financial industry had in one accord put a full stop to money transfers to and from Iceland. The buyers abroad could no longer pay for the Icelandic fish they bought and transfer the money to the accounts of the Icelandic fishing-companies and processing plants.

Normally the foreign money would then have been exchanged by the exporters into Icelandic currency at the central bank. Icelandic retailers could in return have bought those foreign currency from there to pay for their imports. This are the basics of international trade, it balances exports and imports. And due to the boycott, the western financial elites had declared on money-transfers to and from Iceland, this was now no longer possible, to the detriment of Icelanders and their customers abroad.

And so, in one stroke the Icelandic government had lost all sovereignty over it´s financial policies.
Practically every every Icelandic politician was initially opposed to allowing the IMF, the representative of the international banking-consortium, to dictate Icelandic policies.
And still the Icelandic government, both the one driven out of office by the people, as well as the newly elected one, saw eventually no other option, but to surrender control over the nation´s financial policies to the IMF and obey it´s dictates, knowing full well, it would hurt the population and the domestic industry.

To be sure, Iceland is a country with a tiny population, and therefor rather helpless against the pressure from more powerful actors.
But as we can see in US politics today, even the largest economies and military powers on earth have to bow down to those financial powers, against the interests of their own peoples and their own industries.

But the power of the “big finance” goes far beyond purely financial policies.

As is being confirmed by more and more scientific evidence, the burning of oil, natural gas and  coal as energy sources does not have a catastrophic influence on our climate, but still laws are being prepared for the energy consumers of the world to have to pay carbon-taxes and trade in carbon off-setts, a trade, which soon will be controlled by the international financial markets.

As we also have seen, and is coming to be more and more accepted by the scientific community, those hydrocarbon fuels are not really scarce resources either. We will not run out of them any time soon, and still there are reoccurring price-hikes under the pretense of present or soon to come scarcity.

The financial elites with the help of pseudo-scientists nurtured those myths into existence in order to gain even more control over the world´s the energy markets and a free hand in manipulating prizes.

Most prizes consumers pay nowadays for the goods they purchase or the energy they use or the rent- or mortgage-payments they have to make, have nothing whatsoever to do with supply and demand, or production costs or the level of wages or the costs of extracting the needed raw material. The financial markets determine the prizes by their speculative financial instruments.

Both rising as well as falling prizes will produce profits for the “Big Players” of those markets.
To see how much and in what way consumer energy-prizes are shaped by speculation let´s take the example of crude oil and refined gasoline:

According to EIA, the Energy Information Administration,
the official US government source,

in 2006, average production costs (or lifting costs – the cost to bring a barrel of oil to the surface) ranged from
* about $4 per barrel (excluding taxes) in Africa
* to about $8.30 per barrel in Canada;
* the average for the U.S. was $6.83/barrel…

In 2008, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, the refining costs of gasoline was calculated with about 10 cents per gallon (or per 4 liters).
The question, of course, is how many gallons of gasoline can be produced through the refining process from one barrel of crude oil?

The website “Fat Knowledge” explains, that a barrel of crude oil containing 42 gallons or about 158 liters, can be turned using the most modern refining technology into just as many gallons or liters of gasoline.

According to this, we can now estimate, that the combined costs of oil-extraction and -refining and transport minus energy loss (about 18%) in the process, is for American-produced gasoline roughly 30 cents per gallon or 7.5 cents per liter.
Quite a bit of a difference between consumer prizes and costs, isn´t it?

Of course, some of the prizes are taxes (in the US another 11 cents), which are supposed to be used for creating and upholding the traffic infra-structure like streets, roads and bridges.
Does the rest go to the oil-companies or the oil-producing countries?
A percentage of it, yes, but the real profits are being made on the financial markets.

In a November 2009 article stockbroker and financial expert Philip R. Davis writes:
The Global Oil Scam: 50 Times Bigger than Madoff

$2.5 Trillion – That’s the size of the global oil scam…
Goldman Sachs (GS), Morgan Stanley (MS), BP (BP), Total (TOT), Shell (RDS.A), Deutsche Bank (DB) and Societe Generale (SCGLY.PK) founded the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) in 2000.

ICE is an online commodities and futures marketplace. It is outside the US and operates free from the constraints of US laws. The exchange was set up to facilitate “dark pool” trading in the commodities markets. Billions of dollars are being placed on oil futures contracts at the ICE and the beauty of this scam is that they NEVER take delivery, per se. They just ratchet up the price with leveraged speculation using your TARP money. This year alone they ratcheted up the global cost of oil from $40 to $80 per barrel…..

A Congressional investigation into energy trading in 2003 discovered that ICE was being used to facilitate “round-trip” trades. ” Round-trip” trades occur when one firm sells energy to another and then the second firm simultaneously sells the same amount of energy back to the first company at exactly the same price. No commodity ever changes hands. But when done on an exchange, these transactions send a price signal to the market and they artificially boost revenue for the company. This is nothing more than a massive fraud, pure and simple….

How widespread are “round-trip’‘ trades?…

DMS Energy, when investigated by Congress, admitted that 80 percent of its trades in 2001 were “round-trip” trades… Duke Energy (DUK) disclosed that $1.1 billion worth of trades were “round-trip” since 1999….

There is NO shortage of oil. OPEC alone has 6-7 Million barrels a day of spare capacity, more than the total disruption of any single country and any two countries other than Saudi Arabia could offset. Additionally, ICE partners Total and JPM are part of the cartel that is totally skewing the global demand picture by storing 125M barrels of oil in offshore tankers…

Goldman Sachs issues bullish opinions on oil and builds large positions in oil, while it is the cartel’s job to hide oil in offshore tankers, and then sell forward all the oil, with futures contracts, locking in the high price….

Richard Freeman and John Hoefle describe in a June 2004 articlethe history and the technical process of oil-speculations:

The key to the ability of the financiers behind the oil cartel to manipulate prices in the oil market, is the shift which occurred during the oil crises of 1974 and 1979, in which long-term contracts—frequently for 24 or 36 months—at stable prices were replaced with the spot market and then the futures markets…

The oil spot market was created in 1969 by the Lazard/Rothschild-allied Philipp Brothers, then the world’s largest metals trader. Philipp Brothers, largely in the person of their top trader Marc Rich, began by selling small quantities of Iranian crude oil to independent refiners.

The oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, which were orchestrated by the financier oligarchy under the cover of the OPEC oil embargo and the fall of the Shah in Iran, resulted in a shift in oil pricing away from long-term contracts toward the Rotterdam-based spot market.

By “spot” is meant, that one buys the oil at a market only 24-48 hours before one takes physical (spot) delivery, as opposed to buying it 12 or more months in advance. In effect, the spot market inserted a financial middleman into the oil-patch income stream in much the same way that deregulation would later do for electricity.

Today, the oil price is largely set in the futures markets. The two principal locales which dominate oil futures trading are the London-based International Petroleum Exchange (IPE), established in 1980, and the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX), which is more than a century old, but also first started trading oil futures in 1983. Traders call futures contracts “paper oil”: the contracts are a paper claim against oil, which is far in excess of the volume of oil produced and actually delivered at oil terminals on behalf of those contracts.

The traders transact a large volume of derivatives bets. Speculators purchase on the IPE and NYMEX exchanges, futures contracts; each single contract is a bet on 1,000 barrels of oil. More than 100 million of these oil derivatives contracts were traded on these exchanges in 2003, representing 100 billion barrels of oil. In a year 2000 study, EIR showed that on the IPE, for every 570 “paper barrels of oil”—that is futures derivatives covering 570 barrels—traded each year, there was only one underlying physical barrel of oil. The 570 paper oil contracts pull the price of the underlying barrel of oil, manipulating the oil price. If the speculators bet long—that the price will rise—the mountain of bets pulls up the underlying price.

But worse, there is a second layer of leverage. At the London IPE, the speculator can buy a futures contract on a margin of 3.8%. That is, were the speculator to buy a single futures contract, representing 1,000 barrels of oil at, say, an oil price of $40 per barrel, then the contract represents $40,000. However, the speculator pays only $1,520 for the premium of the contract—or 3.8% of the $40,000—which gives him control over the contract. Through an investment of $1,520, the speculator controls 1,000 barrels of oil. A small group of speculators, through leverage, control the world oil price.

A NYMEX document, “How the Exchange Works,” boasts that it has nothing to do with oil production. “Yet the buying and selling on the Exchange occurs amid the winding streets of the oldest section of New York, with nary an oil well or copper mine in sight. In fact, many thousands of transactions conducted on the Exchange each day are accomplished without the participants ever seeing a gallon of heating oil.”…

As for London’s (IPE), it has reported that its trade with Brent Crude oil contracts reached 375 million barrels in open-interest contracts on May 14, the highest level ever. This is about five times the total daily production of all sorts of oil worldwide….

The money that is being drawn out of the real world economy by these speculative practices is then being used to keep the international financial markets afloat, trapping even more real money in it, creating in the process a shortage of buying power for ordinary consumers, causing economic deflation in some countries, while at the same time inflating national currencies all over the world.

The money is also being used to buy up real resources, and agricultural lands all over the world as well as bribing politicians and putting pressure on governments and nations to sell out their industries, public services and public lands to multi-national corporations, which are majority owned by those financial “big players”.

Today´s financial markets and its “big players” are totally disconnected from economic reality and any public good. They have become pure predators on the whole world´s population. They are destructive of the real economy.
And if they ever contributed anything useful in the past, they certainly don´t any more.

The destruction of Iraq was for Israel, not oil

When the US invasion of Iraq started in 2003 how often did we hear the slogan “No Blood for Oil” proclaimed loudly by the anti-war movement?

How often did we hear the accusation that the “insatiable thirst” for oil of the American economy and the American consumer had caused this drive for war against an oil-rich country?

But is this really what we should be focused on?

Ahmed Janabi of Al-Jazeera has good reason, supported by new documentary evidence, to see a far more important motive for the US war-policy.

On November 9, 2009 Janabi wrote:

New Iraq going “soft on Israel”

In 1951 the Arab League established the Bureau for Boycotting Israel. Based in Damascus, Syria, the bureau has lost much of its authority since Egypt, Jordan and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) signed peace treaties with Israel…

Before the US-led invasion, Iraq adhered closely to the instructions of the bureau. Israeli companies, those with Israeli shareholders and companies with dealings with Israel were banned in Iraq….

Before the 2003 invasion, Iraq endured 13 years of UN sanctions. During this time speculation was rife that one of the aims of the sanctions was to force Iraq into a peace process with Israel…

Al Jazeera has obtained a document written by Saddam Hussein’s secretary, which conveys Hussein’s rejection of an offer to partake in a peace process with Israel in exchange for the lifting of sanctions….

Badi Rafaia, a spokesman for the Federation of Anti-Normalisation with Israel Unions Committee in Jordan, said the US-led invasion of Iraq removed one of the last remaining obstacles to Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights.

“[Before the war] Iraq was the main obstacle to Israel’s plan to establish ties with Arab countries and subsequently swallow Palestinians’ rights and demands,” he said.

“We believe that Iraq’s decision to allow companies with ties to Israel to work in the country is the fruit of American strategy in the region.”

Before the the first Gulf war in 1991, Saddam Hussein was actually an US ally:

‘Former National Security Council official, Roger Morris, says’:CIA helped Baath party to power

‘… in 1963, two years after the ill-fated U.S. attempt at overthrow in Cuba known as the Bay of Pigs, the CIA helped organize a bloody coup in Iraq that deposed the Soviet-leaning government of Gen. Abdel-Karim Kassem. [...] Kassem, who had allowed communists to hold positions of responsibility in his government, was machine-gunned to death. And the country wound up in the hands of the Baath party.’

‘At the time () Saddam was a Baath operative studying law in Cairo, one of the venues the CIA chose to plan the coup. [Saddam] was actually on the CIA payroll in those days .

“There’s no question,” Morris says. “It was there in Cairo that (Saddam) and others were first contacted by the agency.”

In 1968 () the CIA encouraged a palace revolt among Baath party elements led by long-time Saddam mentor Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, who would turn over the reins of power to his ambitious protégé [Saddam] in 1979.

“It’s a regime that was unquestionably midwived by the United States, and the (CIA’s) involvement there was really primary,” Morris says.

But the American involvement with the Baath party and Saddam Hussein himself didn´t end there.

In the same year as Saddam was elevated into full power in Iraq, the Islamic revolution in Iran succeeded and the Shah, the American puppet, and his brutal torture regime were ousted, the American embassy was occupied and it´s personnel held hostage by angry Iranians.

Saddam was then encouraged to attack Iran over a border conflict. Without American support, the war would have been over in no time. Iraq, a country with a much smaller population didn´t stand a chance.

‘To prevent Iraqi defeat in the war, which in the end lasted from 1980 to 1988,

the Reagan Administration began supplying Saddam with battlefield intelligence on Iranian troop movements. By the end of the decade, Washington had authorized the sale to Iraq of numerous items that had both military and civilian applications. These included poisonous chemicals and biological viruses, among them anthrax and bubonic plague.’

Contacts between Saddam Hussein and the American government proceeded throughout that war on the highest levels. The Washington Post wrote on December 30, 2002:

‘Declassified documents show that Rumsfeld traveled to Baghdad at a time when Iraq was using chemical weapons on an “almost daily” basis in defiance of international conventions.’

But the end of the Iran-Iraq war wasn´t the end of the US-Iraqi connivance either. Eight days before his Aug. 2, 1990, invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein met with April Glaspie, then America’s ambassador to Iraq. It was the last high-level contact between the two countries before Iraq went to war.

From a translation of Iraq’s transcript of the meeting it seemed quite obvious, that Ms. Glaspie had (in effect) given Saddam a green light to invade.

“We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts,” the transcript reports Glaspie saying, “such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary [of State James] Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction … that Kuwait is not associated with America.”

Why would the American ambassador lead a loyal American ally, a man brought to power by the CIA, into such a trap?

Why, after the attack, where the Iraqi army had been decimated, would the whole Iraqi people subsequently be punished by brutal sanctions costing millions of lives?

Was this really in the interest of the American economy or the American oil-companies?

Economist Ismael Hossein-zadeh has written that the desired policy from the perspective of the oil companies had actually been support for local strong-men, like Saddam Hussein, who would guarantee the stability needed for their business, not demolish them.

Hossein-zadeh sees the claim of the anti-war movement, that the American motivation to go to war in Iraq, was to seek the control of oil, as contradicted by observed modern history and as a contradiction in itself.

While some of these (war-) opponents argue that the war is driven by the U.S. desire for cheap oil, others claim that it is prompted by big oil’s wish for high oil prices and profits. Interestingly, most antiwar forces use both claims interchangeably without paying attention to the fact that they are diametrically-opposed assertions.

Hossein-zadeh then points out that oil-prices aren´t actually controlled by the producers, either the oil-corporations or the oil-producing countries, neither is the access to oil:

Today, oil prices (like most other commodity prices) are determined largely by the forces of supply and demand in competitive global energy markets; and any country or company can have as much oil as they wish if they pay the going market (or spot) price

To the extent that competitive oil markets and/or prices are occasionally manipulated, such subversion of competitive market forces are often brought about not so much by OPEC or other oil producing countries as by manipulative speculations of financial giants in New York and London.

…. Wall Street financial institutions have accomplished this feat through “innovative” financial instruments such as establishment of energy hedge funds and speculative oil futures markets in New York and London….

Most of the current theories of imperialism and hegemony that continue invoking that old pattern of Big Oil behavior tend to suffer from an a-historical perspective. Today, as discussed earlier, even physically occupying and controlling another country’s oil fields will not necessarily be beneficial to oil interests. Not only will military adventures place the operations of current energy projects at jeopardy, but they will also make the future plans precarious and unpredictable….

Big Oil interests also know, that not only is war no longer the way to gain access to oil, it is in fact an obstacle to gaining that access.

Exclusion of U.S. oil companies from vast oil resources in countries such as Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and a number of central Asian countries due to militaristic U.S. foreign policy is a clear testament to this fact.

Many of these countries (including, yes, Iran) would be glad to have major U.S. oil companies invest, explore and extract oil from their rich reserves. Needless to say that U.S. oil companies would be delighted to have access to those oil resources.

But U.S. champions of war and militarism have successfully torpedoed such opportunities through their unilateral wars of aggression and their penchant for a Cold War-like international atmosphere.

If the American oil-companies did not expect any advantages from a war against Iraq, who did?

Anti-Zionist-activist Mark Green analyzes a 60 MINUTES segment which aired on Sunday February,18 in 2007. The program claimed:

that Iraq is indeed disintegrating as a nation. But according to host Bob Simon, this isn’t altogether unreasonable or, for that matter, even unfortunate.

The Kurds of Iraq, explained Simon, are the world’s “largest nation without a country”. Simon lends subtle support to the idea that an irredentist “ethic minority” (Kurds) deserve their own separate nation which, like Israel, is poised to spring suddenly into being out of a battered nation of extremist Arabs….

Indeed, a major part of the ‘Kurdistan’ story which was basically ignored by ‘60 MINUTES’ is how the Jewish State will benefit enormously by the creation of a brand new, ardently pro-Zionist, and oil-rich ally operating right inside of what’s now Northern Iraq….

Indeed, while Baghdad burns, there’s an economic boom, observes Simon on ‘60 MINUTES’, going on right now inside Iraq’s Kurdish region….

Cutting Iraq into pieces, separating a Sunni from a Shiite region and creating an independent Israel-friendly Kurdistan has been on Israel´s policy agenda for at least since the 1980´s, wrote the late Israeli human-rights activist Israel Shahak in his translation of the Oded Yinon policy paper: “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties”.

In 1996 some of the authors of the American Iraq-war strategy within the Bush administration reiterated Yinon´s plan about bombing and cutting Iraq to pieces in their own policy paper : A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm

The paper was written 4 years before Bush the younger brought the Neocon gang with him to power. It was written for Benyamin Netanyahu, then Prime Minister of Israel. The authors were Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser.

The destruction of Iraq, a multi-ethnic and multi-religious nation that sympathizes with the Palestinian people and also the most advanced Arab nation, has been on the Israeli wish list for quite some time. Using the Oded Yinon/PNAC goals of securing the Middle East for Israel, the Iraq war has been an astonishing success. Whereas the outcome for U.S. based oil companies has been far from impressive.

Where “Global Warming” and “Peak Oil” meet

That place, of course, is the world´s financial market.

“Human Caused Climate Change” is a financial scam, so is the “Peak Oil” paradigm of catastrophic energy shortages in the near future.

Oil and natural gas are not scarce, but actually abundant energy resources. They are also most likely of non-biological origin, as Russian scientists and oil companies have shown for over 50 years.

While the myth of “Global Warming” is used to create new revenues for the financial elites, the myth of a limited supply of “fossil fuels” had been used for creating large profits in the past.

The western financial elites hope to secure those profits in the future by regulating the use of oil, gas and coal through internationally agreed upon CO2 reduction measures, carbon trade agreements and by monopolizing tomorrow´s nuclear energy market. This is one reason why Iran´s civilian nuclear energy program is being so severely opposed by all the governments of the western world that seek to dominate export markets for nuclear installations from India to Brazil. A primary reason also is Israel’s demand that it retain technological superiority.

As we have seen in the last post, the theory of “Catastrophic Human Caused Global Warming” neither originated from a large group of scientists nor from environmental grass-roots organizations. Instead it was a long discarded 19th century hypothesis, which was taken out of the dustbin and then proposed by the 1979 British UN Ambassador, who “tickled” the ambition-streak of Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister at the time.

We also saw, that the main argument for a human caused Climate Change, the so-called “Hockey-Stick”, has been scientifically discredited for years.

Using mostly official IPCC charts and other research done by the UN “Global Warming” scientists themselves, Dr.David Evans of Science Speak points out that, while there is evidence for some warming of the planet in the last century, there is indeed

No Evidence

that carbon dioxide emissions are the main cause of the recent global warming

And with this conclusion Evans stands in agreement with over 650 leading scientists who, while attending the UN Climate Conference in Poland,

scoffed at doomsday reports of man-made global warming – labeling them variously a lie, a hoax and part of a new religion.

Those international scientists are then quoted in a US-Senate EPW Minority report.

But in spite of more and more counter arguments by the scientific community, especially from climatologists, the “Climate Change” bills, mandating carbon reduction for individuals and industries are rammed through practically all parliaments in the industrialized world.

We once again have to look at the money trail to explain the reasons for this paradox:

The New York Times, reported on November 12, 2008

Goldman Sachs Buys Into Carbon Offsets

Goldman Sachs has recently bought pieces of two carbon-offset companies, in the latest sign of investment banks’ interest in the area……

Carbon offsets are projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions — thus potentially counterbalancing a rise in emissions elsewhere. Planting trees are the most obvious offset; but other examples include capturing methane (a potent greenhouse gas) from a coal mine, or undertaking a qualified energy-efficiency project. Offsets are used in the European carbon dioxide cap-and-trade system, but have been slow to catch on in this country, where carbon trading is largely voluntary.

And on February 26, 2008 Chris Morrison from the Green Beat branch of the investment website Venture Beat writes:

Will carbon-trading happen? Goldman hopes so, backs APX

APX, a Silicon Valley company that certifies carbon and emissions offset certificates, and which is well-placed to support carbon-trading markets when they emerge, has gotten backing from Goldman Sachs in a $14 million investment, VentureBeat has learned.

Carbon trading is a growing business that could someday come to resemble the world’s largest financial markets.

Today’s emissions markets are generally small and fragmented. In regional U.S. energy markets, utilities are already required to buy electricity from alternative energy sources like geothermal, solar or wind. To prove their use of alternative energy, they’re required to file a certificate tracking their acquisition of the energy units. So this is the beginning of a “transfer” regime that could grow into more.

Meantime, carbon offsetting markets, that corporations buy credits from, are currently voluntary, but in anticipation of future government regulation, they often require similar certifying schemes. However, the source of offsets can vary widely, from alternative energy generation to tree planting projects.

APX acts as part of the intermediary chain between buyer and seller, doing the work of tracking serial numbers on these certificates and the accounts they go into. It’s not glamorous, but having an efficient, scalable back-end will be one of the requirements for building a multi-billion dollar market, as emissions trading may well become.

As today’s small, scattered emissions trading markets grow, they may come to resemble the complex business and regulatory ecosystems of the futures and equities markets, which include various behind-the-scenes businesses similar to APX.

Another indicator that some very serious businesses are becoming involved is one of the new investors in the company’s latest funding: Goldman Sachs, a heavyweight in the New York financial markets.

The largest financial corporation in the world buys into both the “carbon-offset” as well as into the “carbon-trading” market, which is expected to become a multi-billion dollar business.

The reduction of the use of hydro-carbon energy will make large profits to be funneled once again into the financial markets, which then will substitute for the profits the oil companies, in cohorts with the oil producing countries, used to make. While energy demand is fairly inelastic, a generalized increase in end user cost will enrich the well placed.

Why, if “human caused climate change” is a scam, is this substitution necessary?

Because slowly but certainly the knowledge emerges, that these large oil-profits of the past had also been based on a scam – the scam of “resource depletion” caused by over-exploitation of resources due to “exponential global population growth“.

The myth of” increasing and catastrophic resource shortages” was initially promoted by the Rockefeller associated “Club of Rome”.

Nowadays this scam is most often called the “Peak Oil” problem.

The “Peak Oil” propagandists tell us that oil, as well as natural gas-production, has either already peaked or will in the very near future. After reaching the peak of production a fast decline would make “cheap energy” increasingly scarce. As a consequence, the global economy, dependent on “cheap energy”, would contract and eventually crash. This would then cause wide-spread devastation for most of us. And for billions of people all over the globe it would cause constant food-shortages and even starvation.

The catastrophic consequences to global food-production by shortages of oil and gas as energy resources is the first false paradigm promoted by the “Peak Oil” myth.

The second one is, that the world´s economic production is vitally dependent on energy being “cheap”.

The reality is, that it isn´t the world´s real, physical economy but the global financial markets which are dependent on energy-resources being “cheap”. For today´s actual consumers of energy, for private, industrial or public consumers, oil and gas aren´t actually that “cheap”.

It is the large difference between production costs and consumer prices of oil and gas, which for a long time have kept the snake-oil sellers of the big financial corporations afloat. This high price/cost difference in oil production in the past was forced unto global consumers by the monopoly power the large oil-corporations had on the business and the coercive power their main shareholders had on governments all over the world.

The same “monopoly” game is now being started with nuclear energy production, as Dutch researcher Rudo de Ruijter points out in

US-Iran: Raid on nuclear fuel market

In the background of the political joust about Iran, a few countries are reshaping the world. They are taking possession of the global nuclear fuel market. New IAEA regulations should keep newcomers away.

The US, UK, France, Germany, Russia, China and Japan will become the world’s nuclear filling stations. Under the auspices of the IAEA these suppliers will dictate the rules, the prices and the currencies they want to get paid in.

Iran has become the pretext and test case for their plans.

However, like the “man-made Global Warming” myth, the “Peak-Oil” myth is now being contradicted by the facts, which even part of the mainstream media can no longer ignore:

On January 18, 2008 the British Times reports:

World not running out of oil, say experts

A landmark study of more than 800 oilfields by Cambridge Energy Research Associates (Cera) has concluded that rates of decline are only 4.5 per cent a year, almost half the rate previously believed, leading the consultancy to conclude that oil output will continue to rise over the next decade.

Peter Jackson, the report’s author, said: “We will be able to grow supply to well over 100million barrels per day by 2017.” Current world oil output is in the region of 85million barrels a day.

But not only do western experts now concede, that there is far more oil in the ground, than they have previously admitted to, but there are also a growing number of western geologists who finally are starting to challenge the 18th century theory of “fossil” fuel, something the Russians have done over half a century ago.

William Engdahl writes about this in his “Confessions of an “ex” Peak Oil Believer”

Engdahl explains that for the Soviets it actually was “Necessity” which became “the mother of invention”

In the 1950’s the Soviet Union faced ‘Iron Curtain’ isolation from the West. The Cold War was in high gear. Russia had little oil to fuel its economy. Finding sufficient oil indigenously was a national security priority of the highest order.

Scientists at the Institute of the Physics of the Earth of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Geological Sciences of the Ukraine Academy of Sciences began a fundamental inquiry in the late 1940’s: where does oil come from?

In 1956, Prof. Vladimir Porfir’yev announced their conclusions: ‘Crude oil and natural petroleum gas have no intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the earth. They are primordial materials which have been erupted from great depths.’ The Soviet geologists had turned Western orthodox geology on its head. They called their theory of oil origin the ‘a-biotic’ theory—non-biological—to distinguish from the Western biological theory of origins.

If they were right, oil supply on earth would be limited only by the amount of hydrocarbon constituents present deep in the earth at the time of the earth’s formation. Availability of oil would depend only on technology to drill ultra-deep wells and explore into the earth’s inner regions. They also realized old fields could be revived to continue producing, so called self-replentishing fields. They argued that oil is formed deep in the earth, formed in conditions of very high temperature and very high pressure, like that required for diamonds to form. ‘Oil is a primordial material of deep origin which is transported at high pressure via ‘cold’ eruptive processes into the crust of the earth,’ Porfir’yev stated. His team dismissed the idea that oil is was biological residue of plant and animal fossil remains as a hoax designed to perpetuate the myth of limited supply.

The Soviets then started to tailor their oil-explorations accordingly:

Following their a-biotic or non-fossil theory of the deep origins of petroleum, the Russian and Ukrainian petroleum geophysicists and chemists began with a detailed analysis of the tectonic history and geological structure of the crystalline basement of the Dnieper-Donets Basin. After a tectonic and deep structural analysis of the area, they made geophysical and geochemical investigations.

A total of sixty one wells were drilled, of which thirty seven were commercially productive, an extremely impressive exploration success rate of almost sixty percent. The size of the field discovered compared with the North Slope of Alaska. By contrast, US wildcat drilling was considered successful with a ten percent success rate. Nine of ten wells are typically “dry holes.”…

While the American oil multinationals were busy controlling the easily accessible large fields of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran and other areas of cheap, abundant oil during the 1960’s, the Russians were busy testing their alternative theory. They began drilling in a supposedly barren region of Siberia. There they developed eleven major oil fields and one Giant field based on their deep ‘a-biotic’ geological estimates. They drilled into crystalline basement rock and hit black gold of a scale comparable to the Alaska North Slope.

They then went to Vietnam in the 1980s and offered to finance drilling costs to show their new geological theory worked. The Russian company Petrosov drilled in Vietnam’s White Tiger oilfield offshore into basalt rock some 17,000 feet down and extracted 6,000 barrels a day of oil to feed the energy-starved Vietnam economy. In the USSR, a-biotic-trained Russian geologists perfected their knowledge and the USSR emerged as the world’s largest oil producer by the mid-1980’s.

With the fall of the Iron Curtain the Russian oil-theory became far more available to scientists and lay people in the western world. Enthusiastically embracing free-market doctrines in the 1990s the Russian oil experts initially offered to share their expertise with the western world. But they were rebuffed in their overtures.

Obviously a theory which contradicts the scarcity myth would cut into the profits of the western oil-corporations.

The Russian oil-companies at home, however, kept on working the same way they had done for nearly half a century. Well after the dissolution of the USSR, in the early 1990’s, they went on using the a-biotic petroleum theory

to drill for oil and gas in a region believed for more than forty-five years, to be geologically barren—the Dnieper-Donets Basin in the region between Russia and Ukraine.

And while the well-paid scientists of the western oil-companies rejected the theory, others did not. Raymond J. Learsy quotes the western proponents of the abiotic oil-theory in the Huffington Post:

The modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins recognizes that petroleum is a primordial material of deep origin which has been erupted into the crust of the Earth. In short, and bluntly, petroleum is not a “fossil fuel” and has no intrinsic connection with dead dinosaurs (or any other biological detritus) “in the sediments” (or anywhere else)…

The modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of petroleum is based upon rigorous scientific reasoning, consistent with the laws of physics and chemistry, as well as upon extensive geological observation, and rests squarely in the mainstream of modern physics and chemistry, from which it draws its provenance.
Much of the modern Russian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum genesis developed from the sciences of chemistry and thermodynamics, and accordingly the modern theory has steadfastly held as a central tenet that the generation of hydrocarbons must conform to the general laws of chemical thermodynamics, – as must likewise all matter.
In such respect, modern Russian-Ukrainian petroleum science contrasts strongly to what are too often passed off as “theories” in the field of geology in Britain and the U.S.A.

The wall western multinational oil-companies had put up against scientifically based research to save their scarcity paradigm is obviously crumbling as was to be expected at least since the fall of the Iron Wall. More and more western scientific research supporting the long established and well tested Russian theories is now being published, as in the right-wing WorldNetDaily, which cites geologist and researcher Giora Proskurowski who, in a study published in Science Magazine

presented new evidence supporting the abiotic theory for the origin of oil…
While organic theorists have posited that the material required to produce hydrocarbons in sedimentary rock came from dinosaurs and ancient forests, more recent argument have suggested living organisms as small as plankton may have been the origin.

The abiotic theory argues, in contrast, that hydrocarbons are naturally produced on a continual basis throughout the solar system, including within the mantle of the earth. The advocates believe the oil seeps up through bedrock cracks to deposit in sedimentary rock. Traditional petro-geologists, they say, have confused the rock as the originator rather than the depository of the hydrocarbons….

Lost City is a hypothermal field some 2,100 feet below sea level that sits along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge at the center of the Atlantic Ocean, noted for strange 90 to 200 foot white towers on the sea bottom.

In 2003 and again in 2005, Proskurowski and his team descended in a scientific submarine to collect liquid bubbling up from Lost City sea vents.

Proskurowski found hydrocarbons containing carbon-13 isotopes that appeared to be formed from the mantle of the Earth, rather than from biological material settled on the ocean floor.

Carbon 13 is the carbon isotope scientists associate with abiotic origin, compared to Carbon 12 that scientists typically associate with biological origin.

Proskurowski argued that the hydrocarbons found in the natural hydrothermal fluids coming out of the Lost City sea vents is attributable to abiotic production by Fischer-Tropsch, or FTT, reactions.

The Fischer-Tropsch equations were first developed by Nazi scientists who created methodologies for producing synthetic oil from coal.

“Our findings illustrate that the abiotic synthesis of hydrocarbons in nature may occur in the presence of ultramafic rocks, water and moderate amounts of heat,” Proskurowski wrote.

The study also confirmed a major argument of Cornell University physicist Thomas Gold, who argued in his book “The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels” that micro-organisms found in oil might have come from the mantle of the earth where, absent photosynthesis, the micro-organisms feed on hydrocarbons arising from the earth’s mantle in the dark depths of the ocean floors.

Another piece of evidence for the abiotic origin of oil, are several experimental studies done recently:

Alexander Goncharov, a geophysicist at the Carnegie Institution ()
and his colleagues in Russia and Sweden have experimentally shown for the first time that ethane and heavier hydrocarbons can be produced under the pressure and temperature conditions of the upper mantle, the slightly viscous layer of the earth directly below the crust. Their research was published () in Nature Geoscience.

“Our results provide a link which was previously missing or was doubtful because of a lack of in situ measurements … for the upper mantle conditions,” Goncharov said. “Thus, our work suggests there is a possibility for the [abiogenic] oil formation in the deep earth and that there is a potential to find more oil fields than expected if one assumes that oil could be formed only biogenically.”

The researchers used a diamond anvil cell and a laser heat source to subject methane — a primary component of natural gas — to conditions that mimic the earth at 40 to 95 miles deep……………….

Under those conditions, the methane reacted and formed petrochemical feedstock ethane and propane and butane, which are used as fuels, as well as molecular hydrogen and graphite. When the ethane was subjected to the same conditions, it formed methane, suggesting heavier hydrocarbons could exist deep under the earth’s surface.

Barry Katz, a geochemist at Chevron Corp., agreed.

“I don’t disagree with the idea,” Katz said. “I disagree with the idea of commercial quantities. There’s no question that it’s coming out of the system. However, it’s not coming out in commercial quantities.”

Katz is acting like a true corporate hack. Russian, Ukrainian and Vietnamese oil producers have proved that there is indeed oil to be found at great depth and in commercial quantities.

According to an interview with oil-expert Dr. Kenney

Russian and Ukrainian scientists found

that a continuous reaction occurs naturally at a depth of approximately 100 km at a pressure of approximately 50,000 atmospheres (5 GPa) and a temperature of approximately 1500°C, and will continue more or less until the ‘death’ of planet earth in millions of years’ time. The high pressure causes oil to continuously seep up along fissures in the earth’s crust into subterranean caverns, which we call oil fields.

As the “Global Warming” myth is designed to put a large economic burden on the world population and hinder developing countries from rising up from poverty, so would the acceptance of the “Peak Oil” myth become the justification for endless wars in the Middle East, South America or the Caucasus, where we in the West are told we need to protect the “scarce resources” from the grab of the Chinese.

The Origins of the “Global Warming” Scare

Did you know, that the “Human caused Global Warming” hypothesis didn´t originate in the 1980s, but actually in the 1880s?
Although, until the late 1970s, the hypothesis was considered “a curiosity”, since it contradicted observed events.

Did you further know, that at first this hypothesis wasn´t publicly promoted by scientists or even environmentalists, but by an UN ambassador and a very ambitious British Lady-politician?

It’s snowing in April. Ice is spreading in Antarctica. The Great Barrier Reef is as healthy as ever.
And that’s just the news of the past week. Truly, it never rains but it pours – and all over our global warming alarmists.

Time’s up for this absurd scaremongering. The fears are being contradicted by the facts, and more so by the week.

wrote Andrew Bolt in the Australian Herald Sun last April.

Then he goes on to debunk many of the main-claims most “Global Warming” (renamed “Climate Change”) believers will cite in public:

-like the claim that
the earth is rapidly warming at the moment.
The facts, however, are
that according to data from Britain’s Hadley Centre, NASA’s Aqua satellite and the US National Climatic Data Centre
the fall in temperatures from just 2002 (until 2009) has already wiped out half the warming our planet experienced last century.
(See also: Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered)

-or the claim that
the polar ice is rapidly melting.
The facts, however, are
that a British Antarctic Survey, working with NASA, last (April) confirmed
ice around Antarctica has grown 100,000 sq km each decade for the past 30 years.

-or the claim, that
the oceans are warming up
The facts, however, are
according to Josh Willis, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who evaluated
a five years study (done using) a network of 3175 automated bathythermographs deployed in the oceans by the Argo program, a collaboration between 50 agencies from 26 countries:
“There has been a very slight cooling”…

-or the claim that
sea-levels are rising dramatically.
The facts, however, are
according to the Jason-1 satellite mission monitored by the University of Colorado, that
for almost three years, the seas have stopped rising,

-or the claim,
that world-wide devastating storms (cyclones) are getting worse.
The facts, however, are
according to Ryan Maue of Florida State University, who
recently measured the frequency, intensity and duration of all hurricanes and cyclones to compile an Accumulated Cyclone Energy Index.()
The energy index is at its lowest level for more than 30 years.

-or the absolutely ridiculous claim by World Vision boss Tim Costello that Asia was a “region, thanks to climate change, that has far more cyclones, tsunamis, droughts”.
The facts are
(besides that Tsunamis are  caused by earthquakes)
according to a 2006 study by Indur Goklany, who represented the US at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:
“There is no signal in the mortality data to indicate increases in the overall frequencies or severity of extreme weather events, despite large increases in the population at risk.”

Most of the myths, which are now slowly being debunked by scientists through intensive research, have once been created by “scientists”.

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has for several decades now employed “scientists” who claim

that human activities are responsible for nearly all earth’s recorded warming during the past two centuries.

writes David R. Legates  in “Breaking the “Hockey Stick”

A widely circulated image used by the IPCC dramatically depicting these temperature trends resembles a hockey stick with three distinct parts: a flat “shaft” extending from A.D. 1000 to 1900, a “blade” shooting up from A.D. 1900 to 2000, and a range of uncertainty in temperature estimates that envelops the shaft like a “sheath.”
This image was produced by Michael Mann, Ray Bradley and Malcolm Hughes

(other collegues working with Mann on his subsequent “climate change” research-papers were Philip D. Jones and Gavin Schmidt)…..

However, five independent research groups have uncovered problems with the underlying reconstructions by Mann and his colleagues in their 1998 and 1999 work that have persisted through his most recent collaborative efforts, calling into question all three components of the “hockey stick.”…

Mann and Jones indicate that globally- and hemispherically-averaged air temperatures from A.D. 200 to 1900 were nearly constant. Missing from their timeline, however, are the widely recognized Medieval Warm Period (about A.D. 800 to 1400) and the Little Ice Age (A.D. 1600 to 1850).
Most proxy records from around the globe show these climatic events, as Willie Soon, Sallie L. Baliunas and I concluded in a 2003 paper published in Energy and the Environment.

For instance:
* In such widely disparate regions as Argentina, Chile, southern Peru, southern Africa and northern China, records indicate a marked warming at the beginning of the last millennium followed by extreme cold during the middle centuries.

* Historical proxies for temperature – such as tree rings, ice cores and bore holes – in New Zealand, Australia and California also confirm widespread, significant warming and cooling trends…..

(Scientists) Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick..().. contend that Mann and his colleagues in their 1998 and 1999 papers unjustifiably truncated or extrapolated trends from source data, used obsolete data, made incorrect calculations, and associated data sets with incorrect geographical locations….

More recently,(scientists) David Chapman, Marshall Bartlett and Robert Harris identified methodological problems in a 2003 Geophysical Research Letters study by Mann and G. Schmidt.
Specifically, Mann and Schmidt eliminated specific proxy records (data from bore holes) they thought were inaccurate. Chapman et al. showed that Mann and Schmidt had unjustifiably excluded the bore-hole data and concluded that their methods were “just bad science” and that they presented a “selective and inappropriate presentation” of results..….

Jan Esper, David Frank and Robert Wilson () further argued that the fatal flaw with Mann, Bradley and Hughes’ temperature reconstruction is its incorrect representation of longer-term trends.
They observed that the statistical methods used inappropriately remove trends over long time periods..…

But the meteoric rise of the “Global Warming – bad science” into a global dogma and from there into the legislation of, by now, most nations on earth, did not originate with scientists at all.

Richard Courtney, founding member of the European Science and Environment Forum and technical advisor to several members of the British Parliament as well as to some British members of the European Parliament wrote the 1999 article “Global Warming: How It All Began” in which he explores the history of this particular pseudo-science.

The hypothesis of man-made global warming has existed since the 1880s. It was an obscure scientific hypothesis that burning fossil fuels would increase CO2 in the air to enhance the greenhouse effect and thus cause global warming. Before the 1980s this hypothesis was usually regarded as a curiosity because the nineteenth century calculations indicated that mean global temperature should have risen more than 1°C by 1940, and it had not.

Then, in 1979, Mrs. Margaret Thatcher (now Lady Thatcher) became Prime Minister of the UK, and she elevated the hypothesis to the status of a major international policy issue…..

Courtney goes on to explain, that in 1979 Thatcher actually did not yet have a much stature abroad or at home. In Britain her only claim to fame as an Education Secretary in the Heath administration that collapsed in 1974 was  as ‘Milk Snatcher Thatcher’ due to her policy of ending distribution of milk to British school-children.

It was Britain´s  Ambassador to the United Nations, Sir Crispin Tickell, who suggested she should use the issue of “Global Warming” as a means to gain national and international credibility.

He also suggested, that Thatcher with her education, a degree in chemistry, could easily win debates on scientific subjects, since most other politicians were “scientifically illiterate” .

As an aside, there are quite interesting parallels between the British “Iron Lady” of the 1980s and the German “Iron Lady” of today.

Like Thatcher, Angela Merkel was not widely known before she was put into office by her party.
(Why they chose her is rather a mystery. Merkel was actually loosing votes for her conservative Christian Democratic Party, with her pro-Iraq-war position, when practically the whole German nation was opposed to it, and the seeming inability to produce a single genuine smile reaching the eyes, which gave her a definite lack of public charisma.)

Like Thatcher, Merkel also has degree in science, a doctorate (Dr. rer. nat.) for her thesis on quantum chemistry.

Like Thatcher, Merkel is busy cutting down on workers´ rights and on the German social safety net. Merkel, the pro-corporate and anti-union German chancellor, is also a strong supporter of carbon-tax legislation, both in Germany and in Europe, as well as a mandated global reduction in CO2 to combat “Global Warming”.

Margaret Thatcher went for Ambassador Tickell´s “Global Warming” to strengthen her prominence.
Her Conservative Party went for it, to weaken the British coal-miners labor union. “Global Warming” would then give the nuclear industry a push, since now coal-fueled power-stations could be replaced by nuclear power-stations for “environmental” reasons. Britain´s nuclear industry urgently needed that kind of a push since the Three Mile Island  accident had damaged public confidence in nuclear technology.

The other rationale for why nuclear power should be used instead of coal, the alleged cost benefit, was being destroyed, when privatisation of the Britain’s electricity supply industry exposed that British nuclear power was produced at four times the cost of electricity produced in coal-fueled power-plants.

And, writes Courtney,

the Conservative Party wanted a large UK nuclear power industry for another reason. That industry’s large nuclear processing facilities were required for the UK’s nuclear weapons programme and the opposition Labour Party was then opposing the Conservative Party’s plans to upgrade the UK’s nuclear deterrent with Trident missiles and submarines.

Subsequently the “Global Warming” issue was promoted by large government grants and funds. Scientists fell in line through peer pressure and for fear of losing their research fundings and not because they actually were convinced by the argument.

In 1992 Greenpeace International conducted a survey of the world’s 400 leading climatologists. Greenpeace had hoped to publicize the results of that survey in the run-up to the Rio summit, but when they completed the survey, they gave very little publicity to its results. In response to the survey, only 15 climatologists were willing to say they believed in global warming, although all climatologists rely on it for their employment.

Though not all scientists sold out their integrity for funds:

Following the Leipzig Climate Conference in November 1995,

the Leipzig Declaration disputes the IPCC assertions about man-made global warming. It was drafted and has been signed by over 1,500 scientists from around the world.

Today the “Global Warming” and “Climate Protection” issue is being sold to the public as being a liberal or even a left-wing concern. Forgotten is it´s very much right-wing, anti-union corporate and militarist origin.

Green and environmental minded people also seem to have forgotten the connection between “Global Warming” and the nuclear power-industry, and anti-war activists never seem to register, that “Global Warming” was actually used to create more weapons of mass-destruction.

The fact that the “Global Warming” or “Climate Change” issue isn´t really about environmental protection is clearly shown, for instance, by the US Climate Chang Bill, promoted by the new US Obama Administration and his “progressive” Democratic Party.

Atheo News writes about the bill in Dr. Chu’s Energy Bait and Switch

The congressional mandates “are very weak and really will not require any additional renewables beyond what states already are doing,” says Mark Sinclair of Clean Energy States Alliance. “It will be meaningless. It’s just a gesture.”

Marchant Wentworth of the Union of Concerned Scientists came to a similar conclusion, seeing that absolute requirements for renewables, after allowances, would be as low as 8 percent of total electric power generation for each utility. This is hardly a challenge for most utilities in a nation that in 2006 generated almost 10 percent of its electricity from renewable sources, including hydro power.

In other words, the proposed renewable sources requirements amount to little more than shallow symbolism. The current public subsidies and underwriting for nuclear power already make the nuclear choice more economically viable for utilities to maximise return on utility investment.
The legislation is, in fact, a thinly vieled mandate for building new nuclear power plants, or to increase output from existing ones.
Republicans are offering a different plan that simply calls for building 100 new nuclear plants within the next twenty years.

These plans mirror similar policies across the Atlantic where the government in Britain is rushing a new generation of nuclear power plants, with a goal to begin construction within four years. Both ‘energy independence’ and climate change were cited as rationales by policy makers there as well.

Obama’s Secretary of Energy, Dr. Steven Chu, from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is a staunch advocate of nuclear power, citing it as “essential” due to global warming while at the same time ignoring the carbon emissions of the “nuclear cycle” that are produced from the mining, milling, enrichment, fuel fabrication and disposal of spent fuel. The new appointee described nuclear power as “carbon free” at his confirmation in January.

While the “Global Warming” or “Climate Change” sceptics (sometimes called “deniers”) are often accused of being paid assets of the oil industry, the economical and political advantages of the “Global Warming” pseudo-science for the nuclear power industry cannot be denied any longer.

There is, however, an even stronger and even less publically known connection of the “Gobal Warmers” with another industry, as Aletho News reports:

The new Democratic climate change bill , introduced in the Senate by Barbara Boxer and John Kerry, contains more advantages for nuclear power than even the legislation which passed in the House of Representatives last June. Included are waste management, financing and loan guarantee arrangements, regulatory risk insurance, as well as R&D and training programs. Joseph Lieberman is understood to be preparing the fine print for the bill which is presently “short on details”…..

As with other major pieces of legislation under consideration by the current Congress, the financial industry is a central actor, venture capitalists “are ready to pour multibillions of dollars into clean energy” if Congress passes “some kind of bill that talks about energy independence and climate change,” Boxer said.

How deep the connection between the “Climate Change” movement and the financial industry actually is, and how important the matter is for the elite of this industry, and how this even is connected to the issue of Iran´s civillian nuclear energy program, will be the subject of part two of this report.

Could there be a motive for Israel to destabilize Iraq right now?

Look at the map!

In spite of the deal Iran has made with Russia and France about it´s nuclear enrichment program, Israel is still threatening an attack.
If Israel wants to attack Iran from it´s own territory it has to fly over Iraq. There is no other way.

We know that many Shiites in Iraq sympathize with Iran. We know, that no truly sovereign Iraqi government would give Israel permission to use Iraqi airspace for attacks on Iran, no matter who would win the upcoming elections.

And now after the reduction of American troops some areas of Iraq are now under full the control of Iran-friendly Shiites, who might possibly assist Iran in monitoring any missiles flying overhead and so increase Iran´s defensive capability.

Another factor might be, that with fewer US troops in Iraq, fewer can be used by Israel as human shields for their own attacks.
When Iran responds to an Israeli attack with attacking Israel, it´s Israel´s business. If Iran would attack American troops in Iraq, America would have to get involved.

In a speech at the Center for Security Policy last week Dick Cheney, one of the main Neocons and, without being Jewish still an Israel-firster, lambasted the Obama government for many things, including withdrawing partly from Iraq and planning further withdrawals:

Next door in Iraq, it is vitally important that President Obama, in his rush to withdraw troops, not undermine the progress we’ve made in recent years.

Prime Minister Maliki met yesterday with President Obama, who began his press availability with an extended comment about Afghanistan. When he finally got around to talking about Iraq, he told the media that he reiterated to Maliki his intention to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq.

Former President Bush’s bold decision to change strategy in Iraq and surge U.S. forces there set the stage for success in that country. Iraq has the potential to be a strong, democratic ally in the war on terrorism, and an example of economic and democratic reform in the heart of the Middle East. The Obama Administration has an obligation to protect this young democracy and build on the strategic success we have achieved in Iraq.

Think about it, Obama promises Maliki to end American occupation in Iraq in the future (a promise he might or might not keep), an event all Iraqis have been waiting for for years, and Cheney spins it as a betrayal of “this young democracy”.

And then, yesterday, we had those devastating car-bomb attacks. And right away the media is talking about the Iraqi security forces being unable to provide security in their own country.
Today´s online edition of the New York Times declares:

BAGHDAD — Two synchronized suicide car bombings struck at the heart of the Iraqi government here on Sunday, severely damaging the Justice Ministry and provincial council complexes, leaving a scene of carnage that raised new questions about the government’s ability to secure its most vital operations.

So in other words, the American troops need “to save” the Iraqis from themselves or from AlQaida or from the Syrian sponsored terrorists or whoever….

In case of an Israeli attack on Iran more American troops would, of course, either provide better chances for American involvement in Israel´s war or, at least, they would secure the air-space for Israel to have a better shooting range.

Another 147 people dead in Baghdad, cui bono?

Once again, in one of the bloodiest attacks ever, two bombings killed and injured over 800 people.
(update:In the first reports those were called suicide bombings, now we hear about car-bombs of cars parked in a parking garage.)
Nearly a whole street was flattened.
This surely is not the kind of destruction which can be caused by home-made bombs, put together in some basement.

The people behind the attacks, we are told, are supposedly former supporters of the late Saddam Hussein or maybe members of AlQaida or other Sunni radical groups, supported by Syria (What interest would Syria have in destabilizing Iraq, while Syria´s ally Iran is supporting the Shiite dominated government?).

While the attacks were supposedly directed at government buildings, the people killed or maimed were mainly civilians on the street.
What kind of support could Saddam´s supporters possibly gain from the civilian population with this kind of brutal attacks against them. Do they actually think that anyone would vote for them after having lost family or friends in such an attack or being afraid the next attack might kill a loved one?

Saddam Hussein was mainly a secular politician, who opposed the Shiite religious opposition for political, not for religious reasons (the Shiite authorities were close to Iran, while Saddam on the behest of his US-supporters was fighting Iran)

During the early years of  the American occupation, while some of the Shiite establishment allied themselves with the Americans, the more radical leaders of both Sunnis and Shiites called for resistance and at the same time national unity across sectarian borders.

It made no sense that Iraqis of either side would attack the civilian population of the other side while they saw the Americans still as their main enemy.
It made no sense at all that a short time into the American occupation supposedly religiously motivated attacks against mosques and public places started.

Iraqi blogger Riverbend wrote:

“Iraqis have intermarried and mixed as Sunnis and Shia for centuries. Many of the larger Iraqi tribes are a complex and intricate weave of Sunnis and Shia. We don’t sit around pointing fingers at each other and trying to prove who is a Muslim and who isn’t and who deserves compassion and who deserves brutalization.”

But most of those bombings were suicide attacks, were are told, they must be real.
Really?

Here is an article by SOTT Focus on the issue:
Suicide Bombings – A Favourite US Counter-Insurgency Tactic

Roger Trinquier, an immensely influential French counter-insurgency expert, suggested in his book Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency (1961) (Available online here) three simple principles of Counter Insurgency:

1. separate the guerrilla from the population that supports him;
2. occupy the zones that the guerrillas previously operated from, making them dangerous for him and turning the people against the guerrilla movement;
3. coordinate actions over a wide area and for a long enough time that the guerrilla is denied access to the population centres that could support him.

Remote controlled bombings masquerading as “suicide bombings” that are carried out by the US, British and Israeli occupation forces fit these principles very neatly. By detonating bombs on a daily basis across Iraq and Afghanistan and via the propaganda organs touting them as being the work of Iraqi/Afghani “suicide bombers” belonging to the insurgency, the occupying military hopes to achieve several goals:
-cut off the widespread support base that the insurgency have amongst the Iraqis
-create tensions between religious lines, especially by ascribing the faked “suicide attacks” to either Shias or Sunnis.
In other words divide and conquer.

Here is a collectionof some of the reports of fake attempted “suicide attacks” coming out of Iraq:

In May 2005, former Iraqi exile Imad Khadduri, reported how a driver whose license had been confiscated in Baghdad was questioned for half an hour at an American military camp, informed that there were no charges against him, and then directed to the al-Khadimiya police station to retrieve his license.
“The driver did leave in a hurry, but was soon alarmed with a feeling that his car was…carrying a heavy load, and he also became suspicious of a low flying helicopter that kept hovering overhead, as if trailing him. He stopped the car and … found nearly 100 kilograms of explosives hidden in the back seat…the only feasible explanation for this incident is that the car was indeed booby trapped by the Americans and intended for the al-Khadimiya Shiite district of Baghdad. The helicopter was monitoring his movement and witnessing the anticipated ‘hideous attack by foreign elements’”.

(According to Khadurri, the scenario was repeated again in Mosul, when a driver’s car broke down on the way to the police station where he was sent to reclaim his license. The mechanic he then turned to discovered the spare tire to be laden with explosives.)

In the same month, 64-year-old farmer Haj Haidar, who was taking his tomato load from Hilla to Baghdad, was stopped at an American checkpoint and had his pick-up thoroughly searched. Allowed to go on his way, his 11 year-old grandson then told him he saw one of the American soldiers placing a grey melon-sized object amidst the tomato containers. Realizing the vehicle was his only means of work, Haidar fought his initial impulse to run and removed the object from his truck, placing it in a nearby ditch. He later learnt that it had in fact exploded, killing part of a passing shepherd’s flock of sheep.

At this point, legendary Iraqi blogger ‘Riverbend’ reported that many of the supposed suicide bombings were in fact remotely detonated car bombs or time bombs. She related how a man was arrested for allegedly having shot at a National Guardsman after huge blasts struck in west Baghdad. But according the man’s neighbours, far from having shot anyone, he had seen “an American patrol passing through the area and pausing at the bomb site minutes before the explosion. Soon after they drove away, the bomb went off and chaos ensued. He ran out of his house screaming to the neighbors and bystanders that the Americans had either planted the bomb or seen the bomb and done nothing about it. He was promptly taken away.”

In Basra on September 19th 2005, suspicious Iraqi police stopped undercover British soldiers in a Toyota Cressida. The two men then opened fire, killing one policeman and wounding another. Eventually captured, they were identified by the BBC as members of the SAS elite special forces. The soldiers were in wigs and dressed as Arabs and their car was packed with explosives and towing equipment.
Fattah al-Shaykh, a member of the Iraqi National Assembly, told Al-Jazeera TV that the car was meant to explode in the centre of Basra’s popular market. Before his thesis could be confirmed, however, the British army’s tanks flattened the local prison cell and freed their sinister operatives.

In 2005 American and British troops were still very much engaged in fighting the Iraqi insurgency. British and American military planners probably saw it in their interest to make the resistance look bad in the eyes of the Iraqi people.

Today, however, a divided and chaotic Iraq would no longer be in the American interest, since America is busy fighting In Afghanistan and Pakistan two other endless wars.

So in who´s interest would it be?
The “militants”, we are told by Reuters about the bomb attacks on July 31, 2009 against five Shiite mosques,

al Qaeda and other Sunni insurgent groups, most active in ethnically mixed areas north of Baghdad, are trying to reignite the sectarian conflict that brought Iraq to the brink of all-out civil war in 2006 and 2007

Ask yourself who would gain from such a civil war and a divided Iraq?

Who has written policy papers proposing the need for an Iraq divided in 3 parts?

In February 1982 the Israeli policy planner and intellectual Oded Yinon wrote:
A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties

The late human rights activist Israel Shahak, who translated this policy-paper, commented:

The following essay represents, in my opinion, the accurate and detailed plan of the present Zionist regime (of Sharon and Eitan) for the Middle East which is based on the division of the whole area into small states, and the dissolution of all the existing Arab states. I will comment on the military aspect of this plan in a concluding note. Here I want to draw the attention of the readers to several important points:

1. The idea that all the Arab states should be broken down, by Israel, into small units, occurs again and again in Israeli strategic thinking. For example, Ze’ev Schiff, the military correspondent of Ha’aretz (and probably the most knowledgeable in Israel, on this topic) writes about the “best” that can happen for Israeli interests in Iraq: “The dissolution of Iraq into a Shi’ite state, a Sunni state and the separation of the Kurdish part” (Ha’aretz 6/2/1982). Actually, this aspect of the plan is very old.

2. The strong connection with Neo-Conservative thought in the USA is very prominent, especially in the author’s notes. But, while lip service is paid to the idea of the “defense of the West” from Soviet power, the real aim of the author, and of the present Israeli establishment is clear: To make an Imperial Israel into a world power. In other words, the aim of Sharon is to deceive the Americans after he has deceived all the rest.

Some of the above mentioned American Neo-Conservatives then wrote another just as revealing policy-paper for the Israeli Netanyahu government in 1996

“A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm”
5 years before 9/11, this report is calling for an invasion of Iraq.

With contributions from: Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser all members of the “Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy,” and all key Iraq-war players in Bush administration.

The paper b.t.w. also calls for “engaging” Hizbollah (the tactical defense force of southern Lebanon) as well as Syria and Iran militarily.8

Iceland´s Debts and the Question of Fairness

The world has gone topsy turfy up here in the North Atlantic.
The latest news is, that our own Prime Minister might have sabotaged the possible Norwegian loan, which would have freed us from the grips of the IMF.
She herself has apparently written an e-mail to the Norwegian Prime Minister asking him to stop off his coalition partner, who had offered the loan.

Our Prime Minister denies to have done so, but somebody seems to have read the e-mail and now it´s all over the news.(At the moment everybody seems to be spying on everybody else, reading each others e-mails. The editors of the largest newspaper reading the e-mails of their journalists for instance, to find the “leaks”)

A banana republic is nothing against us.
And we still have no ideas what body-snatchers have taken over our government members, who once used to be decent and respected people.

Our Prime Minister used to be the most respected politician in the country, well liked far beyond the voters of her own party, and the Minister of Finances used to be a far left-leaning politician opposed to any EU membership, extremely critical of the IMF and, of course, opposed to the Ice-save indebtedness.

What has happened?
Have they lost their minds?

The Minister has lost his own party, that´s for sure. They just voted Ögmundur, who was booted out of the government for his opposition to the surrendering to Britain in the Ice-save matter, straight back in.

What´ll happen next?
No idea.
My suggestion is, we should build a few more green-houses and export the bananas from our former republic, maybe it´ll give us enough to pay for Ice-save and for the dictator who´ll surely will be installed pretty soon.

Will there be another pot and pan revolution?
Who knows?

To be sure most Icelanders are no fervent revolutionaries. They want lives which follow their ordinary routines.

Since the beginning of 2008, because of the fall of the Icelandic currency, prizes as well as mortgage and other debt-payments for families and companies have more than doubled, while wages have barely increased, and profits for most domestic companies have fallen.

But still most people are paying their personal or their companies debts, grudgingly maybe, and often with hard efforts, but still, they pay. At first debt-payments were prolonged to about kingdom come.

The government put a stop to that. Now they can only be prolonged to an extra 3 years. They also can no longer be indefinitely increased but must stay at the same level as they were at the time of the banking bust. (Of course, the Kronur had by then already lost half of it´s value to the Euro or the Dollar, and the mortgages and other debts partly denominated in foreign currency had already sky-rocketed before the bust.)

These measures by the government and the now once again publicly owned banks make the debts payable for most everybody.
There have not happened any mass-foreclosures. People stay in their homes, and that´s a high priority for the government. For believe me, homelessness isn´t an option in our climate.
The problem isn´t the temperature. It´s the storms and rains alternating with freeze, which would turn you into a popsicle after a short time, if you would stay out long enough.

I tried it one night last winter for a political protest. Even well-dressed after a couple of hours of storm and rain I was wet to the skin, sleeping-bag and all. Then it started snowing, and then came the freeze over. I´d say survival chances after more than a night become close to zero, at least for ordinary people.

People here are angry at the bankers, but also angry at their own stupidity to have taken on those debts and angry at what is here called a “culture of greed” during the last few years in the country.
People pay the debts they believe to be their own debts, be they foreign or domestic, no matter how difficult it gets.

However the Ice-save debts are another matter altogether. They are not our debts people say here. “We are not paying the debts of crooks and banksters, (especially, if they are not even our own crooks).”

The man, who was mainly in charge of the British part of Landsbanki, and the one who was the initiator of the Ice-save internet-bank, which has become this huge problem for our country is a British citizen by the name of Mark Sismey-Durrant.

Sismey-Durrant started his career on a fast track with the Midland Bank from the HSBC group.
The HSBC group is one of the largest investman banks in the world. The HSBC, the Hongkong-Shanghai-Banking-Corporation, started out as the bank, which financed the and profited from British Opium trade to China.

This trade had a devastating effect on the Chinese population. And when the government of the Chinese Emperor tried to stop it, the British declared war on China to force their opium down the Chinese throats.

Well that was a long time ago, more recently it was the HSBC people who “advised” the Icelandic government in the privatization of the Icelandic banks including Landsbanki.
-Framkvæmdanefnd um einkavæðingu sá um söluna fyrir hönd ríkisins og enski bankinn HSBC var aðalráðgjafi nefndarinnar- (A privatization committee worked on the sales on behalf of the Icelandic state and the English bank HSBC was the main advisor of the committee).

After Sismey Durrant´s “fast-track” career at the HSBC group, he then became “spearhead” of the Confederation bank. And soon thereafter the bank’s parent company, Confederation of Life, went into liquidation.
Then he became managing director of the British Heritable Bank, which was bought by Landsbanki, and subsequently the managing director of Landsbanki´s other British investment Ice-save.
And soon enough the parent company… well, you know.

While Sismey Durrant was working for the Icelandic bank Landsbanki, he was (and according to their website still is) also an active member of “The Worshipful Company of International Bankers”, which is the British bankers´guild association (“Incorporated by Royal Charter”).

Nowadays the “Worshipful Company” claims to be a charity.
However, in the outfit, were he was active in the charity and education committee, Sismey-Durrant was rubbing shoulders with Britain´s most prominent banking elite (there is barely a non-British sounding name among those members mentioned on their website).
These bankers, to whose “most worshipful company” Mark Sismey Durrant still belongs stood in direct competition to the Icelandic Landsbanki, and they would have profited enormously from the bankruptcy, if the Icelandic government hadn´t re-nationalized the banks at the last minute, and split the Icelandic part off from the foreign part.
Now talk about conflict of interests.

Icelandic bankers and businessmen in the last months before the crash, after the currency had been attacked by foreign speculators, had committed all kinds of financial crimes to try balance the books. And in the end, some had tried to just take some money and run.

Icelanders blame themselves for having not payed enough attention to the matter. And they accept the consequences of lost life-savings and sky-high debts.
But they draw a line at the Ice-save matter.
And if Icelanders have to collectively take responsibility for their own crooks, why should they also have to take responsibility for somebody elses´crooks?

Var þetta upphafið?- Was this the beginning?

Since I could no longer find the article online, it was first published in the print-edition of Morgunblaðið, and the blogger who posted it last year has closed his blog,  I am now here republishing the article.

It states that the main-advisors who advised the Icelandic government and the privatization committee came from the British bank HSBC.

.

Föstudaginn 3. janúar, 2003 – Miðopna

Landsbankinn seldur

Geir H. Haarde fjármálaráðherra, Valgerður Sverrisdóttir og Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson lesa samninginn yfir áður en ritað er undir. Magnús Guðmundsson og Björgólfur Guðmundsson sitja fjær en að baki standa starfsmenn einkavæðingarnefndar og aðrir sem unn

SALA á tæplega helmingshlut ríkisins í Landsbanka Íslands hf. til Samsonar eignarhaldsfélags ehf. varð að veruleika á síðasta degi ársins 2002.

SALA á tæplega helmingshlut ríkisins í Landsbanka Íslands hf. til Samsonar eignarhaldsfélags ehf. varð að veruleika á síðasta degi ársins 2002. Með undirritun í Þjóðmenningarhúsinu á gamlársdag lauk rúmlega tveggja mánaða samningalotu ríkisins og Samsonar um viðamestu einkavæðingu Íslandssögunnar. Kaupverðið er 12,3 milljarðar króna og núvirt meðalgengi í viðskiptunum er 3,91 króna á hlut. Afhending hlutabréfanna verður tvískipt en Samson greiðir að fullu fyrir í Bandaríkjadölum.Í kjölfar undirritunar og að fengnu samþykki Fjármálaeftirlitsins fær Samson afhent 33,3% hlutafjárins en þau 12,5% hlutarins sem eftir standa verða afhent í desember 2003. Hlutur ríkisins í Landsbankanum er um 2,5% eftir söluna. Fyrri hluti kaupanna er bundinn þeim kvöðum að Samson er óheimilt að selja í 21 mánuð frá undirritun kaupsamningsins nema að fengnu skriflegu samþykki seljenda.

Framkvæmdanefnd um einkavæðingu sá um söluna fyrir hönd ríkisins og enski bankinn HSBC var aðalráðgjafi nefndarinnar. Að Samson ehf. standa Björgólfur Guðmundsson, Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson og Magnús Þorsteinsson og rituðu þeir undir samninginn ásamt iðnaðar- og viðskiptaráðherra og fjármálaráðherra.

Samkvæmt samningnum ættu tæpir 9 milljarðar króna að skipta um hendur um leið og Fjármálaeftirlitið hefur lagt blessun sína yfir viðskiptin og afgangurinn verður greiddur í desember. Virði samningsins í krónum hefur þó rýrnað frá því kaupverðið var ákveðið í október því gengi dollara gagnvart krónu hefur lækkað um tæp 9% frá því að tilkynnt var að ríkið hefði gengið til samninga við Samson um söluna. Verð hlutarins er miðað við gengi dollara hinn 18. október, síðasta viðskiptadag áður en ritað var undir samninginn. Þá var gengi dollara tæpar 89 krónur en er nú um 81 króna. Kaupverðið er því í raun 11,2 milljarðar króna eða um 1,1 milljarði lægra í krónum talið en það var í október, sé miðað við núverandi gengi. Þar sem samningurinn er gerður í dollurum kemur þessi gengismunur þó ekki að sök. Samson greiðir sömu upphæð í dollurum og um var samið í október og íslenska ríkið ætti heldur ekki að fá minna í sinn hlut, að því gefnu að andvirði sölunnar verði ekki skipt í krónur. Andvirði samningsins er því tæplega 140 milljónir dollara.

Verðið endurskoðað í október

Áður en til þess kemur að Samson greiði fyrir 12,5% hlutarins í Landsbankanum verða tilteknir liðir í efnahagsreikningi bankans endurskoðaðir, skv. ákvæðum samningsins. Samningurinn sem undirritaður var á gamlársdag byggist eins og fyrr segir á samkomulagi sem gert var í október. Í millitíðinni var sagt frá því í fréttum að áreiðanleikamat sem endurskoðunarfyrirtækið KPMG gerði benti til þess að það verð sem sett var upp fyrir Landsbankann væri of hátt. Nokkuð bar í milli á mati bankans og KPMG á verðmæti Landsbankans. Ákvæðið um hugsanlega lækkun kaupverðs er haft með til að jafna þennan mun á verðmætamati. Þannig féllust báðir aðilar á að endurskoða mat sitt á tilteknum liðum efnahagsreiknings í október nk. og lækka verðið á bankanum, gæfi nýja matið tilefni til. Samið var um að verðið lækkaði þó ekki meira en um 700 milljónir króna. Miðað við upphaflegar forsendur má sjá að endanlegt verð á hlut ríkisins í Landsbankanum verður því á bilinu 11,6 til 12,3 milljarðar króna.

Endurfjárfest fyrir andvirði lækkunar

Í tilkynningu frá Samson segir að vegna frétta síðustu daga um mismunandi mat kaupenda og seljenda á tilteknum útlánum bankans vilji kaupandinn taka fram að seljandi, þ.e. ríkið, hafi ábyrgst farsæla lausn þeirra mála sem óvissa ríki um. Kaupverðið sé það sama og tilgreint var í október sl. Samson hafi lýst því yfir að andvirði vafasamra krafna verði endurfjárfest í bankanum í formi hlutafjár og verði það öllum hluthöfum Landsbankans til hagsbóta, en um 14.500 einstaklingar og fyrirtæki eru í hópi þeirra.

Sætta sig ekki við að aðrir fái betri kjör

Annað ákvæði í samningnum er sú krafa Samsonar að nái S-hópurinn eða annar aðili í hans stað hagstæðari greiðslukjörum um kaup á hlut ríkisins í Búnaðarbanka Íslands hf. áskilji Samson sér rétt til að endurskoða kaupsamninginn um hlut ríkisins í Landsbankanum. Að sögn talsmanns Samsonar er þessi krafa gerð vegna þess að þær viðræður sem átt hafa sér stað á síðustu mánuðum hafi mótað einkavæðingarferlið. Að baki liggi þekking og reynsla Samsonarmanna, sem einkavæðingarnefnd hafi notið og þeir geti ekki sætt sig við að aðrir sigli í kjölfarið og fái betri kjör. “Sú ákvörðun ríkisstjórnarinnar að selja bankana báða í einu hefur tafið mjög ferlið fyrir sölu Landsbankans og þannig skaðað hagsmuni Samsonar. Þetta hefur sett þeirra áætlanir úr skorðum og telja þeir eðlilegt að nú sé tekið tillit til þeirra hagsmuna,” segir talsmaður Samson.Verðið sem samið var um er ríflega 10% yfir markaðsverði á bankanum eins og það var að meðaltali í desember 2002 sem var 3,5-3,6 krónur á hlut. Komi til þess að nýta þurfi endurskoðunarákvæðið að fullu og verð fyrir hlut ríkisins í Landsbankanum lækki verður gengið í þessum viðskiptum 3,70 krónur á hlut í stað 3,91 krónu á hlut. Eftir sem áður er kaupverðið 5% yfir markaðsverði Landsbankans. Í júní sl. seldi ríkissjóður 20% hlut sinn í Landsbankanum en gengi bréfa í þeim viðskiptum var 3,50 krónur á hlut.

eyrun@mbl.is

News from the Icelandic Home Front

Having had a bit of trouble with my internet-connection, I´m back now for a very small report on my country´s troubles, which isn´t so different from American troubles, I think.

We are equally broke.

Today the new financial plan has come out. It´s about large cut-downs of at least 10% in health- and other services, over 50% in road-repairs, while at the same time tax-rises of 30% on all incomes are proposed, as well as another 10% on several goods and fuel, some “global warming” taxes on energy, how much isn´t quite clear, so are a lot of other things. Sure is only unemployment will rise further and buying power will shrink.

The Ice-save-Ice-slave situation is still the main issue. Britain and Holland have rejected the conditions set by the Icelandic Parliament for paying the debts, that Iceland would only pay as much as it´s economic situation allows on the Ice-save debts. And for that reason the IMF is refusing any loans to Iceland.

Yesterday the minister who was opposed to giving in to the Brits and the Dutch has resigned from the government. At the same time one Norwegian government party offered a Norwegian loan that would enable Iceland to throw the IMF out of the country.

Today the other government party of Norway retracted the loan-offer saying if Icelanders would ever ask for a loan from Norway, they would only get it under the supervision of the IMF and after the Ice-save case with Britain and the Netherlands was settled.

It looks like the Norwegian are dead scared of the IMF and the banking-establishment they represent, like every other country in the world.

And of course, the international bankers who had laid the trap for Iceland by first luring the government into privatizing the banks only five years before the collapse, and then encouraging the Icelandic bankers into over-leveraging, and then snapping the trap on the country by speculating against the Icelandic currency, could ruin Norway just as easily.

Sure Norway is rich with its oil-wealth, but if a large, ultra-productive and rich country like Japan could be set into permanent recession by foreign currency speculation attacks, which has lasted for a decade so far, Norway is surely not immune.

Talking about Japan and the Asian crisis, which started in 1997 with an attack on the Thai Baht and the ripple effect it had on other Asian nations, here is what
Professor Michel Chossudowski writes about the economic attack on Japan in 1998:

In Japan –where the yen has tumbled to new lows — “the Korean scenario” is viewed (according to economist Michael Hudson), as a “dress rehearsal” for the take over of Japan’s financial sector by a handful of Western investment banks. The big players are Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Morgan Gruenfell among others who are buying up Japan’s bad bank loans at less than ten percent of their face value. In recent months both US Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin and Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright have exerted political pressure on Tokyo insisting “on nothing less than an immediate disposal of Japan’s bad bank loans — preferably to US and other foreign “vulture investors” at distress prices. To achieve their objectives they are even pressuring Japan to rewrite its constitution, restructure its political system and cabinet and redesign its financial system… Once foreign investors gain control of Japanese banks, these banks will move to take over Japanese industry…”

Those who had pressured the Japanese political class to sell out the country´s assets, industries and financial institutions to US speculators, had subsequently hindered the recovery of the country. It was far more profitable to start another round of speculation of the Japanese yen against many other currencies. This so-called Yen carry-over trade was then for instance used for those “glacier bonds”- speculations where foreign speculators bought en masse Icelandic currency in the last couple of years before the crisis.

While Japan had an extremely low interest-rate of 1,5% at that time, the Icelandic central bank, in order too cool down the then overheated Icelandic economy, had raised the interest-rates to 15%. So borrowing in Yen and investing in Icelandic Kronur was profitable until all of a sudden the very same big speculators withdrew their money and started to short-sell the Icelandic currency.
This had a ripple effect on those smaller speculators on the bandwagon, which then of course was the main-reason for the cash-deficit of the Icelandic banks and the main reason for the crash.
All this had nothing whatsoever to do with the real productive economy of either country.

People here are only half-joking when they use the biblical phrase with each other: ” And now in these last and worst times….”
And believe me, Icelanders weren´t used to be very religious, and you could find only few Armageddon-awaiting Evangelicals on our rock in the Northern Atlantic.

What bugs me is the government, supposedly a left one, combining Social-Democrats and Left-Greens. It´s like all of them have gotten a personality change operation.
The left-greens were so opposed to the IMF, they wanted to throw them out before they even set foot into the country. And now they, or at least the ones in the government, are so subservient to the organization, it would be truly obscene to use any kind of fitting allegory, so I won´t.

The left-wing Icelandic government is trying to push the British and Dutch demands through the Icelandic Parliament against the opposition of nearly all other Parlamentarians including the members of their own party and against the opposition of practically all of the Icelandic people.

And they won´t tell us clearly why.

It´s political suicide for their parties, in the long run it´s economic suicide for the country, it´s suicide for any form of Icelandic sovereignty. It will lead to a sell-out of anything and everything, the country and its citizens own, to foreign bankers.

We are more indebted than Germany after the Versailles treaty of 1918. Making the repayment conditional to economic stability and as a percentage of what we earn, would be the only way to ever reasonably pay without self-destruction.

I don´t believe our government has been infested by body-snatchers, so the only other explanation must be, that there have been enormous threats leveled at them, what would be done to the country, if it doesn´t comply.
The left-green finance minister once mentioned that not complying with the Ice-save demands was considered (by whom he didn´t say) as a declaration of war.

My guess is, if he would get into details, the mainline media would declare him insane. The media seems to be far more powerful than any politician and the mainline media´s task is to “protect” the ordinary people from knowing too much about what is really going on.

We get to know everything about what the corrupt Icelandic bankers and businessmen have done wrong. However, the connection between the Icelandic and the British bankers, and that the British part of the Icelandic Landsbanki, including Ice-save was actually controlled by a British banker, a British citizens, a member of a British banker´s affiliation is never, ever mentioned in our media.

The fact that this man came originally from the HSBC, one of the largest British banks, which also happened to be the “advisors” of the Icelandic government when they got suckered into privatizing those banks in the first place, is never mentioned either.

My guess is, the whole Ice-slave matter has nothing to do with any debts we as a country might be responsible for by any international law (or they would allow us to go to court over it). It´s nothing else but the sneaky British take-over of the country with all it´s resources, land and sea-area.
After only having been independent since 1944 (having been treated with deep disdain by the Danish before that), Iceland is being recolonized, disdain and all.

About Comments

Truth is stubborn and not relative

There are a lot of people among us, who have become really frustrated about the present state of affairs in the world around us. Realizing how truly ruthless and evil large parts of our economic and political elites are, can be devastating.

After all until quite recently most of us believed, that we were living in a democracy, where our rights and freedoms are well protected. And while our governments were not without flaws, they were at least relatively benign, doing their best to their imperfect knowledge.

A supposedly democratic government attacking their own people, killing arbitrarily loyal citizens in an act of pre-planned mass-murder was beyond the wildest imaginations of most of us. It´s a disconcerting realization, to say the least.

But still the truth was so pervasive it made it through our emotional barriers and protections, and here we are today.
But not everybody around us has come to this point yet, and that´s often frustrating, as well. People ask themselves, if they are able to see through the lies, why can´t all the others around them.

Paul Craig Roberts quotes Hitler´s “Big Lie” Theory:

“In the simplicity of their minds, people more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have such impudence. Even though the facts, which prove this to be so, may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”

Then Roberts goes on to say:

What the sociologists and Hitler are telling us is, that by the time facts become clear, people are emotionally wedded to the beliefs planted by the propaganda and find it a wrenching experience to free themselves. It is more comfortable, instead, to denounce the truth-tellers than the liars whom the truth-tellers expose.

And finally Roberts explains, why this is happening to us, why human beings are by their very nature prone to cling to their beliefs, no matter what.

The psychology of belief retention, even when those beliefs are wrong, is a pillar of social cohesion and stability.

This part of human nature, which the sociologists call “belief retention”, protects human society from chaos and destruction.

Human beings are social creatures. We need one another to survive, to have children and raise them. In order to create a safe environment for raising our children, we need a society. And since humans, unlike animals, don´t live by instincts, our societies need commonly accepted rules and values.
All societies have some kind of structures and some people with more authority to protect the rules of society and its fundamental the structure.
In a democratic society those individuals are supposed to be the ones, who are the most trusted and respected members of society. And electoral processes should normally make sure, that all the people have a say, about who among them they trust the most in these issues.

And no matter how many checks and balances societies tries to install to prevent authorities or ordinary citizens to get out of control and hurt everybody else, a lot of things can´t be checked upon all the time. (And actually they shouldn´t or we will end up in a total police-state.)

We therefor as people have an urgent need to trust one another to live by the rules and values, society has set, and to tell one another the truth about the most important things.
When we can no longer trust those around us in at least the most important issues, everything will break down, and total chaos ensues.

Truth often hurts.
When I first realized that 9/11 was an inside job and all western media and governments were covering it up, it was like the bottom had fallen out of my world.
My most fundamental trust in my own society had been destroyed. I was down and out for a while.
Others when they have come to that conclusion become very, very angry.
In both cases one isn´t very close to reason. But reason is necessary for things to go on.
People need to recover, replace the trust they lost with trust in something else, in order to rebuild their ability to act reasonably.

For me, it was the media, that had lost the most trust, and I now replaced the mainline media outlets with the internet.
Of course, I had to pick and choose. Not everything you read on the internet is true.

Your experiences on the internet teaches you to engage your own reasoning capabilities.
In the end I found sites which seemed the most informative and, over all, the most trustworthy, “Global Research” became my new “Spiegel” and “What really happened” became my daily “Frettir”, the Icelandic news-show on public TV.

I still check on the mainline news, of course, especially the Icelandic ones to get the local news, but all the tell me in foreign news, I´ll confirm with what is to be learned on the internet, before I believe a single word they say.

And because of Professor Chossudovsky, Alex Jones, Mike Rivero and because of all those people in the truth-movement, the anti-war and the pro-Palestine movements, I have come to trust, there – in my mind at least-, is still sanity left in the world, and hell is not upon us yet (and I´ve come to believe it won´t be any time soon).

Everybody who learns the truth has to go through similar processes, has to rebuild his trust in the world and in the people around him or her somehow. It takes us a different amount of time to do so, but eventually most people will get there and they can figure out, where to go from here.

Human nature, or the psychological phenomenon of “belief retention” protects us and society to all break down at the very same time.
People will accept the truth in their own good time. And they will learn to cope with the hurt and the consequences slowly but certainly. Most people are resilient and far more clever than the elites want to believe – and want us to believe.

Truth is accumulative.
Every day more people will wake up and they will talk to others. The more often you hear the truth from more and more different sources, the more familiar it will become. It will also become less scary to listen.

When they hear the truth about 9/11 the first time, a lot of people will be unable to actually pay enough attention to take in the details. The inner barriers are too strong, the fears to big. They will be far more busy to figure out in their mind, how to discredit the truth-teller, than actually concentrate on listening to the argument.

When the truth becomes more familiar, because one has heard it often enough, the defense mechanism against it, will become weak and the barrier in one´s mind is broken. The person will be able to listen, actually listen, and examine the evidence, and then he´ll come to know the truth.
This happened to you and it happened to me and in everyone else´s own good time, it´ll happen them as well, you´ll see.

For truth isn´t relative, it´s absolute.
Interpretations change, perceptions change, knowledge accumulates and grows, but the truth, the real underlying fundamental truth stays the same.
At the time, when the people still believed the earth was flat, the people had no way to figure it out, since communication was slow and traveling around the world very hard. But no matter what the people believed, the earth was still sphere and rotating around itself and the sun.
In time technology improved and some people started to figure out the truth. It took a while for everyone else to catch on and accept the truth, adjust their belief-systems, but in time people did, in the end even the Church did, and so it goes.
But all the time, before and afterwords, before even life on earth began, the truth about the earth and the sun was there and stayed the same. And since the arrival of intelligent man on the scene, this truth was there for man to discover.

The truth about what happened in reality on the real September 11, 2001 in New York and Washington, this truth also stays the same, for everyone to uncover, recognize and accept.
Afterwards everyone has to adjust his or her belief-system about the world around him to the new found facts, and then decide where to go from there.

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