New World Order

*Buckaroo* wrote:the above links came via email ..

furriner wrote:

*Buckaroo* wrote:the above links came via email ..

As opposed to links coming via snail mail?

Perhaps 60% Of Today's Oil Price Is Pure Speculation

By F. William Engdahl
5-3-8

The price of crude oil today is not made according to any traditional relation of supply to demand. It's controlled by an elaborate financial market system as well as by the four major Anglo-American oil companies. As much as 60% of today's crude oil price is pure speculation driven by large trader banks and hedge funds. It has nothing to do with the convenient myths of Peak Oil. It has to do with control of oil and its price. How?

First, the crucial role of the international oil exchanges in London and New York is crucial to the game. Nymex in New York and the ICE Futures in London today control global benchmark oil prices which in turn set most of the freely traded oil cargo. They do so via oil futures contracts on two grades of crude oil-West Texas Intermediate and North Sea Brent.

A third rather new oil exchange, the Dubai Mercantile Exchange (DME), trading Dubai crude, is more or less a daughter of Nymex, with Nymex President, James Newsome, sitting on the board of DME and most key personnel British or American citizens.

Brent is used in spot and long-term contracts to value as much of crude oil produced in global oil markets each day. The Brent price is published by a private oil industry publication, Platt's. Major oil producers including Russia and Nigeria use Brent as a benchmark for pricing the crude they produce. Brent is a key crude blend for the European market and, to some extent, for Asia.

WTI has historically been more of a US crude oil basket. Not only is it used as the basis for US-traded oil futures, but it's also a key benchmark for US production.



'The tail that wags the dog'

All this is well and official. But how today's oil prices are really determined is done by a process so opaque only a handful of major oil trading banks such as Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley have any idea who is buying and who selling oil futures or derivative contracts that set physical oil prices in this strange new world of "paper oil."

With the development of unregulated international derivatives trading in oil futures over the past decade or more, the way has opened for the present speculative bubble in oil prices.

Since the advent of oil futures trading and the two major London and New York oil futures contracts, control of oil prices has left OPEC and gone to Wall Street. It is a classic case of the "tail that wags the dog."

A June 2006 US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report on "The Role of Market Speculation in rising oil and gas prices," noted, "there is substantial evidence supporting the conclusion that the large amount of speculation in the current market has significantly increased prices."


What the Senate committee staff documented in the report was a gaping loophole in US Government regulation of oil derivatives trading so huge a herd of elephants could walk through it. That seems precisely what they have been doing in ramping oil prices through the roof in recent months.

The Senate report was ignored in the media and in the Congress. (those who control oil also control the media)

The report pointed out that the Commodity Futures Trading Trading Commission, a financial futures regulator, had been mandated by Congress to ensure that prices on the futures market reflect the laws of supply and demand rather than manipulative practices or excessive speculation. The US Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) states, "Excessive speculation in any commodity under contracts of sale of such commodity for future delivery . . . causing sudden or unreasonable fluctuations or unwarranted changes in the price of such commodity, is an undue and unnecessary burden on interstate commerce in such commodity."

Further, the CEA directs the CFTC to establish such trading limits "as the Commission finds are necessary to diminish, eliminate, or prevent such burden." Where is the CFTC now that we need such limits?

They seem to have deliberately walked away from their mandated oversight responsibilities in the world's most important traded commodity, oil.

Enron has the last laugh

As that US Senate report noted:

"Until recently, US energy futures were traded exclusively on regulated exchanges within the United States, like the NYMEX, which are subject to extensive oversight by the CFTC, including ongoing monitoring to detect and prevent price manipulation or fraud. In recent years, however, there has been a tremendous growth in the trading of contracts that look and are structured just like futures contracts, but which are traded on unregulated OTC electronic markets. Because of their similarity to futures contracts they are often called "futures look-alikes."

The only practical difference between futures look-alike contracts and futures contracts is that the look-alikes are traded in unregulated markets whereas futures are traded on regulated exchanges. The trading of energy commodities by large firms on OTC electronic exchanges was exempted from CFTC oversight by a provision inserted at the behest of Enron and other large energy traders into the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 in the waning hours of the 106th Congress.

The impact on market oversight has been substantial. NYMEX traders, for example, are required to keep records of all trades and report large trades to the CFTC. These Large Trader Reports, together with daily trading data providing price and volume information, are the CFTC's primary tools to gauge the extent of speculation in the markets and to detect, prevent, and prosecute price manipulation. CFTC Chairman Reuben Jeffrey recently stated: "The Commission's Large Trader information system is one of the cornerstones of our surveillance program and enables detection of concentrated and coordinated positions that might be used by one or more traders to attempt manipulation."

In contrast to trades conducted on the NYMEX, traders on unregulated OTC electronic exchanges are not required to keep records or file Large Trader Reports with the CFTC, and these trades are exempt from routine CFTC oversight. In contrast to trades conducted on regulated futures exchanges, there is no limit on the number of contracts a speculator may hold on an unregulated OTC electronic exchange, no monitoring of trading by the exchange itself, and no reporting of the amount of outstanding contracts ("open interest") at the end of each day."


Then, apparently to make sure the way was opened really wide to potential market oil price manipulation, in January 2006, the Bush Administration's CFTC permitted the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the leading operator of electronic energy exchanges, to use its trading terminals in the United States for the trading of US crude oil futures on the ICE futures exchange in London ­ called "ICE Futures."

Previously, the ICE Futures exchange in London had traded only in European energy commodities ­ Brent crude oil and United Kingdom natural gas. As a United Kingdom futures market, the ICE Futures exchange is regulated solely by the UK Financial Services Authority. In 1999, the London exchange obtained the CFTC's permission to install computer terminals in the United States to permit traders in New York and other US cities to trade European energy commodities through the ICE exchange.

The CFTC opens the door

Then, in January 2006, ICE Futures in London began trading a futures contract for

West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil, a type of crude oil that is produced and delivered in the United States. ICE Futures also notified the CFTC that it would be permitting traders in the United States to use ICE terminals in the United States to trade its new WTI contract on the ICE Futures London exchange. ICE Futures as well allowed traders in the United States to trade US gasoline and heating oil futures on the ICE Futures exchange in London.

Despite the use by US traders of trading terminals within the United States to trade US oil, gasoline, and heating oil futures contracts, the CFTC has until today refused to assert any jurisdiction over the trading of these contracts.

Persons within the United States seeking to trade key US energy commodities ­ US crude oil, gasoline, and heating oil futures ­ are able to avoid all US market oversight or reporting requirements by routing their trades through the ICE Futures exchange in London instead of the NYMEX in New York.

Is that not elegant? The US Government energy futures regulator, CFTC opened the way to the present unregulated and highly opaque oil futures speculation. It may just be coincidence that the present CEO of NYMEX, James Newsome, who also sits on the Dubai Exchange, is a former chairman of the US CFTC. In Washington doors revolve quite smoothly between private and public posts.

A glance at the price for Brent and WTI futures prices since January 2006 indicates the remarkable correlation between skyrocketing oil prices and the unregulated trade in ICE oil futures in US markets. Keep in mind that ICE Futures in London is owned and controlled by a USA company based in Atlanta Georgia.

In January 2006 when the CFTC allowed the ICE Futures the gaping exception, oil prices were trading in the range of $59-60 a barrel. Today some two years later we see prices tapping $120 and trend upwards. This is not an OPEC problem, it is a US Government regulatory problem of malign neglect.

By not requiring the ICE to file daily reports of large trades of energy commodities, it is not able to detect and deter price manipulation. As the Senate report noted, "The CFTC's ability to detect and deter energy price manipulation is suffering from critical information gaps, because traders on OTC electronic exchanges and the London ICE Futures are currently exempt from CFTC reporting requirements. Large trader reporting is also essential to analyze the effect of speculation on energy prices."

The report added, "ICE's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and other evidence indicate that its over-the-counter electronic exchange performs a price discovery function -- and thereby affects US energy prices -- in the cash market for the energy commodities traded on that exchange."


Hedge Funds and Banks driving oil prices

In the most recent sustained run-up in energy prices, large financial institutions, hedge funds, pension funds, and other investors have been pouring billions of dollars into the energy commodities markets to try to take advantage of price changes or hedge against them. Most of this additional investment has not come from producers or consumers of these commodities, but from speculators seeking to take advantage of these price changes. The CFTC defines a speculator as a person who "does not produce or use the commodity, but risks his or her own capital trading futures in that commodity in hopes of making a profit on price changes."

The large purchases of crude oil futures contracts by speculators have, in effect, created an additional demand for oil, driving up the price of oil for future delivery in the same manner that additional demand for contracts for the delivery of a physical barrel today drives up the price for oil on the spot market. As far as the market is concerned, the demand for a barrel of oil that results from the purchase of a futures contract by a speculator is just as real as the demand for a barrel that results from the purchase of a futures contract by a refiner or other user of petroleum.

Perhaps 60% of oil prices today pure speculation

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley today are the two leading energy trading firms in the United States. Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase are major players and fund numerous hedge funds as well who speculate.

In June 2006, oil traded in futures markets at some $60 a barrel and the Senate investigation estimated that some $25 of that was due to pure financial speculation. One analyst estimated in August 2005 that US oil inventory levels suggested WTI crude prices should be around $25 a barrel, and not $60.

That would mean today that at least $50 to $60 or more of today's $115 a barrel price is due to pure hedge fund and financial institution speculation. However, given the unchanged equilibrium in global oil supply and demand over recent months amid the explosive rise in oil futures prices traded on Nymex and ICE exchanges in New York and London it is more likely that as much as 60% of the today oil price is pure speculation. No one knows officially except the tiny handful of energy trading banks in New York and London and they certainly aren't talking.

By purchasing large numbers of futures contracts, and thereby pushing up futures prices to even higher levels than current prices, speculators have provided a financial incentive for oil companies to buy even more oil and place it in storage. A refiner will purchase extra oil today, even if it costs $115 per barrel, if the futures price is even higher.

As a result, over the past two years crude oil inventories have been steadily growing, resulting in US crude oil inventories that are now higher than at any time in the previous eight years. The large influx of speculative investment into oil futures has led to a situation where we have both high supplies of crude oil and high crude oil prices.

Compelling evidence also suggests that the oft-cited geopolitical, economic, and natural factors do not explain the recent rise in energy prices can be seen in the actual data on crude oil supply and demand. Although demand has significantly increased over the past few years, so have supplies.

Over the past couple of years global crude oil production has increased along with the increases in demand; in fact, during this period global supplies have exceeded demand, according to the US Department of Energy. The US Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently forecast that in the next few years global surplus production capacity will continue to grow to between 3 and 5 million barrels per day by 2010, thereby "substantially thickening the surplus capacity cushion."

Dollar and oil link

A common speculation strategy amid a declining USA economy and a falling US dollar is for speculators and ordinary investment funds desperate for more profitable investments amid the US securitization disaster, to take futures positions selling the dollar "short" and oil "long."

For huge US or EU pension funds or banks desperate to get profits following the collapse in earnings since August 2007 and the US real estate crisis, oil is one of the best ways to get huge speculative gains. The backdrop that supports the current oil price bubble is continued unrest in the Middle East, in Sudan, in Venezuela and Pakistan and firm oil demand in China and most of the world outside the US. Speculators trade on rumor, not fact.

In turn, once major oil companies and refiners in North America and EU countries begin to hoard oil, supplies appear even tighter lending background support to present prices.

Because the over-the-counter (OTC) and London ICE Futures energy markets are unregulated, there are no precise or reliable figures as to the total dollar value of recent spending on investments in energy commodities, but the estimates are consistently in the range of tens of billions of dollars.

The increased speculative interest in commodities is also seen in the increasing popularity of commodity index funds, which are funds whose price is tied to the price of a basket of various commodity futures. Goldman Sachs estimates that pension funds and mutual funds have invested a total of approximately $85 billion in commodity index funds, and that investments in its own index, the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI), has tripled over the past few years. Notable is the fact that the US Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, is former Chairman of Goldman Sachs.

F. William Engdahl is an Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order. He may be contacted at info@engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net


1 United States Senate Premanent Subcommittee on Investigations, 109th Congress 2nd Session, The Role of Market speculation in Rising Oil and Gas Prices: A Need to Put the Cop Back on the Beat; Staff Report, prepared by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, United States Senate, Washington D.C., June 27, 2006. p. 3.

How business starves the world’s poor

Joanna Blythman on the food crisis




THE SUMS just don't add up. There's a world food supply crisis, the cost of a basket of groceries has shot up by between 10% and 12.5%, yet our supermarkets are recording healthy profits - Tesco's profits last year, for instance, showed a 11.8% rise.

Meanwhile, farmers - the people who produce our food, say that they are being paid less than they were years ago. Many are selling meat and milk at below the cost of production. Their situation is pretty desperate. It's no coincidence the homepages of farming websites flag up the 24-hour helpline numbers for the Samaritans and the Farm Crisis Network. Suicide among farmers is at record rates.

When pressed by John Humphrys on the Today programme about what the government was doing to control soaring retail food prices, deputy prime minister Harriet Harman said that she "expects the supermarkets to play their part". Ominous words. Farmers will wince, because they understand the sub-text.

Subsequent administrations have given the nod to supermarkets to squeeze farmers on price in order to keep food inflation down and that pressure can only get worse. Asda Wal-Mart CEO, Andy Bond, recently said he intends to be "assertive" and "aggressive" with suppliers. Go right ahead Andy, but there won't be many farmers left.

So there's the mental arithmetic problem. If the farmer gets less, the consumer pays more and the supermarket makes more, where's all the profit in the food chain going?

An interesting insight into this murky maths was provided this week by EU agriculture commissioner, Mariann Fischer Boel. She says that only about two-thirds of the rise in food prices we have seen in Europe can be attributed to increases in the cost of ingredients. "Energy, transport and labour costs have risen, but it is possible that somewhere along the food chain someone may be doing well out of this," she adds.

She has released figures showing that the cost of many grocery staples has gone up by more than the value of basic commodities used to make them. Bread, for example, increased 10% between February 2007 and 2008, but the near-doubling of the price of wheat should have led to only a 3% rise.

It seems our retailers are doing very nicely out of the global food crisis, thank you very much, and so are the global agri-business firms, traders and speculators currently raking in fabulous profits. Hungry people are out on the streets from Egypt to Haiti to protest at the rocketing cost of staples, yet Cargill, the world's biggest grain trader, has achieved an 86% increase in profits from commodity trading in the first quarter of this year alone. Meanwhile Bunge, another huge food trader, reported a 77% increase in profits during the last quarter of last year. ADM, the second largest grain trader in the world, registered a 67% increase in profits in 2007.

Farmers the world over yearn for stable, reliable prices for the food they produce. But stock market traders? My, how they love volatility. Buying and selling? It's how they make their money. That's why investment funds, escaping from sliding stock markets and the credit crunch, are having a bonanza on the commodity markets.

But while they have elevated food speculation to an art form, they are driving food out of reach of poor countries like Bangladesh, Cameroon and the Philippines.

In rich countries like ours, the rising cost of food is not yet critical. Certainly, our poorest citizens already feel the pinch. You can turn off the heater but you still have to eat, and a 60% increase in the cost of a bag of pasta is significant. But the worse scenario for most affluent people is hardly grave - less to spend on a handbag or new trainers, perhaps.

However, globally, the situation is acute. A new UN taskforce now warns that we face "an unprecedented challenge of global proportions that has become a crisis for the world's most vulnerable".

Head of the taskforce Sir John Holmes, has likened it to "a silent, rolling tsunami", more insidious even than the classic famines we have seen in countries such as Ethiopia. The UN World Food Programme estimates that recent food price rises mean an additional 100 million people can no longer afford to eat adequately.

The IMF and the World Bank pushed countries to dismantle all forms of protection for their local farmers and to open up their markets to global agribusiness and subsidised food from rich countries. Like chiselling snake oil salesmen, they said that a liberalised market would provide the most efficient system for producing and distributing food.

Some 70% of developing countries listened to them and changed from exporters of food into importers. Now they can't afford to buy food because traders' asking prices are too high.

Harvests blighted by climate change, combined with a soaring global population, make it ever harder for the planet to feed itself.

But when food is no longer just something that nourishes people and provides them with secure livelihoods, and becomes a commodity for corporate speculation and bargaining, then that task becomes impossible.

Will We See The End Of Empire In Our Time?
By Richard C. Cook
5-28-8

The following is based on a talk given by the author at the "End of Empire" session of the "Building a New World" Conference of the Prout World Assembly at Radford University, Radford, Virginia, on May 22, 2008.

I believe we have had two Americas. One started with the imperialist state which Alexander Hamilton tried to put into place in the 1790s with the First Bank of the United States. Thomas Jefferson overthrew this early expression of empire in the Civic Revolution of 1800 and created a strong and free America which lasted until 1913 in spite of the convulsion of the Civil War.

In 1913 the empire came back through the Federal Reserve Act and the 16th Amendment to the Constitution authorizing the income tax. Franklin Roosevelt dealt it a blow during the New Deal, but now it has taken over again, starting with the Vietnam War, continuing with the Reagan Revolution, and ending with the catastrophe of Bush II.

Though the America we know and love is in agony, I believe the 'real' America is still there, somewhere, among the people, particularly those who remain true to the teaching of the Master, "to love your neighbor as yourself." Whether and how that America will now come to the fore is, for me, the next big question.

A few weeks after I retired from the government in January 2007, I published a book entitled Challenger Revealed: An Insider's Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age.

I had gone to work at NASA in the summer of 1985 as the lead resource analyst for the space shuttle solid rocket boosters.

My first major assignment was to talk with the solid rocket booster engineers and find out about the problems they were having with the O-ring joints. They told me that these joints, located between rocket segments, were being eroded by flame leaks almost every time the shuttle was launched.

The engineers said that if the flame leaks burned all the way through the joints, then the shuttle would blow up. Documents showed that if this happened the astronauts all would die. The engineers said they were trying to redesign the joints but that for now they "held their breath" each time there was a launch.

On January 26, 1986, space shuttle Challenger did blow up for the reason the engineers had described. Among the seven astronauts who died was Christa McAuliffe, the Teacher-in-Space and the first civilian shuttle passenger. I became the only NASA official to testify publicly to the Rogers Commission that NASA had known for a long time this could happen. For my testimony I later received the Cavallo Foundation Award given to whistleblowers for moral courage in business and industry.

After my testimony, the engineers for Morton Thiokol came forward and told how they had tried to stop the launch the night before, because they feared the unusually cold temperatures would prevent the O-ring joints from sealing. NASA refused to accept the engineers' recommendation for a delay, and their own company managers approved the launch in writing.

This was as far as the Rogers Commission went with its investigation. After four more years of personal investigation, I was able to determine that NASA approved the launch against all expert opinion in connection with the TV publicity for the Teacher-in-Space mission and under pressure from the Reagan White House.

I was also able to show that the reason NASA kept flying, despite the knowledge that the O-ring joints were flawed and that their performance was further compromised by cold temperatures, was so as not to interfere with military launches the shuttle was going to be making in support of President Reagan's Star Wars weapons-in-space system.

I tell you this story because it is a concrete example of what happens when a nation goes from being a democracy to an empire. For one thing, human life no longer matters. They don't care if people live or die. They'll kill millions, whole nations, entire cultures, to get what they covet. And they will give it fancy names, like "The War on Terror." Or they'll tell you the earth is overpopulated so hundreds of millions must starve, which is starting to happen even as we speak.

Also, there is always a great leader whose image and prestige matters more than common sense and the truth-a Great Communicator, a Decider, a Unitary Executive. And that leader is going to be good at scaring you and making you do things out of fear you would never do in your right mind.

Finally, under an empire, ideas of science and knowledge-which is to say, Truth-are sacrificed to the imperatives of militarism and national security. What was happening at the time of the Challenger disaster was that the manned space program, which had given mankind some of its greatest triumphs during the Apollo moon landing program, was now being subverted to begin launching weapons into space. Today, no nation in history has been as proficient as ours at inventing things to kill their fellow human beings.

Returning to my personal circumstances, I left NASA a few days after my testimony and spent the next twenty-one years working for the U.S. Treasury Department. There I learned more about what it has meant for us to become an empire, because it has affected public finance as much as space science. And I have studied this topic seriously for years. I publish articles regularly on Global Research and other websites and have a new book coming out this fall entitled, We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.

The issue of whether we in the U.S. want to be an empire or a democracy goes back to the founding of the nation. In the 1790s, our first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, got Congress, with President George Washington's approval, to pass legislation setting up the First Bank of the United States. Hamilton was frank at the time in telling people that the purpose of the Bank was to allow the creation of what he than called an "American empire" in order to compete with the European nations in controlling the world.

The Bank would do the same for the U.S. as the Bank of England did for Great Britain. It would buy government debt and use it as collateral for private lending. The debt would then be used to fund a large standing army and navy, even though in the long run, this could bankrupt the nation. The army and navy began to be built through the 1790s, until Thomas Jefferson and his followers stood up and said this is not the kind of nation we fought to create during the Revolutionary War.

Hamilton and Jefferson split, and that split has defined U.S. politics ever since. Hamilton became the de facto head of the Federalist Party, the ancestor first of the Whigs and then of the Republicans. Jefferson called himself a Republican at first, then a Democratic-Republican, then finally his party became the Democratic Party that has lasted until today. Of course we know that the two parties have come more and more to resemble each other in recent decades in supporting policies of imperialism.

Jefferson was elected president in what was called the Civic Revolution of 1800. The first thing he did was cut military spending. He did what no one has done since, which was to balance the federal budget for eight consecutive years. Then he took an action which defined our nation to a considerable extent all the way into the 20th century. In 1803 he doubled the size of the nation overnight through the Louisiana Purchase.

So for the next century, instead of competing with the European nations for overseas colonies, our energies were devoted to settling the North American continent, to the detriment, of course, of the Native American peoples. We became, as did Russia in Eurasia and Brazil in South America, a continental land power. And we stayed that way for over a century.

But empire finally caught up with us. Across the sea in South Africa a man named Cecil Rhodes was devising a plan to make the British Empire the ruler of the globe. He created a secret society to accomplish this, called the Round Table, using money provided by the Rothschild family, who had controlled the British economy since the Napoleonic wars.

The U.S. was integral to their plans. Following is the relevant passage from Cecil Rhodes' will of 1877. His aims, he wrote in the will, were:

The extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom and of colonization by British subjects of all lands wherein the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour, and enterprise,the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of a British Empire, the consolidation of the whole Empire, the inauguration of a system of Colonial Representation in the Imperial Parliament which may to tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire, and finally the production of so great a power as to hereafter render wars impossible and promote the best interests of humanity.

Think about that: "the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire." In fact, as Professor Carroll Quigley made clear in his celebrated book, The Anglo-American Establishment, the British planners, whose descendants still rule that nation, acknowledged that a time would come when the U.S. would be the senior partner in the empire, which is exactly what happened over the century that lay ahead.

The Russian writer P.D. Ouspensky said all the history you read about in the history books is "the history of crime." This is what he was talking about.
The takeover of America was accomplished when the British, European, and American bankers created the Federal Reserve System in 1913. That year our nation was hijacked. Congressman Charles Lindbergh, father of the future aviator, called it "the legislative crime of the ages."

The Federal Reserve is a privately-owned central banking system modeled on the Bank of England. >From that day onward we got all the accoutrements of empire which have burdened our nation ever since: an enormous national debt, a crushing tax burden, permanent inflation, constant warfare, a gigantic and overweening military-industrial complex, a national character marked by arrogance and violence, and today, the enmity of the world.

Our wealth has been based, first, of course, on our own industriousness and natural resources-a positive-but, when that has proved insufficient, on taking it from others. Until recently our businesses and industry have dominated the globe-ever since World War II. The American dollar has been the world's reserve currency and the denominator of trade in the "black gold" known as oil.

Through the neocolonialist institution known as the International Monetary Fund, we dominated the economies of the developing world. And we backed up our hegemony with military might. Since the start of World War II in 1941 we have been at war with somebody, either overtly or covertly, continuously. This pattern of warfare accelerated with the Reagan Doctrine of fighting proxy wars starting in the 1980s.

Today our military is based in 166 nations. Our economy is dominated by two industries-banking and armaments. Egged on by Israel and the U.S.-based neocons, we are engaged in the military conquest of the Middle East. This began after the 9/11 attacks through use of off-the-shelf plans to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. We are also seeking "full-spectrum dominance" by planning, once again, to put weapons into space.

And we are bankrupt-morally and financially. We gave away our manufacturing industries to the operators of overseas sweatshops and have tried to live on our investments and the inflation of our homes and paper assets. Our secret intelligence agencies are heavily involved in the illicit drug trade, and we carry out our foreign policy with assassinations, subversion, and torture.
Yet we have a national debt approaching $10 trillion and a total societal debt of $50 trillion, neither of which can ever be paid off. Meanwhile the world's financial controllers, still mainly based in London along with Wall Street, have gotten unbelievably rich from the proceeds of empire over the decades and are probably laughing up their sleeves as they watch us inch toward the next world war.

Because it's a fact that the threat of nuclear war which we thought had been dispelled by the end of the Cold War today has come back. Remember talk of the "peace dividend"? What a joke! In our name, and with our money, the U.S. military-industrial complex is seriously preparing for a world war that would be fought with nuclear weapons against Russia and China.

The trigger could be a U.S. attack on Iran, which seems to be in the works and may take place before the November presidential election. Disgusting and corrupt corporate media outlets like the Washington Post are again beating the drums for war on behalf of the financiers and Israel as they did in the run-up to the war against Iraq.

Is there still a chance for us to step back and become the nation we once were, the home of liberty and the hope of mankind? Although I have tried to address these and many other issues in my writings, I honestly do not have the answer to that very pertinent question.

Copyright 2008 by Richard C. Cook

Richard C. Cook is a former U.S. federal government analyst, whose career included service with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury Department. His articles on economics, politics, and space policy have appeared on numerous websites. His book on monetary reform entitled We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform will be published soon by Tendril Press. He is also the author of Challenger Revealed: An Insider's Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age, called by one reviewer, "the most important spaceflight book of the last twenty years."

Weather warfare
Beware the US military’s experiments with climatic warfare, says Michel Chossudovsky

Date:22/05/2008
Author:Michel Chossudovsky

Rarely acknowledged in the debate on global climate change, the world’s weather can now be modified as part of a new generation of sophisticated electromagnetic weapons. Both the US and Russia have developed capabilities to manipulate the climate for military use.

Environmental modification techniques have been applied by the US military for more than half a century. US mathematician John von Neumann, in liaison with the US Department of Defense, started his research on weather modification in the late 1940s at the height of the Cold War and foresaw ‘forms of climatic warfare as yet unimagined’.

During the Vietnam war, cloud-seeding techniques were used, starting in 1967 under Project Popeye, the objective of which was to prolong the monsoon season and block enemy supply routes along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The US military has developed advanced capabilities that enable it selectively to alter weather patterns. The technology, which is being perfected under the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), is an appendage of the Strategic Defense Initiative – ‘Star Wars’. From a military standpoint, HAARP is a weapon of mass destruction, operating from the outer atmosphere and capable of destabilising agricultural and ecological systems around the world.

Weather-modification, according to the US Air Force document AF 2025 Final Report, ‘offers the war fighter a wide range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary’, capabilities, it says, extend to the triggering of floods, hurricanes, droughts and earthquakes: ‘Weather modification will become a part of domestic and international security and could be done unilaterally… It could have offensive and defensive applications and even be used for deterrence purposes. The ability to generate precipitation, fog and storms on earth or to modify space weather… and the production of artificial weather all are a part of an integrated set of [military] technologies.’

In 1977, an international Convention was ratified by the UN General Assembly which banned ‘military or other hostile use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting or severe effects.’ It defined ‘environmental modification techniques’ as ‘any technique for changing – through the deliberate manipulation of natural processes – the dynamics, composition or structure of the earth, including its biota, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, or of outer space.’

While the substance of the 1977 Convention was reasserted in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) signed at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, debate on weather modification for military use has become a scientific taboo. Military analysts are mute on the subject. Meteorologists are not investigating the matter and environmentalists are focused on greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol. Neither is the possibility of climatic or environmental manipulations as part of a military and intelligence agenda, while tacitly acknowledged, part of the broader debate on climate change under UN auspices.

The HAARP Programme

Established in 1992, HAARP, based in Gokona, Alaska, is an array of high-powered antennas that transmit, through high-frequency radio waves, massive amounts of energy into the ionosphere (the upper layer of the atmosphere). Their construction was funded by the US Air Force, the US Navy and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Operated jointly by the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Office of Naval Research, HAARP constitutes a system of powerful antennas capable of creating ‘controlled local modifications of the ionosphere’. According to its official website, www.haarp.alaska.edu, HAARP will be used ‘to induce a small, localized change in ionospheric temperature so physical reactions can be studied by other instruments located either at or close to the HAARP site’.

But Rosalie Bertell, president of the International Institute of Concern for Public Health, says HAARP operates as ‘a gigantic heater that can cause major disruptions in the ionosphere, creating not just holes, but long incisions in the protective layer that keeps deadly radiation from bombarding the planet’. Physicist Dr Bernard Eastlund called it ‘the largest ionospheric heater ever built’.

HAARP is presented by the US Air Force as a research programme, but military documents confirm its main objective is to ‘induce ionospheric modifications’ with a view to altering weather patterns and disrupting communications and radar. According to a report by the Russian State Duma: ‘The US plans to carry out large-scale experiments under the HAARP programme [and] create weapons capable of breaking radio communication lines and equipment installed on spaceships and rockets, provoke serious accidents in electricity networks and in oil and gas pipelines, and have a negative impact on the mental health of entire regions.’

An analysis of statements emanating from the US Air Force points to the unthinkable: the covert manipulation of weather patterns, communications and electric power systems as a weapon of global warfare, enabling the US to disrupt and dominate entire regions.

Weather manipulation is the pre-emptive weapon par excellence. It can be directed against enemy countries or ‘friendly nations’ without their knowledge, used to destabilise economies, ecosystems and agriculture. It can also trigger havoc in financial and commodity markets. The disruption in agriculture creates a greater dependency on food aid and imported grain staples from the US and other Western countries.

HAARP was developed as part of an Anglo-American partnership between Raytheon Corporation, which owns the HAARP patents, and British Aerospace Systems (BAES). The HAARP project is one among several collaborative ventures in advanced weapons systems between the two defence giants.

The HAARP project was initiated in 1992 by Advanced Power Technologies, Inc. (APTI), a subsidiary of Atlantic Richfield Corporation (ARCO). APTI (including the HAARP patents) was sold by ARCO to E-Systems Inc, in 1994.

E-Systems, on contract to the CIA and US Department of Defense, outfitted the ‘Doomsday Plan’, which ‘allows the President to manage a nuclear war’. Subsequently acquired by Raytheon Corporation, it is among the largest intelligence contractors in the World.

BAES was involved in the development of the advanced stage of the HAARP antenna array under a 2004 contract with the Office of Naval Research. The installation of 132 highfrequency transmitters was entrusted by BAES to its US subsidiary, BAE Systems Inc. The project, according to a July report in Defense News, was undertaken by BAES’s Electronic Warfare division. In September it received DARPA’s top award for technical achievement for the design, construction and activation of the HAARP array of antennas.

The HAARP system is fully operational and in many regards dwarfs existing conventional and strategic weapons systems. While there is no firm evidence of its use for military purposes, Air Force documents suggest HAARP is an integral part of the militarisation of space. One would expect the antennas already to have been subjected to routine testing.

Under the UNFCCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has a mandate ‘to assess scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for the understanding of climate change’. This mandate includes environmental warfare. ‘Geo-engineering’ is acknowledged, but the underlying military applications are neither the object of policy analysis or scientific research in the thousands of pages of IPCC reports and supporting documents, based on the expertise and input of some 2,500 scientists, policymakers and environmentalists.

‘Climatic warfare’ potentially threatens the future of humanity, but has casually been excluded from the reports for which the IPCC received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Michel Chossudovsky is a Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and an editor at the Centre for Research on Globalization,

*Buckaroo* wrote:certain posts are for those people who have proper grasp of the right context of international affairs.

newbies like you, doremi need to learn a lot before you can even sniff the air at that level.

WORLD CARTEL CONJURES OIL PRICE. PROFIT $1 TRILLION YEARLY
By P.R.SIDDHARTHA
11 JUNE 2008

Is a Global Oil Cartel with a Global Political Agenda collapsing Political Systems across the world by making them unpopular with their voters by pushing the Oil Prices to an unbearable level of $200?

Political Bosses running Governments across the World have become corrupt. Yet they continue to Govern their nations to profit from unbridled corruption.

The Rocketing Oil prices are collapsing the Ruling Dynasties across the World!

ANALYSIS SENT BY A READER

Rocketing prices of oil in the international market have severely impacted the financial health of the oil importing countries due to unprecedented inflationary pressure. Crude prices have more than doubled during last one year from $65 to an unprecedented level of $ 139 per barrel. All the Oil Analysts are perplexed at this exponential growth. Nobody is clear as to when this price rise juggernaut will stop.

Some officials associated with oil business are predicting that the oil prices will touch $200 or more. Various reasons such as; natural and man-made constraints in oil supply and demand, lack of spare capacity with oil producers, peaking of oil production, weakening of dollar and role of speculators are being put forward to explain this unimaginable price levels.

Who is driving the oil price juggernaut?

A look at the main oil players shows that there are three distinct entities, namely private companies, OPEC and non-OPEC countries. Due to nationalisation of oil assets by oil producing countries, nearly 77 per cent of the world production comes from national oil companies of different oil producing countries. Many of these have political agenda rather than commercial considerations.

MNCs on their own have a limited role in manipulating oil production on large-scale as only 7 per cent of world’s oil reserves are in the countries which allow these MNCs a free hand. However, they have the resources and expertise in influencing market sentiments by planting distorted analyses through their present and former executives to create doomsday scenarios.

To put oil constraint rumours at rest some oil producing countries need to substantially increase their production. Capacity of OPEC to drastically change the oil dynamics has reduced considerably as 65 per cent of the total world production at present is in the hands of non-OPEC members.

Russia has the largest production levels and spare capacity to change the production dynamics. However, its oil production, which at one point even surpassed that of Saudi Arabia has reduced during last two years. It is debatable whether it was really due to peaking problems, as is being made or a deliberate act for escalating oil prices. The second option looks more plausible as Russia has been one of the greatest beneficiary of the boom in oil prices. It earns an additional $ 2 billion for every $1 increase in the international oil price.

A few years ago Russian economy was a basket case with its defaulting on international loans payments and facing international humiliation. Thanks to the oil price boom Russia has become the new energy king and has one of largest surplus reserves of foreign exchange in its history. Putin has understood the role of oil as a most potent weapon and played a key role by his oil diplomacy along with Venezuela and Iran to turn its full impact on western economies with a more deadly impact than nuclear weapons in the cold war.
Saudi Arabia used to act as a spoilsport in earlier attempts to raise oil prices under pressure from the US. Now it appears to have given its tacit support to new dispensation of oil turks led by Russia to shore up its dwindling economy and insulate itself from reduced returns due to decline of US dollar by 13.4 per cent in the last year.

OPEC claims that their net export revenue per capita is just 55 per cent of what it was in 1981 and there is scope for doubling the oil prices from 2007 level so as to strengthen their own economies. Thus, a figure of $ 200 per barrel is quite plausible in new future.
Some of the OPEC members claim that they have subsidised the world economy for too long at their own expenses. This was the main reason that George Bush could not push Saudi Arabia to increase its production substantially to calm the oil price storm and had to come back empty handed.

The telling impact of oil weapon has given flip to another idea of Putin to form a gas cartel on oil lines to push up gas prices in foreseeable future.

Another faceless but deadlier player than OPEC has emerged on the oil scene in the form of speculators. Oil speculators have stockpiled via the future market the equivalent of 1.1 billion barrels of petroleum, which is eight times the oil the US has added to its strategic petroleum reserves over five years or the increase in demand of oil in China over the last five years, which is growing at the rate of 20 per cent per year. This appears to be one of the major causes of runaway oil prices.

$ 260 billion has been invested in to the commodity market, which is up nearly 20 times from what it was in 2003. The stimulus has been a small margin of 5-7 per cent required in the US in the commodity market.

The implications of this low margin are that the speculators with a mere $ 260 billion are able to take positions on approximately $ 5 trillion in the future market. It is estimated that oil accounts for more than half of these bets.

The oil market has turned in to a gambling parlour.

Four financial companies turned oil traders namely Goldmen Sach, J.P.Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Morgan and Stanley now determine the oil prices and only they are aware who is entering in the oil future market. The staggering oil earning by oil producers are being pumped into future market to further maximise their profits. Analysts also claim that investors ruined by real estate meltdown, stocks, shares and bonds during last one year have jumped into the oil market and are making up their losses. Cuts in US interest rate and hedging against fall in dollar and inflation has also diverted the attention of investors to commodity market.

Seasoned oil analysts claim that out of $ 130 per barrel of oil price, $ 50-60 are the speculator’s premium. Some allege that there may be a tacit support of US government to oil speculators as strategic reserves are being filled to the brim at a time when the oil prices are touching new high, instead of using them to cool the runaway oil prices.

Alternatively, it might be a precursor of some geopolitical event of staggering proportions in the Middle East, which is likely to further escalate oil prices.

This shows that a tectonic shift for determining the international oil prices has taken place where oil producers and speculators are working as a cartel to fuel the oil price fire.
In the last three years Oil Companies Profited by an additional $ 3 trillion!

One of the most frequently quoted reasons is the mismatch between supply and demand of oil. International Energy Agency. March 2008 report showed that there has been a 3.8 per cent increase in oil supply during last one year, which was more than the average of five-year production levels. On the other hand , global oil consumption grew by just 0.7 per cent during this period, the weakest growth since 2001 and half of the last ten year average. In spite of this production increase, the oil price rose by 57 percent during this period and are continuously increasing.

Another theory being propagated by the oil analysts is that the world “oil reserves peak” either has already occurred or will occur in 2010/2015 and after that there will be downhill for the oil production capacity. Recent rigorous simulation and modeling done by EIA shows that peak will occur only beyond 2030 and there is no need to get alarmed . This conclusion is being sported by the fact that there has been a net addition of 277 billion barrels in the world oil reserves of 1317 billion barrels between 2000-2007 when net investment in oil exploration was very low. This shows that the prediction of oil doom is far fetched.

There appears to be some other reason than mismatch between supply and demand put forward by the analyst to explain the present surge in oil prices.

The recent price rise is due to the lack of crude “cushion” in the system at merely 1 per cent amounting to 1 million barrels per day out of total consumption of 85 million barrels per day.

Any bottleneck in production as a result of natural or man-made accidents or incidents create a scare in the market resulting in volatile sentiments. This has been effectively refuted by the current president of OPEC, who has emphatically stated that they have at present 3 million barrels per day excess capacity. If the figures of non-OPEC producers is added, the spare capacity is more than sufficient to take care of any major eventuality.

Major oil users of the world like the USA, OECD states and Japan have created strategic oil reserves to tide over these eventualities. Approximately 4.1 billion barrels of oil are held in strategic reserves in the world.

An artificial scare of low spare capacity is being created by the vested interest to further fuel the volatility in oil prices.

The recent meeting of the major oil importing countries is a step in the right direction.

Oil Importing Nations must join hands to devise a strategy to stop the OIL CARTEL from ruining the international monetary and political system.

One of the most frequently quoted reasons is the mismatch between supply and demand of oil. International Energy Agency. March 2008 report showed that there has been a 3.8 per cent increase in oil supply during last one year, which was more than the average of five-year production levels. On the other hand , global oil consumption grew by just 0.7 per cent during this period, the weakest growth since 2001 and half of the last ten year average. In spite of this production increase, the oil price rose by 57 percent during this period and are continuously increasing.

Free-trade era may be nearing end amid food, growth concerns

This article from Bloomberg supports one of the central ideas of this blog - that the capitalist economic system is in its final stages. The purported cause for this is because the globes resources cannot manage any more economic growth, and this may be true to an extent. However, my personal belief is that the capitalists have formed a workable oligarchy to control all major industries and now are intent on shutting down the capitalist system which may pose serious threats to them in the future.

Shutting down the free markets
Interestingly, the market forces of supply and demand are being blamed for the price spikes in commodities that have occurred this year. Although on the surface this seems like a plausible explanation, it does not take into account the sudden dramatic increases for certain commodities. There has been ample evidence to suggest that commodities are increasing in price because the currency they are priced in continues to decline in value.

But as the officials insist that market forces are the culprit, the obvious solution is to construct more regulations to limit the influence of the market. This is commonly called market intervention. Already tighter regulations in futures markets are being proposed by the CFTC in conjunction with the UK’s Financial Service Authority in order to limit the size of trade positions. The CFTC also announced that it is creating an interagency task force consisting of the Federal Reserve and other agencies to see what is drawing so many new investors into the commodities market. No doubt even more regulations will be put in place as a result.

However, the picture is incomplete without taking into account Peak Oil, which some experts claim we have already passed. With oil being so vitally important to the global economy, its diminishing supply will mean governments will have to impose disincentives through taxes and rations to force countries into finding alternative fuels. Truthfully, without a continually expanding oil supply, a continually expanding global economy is unachievable. The United Nations have planned for the event of Peak Oil with an economic model called ’sustainable development’, which is essentially a zero growth economy. In this economic model, capitalist ideas based on growth and profit will have no use.

*Buckaroo* wrote:Either something is wrong with my mental makeup or I am a cheap publicity seeker

*Buckaroo* wrote:certain posts are for those people who have proper grasp of the right context of international affairs.

newbies like you, doremi need to learn a lot before you can even sniff the air at that level.