Monday 31 March 2008

A third American war crime in the making


By Paul Craig Roberts

The US Congress, the US media, the American people, and the United Nations, are looking the other way as Cheney prepares his attack on Iran.

If only America had an independent media and an opposition party. If there were a shred of integrity left in American political life, perhaps a third act of naked aggression -- a third war crime under the Nuremberg standard -- by the Bush Regime could be prevented.

On March 30, the Russian News & Information Agency, Novosti, cited “a high-ranking security source: 'The latest military intelligence data point to heightened US military preparations for both an air and ground operation against Iran.'”

According to Novosti, Russian Colonel General Leonid Ivashov said “that the Pentagon is planning to deliver a massive air strike on Iran’s military infrastructure in the near future.”

The chief of Russia’s general staff, Yuri Baluyevsky, said last November that Russia was beefing up its military in response to US aggression, but that the Russian military is not “obliged to defend the world from the evil Americans.”

On March 29, Chris Floyd cited a report by the Saudi Arabian newspaper Okaz, which was picked up by the German news service, DPA. The Saudi newspaper reported on March 22, the day following Cheney’s visit with the kingdom’s rulers, that the Saudi Shura Council is preparing “national plans to deal with any sudden nuclear and radioactive hazards that may affect the kingdom following experts’ warnings of possible attacks on Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactors.”

And Admiral William “there will be no attack on Iran on my watch” Fallon has been removed as US chief of Central Command, thus clearing the way for Cheney’s planned attack on Iran.

The Iranians don’t seem to believe it, despite the dispatch of US nuclear submarines and another aircraft carrier attack group to the Persian Gulf. To counter any Iranian missiles launched in response to an attack, the US is deploying anti-missile defenses to protect US bases and Saudi oil fields.

Two massive failures by the American media, the Democratic Party, and the American people have paved the way for Cheney’s long planned attack on Iran. One failure is the lack of skepticism about the US government’s explanation of 9/11. The other failure is the Democrats’ refusal to begin impeachment proceedings against President Bush for lying to the Congress, the American people, and the world and launching an invasion of Iraq based on deception and fabricated evidence.

If an American president can start a war exactly as Adolf Hitler did with pure lies and not be held accountable, he can get away with anything. And Bush and his evil regime have.

Hitler launched World War II with his invasion of Poland after staging a “Polish attack” on a German radio station. On the night of August 31, 1939, a group of Nazis disguised in Polish uniforms seized a radio station in Germany. Hitler announced that “last night Polish troops crossed the frontier and attacked Germany,” a claim no more true than the Bush Regime’s claim that “Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.” Hitler’s lie failed, because his invasion of Poland, which began the next day allegedly in reprisal for the Polish attack, had obviously been planned for many months.

Iran is a beautiful and developed country. It is an ancient civilization. It has attacked no one. Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. Iran is permitted by the treaty to have a nuclear energy program. The Bush Regime’s case against Iran is based on the Bush Regime’s desire to deny Iran its rights under the treaty.

The International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors have repeatedly reported that they have found no evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. Despite all the disinformation from US Gen. Petraeus and other Bush Regime military lackeys, Iran is not arming the Iraqis who are resisting the American occupation.

If Iran were arming insurgents, the insurgents would have two weapons that would neutralize the US advantage in the Iraqi conflict: missiles to knock down US helicopter gunships and rocket-propelled grenades that knock out American tanks. The insurgents do not have these weapons and must construct clumsy anti-tank weapons out of artillery shells. The insurgents are helpless against US air power and cannot mass forces to take on the American troops.

Indiscriminate American violence has reduced Iraq to rubble. The civilian infrastructure is essentially destroyed -- electricity, water and sewer systems, medical care and schools. Depleted uranium is everywhere poisoning everyone, including US troops. There is no economy, and half or more of Iraqis are unemployed. Literally no Iraqi family has escaped an injury or a death as a consequence of the US invasion. Millions of Iraqis have become displaced persons. A developed country with a professional middle class has been destroyed because of lies told by the president and vice president of the US. The Bush Regime’s lies are echoed by a neoconservative media, and have gone unchallenged by the opposition party and an indifferent American public.

In Afghanistan, death and destruction rains on even the smallest village from the air. America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are wars against the civilian populations.

Just as the world could not believe Hitler’s next horror and thus was always unprepared, the Iranians despite all the evidence cannot believe that even the Great Satan would gratuitously attack Iran based on nothing but lies about nonexistent nuclear weapons.

Iran’s only chance would be to strike before the US delivers the first blow. Instead of using its missiles to take out the Saudi oil fields and to sink the US aircraft carriers, instead of closing the Strait of Hormuz, instead of arming the Iraqi Shi’ites and moving them to insurgency, Iran is perched like a sitting duck in denial even as the US and its Iraqi puppet, Maliki, move to eliminate Al Sadr’s Iraqi Shi’ite militia in order to avoid supply disruptions and a Shi’ite rebellion in Iraq when the US attack on Iran comes.

It is important to emphasize that Iran is making no moves toward war. Having tamed, blackmailed, and purchased Congress, the US media, and US allies and puppets, Cheney might delight in the arrogance with which he can now attack Iran free of any restraint or fabricated provocation. On the other hand, he might cover himself by orchestrating an “Iranian provocation” to justify his attack as a response. But like Hitler’s planned attack against Poland, Cheney’s attack on Iran has long been in the works.

On March 29 the Associated Press reported that Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi “poured contempt on fellow Arab leaders” at the Arab summit that day. Gadhafi told the Arab “leaders,” many of whom are on the American payroll, that their American masters would turn on them all, just as America turned on Saddam Hussein after using him to fight a proxy war against Iran.

Saddam had once been an ally of Washington, Gadhafi reminded the Arabs, “but they sold him out.” Gadhafi told the American puppets, “Your turn is next.”

Gadhafi asked, “Where is the Arabs’ dignity, their future, their very existence?” If Arabs remain disunited, he predicted, “they will turn themselves into protectorates. They will be marginalized and turn into garbage dumps.”

Indeed, it is this disunity that permits the US to bomb and murder at will in the Middle East.

Full story/Permalink

Friday 21 March 2008

The Sloppy Science of Global Warming

Northern Canada iceberg photo: iStockphoto

While a politician might be faulted for pushing a particular agenda that serves his own purposes, who can fault the impartial scientist who warns us of an imminent global-warming Armageddon? After all, the practice of science is an unbiased search for the truth, right? The scientists have spoken on global warming. There is no more debate. But let me play devil’s advocate. Just how good is the science underpinning the theory of manmade global warming? My answer might surprise you: it is 10 miles wide, but only 2 inches deep.

Contrary to what you have been led to believe, there is no solid published evidence that has ruled out a natural cause for most of our recent warmth – not one peer-reviewed paper. The reason: our measurements of global weather on decadal time scales are insufficient to reject such a possibility. For instance, the last 30 years of the strongest warming could have been caused by a very slight change in cloudiness. What might have caused such a change? Well, one possibility is the sudden shift to more frequent El Niño events (and fewer La Niña events) since the 1970s. That shift also coincided with a change in another climate index, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

The associated warming in Alaska was sudden, and at the same time we just happened to start satellite monitoring of Arctic sea ice. Coincidences do happen, you know…that’s why we have a word for them.

We make a big deal out of the “unprecedented” 2007 opening of the Northwest Passage as summertime sea ice in the Arctic Ocean gradually receded, yet the very warm 1930s in the Arctic also led to the Passage opening in the 1940s. Of course, we had no satellites to measure the sea ice back then.

So, since we cannot explore the possibility of a natural source for some of our warming, due to a lack of data, scientists instead explore what we have measured: manmade greenhouse gas emissions. And after making some important assumptions about how clouds and water vapor (the main greenhouse components of the atmosphere) respond to the extra carbon dioxide, scientists can explain all of the recent warming.

Never mind that there is some evidence indicating that it was just as warm during the Medieval Warm Period. While climate change used to be natural, apparently now it is entirely manmade. But a few of us out there in the climate research community are rattling our cages. In the August 2007 Geophysical Research Letters, my colleagues and I published some satellite evidence for a natural cooling mechanism in the tropics that was not thought to exist. Called the “Infrared Iris” effect, it was originally hypothesized by Prof. Richard Lindzen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

By analyzing six years of data from a variety of satellites and satellite sensors, we found that when the tropical atmosphere heats up due to enhanced rainfall activity, the rain systems there produce less cirrus cloudiness, allowing more infrared energy to escape to space. The combination of enhanced solar reflection and infrared cooling by the rain systems was so strong that, if such a mechanism is acting upon the warming tendency from increasing carbon dioxide, it will reduce manmade global warming by the end of this century to a small fraction of a degree. Our results suggest a “low sensitivity” for the climate system.

What, you might wonder, has been the media and science community response to our work? Absolute silence. No doubt the few scientists who are aware of it consider it interesting, but not relevant to global warming. You see, only the evidence that supports the theory of manmade global warming is relevant these days.

The behavior we observed in the real climate system is exactly opposite to how computerized climate models that predict substantial global warming have been programmed to behave. We are still waiting to see if any of those models are adjusted to behave like the real climate system in this regard.

And our evidence against a “sensitive” climate system does not end there. In another study (conditionally accepted for publication in the Journal of Climate) we show that previously published evidence for a sensitive climate system is partly due to a misinterpretation of our observations of climate variability. For example, when low cloud cover is observed to decrease with warming, this has been interpreted as the clouds responding to the warming in such a way that then amplifies it. This is called “positive feedback,” which translates into high climate sensitivity.

But what if the decrease in low clouds were the cause, rather than the effect, of the warming? While this might sound like too simple a mistake to make, it is surprisingly difficult to separate cause and effect in the climate system. And it turns out that any such non-feedback process that causes a temperature change will always look like positive feedback. Something as simple as daily random cloud variations can cause long-term temperature variability that looks like positive feedback, even if in reality there is negative feedback operating.

The fact is that so much money and effort have gone into the theory that mankind is 100 percent responsible for climate change that it now seems too late to turn back. Entire careers (including my own) depend upon the threat of global warming. Politicians have also jumped aboard the Global Warming Express, and this train has no brakes.

While it takes only one scientific paper to disprove a theory, I fear that no amount of evidence will be able to counter what everyone now considers true. If tomorrow the theory of manmade global warming were proved to be a false alarm, one might reasonably expect a collective sigh of relief from everyone. But instead there would be cries of anguish from vested interests.

About the only thing that might cause global warming hysteria to end will be a prolonged period of cooling…or at least, very little warming. We have now had at least six years without warming, and no one really knows what the future will bring. And if warming does indeed end, I predict that there will be no announcement from the scientific community that they were wrong. There will simply be silence. The issue will slowly die away as Congress reduces funding for climate change research.

Oh, there will still be some diehards who will continue to claim that warming will resume at any time. And many will believe them. Some folks will always view our world as a fragile, precariously balanced system rather than a dynamic, resilient one. In such a world-view, any manmade disturbance is by definition bad. Forests can change our climate, but people aren’t allowed to.

It is unfortunate that our next generation of researchers and teachers is being taught to trust emotions over empirical evidence. Polar bears are much more exciting than the careful analysis of data. Social and political ends increasingly trump all other considerations. Science that is not politically correct is becoming increasingly difficult to publish. Even science reporting has become more sensationalist in recent years.

I am not claiming that all of our recent warming is natural. But the extreme reluctance for most scientists to even entertain the possibility that some of it might be natural suggests to me that climate research has become corrupted. I fear that the sloppy practice of climate change science will damage our discipline for a long time to come.

Roy W. Spencer is a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. His book, Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor, will be published this month. Full story/Permalink

Wednesday 19 March 2008

5,000 YEARS OF CULTURE STOLEN FROM BAGHDAD

(source) When I saw the first photos of Baghdad being bombed during the "shock and awe" phase of the illegal 2003 attack against Iraq, I was saddened. For millennia, the city had endured wars, occupations, plundering, natural disasters, and liberations. This time, however, it was different. I knew Baghdad would be changed in a despicable way that would take decades of recovery to become the city it once was.

Baghdad is the city where commerce was developed for humankind thousands of years ago. It offered a monetary system long before other cultures.

Science flourished in the Baghdad of 5,000 years ago. For instance, archaeologists have discovered star charts from that era showing Jupiter with four moons. No human being has eyesight keen enough to see one of Jupiter’s moons without a telescope. The scientists of the day invented the telescope, only to see it re-invented by Galileo more than four thousand years later.

Archaeologists have also uncovered the use of electricity in Baghdad 5,000 years ago. The objects generated electricity to use in plating gold coins. The Chinese at this time also used crude forms of electricity. So much for Benjamin Franklin.

Arts and sports flourished in ancient Baghdad. In fact, the oldest artifact depicting wrestling was discovered at Kayafaje, near Baghdad, by a team of archaeologists from the University of Pennsylvania in 1938. Archaeologists have concluded that the cast bronze figurine was created by the Sumerian culture of the time and has been judged to be over 5,000 years old. Many people think that ancient Greece developed wrestling, but this finding shows it was popular in Iraq thousands of years prior to the Greek’s participation in the sport.

During the Dark Ages of Europe, when all scientific thought was eliminated for centuries, Baghdad continued to excel in science and engineering. When the Dark Ages finally broke and Europe once again began to exercise science, it looked to Baghdad.

Kingdoms, authoritarian regimes and republics have come and gone in Baghdad, but it still was the jewel of Arab cities. Iran bombed Baghdad during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, yet Baghdad bounced back. In 1991, the city was under constant bombardment by U.S. forces and the infrastructure was destroyed, all to be repaired within weeks of the cessation of hostilities. A 13-year-embargo caused the degradation of many buildings and facilities in Baghdad from 1990-2003, yet it still was the jewel of Arab cities. Despite the sanctions, tourists went to Baghdad and the city hosted international business exhibitions. It was a little ragged around the edges, yet it was still Baghdad.

Thousands of years of prestige came to a halt in April 2003. When American troops entered Baghdad, they went into a city that had been mercilessly bombed and attacked. However, it was the introduction of the troops that degraded and changed the city forever.

Within weeks, concrete barriers were erected to protect the invaders. Today, they are all over Baghdad and make the Berlin Wall pale in comparison. These walls separate families, neighborhoods, businesses and friends.

U.S. military vehicles abound. Checkpoints that Iraqi citizens have to encounter for hours at a time are common.

Never, under any Iraqi leadership, had Baghdad suffered the ongoing violence that occurs daily in the city. Kidnapping is now a major industry. The kidnappers have set standard prices for their wares: a couple of hundred dollars for a kidnapped person from a poor family to a few thousand dollars for one from a middle or upper class family. Kidnapping was unheard of under the previous regimes in Baghdad.

The city is laden with holes and rubble from military confrontations. The Iraqi resistance can claim responsibility for a small amount of damage, but the overwhelming majority of destruction comes from U.S. forces who use modern, large weapons in a disproportionate manner in fighting the freedom fighters.

American officials as well as their stooge Iraqi appointees can not leave their highly-walled compounds for fear of death. Not one would last minutes on the streets of Baghdad. They live in another world.

I can’t imagine a western city, such as London or Paris or New York having to live under such conditions after years of notoriety as leading cultural metropolises. I can’t imagine an enemy with so little regard to culture to allow that to happen. Even in Nazi-occupied Paris of World War II nothing occurred to match the demise of Baghdad. German soldiers and Parisian inhabitants co-existed, albeit not on friendly terms. The Germans did not think of leveling the city or cordoning it off into segregated areas. It may have been occupied by an outside force, but it was still Paris.

Baghdad today is a basket case. I have spoken to or written to various Baghdad residents, past and present, to get their assessment. Some are unrepentant Ba’athists; some opposed the Saddam Hussein regime; and some were neutral, going on with life and considering whatever government in power to be the ruling entity.

They all agreed on one aspect, however: the loss of the city of Baghdad. They all agreed that this was different. They all agreed that Baghdad’s psyche, not just buildings and utilities, was ruined this time. There was a morose feeling with all that was never apparent before.

Kids are being killed in crossfire. Civilians are being killed by trigger-happy U.S. soldiers. Nobody is safe and the public is now showing a degree of numbness to the situation. Many people now walk in dangerous areas without thinking about danger. They assume that if they get killed, so be it. They have no say in the matter.

There is little to be happy about today in Baghdad. Citizens are used to having little or no electricity. They are used to learning a neighbor’s family member(s) have been killed by U.S. fire while walking on the street or sitting on a rooftop. They are used to the squalor that was never a part of Baghdad. They are used to the ever-growing problem of hard drug use in Baghdad. They are used to the massive concrete barriers in their city. They do not accept these things, but they are used to them because they can do nothing to stop the rot.

It is sad to see that there is one occurrence that brings happiness and joy to Baghdad residents: the killing or maiming of American troops. Decent human beings have been turned into bloodthirsty creatures who dance with glee over burning U.S. bodies and vehicles. These are the same people who, before March 2003, would have been aghast at their current actions. These are formerly law-abiding and hard-working citizens. Today, they are people mostly without jobs and totally without hope. An attack on U.S. forces is all they have to look forward to in life. When you see the delighted looks on their faces, one would not be remiss in thinking that Iraq had just won the World Cup. Or an Iraqi had just won a Nobel Peace Prize. Or an Iraqi had just found a cure for cancer. These public showings of happiness are not indications of any positive event to which human beings pay homage. They are for the destruction of other human beings.

Baghdad cries today. It has been defeated. It was destroyed by the real forces of evil in this world — bigotry, xenophobia, ethnocentrism, greed and deceit — not those entities whom the U.S. president has designated as evil. Bush throws around the word "evil" with ease and frequency, but he is the number one practitioner of evil in the world. No one else comes close.

Full story/Permalink

McCain...Manchurian Candidate à la Rothschild

From Elmer Lane

(source)

Under the headline "Lord Rothschild Backs John McCain"

The Washington Post(March 15, 2008) informs us that "Sen. John McCain plans at least one campaign event on his week-long congressional trip to Europe and the Middle East: a March 20 fundraiser in London. An invitation sent out by the campaign says the luncheon will be held at Spencer House, St. James's Place, 'by kind permission of Lord Rothschild OM GBE and the Hon Nathaniel Rothschild.' Tickets to the invitation-only event cost $1,000 to $2,300. Attire is listed as "lounge suits.

How innocent is that?

"The time to buy is when blood is running in the streets." This remark was made by an earlier Nathan Rothschild, the one who reduced the Bank of Englands gold reserves by 100,000 pounds by cahsing hundreds of small notes, almost sinking that institution because the bank would not cash his one of his larger notes. You will note that as blood has been running in Wall Street Goldman Sachs has been investing billions in its hedge funds, paying off %16 percent in just one month, "contrarian-like-a-fox" profitably buying up selected assets as share prices tumble. But the Rothschilds are also playing this game with their hedge funds. Are they placing bets which McCain will turn into sure things? Consider what is behind that question:


"Nathaniel Philip Rothschild (b. 1971), British investor, co-chairman of Atticus Capital. More than 200 years after Mayer Amschel Rothschild founded the family dynasty that offered discreet counsel and investment wisdom to kings, queens, emperors and industrial titans, his 35-year-old direct descendant, Nathaniel, has emerged as a kingmaker in his own right and an investor who some say may become the richest Rothschild of them all. In five short years, the man in line to be the fifth Baron Rothschild became close to becoming a billionaire through a web of private equity investments in Ukraine, Eastern Europe and most significant, his partnership stake in Atticus Capital, the fast-growing $14 billion hedge fund. Rothschild began his career in 1994 at Lazard Brothers Asset Management in London, before joining Gleacher Partners, the New York-based mergers and acquisitions (M&A) advisory firm founded by Eric Gleacher, former head of M&A at Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers. Rothschild is partner and co-chairman of Atticus Capital LLC, an international investment management firm established in 1995, that has offices in New York and London. Mr. Rothschild is also a director of RIT Capital Partners plc, and a director of The Rothschild Foundation. Rothschild is a member of the Belfer Center's International Council at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and the International Advisory Council of the Brookings Institution. He is also a member of the International Advisory Board of the Barrick Gold Corporation. Mr. Rothschild was nominated as a "Young Global Leader" by the World Economic Forum in 2005. Among the top money makers of the world almost all of the money coming from earnings of his investment in Atticus Capital hedge fund. He is partner and co-chairman of Atticus. In addition to his responsibilities at Atticus, Rothschild is director of RIT Capital Partners, his father's publicly traded U.K. investment trust. He is also director of JNR Ltd. -- the initials stand for Jacob and Nathaniel Rothschild -- a merchant banking boutique that specializes in emerging markets. Like his forebears, Nathaniel Rothschild prefers that his influence remain unseen. Mr. Rothschild is a principal adviser to Oleg Deripaska, one of the richest oligarchs in Russia and the owner of the aluminum giant Rusal, which recently merged with two other companies to create the world's largest aluminum company. Mr. Rothschild received no public credit despite having played a crucial role in getting the deal done.


"Lord Jacob Rothschild, OM GBE was born Nathaniel Charles Jacob Rothschild, the fourth Baron Rothschild. The 78 year old merchant banker is President of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, an organization dedicated to cooperation in research, analysis and policy planning on issues affecting Jewish life worldwide. He is head of the English branch of the Rothschild family and chairman of RIT Capital Partners plc. Lord Rothschild is a member of the board of trustees of the Open Russia Foundation and serves as chairman of Yad Hanadiv, the Rothschild foundation which built and handed over to the State of Israel the buildings for both the Knesset and the Supreme Court. He is also Chairman of Rothschild Investment Trust (now RIT Capital Partners plc), an investment trust listed on the London Stock Exchange. He is a shareholder in Rothschild Continuation Holdings, the Swiss-based holding company for the Rothschild interests which has positions in many of the family businesses, including the bank N M Rothschild & Sons. From his headquarters in St James's Place in London, Jacob Rothschild has cultivated an influential set of clients, business associates and friends who have extended his interests far beyond the normal scope of a banker. He maintains strong personal and business links with Henry Kissinger. His country estate has been a regular venue for visiting heads of state including Bill Clinton. He hosted the European Economic Round Table conference in 2002, attended by such figures as James Wolfensohn, former president of the World Bank, Nicky Oppenheimer, Warren Buffett and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"Forbes magazine poses lower ranking billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett as the richest men in the World. Retired management consultant Gaylon Ross Sr, author of Who's Who of the Global Elite, has been tipped from a private source that the combined wealth of the Rockefeller family in 1998 was approx (US) $11 trillion and the Rothschilds (U.S.) $100 trillion. A recent article in the London Financial Times indicates why it is impossible to gain an accurate estimate of the wealth of the trillionaire bankers. Discussing the sale of Evelyn Rothschild's stake in Rothschild Continuation Holdings, it states: ...[this] requires agreement on the valuation of privately held assets whose value has never been tested in a public market. Most of these assets are held in a complex network of tax-efficient structures around the World. The power of the Rothschild family was evidenced on 24 Sept 2002 when a helicopter touched down on the lawn of Waddedson Manor, their ancestral home in Buckinghamshire, England. Out of the helicopter strode Warren Buffet, - touted as the second richest man in the World but really a lower ranking player- and Arnold Schwarzenegger (the gropinator), at that time a candidate for the Governorship of California. Also in attendance at this two day meeting of the World's most powerful businessmen and financiers hosted by Jacob Rothschild were James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank and Nicky Oppenheimer, chairman of De Beers. Arnold went on to secure the governorship of one of the biggest economies on the planet a year later. That he was initiated into the ruling class in the Rothschilds' English country manor suggests that the centre of gravity of the three hundred trillion dollar cartel is in the U.K. and Europe not the U.S. "

"United Kingdom banker N M Rothschild & Sons Ltd. is one of the last remaining of the great family-controlled banking dynasties established in the 19th century. Dwarfed by its larger, public rivals, Rothschild nonetheless remains a mythical name in the banking world. N M Rothschild provides banking and treasury financing services, treasury metals, and resource banking, including a central position in the world bullion markets, investment banking services (together with its joint-venture partnership with ABN AMRO), and risk management services. Since the 1990s, N M Rothschild has been taking steps to consolidate the operations of the various and far-flung Rothschild financial operations, most of which operate as subsidiaries under the Rothschild family-controlled Rothschild Continuation Holdings AG, established in Switzerland in the early part of the 20th century to protect the family's ownership of its banking empire. N M Rothschild has also been working in close cooperation with the--independent--Paris branch of Rothschild banking interests, Rothschild & Cie, led by David de Rothschild, who also functions as deputy chairman of N M Rothschild and is the heir-apparent to chairman and long-time leader Evelyn de Rothschild.

"N M Rothschild found plenty of work in the great wave of British privatization that swept the country during the late 1980s. The company was involved in a number of the country's most ambitious privatization programs, including the £5.6 billion privatization of British Gas in 1986, the exit of the British government from British Petroleum in 1987, and the privatization of the United Kingdom's water and sewage industry in 1989. At the same time, N M Rothschild, while remaining true to its family-owned and independent status, nonetheless made moves to establish itself as a globally operating entity capable of competing with the financial industry's heavyweights. As such N M Rothschild bolstered its international presence, consolidating its United States operations under the single Rothschild Inc. entity, based in New York, in 1981 and establishing separate Canadian operations with its Rothschild Canada Inc. subsidiary. The firm also opened offices in Germany and Italy at the end of the decade. During the 1990s, N M Rothschild began making stronger moves to draw together the various elements of the Rothschilds' empire. One of the last of these was the highly successful Paris-based banking arm, Rothschild & Cie., which retained its independent status. This business, led by David de Rothschild, had been created in the mid-1980s as France's banking industry shrugged off the ill-fated nationalization of the country's commercial banking system under the Socialist government in the early 1980s. The former Banque de Rothschild had been nationalized in 1982. Two years later, Baron Guy de Rothschild and son David took the compensation they had received--about 80 million--and started a new investment banking firm, Paris-Orleans Finance. It was not until 1986, however, that the French Rothschilds were granted a new banking license and the right to restore the family's name to their bank, as the French banking industry once again became privatized.
David de Rothschild quickly took the lead in rebuilding Rothschild & Cie, transforming it into a new French financial powerhouse and one of the driving forces behind many of the country's largest business deals through the next decade. When Evelyn de Rothschild began to look toward consolidating the family's banking interests, he tapped David de Rothschild to become N M Rothschild's deputy chairman in 1992, establishing his younger cousin as his heir apparent. That position was reinforced in 1996, when N M Rothschild engaged in a restructuring of its global operations, reorganizing its businesses around five main product lines: resource banking and treasury operations; investment banking; asset management; development capital; and private banking and trust management services. At the same time the Rothschild operations set up a group investment banking committee charged with coordinating the global financial business of the Rothschild empire. David de Rothschild was named as head of the new committee. Also in that year, N M Rothschild established a joint venture with Dutch bank ABN AMRO to compete for contracts in the world's equity markets. By 1999, that venture--ABN AMRO Rothschild--was completing deals worth more than $125 billion per year.



In the late 1990s, N M Rothschild client-intensive approach paid off as the group became an important player in the booming European market for mergers and acquisitions.


The firm took part in such important deals as the launch of EADS, the European aerospace group created from the merger of France's Aerospatiale, Spain's CASA, and Germany's DASA. N M Rothschild was also an advisor on the massive restructuring of Deutsche Telekom, valued at more than $15 billion; the firm also backed England's National Grid Group in its $8.9 billion takeover of Niagara Mohawk Holdings in the United States, while playing a supporting role in the takeover of Mannesmann by Vodaphone, worth more than $200 billion.

"As the company celebrated more than 200 years of operations at the heart of the world's financial markets, N M Rothschild continued to explore new frontiers. In 1999 the company announced its plans to extend the ABN AMRO Rothschild joint venture to cover the lucrative market for initial public offerings in the United States.

"N M Rothschild found plenty of work in the great wave of British privatization that swept the country during the late 1980s. The company was involved in a number of the country's most ambitious privatization programs, including the £5.6 billion privatization of British Gas in 1986, the exit of the British government from British Petroleum in 1987, and the privatization of the United Kingdom's water and sewage industry in 1989. At the same time, N M Rothschild, while remaining true to its family-owned and independent status, nonetheless made moves to establish itself as a globally operating entity capable of competing with the financial industry's heavyweights. As such N M Rothschild bolstered its international presence, consolidating its United States operations under the single Rothschild Inc. entity, based in New York, in 1981 and establishing separate Canadian operations with its Rothschild Canada Inc. subsidiary. The firm also opened offices in Germany and Italy at the end of the decade.

"During the 1990s, N M Rothschild began making stronger moves to draw together the various elements of the Rothschilds' empire. One of the last of these was the highly successful Paris-based banking arm, Rothschild & Cie., which retained its independent status. This business, led by David de Rothschild, had been created in the mid-1980s as France's banking industry shrugged off the ill-fated nationalization of the country's commercial banking system under the Socialist government in the early 1980s. The former Banque de Rothschild had been nationalized in 1982. Two years later, Baron Guy de Rothschild and son David took the compensation they had received--about 80 million--and started a new investment banking firm, Paris-Orleans Finance. It was not until 1986, however, that the French Rothschilds were granted a new banking license and the right to restore the family's name to their bank, as the French banking industry once again became privatized.

"David de Rothschild quickly took the lead in rebuilding Rothschild & Cie, transforming it into a new French financial powerhouse and one of the driving forces behind many of the country's largest business deals through the next decade. When Evelyn de Rothschild began to look toward consolidating the family's banking interests, he tapped David de Rothschild to become N M Rothschild's deputy chairman in 1992, establishing his younger cousin as his heir apparent. That position was reinforced in 1996, when N M Rothschild engaged in a restructuring of its global operations, reorganizing its businesses around five main product lines: resource banking and treasury operations; investment banking; asset management; development capital; and private banking and trust management services. At the same time the Rothschild operations set up a group investment banking committee charged with coordinating the global financial business of the Rothschild empire. David de Rothschild was named as head of the new committee. Also in that year, N M Rothschild established a joint venture with Dutch bank ABN AMRO to compete for contracts in the world's equity markets. By 1999, that venture--ABN AMRO Rothschild--was completing deals worth more than $125 billion per year. In the late 1990s, N M Rothschild client-intensive approach paid off as the group became an important player in the booming European market for mergers and acquisitions. The firm took part in such important deals as the launch of EADS, the European aerospace group created from the merger of France's Aerospatiale, Spain's CASA, and Germany's DASA. N M Rothschild was also an advisor on the massive restructuring of Deutsche Telekom, valued at more than $15 billion; the firm also backed England's National Grid Group in its $8.9 billion takeover of Niagara Mohawk Holdings in the United States, while playing a supporting role in the takeover of Mannesmann by Vodaphone, worth more than $200 billion. As the company celebrated more than 200 years of operations at the heart of the world's financial markets, N M Rothschild continued to explore new frontiers. In 1999 the company announced its plans to extend the ABN AMRO Rothschild joint venture to cover the lucrative market for initial public offerings in the United States.
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Tuesday 18 March 2008

America was conned - who will pay?

The South Sea Bubble ended in riots as trust was lost. Wall Street also duped the public

Larry Elliott, economics editor
The Guardian,


Bear Stearns marks the moment when the global financial crisis went critical. Up until last Friday, it had been possible - just about - to believe that the worst was over and that things were about to get better. That pretence was stripped away when JP Morgan, at the behest of the Federal Reserve, stepped in when the hedge funds pulled the plug on the fifth-biggest US investment bank.

It is now clear that no end is in sight to the turmoil, and the reason for that is that the Fed and the US treasury are no closer to solving the underlying problem than they were eight months ago. The crisis will only end when house prices stop falling and banks stop racking up huge losses on their loans. Doing that, however, will require the US government to intervene directly in the real estate market to end the wave of foreclosures. Ideologically, it is ill-equipped to take that step and, as a result, property prices will fall and the financial meltdown will go on and on.

Ultimately, though, action will be taken because there will be political pressure for it. Indeed, it is somewhat surprising that there is not already rioting in the streets, given the gigantic fraud perpetrated by the financial elite at the expense of ordinary Americans.

The US has just had its weakest period of expansion since the 1950s. Consumption growth has been poor. Investment growth has been modest. Exports have been sluggish. But if you are at the top of the tree, the years since the last recession in 2001 has been a veritable golden age. Salaries for executives have rocketed and profits have soared, because the productivity gains from a growing economy have been disproportionately skewed towards capital.

Patriotic

For ordinary Americans, though, it has been a different story. Real wages have been growing slowly; at just 1.6% a year on average over the latest upswing, well down on the experience of earlier decades. Business, of course, needs consumers to carry on spending in order to make money, so a way had to be found to persuade households to do their patriotic duty. The method chosen was simple. Whip up a colossal housing bubble, convince consumers that it makes sense to borrow money against the rising value of their homes to supplement their meagre real wage growth and watch the profits roll in.

As they did - for a while. Now it's payback time and the mood could get very ugly. Americans, to put it bluntly, have been conned. They have been duped by a bunch of serpent-tongued hucksters who packed up the wagon and made it across the county line before a lynch mob could be formed.

The debate now is not about whether the US is in recession but how deep and long that recession will be. Super-bears have started to say that this is perhaps "The Big One", by which they mean the onset of a new Great Depression. The need to rescue Bear Stearns has done little to still those voices.

As the economics team at HSBC recently pointed out, there has been a "catastrophic breakdown" of trust, and when that has happened in the past - the US in the 1930s, Japan in the 1990s - chucking extra money at the banks in the hope that they will start lending again proves ineffective.

It's not hard to see why trust has become such a rare commodity: Wall Street at the height of the securitisation mania had, in effect, become London at the time of the South Sea Bubble crisis in 1720. Vast quantities of funny paper were changing hands even though those involved in the deals had no idea of their true worth. Nor did they care. Inevitably, now the bubble has burst and the huge Ponzi securitisation scam has been exposed, there has been a reaction. The securitisation market is dead, there is less money sloshing round the system, banks are hoarding their cash.

Having allowed the housing boom to rage out of control for too long and then delaying cuts in interest rates until the housing market was gripped by recessionary forces, the Fed is now trying to make up for lost time with a burst of hyperactivity. It will cut interest rates on Wednesday and keep cutting them: financial markets expect the Fed funds rate to be 1% by the summer, and they are probably right. In most downturns, easier monetary policy does the trick. Lower interest rates make it cheaper to borrow and also change the trade-off between saving and spending. This may not be the usual sort of downturn, however, with consumers going through a period of debt revulsion after the excesses of recent years, even so the consensus is that after two or three quarters of falling output, a slow and sluggish recovery will be under way.

Deflation

These hopes are likely to be dashed, unless there is intervention at home and internationally to tackle the crisis. Domestically, the priority should be to stop homes that have been foreclosed being auctioned on the open market, since by selling them at a 50% discount property prices are driven down. The US does not seem to have learned the lessons from Japan, which encouraged a fire sale of property in the 1990s and was sucked into a classic debt deflation trap as a result. Those who argue, with some force, that it would be counter-productive to intervene in the market because the US needs to work the rottenness out of its system must recognise that the cold turkey option will be very long and painful.

The second form of intervention should be to shore up the dollar, the collapse of which is worrying countries that rely heavily on exports and is the main reason for the surge in commodity prices. Co-ordinated intervention by the major central banks needs to be at the top of the agenda at next month's G7 meeting in Washington, and there could be action even sooner if the dollar continues to tank.

In the longer term, lessons must be learnt from the turmoil. One is that you don't solve the problems of a collapsing bubble by blowing up another, which is what Alan Greenspan did after the dotcom fiasco in 2001 - the most irresponsible behaviour of any central banker in living memory.

The second lesson is that there has to be far stricter regulation not just of the US real estate market but of Wall Street, to prevent the return of irresponsible lending as soon as the recovery is firmly under way. If this is, heaven help us, The Big One, one of the only consolations will be that the repugnance at the orgy of speculation that has sapped the strength of the US economy will put a new New Deal on the political agenda.

But for this to happen there has to be a political response and even though this year's presidential election will be held in the shadow of recession, there appears not to be a potential FDR among the contenders for the White House. Yet if this crisis really does get as bad as some are forecasting, the public will rightly demand more than a slap on the wrist for Wall Street.

This article appeared in the Guardian on Monday March 17 2008 on p30 of the Financial section. Full story/Permalink

END OF NATIONS - EU Takeover & the Lisbon Treaty (MOVIE) *

Wise Up Journal


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We set out to make a video about the pros and cons of the Lisbon Treaty and found out to our horror the lies, manipulations and deceit behind the EU. From MEPs, legal experts and EU researches the true nature of the EU unfolded, how it really operates from behind closed doors and away from prying eyes. We discovered the massive power grab away from citizens and nations to the elites that is being proposed in this treaty. Most shocking of all was how our elected representatives are willingly handing us over to this emerging Totalitarian Superstate by deception , propaganda and outright lies.

This video details how the structures of the EU really operate, what the full significance of the Lisbon Treaty is and how it is the end of Nations within in the EU. MEPs describe their experience in Brussels and how they are undermined by the real power of the unelected and unaccountable Eurocrats who run the organization. How the politicians are working together for their own selfish needs while being used for a bigger agenda.

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Saturday 15 March 2008

GLOBALIZATION HAS FAILED!

Resistance Mounts Against The EU's Lisbon Treaty

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

[PDF version of this article]

Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche is the chairwoman of the German political party Civil Rights Solidarity Movement (BüSo). Her article has been translated from German.

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time."—Abraham Lincoln

Anyone who has been in constant dialogue with the population at booktables and on the street, as the BüSo has been, cannot fail to have noticed a recent turnabout in popular sentiment. Faced with proposals for wage and pension increases which come nowhere near the so-called "perceived" rate of inflation; the self-enrichment of top corporate executives, which can only be described as obscene, as they continue to eliminate tens of thousands of jobs, despite their super-profits; the widespread sense that we're living in a media dictatorship; and the spectacle of a government whose members, on a daily basis, violate their solemn oath to protect the general welfare, whether it be against [the European Union bureaucracy in] Brussels or against financial locusts of every description—there is a growing sense in the population that "enough is enough!"

And even though no one can predict what the world will look like as this year draws to a close, it is nevertheless certain that the financial oligarchy's strategy of reacting to globalization's systemic crisis with the same methods they employed in the 1930s, is not turning out to be as easy as they had hoped. It remains an open question whether the next U.S. President will respond to the world economic and financial crisis with the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt, or will instead impose the recipes of Mussolini and of Hjalmar Schacht. And it equally is undecided whether Europe will be transformed into an oligarchical dictatorship with the Lisbon Treaty, or into a Europe of the Fatherlands, of sovereign nation-states.

Hillary Clinton's primary election victories, especially in Texas and Ohio, have ensured that she will remain in the race all the way to the Democratic Party Convention at the end of August. And leading up to the decisive April 22 primary in Pennsylvania, the Rezko-Auchi scandal and the "Obama trial" in Chicago will have dashed Obama's election prospects. And by that point, the disintegration of the international financial system will have reached new hurricane levels, and will demonstrate conclusively that Obama has nothing substantial to offer for solving the systemic crisis, and that Hillary Clinton is the only candidate so far, who has been addressing at least some aspects of the crisis, such as the mortgage crisis, and has been calling for a moratorium on home foreclosures.

But the danger of a fascist resolution in the U.S.A. is by no means over. In the wake of Clinton's latest victories, Michael Bloomberg is no longer considering running as an independent candidate, but instead he is using his billions to ramp up the pressure to establish himself as Wall Street's man for Republican Vice Presidential candidate—a new Dick Cheney for a future President McCain, who, even now, is not in good health.

'Stealth Bomber' Lisbon Treaty?

Meanwhile, in Europe, governments' attempts to smuggle through the Lisbon Treaty as a sort of stealth bomber, under the noses of the population, in order to abolish democracy covertly and without the population's consent, are meeting growing resistance. In Ireland, where a referendum is set to be held in late May, polls indicate that only 26% of Irish citizens favor the EU treaty. In other European countries, ever greater numbers of people who learn about this, are in a state of mounting rage against their governments' blatant deception maneuvers. It could even turn out that Europe's governments, with their peasant-sly strategy, have chosen the worst of all possible options for them, and will wind up bringing Nemesis down upon them.

The hijinks around the Treaty would be a total farce, were it not for the fact that it has very real and tragic consequences for the citizens concerned. In Berlin, Hamburg, and Hesse, Germany's parties continue to play their black-green and red-red-green sand-castle games, while on the federal level, they have illegally transferred to Brussels 86% of the sovereignty which voters entrusted to their representatives—for that is the percentage of legislative initiatives which have been coming straight from Brussels. And so, if the remaining 14% is given away by the Lisbon Treaty, why should anyone care who makes a coalition with whom? Cynics point out that, as expected, the only right which the members of parliament will not give away, is their right to increase their own salaries.

The next time Frau Merkel starts lecturing foreign heads of state about a lack of democracy and violation of human rights in their countries, as she has already done with Russia, China, and Zimbabwe, international observers would do well to recall that Frau Merkel, too, has a little duck's foot, as Heinrich Heine described in his poem "Waldeinsamkeit."[1] And the name of her little duck's foot is: democracy deficit!

It is equally scandalous that the government still refuses to admit that we're in the final phase of a systemic collapse, and that they have done absolutely nothing to shield the population from its ravages, nor have they taken any initiatives to overcome the crisis. Apparently they feel they can comfortably acquiesce, now that they have ceded their monetary sovereignty to the European Central Bank. Fat chance: European Central Bank (ECB) President Trichet has just now decided that, in light of exploding inflation rates, the euro should continue to soar upward without restriction—while European exports collapse along with it. Because the reality is that neither Trichet, nor Europe's governments, has the slightest idea what to do!

Inflation Dynamite

The greatest factor in the turnabout within the majority of the population is, without a doubt, the skyrocketing prices of food, home heating, and gasoline. The depreciation of the value of money since the introduction of the "teuro"[2] has continued without letup, and in many places people have to pay the same sum in euros which they previously had to pay in deutschemarks. But now, on top of this, since the outbreak of the global crisis last July, we have had to deal with spiralling inflation. Prices for milk and grain products, for example, increased by 20-40% between September and December of last year, while raw materials prices have risen 15.1% since January—the greatest increase since the Commodity Research Bureau Spot Index was started in 1956! The price of gold is hovering just below the $1,000 mark, while oil is at $103 a barrel.

Since 56% of all households in Germany must spend their entire income on basic living expenses, the actual inflation rate for them must be more like 10-20%, as opposed to the official 3% inflation rate. And as for poorer families which must spend most of their income on food, rent, and transportation alone, this means that they no longer have enough for healthy eating. Even the Wiesbadener Kurier—not exactly a paragon of social conscience—devoted an entire page to the specter of inflation, and reminded its readers that the "black decade" of the 1920s left especially the middle class and small businessmen destitute, and that inflation brought fatal consequences, smoothing the way for the National Socialists.

The fact that we have once again arrived at that same point, is shown by a new study by the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), which reports that the number of households with median income has shrunk over the past seven years from 62.3% to 54.1%. The number of households with lower income (less than 70% of the median) has meanwhile grown from 18.9% to 25.4%, while the share of households with high income (over 150% of median income) has grown from 18.8% to 20.5%. This means that over the past seven years, 5 million people have "dropped out" of the middle class, and one-fourth of all households are poor, or have a meager income.

So, if the public service trade unions refuse to be bought off with wage increase offers that are significantly lower than the real rate of inflation, they can hardly be blamed for causing the increase in inflation, as the EU Commission and the ECB have been trying to convince them, but rather they are simply attempting to defend themselves against a massive reduction in their members' living standards. And so, it looks like we're in for an uncontrollable strike wave here in Europe, based on all-too-justified demands.

Such strikes, however, will succeed only if their leaders raise their eyes above the edges of their dinner plates, and—as the German Trade Union Federation did in the 1930s, with its Woytinsky-Tarnow-Baade Plan[3]—they concentrate on the causes of the economic crisis, and how to overcome it.

Significantly, China's government appears to be more concerned with its citizens' well-being than people are in Berlin, because the Chinese are at least acknowledging the extent of the crisis. At a press conference, Ma Kai, Minister of the State Development and Reform Commission, along with People's Bank of China Governor Zhouo Xiaochuan and Finance Minister Xie Yuren, stressed that as a result of the global crisis and the U.S. Federal Reserve's inflationary reaction to the mortgage crisis, China is facing entirely new challenges, which go way beyond its previous experience and existing know-how. But at the same time, they also announced measures for defending the population's living standard. Moreover, the Chinese government declared that it will make the fight against inflation its absolute priority. Already back in November 2007, leading Chinese institutions and news media were reacting very positively to Lyndon LaRouche's programmatic proposals for a new financial architecture.

Globalization Has Failed

Giulio Tremonti, the former (and possibly future) Italian Economic Minister, has likewise made a public declaration that globalization is the height of folly, and has failed. And he's right when he says that the crisis will grow far worse, and that the solution cannot come from any one country, but must be based on a New Bretton Woods system.

What Germany's government lacks most, is the courage to acknowledge the systemic nature of the crisis. Because without such an admission, they will surely be unable to muster the courage to take measures needed to overcome the crisis. And in order that we may help Frau Merkel, the Cabinet members, and the Federal President more quickly to learn how to reduce their democracy deficit, we need a broad, public debate over Europe's future course. And what we especially need is a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

Even though people in Germany (and in other European nations) have long grown unaccustomed to the exercise of republican virtue, the beginning of civic involvement by a growing number of citizens is nevertheless a positive sign. Because only when people begin to grasp, before it is too late, the dramatic historic decisions we will have to face over the course of this year, and only if a sufficient number of them begin to personally intervene into this process, will there be well-founded hope that the systemic crisis which seems to be gripping all aspects of our lives, can be overcome.

One thing is clear: A dramatic culmination of the world financial crisis, and of hyperinflation, will be setting the stage for both the U.S. Presidential elections, and European parliaments' attempt to whip through a ratification of the EU Treaty. And every parliamentarian and citizen should get themselves uncompromisingly clear on the fact that by adopting the EU Treaty, we would be relinquishing all possibility of defending the general welfare and of adopting such measures as a New Deal and a New Bretton Woods system. With the EU Treaty, we would be condemning ourselves to plunging into a new dark age.

There Is Hope

As the financial crash escalates, there is, however, hope that in the course of the U.S. Presidential elections, Roosevelt's policies will be placed on the agenda, and that a growing number of political leaders in the world will raise their voices in favor of a New Deal and a New Bretton Woods. If 2009 opens with a new President who activates Roosevelt's policies, and if we in Europe can manage to bury the Monster of Lisbon once and for all, and can decide in favor of a vision of a Europe of the Fatherlands with a positive mission for world development, then we can forget about our present terrors in short order.


[1] Among the "elementary spirits" which Heine introduces in his poem "Waldeinsamkeit" ("Forest Solitude") are the gnomes:

Sie tragen Rotmäntelchen, lang und bauschig,
Die Miene ist ehrlich, doch bang und lauschig;
Ich ließ nicht merken, daß ich entdeckt,
Warum sie so ängstlich die Füße versteckt.

Sie haben nämlich Entenfüße
Und bilden sich ein, daß Niemand es wisse.
Das ist eine tiefgeheime Wund,
Worüber ich nimmermehr spötteln kunnt.

Ach Himmel! wir Alle, gleich jenen Zwergen,
Wir haben ja Alle etwas zu verbergen;
Kein Christenmensch, wähnen wir, hätte entdeckt,
Wo unser Entenfüßchen steckt.

They wear little red coats, long and baggy,
Their demeanor is honest, yet anxious and wary;
I didn't let them know that I had discovered
Why they so anxiously conceal their feet.

Namely, they have duck's feet,
But they imagine that no one knows this.
It is a deeply secret wound
Which I was never able to joke with them about.

My heavens! All of us, just like those dwarves,
We all have something to hide;
No Christian, so we imagine, could have discovered
Where we're concealing our little duck's feet.

[2] "Teuer" = "expensive."

[3] "Wladimir Woytinsky, Revolutionary," EIR, April 11, 1997.

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Jail for Belgians Who Reject Polio Shot

By MARIA CHENG

LONDON (AP) - As doctors struggle to eradicate polio worldwide, one of their biggest problems is persuading parents to vaccinate their children. In Belgium, authorities are resorting to an extreme measure: prison sentences.

Two sets of parents in Belgium were recently handed five-month prison terms for failing to vaccinate their children against polio. Each parent was also fined $8,000.

``It's a pretty extraordinary case,'' said Dr. Ross Upshur, director of the Joint Centre for Bioethics at the University of Toronto. ``The Belgians have a right to take some action against the parents, given the seriousness of polio, but the question is, is a prison sentence disproportionate?''

The parents' sentences were delayed to give them a chance to vaccinate their children. But if that deadline also passes without the children receiving the injections, the parents could be put behind bars.

Because of privacy laws, Belgian officials would not talk specifically about the cases, such as why the parents refused the vaccine or how much longer they have to get their children vaccinated.

The polio vaccine is the only one required by Belgian law. Exceptions are granted only if parents can prove their children might have a bad physical reaction to the vaccine. There are no exceptions for people who object to vaccinations on religious grounds.

``Polio is a very serious disease and has caused great suffering in the past,'' said Dr. Victor Lusayu, head of Belgium's international vaccine center. ``The discovery of the vaccine has eliminated polio from Europe and it is simply the law in Belgium that you have to be vaccinated. ... At the end of the day, the law must be respected.''

The highly infectious disease is spread through water and mainly strikes children under 5. Initial symptoms include fever, headaches, vomiting, stiffness in the neck and fatigue. The polio virus invades the body's nervous system and can lead to irreversible paralysis within hours. In extreme cases, patients can die when their breathing muscles are immobilized.

Some ethicists back the hard-line Belgian stance.

``Nobody has the right to unfettered liberty, and people do not have a right to endanger their kids,'' said John Harris, a professor of bioethics at the University of Manchester.

``The parents in this case do not have any rights they can appeal to. They have obligations they are not fulfilling.''

Aside from Belgium, only France makes polio vaccinations mandatory by law. In the United States, children must be immunized against many diseases including polio, but most states allow children to opt out if their parents have religious or ``philosophical'' objections.

In Maryland, prosecutors and school officials in one county threatened truancy charges against parents who failed to vaccinate their children. The measure sharply reduced the number of unvaccinated children although no one has been charged.

The only other case of mandatory polio vaccines is during the Muslim yearly Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia. Pilgrims from polio-endemic countries must prove they have been vaccinated. Saudi officials even give them an extra dose upon arrival at the airport.

Since the polio virus can live in the human body for weeks, it jumps borders easily. That makes health officials even in developed countries nervous, since the threat of an outbreak remains as long as the virus is circulating anywhere.

Incidence has dropped by 99 percent since the World Health Organization and partners began their eradication effort in 1988. But the virus is still entrenched in Afghanistan, India, Nigeria and Pakistan, and occasionally pops up elsewhere.

For developed countries, imported polio cases could cause chaos in the health system, warned Dr. Steve Cochi, an immunization expert at the United States' Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

He said that unlike other medical problems, in which rejecting treatment only affects the individual, refusing a vaccine for a transmissible disease such as polio puts others at risk as well.

Still, health officials doubt that Belgium's strategy will be useful to countries that are still battling polio.

``It is up to individual countries to decide their own policies, but we do not feel that imprisonment would help,'' said Dr. David Heymann, WHO's top polio official.

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Tuesday 11 March 2008

Bush family private equity fund in deep trouble as Financial Tsunami rolls on

Global Research, March 10, 2008

Carlyle Capital Corp. Ltd., a subsidiary of one of the most influential USA private equity funds and closely tied to the Bush family, is in default on several of its securities. Carlyle is an offshore subsidiary of the Washington-based Carlyle Group, one of the most politically powerful private equity firms of the past two decades. The severity of its liquidity problems indicates that the unfolding financial crisis is taking major parts of the US financial and political elite down with it. Among the leading partners of the Carlyle Group in recent years have been George H.W. Bush, father of the President; James Baker III, the Bush family’s attorney and ‘fixer;’ former UK Prime Minister John Major.

Carlyle Capital reports it is attempting to convince lenders holding $16 billion in securities not to liquidate the company's remaining collateral. The company is a listed mortgage-bond fund managed by the Carlyle Group. The Carlyle Group already has loaned Carlyle Capital $150 million to cover debt obligations since July 2007. In the past several days it failed to meet margin calls with four banks. The fear in the market according to informed reports is that its entire portfolio, recently valued at $21 billion, could be sold off in a distress sale, putting major downward pressure on all mortgage bonds globally. A collapse at Carlyle would hit the value of all fixed-income securities, which have already dropped sharply as banks pull back on their lending, and force a new global round of asset sales.

Margin calls

In the past days Carlyle Capital had admitted it had received "substantial additional margin calls and additional default notices from its lenders." It said lenders are selling off securities held as collateral. Margin calls are demanded when a creditor questions the ability of the borrower to repay.

Shares in the fund, which trades on Euronext Amsterdam, have been suspended after closing down nearly 60 percent. Carlyle Capital was a prime example of the financial engineering encouraged during the Alan Greenspan era by Washington. It had leveraged $670 million in equity by an alarmingly high 32 times to finance a $21.7 billion portfolio of highly rated mortgage-backed securities issued by US housing agencies Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. To finance the deals it entered into repurchase agreements with banks where it posted the mortgage securities as collateral in exchange for cash. If the value of the security held as collateral falls, the lender has the right to ask for more collateral — a "margin call" — to secure the loan.

If the borrower does not meet the margin call by putting up more collateral, the lender may sell the security.

More worrisome is the fact that the Carlyle crisis does not owe to so-called sub-prime or bad grade mortgage debt. The company held US government agency AAA-rated residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS). Now Carlyle’s lenders have issued margin calls in excess of $400 million. At the onset of the sub-prime crisis in September 2007 Carlyle was forced to go to Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund to get capital. Mubadala, the arm of Abu Dhabi which has invested in sectors as diverse as Libyan oil exploration and Ferrari, the Italian motor company, paid $1.35bn for a 10% Carlyle stake.

And Blackstone Group too?

Carlyle is by no means the only elite US private capital group in serious trouble. Blackstone Group, manager of the world's largest buyout fund, said fourth-quarter profit plunged 89 percent after a ``meltdown'' in the credit markets and warned that getting loans for takeovers will be difficult in 2008. Profit declined to $88 million from $808.1 million a year earlier.

Blackstone decided to list the private equity company on the stock market in June 2007 in a move some date as the last gasp of the huge securitization and private equity buyout mania of the past decade. Since June its stock has fallen 53 percent. More serious, it hasn't completed a takeover of more than $2 billion in five months and is struggling to close the $6.6 billion buyout of Dallas-based Alliance Data Systems Corp., a credit-card processor, announced in May 2007.

Blackstone and Carlyle led the recent “locust capitalism” (Heuschrecke) hostile takeover binge which triggered a major political backlash in Germany and elsewhere. That debt-financed takeover binge came to a halt with the eruption of the sub-prime securitization crisis last fall. Blackstone has $102 billion in assets under management at present. The value of Leveraged or debt-financed Buyout (LBO) deals announced in the second half of 2007 plunged two-thirds from the first six months, according to data by Bloomberg.

Crisis spreads to US municipal debt market

The ongoing financial market crisis whose background I have detailed in the series, The Financial Tsunami, Part I-V, was nominally triggered by a crisis of confidence in the value of the most risky securities, sub-prime home mortgages in the US, mortgages often made by banks without checking the borrowers credit history or income. Because the securitization revolution was premised on the flawed illusion that by spreading risk throughout the global financial system, risk would disappear, once the weakest part began to collapse, confidence in the multi-trillion entire edifice of securitized debt began to collapse. The process unravels over time which is why most have the illusion of a localized crisis. In reality, centered in the US economic and financial sector, what is now underway is a crisis not even comparable to the 1930’s Great Depression.

Now the normally high-quality debt of US local and state governments, so-called municipal debt, is getting hit. California, New York City and the owner of the World Trade Center site will replace their floating rate debt, sharply raising costs for local governments as the economic depression is slashing their tax revenues.

In February, interest rate yields on US tax-exempt municipal debt rose to the highest ever relative to Treasuries. The market is reacting to deteriorating finances at bond insurance companies and credit rating companies. States, cities and agencies are pulling out of the $330 billion floating rate or auction-rate market, where costs have doubled since January and plan to sell about $22.5 billion of fixed-rate, tax-exempt bonds to raise capital at a significant penalty price.

Bond fund managers in New York and London tell us they have never seen such troubles in the municipal bond market before.

The market for floating rate or auction-rate municipal bonds in the US, once thought safe, entered crisis as losses tied to sub-prime mortgage bonds and related securities threatened so-called monoline bond insurers' AAA ratings, causing investors to avoid the bonds they had insured. The same monoline insurers, specialized New York financial security insurance companies, had insured sub-prime mortgage securities and municipal debt. The monoline companies guarantee about half the $2.6 trillion of outstanding state and local government debt, some $1.2 trillion. Higher interest rate costs for states and local governments will aggravate local US fiscal crises as the depression spreads, creating a self-reinforcing downward spiral. The process is in its early stages yet.

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Reduce Pesticide Exposure 97%: New Study on the Benefits of Eating Organic Produce

Source

Group Lists Top Priority Organic Fruits and Vegetables for Consumers to Reduce Current Pesticide Risks

BOULDER, Colo. ­ March 11, 2008 ­ The Organic Center today releases an historic report that concludes converting the nation's eight million acres of produce farms to organic would reduce pesticide dietary risks by about 97 percent.

The Organic Center provides the first-ever quantitative estimate of the degree to which pesticide risks from food can be eliminated through adoption of organic farming methods in "Simplifying the Pesticide Risk Equation: The Organic Option," a new State of Science Review by Dr. Charles Benbrook, the Organic Center's chief scientist.

Less than three percent of the nation's cropland produces fruits and vegetables. Yet, according to The Organic Center, these crops account for most of the pesticide risks from dietary exposure in domestically produced foods. The 97 percent risk reduction can only be achieved if converting domestic cropland of organic is coupled with consumers choosing only imported produce that is certified organic.

The estimates are based on up-to-date pesticide residue data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Environmental Protection Agency's current methods for estimating pesticide dietary risks.

Founded in 2002, The Organic Center is a non-profit devoted to presenting and providing peer-reviewed scientific evidence on how organic products benefit human health and environmental quality. Other findings and information shared in the report include:

· An analysis of the significantly greater pesticide risks linked to consumption of imported conventionally-grown fruits and vegetables, as compared to domestically-grown produce.
· Rankings of dietary risk levels in select conventionally-grown fruits and vegetables, arranged to help guide consumers seeking to minimize pesticide risks.
· Suggestions on how to meet dietary guidelines for fruit and vegetable intake in the winter, while also reducing pesticide exposures.
· An overview of pesticide residues found in milk.

The Organic Center is offering a free download of its report beginning today at www.organic-center.org

Pesticide Residues are Hard to Avoid
Driving pesticide risks downward is important because, according to pediatrician Alan Greene, M.D., chairman of The Organic Center's board of directors, "Recent science has established strong links between exposure to pesticides at critical stages of prenatal development and throughout childhood, and heightened risk of pre-term, underweight babies, developmental abnormalities impacting the brain and nervous system, as well as diabetes and cancer."

"Yes, with surprising frequency, all Americans, including infants and children, are exposed to pesticides via their diet and drinking water," added Dr. Benbrook.

In fact, Dr. Benbrook noted, recent USDA pesticide residue and food consumption surveys show that most people consume three to four residues daily just through fruits and vegetables.

"Accounting for residues in conventional milk, tap water and other foods, the average American exposes him or herself to ten to 13 pesticide residues daily," Dr. Benbrook added.

The frequency of multiple pesticide residues in conventional produce contributes significantly to each person's daily dose. Multiple residues are eight-times more likely in conventional produce than in organic produce. Reasons why include:

· A conventional spinach sample in 2006 testing was found to have nine residues, a kale sample had 10, and a raisin sample contained 11;
· Almost half the conventional peach samples in 2006 contained five or more residues;
· Conventional sweet bell peppers top the multiple-residue chart, with two samples containing 12 pesticides in 2003 testing; and,
· More than one-third of conventional fruit and vegetable samples in 2006 contained multiple residues.

The 97% Solution

The Organic Center bases its 97 percent risk reduction estimate upon a "Dietary Risk Index" (DRI), developed by the EPA's Office of Inspector General (OIG). The EPA-OIG used the index in a 2006 appraisal of the impacts of the 1996 Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA) on pesticide dietary risks. The Organic Center applied the same DRI to estimate the changes that would occur in risk levels if all produce were grown using organic methods. The Organic Center concluded that a 100 percent reduction in risk is unattainable because of the widespread use of pesticides on conventional farms, and the movement of pesticides in the air and water onto organic farm fields.

"While it will take years to convert most American fruit and vegetable farms to organic methods, the process is well underway and accelerating fast, especially in the Western U.S.," Dr. Benbrook noted. Already, organic produce accounts for nearly ten percent of retail sales of fresh fruits and vegetables. Several major fresh produce grower-shippers have recently announced aggressive timetables to convert all or most of their fruit and vegetable acreage to organic, assuming consumer demand continues to grow. The report points out that a substantial reduction in pesticide exposure will remove, or markedly lesson, an important risk factor for several serious public health problems.

Helping Consumers Minimize Pesticide Exposures The Organic Center's report also presents lists of fresh fruits and vegetables that score the highest using the DRI. Two lists cover domestically grown fruits and vegetables, while two others apply to imported produce that typically enters the U.S. market in the wintertime. The organization hopes consumers will follow these lists in determining which organic fruits and vegetables will most significantly improve their personal pesticide dietary risk equation.

Conventional Fruits and Vegetables with the Highest Pesticide Dietary Risk
Index Scores:
Domestic Fruits
Cranberries: 178
Nectarines: 97
Strawberries: 56
Peaches: 54
Pears: 48

Vegetables
Green beans: 330
Sweet bell peppers: 132
Celery: 104
Cucumbers: 93
Potatoes: 74

Conventional Fruits and Vegetables with the Highest Pesticide Dietary Risk
Index Scores:
Imported Fruits

Grapes: 282
Nectarines: 281
Peaches: 266
Pears: 221
Strawberries: 78

Vegetables:
Sweet bell peppers: 720
Lettuce: 326
Cucumbers: 317
Celery: 170
Tomatoes: 142

Complete Dietary Risk Index can be found in the full report, downloadable at www.organic-center.org

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