The Economic Crisis and What Must be Done

by Richard C. Cook
November 24, 2009

The United States does not control its own destiny. Rather it is controlled by an international financial elite, of which the American branch works out of big New York banks like J.P. Morgan Chase, Wall Street investment firms such as Goldman Sachs, and the Federal Reserve System. They in turn control the White House, Congress, the military, the mass media, the intelligence agencies, both political parties, the universities, etc. No one can rise to the top in any of these institutions without the elite’s stamp of approval.

This elite has been around since the nation began, becoming increasingly dominant as the 19thcentury progressed. A key date was passage of the National Banking Act of 1863, when the system was put into place whereby federal government debt was used to collateralize bank lending. Since then we’ve paid the freight through our taxes for bank control of the economy. The final nails in the coffin came with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

In 1929 the bankers plunged the nation into the Great Depression by constricting the money supply. With Franklin D. Roosevelt as president, the nation struggled through the decade of the 1930s but did not pull out of the Depression until the industrial explosion during World War II.

After the war came the Golden Age of the U.S. economy, when the working man, protected by strong labor unions, became a true partner in the prosperity of the industrial age. That era lasted a full generation. The bankers were largely spectators as Americans led the world in exports, standard of living, science and space exploration, and every measure of health, longevity, and culture.

Roosevelt had kept the bankers subservient to the interests of the economy at large. The Federal Reserve was part of the New Deal team, and interest rates were held at historic lows despite a large federal deficit. One main impact was the huge increase in home ownership. After World War II, the G.I. Bill allowed home ownership to grow further and millions of veterans to attend college. The influx of educated graduates led to productivity growth and the emergence of new high-tech industries.

But the bankers were laying their plans. In the early 1950s they got the government to agree to allow the Federal Reserve to escape its subservience to the U.S. Treasury Department and set interest rates on its own. Rates rose throughout the 1950s and 1960s. By the time of the interest rate hikes of 1968, the economy was slowing down. Both federal budget and trade deficits were beginning to replace the post-war surpluses. High interest rates were the likely cause.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon removed the dollar’s gold peg, allowing the huge inflation resulting from oil price increases that the international bankers engineered through control of U.S. foreign policy when Henry Kissinger was national security adviser and secretary of state. Nixon’s opening to China resulted in early agreements, also overseen by banking interests, to begin to transfer U.S. industry to overseas producers like China which had cheap labor costs.

By the mid-1970s, the U.S. had been taken over by a behind the scenes coup-d’etat that included events in 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a conspiracy that could only have been instigated by the highest levels of world financial control. In the election of 1976, David Rockefeller succeeded in placing fellow Trilateral Commission member Jimmy Carter in the White House, but Carter upset the banking community, thoroughly Zionist in orientation, by working toward peace in the Middle East and elsewhere.

I was working in the Carter White House in 1979-80. Unbeknownst to the president, Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, another Rockefeller protégé, suddenly raised interest rates to fight the inflation the bankers had caused by the OPEC oil price deals, and plunged the nation into recession. Carter was made to look weak and uninformed and was defeated in the election of 1980 by Republican candidate Ronald Reagan. It was through the “Reagan Revolution” that the regulatory controls over the banking industry were lifted, mainly in allowing the banks to use their fractional reserve privileges in making mortgage loans.

Volcker’s recession shattered American manufacturing and hastened the flight of jobs abroad. Under the “Reagan Doctrine,” the U.S. military embarked on an unprecedented mission of world conquest by attacking one small nation at a time, starting with Nicaragua. Global capitalism was also on the march, with the U.S. armed forces its own private police force. With the invasion of Iraq under George H.W. Bush in 1991, mainland Asia was revealed as the principle target.

The economy was floated by productivity gains through computer automation and a huge sell-off of assets through the merger-acquisition bubble of the late 1980s which ended in a recession. This resulted in the defeat of Bush by Bill Clinton in the election of 1992. Clinton was able to create another bubble through a strong dollar policy that attracted foreign capital.

The dot-com bubble that resulted lasted all the way through to the crash of December 2000. Meanwhile, the U.S. Air Force led the way in the destruction of the sovereign state of Yugoslavia, whereby the international bankers took over the resource wealth of the entire Balkan region, and the U.S. military gained forward bases for further incursions into Asia.

Do we need to say that none of this was ever voted on by the American electorate? But they bought into it nevertheless, both with their silence and through participation in a generally favorable job market in the emerging service occupations, particularly finance.

By the time George W. Bush was inaugurated president in January 2001, the U.S. was facing a disaster. $4 trillion in wealth had vanished when the dot.com bubble collapsed. NAFTA caused even more American manufacturing jobs to disappear abroad. The Neocons who were moving into key jobs in the Pentagon knew they would soon have new wars to fight in the Middle East, with invasion plans for Afghanistan and Iraq ready to be pulled off the shelf.

But the U.S. had no economic engine available to generate the tax revenues Bush would need for the planned wars. At this moment Chairman Alan Greenspan of the Federal Reserve stepped in. Over a two year period from 2001-2003 the Fed lowered interest rates by over 500 basis points. Meanwhile, the federal government removed all regulatory controls on mortgage lending, and the housing bubble was on. $4 trillion in new home loans were pumped into the economy, much of it through subprime loans borrowers could not afford.

The Fed began to put on the brakes in 2003, but the mighty work of re-floating a moribund economy had been accomplished. By late 2006 another recession loomed, but it would take two more years before the crisis of October 2008 brought the entire system down.

The impact on the job market was immediate and profound. By the time Barack Obama was elected president in November 2008, the U.S. was mired in seemingly endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the worst recession since the Great Depression was picking up speed. In order to prevent total disaster, the Bush administration ended its eight years of catastrophic misrule with a flourish, by allocating over $700 billion in financial system bailouts to cover the bad loans the banks had been making since Greenspan gave the housing bubble the green light.

It is now November 2009. Since Barack Obama was inaugurated in January, unemployment has soared from 7.9 percent to 10.2 percent. A few hundred billion dollars were allocated for “stimulus” purposes, but most of that went to pay unemployment benefits and to keep state and local governments from laying off more employees.

A fraction has been distributed for highway improvements, but largely through the bank bailouts the federal deficit has been running at an annual rate of $1.5 trillion, by far the largest in history, with the national debt now topping $12 trillion. Ironically, those Americans who still have productive jobs continue to grow in efficiency, with productivity up over five percent in the last year.

So much federal money has been spent that the Obama administration has been struggling to make its health care proposals budget-neutral through a raft of new taxes, fees, and penalties, and by announcing in recent days that the government’ first priority must now shift to deficit reduction. The word “austerity” has been mentioned for the first time since the Carter administration. Yet Congress voted $655 billion in military expenditures to continue fighting in the Middle East. A U.S. military attack on Iran, possibly in conjunction with Israel, would surprise no one.

So where do we now stand?

At present, the Federal Reserve is trying to prevent a total economic collapse. Interest rates are near-zero, to the chagrin of foreign investors in U.S. Treasury securities, and close to half of new Treasury debt instruments have been bought by the Federal Reserve itself as a way of providing free money for federal government expenditures.

But the U.S. economy shows no signs of coming back, with no economic driver emerging that could bring it back. For all the talk about alternative energy, there has been no significant growth of any home-grown industry that could possibly make up so much lost ground in either the short or the long-term.

The industries in the U.S. that are holding up are the military, including arms exports, universities that are attracting large numbers of students from abroad, especially China, and health care, especially for the aging baby boomer population. But the war industry produces nothing with a long-term economic benefit, and health care exists mainly to treat sick people, not produce anything new.

None of this provides a foundation that can bring about a restoration of prosperity to 300 million people when the jobs of making articles of consumption are increasingly scarce. On top of everything else, since government inevitably looks to its own requirements first, the total tax burden continues to increase to the point where the average employee now pays close to 50 percent of his or her income on taxes of all types, including federal and state income taxes, real estate taxes, payroll taxes, excise taxes, government fees, etc. Plus the cost of utilities continues to rise steadily and threatens to skyrocket if cap-and-trade legislation is passed.

The Obama administration has no plans to deal with any of this. They have projected a budget for 15 years hence that shows the budget deficit decreasing and tax revenues going way up, but it is all lies. They have no roadmap for getting us there and no plans for following the roadmap if it portrayed a realistic goal. And yet the U.S. military is still trying to conquer Asia. It is madness.

And it is madness because the big decisions are not made by the U.S., by Congress, or by the Obama administration. The U.S. has, for half-a-century, been marching to the tune played by the international financial elite, and this fact did not change with the election of 2008. The financiers have put the people of this nation $57 trillion in debt, according to the latest reports, counting debt at the federal, state, business, and household levels. Interest alone on this debt is over $3 trillion of a GDP of $14 trillion. Failure of our political leadership to deal with this tragedy over the past three decades is nothing less than treason.

But then again, at some point the decision was made that the U.S. and its population would be discarded by history, the economic status of the nation reduced to a shadow of what it once was, but that its military machine would be used for the financial elite’s takeover of the world until it is replaced by that of some other nation. All indications are that the next country up to bat as military enforcer for the financiers is China.

There you have it. That, in my opinion, is the past, present, and future of this nation in a nutshell. Great evils have been done in the world in the last century, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

Except…. and that’s what each person caught up in these travesties must decide. What are you going to do about it?

In mulling over this question, it would be wise to recognize that the dominance of the financial elite has largely been exercised through their control of the international monetary system based on bank lending and government debt. Therefore it’s through the monetary system that change can and must be made.

The progressives are wrong to think the government should go deeper in debt to create more jobs. This will just create an even deeper hole of debt future generations will have to crawl out of.

Rather the key is monetary reform, whether at the local or national levels. People have lost control of their ability to earn a living. But change could be accomplished through sovereign control by people and nations of the monetary means of exchange.

This control has been stolen. It is time to take it back. One way would be for the federal government to make a relief payment to each adult of $1,000 a month until the crisis lifted. This money could be earmarked for goods and services produced within the U.S. and used to capitalize a new series of community development banks. I have called this the “Cook Plan.”

The plan could be funded through direct payment from a Treasury relief account without new taxes or government borrowing. The payments would be balanced on the credit side by GDP growth or be used by individuals to pay off debt. It would be direct government spending as was done with Greenbacks before and after the Civil War without significant inflation.

Another method increasingly being used within the U.S. today is local and regional credit clearing exchanges and the use of local currencies or “scrip.” Use of such currencies could be enhanced by legislation at the state and federal levels allowing these currencies to be used for payment of taxes and government fees as well as payment of mortgages and other forms of bank debt. The credit clearing exchanges could be organized as private non-profit regional currency co-operatives similar to credit unions.

These would be immediate emergency measures. In the longer run, sovereign control of money and credit must be returned to the public commons and treated as public utilities. This does not mean exclusive government control to replace bank control. As stated previously, it would be done in partnership between government and private trade exchanges. Nor does it mean government takeover of business, industry, or the banking system, though all should be regulated for the common good and fairly taxed.

This program would lead to a new monetary paradigm where money and credit would be available by, as, when, and where needed, to facilitate trade between and among legitimate producers of goods and services. In this way trade and commerce will come to serve human freedom, not diminish it as is done with today’s dysfunctional partnership between big government trillions of dollars in debt and big finance with the entire world in hock.

Such a change would be a true populist revolution.

source: Global Research

Global Warming On Trial: US Senator Inhofe Calls For Investigation Of UN IPCC

by Paul Joseph Watson

November 23, 2009

Climate change alarmists engaged in desperate whitewash, but scandal is not going away

In response to the astounding revelations arising out of the hacked CRU emails, Senator Jim Inhofe has stated that unless something is done within the next seven days, he will lead the call for a rigorous investigation into mounting evidence that top climate scientists conspired to manipulate data to hide evidence of global cooling while engaging in academic witch hunts to eliminate scientists skeptical of man-made climate change.

Speaking on the Americas Morning Show earlier today, Inhofe, Ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said the new revelations proved what he has been warning about for over four years, that politicians and bias-driven climate scientists affiliated with the UN IPCC have been fraudulently “cooking the science” to conform to their agenda.

“If nothing happens in the next seven days when we go back into session a week from today that would change this situation, I will call for an investigation,” said Inhofe. “Cause this thing is serious, you think about the literally millions of dollars that have been thrown away on some of this stuff that they came out with.”

Asked what he would call for an investigation of, Inhofe responded, “On the IPCC and on the United Nations on the way that they cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not.”

Meanwhile, even some pro-man made global warming advocates have conceded that an investigation is necessary.

Bob Ward, director of policy and communications at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, told the London Guardianthat only a rigorous investigation could clear the names of those accused of manipulating the data, admitting that the emails “created the impression of impropriety,” which is a lot further than most have gone in accepting the damning nature of the hacked data.

Indeed, the British Met Office performed the equivalent of a child sticking his fingers in his ears by merely attempting to dismiss the emails altogether, without even explaining what was meant when scientists at CRU talked about pulling “tricks” to “hide the decline” in temperatures.

A spokesman at the Met Office, which jointly produces global temperature datasets with the Climate Research Unit, said there was no need for an inquiry. “If you look at the emails, there isn’t any evidence that the data was falsified and there’s no evidence that climate change is a hoax. It’s a shame that some of the sceptics have had to take this rather shallow attempt to discredit robust science undertaken by some of the world’s most respected scientists. The bottom line is that temperatures continue to rise and humans are responsible for it. We have every confidence in the science and the various datasets we use. The peer-review process is as robust as it could possibly be. It’s no surprise, with the Copenhagen talks just days away, that this has happened now.”

As James Delingpole of the Telegraph highlights, alarmists are not going to be effected by the scandal, because they will allow nothing whatsoever to corrupt their religious belief system. “They’ve made up their minds and no quantity of contrary evidence, however devastating, is going to shake their considered position of “Nyah nyah nyah. Got my fingers in my ears. Not listening. The world IS warming and it’s man’s fault. Must tax carbon now….”

However, there seems little doubt that this bombshell will go a long way to derailing, or at least delaying the agenda for a global carbon tax that will be collected by the very same elitists aggressively pushing the fraud of global warming.

source: Global Research

Third Intifada will have a widespread popular base

By Jack Khoury,Haaretz Correspondent
20/11/2009

Fatah had made a strategic decision to declare a third intifada against Israel, movement officials told Nazereth-based newspaper Hadith Anas, citing the failed peace talks as the reason for their resolution.

The newspaper report quoted Fatah Central Committee members as saying that the movement wished to implement a decision made during its sixth convention, which assembled last August in the West Bank city of Bethlehem.

One of the movement's top officials interviewed by Hadith Anas said the third intifada will have a widespread popular base, adding, however, that unlike the previous popular struggle against Israel, which was sparked in September 2000, the movement will not endorse an armed struggle or the use of firearms.

"We want thousands of Palestinians to demonstrate daily near the settlements of the occupation, carrying out a human siege, and calling for the end of the occupation," one senior official said.

According to the report, Fatah chief and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas agreed to the resolution in principle, stipulating only that the struggle mustn't become a violent one.

Sources estimate that Abbas could prepare the conditions which would allow for such a move by stepping down as PA President as well as by declaring the dissolution of the PA by the end of the year.

Fatah officials had commented recently on the need to duplicate the weekly anti-separation fence rallies in the villages of Na'alin and Bil'in in locations across the West Bank, as well as turning some of those demonstrations against nearby settlements.

A senior member of an Arab-Israeli Knesset party, who maintains close ties with top Fatah and PA officials, said that anti-separation fence rallies could spark renewed popular resistance, if they continued to escalate as they did week ago near the Kalandia checkpoint.

The official said that PA sources have come to understand that unarmed popular resistance, centering on symbols of the West Bank occupation, could garner sympathy for the Palestinian cause in international circles as well as embarrassing the Israeli government.

"The first intifada gained significant diplomatic ground as far as the Palestinians are concerned since its symbol, a boy throwing rocks at a tank, made it impossible for Israel to claim it was defending itself against terror as it did in the second intifada, followings the city-center bombings," the official said.

source: From Occupied Palestine with Love

Why Israelis pick Tarantino over Spielberg

By Matt Beynon Rees
November 23, 2009

Quentin Tarantino’s "Inglourious Basterds" is the definitive Israeli movie.

The bloodthirsty revenge fantasy of Jewish soldiers crushing German skulls with baseball bats and scalping dying Nazis has been a big hit here since its release in mid-September and, unusually, has been reviewed in every big newspaper or magazine. But that’s not just because Israelis, like audiences elsewhere in the world, seem to enjoy seeing Hitler’s henchmen meet grisly pulp fiction ends.

There’s something deeper at work in Israelis’ responses. It’s tied to the way their country has dealt with the very concept of the Holocaust. More particularly, the way Jews died in the Holocaust.

The response of critics has been almost uniformly positive. One of Israel’s most respected and thoughtful critics, Uri Klein, wrote in the leading newspaper Ha'aretz that "what Tarantino does in 'Inglourious Basterds' seems to me more valid and more decent than what Spielberg did in 'Schindler's List.'"

Instead of trying to recreate the horror that was the Holocaust as Spielberg did, Klein wrote, Tarantino simply made up an alternative reality, dealing with Jews and the Nazis on his own terms. That, in fact, is what Israel did, too.

In that context, the most revealing review was by Avner Shavit in Achbar Ha’Ir, a Tel Aviv weekly. “The truth is that [Tarantino] is on our side. … Like a typical Yankee who has been raised on stories about Ari Ben-Canaan, Moshe Dayan and other Mossad agents, he describes the Jew as the only one capable of kicking the bad guy's ass for humanity's sake.”

In other words, Shavit believes Tarantino’s portrayal of Jewish fighters during World War II is determined by the image created of Israel since then. Ari Ben-Canaan was the hero of Leon Uris’ “Exodus,” which is set during Israel’s founding struggle. Moshe Dayan was Israel’s army chief and the country’s Defense Minister during the victory in the 1967 Six-Day War. Mossad agents crop up in almost every popular thriller with inside information and a magical ability to rub out the bad guy.

But what appeals to Israelis about Tarantino’s portrayal of these fantastical Jewish avengers is that they bear little relation to the great bulk of Jews who died in Hitler’s camps without making any attempt to resist.

That gets at the heart of the issue, because the Israeli establishment is, in many ways, still ashamed that so many Jews went to their deaths without a fight. The implication is that Israel created a new breed of Jews who’d have stood up to the Nazis, rather than being herded onto cattle cars.

Israel commemorates the victims of Hitler’s depredations with Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day — the relatively few “heroes” of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising get as much prominence in the naming of that memorial day as the millions of “martyrs.”

After World War II, Israel’s founders didn’t want to acknowledge that most Jews had gone powerless to their deaths. They lauded those “heroes” who fought back, no matter how hopelessly, over those who simply survived. The survivors never overcame that taint in the eyes of those who had arrived in Israel before the war. Many survivors have told me they were called “soaps” when they came to what was then Palestine — a callous reference to the rumor that the Nazis used the bodies of their victims to make soap.

Israel’s founders built a myth around the Holocaust. But the myth was like the repression that an individual places upon the unthinkable moments buried within his own subconscious.

Even to be recognized as a survivor in Israel requires a long battle with red tape. Then the government does its best to hold onto money that’s due to the survivors. New allegations emerged this week that lawyers hired to wrest that cash from the bureaucrats continue to take extortionate commissions from survivors, in violation of recent laws forbidding it.

Of 240,000 survivors in Israel, 20,000 receive compensation from Germany, and 40,000 get an Israeli stipend of less than $300 a month. The rest have nothing but their scarred memories. About 80,000 survivors live below the poverty line in Israel. The worst place in the developed world to be a Holocaust survivor is Israel.

So cheering Tarantino’s bloodcurdling re-imagining of history is an easy way out.

It’s also something which casts an unpleasant light on current Israeli politics.

On the Israelity blog, leading Israeli cultural writer David Brinn described how the crowd at the theater where he watched Tarantino’s movie cheered the demise of each German. In a reference to a banned political party that advocates the forced expulsion of Palestinians and has a reputation for violence, Brinn wrote that it “felt like I was at a Kach rally.”

“On the one hand, it was liberating to be the avengers of the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis,” Brinn wrote, “but on the other hand, maybe we shouldn’t have been so happy about it.”

source

Israeli Soldiers Admit to War Crimes During Gaza War

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Climate change champion and sceptic both call for inquiry into leaked emails

By Leo Hickman - The Guardian - November 23, 2009

Prominent voices on both sides of the climate change debate today called for an independent inquiry into claims of collusion between climate scientists after it emerged last week that hundreds of their emails and documents had been leaked that allegedly manipulated data and destroyed evidence for Freedom of Information Act requests.

Writing in the Times, Lord Lawson, the former Conservative chancellor and long-time climate change sceptic, said: "The integrity of the scientific evidence on which not merely the British government, but other countries, too, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, claim to base far-reaching and hugely expensive policy decisions, has been called into question. And the reputation of British science has been seriously tarnished. A high-level independent inquiry must be set up without delay."

Bob Ward, director of policy and communications at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, said: "Once appropriate action has been taken over the hacking, there has to be some process to assess the substance of the email messages as well. The selective disclosure and dissemination of the messages has created the impression of impropriety, and the only way of clearing the air now would be through a rigorous investigation. I have sympathy for the climate researchers at the University of East Anglia and other institutions who have been the target of an aggressive campaign by so-called 'sceptics' over a number of years. But I fear that only a thorough investigation could now clear their names."

He added: "There needs to be an assurance that these email messages have not revealed inappropriate conduct in the preparation of journal articles and in dealing with requests from other researchers for access to data. This will probably require investigations both by the host institutions and by the relevant journals. There may also be a role for the UK Research Integrity Office to advise on any investigation."

A spokesperson for Nature, the science journal mentioned by name in one of the alleged emails that sceptics say provides evidence of data manipulation and collusion, declined to comment.

Full article

Report: GMOs Causing Massive Pesticide Pollution

Andrew Kimbrell
Center for Food Safety
November 21, 2009

There is one fact about genetically engineered foods that there is no debate about: no one wakes up in the morning eager to buy gene-altered food. There's good reason for this. Genetically modified foods do nothing for the "eating public". They provide no extra nutrition, flavor, safety or any other trait that people actually want. Instead, these food products only offer risks, which include potential toxicity, allergenecity, and lower nutritional value.

This presents a tough problem for the Monsantos of the world, who are pushing these GM foods. How can you sell something to the public that offers no benefits to them? And, because of their lobbying power, the biotech companies have ensured that their products are not labeled. So Monsanto's real request of the public is "be unknowing guinea pigs for foods that make us a lot of money and offer you nothing but risk."

Obviously this message is a PR nightmare, so Monsanto has come up with a spin that is old as public relations itself: "accept and buy our products because they will help the world." More particularly, their ads displayed in mass transit systems around the country and regularly on NPR claim that GM foods "will feed a hungry world" and "reduce the load of pesticides" used in agriculture.

Not surprisingly, both these claims turn out to be self-serving myths. Earlier this year the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a detailed report entitled "Failure to Yield". The report's findings were straightforward and incontrovertible. After 21 years of research, billions of dollars of investments in public and private funds, and more than 13 years of commercialization, GM crops have done nothing to significantly increase yield: so much for the "feeding the world's hungry" spin.

Now, a new report from The Organic Center, "Impacts of Genetically Engineered Crops on Pesticide Use: The First Thirteen Years", exposes the "less pesticide" myth. The report, which was released on Tuesday, was authored by Dr. Charles Benbrook, a leading agricultural scientist. In the spirit of full disclosure, I should also mention that Center for Food Safety helped fund the report.

It turns out that far from reducing pesticides, GM crops are a major reason for the massive expansion of pesticide use in recent years. This should not be a surprise. The majority of GE crops are "Roundup Ready," designed to survive heavy and repeated spraying with Monsanto's Roundup weedkiller. Roundup Ready crops have dramatically increased Roundup use, and spawned a growing epidemic of Roundup-resistant weeds, which now infest millions of acres of American cropland. Killing resistant weeds requires more herbicides. How much more? Dr. Benbrook's study - based on official USDA data - shows that GE crops have increased the overall use of weedkillers in the U.S. by a massive 383 million pounds since 1996.

Sometimes even more chemicals won't do the trick. In the South, cotton farmers are reverting to the pre-industrial practice of "chopping cotton," or manual hoeing, to rid their fields of Roundup-resistant pigweed.

Never fear, the biotech industry has "killer" solutions to the Roundup-resistant weed epidemic - you guessed it, new crops resistant to different and multiple herbicides. Dr. Benbrook describes these "next-generation" GE crops, which are the true pesticide-promoting future of agricultural biotechnology.

For instance, Dow Agrosciences will soon bring us GE corn, resistant to 2,4-D, one of the weedkillers in Agent Orange - the dioxin-laced defoliant used during the Vietnam War. 2,4-D-resistant corn will undoubtedly increase use of this dangerous weedkiller, which has been banned in Sweden, Norway and Denmark due to its links to cancer and reproductive disorders. Monsanto, DuPont, Bayer and Syngenta all have their own new "herbicide-tolerant" crops in the works, some resistant to two and even three herbicides each. The inevitable result will be continuing increases in the use of toxic chemicals to kill "next-generation" weeds resistant to multiple weedkillers.

In the face of all this, many farmers are becoming disillusioned with GE crops. In many states, demand for conventional seed, especially soybeans, is outstripping supply. Among the reasons given by farmers for this historic switch are dramatic price hikes for biotech seeds, increased pesticide costs due to resistant weeds, premiums for non-GM supplies, and importantly, the ability to save and replant conventional seeds, which is illegal with Monsanto's patented GE seeds.

Thanks then to the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Organic Center for debunking the myths about GM crops and foods. In terms of timing, the two reports released this year couldn't have come at a more crucial moment. Through careful scientific analysis they expose the false advertising that biotechnology companies are using in print and on our public radio airways.

We should all know what Monsanto and other companies are selling, and its not a solution to world hunger or a cleanser for the environment. What they are really selling is what they make best: chemicals. The biotech giants - Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Bayer and Dow - are, without exception, major pesticide manufacturers. They have each bought up sizeable chunks of the world's seed supply, and are using biotechnology to make those seeds sell their pesticides for them.

It may be good for their bottom line, but its bad for us, the safety of our food, and the health of our environment.

Source

Iran, Brazil sign 8 deals

Press TV - November 24, 2009 00:21:04 GMT

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (R) and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (L)

Iran and Brazil signed eight cooperation deals in Brasilia on Monday after talks between Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

On the second leg of his five-nation tour of South America and Africa, Ahmadinejad arrived in Brazil on Monday with the goal of strengthening ties between the two countries.

The new deals will pave the way for Iran and Brazil to enhance their cooperation in the areas of commerce, energy, and agricultural research and to lift the visa regime between the two countries.

After Ahmadinejad's arrival, the Brazilian president expressed support for Iran's right to access peaceful nuclear energy and called for a “just solution” to be found in the dispute between Iran and the West over the Islamic Republic's nuclear program.

Lula stated that Brazil backed Iran's plans to make use of “peaceful nuclear energy, in full respect of international accords.”

He also advised Iran to “continue contacts with interested countries to find a just solution to the nuclear issue.”

Brazil has repeatedly voiced its support for Iran's nuclear program and has always opposed calls to impose sanctions on the country.

Ahmadinejad was in Gambia on Sunday.

After his one-day visit to Brazil, the Iranian president will travel to Venezuela, Bolivia, and Senegal.

How the financial "Big Players" gained their power

Not Sylvia Night
November 23, 2009

The international financial elites wield enormous power over governments both in developing and developed industrial countries.

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

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

The power by which the financial elite create these processes is the power they have over the money issuing process of nations and over the world's resources.

"Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws" said Mayer Amschel Rothschild, founder of the first international banking empire, about 200 years ago.

With the invention of fractional reserve banking, private bankers became the de facto money-issuing entities which now controls the money supply of all capitalist nations.

With the establishment of private, or semi-private, central banks, like the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve, or the European Central Bank, the largest private banking establishments became interconnected cartels with monopoly powers.

The history of money creation and the consequences of the process today are explained in the videos; Money as Debt, and with more details on the influence of interest payments in, Money as Debt II.

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

In order to control prices and availability of vital resources, the financial elites do not actually need to own those very resources. It is far more efficient for them to gain control over the trade of raw-materials among nations.

In gaining trade-control the physical transit lines; using ships, pipelines, rail, trucks or airfreight, are relatively unimportant. What actually counts in international trade nowadays are the money-transfer lines.

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

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

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

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

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

But the power of "big finance" goes far beyond purely financial policies. As is being confirmed by more and more scientific evidence, the burning of oil, natural gas and coal as energy sources does not have a catastrophic influence on our climate, but still laws are being prepared for the energy consumers of the world to have to pay carbon-taxes and trade in carbon offsetts, a trade, which soon will be controlled by the international financial markets. We also have seen it becoming more accepted by the scientific community that those hydrocarbon fuels are not really scarce resources either. We will not run out of them any time soon, and still there are reoccurring price hikes under the pretense of present or soon to come scarcity.

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

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

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

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

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

In 2008, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, the refining costs of gasoline was calculated with about 10 cents per gallon (or per 4 liters).

The next question, of course, is how many gallons of gasoline can be produced through the refining process from one barrel of crude oil?

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

Using these figures we can now estimate that the combined costs of oil extraction and refining and transport, minus energy loss (about 18%) in the process, is for American-produced gasoline roughly 30 cents per gallon or 7.5 cents per liter.

Quite a bit of a difference between consumer prices and production costs, isn´t it?

Of course, some of the prices are taxes, which are supposed to be used for creating and upholding the traffic infrastructure like streets, roads and bridges. Does the rest go to the oil-companies or the oil-producing countries? A percentage of it, yes, but the real profits are being made on the financial markets.

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

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

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

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

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

DMS Energy, when investigated by Congress, admitted that 80 percent of its trades in 2001 were “round-trip” trades... Duke Energy (DUK) disclosed that $1.1 billion worth of trades were “round-trip” since 1999 [of course these trades gained strategic leverage on broader price levels]....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The money that is being drawn out of the real world economy by these speculative practices is then being used to keep the international financial markets afloat, enticing even more real economy money into the speculative realm, creating in the process a shortage of liquid capital for ordinary consumer lending and end user purchasing, causing economic deflation in some countries, while at the same time depreciating the value of national currencies across the world.

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

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

The author is a frequent contributor to Aletho News and a human rights activist based in Iceland. An archive of previous articles is available at her blog. She deals with subjects like Zionism and the war against the Palestinian people, Western Islamophobia and the myths used to justify wars in the Middle East, imperialism in general, pseudo-scientific myths, falsification of history, the influence of religion on political philosophies, the human mind and how it is influenced by organized propaganda.