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Friday, September 19, 2008 |
and there is an urgent need for a different, fair world order.
Guardian: "The government last night stunned the City when it banned short-selling of bank shares by speculators, hours after a pledge by Gordon Brown to tackle the deepening global credit crunch with a 'clean-up' of the financial markets.
Amid concern that the officially brokered marriage between Lloyds TSB and HBOS could fall victim to the controversial practice of driving down a company's share price, the Financial Services Authority said it was prohibiting the 'active creation or increase' of short positions in financial companies for three months, from midnight last night.
In the US, there were similar signs of action as New York's attorney general began a criminal investigation into short-sellers spreading misinformation to drive down banks' stock prices.
Short-selling is where a trader borrows stock and sells it on in the hope of buying it back at a lower price before returning it to the original owner, often large institutional shareholders which charge a fee for the rent of the shares. While Darling is reluctant to ban the practice outright, he is concerned about its impact on the banking sector, where confidence is crucial."
There were earlier warnings, but nobody cared to react. As long as no drastic changes are made to the whole financial system, our economy will continue getting worse.
Reuters: "Threatened by a 'financial tsunami', the world must consider building a financial order no longer dependent on the United States, a leading Chinese state newspaper said on Wednesday.
'The eruption of the U.S. sub-prime crisis has exposed massive loopholes in the United States' financial oversight and supervision,' writes the commentator, Shi Jianxun.
'The world urgently needs to create a diversified currency and financial system and fair and just financial order that is not dependent on the United States.'"
The American government is a bunch of crooks. It is amazing that the world has so long put up with these criminals, for there is no other word for people who are ruining the economy, making a living killing and breaching the Constitution, and national and international laws.
Trillions of dollars are missing from the US government.
The 'new world order' was pushed down our throats by the neo-imperialists of the US and Britain. As long as their game continues nothing much will change. The privatisation and deregulation that is rampant in the financial policies, the foreign policy and the military, is the source of all evil. We are living in a mercenary economy, that looks very much like piracy, and as such we no longer live in a democracy.
"In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story of how America's 'free market' policies have come to dominate the world - through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries."
Craig Murray got another libel action threat on behalf of a very rich man (Tony Buckingham) who made cash from mercenary activity.
CenterForPublicIntegrity: "... Tim Spicer, a man simultaneously at the center of a number of scandals provoked by his global mercenary activities and of an effort to legitimize the status and sanitize the image of the country's 'dogs of war' - soldiers of fortune who have mounted coups, guarded British, U.S. and Arabian dignitaries and ambassadors, engaged in civil wars, and run sabotage and terror activities from behind hostile lines. From the Contra campaign in Nicaragua to organizing and training Afghan or Kosovar insurgents, British mercenary operators have been employed by the CIA, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the U.S. State Department, as well as by Britain's own Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).
After decades of controversial intervention in the developing world, these private military enterprises are seeking legal recognition and standing. They wish for re-branding as peacekeepers and conflict resolvers. Politicians in the West seem quickly to have accepted a convenient if illusory dichotomy just as it has been handed to them - contrasting the old-style (and bad) 'dogs of war' with the new-style (and good) private military companies, or PMCs, of the 1990s and beyond.
In 1978, Peter de la Billiere, then a brigadier, became director of the U.K. Special Forces. De la Billiere was responsible for overseeing the SAS's most famous operations of the decade, among them the recovery of hostages from the Iranian Embassy siege in 1980, and for commanding Special Forces operations in the 1982 war with Argentina to recover the Falkland Islands. In 1990-1991, as general, he commanded British forces in the Gulf War against Iraq.
In April 1992, de la Billiere returned to London and retired from his military career. He immediately took up a new post as the British government's 'Middle East adviser'. The job involved selling military services to and obtaining or retaining British bridgeheads in the Gulf. Spicer, who had spent the Gulf War as a lecturer at the British Army's staff college, heard that de la Billiere would need a military assistant. He applied for and got the job, and finally entered the secret world of the Special Forces. De la Billiere's office was in the Duke of York's headquarters off of Sloane Square in London, where the offices of the directorate of Special Forces were also located. Soon after joining de la Billiere, Spicer contacted fellow ex-Scots Guards officer Simon Mann and 'co-opted' him into the operation, according to Spicer's autobiography. Mann, an anti-terrorism and computer specialist, who had left the SAS in 1985, later went on to found Executive Outcomes in the United Kingdom in 1993.
Like Executive Outcomes, the entrepreneurial Buckingham had been gaining influence, but his area of interest was the United Kingdom. He added corporate financial and lobbying expertise to Plaza 107, which he had started in 1994. An experienced financier, Michael Grunberg, resigned his partnership in a prominent management accountancy firm and joined Buckingham's King's Road-based network. The entrepreneur also persuaded the leader of Britain's Liberal Party, David Steel, to become a director of Heritage Oil and Gas. The one-time marine and diver - the sort of man whom colleagues considered as quite ready to lift his fists for a pub brawl - was gradually securing influence and access at every level of the British establishment that counts.
Buckingham also recruited a former British secret service 'friend' - that is, a former SIS intelligence officer - to support his activities that could embarrass those establishment connections. Rupert Bowen, whose overt career as a British diplomat in Europe and Namibia was later identified as cover for Secret Intelligence Service work, left his post in Namibia and joined Buckingham's growing oil and military empire at the start of 1994.
The public relations campaign may have finally paid off. In February 2002, the British Foreign Office published a long-delayed response to parliamentary criticism of Spicer and the mercenary trade. The conclusion of the British government's 'green' paper - essentially, a proposal for legislation - on 'Private Military Companies: Options for Regulation' was almost all that Spicer had wanted. The government opined that PMCs should be legalized and licensed. Spicer told his business colleague Professor Blankenship (inaccurately) that 'the British government has changed the law on private military companies', calling it 'a significant event', according to Blankenship.
The moral dilemma of addressing what to do about mercenaries in a democracy when they have been integral to secret and unaccountable foreign policy activities was one the British government was unwilling even to acknowledge."
InvestigatingNewImperialism: "The British government hides its actions, embarrassed perhaps that its activities expose its hypocritical position? But this is nothing new for the Blair government whose activities ever since coming to power in 1997 have been exemplified by an endless trail of broken promises and lies about its true intentions as it attempts to resurrect the empire. So the fact that it rewards the dregs of its former colonial empire's military occupiers with crumbs off the US table should come as no surprise."
11:45:44 AM 
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© Copyright 2008 Hetty Litjens.
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