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The 'Why' of TTIP & TPP

Sun, 08/02/2015 - 03:56 — james

This post is an answer to a question posed to me by Mark Nesop at his Kremlin Stooge blog in response to a previous comment of mine.
Mark's question was,
“(I) would be very interested in a comprehensive overview of how TTIP would benefit the USA. It is a fairly reliable implication of self-interest that the USA is so enthusiastic about it while Europe’s bellwethers – France and Germany – are broadly nervous about it. That suggests it threatens a loss of sovereign decision-making somehow.”

A shorter answer has been posted on his blog and the longer version has been posted below. It outlines some further background or context to my answer at Kremlin Stooge which would, due to its length, be rather an imposition in a comment thread.

Mark, thanks for your question. It has made me line my ducks up in a row which is of benefit to me, at least. I, like everyone else, do not know the details of the agreements (incl TTP) and given that the negotiations are being carried out by people none of whom have our interests at heart, we can't take at face value anything that has been revealed. So any details that have been leaked are likely to be less than the truth and serve the interests of those who leak them and not the public. For this reason, I have not even bothered to keep abreast of what has been available. However, we can deduce a lot from the political and historical context in which these deals are being pursued.

For 250 years, at least, certain banking dynasties have wanted to rule the world uncontested. They rule nations by issuing their currencies and it is a natural progression to want to rule the world through providing one international currency. But how to do it?

Without a formal world government to enforce compliance, the bankers would need to control a commodity that is essential for everyone and make it only available in exchange for the bankers international currency. That commodity proved to be oil.

It is my opinion that the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008 was meant to trigger a crisis that would provide the 'solution' of a One World Currency (OWC). The GFC had been set up years in advance through underwriting dodgy mortgages and leveraging them with derivatives of all sorts with the express purpose of it all blowing up in the future. Meanwhile, the bankers set about controlling those oil producing nations, including Russia, that did not belong to OPEC (whose sales are formally tied to the US dollar). Unfortunately for the bankers when 2008 rolled around, many oil producers were not only not in the West's pocket but were positively hostile to the prospect. Things had been gone horribly wrong for the bankers for a few years.

First and foremost, Putin had come to power in Russia in 2000 and had soon set the priority to take back the stolen oil industry and was spectacularly successful in doing so. In 2006, israel attacked Lebanon hoping to draw Syria into the war which would, in turn, pull in Iran and either place their oil fields under the control of Wall Street or, at least, destroy them and take them off the market. It didn't happen. In 2011, the attack on Syria was renewed in the form of NATO's jihadists. Chavez of Venezuela also appeared on the scene and put his own spanner in the works.

So without control of the world's oil sales, the bankers could not bring in their OWC to replace the ailing, inflating and debt-plagued US dollar. So it has all been an ad hoc scramble for the bankers from there on in. So the job at hand now was to implement measures to rescue the dollar that they had been happy to undermine in previous years because they were anticipating replacing it.

One of those measures has been to artificially hold down the price of gold as its price moves counter to the US $. The price relationship is like a 'see-saw' or 'teeter totter' as it is called in North America.

Another move has been to issue a torrent of US dollars at zero interest rates for those in the know who will pore the money into the speculation of existing assets to prop up their values while keeping the money away from the productive economy to keep it and the general population screwed down and controllable.

While this is going on, Russia and China, in particular, have been focussed on conducting their international trade in their own currencies and away from US dollars (and swapping their US Treasury certificates for physical gold - and taking advantage of gold's depressed price). This is lessening the demand for dollars and therefore lessening the value and putting inflationary pressure on the dollar and weakening it as an international currency. Who wants to hold something that is depreciating in value?

Russia and China, along with the rest of the world, has been suffering from the imposition of the US dollar as the international currency. They have to sell something of actual substance to gain dollars with which to trade with. The US only has to print dollars in exchange for other countries' goods. This has allowed the US to build up the world's largest military machine at everyone else's expense, in every meaning of that word! The US has then bullied the world with this military machine to allow it to continue this world wide plunder.

The BRICS countries are putting an end to that and European countries will join them if they can get out from under the yoke (and physical military occupation) of the US. The Wall St bankers are determined to stop that because it will render themselves irrelevant in world trade and politics and even militarily. They have to stop the rot. But what to do?

Enter the TTIP and TTP international 'free trade' agreements. Their purpose is to tie up those countries not in BRICS and prevent them from joining. This means that these European and Asian countries will have to trade using US dollars and, importantly, not Rubles or Yuan. The proposition that the EU put to Ukraine (“No, you can't trade with Russia and the EU. Join us or you won't be joining anyone”) is now being put to Europe by the US. This is splitting the world into East and West again – another Cold War brought to us by the same group of people and for exactly the same reasons.

If the bankers can't control the whole world, then they will tighten their grip on as many countries as they can, prevent trade and cultural exchanges with countries they do not control and use the time to regroup and figure out another way to conquer the BRICS and associated nations. The first order of the day is to survive, though.

We do know that TTIP and TPP will disbar countries from passing laws or upholding existing laws that prevent international corporations maximising their profits in any way. Any attempts to address the imbalance of capital and economic clout that these international (Wall St dominated) corporations have in favour of any home grown corporations will be ruled illegal and 'anti-free-trade' by supranational bodies appointed and controlled by the international bankers.

This means that the comprador class (the local elite) in all these vassal countries (that have agreed to international dominance in exchange for the right to mercilessly exploit their own domestic population) will be rendered powerless as their own domestic banks and corporations get eaten up or left to wither on the vine. They will be eaten up by the likes of Goldman Sachs and Monsanto. Not a happy prospect for this privileged comprador class . Hence the resistance and ongoing and interminable negotiations.

It also means that the Euro will disappear one way or another as a medium of exchange within and without Europe if Goldman Sachs et. al. get their way. Wall St needs to replace the Euro with the US dollar to ensure the survival of said dollar and with it the survival of those bankers that issue it. It's dog eat dog now. They need to keep demand for the dollar as high as possible to maintain its value and power in a world that is rapidly abandoning it. Without that demand, that power, the bankers' generations long dream of world dominance cannot survive.

Gallipoli, The Truth - for a change

Sat, 04/25/2015 - 06:30 — james

April 25th is Anzac Day in Australia and New Zealand. It commemorates the beginning of the Gallipoli campaign in Turkey during the First World War. This year is the 100th anniversary. It has been much hyped here in Australia, as you might imagine. If a sizable number of Australians and New Zealanders understood the truth in the following well written article, it would become exceedingly hard to con these peoples into yet another war for the psychopaths who want to rule the world.

Indeed, the conspirators behind WW1 and the Gallipoli debacle were well aware of this as you will read in the article below and took steps to obscure the truth from the Australian and New Zealand populations. This propaganda has been extraordinarily effective.

I have copied this article from where I first found it at GlobalResearch. The original appeared at New Dawn Magazine. The authors' blog can be found at First World War Hidden History (after their book of the same name) and it contains much more information. The numbers in the text below refer to references at the foot of the article.

World War I and the British Empire: The Gallipoli Campaign, The Untold Story
‘The first casualty of war is truth’
By Global Research News
Global Research, April 25, 2015

New Dawn Magazine
worldwarw1

By Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor

The truth about Gallipoli has, unlike its victims, been buried deep. Historians like Peter Hart who describe it as “an idiocy generated by muddled thinking”1 are justified in their anger, but not their conclusions. The campaign was conceived in London as a grotesque, Machiavellian strategy to fool the Russians into believing that Britain was attempting to capture Constantinople for them. The paradox of its failure lay in its success. Gallipoli was purposefully designed to fail.

A secret cabal of immensely rich and powerful men – the Secret Elite – was formed in England in 1891 with the explicit aim of expanding the British Empire across the entire globe. They planned a European war to destroy Germany as an economic, industrial and imperial competitor and, to that end, drew France then Russia into an alliance termed the Entente Cordiale. Their massive land armies were needed to crush Germany. France would be rewarded with Alsace and Lorraine, while Russia was conned into believing she would get Constantinople.2 Thereafter, seizing the Ottoman capital became a “widespread obsession, bordering on panic” in St Petersburg.3

Had Britain encouraged the friendship of Turkey in 1914, the disaster of Gallipoli would never have happened.4The Turks generally disliked the Germans and their growing influence,5 and made three separate attempts to ally with Britain. They were rebuffed on each occasion.6 They also pleaded in vain with the French to accept them as an ally,7 and protect them against their old enemy, Russia.8 Poor fools. The French and British alliance with Russia was at the expense of the Turks, not an alliance with the Turks to save them from Russia. Britain and France planned to carve up the oil rich Ottoman Empire. To that end, the Turks had to be pushed into the German camp and defeated.

In July 1914 the majority of the Turkish cabinet was still well disposed towards Britain,9 but their faith was shattered by the seizure of two battleships being built for them in England. As an essay in provocation it was breathtaking.10 “If Britain wanted deliberately to incense the Turks and drive them into the Kaiser’s arms she could not have chosen more effective means.”11 Winston Churchill (a loyal servant of the Secret Elite) seized the dreadnoughts because they were “vital to Britain’s naval predominance.”12 The truth ran much deeper.

F. William Engdahl - Iceland’s Economic Revolution

Tue, 04/21/2015 - 18:00 — james

Iceland's Economic Revolution - New Eastern Outlook
By F. William Engdahl

Iceland - image source

Icelanders are a proud stubborn people with more than 1200 years of history, rugged Scandinavian stock, living in one of the most beautiful natural areas of our Earth. In 2001 her government made a colossal series of disastrous decisions that resulted in the worst banking crisis in history.

Prime Minister Davíð Oddsson, enchanted with Milton Friedman’s free market ideas, implemented a course of tax cuts, cut the corporate income tax to 18%, abolished the net wealth tax, lowered the personal income tax and inheritance taxes and privatized the banking system, introducing financial deregulation along lines of the United States, for a nation with a population of a mere 239,000 citizens. He also entered a free trade agreement with the EU. Oddsson joined the charmed circles of Bill Clinton, of George H.W. Bush, who was invited to Rekyjavik to go salmon fishing. He became a regular at Bilderberg meetings. It seems it all went to his head.

Oddsson went on to become head of the Iceland National Bank in 2005 where he fed the megalomania of the three deregulated banks by in effect printing money at unprecedented rates, flooding the economy with liquidity, until he was de facto fired in 2009 by an act of parliament in the wake of the worst banking crisis in Iceland’s history.

Since the outbreak of the Iceland banking collapse and economic crisis in 2008, in the wake of the September 2008 US Lehman Bros. crisis, Icelanders, exercising their centuries-long tradition of direct democracy, took to the streets demanding fundamental change.

Oddsson’s pals in the small country’s newly-deregulated private banks had abandoned caution to the winds as they decided Reykjavik was destined to become the new Wall Street, an emerging world financial center.

By the outbreak of the global financial crisis, the three banks had combined assets equal to more than 11 times of the Icelandic GDP. They held foreign debt in excess of €50 billion, compared with Iceland’s gross domestic product of €8.5 billion. The inexperienced Iceland bankers had financed their staggering growth by borrowing on the interbank market mainly from UK and Holland banks.

The government’s main priority was to insulate the nation’s population and economy from the effects of the wanton lending abuses of the three banks, something the present Greek government was elected to do for its citizens, to the horror of German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble and others. By November 2008 Iceland’s unemployment had tripled in a matter of two months.

Decisive action

When the dust settled, relative to the size of its economy, Iceland’s systemic banking collapse ranked as the largest experienced by any country in economic history. By the October 2008 the country’s three major banks–Glitnir bank, Landsbanki and Iceland’s largest bank, Kaupþing were placed into state receivership, nationalized.

That was the same time US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who deliberately triggered the Lehman crisis, categorically refused nationalizing the criminal Wall Street banks, contemptuously stating, “Nationalization is socialism; we don’t do that here.” It was a lie at best as Paulson, with carte blanche control over an unprecedented $700 billion Troubled Asset Recovery Fund, bailed out AIG, Goldman Sachs and his old buddies on Wall Street with “socialized” losses dumped on American taxpayers.

Unlike Greece or Ireland or other EU countries or the USA, the Iceland Parliament and government refused to give unlimited state guarantee to save the private banks.

They nationalized them instead, creating a “Good bank-Bad bank” model loosely based on the successful Swedish 1992 experience with Securum. All domestic assets of the three banks were placed in new publicly-owned domestic versions of the banks. All foreign liabilities of the banks, which had expanded with subsidiaries in the UK and Netherlands, went into receivership and liquidation. British and Dutch bank counterparties and governments shrieked howls of protest, threatening Iceland with being blackballed and forever cut off from further credit by the world. The government also imposed currency controls.

The Parliament established an Office of Special Prosecution to investigate allegations of criminal fraud by government and bankers. People responsible went to prison. Baldur Guðlaugsson, Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Finance went to prison for insider trading; the president of Glitnir bank went to prison for tax fraud; the president of Kaupthing Bank got 5 ½ years prison; former Prime Minister Geir H. Haarde was indicted.

Iceland decided to go it alone and focus on rebuilding her devastated real economy. The results are quite opposite the results in the EU where the brutal IMF and ECB and EU austerity policies have turned a banking crisis into a major economic crisis across the EU.

By March 2015, according to the IMF itself, “Overall, macroeconomic conditions in Iceland are now at their best since the 2008-9 crisis. Iceland has been one of the top economic performers in Europe over the past several years in terms of economic growth and has one of the lowest unemployment rates… Iceland’s strong balance of payments has allowed it to repay early all of its Nordic loans and much of its IMF loans while maintaining adequate foreign exchange reserves.” The report added, “This year, Iceland will become the first 2008-10 crisis country in Europe to surpass its pre-crisis peak of economic output.”

Revolution in banking next?

The most dramatic and heartwarming development from the Iceland financial crisis however is the Prime Minister’s proposal to revolutionize the country’s money creation process. The first country in the present world to consider such bold action, Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson commissioned a major report, on reform of the monetary system to prevent future crises. The report, issued by Progressive Party parliamentarian and chair of the parliament’s Committee for Economic Affairs and Trade, Frosti Sigurjónsson, examined the very taboo subject of how private commercial banks are able to create money “out of thin air.”

The report considers the extent to which Iceland’s history of economic instability has been driven by the ability of banks to ‘create money’ in the process of lending.

They went to the Holy of Holies of the secrets of banking since the Bank of Amsterdam first introduced systematic fraud into credit lending in the late 1700’s before it went bankrupt—fractional reserve banking. That simply means a bank lends many times over its deposit or equity base. If there is a crisis of confidence and depositor bank runs, under fractional reserve banking, the bank goes under.

The Frosti report concluded its examination of the link between Iceland bank lending up to September 2008 and the severity of the crisis. Their conclusion was that, “the fractional reserve system may have been a long term contributing factor to various monetary problems in Iceland, including: hyperinflation in the 1980s, chronic inflation, devaluations of the Icelandic Krona, high interest rates, the government foregoes income from money creation, and growing debt of private and public sectors.” That’s a strong indictment and accurate.

It described the stages of every bank crisis since at least 1790 when the Bank of Amsterdam went bankrupt after a run: “A bank’s stock of cash and Central Bank reserves (both assets of the bank) is small compared to total deposits (the banks’ liability). A rumor that a bank may be in difficulty can therefore cause customers to withdraw their deposits in panic (a bank run). A bank run forces the bank to sell assets quickly to fund payouts to depositors. Such a sudden increase in the supply of assets can lead to a fall in market prices, putting other banks into trouble, and the whole banking system may follow.”

Sovereign Money System

The report to the Prime Minister concludes that a revolutionary change in control of credit is needed to control the greed and voracity of the private banks. They call for something known as a Sovereign Money System.

To read more including Iceland's simple and effective solution, click on the link below

Iceland's Economic Revolution

Image source and a little more background - Icelandic People Take Back Government. Refuses to pay international debt!

YES!!! smiling

Power And The Rest of Us

Tue, 01/27/2015 - 07:58 — james

In the first part of this series, I wrote how it is less than useful being informed of the problems of this world if we do not understand or are not shown the causes of the problems. Being subjected to a litany of the harmful effects and not the causes is disempowering. It contributes to a condition known as “learned helplessness”.

The answers to the world's problems are predicated on knowing the causes of these problems.

The second and third parts detailed the primary cause of our troubles, psychopathy; it's nature and prevalence together with some tips on how to deal with it in your personal life. Psychopaths in religion, politics, law and business, especially banking, cause the vast bulk of humanity's problems. But, to remain in control, psychopaths need to divorce us from our power over ourselves through propaganda to control the content of what we think about and offer us the false choice of being for or against whatever the topic of the day is. They cause further conflict between us by offering power over others to further divide and thus rule us. This essay is about how they use their psychopathic culture against us to divide us so that we attack each other and disempower ourselves as a group against the psychopaths. In short, how we contribute to the problems we all suffer from.

Our present culture is psychopathic in nature because it is organised around coercion. But it wasn't always this way. This is not how we evolved through 99% of our history. Before civilisation (the last 1% of our time on earth), humans lived in tribes which were generally of a size where everyone knew everyone else. There were no hierarchies to speak of, no prisons and no taxes. We lived according to Natural Law where it was accepted that everyone was of equal value and were treated accordingly, unlike our present day situation.

But what is Natural Law? Natural Law is the law of nature; that which can be observed in operation in the world and is universal and immutable. These are the observable principles that govern and guide our world including our species. The law of gravity is one such law, for instance. It is constant and is not dependent upon someone's opinion. Quite the opposite, in fact. Anyone who advocates that there is no objective reality, that reality is a matter of personal perception, is welcome to jump off the roof of my house any time they like!

Psychopaths and Power: Hand, Meet Glove Pt2 - Using Our Knowledge of Psychopathy

Sun, 12/28/2014 - 02:32 — james

(If you haven't read Pt1 - Psychopaths and Power: Hand, Meet Glove- pt 1: Civilisation and the Rise of the Psychopaths, it can be viewed here)

Many people do not want to know about psychopathy. It is not something I relish thinking about for too long myself. Who wants to contemplate evil? But to survive, we need to learn about it. If we leave it to the 'authorities', then we are leaving it to the foxes who are in charge of the hen-house to police themselves and to inform us as to their goings-on as they see fit.

We are in this world with psychopaths amongst us and in charge of us whether we like it or not. And psychopaths will exploit us at every opportunity regardless. They bring about the wars and the poverty and much else besides including serious crimes against us as individuals and as nations. So it behooves us to learn about them and their condition. Once we learn to recognize them, we can actually improve our individual lives because we can remove them from our personal lives (or ourselves from their lives) and not continue under their spell and not keep following their destructive advice.

It may be unpleasant to recognize one or more family members or acquaintances as being psychopaths but once you do and take appropriate action, life for yourself and for the rest of your family or social circle can improve markedly. The same applies to businesses and all sorts of organizations. With growing awareness of this condition, we can affect government and politics for the better. This path is the only one that will bring an end to wars and poverty because no matter how ingenious an answer to a problem that is enacted, it will be undone by psychopaths who will be attracted to your organization or your solution. If you can't spot them coming, then your work will be in vain.

If you have read my previous article, you will have read that psychopaths believe they can create reality. This is a delusion, of course, but they do 'create' delusions. I say 'create' because delusions, by their nature, do not exist in reality. But they can exist in peoples minds. If your mind is out of sync with the objective world around you, you will sooner or later find yourself in a world of pain. Your progress through the world will become like trying to navigate through a minefield with a faulty map.

To illustrate this, we have a quote from Evgeny Fedorov, a deputy of the Russian Parliament, talking about the Ukrainian disaster but it is applicable to most situations, “Many, many thousands of people will die in this slaughter. This slaughter will only increase. You know why? Because when people don’t have the truth, they can’t solve the issue.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0zRD-Ulv2s

The problems that face mankind now are a result of following that faulty map that has been drawn up for us in many ways by psychopaths over many centuries. We are not entirely innocent either. I will discuss the ways that normal, empathic, people contribute to the madness of this world in the next essay. But for now, we'll focus on the psychopaths.

Natural Law As Restraint Against Tyranny - Judge Andrew P. Napolitano

Thu, 11/27/2014 - 21:41 — james

Below is an excellent article by William Barbe copied (with emphasis mine - Ed) from Signs Of The Times website.

I have a couple of qualifications, though. The article concerns a talk given at the Mises Institute by one of its members, Judge Andrew Napolitano. I do not endorse the Mises Institute as I disagree with their solution to the current economic woes. But that is another issue for another day.

I also want to point out that though Judge Napolitano correctly blames government for the abuse of our natural rights (and for the incarceration of half of the US prison population even though they have not harmed anyone - and therefore have committed no crimes - in another video talk of his), he leaves out the very pertinent fact that his own profession is entirely complicit in these outrageous abuses and that these abuses are knowingly enacted daily for the profit of the legal profession. But more on that below William Barbe's article.

Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, once a Fox News TV show host - and now an outspoken critic of the US government - delivered a short, intriguing, and, I believe, important speech at the Mises Institute in Costa Mesa, California, on November 8th, 2014.


Sir Thomas More

He began by talking about the origins of Natural Laws, beginning with this quote from Sir Thomas More's treason case under Henry VIII:

Some men say the earth is flat.
Some men say the earth is round.
But if it is flat, could Parliament make it round?
And if it round, could the kings command flatten it?

More was appealing to the jury of the Laws of Nature that restrain even the government. This was the classic Natural Law argument. More was not the originator of this argument; that was Saint Thomas Aquinas nearly 800 years ago. The English liberal philosopher John Locke picked up on this, as did Thomas Jefferson when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, and James Madison when he was a Scrivener for the US Constitution.

Thomas Jefferson's version of More's phrase -- "We are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" -- articulates the view that our rights come from our humanity.

Napolitano asks: What are these rights that come from humanity? And how can the government trample them? The concept of Natural Rights articulated by Aquinas is that there are areas of human behavior for which we do not need a government permission slip in order to make free choices. Things like freedom to develop your own personality, to think as you wish, to say what you think, the right to worship or not to worship, to assemble in groups or to refuse to assemble, to petition the government for redress of your differences, and the right to defend yourself against tyrants. These are the quintessential 'American rights'. The right to be left alone, for example, codified in the Fourth Amendment today is called the 'right to privacy'.

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