Monde et contre-monde
Monde et contre-monde
L’Occident halète, bouleversé, mobilisé, devant cette crise terrible. La formule “droits de l’homme-démocratie” claque comme un étendard, rythmant la perception que nous avons des manifestations dans les rues de Téhéran. Le nirvana occidentaliste répand son fumet venimeux et dégénéré, et la ferveur nous habite. Nous nous interrogeons, comme autant de midinettes en virée nocturne: pourquoi pas eux, les Iraniens, pourquoi ne bénéficieraient-ils pas de notre faveur royale en suivant nos consignes qui dispensent le bonheur et la liberté du monde? Qu’importe que le “réformiste” iranien ne le soit pas plus que vous et moi. L’essentiel est que les mots (“droits de l’homme-démocratie”) claquent. Il est vrai que notre propre croyance de nous-mêmes en nous-mêmes est en jeu.
A la Commission européenne, nous dit-on, «c’est la mobilisation générale. En quelques jours, l’affaire a envahi toutes nos préoccupations et l’on ne parle plus que de l’Iran. C’est “notre” crise…» Bien entendu, cette “mobilisation” ne débouche et ne débouchera sur rien de quoi que ce soit ni rien de précis, c’est-à-dire une politique vis-à-vis des événements. (Eventuellement, on débloquerait des fonds pour tel ou tel groupe de manifestants, voilà la “politique” de la Commission.) Toutes les informations et diverses analyses convergent pour présenter une situation iranienne de désordre politique, d’incertitude et d’absence de cohésion, – autant dans les événements eux-mêmes que dans les réactions face à ces événements. Il est notamment extrêmement difficile de distinguer une orientation, une “ligne” politique qu’on pourrait accoler à un des grands courants politiques auxquels nous sommes accoutumés de nous référer.
Le fait est pourtant que les événements iraniens semblent paralyser la politique occidentale, entre la réaction devenue presque instinctive presque mécaniste (“droits de l’homme-démocratie”), et qui interdit une analyse vraiment rationnelle de l’attitude politique à déterminer; et cette attitude politique déterminée par cette “analyse vraiment rationnelle”, évidemment interdite par le précédent constat. Par contraste, par exemple, il y a la réaction russe, qui représente effectivement la seule attitude diplomatique rationnelle pour le moment, faite à la fois de prudence et de mesure, effacée et sans le moindre effet oratoire ni de manche, – lors du sommet de l’Organisation de Coopération de Shanghaï, à Ekaterinbourg (AFP, le 16 juin 2009):
«Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov earlier described the elections as an “internal affair of the Iranian people”, in Moscow’s first official reaction to the controversy. »
Justement, disons quelques mots de ce sommet, – en fait des deux sommets (16-17 juin) qui se sont tenus à Ekaterinbourg, la ville où la Tchéka liquida la famille impériale sur ordre direct de Lénine; deux sommets qui ont fort peu mobilisé notre attention, comme il est logique pour toute chose qui importe.
• Le sommet de l’OCS, qui représente désormais une force de coopération puissante et organisée. L’article du 13 juin 2009 de l’excellent M K Bhadrakumar, sur Atimes.com, était lui-même excellent, détaillant de façon convaincante l’image d’une organisation parvenue à sa maturité, avec son noyau central autour de la Chine et de la Russie, et ses “satellites”, invités réguliers des réunions en observateurs (Inde, Pakistan, Iran, etc.). Les USA, qui ignoraient jusqu’ici l’OCS, commencent à s’y intéresser et ont fait la demande d’obtenir une place d’observateur aux réunions, – sans succès jusqu’ici. Après huit ans de maturation, nous dit M K Bhadrakumar, l’OCS est devenue une structure fondamentale de l’Eurasie, pouvant étendre son action jusqu’au sous-continent indien.
«After eight years, the six-member Shanghai Cooperation Organization has evolved from being “little more than a discussion forum” into a powerful bloc, with China and Russia its main drivers. From economic clout to gatecrashing the United States’ AfPak strategy, the group demands attention, so much so it is being talked of as an emerging military alliance. This is not the case, but the SCO’s leaders are ensuring that security in Central Asia and beyond is in trusted hands.»
Le sommet d’Ekaterinbourg de l’OCS a d’ailleurs examiné des problèmes qui montrent qu’il s’agit de bien autre chose qu’une organisation à vocation militaire, comme l’Occident, avec son obsession militariste, l’avait immédiatement identifiée (une “OTAN eurasiatique”). Le sommet a notamment lancé un travail pour aller vers une “monnaie commune” (type ECU plutôt que type Euro), qui servirait de substitut au dollar. Le sentiment est effectivement général de l’obsolescence complète du système basé sur le dollar. (Selon Novosti, le 16 juin 2009: «Les leaders des pays de l’Organisation de coopération de Shanghai ont chargé leurs experts d’étudier la question relative à la mise en place d’une monnaie de règlement supranationale, a annoncé mardi Arkadi Dvorkovitch, conseiller du président russe. […] Le sommet a reconnu [que] la configuration actuelle du système financier international fondée sur le dollar [n’était pas idéale] non-idéale et [que] l’apparition de nouvelles monnaies de réserve [était] inévitable.»)
• Pendant ce temps, à Ekaterinbourg également, se tenait le sommet du BRIC, qui réunit les quatre principaux pays émergents (Brésil, Russie, Inde, Chine). Comme le sommet de l’OCS, le sommet du BRIC s’est attaché à la crise financière et à l’examen du système international de facture américaniste, pour en faire une critique aigüe et souligner son obsolescence. Face à ces différentes réunions qui représentent des regroupements de forces nouvelles, l’Occident apparaît dépassée, vieillie, l’esprit ailleurs (“droits de l’homme-démocratie”).
Sur Atimes.com également, site qui commente excellemment ces différentes réunions, il y a aussi une série d’analyses de W. Joseph Stroupe, analyste stratégiste financier de Global Magazine Online. Le second article examine le 17 juin 2009 le sommet du BRIC et observe : «Their summit on Tuesday in the central Russian city of Yekaterinburg, scene of the July 1918 execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, may prove to be a milestone in efforts to engineer the architecture of a new global order spanning financial, economic, trade, and monetary matters.»
Dans le troisième texte de sa série, toujours sur Atimes.com, ce 18 juin 2009, avec le titre de «The world is now changed», on lit ce passage de Stroupe, qui nous explique peut-être pourquoi l’Occident préfère s’intéresser au domaine “droits de l’homme-démocratie” en Iran qu’à la crise financière:
«Yet another popular myth is the assumption that the US and the developed economies are merely undergoing a cyclical downturn, albeit a severe one, and they will soon return to growth and will recapture their global position as the driver of demand and growth.
»This crisis is no mere cyclical downturn for the developed economies. It is rather a full-blown crash of their shortsighted bubble-based economic model which they fully embraced in such a foolhardy fit of arrogance and greed. Now they are paying the colossal price for their un-wisdom. The finances of the developed economies are in profound trouble. Yet their governments continue to spend colossal sums of money in a vain attempt to reboot their utterly failed model.»
Effectivement, l’Ouest n’est pas concerné. Le black out naturel, comme un réflexe qui n’a nul besoin de pression ni de coercition, comme l’épicier du coin baisse le rideau de fer de son épicerie en fin de jourée, – les réactions de l’establishment et de la presse Pravda occidentale sont un réflexe de survie à tous prix de l’illusion. Nous en constatons tous les jours les effets, notamment avec le décalage entre ce monde virtualiste et ceux qui s’attachent à tenter de cerner la réalité («Vous aurez noté le fossé qui va se creusant entre les commentaires lénifiants de la presse selon qui, si tout ne va pas bien, tout va en tout cas beaucoup mieux, et les commentaires de plus en plus apocalyptiques des blogueurs – dont je suis…», écrit Paul Jorion le 17 juin 2009 sur son site).
Le nœud gordien
L’Occident est fasciné par le désordre qu’il engendre lui-même. Il a succombé à une rhétorique qui fut notamment le cheval de bataille des neocons, qui est celui du capitalisme extrémiste, qui est la rhétorique du “chaos créateur”, – qui n’est rien moins que la rhétorique du fondement de la modernité, l’irrésistible tabula rasa. Il n’est question ni d’organisation, ni de complot ici, – à propos de l’Iran comme d’une façon générale, – mais bien de fascination pour soi-même, pour son propre entraînement vers la chute. Le désordre de Téhéran fascine, provoque la réaction de sauvegarde de sa propre illusion qu’on a décrite le 17 juin 2009, alors qu’on n’ignore pas par ailleurs que cette réaction alimente le désordre et que le bon sens politique conseillerait l’abstention et la discrétion pour ne pas accélérer un processus dont l’effet mettrait encore plus en évidence à la fois notre impuissance et une évolution catastrophique dans la région pour les intérêts politiques de l’Occident. Mais nous n’y pouvons rien: nous sommes fascinés par le vide du désordre qu’engendre notre propre tendance à la déstructuration du monde, dont nous savons pourtant qu’elle constitue un processus de rupture et de destruction de notre propre système. Ainsi en est-il de l’instinct suicidaire, ou de la “tendance suicidaire” de la pathologie psychologique.
La concordance des dates et des événements, les uns prévus (sommets d’Ekaterinbourg), les autres imprévus (Iran), fait que l’émergence d’un “deuxième monde”, non pas concurrents du “premier” (le nôtre), mais simplement ignorant et méprisant désormais de celui-ci pour s’affirmer lui-même, est un phénomène singulier pour accélérer notre perception de l’accélération de la crise de notre système. D’ailleurs, plus que “premier” et “deuxième”, qui suggèrent une hiérarchie toujours entachée par notre arrogance stupide, nous parlerions d’un “autre monde” qui s’installe à côté, peut-être, bientôt, à la place de notre monde dégénéré et impuissant qui s’effondre. (Donc “autre monde”, ou “contre-monde” pour suggérer l’orientation.) Il y a, dans cette occurrence, du mépris pour “l’homme blanc aux yeux bleus” et sa faute originelle, du Brésilien Lula, – dont les Russes sont soigneusement et ironiquement mis à part, parce qu’il s’agit du modèle anglo-saxon dans l’esprit de Lula; il y a aussi de la dérision, qui fait écho au fou rire spontané et incroyablement ridiculisant des étudiants chinois accueillant la déclaration du secrétaire au trésor US Geithner qui leur disait, le brave homme, que la Chine doit être rassurée avec l’achat des bons du trésor US, cette monnaie de singe si rassurante dans sa pourriture énervée. Nous commençons à être sérieusement ridicules (apparence d’oxymore intéressante et révélatrice) et, dans notre époque médiatique et virtualiste où le sérieux du conformisme règle toutes nos pensées, le ridicule peut être mortel parce qu’il pulvérise le sérieux.
La démarche de l’“autre monde”/“contre-monde” est totalement structurante, contrairement à notre irrésistible chute déstructurante. Si tous ces nouveaux-venus ne sont pas des démocrates impeccables, chargés de la gloire d’un scrutin transnational avec deux tiers d’abstentions et d’un mépris traditionnel pour les vœux du votant qui vote à répétition, ils ont pour eux la légitimité de dirigeants cherchant à structurer un ordre pour résister à la déstructuration entropique que plus personne ne contrôle. En face, nos leaders incapables de résister au vertige de la déstructuration du monde, ne sont plus que l’ombre sinistre de la légitimité perdue.
Fin d’un monde et surgissement d’un autre qui le remplace («The world is now changed»)? Cela devrait être la conclusion mais ce n’est pas tout à fait la nôtre… Nous en venons au point essentiel. Nous (l’Occident) détenons trop de puissance bloquante, irresponsable mais destructrice, appuyée sur une arrogance si aveugle qu’elle renvoie vraiment à une pathologie inguérissable, pour que l’“autre monde”/“contre-monde” prenne notre place sans coup férir et nous soumettent à ses règles, – à ses structures en formation puisqu’il est, lui, complètement structurant. Nous en revenons au constat secrètement désespéré d’Arnold Toynbee, au début des années 1950 (la chose vient de loin), d’une civilisation d’une puissance technologique extraordinairement développée jusqu’à être invincible et interdire à une nouvelle civilisation de prendre le relais comme l’on vit faire tant de fois dans l’Histoire (19 fois, décompte Toynbee), et d’une absence de sens, d’un vide entropique, d’une inexistence eschatologique conduisant au chaos. L’outil (la technologie) que nous croyions être la force de la structuration du monde s’avère être le moyen indirect d’une puissance inouïe imposant la déstructuration du monde et interdisant à toute force structurante nouvelle (ou civilisation, éventuellement) de prendre le relais pour sauver le monde de notre impuissance suicidaire, – qui devient irrésistiblement puissante dans sa capacité d’entraînement.
C’est bien le nœud gordien du drame. L’ “autre monde”/“contre-monde” en formation est tout de même obligé de passer par nos outils (la technologie), dont il est avéré désormais qu’ils possèdent, malgré leur caractère matérialiste, une puissance quasiment spirituelle de l’ordre du maléfique, conduisant inéluctablement à la déstructuration. L’“autre monde”/“contre-monde” n’empêchera pas le développement accéléré de la crise climatique qui, dans les conditions démographiques, économiques, culturelles et de déstructuration en cours de l’ordre ancien, débouche tout de même sur une perspective catastrophique.
Peut-on en rester à cette conclusion sinistre? On ne peut faire que ce que l’esprit et votre logique vous imposent, sinon à verser dans l’illusion et le virtualisme que nous dénonçons. Cette conclusion sinistre est inévitable. Elle ne peut être nuancée que d’une conviction, – qui est l’expression non d’une illusion sciemment acceptée comme une tromperie, mais d’une force intuitive que vous croyez avoir identifiée comme telle et jugez digne d’être présentée d’une façon rationnelle. Cette conviction est de l’ordre de la psychologie. L’“autre monde”/“contre-monde” est déjà, à côté de l’aspect négatif, et en contraste avec eux, de ses ambitions techniques totalement compromises par l’emploi de nos outils déstructurants, une évolution psychologique qui va dans le sens de la libération. Mais il faut plus, beaucoup plus, une libération psychologique qui soit une explosion psychologique et déchaîne les esprits emprisonnés par le totalitarisme du conformisme du système. D’un point de vue concret, nous ne voyons qu’une seule possibilité, sur laquelle nous insistons de plus en plus: la fin du mythe qui est la chaîne fondamentale de l’emprisonnement de notre esprit, – qui serait le fracassement, la destruction brutale de l’“American Dream”, l’illusion magique et universelle qui nous enchaîne tous, Américains en premier. C’est la nécessité que les Américains soient les premiers à détruire l’américanisme qui soumet le monde à son emprise psychologique totalitaire par le biais de cette illusion magique et diabolique. Physiquement, ils ne peuvent le faire qu’en brisant, en cassant, en pulvérisant le cadre national des Etats-Unis. Cet acte physique, en libérant la psychologie, est la seule voie qui puisse laisser espérer une évolution de notre spiritualité actuellement perdue dans un désert sans fin, glacé et brûlant à la fois.
BHO est certes intelligent, voire brillant; mais ce sont choses sans importance s’il ne s’avère pas “maistrien”… BHO, suivez donc les conseils de Gorbatchev, peut-être arriverez-vous à trouver votre vraie tâche historique et à la conduire au terme.
http://www.dedefensa.org/article-monde_et_contre-monde_18_06_2009.html
Western democracy is about division, corruption, fraud and world domination, and not about unity as alleged by Robert Fisk
Western democracy is about division, corruption, fraud and world domination, and not about unity as alleged by Robert Fisk. Unity in Iran is about Islamic Unity. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei clearly stated that the 12th June 2009 Iranian Presidential elections were fair and ruled out any allegations of fraud, insisting that the Islamic system does not “cheat” voters.
Robert Fisk
The award-winning journalist Robert Fisk is a well-known Middle East correspondent. He said that for peace in the Middle East, all western occupying forces and mercenaries should leave the region (Interview with Martin Griffiths, New Zealand on Air, 15 Sept 2008). In a complete volte-face, through the newspaper The Independent, he embarks upon a western-inspired anti-Iran propaganda prior to, during and in the aftermath of the 12 June 2009 Iranian Presidential elections when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, unlike some lobby-manipulated western political leaders, was genuinely and irrefutably properly elected under the Iranian Islamic system of government. By indulging in such propaganda, Robert Fisk runs the great risk of undoing, at a stroke, all the good work he has accomplished over the years.
Ayatollah-obsessed Robert Fisk
From the very outset, Ayatollah-obsessed Robert Fisk demonstrates jealousy and envy of the Iranian Islamic system of government as he speaks of the « the thick, dark skin of clerical rule that covers Iran » ( Ref. « Iran’s old guard are poised to crush any hope of revolution », Independent 12 June 2009), and was already preparing the mindset of western Europeans in that the pro-western opposition little known leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi would be elected through a revolution that the ‘old guard was poised to crush’. This blatant lie and pure anti-Iran propaganda rhetoric permeate all of Robert Fisk’s recent articles about the elections in Iran. In the same 12th June article, putting himself in the shoes of a Zionist, Fisk alleges that « Ahmadinejad denies Hitler’s greatest crime », which, according to Fisk, only boils down to the disputed figure of six million Jewish Europeans victims, with total disregard of the 60 millions killed in World War II. One wonders what an acceptance or denial of certain historical reports has to do with the conduct of the present Iranian elections. Hence, Fisk must be reminded that President Ahmadinejad never denied that there were many Jews among those killed. But, confronted with contradictory historical findings, he only asked for the contention that six million European Jews were gassed by the Germans to be academically and scientifically researched. However, it does not seem to be a matter of historical concern to Fisk that, according to many sources, Jews and Zionists funded the Third Reich, formed part of the Nazi army, signed the Haavara Agreement with Hitler and his bankers under which ship loads of Jews, under Nazi commanding officers, were sent to Palestine, then occupied by the British, and, with British approval, expelled Palestinians from their lands through genocide and terror. Fisk is not asking those occupiers to leave.
Robert Fisk is very ill-advised to lash out against and to attempt to demonise « scarved or chadored » Iranian women (Ref. « A divided country united by the spirit of democracy », Independent 13 June 2009). Perhaps he would have preferred them to show their cleavages and bare or thonged buttocks as is customary in Europe Despite more than 30 years dealing in Middle Eastern matters, it is most unfortunate to see that Fisk has such contempt for Muslim cultural attitudes and for what Muslims regard by law as fundamental decency. Muslims reject Fisk’s arrogant western-style democracy which they regard as fascism and dictatorship in disguise (Ref. Plato). Western democracy is about division, corruption, fraud and world domination, and not about unity as alleged by Fisk. Unity in Iran is about Islamic Unity.
Crystal ball journalism
Unknown Mousavi
More lies
Having clearly lost the argument, Robert Fisk now seeks to overplay the death of Iranian rioters, who many would refer to as terrorists bent upon overthrowing President Ahmadinejad. Fisk even tells the tale of someone who allegedly rang his « Beirut mobile phone » in his « Tehran hotel room » and who allegedly called himself « a computer science student in Lebanon », to enquire about alleged massacres of students at Tehran University (Ref. « In Tehran, fantasy and reality make uneasy bedfellows », Independent 20 June 2009). This tale has striking parallels with the uncertified alleged ‘election results letter’ ‘mysteriously’ leaked to the Iranian public.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei
The Society of Iranian Jews condemned opportunists for targeting « the security, peace, and the unity of Iranians by creating chaos and damaging public properties », and denounced behaviour against « Iranian culture ».
Incitement
Conclusion
Pakistan Daily, 19 June 2009, reports that, in a letter to President Ahmadinejad, Rabbi Meir Hirsh of the Neturei Karta Anti-Zionist Jews congratulates the President for his re-election, praises his stance against the Zionist State and prays that « all the rights of the Palestinian People are restored throughout historic Palestine, and a Republic of Palestine replaces the ethnocratic and racist State of “Israel,” which always violates all laws and values of the international community and all laws and values of the authentic Jewish religion ». Pakistan Daily also speaks of the « Zionists’ latest hoax : The “Stolen Election” », and states that, historically, « the entire Zionist dogma is based on hoax and myths », and quotes the book of the French philosopher Roger Garaudy « The Founding myths of Israeli Politics ».
It is amply clear that the manipulated, unsubstantiated and unproven allegation of ‘stolen election’ in Iran as propagated by Robert Fisk and his cohorts is a complete propaganda and myth in support of Zionism. Paul Joseph Watson demonstrates how the BBC manipulated a photograph of a pro-Ahmadinejad crowd and described it as « Supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi again defied a ban on protests » after removing Ahmadinejad from the photograph (Ref. « BBC Caught In Mass Public Deception With Iran Propaganda », 18 June 2009). Thierry Meyssan confirms the fact that riots in Iran were provoked by the CIA which inundated Iranians with SMS inflammatory messages, and which he likens to « psychological warfare » (Ref. « The CIA and the Iranian Laboratory », 18 June 2009). NBC’s Richard Angel rightly stated that the little-known Mir-Hossein Mousavi was merely « Iran’s ‘accidental’ opposition leader », and nowhere near winning those elections. The Iranian authorities should rather investigate how Mousavi collected those 12 million votes and at what costs.
M Rafic Soormally
London
20 June 2009
Obama’s upside down world: short-term gain for long-term pain
Climate Change, Obama’s change
Obama’s upside down world:
short-term gain for long-term pain
By Dr. Tim Ball Monday, June 8, 2009

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future. George Bernard Shaw
Change
What did Obama
mean when he promised change? He did say it was “Change you can believe in”, but that doesn’t clarify anything. You can believe in change but not understand or agree.
Many understood or at least hoped he meant a change to something completely new. Most were more limited and partisan wanting anything but Bush; a view reinforced by Obama’s rhetoric on the campaign trail. Politicians using words or phrases in vague ways that appear full of conviction, but are actually quite hollow, fuel the confusion. I heard an economist recently describe Obama as 100 yards wide and six inches deep. It is rather cruel, but seems supported when you look beyond the rhetoric at the actual policies.
Understanding is not helped by the many different definitions or usages of change.
Change is the most overused, misused, and exploited idea in the last fifty years. There are two distinct concepts of change creating the confusion in this case, one in the scientific world with climate change
and the other in Obama’s promise of change in the political world. Confusion is amplified by his blending the two in policies that can’t work or are unnecessary. Bertrand Russell identified the difference between the two. “Change is scientific, progress is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy.” In other words change identified by science is unquestionable, whereas change in the Obama concept is progress, which may not be an improvement.
Climate change is presented as something new when it is normally significant in short time spans. People were then incorrectly told change is occurring more rapidly then ever before. Most were easily misled because the view of the natural world in western science is still based on the philosophy of uniformitarianism, which holds that change is gradual over long periods of time. This made it easy to identify natural change as unnatural. Now climate change, especially in the form of warming is something to stop; a direct measure of the lack of understanding.
Obama presents change as progress, but what is the reality? Genuine progress is not just discarding old ideas and practices. It is not resurrecting old ideas and presenting them as new. It involves producing and implementing something original and innovative. If this is happening, then the sacrifice and turmoil is tolerable. He has managed to invert the old adage that to become fit and healthy exercise involves short-term pain for long-term gain. His approach and policies are creating short-term gain for long-term pain.
It Failed Before
Nothing Obama has suggested is original or innovative. Worse, it was all tried before and failed. The first sign of change that was not change was the extensive involvement of people from the Clinton era. Then came the completely illogical fiscal policy of getting out of debt by going much further into debt. Similar attempts by Roosevelt in the US, Japan and more recently Britain have all failed.
It was frightening when Vladimir Putin warned the US and the UK about going down the path of Marxism as he did at the world economic forum in Davos. Who would recognize the signs better than those who have recently escaped from the effects?
Communist Chinese students provided the most damning comment of the Obama financial policies by laughing at Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s claim that “Chinese assets are very safe” invested in the US.
Then there is the damming view of liberal commentator Paul Krugman who summarizes it all with, “What an awful mess.”
Much broader condemnations come from a wide variety of sources. Even if you only agree with fifty percent of items on the list it is a damning list of failures and fiascos.
There is a serious problem when countries with experience are telling you not to do what they did.
You Can’t Solve a Non-existent Problem
Everyone agrees the US is facing massive debt for a very long time. History shows tax reductions are the best way to stimulate the economy and generate increased revenue to pay down the debt. Obama plans to deal with climate and energy issues through more taxes with Cap and Trade, and additional costs with expansion of alternative energy. Cap and Trade will provide revenue, but increase the cost of doing business. This will make the US economy less competitive and inhibit growth. Cap and Trade is exactly the wrong policy for two reasons. It assumes CO2 (carbon) is a problem and it will ensure a reduced economy and prolonged debt. Even James Hansen, ardent promoter of human caused global warming, calls Cap and Trade the ‘Temple of Doom’.
Alternative energies are another part of Obama’s plans. He expects they will reduce CO2 levels, produce jobs and make the US independent of foreign oil. This will require considerable changes from the current situation since alternatives provide only 7 percent of US energy.
Other countries have learned the limitations of alternative energies, especially wind power. Richard Courtney provides a good summary of the problems with all of them. His conclusion about wind power; ”Windfarms are expensive, polluting, environmentally damaging bird swatters that produce no useful electricity and make no significant reduction to emissions but threaten electricity cuts.”
As Jon Basil Utley says, “It is only a matter of time before President Barack Obama’s vast popularity runs aground on his energy policies.” See also.
Even the left wing Guardian newspaper is running stories about the failure of the British energy policy that Obama seeks to emulate. Despite this both countries are blindly pushing for energy policies that will reduce CO2 while ignoring the fact it is unnecessary and will have no effect on global warming.
Many countries and regions are facing energy shortages created by abandoning traditional energies before fully assessing the costs and limitations of alternative energies. Now accurate assessment is almost impossible because of government subsidies at all stages. We’ve already witnessed devastating effects of subsidized biofuels leading to hunger and starvation. Meanwhile closures of biofuel and ethanol plants don’t make the mainstream media.
When the Party is Over
The party is still in progress following the justified euphoria of the first African American President. However, Obama clearly rushed to judgment using the euphoria and exaggeration of the financial situation to establish his ideas of change. Many thought he meant real change while others gave him the benefit of the doubt. The problem is the hangover is yet to come. The changes were not new. Worse, they were changes that had failed everywhere they were tried. Countries and leaders with the experience from those failures quickly spoke out, but their warnings appear unheeded.
President Obama is now famous for his teleprompter from which he reads wonderful rhetoric. One dictionary defines rhetoric as, “language designed to have a persuasive or impressive effect on its audience, but is often regarded as lacking in sincerity or meaningful content.” Maybe Vice President Joe Biden was revealing more than he realized when he said, “What am I going to tell the president when I tell him his teleprompter is broken. What will he do then?”
We do not know what he will do. We do know beyond the rhetoric his changes are not real and his chosen policies have failed every time they were tried. George Santayana said, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” So, in another twist on an old saying, Obama is repeating doomed history.
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Copyright © 2009 CFP
“Dr. Tim Ball is a renowned environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg. Dr. Ball employs his extensive background in climatology and other fields as an advisor to the International Climate Science Coalition, Friends of Science and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.”
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http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/11779
Two months of rain in half a day as tornados and flash floods hit Britain… and there’s more to come
Two months of rain in half a day as tornados and flash floods hit Britain… and there’s more to come
It’s a sight more commonly seen on the subcontinent, but a swirling tornado can be seen forming in the skies above Britain.
The dramatic image was captured by amateur photographer John Prescott near Bude, Cornwall, yesterday as the tip of the tornado comes close to making contact with the ground.
It comes as torrential downpours and thunderstorms battered Britain over the weekend, with parts of the country seeing two months of rain in half a day.
Storm: A tornado comes close to touching the ground near Bude, Cornwall, yesterday during a day of heavy rainfallWhile the country basked in the hottest day of the year at the start of last week, by the end Britons were witnessing a return to more familiar weather.
Heavy rain accompanied by lightning swept across the south during the weekend bringing flash-flooding to Devon, Somerset and south Wales.
Exeter saw almost four inches of rain fall in just over half a day – twice the seasonal monthly average – trapping a number of cars in flood water.
Scorched: Campsite owner Cindy Ramm sifts through the remains of two caravans, destroyed this morning when lightning struck them at Corfe, Dorset
Thousands of families were left without power in the West Country today following the downpours.
Devon was the worst-hit county as more than 2,000 properties were left without electricity.
More than 100 homes were evacuated after flash flooding hit south Wales yesterday.
Mother-of-two Cerwen Price, 32, from Rhydfelin, near Pontypridd, said: ‘It is ridiculous. Last weekend we were having a barbecue, now we are flooded out.’
Inferno: A roof blaze after a lightning strike in Wembley, North West London
Rescue: Ambulance crews and firefighters battled to rescue occupants
The storms reached the capital between 6am and 8am today, before moving north.
But the angry weather left its mark; with residents evacuated from a block of flats in Wembley, North West London, early this morning after lightning set the roof ablaze. Nobody was reported injured.
Dave Elliott, a weather forecaster at the Met Office, said: ‘This time last week it was hot and dry, with temperatures reaching 27C (81F).
Clean-up operation: Robert Penduck begins clearing mud and water from his home in Rhydfelin, South Wales, following flash flooding
Damage: Rydfelin residents clear away tarmac that was ripped up by the floods
‘This weekend, a band of heavy rain and thunder has swept across the south over Saturday and Sunday and then started to move north, so most of the country will have got a good drenching.
‘Exeter saw 93mm (3.66 inches) of rain in 13 hours, which is close to two months worth of rainfall for the area.
‘Parts of south Wales saw three inches of rainfall as well, causing localised flooding.
‘Heavy showers also arrived in London early Sunday morning, with three weeks worth of rain falling in a few hours.
‘The band of rain then headed north, but should peter out by the end of the weekend, although fresh thunderstorms may follow.
Airlift: An RAF helicopter rescues endangered fell runners in Snowdonia
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Safe and sound: The helicopter returns another fell runner to safety
‘Northern England enjoyed the best of the weekend weather. Saturday started off wet, but it quickly dried out and much of the region enjoyed long sunny spells.
‘The bad conditions were a result of an area of low pressure bringing wet weather in from the Atlantic.’
Those hoping for a return of warmer climes will be left disappointed, as forecasters warn the unsettled weather is due to remain throughout much of the week, with temperatures peaking at 18C (64F).

Gimme shelter: The crowd at the Capital 95.8 Summertime Ball music festival try not to let the rain get them down at the Emirates Stadium in North London today
Last month’s sunny spell has helped boost the popularity of British destinations, according to the latest research.
Scotland and the Lake District have seen the biggest rise in searches for summer 2009 getaway breaks on holiday website Expedia.co.uk website.
Scotland has seen a massive 203 per cent increase year-on year in searches, while the Lake District has gone up 127 per cent.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1191361/Storm-Britain-Lightning-flash-floods-hit-country-bad-weather-predicted.html
Why the Present Depression Will Be Deeper than the Great Crash of 1929
Why the Present Depression Will Be Deeper than the Great Crash of 1929
(June 4, 2009)
Galbraith’s conclusions about the causes of the Great Depression point to why the current Depression will be deeper.
Continuing our analysis of The Great Crash of 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith: by understanding the causes of the Great Depression as elucidated by Galbraith, we can observe the differences between the present and 1929. These reveal why today’s Depression will be even deeper than the 1929-1941 one and why today’s policy “fixes” as pursued by that great student of Depression, Ben Bernanke, are fighting the last war–a Keynesian stimulus strategy doomed to catastrophic failure.
I hesitate to call this topic “important” because such announcements instantly cut my readership in half. Thus I am inclined to call this topic “edgy,” “explosive” and “contrarian,” all of which sound more interesting than “important” (yawn).
Galbraith begins his exploration of causes by noting that “economics does not allow final answers on these matters. But, as usual, something can be said.”
First, he demolishes the notion that abundant credit caused a speculative orgy.
The long-accepted explanation that credit was easy and so people were impelled to borrow money to buy common stocks on margin is obviously nonsense. (page 169) On numerous occasions before and since credit has been easy, and there has been no speculation whatever. Furthermore, much of the 1928 and 1929 speculation occured on money borrowed at interest rates which would have been considered especially astringent.
Far more important that rate of interest and supply of the credit is the mood. Speculation on a large scale requires a pervasive sense of confidence and optimism and conviction that ordinary people were meant to be rich. (emphasis added, CHS)
Next, Galbraith looks to the wellspring of credit which has been virtually nonexistent in our current speculative boom: savings. (Or at least domestic i.e. U.S. savings.)
Savings must also be plentiful. If savings are growing rapidly, people will place a lower marginal value on their accumulation; they will be willing to risk some of it against the prospect of a greatly enhanced return.
Speculative excess is somewhat self-regulating–or should be unless manipulated by the very state which is pledged to protect the economy from such excesses. Galbraith notes:
Finally, a speculative outbreak has a greater or less immunizing effect. The ensuing collapse automatically destroys the very mood speculation requires.
Moving from the causes of speculative excess to that of Depression, Galbraith rejects a cyclical cause: “No inevitable rhythm required the collapse and stagnation of 1930-1940.”
As for the business cycle–expansion of plant, credit and inventory once over-extended, requires a contraction to restore balance–Galbraith grants it viability, but he rejects it as the cause of the Depression:
In 1929 the labor force was not tired; it could have continued to produce indefinitely at the best 1929 rate. The capital plant of the country was not depleted. In the preceding years of prosperity, plant had been renewed and improved.
Finally, the high production of the twenties did not, as some have suggested, outrun the wants of the people. There is no evidence that their desire for automobiles, clothing, travel. recreation or even food was sated. A depression was not needed so that people’s wants could catch up to their capacity to produce.
So then what did trigger the Great Depression? Galbraith sets aside the speculative collapse itself for a moment and digs for problems in the real economy. He begins by noting worker productivity rose by 43% between 1919 and 1929 even as wages, salaries and prices all remained comparatively stable. This enabled increasing profits, which due to the large income disparities of the era, flowed largely to the well-to-do.
What did the wealthy do with this new-found capital?
A large and increasing investment in capital goods was a principal device by which the profits were spent. (page 175) It follows that anything that interrupted the investment outlays–anything, indeed, which kept them from showing the neessary rate of increase–could cause trouble.
The effect, therefore of insufficient investment–investment that failed to keep pace with the steady increase in profits–could be falling total demand reflected in turn in falling orders and output.
As I understand this, the proximate cause was a vast income disparity which placed much of the prosperous era’s profits in the hands of a small wealthy class, who then mal-invested the profits. If that isn’t ringing some bells in your head, then please recall that income disparity, which fell from 1946-1970 or so, has been rising ever since. Bingo–profits flowed increasingly into the hands of a elite wealthy class who then squandered/mal-invested the vast profits, undermining the entire economy.
Galbraith then turns to the causal relations between the collapse of the speculative stock market and the ensuing Depression. Once again, Galbraith fingers income disparity: 5% of the populace garnered a full third of personal income.
This highly unequal income distribution meant that the economy was dependent on a high level of investment or a high level of luxury consumer spending or both. The rich cannot buy great quantities of bread. If they are to dispose of what they receive it must be luxuries or by way of investment in new plants and new projects.
As the stock market crashed, those with the most to lose–the wealthy–found their cashflow and capital massively crimped. Since the entire economy was dependent on them spending and investing freely, the economy crashed, too.
You see where this leads in terms of the 1990s-2006 boom. The stupendous profits skimmed in the great dot-com boom flowed disproportionately into a few hands, who then mal-invested the gains (in a macro context) in a completely unproductive burst of overbuilt housing and commercial real estate. The ensuing bubble drew in all those who in Galbraith’s words believed they deserved to be rich and as those hapless speculators crashed they took the entire middle class of homeowners with them.
Galbraith also fingers two other causes of the Great Depression: Faulty corporate structure and flawed banking structure. The parallels to the present are achingly obvious; here’s Galbraith’s terse description:
The fact was that American enterprise in the twenties had opened its hospitable arms to an exceptional number of promoters, grafters, swindlers, imposters and frauds. This, in in the long history of such activities, was a kind of flood tide of corporate larceny.
As gargantuan as the flood of corporate larceny was in the 20s, the present era certainly exceeds it by a large margin.
Here is Galbraith’s trenchant comment about the banking practices of the 20s:
Since the early 30s, a generation of Americans has been told, sometimes with amusement, sometimes with indignation, often with outrage, of the banking practices of the late 20s. In fact, many of those practices were made ludicrous only by the depression. Loans which would have been pefectly good were made perfectly foolish by the collapse of the value of the collateral he had posted.
The same, I fear, cannot said of the present: millions of guaranteed-to-default mortgages made to impossibly unqualified borrowers were never good nor prudent. The same can also be said of millions of auto/truck loans, millions of credit cards, millions of home equity lines of credit, etc.
Even worse, of course, the banks of the present era achieved heights of leverage via off-balance sheet derivatives, the securitization of mortgages and other financial legerdemaine that even the greediest, most venal bankers of the 20s could not even imagine.
Lastly, Galbraith blames “the dubious state of the foreign balance,” i.e. the imbalance of foreign trade and flow of funds. In 1929, the problem seems to be that the U.S. was a magnet for capital inflows even as it managed a trade surplus. That imbalance doomed the global economy. Now of course we face the opposite imbalance but the same result will follow: the U.S. continues to run a staggering, unprecendented trade imbalance even as it sucks up an unprecedented share of global capital/savings.
Galbraith concludes: “Had the economy been fundamentally sound in 1929 the effect of the great stock market crash might have been small. But business in 1929 was not sound; on the contrary it was exceedingly fragile. It was vulnerable to the kind of blow it received from Wall Street.”
You mean like the evaporation of $12 trillion wealth we’ve just experienced in the U.S.?
But the present is far more fragile and vulnerable than the U.S. economy of 1929, for the following reasons. In 1955 Galbraith could not possibly have foreseen or anticipated these current conditions:
1. A Federal government which since the “Reagan Revolution” of 1981 (e.g. don’t tax and spend, just borrow and spend) has borrowed during so-called good times on a scale once reserved for rare Keynesian stimulus to combat serious recession. Thus we find ourselves at unprecedented levels of debt (comparable in terms of GDP to the entire cost of World War II) and our current Depression has barely begun.
2. A corrupt-to-the-core corporate structure riddled with bogus accounting, reliance on financial trickery for profits and misdirected/worthless regulatory oversight.
3. A banking sector of such debauchery and fraud that the excesses of the 1920s are reduced to the pranks of slighty-naughty choirboys and girls.
4. A Federal system of entitlements (Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security) which has grown far faster than the underlying economy for decades and now threatens the very solvency of the government itself, so stupendous are the future obligations.
5. A global military hegemony which costs more than all the other militarys and intelligence operations of the entire world put together. The U.S. military consumes more oil than the nation of Sweden (9 million residents).
6. An industrial, transportation and energy infrastructure that, rather than being rebuilt during the past 26 years of debt-based “prosperity,” has crumbled in a long decline. Rather than invest in electrical power grids and energy-efficient transport systems, the U.S. squandered the trillions of borrowed dollars on toys, gewgaws, electronics made elsewhere, malls and commercial towers with only transient value and millions of bloated, inefficient poorly constructed homes no one needed or could afford: “assets” which were not productive at all, “assets” which are now capital traps on a scale heretofore unimaginable
7. A paucity of U.S. savings (and thus of domestic capital) with only one historical parallel: the depths of the Great Depression when unemployment was 25%.
8. A huge reliance on financial leverage, debt, borrowing and trickery for corporate profits; the U.S. exports soybeans, increasingly worthless dollars and “financial innovations” which are now exploding in economies from Ireland to India with the destructive force of superweapons. In exchange for this dubious paper, we have accepted actual tangible goods from the rest of the world.
They are now slowly waking up to the fact they’ve been conned on a scale few can grasp.
9. Globalization has reworked the global supply chain in an astonishingly brief period of time. As a result, the arbitrage of currencies (foreign exchange a.k.a. forex), wages, governance (less is more profitable) and environmental regulations (zero is the most profitable) have all placed advanced post-industrial economies like the U.S. at great structural disadvantages.
10. The U.S. claims to be competitive but much of this competitiveness is highly selective and thus illusory. Everything in the U.S.–labor, goods, buildings and taxes–is high-cost, overregulated (except for finance, banking and governance) and vulnerable to unpredictable lawsuits and officially sanctioned looting. Other than recent immigrants, non-U.S. employers find the workforce is often surly, unappreciative, narcissistic, entitlement-obsessed, unhealthy, poorly educated, unmotivated and more inclined to get-rich-quick schemes than actual enterprise or productivity.
The middle management labors under impossible demands to enrich stockholders next quarter and heavy turnover insures few stay in any job long enough to learn it effectively. Team cooperation is a doublespeak fraud imposed by “facilitators,” creating a phony work environment where employees and managers alike pretend to care. This bogus environment breeds a looting, game-the-system mentality in which everyone is grabbing for all they can before retirement, restructuring, reassignment, resignation or getting fired.
A “quarterly profits are God” mentality reduces the workforce (even the good workers) to units of input which are pared back or hired without regard to morale or loyalty. This managerial and cultural pathology makes a mockery of worker loyalty and breeds the very qualities of distrust and “I got mine” attitude which undermines both productivity and workplace happiness.
11. Last but certainly not least, the U.S. economy is highly depedent on cheap, abundant fossil fuels–the very fuels which are in the global depletion phase, happy stories about unlimited natural gas and tar sands to the contrary.
For all these reasons, we can anticipate the Depression currently unfolding will be deeper, longer and more destructive than the Great Depression.
Let’s recount the chain of events which partly parallel the Great Depression and partly diverge in meaningfully more destructive ways from that previous era:
1. The postwar income convergence (i.e the rise of the great middle class, the reduction of poverty and the relative reduction of the Plutocracy’s share of national income) reverses in the early 1970s as the “true prosperity” of the postwar era ends and is replaced by income flowing increasingly to the top as stagflation, globalization and the decline of dollar gut the purchasing power of the middle class.
2. The rising productivity of the 50s and 60s slips to the flatline through the 70s and early 80s, only picking up again as computer software and hardware revolutionize the back office, sales, manufacturing, just-in-time shipping/production, etc.
3. Concurrent with this gradual return to productivity is the rise of finance as the key profit-center of corporate America. As income skews ever more heavily to the top 1%/5%, then capital (productive assets) become ever more heavily concentrated in the hands of the financial Plutocracy. The top 1% now owns some 2/3 of the nation’s entire productive wealth.
4. As profits rise (from rising productivity) then the profits flow not to wages (which remain flat to down 1975-2009 for all but the top 10% professional class) but to those who own the capital.
5. As the middle class experiences a decline in their income and purchasing power (for reasons cited above: declining dollar, rising income disparity, and wages falling due to global wage arbitrage) then they turn more and more to borrowing and ever greater debt to fund what they have been brainwashed by the media to believe is “the American dream” of imported luxury goods, bloated homes, vacuous cruises, etc.
The only other mechanism available to the middle class to increase household income is for Mom/Aunt/Grandmom to enter the workforce, which she does in the tens of millions, with sociological consequences which are still unfolding.
6. This advert/media-driven desire to borrow to fund the “good life” is hugely profitable to the money-center banks, which expand rapidly into mortgage securization, derivatives and consumer credit to the point that they come to dominate corporate profits.
7. The financial Plutocracy, observing that actually producing goods is not very profitable unless you can fix prices as per ADM (Archer Daniels Midlands) or gain government subsidies and tax giveaways (oil lease depreciation, etc.) sinks its capital into the FIRE economy (finance, insurance and real estate), eschewing real-world investments as comparatively unprofitable.
Though rarely noted, this is a longstanding trait of capitalism stretching back to 1400-era Venice. When trade became less profitable than mainland farmimg, the Venetian Elite stopped funding trading and bought farms on the mainland. As a side effect, Venice ceased to be a military and trading power. But the Elite remained immensely wealthy.
8. As the tech bubble expands, middle-class investors see the Plutocracy (those with enough capital to qualify as angel investors and vulture, oops, I mean venture capital) reaping huge gains, and they enter the dot-com stock bubble buildup with a vengeance.
9. In a happy accident, the Soviet Empire collapses just as productivity begins its computer-fueled rise in the U.S. In a so-called Unipolar World in which U.S. military, political and financial influence is unrivaled, non-U.S. investors seek the relative safety and high returns (based on appreciation of the dollar) of U.S. financial instruments.
10. The dot-com bubble implodes in a speculative meltdown (dot-bomb), and retail investors (a.k.a. the middle class 401K investors) are devastated. The ephemeral wealth they once possessed, however briefly, fuels their speculative desire to get into the next get-rich-quick game, which just so happens to be “something everyone understands:” real estate and housing.
11. Having exhausted the dot-com play, Elite capital is seeking a new high-profit home. The miracles of derivatives (CDOs, credit default swaps, etc.) and securitized debt (mortgage tranches, etc.) open up vast new opportunities for leverage, off-balance sheet shenanigans and outright fraud/debauchery of credit. As chip wafer plants disappear from Silicon Valley (too dirty, too costly, etc.) then they’re replaced with paper: mortgage-backed securities.
12. Sniffing gold in them thar exurban hills, the under-capitalized and over-indebted U.S. working class and middle class reach for the chalice of easy-money gold: leveraged real estate.
13. With the Federal financial regulatory agencies in a Republican/Democrat-enforced somnambulance, the coast is clear for brigands, shysters, fraudsters, con artists, liars, cheats, and assorted riff-raff in the realtor, mortgage and appraisal businesses, who all feed the ravenous maw of the money-center banks’ apparently limitless appetite for real estate assets to securitize and leverage in exotic and highly profitable ways.
14. For a wonderful five years circa 2001-2006, the game is afoot and no-down-payment Jill and $100 million bonus Jack are immensely enriched. Meanwhile, the underlying real economy is becoming ever more imbalanced and ever more fragile as real production and real productivity plummet as everyone rushes to the speculative riches of exurban McMansions and malls.
15. This last best speculative leveraged bubble pops, gutting a Wall Street which had grown utterly dependent on leverage, debt, gamed/fraudulent accounting and bubbles for its rising profits.
16. Doubly devastated by the implosion of housing and their stock investments (mostly in retirement funds), the middle class faces the terrible consequences of its 26-year stupor of ever-rising debt and leverage. Alas, the Emperor’s clothes are revealed as remarkably transparent.
17. Just as in the Great Depression, to its great surprise, the Elite has also suffered catastrophic losses and declines in capital and income.
18. Having borrowed and squandered trillions of dollars since 1981 on unaffordable entitlements, military misadventures and assorted worthless bridges-to-nowhere pork spending, the Federal government (The Fed and the Treasury) finds that its ability to borrow its way out of its current debt hole somewhat annoyingly limited. The rest of the world has finally caught on to the con, and Chinese university students are openly mocking Treasury Secretary Geithner’s Orwellian claim of “we support a strong dollar.” The miracle is that he was not pelted with tomatoes and tarred and feathered for making such absurd statements.
19. With the global media concentrated in a scant few corporate hands (less than 10), this pulling away of the curtain is deleted/excised from media coverage in a ruthless campaign of pure “green shoots” propaganda.
20. As the wheels fall off the U.S. economy and the bubbles cannot be re-inflated, fruitless attempts at holding back the tide with incantations (stop, tide, I am Obama/Geithner/Bernanke!) and loopy sand castles (the bottom is in, buy now! Green shoots are sprouting everywhere except in the real economy!) abound. Unresponsive to propaganda, the real world grinds down into a global Depression without visible end.
Is this “edgy” enough to be worthy? I hope so.
Of Two Minds is now available via Kindle: Of Two Minds blog-Kindle
http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjune09/depression06-09.html
Bad news as usual: Israel Murders Unarmed Protestors, More Israeli Demolition, The Washington Child Sex Ring Coverup, FEMA Web Page Shows Martial Law Exercise With Foreign Troops
Bad news, 4 How long?
Israel Murders Unarmed Protestors
Israel’s Heinous Attack On The USS Liberty
Palestine Lawyers Prepare 936 War Crime Suits
Lunatic Israeli ‘Settlers’ Dedicate New Site to Obama
The Washington Child Sex Ring Coverup
UK Supermarkets – Lawsuits Over Israeli Food Labels
Saudi Urges US To Stop Israel Aid
UK Supermarkets – Lawsuits Over Israeli Food Labels
FEMA Web Page Shows Martial Law Exercise With Foreign Troops
Illuminati Symbolism In Movies (NEW VERSION – MUST SEE ALL OF VIDEO!) – High Definition
Illuminati Symbolism In Movies (NEW VERSION – MUST SEE ALL OF VIDEO!) – High Definition
Key figures in global battle against illegal arms trade lost in Air France crash
Key figures in global battle against illegal arms trade lost in Air France crash
ARGENTINA: Argentine campaigner Pablo Dreyfus and Swiss colleague Ronald Dreyer battled South American arms and drug traffickingFrom Andrew McLeod
AMID THE media frenzy and speculation over the disappearance of Air France’s ill-fated Flight 447, the loss of two of the world’s most prominent figures in the war on the illegal arms trade and international drug trafficking has been virtually overlooked.
Pablo Dreyfus, a 39-year-old Argentine who was travelling with his wife Ana Carolina Rodrigues aboard the doomed flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, had worked tirelessly with the Brazilian authorities to stem the flow of arms and ammunition that for years has fuelled the bloody turf wars waged by drug gangs in Rio’s sprawling favelas.
Also travelling with Dreyfus on the doomed flight was his friend and colleague Ronald Dreyer, a Swiss diplomat and co-ordinator of the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence who had worked with UN missions in El Salvador, Mozambique, Azerbaijan, Kosovo and Angola. Both men were consultants at the Small Arms Survey, an independent think tank based at Geneva’s Graduate Institute of International Studies. The Survey said on its website that Dryer had helped mobilise the support of more than 100 countries to the cause of disarmament and development.
Buenos Aires-born Dreyfus had been living in Rio since 2002, where he and his sociologist wife worked with the Brazilian NGO Viva Rio.
“Pablo will be remembered as a gentle and sensitive man with an upbeat sense of humour,” said the Small Arms Survey. “He displayed an intellectual curiosity and a determined work ethic that excited and enthused all who worked with him.”
According to the International Action Network on Small Arms Control (IANSA), Dreyfus’s work was instrumental in the introduction of landmark small arms legislation in Brazil in 2003. Under this legislation, an online link was created between army and police databases listing production, imports and exports of arms and ammunition in Brazil.
Dreyfus was an advocate of the stringent labelling of ammunition by weapons firms, arguing that by clearly identifying ammunition not only by its producer but also its purchaser, the likelihood of weapons being sourced by criminals from corrupt police or armed forces personnel is greatly reduced.
Though a Brazilian referendum on the right to bear arms was rejected in 2005, Viva Rio says the campaign should be considered a success because half a million weapons were voluntarily handed in to the authorities. Anti-gun activists put the referendum defeat down to fears criminals would circumvent the law and continue to gain access to small arms the usual way – through Paraguay and other bordering countries. This was not an irrational fear: until 2004, when Paraguay bowed to Brazilian pressure, even foreign tourists were allowed to purchase small arms simply by presenting a photocopy of their identity card. Dreyfus knew that many of the weapons from the so-called tri-border area between Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina were reaching Rio drug gangs.
When unidentified gunmen made off with a stash of hand grenades from an Argentine military garrison in 2006, Dreyfus deplored what he said was lax security at military depots across the world. “If a supermarket can keep control of the amount of peas it has in stock, surely a military organisation could and should be able to do the same with equal if not greater efficiency with its weapons,” he said. “The key words are logisitics, control, security.”
When Rio agents smashed a cell of drug traffickers who had sourced their weapons from the tri-border area, Dreyfus noted its leaders were prominent businessmen living in apartments in the plush Rio suburbs of Ipanema and São Corrado, “not in the favelas”.
In a recent report posted on the Brazilian website Comunidade Segura (Safe Community), Dreyfus noted that the Brazilian arms firm CBC (Companhia Brasileira de Cartuchos) had become one of the world’s biggest ammunition producers by purchasing Germany’s Metallwerk Elisenhutte Nassau (MEN) in 2007, and Sellier & Bellot (S&B) of the Czech Republic in March. This would not be particularly noteworthy but for the fact that CBC’s exports had tapered off in recent years due to legislation restricting exports to Paraguay, arms that often found their way back into Brazil and on to the Rio drug gangs – the “boomerang effect”, as Dreyfus called it. “The commercial export of weapons and ammunition from Brazil to the bordering countries stopped in 2001,” wrote Dreyfus. “CBC lost commercial markets in Latin America, but Brazil won in public security.”
However, manufacturers from other countries had moved in to fill the void, and before its purchase by CBC, S&B was already “one of the marks most currently apprehended” by Brazilian police. Dreyfus said that, in view of the fact the Czech Republic was bound by the EU Code of Conduct on weapons exports – which states that EU countries must “evaluate the existence of the risk that the armament can be diverted to undesirable final destinations”, CBC should “consider the risk that some of these exports end up, via diversions, feeding violence in Brazil”.
Though his focus was on Latin America, Dreyfus also advised the government of Mozambique and at the time of his death was preparing to do the same for the government of Angola, where stockpiles of weapons left over from the civil war continue to pose a security problem.
Dreyfus and Dreyer were on their way to Geneva to present the latest edition of the Small Arms Survey handbook, of which Dreyfus was a joint editor. It was to have been their latest step in their relentless fight against evil.
http://www.sundayherald.com/international/shinternational
The Taliban will ‘never be defeated’
The Taliban will ‘never be defeated’
‘Colonel Imam’, the Pakistani agent who trained Mullah Omar and the warlords to fight the Soviets, says the US must negotiate with its enemies.

<!– Remove following
The Taliban have Nato forces trapped says ‘Colonel Imam’. Eventually the West will tire

Christina Lamb in Rawalpindi
Sarkozy’s Secret Plan for Mandatory Swine Flu Vaccination
Sarkozy’s Secret Plan for Mandatory Swine Flu Vaccination
The French Government is developing secret plans to impose mandatory vaccination of the entire French population, allegedly against possible Swine Flu disease according to reports leaked in a French newspaper. The plan is without precedent and even defies recommended public health advice. Pharmaceutical giants benefit from the move, as the Swine Flu increases the trend to militarization of public health and use of needless population panic to advance the agenda.
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| The Sarkozy government has authorized spending of an estimated €1 billion to buy vaccines allegedly to combat or protect against H1N1 Swine Flu virus. | |
According to a report in the May 30 edition of the French newspaper, Le Journal du Dimanche, the Sarkozy government has authorized spending of an estimated €1 billion to buy vaccines allegedly to combat or protect against H1N1 Swine Flu virus. The only problem is that to date neither the WHO nor the US Government’s Center for Diseases Control (CDC) have succeeded to isolate, photograph with an electron microscope and chemically classify the H1N1 Influenza A virus. There is no scientifically published evidence that French virologists have done so either. To mandate drugs for a putative disease that has not even been characterized is dubious to say the least.
Even more bizarre is the admission by the US Government’s Food & Drug Administration, an agency responsible for health and safety of its citizens, that the ‘test’ is approved for premature release to test for H1N1 is not even a proven test. More to the point, there is no forensic evidence in any of the deaths reported to date that has been presented that proves scientifically that any single death being attributed to H1N1 Swine Flu virus was indeed caused by such a virus. European epidemiologists believe the deaths reported to date are ‘coincidental’ or what are called opportunistic infections.
What we know conclusively is that the people who died often had prior respiratory complications of an undisclosed nature. People die every day with respiratory diseases. In the USA alone some 36,000 flu-related deaths are recorded yearly with no undue panic or alarm. Most are elderly or patients with lung diseases. To date in all France, 24 people have been identified by health authorities as even having ‘symptoms’ of H1N1. It is worth noting that the WHO and CDC list the symptoms of H1N1: temperature, coughing, headache, runny nose. Hmmmmm. Do you know anyone with such Swine Flu symptoms? Also worth noting is that in the counting of the more than 15,000 ‘confirmed’ H1N1 Swine Flu cases worldwide the vast majority made miraculous recovery within three to seven days, just as in the case of a bad cold.
The goal: Militarization of Public Health
Increasingly it is becoming clear that the successive waves of mass panic created in recent years by CDC, WHO and leading government agencies has an ulterior motive. We have been hit with mass panic over eating beef when cattle in the UK and elsewhere developed fatal illness that was called BSE or ‘Mad Cow’ disease. Later evidence emerged that BSE was the result of vaccination of the cows to kill harmless insects that got under the animal’s skin. More recently, after reports of incidence of what is called ‘Blue Tongue’ disease in cows, sheep and goats in Belgium and Holland in 2006, animal veterinary authorities in Germany, Switzerland and Austria imposed mandatory vaccination or treatment with drugs allegedly to protect the animals from bites by insects allegedly carrying the usually harmless illness.
The vaccinations of the animal herds has been made mandatory for an illness that typically was so mild as to go unnoticed and in only extreme rare cases could be tied to death. All animals after three months must be vaccinated. The vaccines, according to a report in the Swiss publication Aegis-Impuls from 2008, resulted in mass deaths, decreased birth rates, decline in milk yields, heart attack and other severe effects. The vaccines were used despite the fact none apparently had been previously certified as safe. They typically contained aluminium hydroxide and Thiomersol or mercury, as adjuvants and or preservatives, both highly toxic and both also used in most human vaccines.
Despite mass protests and reports to the veterinary authorities in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, the warnings went unheeded and mandatory mass vaccinations continued. Little wonder that farmers are taking their tractors to the streets to protest.
The report of a secret French government plan to vaccinate every French citizen over three months of age, over 100 million doses, is more than alarming. According to the French Le Journal du Dimanche, anticipating a probable return of the virus in the fall, the government will spend nearly a billion euros to buy vaccines. Authorities will announce in the fall if they decide to make the vaccine mandatory. “We will be ready to go in a very short time”, explains the Minister of Health. According to sources, the state wants to order 100 million doses of flu vaccine from three laboratories, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi and Novartis. The latter two are French companies.
The French report comes just after the State of Massachusetts State Senate passed a mandatory vaccination bill that authorizes mandatory vaccination against purported H1N1 Swine Flu. In New York State the state hospital planning authority is debating making mandatory annual vaccination against flu of all public health employees, despite the fact that no approved vaccine for H1N1 exists. More and more it is beginning to appear that the scare about pandemic from flying birds or flying pigs is an excuse to justify mandatory vaccination with substances whose harmful side effects are demonstrably worse than any flu they should guard us against.
Novavax, a US pharmaceutical company based in Rockville, Maryland, conveniently enough just announced it is developing a vaccine for H1N1 based on “virus-like particles” that contain three key proteins of the flu virus without the genes required for replication. The vaccine is produced by techniques of genetic modification of organisms or GMO. The announcement came within days of the company announcing losses for the fiscal year of $36 million.
The drug Tamiflu which is officially recommended by the WHO as treatment to ‘ameliorate’ the symptoms of possible Swine Flu or H1N1 Influenza A as it has been renamed, is itself highly toxic. Health Canada informed Canadians of international reports of hallucinations and abnormal behaviour, including self harm, in patients taking the antiviral drug Tamiflu. In some cases death was the result and severe lung complications are widely reported associated with Tamiflu, the drug whose main financial benefactor is believed to be its largest stockholder, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
In 1976 in the US President Gerald Ford, nervous about winning a close election ordered mass immunisation of the population in the face of a possible pandemic to show voters he was a ‘hands on’ President. The 1976 pandemic never came but a vast number of people suffered serious neurological side effects from the vaccine that was rushed into production, including 25 reported deaths from Guillain-Barré syndrome.
Mandatory vaccination with drugs whose side effects are unknown because they have not been rigorously and independently tested begins to smack of the kind of inhuman mass human experiments carried out in the United States with mentally retarded, prisoners and other disadvantaged people or in Germany during the 1930’s.
Mud slide: A JCB is needed to clear away mud, rubble and water in Rhydfelin