Two years recession, or ten years of hell?
Two years recession, or ten years of hell?
F William Engdahl: US economy has been hollowed out over the last 15 years and debt load is staggering.
In this first segment of the interview, Paul Jay discusses how the global economic crisis will impact Europe with author and political economist William Engdahl. Engdahl says Italy is experiencing the worst economic crisis it has seen in 30 years, and the British economy is “falling off a cliff.” He says the European situation is “differentiated,” that “it’s a little bit different from what’s going on in North America, especially in the United States.” In Europe, he explains, “it is more an indirect knock-on effect of the United States financial meltdown.” He says the question now is whether the European Union is going to try and decouple its dependency on the US dollar and begin to form regional currency blocks like many nations around the world are starting to do.
Bio
F William Engdahl is an economist and author and the writer of the best selling book “A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order.” Mr Engdhahl has written on issues of energy, politics and economics for more than 30 years, beginning with the first oil shock in the early 1970s. Mr. Engdahl contributes regularly to a number of publications including Asia Times Online, Asia, Inc, Japan’s Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Foresight magazine; Freitag and ZeitFragen newspapers in Germany and Switzerland respectively. He is based in Germany.
http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=3260
Asia: The coming fury – Obama’s real foreign policy agenda – Obama Could Order More Troops to Afghanistan This Week – Obama Hijacks the Census
Asia: The coming fury
By Walden Bello
As goods pile up in wharves from Bangkok to Shanghai, and workers are laid off in record numbers, people in East Asia are beginning to realize they aren’t only experiencing an economic downturn but living through the end of an era.
For over 40 years, the cutting edge of the region’s economy has been export-oriented industrialization (EOI). Taiwan and South Korea first adopted this strategy of growth in the mid-1960s, with Korean dictator Park Chung-Hee coaxing his country’s
entrepreneurs to export. He did this by, among other measures, cutting off electricity to their factories if they refused to comply.
The success of Korea and Taiwan convinced the World Bank that EOI was the wave of the future. In the mid-1970s, then-Bank president Robert McNamara enshrined it as doctrine, preaching that “special efforts must be made in many countries to turn their manufacturing enterprises away from the relatively small markets associated with import substitution toward the much larger opportunities flowing from export promotion.”
EOI became one of the key points of consensus between the World Bank and Southeast Asia’s governments. Both realized import substitution industrialization could continue only if domestic purchasing power were increased via significant redistribution of income and wealth, and this was simply out of the question for the region’s elites. Export markets, especially the relatively open US market, appeared to be a painless substitute.
Japanese capital creates an export platform
The World Bank endorsed the establishment of export processing zones, where foreign capital could be married to cheap (usually female) labor. It also supported the establishment of tax incentives for exporters and, less successfully, promoted trade liberalization. Not until the mid-1980s, however, did the economies of Southeast Asia take off, and this wasn’t so much because of the World Bank but because of aggressive US trade policy.
In 1985, in what became known as the Plaza Accord, the United States forced the drastic revaluation of the Japanese yen relative to the dollar and other major currencies. By making Japanese imports more expensive to American consumers, Washington hoped to reduce its trade deficit with Tokyo. Production in Japan became prohibitive in terms of labor costs, forcing the Japanese to move the more labor-intensive parts of their manufacturing operations to low-wage areas, in particular to China and Southeast Asia. At least US$15 billion worth of Japanese direct investment flowed into Southeast Asia between 1985 and 1990.
The inflow of Japanese capital allowed the Southeast Asian “newly industrializing countries” to escape the credit squeeze of the early 1980s brought on by the Third World debt crisis, surmount the global recession of the mid-1980s, and move onto a path of high-speed growth. The centrality of the endaka, or currency revaluation, was reflected in the ratio of foreign direct investment inflows to gross capital formation, which leaped spectacularly in the late 1980s and 1990s in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand.
The dynamics of foreign-investment-driven growth was best illustrated in Thailand, which received $24 billion worth of investment from capital-rich Japan, Korea, and Taiwan in just five years, between 1987 and 1991. Whatever might have been the Thai government’s economic policy preferences – protectionist, mercantilist, or pro-market – this vast amount of East Asian capital coming into Thailand could not but trigger rapid growth. The same was true in the two other favored nations of northeast Asian capital, Malaysia and Indonesia.
It wasn’t just the scale of Japanese investment over a five-year period that mattered, however; it was the process. The Japanese government and keiretsu, or conglomerates, planned and cooperated closely in the transfer of corporate industrial facilities to Southeast Asia. One key dimension of this plan was to relocate not just big corporations such as Toyota or Matsushita, but also small and medium enterprises that provided their inputs and components. Another was to integrate complementary manufacturing operations that were spread across the region in different countries.
The aim was to create an Asia-Pacific platform for re-export to Japan and export to third-country markets. This was industrial policy and planning on a grand scale, managed jointly by the Japanese government and corporations and driven by the need to adjust to the post-Plaza Accord world. As one Japanese diplomat put it rather candidly, “Japan is creating an exclusive Japanese market in which Asia Pacific nations are incorporated into the so-called keiretsu financial-industrial bloc system.”
China masters the model
If Taiwan and Korea pioneered the model and Southeast Asia successfully followed in their wake, China perfected the strategy of export-oriented industrialization. With its unmatchable reserve army of cheap labor, China became the workshop of the world, drawing in $50 billion in foreign investment annually by the first half of this decade. To survive, transnational firms had no choice but to transfer their labor-intensive operations to China to take advantage of what came to be known as the “China price”, provoking in the process a tremendous crisis in the labor forces of advanced capitalist countries.
This process depended on the US market. As long as US consumers splurged, the export economies of East Asia could continue in high gear. The low US savings rate was no barrier since credit was available on a grand scale. China and other Asian countries snapped up US Treasury bills and loaned massively to US financial institutions, which in turn loaned to consumers and homebuyers.
But now the US credit economy has imploded, and the US market is unlikely to serve as the same dynamic source of demand for a long time to come. As a result, Asia’s export economies have been marooned.
The illusion of decoupling
For several years China has seemed to be a dynamic alternative to the US market for Japan and East Asia’s smaller economies. Chinese demand, after all, had pulled the Asian economies, including South Korea and Japan, from the depths of stagnation and the morass of the Asian financial crisis in the first half of this decade. In 2003, for instance, Japan broke a decade-long stagnation by meeting China’s thirst for capital and technology-intensive goods. Japanese exports shot up to record levels.
Indeed, China had become by the middle of the decade, the overwhelming driver of export growth in Taiwan and the Philippines, and the majority buyer of products from Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and Australia.
Even though China appeared to be a new driver of export-led growth, some analysts still considered the notion of Asia decoupling from the US locomotive to be a pipe dream. For instance, research by economists C P Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh, underlined that China was indeed importing intermediate goods and parts from Japan, Korea, and member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, but only to put them together mainly for export as finished goods to the United States and Europe, not for its domestic market.
Thus, “if demand for Chinese exports from the United States and the EU slow down, as will be likely with a US recession”, they asserted, “this will not only affect Chinese manufacturing production, but also Chinese demand for imports from these Asian developing countries”.
The collapse of Asia’s key market has banished all talk of decoupling. The image of decoupled locomotives – one coming to a halt, the other chugging along on a separate track – no longer applies, if it ever had. Rather, US-East Asia economic relations today resemble a chain-gang linking not only China and the United States but a host of other satellite economies. They are all linked to debt-financed, middle-class spending in the United States, which has collapsed.
China’s growth in 2008 fell to 9%, from 11% a year earlier. Japan is now in deep recession, its mighty export-oriented consumer goods industries reeling from plummeting sales. South Korea, the hardest hit of Asia’s economies so far, has seen its currency collapse by some 30% relative to the US dollar. Southeast Asia’s growth in 2009 will likely be half that of 2008.
The coming fury
The sudden end of the export era is going to have some ugly consequences. In the past three decades, rapid growth reduced the number of people living below the poverty line in many countries. In practically all countries, however, income and wealth inequality increased. But the expansion of consumer purchasing power took much of the edge off social conflicts. Now, with the era of growth coming to an end, increasing poverty amid great inequalities will be a combustible combination.
In China, about 20 million workers have lost their jobs in the last few months, many of them heading back to the countryside, where they will find little work. The authorities are rightly worried that what they label “mass group incidents”, which have been increasing in the last decade, might spin out of control.
With the safety valve of foreign demand for Indonesian and Filipino workers shut off, hundreds of thousands of workers are returning home to few jobs and dying farms. Suffering is likely to be accompanied by rising protests, as it already has in Vietnam, where strikes are spreading like wildfire. South Korea, with its tradition of militant labor and peasant protest, is a ticking time bomb.
Indeed, East Asia may be entering a period of radical protest and social revolution that went out of style when export-oriented industrialization became the fashion three decades ago.
Walden Bello is a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist, a senior analyst at the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South, president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition, and a professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Asian_Economy/KB11Dk01.html
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Obama’s real foreign policy agenda
by Justin Raimondo
While the great debate over the “stimulus” spending bill was the focus of President Obama’s Monday sermon, some of the questions asked at a subsequent press conference dealt with foreign policy, including a pointed one by CNN’s Ed Henry, and it was a double zinger:
“Thank you, Mr. President. You’ve promised to send more troops to Afghanistan. And since you’ve been very clear about a timetable to withdraw combat troops from Iraq within 16 months, I wonder, what’s your timetable to withdraw troops eventually from Afghanistan?
“And related to that, there’s a Pentagon policy that bans media coverage of the flag-draped coffins from coming in to Dover Air Force Base. And back in 2004, then-Senator Joe Biden said that it was shameful for dead soldiers to be, quote, ’snuck back into the country under the cover of night.’
“You’ve promised unprecedented transparency, openness in your government. Will you overturn that policy so the American people can see the full human cost of war?”
Hey, who let that guy in here, anyway?
Obama’s answer is a study in obfuscation and chilling sanctimony eerily reminiscent of his predecessor: “Your question is timely,” the president averred. “We got reports that four American service members have been killed in Iraq today. And, you know, obviously, our thoughts and prayers go out to the families.”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but hasn’t the question been timely for quite some time? After all, U.S. soldiers have been fighting and dying for eight years now in a war with no clear goal – except, perhaps, perpetual conflict for its own sake – and no visible end. Obama’s fabled calmness is really an uncanny ability to utter nonsense with absolute equanimity.
His entire answer is a peroration consisting of clichés strung together like plastic baubles on a dime-store bracelet. There’s a riff about how you know you’re president when you have to console the families of fallen soldiers. Ye gods, how many times have we heard presidents say this? It sounds like a line cut from a West Wing script. Richard Nixon might have said it. This is the moment when he feels truly presidential – when he realizes what a heavy burden it is having absolute power over the conduct of American foreign policy. Or, as Obama puts it: “It reminds you of the responsibilities that you carry in this office and – and the consequences of the decisions that you make.”
Not that there’s a chance he’d be willing to cede some of that decision-making back to the people’s representatives, where the Constitution says it belongs. You may dimly recall that, under the strictures set down by the Founders, only Congress may declare war. Yet that power, once usurped by a pint-sized haberdasher, was permanently surrendered by Congress. Certainly the majority Obamacrats would never dream of reclaiming it.
Obama refused to say that he’d reject the Bushian policy of keeping cameras away from those coffins, claiming he doesn’t yet “understand all the implications involved.” A truly oily evasion, that one, to which the only possible rejoinder is: What are the implications of continuing the policy?
Such a decision would underscore the essential continuity of American foreign policy and chip away at the myth of Obama the great change-maker. This is made all to clear in the rest of his answer, in which he touts the recent Iraqi elections as if they weren’t fraught with fraud and carried out in an atmosphere of intimidation, with the whole country practically put into lockdown. At any rate, elections are now the metric of military success and a sign that we can move on to fresh battlefields, where the battle for Democracy, Goodness, and the American Way is not yet won:
“You do not see that yet in Afghanistan. They’ve got elections coming up, but effectively the national government seems very detached from what’s going on in the surrounding community.”
How this is different from any other central government in Afghan history the president does not venture to say. Does he think he’s dealing with, say, France? Afghanistan’s very geography makes it ungovernable, despite what you may hear from those geniuses over at the Center for a New American Security or whatever neoconnish name they’ve dreamed up for the latest incarnation of American supremacism.
It’s amazing how quickly Obama started sounding just like Bush, because, when cornered by this question on the Afghan endgame, he reverted to waving the bloody flag of 9/11, just as his predecessor did in the run-up to war with Iraq, and long after the alleged links between Saddam and 9/11 had been thoroughly debunked. The president claims “you’ve got the Taliban and al-Qaeda operating in the FATA and these border regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan,” and he promises a “concerted effort to root out these safe havens.”
The Taliban in Pakistan are not the problem when the Taliban control a great hunk of Afghanistan proper and the domain of the central government is largely confined to Kabul. Furthermore, we have heard much about the alleged presence of al-Qaeda’s shadowy remnants in Pakistan, yet we have seen no evidence. Nor have we been offered any specifics. It seems to me that the president came pretty close to saying, definitively, that Osama bin Laden is in the tribal areas, without, of course, actually coming out and saying it. If he doesn’t know this to be true, then Obama is doing precisely what Bush and his gang did to gin up a war with Iraq – lying.
It always comes back to 9/11:
“The bottom line though – and I just want to remember the American people, because this is going to be difficult – is this is a situation in which a region served as the base to launch an attack that killed 3,000 Americans.”
A whole region? By this same token, then, so did Germany serve as a base for al-Qaeda, since the plotters lived in Hamburg for quite some time, where, presumably, they did their share of plotting. And the original conception of the 9/11 terrorist attacks can be traced back to a meeting held in the year 2000 in Malaysia. Therefore, according to Obama’s logic, these two countries are prime candidates for revenge attacks by the U.S. But this makes about as much sense as invading Italy in order to deprive the Mafia of its “safe haven.”
Terrorists don’t need “safe havens” to plan attacks on the U.S. They can do it anywhere. That’s their great advantage: “al-Qaeda” is more of an idea than a real organization. By running with this “safe haven” malarkey, Obama – far from being “tough” – underestimates the real source and deadly power of the terrorist threat.
“I do not yet have a timetable” for getting out, Obama declared – aside from which, you know how these “safe havens” tend to proliferate. Why, no sooner will Afghanistan be pronounced relatively clean of al-Qaeda than those scoundrels will somehow wriggle their way into Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and in all likelihood Uzbekistan – giving the U.S. a pretext to intervene in a region of the world our oil companies and other economic interests have long coveted.
One hopeful sign, however, is that he said he doesn’t yet have a timetable. Perhaps a vocal and visible protest against his neo-Bushian foreign policy will help concentrate his mind and speed up the process of timetable-creation.
~ Justin Raimondo
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=14224
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Obama Could Order More Troops to Afghanistan This Week
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates says President Obama will make a decision on additional U.S. troop deployments to Afghanistan in the “next few days,” before a strategy review is completed. But the secretary says the orders may not involve all the troops the U.S. commander in Afghanistan wants, at least not immediately.
Secretary Gates told a news conference the president has “several options in front of him,” and if he wants to send even one more combat brigade to Afghanistan he will have to make the decision soon, before the conclusion of the strategic review, which could take two more months.
“I think that there is a realization that some decisions have to be made before the strategic review is completed, if only because if he does decide to send at least an additional brigade combat team, just one, the next one to go would need to be notified pretty quickly,” he said.
A U.S. Army combat brigade is about 3,500 soldiers, but could require nearly as many support troops. Secretary Gates has said he wants to get at least some additional troops to Afghanistan by early summer, when fighting usually increases.
On Tuesday, the White House announced the formation of a high-level team to conduct an inter-agency review of U.S. policy toward Afghanistan. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the team will look not just at how many troops the United States should have in Afghanistan, but also try to determine “what is possible and what needs to happen in order to change the direction” in the country, where security and public support for the government have been deteriorating. Gibbs indicated the review will take about two months.
There have already been several such strategy reviews, including two by the U.S. military and one by the Bush White House.
Some analysts say it does not make sense to send more troops to Afghanistan before the president decides on his strategy. But Pentagon officials say any strategy will include improving security, and that will require more troops. Secretary Gates has endorsed the request by his commander in Afghanistan (General David McKiernan0 for about 30,000 more U.S. troops. But on Tuesday he indicated the strategy review might settle on a plan that would require fewer troops.
“I give great deference to the commander in the field as to what he needs, and it’s my job try and satisfy those needs,” he said. “If his mission changes then the number of troops or the capabilities that he would need would change, one way or the other, as well. So I think we just have to wait until the conclusion of the strategic review.”
Secretary Gates would not say what mission or strategy would require fewer troops, saying that will be for the review to figure out. But he did say he advocates an approach that involves more engagement with local and provincial governments, although not to the exclusion of the central government. On Monday, President Obama called the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai “detached” from what is going on in the country.
About 5,000 additional U.S. troops have already arrived in Afghanistan, bringing the total to 37,000, but no further deployments have yet been approved. Secretary Gates defended what some officials say is a delay in the deployment orders, saying this would be President Obama’s first such decision, and it makes sense for him to follow a careful process before making it.
http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-02-10-voa68.cfm
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Another Attack on the Constitution: Obama Hijacks the Census
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
February 10, 2009
It’s another shot across the bow of the Constitution: the White House has announced it will micromanage the census. It is said Obama and crew — you can almost hear Rahm Emanuel cracking his knuckles in Obama’s ear — decided to lord over the census after California Rep. Barbara Lee, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, and Hispanic groups complained to the White House about Judd Gregg, the Republican senator from New Hampshire slated to head the Commerce Department. Lee, the Caucus, and Hispanic groups complained Gregg couldn’t be trusted to conduct to run the census, at least not to their liking, and in response the Obama administration hijacked the census.
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| Mary Ann Akers of the Washington Post cited a senior Republican Senate aide who declared that letting the census “be run out of Rahm’s office is like putting PETA in charge of issuing hunting permits.” | |
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On February 6, White House spokesman Laena Fallon said: “From the first days of the transition the census has been a priority for the president, and a process he wanted to reevaluate. There is historic precedent for the director of the census, who works for the Commerce Secretary and the president, to work closely with White House senior management — given the number of decisions that will have to be put before the president. We plan to return to that model in this administration.”
In short, the Obama administration plans to violate the Constitution and the law. According to Article I, Section 2 the Constitution: “The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.” As for the Law, Congress decreed the following:
The Secretary [of Commerce] shall perform the functions and duties imposed upon him by this title, may issue such rules and regulations as he deems necessary to carry out such functions and duties, and may delegate the performance of such functions and duties and the authority to issue such rules and regulations to such officers and employees of the Department of Commerce as he may designate.
Title 13 of the U.S. Code, Chapter 1, Subchapter I, § 2, entitled “Bureau of the Census,” states: “The Bureau is continued as an agency within, and under the jurisdiction of, the Department of Commerce.”
Not under the jurisdiction of Obama and Rahm Emanuel, but the Department of Commerce. The Director of the Census by law must be within the Department of Commerce and under the direction of the Senate approved Secretary of Commerce who then reports to the president.
According to the Chicago Daily Observer, the Secretary of Commerce will not report directly to Obama, but his designee — feared by Republicans to be Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Last week, Mary Ann Akers of the Washington Post cited a senior Republican Senate aide, who declared that letting the census “be run out of Rahm’s office is like putting PETA in charge of issuing hunting permits.”
For the Democrats, all of this is exceedingly important because census results will determine the redrawing of congressional districts and electoral college numbers and may impact the 2012 elections when Obama could be fighting for reelection and Democrats fighting to hold on to the House and the Senate.
In such matters — considering the composition of government — the integrity of the Constitution and the letter of law come in dead last. Obama is said to be a constitutional scholar. In fact, he has about as much reverence for our founding document as George W. Bush, who infamously said during a meeting with Republican congressional leaders in 2005 that the Constitution is “just a goddamned piece of paper.”
Obama may indeed have a soft spot in his heart for the Constitution, not that it matters — he is little more than a front man for the ruling elite who call the shots.
Sabotaging the Constitution has nothing to do with Democrats, Republicans, congressional districts, or the Congressional Black Caucus and Hispanic groups — it has to do with control exercised by our rulers. If the census needs to be fiddled with in order to make sure the globalist agenda remains on track with the current spate of factotums in place, the act of treading on the Constitution is of no account.
http://www.infowars.com/another-attack-on-the-constitution-obama-hijacks-the-census/
If not fascism, what is? Without censure, a growing current in Israeli politics is calling for the outright killing of Palestinians – British diplomat arrested over ‘anti-Semitic’ rant – Video: Israel accused of using ‘human shields’ in Gaza – Israeli forces open fire on Palestinian farmers and internationals – War Crimes Found in the Gaza Strip
If not fascism, what is?
Without censure, a growing current in Israeli politics is
calling for the outright killing of Palestinians
By Khaled Amayreh in occupied East Jerusalem
His name is Avigdor Lieberman and he is widely expected to be the main surprise of the Israeli elections, slated to take place 10 February.
Many Israeli intellectuals dub Lieberman as the secular equivalent of Meir Kahana, the slain founder of the Kach terrorist group who advocated genocidal ethnic cleansing of non-Jews in Israel-Palestine. Kahana was assassinated in Manhattan, New York, in 1990 shortly after giving a speech in which he called for the annihilation and expulsion of Palestinians from “the Land of Israel”.
According to most opinion polls, Lieberman’s party, Yisrael Beiteinu, or “Israel is our Home”, is projected to win 16-17 Knesset seats out of 120 making up the Israeli parliament. This would allow Yisrael Beiteinu to overtake the Labour Party, led by Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, to become the third largest party in the Israeli political system, after the Likud and Kadima parties. Lieberman’s party will likely be a chief coalition partner in the next Israeli government.
Yisrael Beiteinu is not a party of marginal or pariah politicians. A few months ago, several high-profile politicians joined the party, including former Israeli Ambassador to the US Danny Ayalon and Uzi Landau, a former Israeli cabinet minister and prominent Likud figure for many years.
Some observers expect the Obama administration and international Jewish circles to press Benyamin Netanyahu, who is widely expected to form the next Israeli government, to exclude Lieberman from government in order to avoid negative ramifications with regards to relations with the United States and European Union. However, it is uncertain that Netanyahu would cave in to such pressure, given his rapport with Lieberman. Lieberman was the director-general of the Prime Minister’s Office when Netanyahu was premier in 1996-1998. He later assumed key portfolios, including deputy prime minister, minister of strategic affairs and minister of national infrastructure.
Lieberman was born in Moldova in the former Soviet Union in 1958. In 1978, at the age of 20, he immigrated to Israel and received automatic citizenship under Israel’s law of return. He now lives in the settlement of Nokdi in the West Bank. A nightclub bouncer-turned-politician, Lieberman formed the Yisrael Beiteinu Party in 1999 when he was first elected to the Knesset. Without controversy, Lieberman’s political and social ideas can be described as racist, even genocidal. In recent weeks, he was quoted as suggesting that Israel should use nuclear weapons against the Gaza Strip.
In 2002, Lieberman called on the Israeli government, under Ariel Sharon, to blanket-bomb Palestinian population centres in order to force Palestinians to flee to Jordan. The Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot quoted Lieberman as saying during a cabinet meeting that the Palestinians should be given an ultimatum: “At 8am we’ll bomb all the commercial centres… at noon we’ll bomb their gas stations… at 2pm we’ll bomb their banks… while keeping the bridges open.”
In 1998, Lieberman called for flooding Egypt by bombing the Aswan Dam. In 2001, as minister of national infrastructure, Lieberman proposed that the West Bank be divided into four cantons, with no central Palestinian government and no possibility for Palestinians to travel between the cantons. In 2003, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Lieberman called for thousands of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel to be drowned in the Dead Sea and offered to provide buses to take them there.
Further, Lieberman has proposed that a “loyalty test” be applied to those “Arabs” who desire to remain in Israel. Those committed to making Israel a state of all its citizens, including the Palestinian minority, would be stripped of their voting rights. In April 2002, Lieberman stated that there was “nothing undemocratic about transfer”.
In May 2004, Lieberman said that 90 per cent of Israel’s 1.2 million Palestinian citizens would “have to find a new Arab entity” in which to live beyond Israel’s borders. “They have no place here. They can take their bundles and get lost.”
In May 2006, Lieberman called for the killing of Arab members of the Israeli parliament who meet with members of the then Hamas-led Palestinian Authority.
In recent months, Lieberman urged that Tehran be levelled if Iran went ahead with its alleged nuclear weapons programme. He reportedly told listeners of Israel’s Radio Persian Service that “you will pay a high price; you, the good Iranian citizens, will pay for your leaders’ actions.”
According to Israeli journalist Gideon Samet, the rising star of Lieberman in Israel shouldn’t be dismissed as an anomalous development, saying that “Lieberman’s ideas [are] penetrating deeply in the Israeli society.” Samet opined that the political class in Israel was expected to adapt to Lieberman’s reality.
“Netanyahu will not say openly he won’t sit down with Lieberman in government. After all, both Kadima and Labour had sat down with him in previous governments,” Samet wrote in Maariv.
In recent weeks, a large number of Israeli intellectuals, including ostensible leftists, have spoken in favour of the idea of waging a genocidal war against the Palestinians. Left-leaning television personality Yaron London surprised many during the recent blitz on Gaza by urging a “no-holds-barred” campaign against Palestinian civilians. London outlined his views in an article in Yediot Aharonot and then elaborated on them in a series of interviews published in the Hebrew media.
“The time has come to shock the Gaza population with actions that until now have nauseated us — actions such as killing the political leadership, causing hunger and thirst in Gaza, blocking off energy sources, causing widespread destruction, and being less discriminating in the killing of civilians. There is no other choice,” he wrote.
Responding to questions, London further argued that murdering civilians was a justified act. “I am referring to both the population and their leadership; they are the same, because the population voted for Hamas. I can’t separate between one who voted for Hamas and a Hamas leader.”
This clearly criminal mindset is not going unchallenged, but is gaining in popularity. Former TV anchorman Haim Yavin has warned against including Lieberman and his ilk in the next Israeli government. “Kahana may have died, but Kahanism is alive and well; there is too much ‘death to the Arabs’ and hatred for Arabs,” Yavin said in an interview with Haaretz this week.
Alarmingly, Yavin represents a dwindling minority in a society that is drifting fast towards fascism.
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/933/re5.htm
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British diplomat arrested over ‘anti-Semitic’ rant
Allegations that a senior British diplomat launched into an anti-Semitic rant in a London gym while watching TV footage from Gaza will not upset the “treadmill of diplomacy”, the Israeli Ambassador to London said today.
In a curiously tongue-in-cheek response to a case that has provoked concern within the Jewish community in Britain, Ron Prosor added that the tirade did not reflect “the health and fitness of our relations”.
The diplomat, 47-year-old Rowan Laxton, allegedly shouted “f***ing Israelis, f***ing Jews” while watching television reports of the Israeli attack on Gaza last month.
He is also alleged to have said that Israeli soldiers should be “wiped off the face of the Earth” during the rant at the London Business School gym near Regents Park on January 27. The tirade reportedly continued even after other gym users asked him to stop.
After a complaint from a member of the public, Mr Laxton was arrested for inciting religious hatred – which can carry a seven-year prison term – and bailed to reappear at a central London police station at the end of March.
In the meantime, he continues to work as usual as head of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s South Asian group, in charge of UK diplomatic policy in the region. In that job he would be expected directly to brief the Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who is himself Jewish.
The FCO refused to comment on the case while police inquiries are continuing, but Mr Prosor released a statement to The Times this afternoon in which he made it clear that Israel would let the Foreign Office deal with the problem as it saw fit.
He said: “The treadmill of diplomacy between our countries continues to run smoothly. The abusive tirade of this one individual should not be seen as a reflection of the health and fitness of our relations.
“From the nature of our work with the British Foreign Office, we understand that the unacceptable outburst expressed by a British diplomat does not reflect the official policy of the United Kingdom and we have been informed that an internal investigation is currently taking place.
“If the investigation concludes that the incident actually occurred, appropriate action will be taken by the Foreign Office.”
Mr Prosor’s sanguine response appears to be at odds with that of the Jewish community in Britain. Mark Gardner, deputy director of the Community Security Trust which monitors anti-Semitism, said: “There were an unprecedented number of anti-Semitic incidents during the Gaza conflict.
“This alleged case is particularly shocking, given the position held by the civil servant in question. We must not allow an overseas conflict to cause racism here in Britain and especially not among civil servants.
“The Jewish community will be rightly appalled to hear of these allegations against such a senior figure.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article5693687.ece
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Video: Israel accused of using ‘human shields’ in Gaza
AlJazeeraEnglish
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Feb 9, 2009
While Israel is going to the polls, the story of how their army conducted its war on Gaza is slowly being pieced together. Two Gaza residents have told al Jazeera that they were used as human shields by the army – a military tactic that is specifically forbidden by Israeli law. The Israeli army denies the allegations. Hoda Abdel Hamid reports from Gaza.
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Israeli forces open fire on Palestinian farmers and
internationals in al-Farahee
Israeli soldiers again opened fire on Palestinian farmers and international Human Rights Workers (HRWs) on Thursday 5th February, as they attempted to harvest parsley in agricultural land near the Green Line.
Returning to farmland of al-Faraheen village, in the Abassan Jadida area, east of Khan Younis, where soldiers had opened fire on Tuesday 3rd February, farmers and HRWs were able to harvest the parsley crop for only half an hour, before soldiers again began to shoot. A number of shots were fired into the air, before the soldiers started to aim in the direction of the farmers and international accompaniment. Bullets were heard to whiz past, close to people’s heads.
The soldiers continued to shoot on the group, despite the fact that many members of the group had their arms in the air and were wearing fluorescent vests to make them highly visible, and identify them as Human Rights Workers; had erected a banner indicating that the farmers and accompaniment were civilians; contact had been made with the Israeli army to advise them that Palestinian civilians and internationals would be working in the area; the various international embassies had been advised of the planned accompaniment; and the internationals were announcing their presence via a megaphone – demanding that the soldiers stop shooting on unarmed civilians.
“We are unarmed civilians! We are farmers and international Human Rights Workers! Stop Shooting!”
With internationals acting as human shields, the farmers – after initially lying down to avoid being shot – attempted to continue harvesting. After a few moments, however, the shooting intensified and farmers decided to leave the area, rather than be killed. Internationals announced on the megaphone that the group was leaving the area – asking that the soldiers halt their fire. Instead, as the group started to leave, the shooting further intensified in rapidity and proximity. Even after the group had taken refuge in a house, approximately 1km from the Green Line, the soldiers continued to shoot at nearby houses that were demolished during the recent Israeli Operation Cast Lead.
This behaviour on the part of the Israeli soldiers was an almost exact repeat of their response to the presence of the farmers and internationals, in the same area of farm-land, two days before. On the Tuesday, however, the group was able to harvest for two hours before soldiers began to shoot. Whilst farmers had hoped to be able to wait-out the shooting, in order to continue harvesting, it quickly became clear that the situation was too dangerous for that to be possible.
The farmers of al-Faraheen are particularly aware of the level of danger they face when entering farm lands that are within 1 km of the Green Line – after watching their friend and colleague, 27 year old Anwar Il Ibrim, from neighbouring Benesela, killed by a bullet to the neck while he was picking parsely in the same area, just one week before.
The owner of the land, Yusuf Abu Shaheen, commented after Tuesday’s gun-fire “If you internationals hadn’t been with us today, the soldiers would have killed us all”.
Whilst it has become increasingly dangerous for farmers to enter their lands near the Green Line, especially since the recent Israeli attacks, for farmers like Yusuf, there is an economic imperative to harvest his crops. Yusuf explains that just to plant the crops and keep them watered and fertilised, costs him $2000 each month – money that has already been spent. There is the additional factor of a lack of water that increases the sense of urgency to harvest crops planted in the vicinity of the Green Line. Israeli forces broke the pipes for the area one week before their war on Gaza began. The parsley in the most dangerous areas, with water, could very well have been left for another week or two without harvesting – in the hope that the soldiers might become less aggressive over time. Without water, the plants are becoming increasingly tough, sweet and salty. If they are not harvested soon, they will become worthless.
The workers, who are employed by Yusuf to harvest the crops, also put themselves in mortal danger every time they enter the lands close to the Green Line. Like most in the Gaza Strip, they too are compelled by economic concerns to risk their lives for the meager sum of 20 shekels ($5)/day. With an unemployment rate of 40%, and almost two-thirds (900 000) of Gaza’s residents reliant on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the levels of poverty existing in Gaza mean that, for many families, money earned by sons and farmers risking their lives near the Green Line, might be the only money they have.
Anwar’s mother explains that her son hadn’t worked in the al-Faraheen area for 6 months – not since a large-scale Israeli incursion into the area in May 2008, and the following Israeli military aggression, made agricultural work in the area extremely dangerous. Anwar, the only son in the family, felt compelled to try to earn whatever he could to support the family – in particular to buy medicine for his ailing and paralysed father.
The ability of farmers to earn money from these lands is not only being threatened by the daily shooting from the Israeli army, however, but also by the inability to irrigate the crops. On Tuesday, Yusuf took the opportunity to remove expensive connecting valves from the irrigation pipes. On Thursday, an elderly farmer was pulling up all of the irrigation pipes themselves – now useless as it is impossible to get water to the area. This crop the farmers have spent two days trying to harvest seems likely to be the last that will be planted there for some time.
Such actions – shooting at farmers trying to work their lands; and destroying irrigation systems – are part of the wider, systematic economic oppression of Palestinians. Along with sanctions and a siege that prevents Palestinians from importing and exporting goods; and denies freedom of movement to work in other countries, Israeli military forces also attempt to prevent Palestinians from deriving income from other methods, such as fishing and farming – through extreme levels of military force. Indeed, throughout the 23-day war on Gaza, the Israeli military, along with demolishing approximately 10,000 homes, and damaging many thousands more to the extent to which they are uninhabitable, intentionally killed hundreds of thousands of livestock, and bulldozed thousands of dunums of agricultural land.
In order to stand in solidarity with farmers in their struggle against this economic oppression, international HRWs will continue to accompany farmers to dangerous lands – challenging Israeli military imposition of “closed military zones” in areas that they claim to no longer occupy.
Filmed in Abassan on 3rd and 5th February, 2009
https://rcpt.yousendit.com/650164221/49624530899dff4a7845ef331c20ae09
Filmed in Abassan on 5th February, 2009
https://rcpt.yousendit.com/650362411/0ad97c932e875d823c1c1102b37cdae9
Photos taken in Abassan on 5th February, 2009
https://rcpt.yousendit.com/650440585/c81627c1d551e128f34eac3ce39866ec
ISM
Homepage: http://palsolidarity.org/2009/02/5065
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/02/421658.html
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Israeli forces extra-judicially execute man in Jenin area
International Solidarity Movement
A 21 year old man, Ala Ad-Din Abu Ar-Roub, from Qabatiya village near Jenin was killed early Thursday morning after his home was surrounded and entered by a large number of Israeli forces
According to family members, Ala was working on his computer in his room at 4:30am when the soldiers attacked the house, blowing open the front door and entering without warning. Ala was killed by multiple gunshots to the head and chest while his brother Muhammed lay sleeping on a mattress next to him.
The Israeli forces then forced all of the family members outside after violently subduing Ala’s mother who had attempted to come to his aid. The family members including children were not even permitted to put on outdoor clothing or shoes before exiting the house.
After the family was evacuated, the Israeli forces laid explosive charges inside the house, blowing open a large hole in one wall and damaging much of the internal structure of the house. The family was prevented from attending to Ala during this time and had no knowledge of his condition.
Family members claimed that they had been given no indication by Israeli forces that Ala was wanted on any charges although he had been imprisoned more than a year previously. They stated that he had not been involved recently in any political activity and would not have been living unprotected at the family home if he had believed he was a target of Israeli security forces.
Ala was the oldest child of the Abu Ar-Roub family, and is survived by his parents and brother Muhammed and seven sisters. He had previously studied electrical engineering and intended to continue his studies. He also enjoyed various athletic activities.
According to village sources, this is the first targeted assassination in the Jenin area in over a year, although arrests have been common by Israeli forces. Such extra-judicial executions by the occupying forces are flagrant violations of international and humanitarian law.
Link: palsolidarity.org/2009/02/5102
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What We Found in Gaza
Strong Indications of Violations of the Laws of War, U.S. Law, and War Crimes Found in the Gaza Strip
Targeting of Civilians and Civilian Infrastructure
Much of the debate surrounding Israel’s aerial and ground offensive against Gaza has centered on whether or not Israel observed principles of proportionality and distinction. The debate suggests that Israel targeted Hamas i.e., its military installations, its leaders, and its militants, and in the process of its discrete military exercise it inadvertently killed Palestinian civilians. While we have found evidence that Palestinian civilians were victims of excessive force and collateral damage, we have also found troubling instances of Palestinian civilians being targets themselves.
The delegation recorded numerous accounts of Israeli soldiers shooting civilians, including women, children, and the elderly, in the head, chest, and stomach. Another common narrative described Israeli forces rounding civilians into a single location i.e., homes, schools which Israeli tanks or warplanes then shelled. Israeli forces continued to shoot at civilians fleeing the targeted structures.
We spoke to Khaled Abed Rabbo, who witnessed an Israeli soldier execute his 2-year-old and 7-year-old daughters, and critically injure a third daughter, Samar, 4-years old, on a sunny afternoon outside his home. Two other Israeli soldiers were standing nearby eating chips and chocolates at the time on January 7, 2009. Abed Rabbo recounts standing in front of the Israeli soldiers with his mother, wife and daughters for 5 – 7 minutes before one of the soldiers opened fire on his family.
We spoke to Ibtisam al-Sammouni, 31, and a resident of Zaytoun neighborhood in Gaza City. On January 4th, the Israeli army forced approximately 110 of Zaytoun’s residents into Ibtisam’s home. At approximately 7 am on January 5th, the Israeli military launched two tank shells at the house without warning killing two of Ibtisam’s children: Rizka, 14 and Faris, 12. When the survivors attempted to flee Israeli forces shot at them. Her son Abdullah, 7, was injured in the shelling and remained in the home among his deceased siblings for four days before Israeli forces permitted medical personnel into Zaytoun to rescue them. After medical personnel removed the injured persons, an Israeli war plane destroyed the house and it crumbled over the lifeless bodies. The dead remained beneath the rubble for 17 days before the Israeli Army permitted medical personnel to remove their bodies for burial.
We spoke to the family of Rouhiya al-Najjar, 47, who lived in Khoza’a, Khan Younis. Israeli forces ordered her neighborhoods residents to march to the city center. Rouhiya led 20 women out of her home and into the alley. They all carried white scarves. Upon entering the alley, an Israeli sniper shot Rouhiya in her left temple killing her instantly. Israeli forces prevented medical personnel from reaching her body for twelve hours. These are only some of the accounts that we’ve collected.
Israeli forces also destroyed numerous buildings throughout the Gaza Strip during the recent incursion. Guild delegates viewed the remains of hundreds of demolished homes and businesses – in addition to the remains of the American School in Gaza, damaged medical centers, and the charred innards of UNRWA warehouses. While in situations of armed conflict, collateral damage and mistakes can occur, the circumstances surrounding the cases that the delegation investigated indicate deliberate targeting rather than collateral damage or mistake. Specifically:
The American School at Gaza, which was hit with two F-16 missiles on January 3, 2009, killing the watch guard on duty. According to Ribhi Salem, the school’s director, the Israelis gave no warnings. Mr. Salem stated that the school had come to an agreement with resistance groups not to use school grounds and there had never been resistance activity on the property.
United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)
John Ging, the Director of Gaza Operations for UNRWA reported that Israeli forces fired missiles at UNRWA schools in Gaza City, Jabalyia and Bet Lahiya. The United Nation compound in Gaza city was also hit with white phosphorous shells and missiles. Ging noted that al United Nations buildings and vehicles all fly UN flags, are marked in blue paint from the top, and that during hostilities the UN personnel remained in constant contact with Israeli authorities.
Misuse of Weapons
Our delegation has heard allegations of the use of DIME (Dense Inert Metal Explosive) weaponry, white phosphorus and other possible weapons whose use in civilian areas is prohibited. We have also heard of the use of prohibited weapons, such as flachettes. We have found our own evidence of the use of flachette shells, which we will combine with evidence collected by Amnesty International to push for further investigation. We have not found any conclusive evidence of the use of DIME, though we believe that this warrants further investigation and disclosure by the Israeli military.
Our findings overwhelmingly point to the use of conventional weapons in a prohibited manner, specifically, the use of battlefield weaponry in densely populated civilian areas. Customary international law forbids the use of weapons calculated to cause unnecessary suffering. We found evidence that Israel used white phosphorus in extensively throughout its three-week offensive in a manner that led to numerous deaths and injuries. For example, Sabah Abu Halima, 45, lived in Beit Lahiya with her husband, seven boys, and one girl. It was midday and she and her entire family was home. Within minutes she felt her home shaking and missiles fell through the rooftop. She fell to the ground upon impact. When she looked up she saw her children burning.
Preventing Access to Medical and Humanitarian Aid
Under customary international humanitarian law, the wounded are protected persons and must receive the medical care and attention required by their conditions, to the fullest extent practicable and with the least possible delay. Parties to a conflict are required to ensure the unhindered movement of medical personnel and ambulances to carry out their duties and of wounded persons to access medical care. Speaking to medical workers and the family of victims, NLG delegates documented serious violations of this provision. Among the stories documented include:
Zaytoun neighborhood, which came under attack and invasion by ground foces on January 3, 2009. The Palestinian Red Crescent received 145 calls from Zaytoun for help, but were denied entry by Israel. Bashar Ahmed Murad, Director of Emergency Medical Services for the Palestinian Red Crescent Society told us that “a lot of people could have been saved, but hey weren’t given medical care by the Israelis, nor did the Israeli army allow Palestinian medical services in.” When paramedics were finally allowed to enter on January 7, Israeli forces only gave them a 3-hour “lull” to work and prohibited ambulances into the area. Instead they forced paramedics park the ambulances 2 kilometers away and enter the area on foot. Murad told delegation members how they had to pile the wounded on donkey carts and have the medical workers pull the carts in order to help the most people possible in the short time they were given. After the 3 hours were over, the
Israeli army started shooting toward the ambulances. The Red Crescent was not able to reach that area again to evacuate the dead until January 17, 2009 when the Israeli army pulled out.
Al-Shurrab Family
On January 16th, Israeli forces shot at the jeep of Mohammed Shurrab, 64 years of age, and two of his sons, Kassab and Ibrahim, aged 28 and 18 as they were returning from their fields. Mohammad was shot in the left arm and Ibrahim was shot in the leg. The elder son, Kassab, sustained a fatal bullet wound to the chest, being shot multiple times after being ordered out of the car. Mohammad, bleeding from his wound, contacted the media, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and a number of NGOs via mobile phone in order to acquire medical assistance. Israeli forces denied medical relief agencies clearance to reach them until almost 24 hours after Mohammad, Ibrahim and Kassab had been shot. Earlier that morning, Ibrahim had succumbed to his wound and died. Mohammad Shurrab and his sons were shot during a so-called “lull” in Israeli ground operations, which Israeli forces had agreed to in order to allow humanitarian relief to enter and be
distributed in the Gaza Strip. As such NLG delegates fail to see how this denial of medical access to the wounded Shurrab family could have been absolutely necessary and not simply arbitrary.
International humanitarian law also prohibits attacks on medical personnel, medical units and medical transports exclusively assigned to carry out medical functions. Delegate members saw ambulances seriously damaged and destroyed, some apparenly deliberately crushed by Israeli tanks. The Palestinian Red Crescent Society and the Palestinian Ministry of Health informed delegates that 15 Palestinian medics were killed and 21 injured in the course of Israel’s assualt.
Conclusions
This delegation is seriously concerned by our initial findings. We have found strong indications of violations of the laws of war and possible war crimes committed by Israel in the Gaza Strip. We are particularly concerned that most of the weapons that were found used in the December 27 assualt on Gaza are US-made and supplied. We believe that Israel’s use of these weapons may constitute a violation of US law, and particularly the Foreign Assistance Act and the US Arms Export Control Act.
A report of our initial findings will be compiled and submitted to, among others, members of the United States Congress. We intend to push for an investigation by the United States government into possible violations by Israel of US law. We also hope to contribute our finding and efforts to other efforts by local and international lawyers to push for accountability against those found responsible for the egregious crimes that we have documented.
Members of the Legal Delegation
Huwaida Arraf (New York, Washington DC)
huwaida.arraf@gmail.com
Palestine: 0599-130-426
USA: 1-202-294-8813
Noura Erekat (Washington DC)
noo194@yahoo.com
Palestine:
USA: 1-510-847-4239
James Marc Leas (Vermont)
jolly39@gmail.com
Palestine:
USA: 1-802 864-1575 and 1-802 734-8811(cell)
Linda Mansour (Ohio)
Lindamansour@aol.com
Palestine:
USA: 1-419-535-7100 and 1-419-283-8281 (cell)
Rose Mishaan (California)
roseindigo7@gmail.com
Palestine:
USA: 1-917-803-2201
Thomas Nelson (Oregon)
nelson@thnelson.com
Palestine:
USA: 1-503-709-6397
Radhika Sainath (California)
radhika.sainath@gmail.com
Palestine:
USA: 1-917-669-6903
Reem Salahi (California)
reemos@gmail.com
Palestine:
USA: 1-510-225-8880
U.S. Army Lab Freezes Research on Dangerous Pathogens – Bond market calls Fed’s bluff as global economy falls apart
February 7, 2009
U.S. Army Lab Freezes Research on Dangerous Pathogens
The U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) has suspended research activities involving biological select agents and toxins. Army officials took the step on Friday after discovering apparent problems with the system of accounting for high-risk microbes and biomaterials at the Fort Detrick, Maryland, facility.
The lab has been under intense scrutiny since August, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) named former USAMRIID researcher Bruce Ivins as the perpetrator of the 2001 anthrax letter attacks. Although the case never went to trial because of Ivins’s suicide on 29 July 2008, FBI officials have claimed that the evidence against him is indisputable and that he carried out the mailings using anthrax stolen from a flask at USAMRIID.
Officials have begun a complete inventory of all select agents and toxins at the facility. All experiments using select agents will remain suspended until the accounting is finished, which could take several weeks. Several USAMRIID researchers have been grumbling about the decision, which seems to have caught them by surprise, according to a government official not connected to the lab.
The decision was announced by institute commander Col. John Skvorak in a 4 February memo to employees. The memo, which ScienceInsider has obtained, says the standard of accountability that USAMRIID had been applying to its select agents and toxins was not in line with the standard required by the Army and the Department of Defense. USAMRIID officials believed that a satisfactory accounting involved finding all the items listed on its database; the Army and DOD wanted the converse—that is, all select agents and toxins needed to be matched to the database.
According to the memo, any materials found without a corresponding record in the database must be reported to the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army. “I believe that the probability that there are additional vials of BSAT [biological select agents and toxins] not captured in our … database is high,” Skvorak wrote.
A former USAMRIID scientist told ScienceInsider that in the past, inventorying of biological materials at the institute routinely turned up items that had not been listed on the database before. Those items would be added to the database without shutting down research.
—Yudhijit Bhattacharjee
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2009/02/us-army-lab-fre-1.html
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Bond market calls Fed’s bluff as global economy falls apart
Global bond markets are calling the bluff of the US Federal Reserve.
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
The yield on 10-year US Treasury bonds – the world’s benchmark cost of capital – has jumped from 2pc to 3pc since Christmas despite efforts to talk the rate down.
This level will asphyxiate the US economy if allowed to persist, as Fed chair Ben Bernanke must know. The US is already in deflation. Core prices – stripping out energy – fell at an annual rate of 2pc in the fourth quarter. Wages are following. IBM, Chrysler, General Motors, and YRC, have all begun to cut pay.
The “real” cost of capital is rising as the slump deepens. This is textbook debt deflation. It was not supposed to happen. The Bernanke doctrine assumes that the Fed can bring down the whole structure of interest costs, first by slashing the Fed Funds rate to zero, and then by making a “credible threat” to buy Treasuries outright with printed money.
Mr Bernanke has been repeating this threat since early December. But talk is cheap. As the Fed hesitates, real yields climb ever higher. Plainly, the markets do not regard Fed rhetoric as “credible” at all.
Who can blame bond vigilantes for going on strike? Nobody wants to be left holding the bag if and when the global monetary blitz succeeds in stoking inflation. Governments are borrowing frantically to fund their bail-outs and cover a collapse in tax revenue. The US Treasury alone needs to raise $2 trillion in 2009.
Where is the money to come from? China, the Pacific tigers and the commodity powers are no longer amassing foreign reserves ($7.6 trillion). Their exports have collapsed. Instead of buying a trillion dollars of extra bonds each year, they have become net sellers. In aggregate, they dumped $190bn over the last fifteen weeks.
The Fed has stepped into the breach, up to a point. It has bought $350bn of commercial paper, and begun to buy $600bn of mortgage bonds. That helps. But still it recoils from buying Treasuries, perhaps fearing that any move to “monetise” Washington’s deficit starts a slippery slope towards an Argentine fate. Or perhaps Bernanke doesn’t believe his own assurances that the Fed can extract itself easily from emergency policies when the cycle turns.
As they dither, the world is falling apart. Events in Japan have turned deeply alarming. Exports fell 35pc in December. Industrial output fell 9.6pc. The economy is contracting at an annual rate of 12pc. “Falling exports are triggering a downward spiral of production, incomes and spending. It is important to prepare for swift policy steps, including those usually regarded as unusual,” said the Bank of Japan’s Atsushi Mizuno.
The bank is already targeting equities on the Tokyo bourse. That is not enough for restive politicians. One bloc led by Senator Koutaro Tamura wants to create $330bn in scrip currency for an industrial blitz. “We are facing hyper-deflation, so we need a policy to create hyper-inflation,” he said.
This has echoes of 1932, when the US Congress took charge of monetary policy. We are moving to a stage of this crisis where democracies start to speak – especially in Europe.
The European Central Bank’s refusal to follow the lead of the US, Japan, Britain, Canada, Switzerland and Sweden in slashing rates shows how destructive Europe’s monetary union has become. German orders fells 25pc year-on-year in December. French house prices collapsed 9.9pc in the fourth quarter, the steepest since data began in 1936. “We’re dealing with truly appalling data, the likes of which have never been seen before in post-War Europe,” said Julian Callow, Europe economist at Barclays Capital.
Spain’s unemployment has jumped to 3.3m – or 14.4pc – and will hit 19pc next year, on Brussels data. The labour minister said yesterday that Spain’s economy could not “tolerate” immigrants any longer after suffering “hurricane devastation”. You can see where this is going.
Ireland lost 36,500 jobs in January – equal to a monthly loss of 2.3m in the US. As the budget deficit surges to 12pc of GDP, Dublin is cutting wages, disguised as a pension levy. It has announced “Rooseveltian measures” to rescue the foundering companies.
The ECB’s obduracy has nothing to do with economics. It fears zero rates as a vampire fears daylight, because that brings the purchase of eurozone bonds ever closer into play. Any such action would usher in an EMU “debt union” by the back door, leaving Germany’s taxpayers on the hook for Club Med liabilties. This is Europe’s taboo.
Meanwhile, Eastern Europe is imploding. Industrial output fell 27pc in Ukraine and 10pc in Russia in December. Latvia’s GDP contracted at a 29pc annual rate in the fourth quarter. Polish homeowners have had the shock from Hell. Some 60pc of mortgages are in Swiss francs. The zloty has halved against the franc since July.
Readers have berated me for a piece last week – “Glimmers of Hope” – that hinted at recovery. Let me stress, I was wearing my reporter’s hat, not expressing an opinion. My own view, sadly, is that there is no hope at all of stabilizing the world economy on current policies.
American States Declaring Soverignty – Britain under attack from 20 foreign spy agencies including France and Germany – Western Economists (morons) don’t understand that the banks had made bad loans & engaged in reckless gambling. There had been a bubble, and the bubble had broken. No amount of talking would change these realities
American States Declaring Soverignty
9+ States have now declared sovereignty, now add Washington to the list.
Arizona State Legislature for formulating a bill that declares their state sovereignty. That same bill further details their right during martial law to call back servicemen to protect the state:
“…if the President or any other federal entity attempts to institute martial law or its equivalent without an official declaration in one or more of the states without the consent of that state … individual members of the military return to their respective states and report to the Governor until a new President is elected…”
In case you didn’t hear about it on the mainstream media (which you haven’t because they want to keep us asleep), numerous states are currently declaring or have already declared sovereignty, including:
Washington
http://apps.leg.wa.gov/billinfo/summary.aspx?year=2009&bill=4009
New Hampshire
http://www.gencourt.state.nh.us/legislation/2009/HCR0006.html
Arizona
http://www.azleg.gov/FormatDocument.asp?inDoc=/legtext/49leg/1r/bills/hcr2024p.htm
Montana
http://data.opi.mt.gov/bills/2009/billhtml/HB0246.htm
Michigan
http://legislature.mi.gov/doc.aspx?2009-HCR-0004
Missouri
http://www.house.mo.gov/content.aspx?info=/bills091/bills/HR212.HTM
Oklahoma
http://axiomamuse.wordpress.com/2009/01/07/state-legislator-charles-key-wants-to-limit-federal-power
California
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/93-94/bill/sen/sb_0001-0050/sjr_44_bill_940829_chaptered
Georgia
http://www.legis.state.ga.us/legis/1995_96/leg/fulltext/sr308.htm
Possibly: Colorado, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, Montana, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Alaska, Kansas, Alabama, Nevada, Maine, Illinois.
“The Tenth Amendment was intended to confirm the understanding of the people at the time the Constitution was adopted, that powers not granted to the United States were reserved to the States or to the people. It added nothing to the instrument as originally ratified.” — United States v. Sprague, 282 U.S. 716, 733 (1931).
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Britain under attack from 20 foreign spy agencies
including France and Germany
Britain under attack from 20 foreign spy agencies including France and Germany
Spies from 20 foreign intelligence agencies, including Nato allies such as France and Germany, are attempting to steal Britain’s most sensitive secrets.
By Sean Rayment, Security Correspondent
Russia and China have been identified as having the most active spy networks operating in the UK but it is understood that some European countries are also involved in espionage attacks against Britain.
Details of the spy plots were revealed in a government security document obtained by The Sunday Telegraph which states that Britain is “high priority espionage target” for 20 foreign intelligence agencies.
Security sources have revealed that the list of foreign agencies operating within the UK includes Iran, Syria, North Korea and Serbia, as well as some members of the European Union, such as France and Germany, who have traditionally been regarded as allies.
The document, marked “restricted”, warns that foreign spies are trying to steal secrets related to the military, optics, communications, genetics and aviation industries.
The report, which was drawn up by an Army intelligence cell inside Whitehall, warns that it is too easy to “lose sight” of the threat from traditional espionage and become solely focused on attacks by al Qaeda.
The document, which has been distributed to all government departments, states: “Whilst our primary threat would seem to come from International Terrorism, it is important that we do not lose sight of another omnipresent threat. Espionage against UK interests continues to come from many quarters.”
The report, dated 19th January 2009, continues: “In the past, espionage activity was typically directed towards obtaining political and military intelligence. In today’s high-tech world, the intelligence requirements of a number of countries now include new communications technologies, IT, genetics, aviation, lasers, optics, electronics and many other fields. Intelligence services, therefore, are targeting commercial enterprises far more than in the past.
“The UK is a high priority espionage target and a number of countries are actively seeking UK information and material to advance their own, military, technological, political and economic programmes.
“It is estimated that at least 20 Foreign intelligence services are operating to some degree against UK interests. Of greatest concern are the Russians and Chinese. The number of Russian intelligence officers in London has not fallen since the Soviet times.”
A Whitehall source told The Sunday Telegraph that Russia uses its massive spy network as an “extension of state power” in an attempt to “further its own military and economic base”.
The source said: “If a country, such as Russia or Iran, can steal a piece of software which will save it seven years in research and development then it will do so without any hesitation. Russian agents will target anybody that they believe could be useful to them. Spying is hard-wired into the country’s DNA. They have been at it for centuries and they are simply not going to stop because the Cold War has ended.”
The source added that Britain’s European neighbours, including Germany and France, were also engaged in industrial and political espionage within the UK.
Many senior figures in Britain’s intelligence community are frustrated by the activities of Russian spies which they claim is detracting from the fight against al-Qaeda and international terrorism.
In a speech in November 2007, Jonathan Evans, the director general of MI5, said that foreign intelligence services were active in the UK, with the Russians at the forefront of covert operations.
He said: “Despite the Cold War ending nearly two decades ago, my service is still expending resources to defend the UK against unreconstructed attempts by Russia, China and others, to spy on us.
“A number of countries continue to devote considerable time and energy trying to steal our sensitive technology on civilian and military projects, and trying to obtain political and economic intelligence at our expense.
“They do not only use traditional methods to collect intelligence but increasingly deploy sophisticated technical attacks, using the internet to penetrate computer networks.
“It is a matter of some disappointment to me that I still have to devote significant amounts of equipment, money and staff to countering this threat.
“They are resources which I would far rather devote to countering the threat from international terrorism – a threat to the whole international community, not just the UK.”
Patrick Mercer, the chairman of the House of Commons counter-terrorist subcommittee, said the document served as a warning to Britain that the Cold War espionage threat had not gone away.
He said: “Britain is at the forefront of many cutting edge technologies and these are extremely attractive to lots of other countries, some of whom may actually be our allies.
“This serves as a timely reminder that our counter-intelligence assets must not be solely concentrated on countries with a traditional track record of espionage against us.”
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Western Economists (morons) don’t understand that the banks had made bad loans & engaged in reckless gambling. There had been a bubble, and the bubble had broken. No amount of talking would change these realities
Is the Entire Bailout Strategy Flawed?
Let’s Rethink This Before It’s Too Late
Global Research,
February 5, 2009
America’s recession is moving into its second year, with the situation only worsening.
The hope that President Obama will be able to get us out of the mess is tempered by the reality that throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at the banks has failed to restore them to health, or even to resuscitate the flow of lending.
Every day brings further evidence that the losses are greater than had been expected and more and more money will be required.
The question is at last being raised: Perhaps the entire strategy is flawed? Perhaps what is needed is a fundamental rethinking. The Paulson-Bernanke-Geithner strategy was based on the realization that maintaining the flow of credit was essential for the economy. But it was also based on a failure to grasp some of the fundamental changes in our financial sector since the Great Depression, and even in the last two decades.
For a while, there was hope that simply lowering interest rates enough, flooding the economy with money, would suffice; but three quarters of a century ago, Keynes explained why, in a downturn such as this, monetary policy is likely to be ineffective. It is like pushing on a string.
Then there was the hope that if the government stood ready to help the banks with enough money — and enough was a lot — confidence would be restored, and with the restoration of confidence, asset prices would increase and lending would be restored.
Remarkably, Bush administration Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and company simply didn’t understand that the banks had made bad loans and engaged in reckless gambling. There had been a bubble, and the bubble had broken. No amount of talking would change these realities.
It soon became clear that just saying that we were ready to spend the money would not suffice. We actually had to get it into the banks. The question was how. At first, the architects of the bailout argued (with complete and utter confidence) that the best way to do this was buying the toxic assets (those in the financial market didn’t like the pejorative term, so they used the term “troubled assets”) — the assets that no one in the private sector would touch with a 10-foot pole.
It should have been obvious that this could not be done in a quick way; it took a few weeks for this crushing reality to dawn on them. Besides, there was a fundamental problem: how to value the assets. And if we valued them correctly, it was clear that there would still be a big hole in banks’ balance sheets, impeding their ability to lend.
Then came the idea of equity injection, without strings, so that as we poured money into the banks, they poured out money, to their executives in the form of bonuses, to their shareholders in the form of dividends.
Some of what they had left over they used to buy other banks — to pursue strategic goals for which they could not have found private finance. The last thing in their mind was to restart lending.
The underlying problem is simple: Even in the heyday of finance, there was a huge gap between private rewards and social returns. The bank managers have taken home huge paychecks, even though, over the past five years, the net profits of many of the banks have (in total) been negative.
And the social returns have even been less — the financial sector is supposed to allocate capital and manage risk, and it did neither well. Our economy is paying the price for these failures — to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
But this ever-present problem has now grown worse. In effect, the American taxpayers are the major provider of finance to the banks. In some cases, the value of our equity injection, guarantees, and other forms of assistance dwarf the value of the “private” sector’s equity contribution; yet we have no voice in how the banks are run.
This helps us understand the reason why banks have not started to lend again. Put yourself in the position of a bank manager, trying to get through this mess. At this juncture, in spite of the massive government cash injections, he sees his equity dwindling. The banks — who prided themselves on being risk managers — finally, and a little too late — seem to have recognized the risk that they have taken on in the past five years.
Leverage, or borrowing, gives big returns when things are going well, but when things turn sour, it is a recipe for disaster. It was not unusual for investment banks to “leverage” themselves by borrowing amounts equal to 25 or 30 times their equity.
At “just” 25 to 1 leverage, a 4 percent fall in the price of assets wipes out a bank’s net worth — and we have seen far more precipitous falls in asset prices. Putting another $20 billion in a bank with $2 trillion of assets will be wiped out with just a 1 percent fall in asset prices. What’s the point?
It seems that some of our government officials have finally gotten around to doing some of this elementary arithmetic. So they have come up with another strategy: We’ll “insure” the banks, i.e., take the downside risk off of them.
The problem is similar to that confronting the original “cash for trash” initiative: How do we determine the right price for the insurance? And almost surely, if we charge the right price, these institutions are bankrupt. They will need massive equity injections and insurance.
There is a slight variant version of this, much like the original Paulson proposal: Buy the bad assets, but this time, not on a one by one basis, but in large bundles. Again, the problem is — how do we value the bundles of toxic waste we take off the banks? The suspicion is that the banks have a simple answer: Don’t worry about the details. Just give us a big wad of cash.
This variant adds another twist of the kind of financial alchemy that got the country into the mess. Somehow, there is a notion that by moving the assets around, putting the bad assets in an aggregator bank run by the government, things will get better.
Is the rationale that the government is better at disposing of garbage, while the private sector is better at making loans? The record of our financial system in assessing credit worthiness — evidenced not just by this bailout, but by the repeated bailouts over the past 25 years — provides little convincing evidence.
But even were we to do all this — with uncertain risks to our future national debt — there is still no assurance of a resumption of lending. For the reality is we are in a recession, and risks are high in a recession. Having been burned once, many bankers are staying away from the fire.
Besides, many of the problems that afflict the financial sector are more pervasive. General Motors and GE both got into the finance business, and both showed that banks had no monopoly on bad risk management.
Many a bank may decide that the better strategy is a conservative one: Hoard one’s cash, wait until things settle down, hope that you are among the few surviving banks and then start lending. Of course, if all the banks reason so, the recession will be longer and deeper than it otherwise would be.
What’s the alternative? Sweden (and several other countries) have shown that there is an alternative — the government takes over those banks that cannot assemble enough capital through private sources to survive without government assistance.
It is standard practice to shut down banks failing to meet basic requirements on capital, but we almost certainly have been too gentle in enforcing these requirements. (There has been too little transparency in this and every other aspect of government intervention in the financial system.)
To be sure, shareholders and bondholders will lose out, but their gains under the current regime come at the expense of taxpayers. In the good years, they were rewarded for their risk taking. Ownership cannot be a one-sided bet.
Of course, most of the employees will remain, and even much of the management. What then is the difference? The difference is that now, the incentives of the banks can be aligned better with those of the country. And it is in the national interest that prudent lending be restarted.
There are several other marked advantages. One of the problems today is that the banks potentially owe large amounts to each other (through complicated derivatives). With government owning many of the banks, sorting through those obligations (“netting them out,” in the jargon) will be far easier.
Inevitably, American taxpayers are going to pick up much of the tab for the banks’ failures. The question facing us is, to what extent do we participate in the upside return?
Eventually, America’s economy will recover. Eventually, our financial sector will be functioning — and profitable — once again, though hopefully, it will focus its attention more on doing what it is supposed to do. When things turn around, we can once again privatize the now-failed banks, and the returns we get can help write down the massive increase in the national debt that has been brought upon us by our financial markets.
We are moving in unchartered waters. No one can be sure what will work. But long-standing economic principles can help guide us. Incentives matter. The long-run fiscal position of the U.S. matters. And it is important to restart prudent lending as fast as possible.
Most of the ways currently being discussed for squaring this circle fail to do so. There is an alternative. We should begin to consider it.
AlterNet is making this material available in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107: This article is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate, is a professor of economics at Columbia University.
Global Research Articles by Joseph Stiglitz
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12180
Ecuador expels US embassy official – The European Revolution Begins – USA/Europe: “False Flag” Terrorist attack in preparation – “Crasy Hypocrit criminal NATO” urges Russia to abandon 19th century mindset
Ecuador expels US embassy official
Correa, who enjoys a 70 per cent popularity rating, will run for a second term as president in April polls.
The president of Ecuador has ordered a US embassy official to leave after accusing him of meddling in local police projects, a move likely to fray ties with Washington.
President Rafael Correa said during his weekly media address on Saturday: “Foreign minister, give this gentleman 48 hours to pack up his suitcases and get out of the country”.
The popular leftist president has generally kept good relations with the United States since he took office in 2007, but his socialist allies in Bolivia and Venezuela have often clashed with Washington over US policies in Latin America.
Correa said Armando Astorga, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement attache, had abruptly ended a financing deal with local police after authorities refused to abide by his terms in selecting officers in charge of the aid projects.
Correa said Astorga suspended $340,000 in annual aid to Ecuador’s anti-contraband police and demanded in a January 8 letter that the police return all vehicles, furniture, cameras and phones donated by Washington.
“Mr Astorga keep your dirty money. We don’t need it. We have dignity in this country,” he said.
“Ecuador doesn’t need charity from anyone.”
Fred Lash, a US State Department spokesman, said that Washington was aware of the announcement and was checking into it.
Anti-US sentiment
Correa also said that he would allow US coast guard airplanes to land on Ecuadorean soil, a request made earlier by Heather Hodges, the US ambassador, only “on one condition: that we be allowed to vet the pilots of those planes, so that they don’t sneak criminals into the country.”
There has been tension with Washington since Correa vowed not to renew a lease ending this year on a coastal air base used by US troops for counter-narcotics missions.
Correa, who enjoys a 70 per cent popularity rating, is running for a second four-year term as president in April elections.
Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president and a standard-bearer for anti-US sentiment, last year expelled the US ambassador to Caracas and Evo Morales, the Bolivian president, kicked out the US envoy in September after accusing him of fanning civil unrest.
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The European Revolution Begins
A flurry of protest has broken out as the depth of the crisis becomes clear for all to see. And it can only get worse as the temple of neo-liberalism, the whole structure of the empire of fraud, begins to crumble returning to the shifting sands on which it was constructed.
This is no transient economic crisis, rather it is the collapse of an illusory world of prosperity, a delusional bubble whose expansion is inversely proportional to real wealth creation.
The UK , amongst the European powers, is the one which most typifies this parasitic nirvana, a nation which only a short while ago seriously thought it could count its wealth on the basis of the price of its real estate, the exploits of its city financiers and, incredibly, the strength of Sterling.
But it is more widely, a ”Western” phenomena, a malaise of the peoples of Europe who have not yet, for all their culture, been able to cast off that assumption of privilege and primacy, consistent with our status as the world’s great imperialists, and have been lured by the promise of eternal well-being, of living life as a dream, as of by right.
This is a rude awakening, but a timely one, for we we’re sleepwalking to disaster. Suddenly, a mountain of difficulties looms before us, but they are still susceptible of solution. Politics, viewed of late as so utterly passe, such an unpardonable diversion from “getting a life’, such an insult to those who had got one and saw ahead a smooth path to fulfillment and pleasure untroubled by reality, is back with a vengeance.
It has returned in its most primal form: movement on the streets. It’s basis in terms of programme or ideology is seemingly nebulous.
It includes violent protest in states, like Lithuania, which until recently were still resting on the laurels of victory in the Cold War, as well as spontaneous outbreaks in the traditionally more volatile Mediteranean states like Greece. France, of course, has not disappointed with a traditional mass mobilization of public sector workers and youth.
Britain has seen the return of the time-honoured unofficial strike, with, almost inevitably, something of a wiff of anti-European chauvinism thrown in. One thing is clear: these protests are born of fear, desperation and necessity; equally, now they have begun they will not end any time soon. A revolutionary process, rather than a single revolutionary event, has been set in motion. It will not come to a halt until epochal issues have been resolved.
The characterisation of these events as revolutionary may seem over-dramatic to some, but if we look to what has happened in Iceland we can see that it is justified.
If not much has appeared on our media about those events there is good reason: the people of Iceland have taken to the streets and forced the ruling party from power and the calling of elections. This is not an example the elite wish to see emulated elsewhere.
Around five thousand people decided to occupy the square outside the Icelandic parliament on a permanent basis until those demands were met thus settling, once and for all, the debate, widespread in Britain during the campaign against the Iraq War, about whether there was any point in protesting in the streets: three times a year, probably not, but every day until you succeed, definitely.
I always found this argument strange, anyway, like newly weds deciding to sleep in separate beds because the bride didn’t become pregnant- sometimes you just have to keep on trying. But a body of brave Icelanders kept on trying and they have provided a lesson to us all, one which is certainly worth emulating far and wide. They have successfully given birth to an astonishing movement which is making history.
But where is this movement taking us? It is leading us to the refoundation of Europe. Its economic, constitutional , legal basis and its role in the world must be transformed or redefined in a constructive and legal revolutionary process. Let us look to Iceland as the paradigm of this process. What is it doing?
Firstly, it is reaffirming its sovereignty, through a democratic process: it is making its institutions truly its own and modifying them where necessary. The Icelanders are representing themselves as a people, not as some agglomeration of economic atoms, as consumers in the globalist’s fantasy world.
Those moving songs, these voices of the people, entoned in parliament square tell of a deep cultural, dare I say patriotic, element. They are not about to become a Dubai of the north and they will resist as they must resist tutelage to the IMF, to global finance. They will resist colonisation and slavery.
Secondly, it is re-examining the economic basis of the lives of its people. The link between the things people need and their origins in productive and creative labour has been lost. In rediscovering this link, we begin a return to a real economy rather than a fictional one. It is the real economy that must be saved and built on, not the fictional, paper one.
Thirdly, the people have become aware of the existence of a treacherous and criminal element in the elite who have hijacked the country and brought it to its knees. Quite naturally and quite properly they wish to bring these people to account: they wish to reaffirm the rule of law.
Forthly, they must define where Iceland stands viv-avis the rest of the world: they must locate themselves within a world itself in transformation. Do they wish to continue within NATO, or break away from an alliance which is itself a permanent threat, a clear and present danger, to world peace? Or will they become a fully-fledged European power, and, crucially, one which plays a key role in redefining Europe itself as an independent force for peace and global cooperation.
These, I believe, are the fundamental issues facing Iceland and we see them in Iceland under a peculiarly intense focus. Iceland’s problems are our problems, the problems of the Icelandic revolution are also those of the European revolution. Great days lie ahead, days which will call on all our reserves of courage and endurance, days which will not end until we have layed the foundations of a new epoch of world peace and prosperity.
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USA/Europe: “False Flag” Terrorist attack in preparation
After Bush, it’s Devil Cheney who warns of high probability” of a nuclear or biological terrorist attack…made by his friends Zio-West secrets services and then blame muslims again…
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Cheney Warns of New Terrorist Attacks
Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned Tuesday that there is a “high probability” of a nuclear or biological terrorist attack in the coming years, according to a report published Wednesday on Politico.com.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney predicts a “high probability” of a nuclear or biological terrorist attack in the coming years and said the Obama administration is ill-equipped to prevent it.
In a candid interview published Wednesday on Politico.com, Cheney said he fears President Obama will put the county at risk
“When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry,” he told the Web site.
The outlook for terrorism couldn’t be more grim to Cheney, Politico.com Editor-in-Chief John Harris described to FOX News on Wednesday.
Cheney — who fervently supports the operations at Guantanamo Bay prison and the use of aggressive interrogation techniques — told Politico that the detention center is “a necessary facility” running a “first class program.”
Obama signed his first executive order on Jan. 22, ordering the prison in Guanatamo Bay prison be closed. The president has also strongly opposed the use of torture as an interrogation method — a position that has garnered widespread support from Americans, according to a Gallup poll released Tuesday that showed 50 percent of Americans also disagree with Obama’s order.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/02/04/report-cheney-warns-new-terrorist-attacks/
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“Crazy Hypocrite criminal NATO”
urges Russia to abandon 19th century mindset
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Or to be clear “Let us attack you” !!
What else ?
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By David Brunnstrom and Noah Barkin
Criminal NATO said on Saturday it was willing to include Russia in talks about a missile defence shield but does not consider serious defence cooperation possible unless Moscow abandons old thinking.
NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer (R) chats with former Russian foreign minister Igor Ivanov before the start of the 45th Conference on Security Policy in Munich February 6, 2009. (REUTERS/Michaela Rehle)
On Friday, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov sent conciliatory messages to new U.S. President Barack Obama, saying Moscow would not start new missile deployments if Washington reviewed plans for a missile defence system in central Europe.
Speaking at the same security conference in Munich, NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer backed cooperation with Russia on the missile shield, which Washington says is aimed at protecting against attack from “rogue” states like Iran.
“I think real transatlantic cooperation on missile defence including Russia is very doable and would, I think, make those who might threaten Europe with missiles think twice,” he said.
He said he also supported the idea of discussions Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has proposed on a broader Euro-Atlantic security architecture, which many NATO allies have expressed a willingness to take part in.
However he added: “I cannot see how we can have such a serious discussion of such a new architecture, in which President Medvedev himself says territorial integrity is a primary element when Russia is building bases inside Georgia, a country that doesn’t want those bases.
“That cannot be ignored and it cannot be the foundation of a new European security architecture,” he said.
“GREAT GAME”
De Hoop Scheffer was also concerned that Kyrgyzstan had announced in Moscow this week plans to close a U.S. air base used to supply forces in Afghanistan, saying this was at least “incongruous” with Russian support in other ways for the international operation there.
“We … need to move beyond a 19th century ‘Great Game’ idea of sphere of influence,” he said.
Czech Deputy Prime Minister Alexandr Vondra, whose country would host part of the U.S. shield, also said the United States and central European countries should cooperate with Russia on the plans but Moscow could not have a veto.
“It is important to develop the future missile defence system,” he said, saying it would protect Western countries from Middle East threats. “Russia should be invited to this cooperation but must not have a veto over it.”
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said his country still agreed to hosting another part of the shield.
“We are willing to participate in difficult projects because we believe this will underscore our ability to defend ourselves, but also the preventative capabilities of the transatlantic community,” he told the conference.
Former U.S. President George W. Bush sealed deals last year to deploy 10 interceptor missiles in Poland and a radar in the Czech Republic. Moscow has condemned the plan and threatened to put its own missiles near the Polish border in response.
Ivanov added that Moscow was eager to hold talks on the shield with the Obama administration and was open to a joint assessment of threats with the United States.
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden is due to speak later on Saturday in Munich and is expected to refer to the missile shield plan.
An Islamic View of Gog and Magog in the Modern Age – Ten Major Signs of the Last Day – Has One Just Occurred
An Islamic View of Gog and Magog in the Modern Age
Written by Imran Nazar Hosein
I began my study of Gog and Magog more than fifteen years ago in the early 90’s while resident in New York. My subsequent public lectures on the subject never failed to provoke keen interest from my Muslim audiences in several parts of the world. The evidence and arguments presented in the chapter on Gog and Magog in my book, ‘Jerusalem in the Qur’an’, succeeded in convincing many who read the book that we now live in a world dominated by Gog and Magog. They were easily convinced that the ‘town’ mentioned in the Qur’ān in Sūrah al-Anbiyāh’ (21:95-6) was Jerusalem and hence, that Gog and Magog (and Dajjāl) explained the ominously unfolding ‘war on Islam’ with slaughter and destruction of Muslims in so many parts of the world. As a consequence, such readers also understood Israel’s mysterious imperial agenda, and many have been making efforts to extricate themselves and their families from the embrace of Gog and Magog – an embrace that will take 999 out of every 1000 of mankind into the hellfire.
Despite my best efforts, however, I failed miserably, again and again, to convince my learned peers, the scholars of Islam, that Gog and Magog were even released into the world. I earnestly hope and pray that this book might make a difference Insha’ Allah.
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Extracts of books
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Gog and Magog: a destructive nation capable of becoming the sole superpower
Dhul Qarnain’s kingdom was an unchallenged superpower with unlimited technology (innaa makkanna lahoo fil ardi wa aataynahu min kulli shay’in sababaa, Qur’ān, al-Kahf 18:84). He conquered every nation of the known world, from the far west to the far east, punished the unjust and rewarded the righteous (Qur’ān, al-Kahf 18:85-91). When he reached a place near the middle of the Two Barrier-Mountains (assaddain, Qur’ān, al-Kahf
18:93), he received a peculiar cry for help from a people who lived there.
“They said, ‘O Dhul Qarnain, [the nation of] Gog and Magog are certainly perpetrators of destruction on Earth [or perpetrators of global destruction, mufsidoona fil ard]. Shall we raise a tax for you in return for converting (taj’ala) what is between us and them [the Two Barrier-Mountains, assaddain, which have a pass between them and thus are not a complete
barrier] into a [complete] barrier [saddan, a single barrier without a pass]?’ ” (Qur’ān, al-Kahf, 18:94)
One would think that Dhul Qarnain would conquer the nation of Gog and Magog and punish them as he did with other unjust peoples. Instead, he agreed to convert the mountains into a barrier (Qur’ān, al-Kahf 18:95). This can only mean that he knew that it was Allah’s will that the nation of Gog and Magog could not be vanquished by man, not even by a superpower like his that possessed advanced technology. This means that Gog and Magog
are capable of becoming the sole superpower on earth. In Chapter Four, Shaykh Hosein includes these properties of Gog and Magog in his depiction of their profile.
Al-Radm: the barrier of Gog and Magog consists of two mountains and a crack between them that was patched by Dhul Qarnain
Gog and Magog traveled through the only existing pass between two mountains which are very high and barrier-like (assaddain, Qur’ān, al-Kahf 18:93) and attacked their neighbors on the other side of the mountains.
The victimized people asked Dhul Qarnain to convert (taj’ala) what is between them and Gog and Magog (baynana wa baynahum, i.e., a mountain range with a crack for a pass) into a
perfect barrier (saddan, Qur’ān, al-Kahf 18:94). He replied: “aj’al baynakum wa baynahum radman,” i.e., “I shall patch (aj’al . . . radman) what is between you and them (Qur’ān, al-Kahf 18:95).
Dhul Qarnain blocked the pass outlet with heated iron ore upon which he poured molten copper. The barrier of Gog and Magog consists of two mountains and a crack between them that was patched by Dhul Qarnain (al-Radm).
If someone wears a patched shoe, we say he wears radman (something patched). Because of the phrase “aj’al baynakum wabaynahum radman” (I shall convert what is between you and them into radman), it would be wrong to assume that the term radman refers to the patch alone. Grammatical imprecision has led this researcher and others to make this mistake. The above clarification allows for better ta’weel.
In Chapter Five, Shaykh Hosein identifies the geographical location of al-Radm based on ta’weel of Qur’ān, al-Kahf 18:93-97. The Two Barrier-Mountains are the eastern and western sections of the Caucasus mountain range, separated by a narrow pass called the Daryal Gorge. The Caucasus mountain range stretches from the Black Sea in the west to the Caspian Sea in the east.
A large gap in the barrier was created before Islam—a hilly coastal passage was exposed by the receding Caspian Sea
Allah declared that Gog and Magog initially could not climb over the patched barrier nor were they able to penetrate it (famastaa’oo an yazharoohu wa mastataa’oo lahoo naqba, Qur’ān, al-Kahf 18:97).
Dhul Qarnain knew that the barrier only offered temporary protection. He announced, on authority from Allah, “This [al-Radm, the patched mountain barrier] is mercy from my
Lord-God, but when the Promise of my Lord-God comes, then He shall turn it into dakkaa’ [dakkaa' = 'hilly area' or 'demolished']” (qaala haadha rahmatun min rabbee, fa idha jaa’a wa’du rabbee ja’alahoo dakkaa’, Qur’ān, al-Kahf 18:98).
Allah promised each of His prophets that a last prophet would come with a great final law (the Qur’ān). In some scriptures (e.g., the Torah), this is referred to as “The Promise.” The Promise that Dhul Qarnain refers to is Islam. A few decades before the birth of the Prophet of Islam sallalahu ‘alaihi wasallam, around 550 A.D., the Caspian Sea receded to expose a hilly coastal passage on the east end of the Caucasus Mountains. Gog and Magog used this
passage to invade Persia before Islam. Umar radiallahu ‘anhu launched military campaigns against Gog and Magog through this passage.
Many ahadeeth confirmed that “The Promise” was Islam by warning that the Arabs were targets (wailun lil ‘arab) because a gap in the Gog and Magog radm (patched barrier) was opened. What frightened the Prophet sallalahu ‘alaihi wasallam was the width of this gap: 90 units, possibly 90 farsakh (1 farsakh = 3.5 miles). This is wide enough to allow large waves of Gog and Magog to devastate the Arabs. The prophecy was fulfilled: “And
on that day [when the barrier is opened], we shall let them merge into each other like waves (wa taraknaa ba’dahum yawma idhin yamooju fee ba’d, Qur’ān, al-Kahf 18:99).
Moreover, Gog and Magog are described as “coming out of every hill” (min kulli hadabin yansiloon, Qur’ān, al-Anbiyaa’ 21:96). The use of the term hill (hadabin) in this context strongly supports the choice of the meaning “hilly area” for dakkaa’. The wide passage by the sea made the patch itself insignificant. The patch came down later and the narrow Daryal Gorge was opened.
Based on Hadith terminology, early Muslims referred to Gog and Magog as al-Turk (the Turks), named after their ancestor Turk. This is not to be confused with modern day Turks.
The age of Gog and Magog When Allah declares, “and on that day, we shall let them
merge into each other like waves (wa taraknaa ba’dahum yawma idhin yamooju fee ba’d, Qur’ān, al-Kahf 18:99), what does He mean by “that day”? One “day” (yawm) of Allah’s time—a divine day—is not 24 hours, but a period lasting a thousand lunar years or more. There are divine days of different length, but in general, a divine day is 1,000 lunar years long, a millenium (wa inna yawman ‘inda rabbika ka alfi sanatin mimmaa ta’uddoon, Qur’ān, al-Hajj 22:47).
In Chapter Three, Shaykh Hosein discusses different divine days. The Qur’ān discusses the lengths of only three special divine days: 1. A divine day that is 50,000 lunar years long in which all the angels ascend to Allah (Qur’ān, al-Ma’aarij 70:4). Surah al-Ma’aarij describes what happens in this long period. Among other things, people are resurrected and the disbelievers are sent to the hellfire. Some mufassiroon believe that it is Yawm al-
Qiyamah, the Day of Resurrection.
2. A divine management cycle that consists of two divine days: a management millennium in which Allah uses angels to manage the sending and execution of commands from the sky down to the earth, followed by an accounting millennium in which
these angels ascend to Allah to report about the deployed commands so that people are judged accordingly (yudabbiru al-amra minas samaa’i ilal ardi thumma ya’ruju ilayhi fee yawmin kaana miqdaruhu alfa sanatin mimmaa ta’uddoon, Qur’ān, as-Sajdah 32:5).
As we have seen above, the coming of Islam and the release of Gog and Magog (around 550 A.D.) both happened at the dawn of a single divine day. It may be safe to assume that it is in fact a management millennium.
If so, this millennium ended five centuries ago and we are now in the middle of the accounting millennium that follows every management millennium. The management millennium started about 1,460 solar years or 1,505 lunar years ago.
Only Allah knows when The Hour will come. Maybe during the accounting millennium, maybe later.
Gog and Magog are now the sole superpower, but they will be destroyed
After over 1,500 years of merging like waves with Gog and Magog, most of humanity has either adopted their lifestyle or is going along with it. Nowadays, it is very difficult to tell who is an original member of Gog and Magog and who simply has joined them. This is the basis of the hadith that 999 out of every 1,000 people in Hell shall be from Gog and Magog. Gog and Magog are already coming out of every hill, every position of power (min kulli hadabin yansiloon, Qur’ān, al-Anbiyaa’ 21:96). They are now the sole superpower on earth. This superpower is nothing but an unjust civilization (qaryatin zaalimatin), and like every other unjust civilization, it will be destroyed before the arrival of the Hour (al-Hajj 22:45-48).
Gog and Magog have realized the meaning (formula) of their Arabic name, Ya’jooj wa Ma’jooj. These two terms are active and passive word forms derived from the root “hamza jeem jeem” (the sounds “a j j”). The only other contexts containing this root in the Qur’ān, use the the word ujaaj which describes the taste of salty water as burning. Gog and Magog thus are those who burn others (Ya’jooj) and are themselves burned (Ma’jooj).
Why would Allah condemn Gog and Magog—along with most of humanity who have adopted their lifestyle—to burning in Hell? How can one recognize and avoid the lifestyle of Gog and Magog? Insha’ Allah, the following sections will elicit answers from muhkam verses.
What is fasaad?
Gog and Magog are described as mufsidoon fil ard (Qur’ān,al-Kahf, 18:94). I have loosely translated this phrase as “perpetrators of destruction on Earth.” Let us take a closer look.
Mufsidoon is the plural of an actor form, mufsid. This means “people who collectively do something.” In this case, it refers to a group whose collective profession or lifestyle is to cause a certain type of harm called fasaad. Both terms, fasaad and mufsidoon, are derived from the word root “fa seen dal” (the sounds “f s d”). So, what kind of harm is fasaad?
Allah uses terms derived from this root (yufsidoona, yufsidu, yufsida, tufsidoo, al-mufsideen, and so on) in many verses of the Qur’ān in conjunction with certain types of behavior. Below are some verse examples that realize the formula of fasaad. Please
note that the plural forms of verbs indicate collective or social activity. Also, the article al (the) and certain grammatical structures indicate comprehensiveness or totality. This is similar to “all the” or “the whole.”
1. Religious fasaad. Blatant abandonment of the whole Divine Covenant by a group that has solemnly committed itself to this covenant (yanqudoona ‘ahda Allaahi min ba’di meethaaqihi . . . wa yufsidoona fil ard, Qur’ān, al-Baqarah, 2:27). When an avowedly
strict or orthodox religious sect systematically breaks the laws of their own scripture, this is called fasaad. This behavior destroys the life of the Hereafter for the group.
2. Family ties fasaad. Systematic tearing up of all family ties (yaqta’oona ma amara Allahu bihee an yoosala wa yufsidoona fil ard, Qur’ān, al-Baqarah, 2:27). This means separating wives from husbands, children from parents, brothers from each other, and so on.
3. Genocidal fasaad. Mass murder (yufsidu feeha wa yasfikud-dimaa’, literally, “sheds all the bloods,” Qur’ān, al-Baqarah, 2:30).
4. Agricultural fasaad. Systematic destruction or spoiling of all crops (li yufsida feeha wa yuhlika al-harth, Qur’ān, al-Baqarah, 2:205). This includes, for example, the ruining of whole agricultural systems or the genetic modification and insertion of poisons into seeds.
5. Fasaad to offspring (nasl). Systematic destruction of all human reproduction or mass murder of all children (li yufsida feeha . . . wa yuhlika . . . an-nasl, Qur’ān, al-Baqarah, 2:205).
6. Economic fasaad. A trade system that enables the powerful to underpay people or deny them their dues (fa awful kayla wal meezaana wa la tabkhasoo an-naasa ashya’ahum wa la tufsidoo fil ardi ba’da islaahiha, Qur’ān, al-A’raaf, 7:85).
7. Sodomy fasaad. Socially acceptable practice of homosexuality (ta’toona ar-rijaala . . . al-mufsideen, Qur’ān, al-’Ankaboot, 29:29-30). This culminates in “gay marriage” and undermines real marriage. Fasaad is then the deliberate and systematic destruction of
human life by mass murder or by thorough destruction of key elements of life, including the life of the hereafter. Gog and Magog are called mufsidoon, but no type of fasaad is specified. They are thus a group whose collective profession or lifestyle is the creation
and practice of all kinds of fasaad. They verily earn the wrath of Allah and deserve to burn in Hell. They are the kind of people who are referred to as almaghdoobi ‘alayhim (the ones who earned Allah’s wrath) in al-Fatiha.
In Chapter One, Shaykh Hosein identifies many types of fasaad that can be observed on a global scale. In Chapter Seven, he points to the genocidal fasaad that has been increasing in recent centuries, certainly the work of Gog and Magog. But how did they bring humanity to adopt such horrible collective and individual practices?
Profiles of Gog and Magog and the fasaad groups they control
At the beginning of surah al-Baqarah of the Qur’ān, Allah depicts a group of people who collectively practice fasaad. He describes their false mission statement, their strange beliefs, their mode of operation (modus operandi), their organizational structure,
and He even names their secret masterminds. As it turns out, these verses actually describe Gog and Magog and other fasaad groups that work for them.
1. False religious front. The group deceptively pretends to believe in Allah and the Last Day (wa minan naasi man yaqoolu aamanna billahi wa bilyawmil aakhiri wamahum bi mu’mineen, yukhaadi’oona Allaha walladheena aamanu . . . Qur’ān, al-Baqarah, 2:8-9,
14).
2. Uncommon articles of faith. The group is too proud to share the straightforward faith of ordinary people whom they call “stupid” (wa idhaa qeela lahum aaminoo kamaa aamanan naasu qaaloo anu’minu kamaa aamanas sufahaa’, Qur’ān, al-Baqarah, 2:13).
3. Mentally twisted. The members of the group have mental and spiritual diseases (sick hearts) which Allah causes to become worse (fee quloobihim maradun fazaadahumu Allahu maradaa, Qur’ān, al- Baqarah, 2:10). This may include a warped logic, bizarre rituals and sexual perversions.
4. Positive mission statement. The group falsely claims to have a positive, constructive mission in society (wa idhaa qeela lahum la tufsidoo fil ardi qaaloo innamaa
nahnu muslihoon . . . Qur’ān, al-Baqarah, 2:11-12).
5. Secret meetings, conspiracies. Leading members of the group regularly hold secret meetings with the top leaders to renew allegiance and discuss activities (wa idha khalaw ilaa shayaateenihim qaaloo innaa ma’akaum . . . Qur’ān, al-Baqarah, 2:14, see also 2:76
and Aal ‘Imraan 3:119-120).
6. Top leaders are “satans.” Leading members report to top leaders whom Allah identifies as satans (wa idha khalaw ilaa shayaateenihim . . . Qur’ān, al-Baqarah, 2:14). This is the first mention of the term “satan” in the Qur’ān. It happens to be in the plural form. In the
next two sections, I will discuss who these satans are and how they recruit, motivate and lead the fasaad groups that work for Gog and Magog.
In Chapter One, Shaykh Hosein points to centralized global monetary and financial fasaad that could only have been accomplished by the organization described above, Gog and
Magog. In Chapter Four, Shaykh Hosein discusses the profile of Gog and Magog and identifies features similar to those mentioned above.
Satans: charismatic leaders with sweet and deceptive speech
In addition to Satan (Iblis, father of the jinn), the great deceiver (al-gharoor), Allah has designated human and jinn satans as masterminds of opposition to prophets (wa laqad ja’alnaa likulli nabiyyin ‘aduw-wan shayateena al-insi wal-jinn, Qur’ān, al-An’aam 6:112).
These satans inspire (yoohi, tell secretly or indirectly) each other with golden language (zukhrufal qawli) that is used as a tool of deception (ghuroora). The hearts and minds
(quloob) of those who do not believe in the Hereafter (al-aakirah) would listen to such language, accept it, and consequently commit whatever sins they would commit (Qur’ān, al-An’aam 6:113).
You can download the book Here : http://imranhosein.org/media/books/ivgmmw.pdf
via
http://wakeupproject.com check out the video section (the arrival) :
for an interesting view on islam and the end of the world, New World Order…
A must see
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Ten Major Signs of the Last Day – Has One Just Occurred
Written by Imran N. Hosein
LAST DAY MEANS LAST AGE
The term ‘Last Day’ in reality stands for the ‘Last Age’, or the age which would culminate in the end of history—when the true Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary (not son of God), would return to rule the world from Jerusalem with justice and ‘eternal’ rule. It would be ‘eternal’ in the sense that history would end with that event. Life on earth beyond that event, and after Jesus dies a human death and is buried next to Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon them both) in Madinah, would not qualify as history. This would be so since the modern secular rope would have reached its predictable end in total godlessness, and with such a consequent collapse of morals, and of moral consciousness, that people would forget their human status and “would engage in sexual intercourse in public like donkeys”. Already it is quite clear (particularly at the time of Trinidad’s Carnival) that we are quite close to the fulfillment of that ominous prophecy made by Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).
So much so then, for the spurious claims of the one-eyed Judeo-Christian western civilization and its ‘colored house slaves’ around the world. They claim that mankind is witnessing unprecedented progress, that the present is the best of all ages, that the world keeps on growing better and better, and that modern western civilization has rendered all previous civilizations, including Islam, moribund and obsolete!
So much so, then, for the local one-eyed ‘house slave’ here in my native island of Trinidad who insists that Muslims must remain a part of ‘mainstream society’ -even when that mainstream is heading for the hell-fire.
When a ship is sinking and you cannot prevent it from sinking, you have to get off that ship, and urge others as well to do so. The ship of the world is now sinking! The evidence is all around us as plainly visible as daylight! But those who are blind cannot see that the ship is sinking. They use their checkbooks, or the barrels of their guns, to impose themselves around the world as leaders. The blind then lead the blind until all are lost and will be drowned like the people of Noah (peace be upon him).
Prophet Muhammad prophesied many more signs of the Last Day other than public ‘donkey sex’. Most of these are known as the ‘minor’ signs. Let us describe some of them (randomly selected) before we turn to the ten ‘major’ signs in which we venture to include the major underwater earthquake and resultant Tsunami in South East Asia that occurred in late December 2004.
MINOR SIGNS
Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him) prophesied of the Last Age that:
• “People would follow a way of life other than mine, and give guidance other than mine”…“I fear for my people only the leaders who lead men astray”…“Before the Last Hour there will be great liars, so beware of them”…“When the most wicked member of a tribe becomes its ruler, and the most worthless member of a community becomes its leader, and a man is respected through fear of the evil he may do, and leadership is given to people who are unworthy of it, expect the Last Hour”. All of these warnings have already been dramatically and ominously fulfilled. Around the world today, with but few exceptions, and even here in my native Caribbean island of Trinidad, people, including Muslims, now have the worst leaders. This ominous sign of the Last Day has come to pass, yet there are so many who do not, or cannot see, and they blindly rush as dumb cattle to endorse or to follow such leaders for personal gain, or fear, or due to sheer ignorance; • “Women would arrange their hair to look like the hump of a camel”, and this sign has already occurred, we see it everyday;
• “Women would dress like men”, and we already see them today with trousers, jacket and, perhaps, a tie; and “women would be dressed and yet be naked”, and this prophecy, also, is now fulfilled. When women parade in public “dressed, yet naked”, as they do today, and when Muslims cannot prevent such, they should then seek to flee from such mainstream society rather than to remain a part of it until the women are fully naked and “donkey-like” sexual intercourse is on public display. If they foolishly choose to remain a part of such corrupt and decadent society then they or their children would eventually be ruined by such a society.
• “Men would dress like women”, and already this sign also has come to pass. Almost no one can tell that ‘she’, the so-called ‘crossdresser’, is really a man;
• Homosexuality (and lesbianism) would become commonplace, and that is now happening before our very eyes. Social acceptance and legal protection for this abominable sexual perversion is gaining ground. Indeed those who hold fast to the divine prohibition of such sexual perversion are now demonized as a people who suffer from a disease called ‘homophobia’;
• Children born outside of marriage would become commonplace, in fact marriage itself now seems destined to become obsolete;
• Fornication and adultery would become commonplace, that, also, appears to have already been fulfilled in a modern world in which virginity and marital fidelity are becoming old-fashioned;
• Disproportion in balance of men and women to such an extent that “one man would have to maintain (not marry) fifty women”, that is yet to occur but could be linked to the impact on male sperm production of such things as environmental pollution and genetically modified food;
• Universal consumption of alcoholic beverages, this “mother of all evils” has already become a horrendous plague in which no one is safe from the drunk driver; the unborn baby drinks when his mother drinks and suffers unimaginably for such; people, including Prime Ministers, drink and become drunk, and then behave in public like asses;
• “Religious knowledge would disappear”, since the rightly-guided scholars of Islam are demonized, marginalized, “banned”, or declared to be “great security risks”. Only those scholars who can skillfully skip and dance to the tunes of those who control power are allowed the unfettered freedom to preach a sanitized cosmetic version of Islam acceptable to the godless rulers of the world. Institutions of Islamic learning are forced to submit to the control of those waging war on Islam. If they do not submit, they are shut down. Foreign students are prohibited from studying Islam in certain so-called Islamic Republics;
• “Time would move swiftly—a year passing like a month—a month like a week—a week like a day” etc., and already the perception of swiftly moving time is a universal experience;
• Such prevalence of random killing, murder and violence that “a killer would not know why he is killing and the one who is killed would not know why he is being killed”, and “every age is followed by one which would be worse”—already around the world senseless random killing has arrived and is constantly escalating;
• “Nothing would remain of Islam but the name, and nothing would remain of the Qur’an but the traces (of its writing) (i.e., the Qur’an would not be studied, no one would follow its guidance, it would be recited mechanically etc.); the Masajid (mosques) would be grand structures but would be devoid of guidance; and the Ulama (religious scholars of Islam who represent such people) would be the worst people beneath the sky. From them would emerge Fitnah (trials) and they would be the centers of Fitnah (since they betray Islam)” — there are many distinguished scholars of Islam who declare that this prophesy, also, has today found fulfillment. The evidence of such is overwhelming. The Islamic Khilafah (Caliphate) has been long destroyed, Zakat is no longer collected and distributed by the state, money itself is now corrupted, the universal Shirk of the modern state has corrupted all of mankind, Riba is universally prevalent, the Hajj would probably soon be abandoned;
• Universal consumption of Riba (i.e, money lent on interest, and transactions which ‘rip off’ people through deception in business, etc.) Around the world today Riba in modern banking and insurance, as well as in the monetary system, has already taken total control over the market and over economic life. There are some minor signs which have been couched inenigmatic language such as,
• “A slave woman would give birth to her mistress”, made possible through a combination of Riba and the modern feminist revolution, and; • “Naked barefooted shepherds would vie with one another in the construction of high-rise buildings”. This is already being fulfilled when wealth is wasted in grandiose and expensive public relations construction projects commissioned by people who hanker for visible symbols of status in a modern world which recognizes the rich as a ‘somebody’ and the poor as a ‘nobody’ (see story of the rich man and the poor man in Surah al-Kahf of the Qur’an).
And then there are minor signs which have not as yet occurred such as:
• “The Last Hour would not come until there issues from the land of the Hejaz (which is in Saudi Arabia) a fire which will illuminate the backs of the camels in Busra”. But for the exchange of Basra for Hejaz, this prophecy perhaps, anticipates a nuclear attack in or around Iran which would formally launch Israel into the club of nuclear powers. So many of these minor Signs of the Last Day, and so many more not here mentioned, have already occurred, that we can now turn to the major Signs with a clear recognition that we are already living in that Last Age.
MAJOR SIGNS
Hudhayfah ibn Usayd Ghifari, the companion of the Prophet, said,
“Allah’s Messenger came to us all of a sudden as we were (busy in a discussion). He asked: What are you discussing? (The Companions) replied: We are discussing (the subject of) the Last Hour. Thereupon he said: It will not come until you see ten signs. And (in this connection) he made a mention of the ‘smoke’, ‘Dajjal’, the ‘beast’, the ‘rising of the sun from the west’, the ‘descent of Jesus son of Mary’, ‘Gog and Magog’, ‘sinkings of the earth in three places, one in the east, one in the west and one in Arabia’ at the end of which ‘fire would burn forth from Yemen, and would drive people to the place of their assembly’ (i.e., the place where mankind will be assembled for judgment).”
(Sahih Muslim)
Here, then, are the ten major Signs of the Last Day as prophesied by Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him):
• Dajjal — the false Messiah or Anti-Christ,
• Gog and Magog,
• Smoke,
• The beast of the earth or land (most likely the holy land),
• The sun would rise from the west,
• Three sinkings of the earth
• one in the east
• One in the west
• and One in Arabia,
• A fire would come out of Yemen and would drive people to their place of assembly (for judgement),
• The son of Mary would descend. Although these signs were not given by the blessed Prophet (peace and blessings of
Allah Most High be upon him) in their chronological order of occurrence I have made an effort to put them in that order, with the ones that have not as yet occurred at the bottom of the list. How did I arrive at the above order? We know from the prophecies of the blessed Prophet that the third major ‘sinking of the earth’, i.e., the one that would occur in Arabia, would swallow an army that would be heading south to Makkah. That army would be on its way to attack Imam al-Mahdi, the descendent of Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him). It was prophesied that he would restore the Islamic Caliphate (or Islamic model of a state) in the Arabian peninsula. It is after that sign has occurred (i.e., the third major earthquake) that the son of Mary would descend from the sky with his hands resting on the wings of two angels, and would kill Dajjal the False Messiah or Anti-Christ. The Qur’an itself has described Jesus (i.e., the return of Jesus) as the ‘ilm (which here means the very key to the subject) of the Last Hour:
“And he (i.e., Jesus) shall be a Sign (for the coming of) the Hour (of Judgment): therefore have no doubt about the (Hour), but follow Me: this is a Straight Way.”
(Qur’an, Zukhruf, 43:61)
It follows that his return must come chronologically at the end of the list. We also know that the ‘fire’ from Yemen would follow the third earthquake. And so now that it appears that the major earthquake in the East has occurred, we await four more major signs that still remain to occur. When did the first six ‘major’ signs occur?
DAJJAL
I have argued in my book, ‘Jerusalem in the Qur’an – An Islamic View of the Destiny of Jerusalem’, that Dajjal the False Messiah or Antichrist was released into the world in the lifetime of Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him). He has already completed the first stage of his mission that lasted for “a day like a year”, and is about to complete the second stage that lasts for “a day like a month”. The third and last stage of his mission (of impersonation of the true Messiah) that would last for just “a day like a week” would, I believe, commence when Israel replaces USA as the ruling state of the world. And that would occur when Israel wages a big war that would result in dramatic territorial expansion “from the river of Egypt to the river Euphrates”. Israel would then seize control of the Suez Canal and all the oil of the Arabian Gulf.
By the end of that third stage, Dajjal the false Messiah or Antichrist would have been born into the world of Jewish parents, would have risen to become ruler of Israel and, hence, would have completed his mission to rule the world from Jerusalem. And Allah Knows best!
An entire chapter of the book is devoted to explaining the subject of Dajjal. I am now writing a quartet of books on Surah al-Kahf of the Qur’an, and one of the four books would be entirely devoted to a comprehensive explanation of the subject of Dajjal, the false Messiah or Anti-Christ in Islam Insha Allah.
GOG AND MAGOG
I have also argued in my book that Gog and Magog were released into the world in the lifetime of Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him). The Qur’an itself has made mention (Qur’an, al-Anbiyah, 21:94-5) of a ‘town’ which was destroyed by Allah Most High, and the people of the town expelled, and then banned from returning to reclaim their town until Gog and Magog were not only released but, also, had spread out (around the world) in all directions.
“But there is a ban on a town which We have destroyed: that they (the people of the town) shall not return (to reclaim that town as their own); until Gog and Magog are let through (their barrier), and they swiftly spread out in every direction (replicating themselves amongst all the peoples of the world).”
(Qur’an, al-Anbiyah, 21:95-96)
I identified that ‘town’ to be Jerusalem. And since the Jews have already returned to Jerusalem to reclaim it as their own, it follows that Gog and Magog, like Dajjal, are also close to the end of their mission. And Allah Knows best!
Another entire chapter of ‘Jerusalem in the Qur’an’ is devoted to explaining the subject of Gog and Magog. In addition, the fourth of the quartet of books on Surah al-Kahf will be devoted to a comprehensive explanation of this subject Insha Allah.
DUKHAN (SMOKE)
This appears to be totality of environmental pollution (not just smog and haze) that is already wreaking havoc on the earth itself and is bringing about global warming with the consequent impact of earthquakes, hurricanes, flooding etc. The modern industrial economy that Dajjal has authored, appears to be the greatest culprit of environmental pollution in the world today. In other words, we have been tricked into causing Dukhan (smoke) which in turn spawns global warming and eventual climatic disaster. And Allah Knows best! However, it is important that we note that there are several Ahadith in Sahih Bukhari that declare the sign of Dukhan (smoke) already appeared in the lifetime of the blessed Prophet.
D’ABBATUL ARD (THE BEAST OF THE LAND OR EARTH)
I have argued in ‘Jerusalem in the Qur’an’ that the beast of the earth’ is, in fact, the imposter State of Israel that now occupies the Holy Land. The learned Shaikh, Safar al-Hawali, holds the view that the ‘beast’ is the Zionist Movement. And Allah Knows best!
THE SUN WOULD RISE FROM THE WEST
Those who interpret this sign literally assume that the order of nature would be reversed despite the Qur’anic declaration that there can be no change in Allah’s creation (of that natural order):
“So set thou thy face steadily and truly to the faith: (establish) Allah’s handiwork according to the pattern on which He has made mankind: no change (can there be) in Allah’s creation: that is the standard religion: but most among mankind understand not.”
(Qur’an, al-Rum, 30:30)
They also do so despite the specific declaration of Prophet Abraham (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him) that his Lord-God causes the sun to rise from the East. Abraham then proceeded to challenge the King to cause the sun to rise from the West if he possessed power greater than Allah’s:
Hast thou not turned thy vision to one who disputed with Abraham about his Lord, because Allah had granted him power? Abraham said:
“My Lord is He Who giveth life and death.” He said: “I give life and death.” Said Abraham: “But it is Allah that causeth the sun to rise from the East do thou then cause it to rise from the West!” Thus was he confounded who (in arrogance) rejected Faith. Nor doth Allah give guidance to a people unjust.
(Qur’an, al-Baqarah, 2:258)
And so they wait for that western sunrise as an event that would literally occur, while ignoring the basic rule that no Hadith can contradict the Qur’an.
But this sign has provoked numerous other non-literal interpretations, all of which agree that it has already occurred. Our view is that the rising of the sun from the West symbolizes an upside– down world in which mankind is led by their noses to a way of life which would be the very opposite of that natural way ordained by Allah. Natural money, for example, so identified in the Qur’an, is derived from precious metals. When such money is in short supply in a market such as Madina’s, then a substitute in the form of commodities such as wheat, barley, dates, salt, etc., can temporarily take its place. Around the world today that natural money with intrinsic value has been displaced by artificial money with no intrinsic value and it is used as an instrument of oppression. That upside-down unnatural way of life has already been accepted by most of mankind. In this sense, therefore, the sun is already rising from the West. And Allah Knows best!
THREE SINKINGS OF THE EARTH
Many terrible earthquakes have already occurred in history. They have no relevance to our subject. We are concerned with three major ‘sinkings of the earth’ that would occur at a specific moment in history, i.e., they would occur at a time that would herald the return of Jesus, the Messiah, the son of Mary, and Messenger of Allah Most High. One would occur in the East, the second in the West, and the third in Arabia. When the third one takes place, the world of Islam would suddenly and dazzlingly reenter the affairs of the Arabian peninsular, as well as of the world, in the same revolutionary way that it did in the lifetime of Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him). This appears to be the meaning of the last of the major signs (prior to the return of Jesus) mentioned by the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him), i.e., that a fire would come out of Yemen and drive people to their place of assembly (i.e., for judgment) which is Arafat in Arabia.
THE EARTHQUAKE IN THE EAST
I believe that the recent massive earthquake and resultant Tsunami in South East Asia which has claimed many more than 100,000 lives, is the earthquake of the East mentioned by Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him) in the ten major Signs of the Last Day. It could thus be the first of three such earthquakes heralding the return of Jesus (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him). I came to this conclusion because of the following reasons:
Firstly, the prophecy of the blessed Prophet is that a ‘khasf’ would occur in the East, i.e., the earth sinks down or caves in. A ‘Tsunami’ is defined as a sea wave of local or distant origin that results from large-scale seafloor displacements associated with large earthquakes, major submarine slides, or exploding volcanic islands. When this recent displacement of the earth occurred under the sea, and consequently resulted in the massive Tsunami, it ensured that those who have maliciously concealed the Truth time and again in history could not conceal this major Sign of the Last Day. The magnitude of the event, i.e., the severity of the earthquake (9 on the Richter scale) and, more importantly, the massive damage already done and still unfolding, makes it absolutely unique for mankind today.
Secondly, I am impressed by the location of the event – it occurred in that East which is clearly east of Madinah.
Thirdly, and most important of all, I would like to direct attention to the time that it occurred. This was after the liberation of the Holy Land (1917), and return of the Jews to reclaim the Holy Land as their own (1918-1948). It was also after the restoration of a State of Israel in the Holy Land (1948) and the growth of Israel to become a superpower in the world (i.e., the present). Finally it occurred at precisely that time when Israel is about to wage her big war of massive territorial expansion after which Israel would replace USA as the ruling state in the world. Jesus cannot return until all these things have occurred. It has also occurred at that time when the prophecy of the Prophet concerning the abandonment of the Hajj seems about to be fulfilled. The Hajj would pose a gigantic security threat to the present Saudi ruling elite whenever Israel wages its big war and assumes rule over the world. And it has occurred at just that time when the US dollar has begun its perhaps irreversible decline that might culminate in its collapse. Such a collapse would also bring down all the paper-money in the world and electronic money, controlled by the Jewish-controlled banking system, would then control all the money in the money-system of the world.
This momentous Sign in the East that occurred at the end of December 2004 appears, therefore, to be a sign to mankind warning that dangerous change in the world will soon take place.
It appears to be the first of the three major earthquakes, or ‘sinkings of the earth’, as prophesied by Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him), which would herald the return of the true Messiah, Jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allah Most High. If we are correct, and Allah Knows best, then the world has to await only two more such major events before the son of Mary returns to liberate us from the oppressors who now rule the world.
THE SECOND EARTHQUAKE IN THE WEST
When a second massive earthquake (with a sinking down, caving in, or displacement of the earth) eventually occurs in the west, after the recent one in the east, that would further confirm the analysis presented in this essay. All that would then remain to occur for Jesus to descend from the clouds would be the third earthquake in Arabia that would swallow an entire army, and the fire that would come out of Yemen. We are so close to that event that we can already feel the heat of that fire. Although what appears to be the first of the three major earthquakes occurred underwater and resulted in the massive Tsunami in South East Asia, it is not necessary that the second that would occur in the west would be similar. After all, we know that the third and last major earthquake would have its epicenter on land just north of Makkah in Arabia. But it would seem that the mid-Atlantic (rather than the Pacific) may be the location of the major earthquake of the west that is to come. In case the second major earthqake occurs in the mid-Atlantic, the islands of the Caribbean and the eastern coast of USA and Canada as well as South America would be likely to be affected. It could also be a big earthquake in California along the fault.
THE THIRD EARTHQUAKE IN ARABIA
Narrated Aisha: Allah’s Apostle said, “An army would invade the Ka’aba and when the invaders reach Al-Baida’, all the ground would sink and swallow the whole army.” I said, “O Allah’s Apostle! How would they sink into the ground while amongst them would be their markets (the people who worked in business and not invaders) and the people not belonging to them?” The Prophet replied, “All of those people would sink but they would be resurrected and judged according to their intentions.”
(Sahih al-Bukhari)
Narrated Umm Salamah, Ummul Mu’minin: The Prophet said: “Disagreement will occur at the death of a Caliph and a man of the people of Madina would come flying forth to Makkah. Some of the people of Makkah would come to him, bring him out against his will, and swear allegiance to him between the Corner and the Maqam. An expeditionary force would then be sent against him from Syria but would be swallowed up in the desert between Makkah and Madina.”
(Sunan Abu Daud)
It is quite clear from the above prophecy of Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him) that the third earthquake would take place at the time of the advent of Imam al-Mahdi. But the Imam cannot emerge to liberate the Arabian heartland of Islam until Israel has become the ruling state in the world. And Allah knows best!
THE RETURN OF THE TRUE MESSIAH, JESUS, THE SON OF MARY
Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him) has spoken extensively and in minute details about the event of the return of Jesus (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him). But that event is so rich and complex that it lies beyond the scope of this paper. However, my book, ‘Jerusalem in the Qur’an’ has dealt with the subject in some detail, and it is to that book that I now refer the gentle reader.
ONE FINAL WORD
The destiny of Jerusalem is such as to give to Muslims the greatest confidence and hope that Truth will triumph over falsehood and oppression. ‘Jerusalem in the Qur’an’ was written for precisely this purpose — i.e., to explain to Muslims the strange world in which we live today. It is a world in which the cause of Islam appears to be a lost cause. But having read the book the reader would know, if he or she had not already known it, that the reality is quite different. When they know for certain that it is the destiny of Jerusalem to give a spectacular validation of Islam’s claim to truth, Muslims should be able to summon the strength to resist the present war on Islam in which the godless world is making the greatest possible effort to destroy their faith in Allah Most High.
CSTO (Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) Rapid Reaction Force to Equal NATO – Medvedev – China’s Hu reiterates support for Sudan
CSTO
(Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan)
Rapid Reaction Force to Equal NATO – Medvedev
The collective rapid-reaction force to be created by a post-Soviet regional security bloc will be just as good as comparable NATO forces, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Wednesday.
The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) agreed on Wednesday at a summit in Moscow to set up the new force, to be based in Russia.
Medvedev said the force, to be comprised of a “sufficient” number of units, would be “well trained and well equipped.”
“Russia is ready to contribute a division and a brigade,” he said. “This gives you an idea of the scale.”
The Russian president also said the CSTO was open for cooperation with the United States in the fight against terrorism in Central Asia.
The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) is a security grouping comprising the former Soviet republics of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
The rapid-reaction force agreement was signed by the leaders of all CSTO member states in the Kremlin, although Uzbekistan recorded “a special opinion.”
“Uzbekistan cannot accept the provision whereby all special services, including emergency services, are to be part of the collective force,” CSTO press secretary Vitaly Strugovets said.
The force will be used to repulse military aggression, conduct anti-terrorist operations, fight transnational crime and drug trafficking, and neutralize the effects of natural disasters.
The force will be permanently based in Russia and placed under a single command, with CSTO member countries contributing special military units.
A source in the Russian delegation said Uzbekistan would not participate in the collective force on a permanent basis but would “delegate” its detachments to take part in operations on an ad hoc basis.
http://en.rian.ru/russia/20090204/119984654.html
Well done !
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China’s Hu reiterates support for Sudan
[ This relates to the fact that China invested heavily in Sudan and in Darfur.
The fact that Russia is asssisting the Irish troops of Nato in Chad in their mobility through helicopters and airplanes and we all know that Nato in Chad is supporting insurgency in Darfur makes one put the question where does Russia stand in this world with Nato against China or with China against the zioWest?? The foreign affairs of Russia cannot be concealed in this case, Mr. Lavrov an answer please? ]
Chinese President Hu Jintao on Wednesday reiterated China’s support for Sudan, whose president has been accused of genocide in Darfur, ahead of his trip to Africa next week.
Rights groups say China, which last year imported $6.3 billion of Sudanese crude oil, has failed to do enough to stop bloodshed in Darfur and has violated a U.N. arms embargo on the region.
China denies the charges and has appointed its own envoy to try to bring peace to Darfur.
“China is willing to make joint efforts with Sudan to carry on their traditional friendship, boost pragmatic cooperation and push friendly cooperation to a new high,” the official Xinhua news agency quoted Hu as telling Sudan President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.
In July, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court asked judges to issue an arrest warrant for Bashir, accusing him of orchestrating genocide in Darfur where international experts say fighting has killed 200,000 people.
China has said a war crimes indictment against Bashir would have a “disastrous” impact on the Darfur conflict and has called for the case to be postponed.
Hu, who sent the message to Bashir to mark the anniversary of establishing diplomatic ties, did not mention the war crimes case specifically.
“China respects Sudan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Xinhua paraphrased Hu as saying. “China also supports the African country’s efforts to realise national reconciliation, advance the peace process, develop the national economy and improve people’s living standards.
Hu heads to Saudi Arabia and four African countries next week on a state visit, though he will not go to Sudan. (Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by David Fox)
http://www.reuters.com/article/africaCrisis/idUSPEK23853
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China’s Hu to talk energy on visit to Saudi Arabia
Chinese President Hu Jintao will visit key oil supplier Saudi Arabia to discuss potential energy deals next week on a trip that will also see stops in four African countries, an official said Friday.
More than half of China’s oil exports come from the Persian Gulf region, mainly from Saudi Arabia, which exported 36 million tons of oil to China in 2008, Assistant Foreign Minister Zhai Jun said.
“Over the years, Saudi Arabia has been China’s largest oil exporter, so energy will be high on the agenda of the talks between President Hu Jintao and King Abdullah,” Zhai said. He did not give any details or say if any contracts would be signed.
Chinese investment in Africa — in terms of business ties, aid and attempts to secure political influence — has soared in recent years in deals to keep the continent’s natural resources flowing to China’s booming economy.
Hu will travel to Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, then make stops in Mali, Senegal, Tanzania and Mauritius on the one-week trip. The African countries are all longtime allies of Beijing.
In China quake, a man-made or natural disaster?China stops protesters before UN rights reviewIndonesia to allow UN access to RohingyaHu last traveled to Africa in 2007. Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi visited Uganda, Rwanda, Malawi and South Africa last month.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2009/02/06/asia/AS-China-Saudi-Africa.php
Martial Law, the Financial Bailout, and War – Financial Coup d’Etat – Obama ‘will give green light for Iran war’
Martial Law, the Financial Bailout, and War
Paulson’s Financial Bailout
It is becoming clear that the bailout measures of late 2008 may have consequences at least as grave for an open society as the response to 9/11 in 2001. Many members of Congress felt coerced into voting against their inclinations, and the normal procedures for orderly consideration of a bill were dispensed with.
The excuse for bypassing normal legislative procedures was the existence of an emergency. But one of the most reprehensible features of the legislation, that it allowed Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to permit bailed-out institutions to use public money for exorbitant salaries and bonuses, was inserted by Paulson after the immediate crisis had passed.
According to Congressman Peter Welch (D-Vermont) the bailout bill originally called for a cap on executive salaries, but Paulson changed the requirement at the last minute. Welch and other members of Congress were enraged by “news that banks getting taxpayer-funded bailouts are still paying exorbitant salaries, bonuses, and other benefits.”1 In addition, as AP reported in October, “Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. questioned allowing banks that accept bailout bucks to continue paying dividends on their common stock. `There are far better uses of taxpayer dollars than continuing dividend payments to shareholders,’ he said.”2
Even more reprehensible is the fact that since the bailouts, Paulson and the Treasury Department have refused to provide details of the Troubled Assets Relief Program spending of hundreds of billions of dollars, while the New York Federal Reserve has refused to provide information about its own bail-out (using government-backed loans) that amounts to trillions. This lack of transparency has been challenged by Fox TV in a FOIA suit against the Treasury Department, and a suit by Bloomberg News against the Fed.3
The financial bailout legislation of September 2008 was only passed after members of both Congressional houses were warned that failure to act would threaten civil unrest and the imposition of martial law.
U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., and U.S. Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., both said U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson brought up a worst-case scenario as he pushed for the Wall Street bailout in September. Paulson, former Goldman Sachs CEO, said that might even require a declaration of martial law, the two noted.4
Here are the original remarks by Senator Inhofe:
Speaking on Tulsa Oklahoma’s 1170 KFAQ, when asked who was behind threats of martial law and civil unrest if the bailout bill failed, Senator James Inhofe named Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson as the source. “Somebody in D.C. was feeding you guys quite a story prior to the bailout, a story that if we didn’t do this we were going to see something on the scale of the depression, there were people talking about martial law being instituted, civil unrest….who was feeding you guys this stuff?,” asked host Pat Campbell. “That’s Henry Paulson,” responded Inhofe, “We had a conference call early on, it was on a Friday I think – a week and half before the vote on Oct. 1. So it would have been the middle … what was it – the 19th of September, we had a conference call. In this conference call – and I guess there’s no reason for me not to repeat what he said, but he said – he painted this picture you just described. He said, ‘This is serious. This is the most serious thing that we faced.’”5
Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA 27th District) reported the same threat on the Congressional floor (Rep. Sherman later downplayed his remarks slightly on the Alex Jones show):
“The only way they can pass this bill is by creating a panic atmosphere…. Many of us were told that the sky would fall…. A few of us were even told that there would be martial law in America if we voted no. That’s what I call fear-mongering, unjustified, proven wrong.”6
So it is clear that threats of martial law were used to get this reprehensible bailout legislation passed. It also seems clear that Congress was told of a threat of martial law, not itself threatened. It is still entirely appropriate to link such talk to the Army’s rapid moves to redefine its role as one of controlling the American people, not just protecting them. In a constitutional polity based on balance of powers, we see the emergence of a radical new military power that is as yet completely unbalanced.
The Army’s New Role in 2001: Not Protecting American Society, but Controlling It
This new role for the Army is not wholly unprecedented. The U.S. military had been training troops and police in “civil disturbance planning” for the last three decades. The master plan, Department of Defense Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2, or “Operation Garden Plot,” was developed in 1968 in response to the major protests and disturbances of the 1960s.
But on January 19, 2001, on the last day of the Clinton administration, the U.S. Army promulgated a new and permanent Continuity of Operations (COOP) Program. It encapsulated its difference from the preceding, externally-oriented Army Survival, Recovery, and Reconstitution System (ASRRS) as follows:
a. In 1985, the Chief of Staff of the Army established the Army Survival, Recovery, and Reconstitution System (ASRRS) to ensure the continuity of essential Army missions and functions.
ASRRS doctrine was focused primarily on a response to the worst case 1980’s threat of a massive nuclear laydown on CONUS as a result of a confrontation with the Soviet Union.
b. The end of the Cold War and the breakup of the former Soviet Union significantly reduced the probability of a major nuclear attack on CONUS but the probability of other threats has increased. Army organizations must be prepared for any contingency with a potential for interruption of normal operations.
To emphasize that Army continuity of operations planning is now focused on the full all-hazards threat spectrum, the name “ASRRS” has been replaced by the more generic title “Continuity of Operations (COOP) Program.”7
This document embodied the secret Continuity of Operations (COG) planning conducted secretly by Rumsfeld, Cheney, and others through the 1980s and 1990s.8 This planning was initially for continuity measures in the event of a nuclear attack, but soon called for suspension of the Constitution, not just “after a nuclear war” but for any “national security emergency.” This was defined in Reagan’s Executive Order 12656 of November 18, 1988 as “any occurrence, including natural disaster, military attack, technological emergency, or other emergency, that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the
national security of the United States.” The effect was to impose on domestic civil society the extreme measures once planned for a response to a nuclear attack from abroad.9
In like fashion ARR 500-3 Regulation clarified that it was a plan for “the execution of mission-essential functions without unacceptable interruption during a national security or domestic emergency.”
Donald Rumsfeld, who as a private citizen had helped author the COG planning, promptly signed and implemented the revised ARR 500-3. Eight months later, on 9/11, Cheney and Rumsfeld implemented COG, a significant event of which we still know next to nothing. What we do know is that plans began almost immediately – as foreseen by COG planning the 1980s — to implement warrantless surveillance and detention of large numbers of civilians, and that in January 2002 the Pentagon submitted a proposal for deploying troops on American streets.10
Then in April 2002, Defense officials implemented a plan for domestic U.S. military operations by creating a new U.S. Northern Command (CINC-NORTHCOM) for the continental United States.11 In short, what were being implemented were the most prominent features of the COG planning which Oliver North had worked on in the 1980s.
Deep Events and Changes of Party in the White House
Like so many other significant steps since World War Two towards a military-industrial state, the Army’s Regulation 500-3 surfaced in the last days of a departing administration (in this case the very last day). It is worth noticing that, ever since the 1950s, dubious events–of the unpublic variety I have called deep events–have marked the last months before a change of party in the White House. These deep events have tended to a) constrain incoming presidents, if the incomer is a Democrat, or alternatively b) to pave the way for the incomer, if he is a Republican.
Consider, in the first category, the following (when a Republican was succeeded by a Democrat):
* In December 1960 the CIA secured approval for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, and escalated events in Laos into a crisis for which the Joint Chiefs proposed sending 60,000 troops. These events profoundly affected President Kennedy’s posture towards Cuba and Indochina.
* In 1976 CIA Director George H.W. Bush installed an outside Team B intelligence unit to enlarge drastically estimates of the Soviet threat to the United States, eventually frustrating and reversing presidential candidate Jimmy Carter’s campaign pledge to cut the U.S. defense budget.12
Equally important were events in the second category (when a Democrat was succeeded by a Republican):
* In late 1968 Kissinger, while advising the Johnson administration, gave secret information to the Nixon campaign that helped Nixon to obstruct the peace agreement in Vietnam that was about to be negotiated at the peace talks then taking place in Paris. (According to Seymour Hersh,“The Nixon campaign, alerted by Kissinger to the impending success of the peace talks, was able to get a series of messages to the Thieu government” in Saigon. making it clear that a Nixon presidency would offer a better deal. This was a major factor in securing the defeat of Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey.13 Kissinger was not the kind of person to have betrayed his president on his own personal initiative. At the time Nixon’s campaign manager, John Mitchell (one of the very few in on the secret), told Hersh that “I thought Henry [Kissinger] was doing it because Nelson [Rockefeller] wanted him to. Nelson asked Henry to help and he did.”14
* In 1980 the so-called October Surprise, with the help of people inside CIA, helped ensure that the Americans held hostage in Iran would not be returned before the inauguration of Reagan. This was a major factor in securing the defeat of incumbent Jimmy Carter.15 Once again, the influence of the Rockefellers can be discerned. A CIA officer later reported hearing Joseph V. Reed, an aide to David Rockefeller, comment in 1981 to William Casey, the newly installed CIA Director, about their joint success in disrupting Carter’s plans to bring home the hostages.16
Both the financial bailout, extorted from Congress and the escalated preparations for martial law can be seen as transitional events of the first category. Whatever the explanations for their timing, they will constrain Obama’s freedom to make his own policies. I fear moreover they may have the consequence of easing this country into unforeseen escalations of the Afghan war.
The Intensive Quiet Preparations for Martial Law
Let us deal first with the preparations for martial law. On September 30, 2008, the Army Times announced the redeployment of an active Brigade Army Team from Iraq to America, in a new mission that “may become a permanent part of the active Army”:
The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys.
Now they’re training for the same mission — with a twist — at home.
Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks. . . . After 1st BCT finishes its dwell-time mission, expectations are that another, as yet unnamed, active-duty brigade will take over and that the mission will be a permanent one. . . .They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control.17
This announcement followed by two weeks the talk of civil unrest and martial law that was used to panic the Congress into passing Paulson’s bailout legislation. Not only that, the two unprecedented events mirror each other: the bailout debate anticipated civil unrest and martial law, while the announced positioning of an active Brigade Combat Team on U.S. soil anticipated civil unrest (such as might result from the bailout legislation).
Then on December 17, 2008, US Northern Command chief General Renuart announced that “the US military plans to mobilize thousands of troops to protect Washington against potential terrorist attack during the inauguration of president-elect Barack Obama.”18
The US Army War College has also raised the possibility of the U.S. Army being used to control civil unrest, according to the Phoenix Business Journal:
A new report by the U.S. Army War College talks about the possibility of Pentagon resources and troops being used should the economic crisis lead to civil unrest, such as protests against businesses and government or runs on beleaguered banks.
“Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security,” said the War College report.
The study says economic collapse, terrorism and loss of legal order are among possible domestic shocks that might require military action within the U.S.19
It is clear that there has been a sustained move in the direction of martial law preparations, a trend that has been as continuous as it has been unheralded. Senator Leahy was thus right to draw our attention to it back on September 29, 2006, in his objections to the final form of the Fiscal Year 2007 National Defense Authorization Act, which gave the president increased power to call up the National Guard for law enforcement:
It . . . should concern us all that the Conference agreement includes language that subverts solid, longstanding posse comitatus statutes that limit the military’s involvement in law enforcement, thereby making it easier for the President to declare martial law. There is good reason for the constructive friction in existing law when it comes to martial law declarations.20
This quiet agglomeration of military power has not “just growed,” like Topsy, through inadvertence. It shows sustained intention, even if no one has made a public case for it.
How the Bush Administration Protected Predatory Lending and Let the Financial Crisis Grow
Let us now consider the financial crisis and the panic bailout. No one should think that the crisis was unforeseen. Back in February Eliot Spitzer, in one of his last acts as governor of New York, warned about the impending crisis created by predatory lending, and reveled that the Bush Administration was blocking state efforts to deal with it. His extraordinary warning, in the Washington Post, is worth quoting at some length:
Several years ago, state attorneys general and others involved in consumer protection began to notice a marked increase in a range of predatory lending practices by mortgage lenders. …
Even though predatory lending was becoming a national problem, the Bush administration looked the other way and did nothing to protect American homeowners. In fact, the government chose instead to align itself with the banks that were victimizing consumers. . . . Several state legislatures, including New York’s, enacted laws aimed at curbing such practices. . . .Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.
Let me explain: The administration accomplished this feat through an obscure federal [Treasury] agency called the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The OCC has been in existence since the Civil War. Its mission is to ensure the fiscal soundness of national banks. For 140 years, the OCC examined the books of national banks to make sure they were balanced, an important but uncontroversial function. But a few years ago, for the first time in its history, the OCC was used as a tool against consumers.
In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks. The federal government’s actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking superintendents, actively fought the new rules.
But the unanimous opposition of the 50 states did not deter, or even slow, the Bush administration in its goal of protecting the banks. In fact, when my office opened an investigation of possible discrimination in mortgage lending by a number of banks, the OCC filed a federal lawsuit to stop the investigation.21
Eliot Spitzer submitted his Op Ed to the Washington Post on February 13. If it had an impact, it was not the one Spitzer had hoped for. On March 10 the New York Times broke the story of Spitzer’s encounter with a prostitute. According to a later Times story, “on Feb. 13 [the day Spitzer’s Op Ed went up on the Washington Post website] federal agents staked out his hotel in Washington.”22
It is remarkable that the Mainstream Media found Spitzer’s private life to be big news, but not his charges that Paulson’s Treasury was prolonging the financial crisis, or the relation of these charges to Spitzer’s exposure. As a weblog commented,
The US news media failed to draw the obvious connection between the bizarre federal law enforcement investigation and leak campaign about the private life of New York Governor Spitzer and Spitzer’s all out attack on the Bush administration for its collusion with predatory lenders.
While the international credit system grinds to a halt because of a superabundance of bad mortgage loans made in the US, the news media failed to cover the details of Spitzer’s public charges against the White House.
Yet when salacious details were leaked about alleged details of Spitzer’s private life, they took that information and made it the front page news for days.23
After Spitzer’s Op Ed was published, according to Greg Palast, the Federal Reserve, “for the first time in its history, loaned a selected coterie of banks one-fifth of a trillion dollars to guarantee these banks’ mortgage-backed junk bonds. The deluge of public loot was an eye-popping windfall to the very banking predators who have brought two million families to the brink of foreclosure.”24
What are we to make of Spitzer’s charge that the Bush administration interfered to preempt state laws against predatory lending, and of the fact that the mainstream media did not report that? A petty motive for the OCC’s behavior in 2003 might have been to allow the housing bubble to continue through 2003 and 2004, thus facilitating Bush’s re-election. But the persistence of Treasury obstruction thereafter, despite the unanimous opposition of all fifty states, and the continuing silence of the media about this disagreement, suggest that some broader policy intention may have been at stake.
One is struck by the similarities with the Savings and Loan scandal which was allowed to continue through the Reagan 1980s, long after it became apparent that deliberate bankruptcy was being used by unscrupulous profiteers to amass illegal fortunes at what was ultimately public expense.25
In the same way, the long drawn-out housing bubble of the current Bush decade, and particularly the derivative bubble that was floated upon it, allowed the Bush administration to help offset the trillion-dollar-plus cost of its Iraq misadventure,26 by creating spurious securities that sold for hundreds of billions, not just in the United States, but through the rest of the world.
In the long run, this was not a sustainable source of wealth for America’s financial class, which is now suffering like everyone else from the consequent recession. But in the short run, the financial crisis and bailout made it possible for Bush to wage a costly war without experiencing the kind of debilitating inflation that was brought on by America’s Vietnam War.
The trillion dollar meltdown,27 in other words, can be rationalized as having helped finance the Iraq War. When we turn to the martial law preparations, however, they are being made in anticipation of civil unrest in the future. Why such intense preparation for this?
The obvious answer of course is memory of the rioting that occurred in San Francisco and elsewhere during the great depression of the 1930s. Indeed that thought may be uppermost among those who recently arranged for the redeployment of a Brigade Combat Team from Iraq to America. But the planning for martial law in America dates back almost three decades, from the days when Reagan appointed Rumsfeld, Cheney and others to plan secretly for what was misleadingly called Continuity [i.e., Change] of Government. Concern about the 2008 recession cannot have been on their minds then, or on those who introduced the Army’s “Continuity of Operations (COOP) Program” on January 19, 2001. Instead the “full all-hazards threat spectrum” envisaged in that document was clearly ancillary to the doctrine of “full-spectrum dominance” that had been articulated in the Joint Chiefs of Staff blueprint, Joint Vision 2020, endorsed eight months earlier on May 30, 2000.28
The interest of Cheney and Rumsfeld in COG planning, including planning for martial law, also envisaged full spectrum dominance. This is made clear by their simultaneous engagement in the 1990s in the public Project for the New American Century (PNAC). PNAC’s goals were stated very explicitly in their document Rebuilding America’s Defenses: to increase defense spending so as to establish America’s military presence throughout the world as an unchallengeable power. This would entail permanent U.S. forces in central as well as east Asia, even after the disappearance[jam1] of Saddam Hussein.29
In short PNAC’s program was a blueprint for permanent overseas American empire, a project they recognized would not be easily accepted by an American democracy. Their call frankly acknowledged that it would be difficult to gain support for their projected increase in defense spending to “a minimum level of 3.5 to 3.8 percent of gross domestic product, adding $15 billion to $20 billion to total defense spending annually.” “The process of transformation,” the document admitted, “is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”30
There is of course every reason to hope that the disastrous era of Rumsfeld and Cheney is about to end, with the election of Barack Obama. Obama has made it clear that he will pursue a foreign policy dedicated to diplomacy and multilateralism. In this spirit he has declared his willingness to talk to Iran without preconditions.
But Obama’s stated reason for disengagement from Iraq – “The scale of our deployments in Iraq continues to set back our ability to finish the fight in Afghanistan”31 – is very ominous. Few serious students of the Afghan scene believe that America can “finish the fight in Afghanistan,” any more successfully than could the Russians or British before them. The U.S. position there is visibly deteriorating, while the U.S. strategy of cross-border attacks is having the effect of destabilizing Pakistan as well. The U.S.-backed Karzai regime has so little control over the countryside that Kabul itself is now coming under rocket attack. Experts on the scene agree that any effort to “finish” will be a long-term proposition requiring at a minimum a vastly escalated commitment of U.S. troops.32
One cannot predict the future, but one can examine the past. For thirty years I have been writing about the persistence in America of a war mentality that, time after time, trumps reasonable policies of negotiation, and leads us further into armed conflict. This dominant mindset is not restricted to any single agency or cabal, but is rather the likely outcome of on-going tensions between hawks and doves in the internal politics of Washington.
If a container of rocks and gravel is shaken vigorously, the probability is that the gravel will gravitate towards the bottom, leaving the largest rocks at the top. There is an analogous probability that, in an on-going debate over engaging or withdrawing from a difficult military contest, the forces for engagement will come out on top, regardless of circumstances. Available military power tends to be used, and one of the most remarkable features of history since 1945 is that this tendency has not so far repeated itself with atomic weapons.
Let me explain this metaphor in more concrete detail. Progressive societies (in this era usually democracies) tend to expand their presence beyond their geographic boundaries. This expanded presence calls for new institutions, usually (like the CIA) free from democratic accountability. This accretion of unaccountable power, in what I have elsewhere called the deep state, disrupts the public state’s system of checks and balances which is the underpinning of sane, deliberative policy.
We might expect of progressive democracies that they would evolve towards more and more rational foreign policies. But because of the dialectic just described, what we see is the exact opposite – evolution towards foolish and sometimes disastrous engagements. When Britain became more democratic in the late 19th Century, it also initiated the Boer War, a war very suited to the private imperial needs of Cecil Rhodes, but irrelevant if not deleterious to the interests of the British people.33 Hitler’s dreams of a Third Reich, entailing a doomed repeat of Napoleon’s venture into the heart of Russia, suited the needs of the German industrialists who had financed the Nazis; but from the outset sane heads of the German military staff could foresee the coming disaster.
For over a half century now, beginning with Vietnam, unaccountable forces have been maneuvering America into unsustainable adventures on the Asian mainland. We now know that Kennedy did not intend ever to commit U.S. combat troops to Vietnam.34 But the fatal planning to expand the Vietnam War north of the 17th parallel was authorized in the last week of his aborted presidency, probably without his being aware.35 When elected, Jimmy Carter was determined to reduce the size and frequency of CIA covert operations.36 Yet his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, initiated maneuvers in Afghanistan that led to the largest CIA covert operation (and in my view, one of the most deleterious) of all time.37
Our archival historians have not yet fully understood either paradox, or the forces behind them. And as the philosopher George Santayana famously observed, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”38
The Future: Military Escalation Abroad and at Home?
Like both Kennedy and Carter, Barack Obama is a complex mix of hopeful and depressing qualities. Among the latter are his unqualified desire to “finish” (i.e., “win”) the war in Afghanistan, and his support, along with his party’s, for the final version of the Paulson bailout. In my view they go together.
Like the government negotiated resolution of the savings-and-loan-scandal of the 1980s, the financial bailout undisguisedly taxed the public wealth of the republic to protect and even enrich those who for some time had been undeservedly enriching themselves. Old-line leftists might see nothing unusual about this: it conforms to their analysis of how the capitalist state has always worked.
But it is only characteristic of the American state since the Reagan revolution of the 1980s. Before that time governmental policies were more likely to be directed towards helping the poor; afterwards the ideology of free-market literalism, even under Clinton, was invoked in numerous ways for the enriching of the rich.
The result of these government policies has been summarized by Prof. Edward Wolff:
We have had a fairly sharp increase in wealth inequality dating back to 1975 or 1976. Prior to that, there was a protracted period when wealth inequality fell in this country, going back almost to 1929. So you have this fairly continuous downward trend from 1929, which of course was the peak of the stock market before it crashed, until just about the mid-1970s. Since then, things have really turned around, and the level of wealth inequality today is almost double what it was in the mid-1970s…..
Up until the early 1970s, the U.S. actually had lower wealth inequality than Great Britain, and even than a country like Sweden. But things have really turned around over the last 25 or 30 years. In fact, a lot of countries have experienced lessening wealth inequality over time. The U.S. is atypical in that inequality has risen so sharply over the last 25 or 30 years.39
Past excesses of American wealth, as in the Gilded Age and the 1920s, have been followed by political reforms, such as the income tax, to reduce wealth and income disparity. But as Kevin Phillips has warned, this type of reform must happen again soon, or it may not happen at all:
As the twenty-first century gets underway, the imbalance of wealth and democracy in the United States is unsustainable. . . . Either democracy must be renewed, with politics brought back to life, or wealth is likely to cement a new and less democratic regime—plutocracy by some other name.40
Judged by this criterion, the Paulson bailout as passed was not just an opportunity missed; it was a radical leap in the wrong direction. It is not reassuring that the bailout was passed with the support of Obama and the Democratic Party. This is rather a sign that plutocracy will not be seriously challenged by either party in their present state.
Warren Buffett may have been correct in saying that the bailout was necessary. But it is not hard to think of reforms that should have accompanied it:
1) there should have been transparency, not secrecy
2) public funds should not have been made available for bonuses or dividends (The richest 10 percent of Americans own 85 percent of all stock).41
And as a bailout for the automobile industry is debated, two more reforms seem self-evident:
3) any reduction in income should not affect workers alone, but all levels of employees equally
4) as has often been suggested, a limit should be established by law to the maximum ratio of the highest remuneration to the lowest in any industry – perhaps a ratio of twenty to one.
I am not making these obvious suggestions with any expectation that they will be passed or seriously debated. The plutocratic corruption of both our parties makes such a prospect almost unthinkable.
What I do want to contemplate is the serious prospect of war. America escaped from the depression of the 1890s with the Spanish-American War.42 It only escaped the Great Depression of the 1930s with the Second World War. There was even a recession in the late 1940s from which America only escaped with the Korean War. As we face the risk of major depression again, I believe we inevitably face the danger of major war again.
In the meantime, some aspects of the financial meltdown, although they arose for many reasons and were not the result of some conspiratorial cabal, may be prolonged because of their utility to the war-minded. Consider that, from the perspective of maintaining America’s imperial thrust into Afghanistan (and even Pakistan), the financial crisis has had some desired consequences:
1) The dollar’s value against other international currencies, notably the euro, has improved, thus improving America’s balance of payments and also offsetting the threat to the dollar’s important role as the primary unit of international trade.
2) Thanks to the determined international marketing of overvalued derivatives based on predatory lending, the resulting financial crisis has been internationalized, with economies elsewhere suffering even greater shocks than the United States. This has relatively improved America’s capacity to finance a major war effort overseas (which has always had a major impact on the U.S. balance of payments).
3) The price of oil has plummeted from $147 a barrel last July to under $40, thus weakening the economies of Russia, China, and especially Saudi Arabia, the country whose international foundations have been supporting Al Qaeda.
The Afghan situation is grim, but it is not hopeless. Two skilled observers, Barnett R. Rubin and Ahmed Rashid, have proposed a political solution for the entire region that would promise greater security for the entire area than Obama’s ill-considered proposal to send 20,000 more U.S. troops.43 In Rashid’s words,
President-elect Obama and Western leaders have to adopt a comprehensive approach that sees the region [with Afghanistan's neighbors, including Pakistan, India, Russia, China, Iran, and the former Soviet states] as a unit with interlocking development issues to be resolved such as poverty, illiteracy and weak governance. There has to be a more comprehensive but more subtle approach to democratising the region and forcing powerful but negative stakeholders in local power structures – such as the drug mafias – either to change their thinking or be eliminated.44
That observers with such recognized status are offering a sensible political solution does not provide me with much optimism. For three decades now Barnett Rubin has been offering sound advice on Iran and Afghanistan to Washington, only to be ignored by those lobbying for covert operations and military solutions. This dialectic is reminiscent of the Vietnam War, where for over a decade reasonable proposals to demilitarize the conflict were similarly ignored.
I repeat that the future is unpredictable. But I fear that Obama’s proposal to send 20,000 additional troops will carry the day, with its predictable consequences of a wider war in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.45 With this I also fear an increased use of the U.S. Army to control protests by the American people.
I earnestly hope that my fears are misplaced. Time will tell.
NOTES
1.WCAX, Burlington, Vermont – December 22, 2008, http://www.wcax.com/Global/story.asp?S=9567271. Cf. CNBC, October 30, 2008, http://www.cnbc.com/id/27423117: “`You can get paid $30 million under this program,’ says Michael Kesner, who heads Deloitte Consulting’s executive compensation practice. `There’s no limit on what you can get paid.’”
Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. His most recent book is The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War, It can be ordered from the Mary Ferrell Foundation Press at http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/MFF_Store.
Scott’s website is http://www.peterdalescott.net.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11681
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Financial Coup d’Etat
In the fall of 2001 I attended a private investment conference in London to give a paper,
The Myth of the Rule of Law or How the Money Works: The Destruction of Hamilton Securities Group.
The presentation documented my experience with a Washington-Wall Street partnership that had:
- Engineered a fraudulent housing and debt bubble;
- Illegally shifted vast amounts of capital out of the U.S.;
- Used “privitization” as form or piracy – a pretext to move government assets to private investors at below-market prices and then shift private liabilities back to government at no cost to the private liability holder.
Other presenters at the conference included distinguished reporters covering privatization in Eastern Europe and Russia. As the portraits of British ancestors stared down upon us, we listened to story after story of global privatization throughout the 1990s in the Americas, Europe, and Asia.
Slowly, as the pieces fit together, we shared a horrifying epiphany: the banks, corporations and investors acting in each global region were the exact same players. They were a relatively small group that reappeared again and again in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Asia accompanied by the same well-known accounting firms and law firms.
Clearly, there was a global financial coup d’etat underway.
The magnitude of what was happening was overwhelming. In the 1990’s, millions of people in Russia had woken up to find their bank accounts and pension funds simply gone – eradicated by a falling currency or stolen by mobsters who laundered money back into big New York Fed member banks for reinvestment to fuel the debt bubble.
Reports of politicians, government officials, academics, and intelligence agencies facilitating the racketeering and theft were compelling. One lawyer in Russia, living without electricity and growing food to prevent starvation, was quoted as saying, “We are being de-modernized.”
Several years earlier, I listened to three peasant women describe the War on Drugs in their respective countries: Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. I asked them, “After they sweep you into camps, who gets your land and at what price?” My question opened a magic door. They poured out how the real economics worked on the War on Drugs, including the stealing of land and government contracts to build housing for the people who are displaced.
At one point, suspicious of my understanding of how this game worked, one of the women said, “You say you have never been to our countries, yet you understand exactly how the money works. How is this so?” I replied that I had served as Assistant Secretary of Housing at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the United States where I oversaw billions of government investment in US communities. Apparently, it worked the same way in their countries as it worked in mine.
I later found out that the government contractor leading the War on Drugs strategy for U.S. aid to Peru, Colombia and Bolivia was the same contractor in charge of knowledge management for HUD enforcement. This Washington-Wall Street game was a global game. The peasant women of Latin America were up against the same financial pirates and business model as the people in South Central Los Angeles, West Philadelphia, Baltimore and the South Bronx.
Later, courageous reporting by Naomi Klein and Greg Palast confirmed in detail that the privitization and economic warfare model I discussed in London had deep roots in Latin America.
We were experiencing a global “heist”: capital was being sucked out of country after country. The presentation I gave in London revealed a piece of the puzzle that was difficult for the audience to fathom. This was not simply happening in the emerging markets. It was happening in America, too.
I described a meeting that had occurred in April 1997, more than four years before that day in London. I had given a presentation to a distinguished group of U.S. pension fund leaders on the extraordinary opportunity to reengineer the U.S. federal budget. I presented our estimate that the prior year’s federal investment in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area had a negative return on investment.
We presented that it was possible to finance places with private equity and reengineer the government investment to a positive return and, as a result, generate significant capital gains. Hence, it was possible to use U.S. pension funds to significantly increase retirees’ retirement security by successfully investing in American communities, small business and farms — all in a manner that would reduce debt, improve skills, and create jobs.
The response from the pension fund investors to this analysis was quite positive until the President of the CalPERS pension fund — the largest in the country — said, “You don’t understand. It’s too late. They have given up on the country. They are moving all the money out in the fall [of 1997]. They are moving it to Asia.”
Sure enough, that fall, significant amounts of moneys started leaving the US, including illegally. Over $4 trillion went missing from the US government. No one seemed to notice. Misled into thinking we were in a boom economy by a fraudulent debt bubble engineered with force and intention from the highest levels of the financial system, Americans were engaging in an orgy of consumption that was liquidating the real financial equity we needed urgently to reposition ourselves for the times ahead.
The mood that afternoon in London was quite sober. The question hung in the air, unspoken: once the bubble was over, was the time coming when we, too, would be “de-modernized?”
In 2009 — more than seven years later — this is a question that many of us are asking ourselves.
http://solari.com/blog/?p=2058
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Obama ‘will give green light for Iran war’
An Israeli fighter of the Negev Squadron of F-16i “Sufas” — which was used in a demonstration of Israeli air power. The F-16i has become known as the backbone of the Israeli Air Force and may be employed in an attack on Iran.
The Israeli prime ministerial frontrunner will win a US blessing to enter war with Iran, says a source familiar with US Mideast policies.
Aaron David Miller, the US State Department’s top analyst in the 1980s, said Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu will be able to convince President Barack Obama that a military attack is the only solution to the Iranian nuclear issue.
“The Israelis will be pushing Washington to ensure that Iran never gets to that point and failing that, they will consider a military strike,” Reuters quoted Miller — who is a former US Middle East peace negotiator and is currently an analyst at the Woodrow Wilson Center — as saying late Friday.
“It need not be conclusive or threatening, but it will be very serious and … scare the daylights out of the president that unless the international community mobilizes to address the situation, the Israelis will,” he said.
Tel Aviv accuses Iran, a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), of having plans to develop nuclear weaponry.
Tehran, however, insists that it enriches uranium for peaceful purposes and that it has the right to the technology already in the hands of many others.
Israeli leaders, who have in their possession the sole nuclear arsenal in the Middle East, have intensified their go-to-war rhetoric against Iran in the run-up to Tel Aviv’s elections set for February 10.
Israeli election frontrunner Benjamin Netanyahu said last week that his first mission, if elected prime minister, would be to “thwart the Iranian threat” once and for all.
“Iran will not be armed with a nuclear weapon… It includes everything that is necessary to make this statement come true,” said Israel’s leading candidate for the prime minister post.
Israeli legislator and weapons expert Isaac Ben-Israel, meanwhile, claimed that Tel Aviv has only a year to pull off a unilateral strike on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, asserting that any attack would only delay, rather than sabotage, Iranian breakthroughs in nuclear technology.
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has also stressed that Washington-Tehran negotiations “should be kept short and followed by readiness to take action”.
British strategist Mark Fitzpatrick asserted that an Israeli military drive against Iran was “a significant possibility, but not a probability”.
“That point will probably be some time towards the end of this year,” says the senior fellow for non-proliferation at London’s Institute for Strategic Studies, adding that Israel should consider the negative consequences before it makes its move.
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=84974§ionid=351020101
The Whole World Is Rioting as the Economic Crisis Worsens — Why Aren’t We? – China outraged after India bans all toy imports – Britain ‘headed’ for deepest slump in 60 years
The Whole World Is Rioting
as the Economic Crisis Worsens
Why Aren’t We?
By Joshua Holland,
Americans are rightfully angry about the economic decline, but with a few small exceptions, quietly so. Why? It depends on whom you ask.
Explosive anger is spilling out onto the streets of Europe. The meltdown of the global economy is igniting massive social unrest in a region that has long been a symbol of political stability and social cohesion.
It’s not a new trend: A wave of upheaval is spreading from the poorer countries on the periphery of the global economy to the prosperous core.
Over the past few years, a series of riots spread across what is patronizingly known as the Third World. Furious mobs have raged against skyrocketing food and energy prices, stagnating wages and unemployment in India, Senegal, Yemen, Indonesia, Morocco, Cameroon, Brazil, Panama, the Philippines, Egypt, Mexico and elsewhere.
For the most part, those living in wealthier countries took little notice. But now, with the global economy crashing down around us, people in even the wealthiest nations are mad as hell and reacting violently to what they view as an inadequate response to their tumbling economies.
The Telegraph (UK) warned last month that protests over governments’ handling of the crisis “are widespread and gathering pace,” and “may spark a new revolution”:
A depression triggered in America is being played out in Europe with increasing violence, and other forms of social unrest are spreading. In Iceland, a government has fallen. Workers have marched in Zaragoza, as Spanish unemployment heads towards 20 percent. There have been riots and bloodshed in Greece, protests in Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary and Bulgaria. The police have suppressed public discontent in Russia and will be challenged again at large gatherings this weekend.
Consider a snapshot of a single week of unrest, courtesy of the Guardian:
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- Greece: “There are many wellsprings of the serial protests rolling across Europe. In Athens, it was students and young people who suddenly mobilized to turn parts of the city into no-go areas. They were sick of the lack of jobs and prospects, the failings of the education system and seized with pessimism over their future.”This week it was the farmers’ turn, rolling their tractors out to block the motorways, main road and border crossings across the Balkans to try to obtain better procurement prices for their produce.”
- Latvia: “The old Baltic trading city had seen nothing like it since the happy days of kicking out the Russians and overthrowing communism two decades ago. More than 10,000 people converged on the 13th century cathedral to show the Latvian government what they thought of its efforts at containing the economic crisis. The peaceful protest morphed into a late-night rampage as a minority headed for the parliament, battled with riot police and trashed parts of the old city. The following day, there were similar scenes in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital next door.”
- France: “Burned-out cars, masked youths, smashed shop windows and more than a million striking workers. The scenes from France are familiar, but not so familiar to President Nicolas Sarkozy, confronting the first big wave of industrial unrest of his time in the Elysée Palace.”France, meanwhile, is moving into recession, and unemployment is going up. The latest jobless figures were to have been released yesterday, but were held back, apparently for fear of inflaming the protests.”
- Iceland: “Proud of its status as one of the world’s most developed, most productive and most equal societies, Iceland is in the throes of what is, by its staid standards, a revolution.”Riot police in Reykjavik, the coolest of capitals. Building bonfires in front of the world’s oldest parliament. The yogurt flying at the free market men who have run the country for decades and brought it to its knees.”
- Britain (via the Times of London): “Wildcat strikes flared at more than 19 sites across the country in response to claims that British tradesmen were being barred from construction jobs by contractors using cheaper foreign workers.”
- Russia (via Al-Jazeera): “Thousands of protesters have rallied across Russia to criticize the government’s economic policies and its response to the global financial crisis.”Russian police forcefully broke up many of the anti-government protests on Saturday, arresting dozens of demonstrators.”
At least in Western Europe, cries of “burn the shit down!” are being heard in countries with some of the highest standards of living in the world — states with adequate social safety nets; countries where all citizens have access to decent health care and heavily subsidized educations. Places where minimum wages are also living wages, and a dignified retirement is in large part guaranteed.
The far ends of the ideological spectrum appear to be gaining currency as the crisis develops, and people grow increasingly hostile toward the politics of the status quo.
The Financial Times quotes Olivier Besancenot, a young leader of “France’s extreme left,” promising “to reinvent and re-establish the anti-capitalist project.” “We want the established powers to be blown apart,” Besancenot said. Europe’s far right is gaining momentum, too, using the economy and populist outrage over immigration to gain a legitimacy it hasn’t enjoyed in some time.
Notably absent from the list of countries where the economic crunch is rending the social fabric is the good ole US of A, a state with the greatest level of economic inequality in the wealthy world.
Outside of a few scattered and quickly contained protests, the citizens of the U.S. — a country born of revolution, but with an elite that’s been terrified of that legacy since immediately after its founding — have been calm, despite opinion polls showing that Americans are more dissatisfied with the direction in which the country has been headed since they began measuring such things.
It’s a baffling disconnect, considering that real wages for all but the top 10 percent of the economic pile haven’t increased in 35 years.
It’s more bizarre still when you consider that while European governments have handled their own bailouts relatively transparently, the U.S. government has doled out close to $10 trillion in bailouts, loan guarantees and fiscal stimulus — if there were a million-dollar bill, that would be a stack of 10 million of them — with a stunning lack of oversight or accountability.
Even the congressional commission charged with overseeing key parts of the banking bailout can’t get answers to basic questions like “who’s getting what?”
Americans are rightfully angry about that state of affairs, but with a few small exceptions, quietly so. Why? It depends on whom you ask.
In a 2006 interview with Harper’s, Barack Obama shared a subtle, but rather fundamental observation about America’s political culture: “Since the founding,” he said, “the American political tradition has been reformist, not revolutionary.” If there is to be positive change, Obama has argued, it must be gradual; “brick by brick,” as he put it in one of his final campaign speeches.
Mark Ames, author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion — From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond, argues that Americans have been beaten down to a degree that they’re now a pacified population, largely willing to accept any economic outrage its elites impose on them.
In a 2005 interview with AlterNet, Ames said the “slave mentality” is stronger in the U.S. than elsewhere, “in part because no other country on earth has so successfully crushed every internal rebellion.”
Slaves in the Caribbean for example rebelled a lot more because their oppressors weren’t as good at oppressing as Americans were. America has put down every rebellion, brutally, from the Whiskey Rebellion to the Confederate rebellion to the proletarian rebellions, Black Panthers, white militias … you name it. This creates a powerful slave mentality, a sense that it’s pointless to rebel.
Anyone who has witnessed the brutal police riots that have become so common since the infamous “Battle in Seattle” protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999 can tell you there’s some merit to the argument.
It’s also the case that European societies tend to be more homogenous than the mishmash of tribes we call the United States. Whereas Americans are divided by religion, region, ethnicity, urban-rural tensions and all the other trappings of the “culture wars,” the primary split in most European countries is class.
Thomas Frank argued eloquently in What’s the Matter With Kansas that those wedge social issues that the American right nurtures with such care obscure the fundamental differences between the rich and poor, the powerful and the disenfranchised.
Indeed, any hint of discussion of economic inequality in the U.S. is shot down with cries of “class warfare” — exactly what is playing out in the streets of much of the world today.
As the crisis deepens, as virtually every analyst predicts it will, that may well change. As The Nation’s Bill Greider told Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, “you can’t do this to people year after year — that is, upturn their lives, take away what they thought they had earned, and so forth and so on, without provoking rather intense political reactions. … We’re just, just beginning to see a few bubbles like that around this country. I don’t say we’re going to have riots, but I think … people, out of their own distress and anger, will organize their own politics, and they will make themselves seen and heard around this country.”
Stay tuned.
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China outraged after India bans all toy imports
India has banned all imports of toys from China for six months, in the first major example of protectionism following the financial crisis.
By Malcolm Moore in Shanghai
The ban came amid growing global tensions about protectionism, with Europe and Canada warning the US about its determination to get consumers to buy American goods and wildcats strikes in the UK over the use of foreign workers.
State media reported that the Chinese government is likely to appeal to the World Trade Organisation to reverse the ban, which is the latest blow to China’s beleaguered toy industry.
China makes three-quarters of the world’s toys, but a combination of safety fears and the global slowdown has hit the sector hard. By the end of last year, the number of companies exporting toys from China had halved to just over 4,000. Tens of thousands of factories have been shuttered, according to toy trade associations in Hong Kong.
India imports around half of its toys from China and its market is worth around Pounds350 million a year. The Indian government gave no reason for the ban, although Raj Kumar, the president of the Toy Association of India, said politicians were acting in the interests of the economy and consumer safety.
In December, the Chinese government raised the export tax rebates for Chinese toys by 14 per cent in a bid to help manufacturers. According to Mr Kumar, the rebates put Indian toy manufacturers at an unfair disadvantage.
“The ban cannot hold water. The Indian side is doomed to lose in the court if the Chinese government appealed to the WTO Dispute Settlement Body,” said Fu Donghui, managing director of Allbright Law Firm Beijing, and a legal expert on trade issues.
“In the past, the Chinese government always kept silent. But the situation is changing, and resorting to the WTO is the right choice to prevent the trade partners from abusing the WTO regulations,” he told the state-owned China Daily newspaper.
Some commentators suggested that the ban might be a rebuff to China for its close relationship with Pakistan. Indian politicians were outraged at the end of January when Shah Mahmood Qureshi, the Pakistani foreign minister, announced that he had given China carte blanche to negotiate on Pakistan’s behalf with regard to the terrorist attacks in Mumbai.
The Pakistani foreign minister said that he had told He Yafei, a Chinese special envoy, to “go to Delhi and you have a blank cheque from us”. He added that Pakistan was ready to do whatever China suggests.
A spokesman for India’s Congress party said there was “no scope for mediation or intervention by anyone else” in negotiations between the two countries.
In 2007, the world’s leading toymaker, Mattel, recalled over 21 million Chinese-made toys because of fears of poisoning from their lead paint.
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Britain ‘headed’ for deepest slump
in 60 years
As consumers cut their spending on a scale not seen for decades, Britain will enter the gravest recession of the post-war era
The sharpest plunge in consumer spending since the Second World War will drive Britain this year into its deepest economic slump for 60 years, according to the country’s leading economic research institute.
The headlong retreat from the high street by consumers is set to reach a scale not seen for generations, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research says in a bleak assessment of Britain’s worsening prospects.
Consumer spending this year is set to plummet by 3.8 per cent – double the scale of a previous record annual drop, of 1.6 per cent, suffered in 1991, the institute forecasts.
The grim trend, already clear from the waning fortunes of troubled retailers, marks a sharp reversal after a decade in which consumer spending climbed at an average of almost 3.5 per cent a year.
The institute throws its weight behind a growing number of forecasts that Britain faces its gravest recession in the postwar era.
It expects the UK economy to shrink this year by 2.5 per cent and it concludes that the decline would be even steeper, at 2.7 per cent, but for the spillover into Britain from President Obama’s planned $800billion (£558billion) stimulus measures in the United States.
The plunge in consumer spending predicted by the institute comes des-pite an expected resurgence in Britons’ earnings growth, with real disposable incomes of households tipped to rise by 3.3 per cent this year, after an anaemic 1.5 per cent increase last year.
The boost to British competitiveness from a weak pound will offer a rare glimmer of hope, helping UK exports to rise by 2.4 per cent next year and pave the way for a recovery, the institute finds.
However, the first glimmerings of recovery will not emerge until this winter, with GDP set to keep falling through the third quarter.
The depth of the recession is set to take a big toll on the Government’s finances, the report adds.
The Chancellor will be forced to borrow £128billion in 2009-10, £10billion more than his £118billion projection, and up to £140billion in the 2010-11 financial year.
It says that after excluding the cost of financial sector rescues such as Northern Rock, national debt will be 70 per cent of GDP by 2012-13, against the Treasury’s 57 per cent forecast and almost double the 36.5 per cent for 2007.
— The Bank of England has lent £185 billion to Britain’s banks under its special liquidity scheme, it has revealed. The scheme, under which banks and building societies were allowed to swap illiquid assets for UK Treasury Bills, closed last Friday. It was launched last April. Describing use of the scheme as having been “considerable”, the Bank said that 32 banks and building societies had accessed the scheme — more than four fifths of those able to do so. The Bank said that they had swapped assets worth some £287 billion for UK Treasury Bills, but said that its valuation of these securities, as of last Friday, was only £242 billion.
