Financial

OK, lets get started. I’m going to start today with the financial situation, because the collapse is accelerating every day now. Alistair Darling’s unprecedented intervention over the weekend was quite amazing, really, if a little deluded in some areas, especially his suggestion that no-one could have predicted the situation, which demonstrates a certain separation from reality.

Clearly the big news of the day at home is the collapse of Sterling, now at its lowest level ever aginst the Euro. A few months ago, I opened a book with some friends, taking odds on which month would see 1:1. I said Christmas. The way its going, I’m going to lose.

What’s really interesting is the BBCs reaction to this. Instead of covering what is a really serious event for British business, their headline story today was the raising of the threshold of stamp duty for a year. The housing market is in collapse because of the lack of available finance – mortgage approvals are now the lowest since records began. So this is real news manipulation, because removal of stamp duty will have no effect on the housing market whatsoever, and is instead being used to keep people looking in the wrong direction.

In Germany there have been two major pieces of news that demonstrate the fragility of the financial system there. First of all is the loss of Dresdner, which has been asset stripped by Commerzbank, with the loss of 10,000 jobs.

Second is the completion of the purchase of IKB by Lone Star, a private equity fund. There are two interesting aspects to this deal. First of all, the German authorities insisted that IKB was worth 800 million Euros. Apparently, although its not known, Lone Star paid somewhere in the region of 100-500 million Euros. Once the sale went through, they publically denounced the German government for trying to inflate the value of the bank.

The other interesting thing about the deal, and it demonstrates the desperation of the German government to offload the bank to any taker, is the fact that IKB specialised in loans to small and medium sized companies. So Lone Star, a company of asset stripping locusts, now has insider access to the records of Germany’s small and medium sized enterprises, to do with as they will. At the very least this has to be a conflict of interest.

So, as consolidation continues in the financial sector Europe wide, I expect to see more of this kind of deal.

Its not all bad news, though. In France, the Socialist Party has begun a major campaign calling for a complete restructuring of global finance. They join Italy’s finance minister in demonstrating some sense of sanity.

Francois Hollande, the outgoing President, said at the Socialist Party’s summer conference in La Rochelle, “We must not underestimate this crisis, as the right wing has done for the last year, merely because it confirms the failure of its policies … It is a general crisis, global crisis of globalised capitalism which is hitting hard with all its dimensions.  The chaos we are living through is the consequence of political choices: deregulation of the markets, financialisation of the economy, disengagement of public authorities, privatization, setting up competition among public sectors.” He then went on to call for a new “Bretton Woods,” more regulation, support for high tech industries and plans for large scale infrastructure projects. All good stuff.

And finally on this subject, in China, despite their problems with exports, they announced the building of the world’s fastest Bullet train, between Beijing and Shanghai. At about 260 mph, its not as fast as their maglev trains, but impressive none the less, and at almost 900 miles long, even more so.

Russia

OK. As far as the situation with Russia is going, the EU tried to put a united face on their summit, but there is a clear division between the old Europe on one side, and the new Europe + Britain on the other. Old Europe is trying to reign in the UK driven warmongering. At the moment, old Europe has the upper hand, and the calls for sanctions were defeated, which has been welcomed by Russia, of course.

While the EU summit was taking place, the Foreign Minister of Russia, Sergei Lavrov gave a speech to Russia’s top foreign policy graduate school, where he called for an arms embargo by the West against Georgia, until “normal government” comes into power.

He made some interesting points in his speech, which show the thinking in Moscow. For example, “The spectre of the Great Game is again loose in the Caucasus. If the USA and its allies ultimately choose not their own national interests, nor those of the Georgian people, but the Saakashvili regime, which ’still has learned nothing,’ this will be a blunder of truly historic proportions.”

The use of the term “Great Game,” hints clearly at who Russia believes is orchestrating the whole affair. And in an even broader hint, he said “When we are constantly told about ‘the democratic government of Georgia,’ does that mean that a democratic government is allowed to act like that against a civilian population that it considers its own? We will never agree with such a British-model ‘license to kill,’ which certain capitals hand out to what they have certified as ‘friendly regimes.’”

A couple of days ago, Spiegel Online published an article claiming that the OSCE, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, had said in an internal report that there is no question that it was Georgia’s one-sided provocation against Russia that began the affair, and that basically Saakashvili “lied 100%” to both the Europeans and the Americans. Der Spiegel had apparently spoken to an OSCE insider who had seen the report. The OSCE has come out and denied this categorically, calling it “ludicrous”, and said they regretted the report’s appearance in a magazine they described as “normally very trustworthy”.

There is some evidence that support for Saakashvilli is disappearing fast. Remember, he was put in power through the auspices of the Open Society Institute, a George Soros NGO. Another Soros NGO, Human Rights Watch, has issued a report condemning Saakashvilli for using cluster bombs on the South Ossetians. This is a war crime under international law, and so there is clearly some pressure mounting on the man, just as Dick Cheney arrives for a friendly chat and a cup of tea.

Drugs

OK, we’ll move on. I’ve already mentioned him … one of the key players globally today, is George Soros. In case you don’t know, he’s a Hungarian Jew, who is proud of the fact he collaborated with the Nazis as a teenager, helping their Jewish deportation program during WWII. So he’s a nice guy, with loyalty to no-one but himself. These days, aside from currency speculation and running revolutions, one of his big things is the legalisation of drugs. In this quest, he is amply supported by Britain.

One of the major NGOs in the fight for drug legalisation is the Transnational Institute, funded by Soros. For example, the TNIs Martin Jelsma is active in the British led “poppy for medicine” legalisation effort in Afghanistan. On the surface, this effort is supposed to provide a legal market for the poppy farmers.

I want to draw your attention to two other NGOs, the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy, and the International Drug Policy Consortium, which unites some 25 international “drug policy reform” NGOs which are mostly funded by Soros. These two were founded as the result of a seminar held in the House of Lords in 2004.

The seminar was arranged by the Beckley Foundation, set up by Lady Niedpath, Amanda Fielding. She received funding from Soros’ Open Society Institute to set up the Beckley Foundation, and it has been a central player in the legalisation effort ever since 2000 or so.

The Beckley Foundation was originally named the Foundation To Further Conciousness, and openly campaigns for the use of psychoactive drugs (particularly LSD, whose inventor was a close friend of Fielding) for the purposes of “expanding consciousness” and achieving “altered states.”

As an aside, it should be noted that Fielding is a bit of a nut, having trepanned herself on film during the 1970s in an attempt to alter her state.

Anyway, the reason I’m bringing this up now, is that a few days ago, Thomas Schweich, the former acting #2 in the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, and a former U.S. Acting Assistant Secretary of State, in an interview with Le Figaro in France, exposed the fact that the British military in Afghanistan has been actively sabotaging the anti-opium effort.

Schweich explicitly blasted the prominent role of Britain protecting the opium trade: “Although Britain’s foreign office strongly backed anti-narcotics efforts (with the exception of aerial eradication), the British military were even more hostile to the anti-drug mission than the U.S. military. British forces–centered in Helmand–actually issued leaflets and bought radio advertisements telling the local criminals that the British military was not part of the anti-poppy effort.” He went on to say he had “to fly to Brussels and show one of these leaflets to the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, who oversees Afghan operations for NATO, to have this counterproductive information campaign stopped.”

Now, in the Bonn agreement of 2001, which established the new government of Hamid Karzai, the different G8 countries were assigned different tasks. For example, the U.S. took responsibility to rebuild the Afghanistan national Army, Germany the police force, Italy the justice system, and UK chose … wait for it … to rebuild Afghanistan’s counter narcotics institutions, which probably explains the record Opium production ever since.

So this is maybe an area we should be researching and campaigning on, particularly since the opium trade was a cornerstone of the Victorian Empire.

Surveillance

OK, to bring this to a close, I just wanted to let you know about an upcoming international action day, called “Freedom not fear – Stop the surveillance mania!” on 11th October.

To quote their website, “A broad movement of campaigners and organisations is calling on everybody to join action against excessive surveillance by governments and businesses. On 11 October 2008, concerned people in many countries will take to the streets, the motto being “Freedom not fear 2008″. Peaceful and creative action, from protest marches to parties, will take place in many capital cities.”

I’ll post more details on the website, but I think this is an event we should attend and distribute newspapers, if we can.

OK, that’s it for today …

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