Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 1388

Bolivia Expels USAID

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According to Reuters, Bolivia’s President Evo Morales celebrated International Workers Day (May 1) by expelling the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Mr Morales accused the agency of seeking to “conspire against” the Bolivian people and his government. Morales accused the agency, which operates under US State Department auspices, of seeking to “conspire against” the Bolivian people and his government. USAID has been working in Bolivia for almost five decades, and had a budget of $52.1m for the country in 2010, according to its website.

On previous May Days, Mr Morales announced the nationalization of key industries, such as hydroelectric power and the electricity grid. This year he announced he “would only nationalize the dignity of the Bolivian people”. Speaking at a rally in La Paz, the president said there was “no lack of US institutions which continue to conspire against our people and especially the national government, which is why we’re going to take the opportunity to announce on this May Day that we’ve decided to expel USAID”.

Morales explained the expulsion was in protest to a recent remark by US Secretary of State John Kerry, who referred to Latin America as “the backyard of the United States”. The term evokes strong emotions in the region, which experienced several U.S.-backed coups during the Cold War. The Bolivian leader has threatened USAID with expulsion in the past, asserting that its programs have “political rather than social” ends. He has also accused it of “manipulating” and “using” union leaders.

USAID’s Unsavory Past

I and other veterans of the 1980s Central American solidarity movement are only too aware of USAID’s unsavory past. Its reputation of being used as cover, like many US embassies, for the CIA and other US intelligence agencies, was in large part responsible for President Putin’s decision to expel USAID from Russia last fall.* Many older activists vividly recall USAID’s heavy hand in suppressing domestic opposition (by destabilizing human rights and labor initiatives, meddling in local elections and  collaborating with right wing coups to overturn democratic elections) to US military intervention in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua and maintaining South American dictatorships friendly to US corporate interests.

Bolivian present criticisms of USAID are far more nuanced. The main complaint seems to be that the US agency contrasts unfavorably with European development programs, which are totally open and transparent and consistently consult and collaborate with the Bolivian government. USAID differs significantly in its heavy reliance on private contractors and drug eradication (which is controversial among Bolivian farmers and a low priority for the government), who rarely collaborate with local officials and are generally extremely secretive about their activities.

Mr Morales, who heads his country’s union of coca growers, has also been critical in the past of US counter-narcotic programmes in Bolivia, repeatedly stating that the fight against drugs is driven by geopolitical interests.

In 2008, Mr Morales expelled the US ambassador and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) for allegedly conspiring against his government.

The State Department Response

US state department spokesman Patrick Ventrell rejected the allegations as “baseless and unfounded”. He added “We think the programs have been positive for the Bolivian people, and fully coordinated with the Bolivian government and appropriate agencies under their own national development plan.”

A prepared statement from USAID further read: “Those who will be most hurt by the Bolivian government’s decision are the Bolivian citizens who have benefited from our collaborative work on education, agriculture, health, alternative development, and the environment.”

Evo Morales became Bolivia’s first socialist and indigenous president in 2005. He was re-elected by a landslide in 2009,

*I was interviewed by Voice of Russia radio at the time of the Russian move to expel USAID. The transcripts unfortunately are in pigeon English, with Parts I and II on two separate sites. For this reason, I also include a link to the audio file of the entire interview:

http://english.ruvr.ru/2012_10_16/USAID-CIA-supporting-dictators-and-stifling-democracy-exclusive-interview/

http://bbs.chinadaily.com.cn/thread-803039-1-1.html

Download audio file

 

photo credit: Alain Bachellier via photopin cc

 

Crossposted at Daily Censored

Happy Birthday, World Wide Web

 

  (Above) The first public website – reconstructed at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

 

April 30th marked the 20th anniversary of the technology behind the World Wide Web becoming available royalty-free to the public. On April 30, 1993 the Swiss group CERN made the software used to operate the World Wide Web available to the entire world at no charge. CERN or European Organization for Nuclear Research (French: Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire ) was originally established to operate the the world’s largest particle laboratory.

When the World Wide Web was first invented by British physicist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, there was a royalty charge to use the software necessary to access it. Between 1989 and 1993 the physicists at CERN expanded and improved on W3 software to facilitate rapid document exchange between their physicists. Then in 1993 they made the momentous decision to “democratize the Word Wide Web” by making the software available royalty-free on an Open Source basis. This gift of W3 software to the “commons” was a marked departure from a growing drive by corporations to privatize other publicly held aspects by converting them into profit-generating commodities.

I love the first sentence about aiming “to give universal access to a large universe of documents.” Talk about understatement.

In their coverage of the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web, World Business Report interviewed Joi Ito, director of MIT’s Media Lab. Under his leadership, the Media Lab seems to be carrying on in the CERN tradition of democratizing the Internet. Ito insists one of the main purposes of Media Lab is to foster technology that ensures everyone has access to the Internet and (surprisingly) that everyone learns to write computer code. He makes specific reference to a free computer coding program for children called “Scratch.” After checking out the website (http://scratch.mit.edu/), I’ve decided this is the appropriate level for me to start it – if I do decide to take up computer coding, that is.

Ito also talks about a concept referred to as “frugal engineering,” which is the specific application of design concepts to third world societies. Reportedly a “frugal engineering” approach led to the development of India’s $2,000 Tato Car released in 2009 (with a carbon fiber frame that’s far cheaper to manufacture than steel). It sounds to me this initiative is roughly comparable to what we called “appropriate technology” in the 1970s.

Finally he reminds us about other important Open Source Internet technologies that have developed in recent years including Linux (the free Open Source alternative to Microsoft Windows) and Voice Over Internet Protocol (first introduced as Skype). I wonder how significant it is that neither was developed in the US – Linux was developed in Finland and Skype in Estonia. If they had been, I seriously doubt either would have been freely publicly available as Open Source. I suspect American software developers (or more accurately, their corporate employers) would have succumbed to the temptation to exploit them for the profit-making potential.

 

 

The Corporatization of Medical Research

 

Guest post by Steven Miller

(This is the last of three guest blogs by Steven Miller about Obama’s BRAIN Initiative and Wall Street’s broader agenda of privatizing all aspects of medical treatment and research. In this last post, he makes the alarming revelation that corporations fund the bulk of university research in the US. This means future decisions about medical research will be based on profit considerations, rather than patient need.)

The human brain is next

President Obama knows all this history. He is not naïve. He is consciously opening up the privatization of the human brain. Let’s examine exactly what he said when announced the initiative:

 Today I’ve invited some of the smartest people in the country, some of the most imaginative and effective researchers in the country — some very smart people to talk about the challenge that I issued in my State of the Union address:  to grow our economy, to create new jobs, to reignite a rising, thriving middle class by investing in one of our core strengths, and that’s American innovation.

“Ideas are what power our economy.  It’s what sets us apart.  It’s what America has been all about.  We have been a nation of dreamers and risk-takers; people who see what nobody else sees sooner than anybody else sees it.  We do innovation better than anybody else — and that makes our economy stronger.  When we invest in the best ideas before anybody else does, our businesses and our workers can make the best products and deliver the best services before anybody else.

“And because of that incredible dynamism, we don’t just attract the best scientists or the best entrepreneurs — we also continually invest in their success.  We support labs and universities to help them learn and explore.  And we fund grants to help them turn a dream into a reality.  And we have a patent system to protect their inventions.  And we offer loans to help them turn those inventions into successful businesses. (5)

“Investing in ideas”, “investing in their success”, “attracting the best entrepreneurs” and “supporting labs and universities” are all code words for corporate ownership. When Jonas Salk worked on polio, the federal government funded the bulk of scientific research as a subsidy to corporations. It still does so today, although they are reducing their contribution. In the 1950s, federal R & D went to universities, which turned their results over to the government as public property. Not so today.

The same year as the Chakrabarty Decision (what a coincidence!!), the Bayh-Dole Act was passed to allow universities and corporations to license and patent government-funded research. Then the Federal Technology Transfer Act of 1986 permitted university labs to accept funding from corporations in exchange for intellectual property rights. Corporations are now authorized to commercialize inventions owned by universities through various leasing agreements. Further, they get massive tax credits for investing in university research. (6)

In other words, corporations now own the vast bulk of publicly funded university research in the US. This is a historic transition in how scientific inquiry is organized. Private funding increased 250% from 1985 to $2.4 billion in 2005. In the ‘70s, about 62% of government-funded research was basic research – science to investigate fundamental issues of science. (7) This is being increasingly replaced with “commercial research” that is driven by the market and the corporate demand for private profits. Universities are being warped into being a component of global capitalism.

Consequently corporations will make the choices over what is researched. This will be based on corporate interest and private profit, rather than the public interest. We see the results already. While there are dozens of animal diseases that are treated with immunizations, there is little research to find them for humans. It is far more profitable to find a medicine that treats the disease for life without eliminating it.

This trend isn’t going to stop with the BRAIN Initiative. However, there is one aspect of this that is still under public control. The project will be organized by the military (assuming the military is not privatized) through DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Defense Department’s research arm. DARPA itself has a significant portfolio of companies that research biological and neuroscience.

How reassuring!

Back in the day (in the ‘80s), the happy, chirpy slogan was “GE – we bring good things to life!” Today it is becoming abundantly clear that the global corporatocracy – the organized power of the 1% – demonstrates the malign intent of a psychopath.

These corporate persons sell depleted uranium bullets to the army that spread radiation everywhere. They consciously let New Orleans flounder in Hurricane Katrina. They openly organize the pipelines so that they can burn the Canadian Tar Sands, which will release so much carbon dioxide that it will trigger climate collapse. They brag that they will continue to make a profit off the end of human civilization. Meanwhile they are addicting our children to high fructose corn sugar and producing an epidemic of diabetes in children. And if you don’t like it, corporations will use their private drones to enforce their will.

Corporations are a carcinogen, a cancer that grows at the expense of the human body, both publicly and individually. As they unleash crisis after crisis, they are systematically destroying the institutions of society. That means we have no choice but to build new institutions that benefit the public in all directions. We really don’t have much choice. This will require a historic political battle that will heal humanity and the planet.

The technology they claim as private property has the potential for the first time to free humanity from misery, yet they can only use it to degrade society even further. Corporate property no longer serves real people. The very intent is malign and destructive. The solution is to make it public property and to place its control in the cooperative hands of the public.

Notes

5) Remarks by the President on the BRAIN Initiative and American Innovation http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/04/02/remarks-president-brain-initiative-and-american-innovation

6) David Hill, “Corporate Sponsored Research and Development at Universities in the United States.” AIPPI Journal, June 2002

7) EastBay Express, April 10-16, 2013

Steven Miller has taught science for 25 years in Oakland ’s Flatland high schools. He has been actively engaged in public school reform since the early 1990s. When the state seized control of Oakland public schools in 2003, they immediately implemented policies of corporatization and privatization that are advocated by the Broad Institute. Since that time Steve has written extensively against the privatization of public education, water and other public resources. You can email him at nondog2@hotmail.com

photo credit: Novartis AG via photopin cc

Crossposted at Daily Censored

 

Corporatizing Life

Guest post by Steven Miller

This is the 2nd of three guest blogs by Steven Miller about Obama’s BRAIN Initiative and Wall Street’s broader agenda of privatizing all aspects of medical treatment and research. In this post Miller traces how decisions in the Supreme Court and US Patent office led to the patenting of bacteria and other life forms, human genes, blood and cancer cells and Taxol and other treatments originating from natural sources. 

Privatizing Life

In 1980, the Supreme Court, in the Chakrabarty Decision, held that the scientist could patent a bacterium that he had “invented”. Chakrabarty had taken an existing bacterium and inserted genes from another existing bacterium. The court said that since isolated genes did not exist in nature or in any cell (which is of course true), the scientist therefore created something new by isolating them. This opened the door to patenting life forms.

Patents traditionally have been for tangible, hard inventions, real human-created things like a device or a manufacturing process. Natural processes had never before been considered as private property. These were things like laws of nature, the force of gravity or the vibrations of atoms, or natural things like oceans or Antarctica. You could own a horse, but you couldn’t own the species.

Quickly corporations began to besiege the US Patent Office with patents on various life forms, including human DNA. The Supreme Court decision did not address human DNA, but the Patent Office did, in secret procedures since these are not open to public debate. They allowed the extension of patent rights to every form of life without any public debate whatsoever.

Privatization rapidly followed. Sequanna Therapeutics filed for patents on the cells and genes of indigenous tribes in New Guinea. Rice-Tec got patents on the famous Basmati variety of rice that has been grown in India for centuries. How can it be that a US company can patent crops created by farmers in another country, thousands of years ago? Well, US law allows patents for the party that registers first, not necessarily for the discoverers. Corporations will always beat you to that.

During the 1960s, scientists showed that the bark of the Pacific Yew tree, found in Oregon and Washington, contained a protein that could kill cancer cells. This was marketed as the drug Taxol. The next question obviously was…  what other marvelous proteins exist in Nature? Today corporations are rapidly privatizing every life form they can get their hands on, from frogs to herbs to insects… and to humans.

In the 1980s, an engineer named John Moore was treated for hairy-cell leukemia at the UCLAMedicalCenter. Doctors took cell samples of Moore from his blood, skin, bone and sperm. They then began to grow Moore’s cells in cell cultures for research. Though cells die inside of an organism in the ordinary life process, they can be kept alive indefinitely for years in a petri dish. The doctors recognized that Moore’s cells produced some unique proteins, so they sold them, for a profit, to a biotech company.

John Moore sued the doctors, Sandoz (a pharmaceutical company) and the Regents of the University of California. The California Supreme Court held in 1991 that John Moore had no right to his “discarded” cells, or to any profits made from them.

Try this yourself. If by chance you have to have your appendix removed ask the hospital to give it back to you. “Sorry”, they will respond, “You signed the papers. We keep it or there’s no operation.” They own your tissue, not you.

The recent book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, details the horrific story of how corporations harvested the cells of an African-American cancer patient before she died in 1951 to begin a highly profitable HeLa cell line. Trillions more HeLa cells exist today than there ever were in the body of Ms Lacks. “One scientist estimates that if you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—an inconceivable number, given that an individual cell weighs almost nothing.”  (2)

The HeLa cell line was even used in creating the polio vaccine! To this day, her family has received no compensation for anything, even though her cells changed the face of medicine.

Ownership of human life in the form of slavery was legal in the US from 1620 to 1865. Under the banner of private property, the slaves were denied access to all they produced. Today – under the banner of private property – humans are being harvested once again for what they produce. This might sound harsh and disconcerting, but there is truth here.

Every single person who was arrested or detained by the US military during the Iraq War (and no doubt everywhere the military is active) has been forced to give up cell samples in the form of a simple mouth swab with a Q-tip. Although it is “proprietary information” and therefore not readily available to the public, there can be no doubt that the infrastructure exists to culture these cells to see what is interesting.

In 2012, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a 2004 California law requiring officials to collect the DNA samples from prisoners does not violate the U.S. Constitution’s ban on unreasonable searches. Claiming that these are fingerprints for the 21st Century, California Attorney General Kamala Harris claimed this as “a victory for public safety in California.”  (3)

With corporations working night and day to privatize literally everything in the world, it is hard to imagine that they haven’t found a way to seize and profit from these potential cell lines. How far, are we, from an America of 315 million petri dishes, all tested and controlled by automated machinery that flag any unique chemical process for further investigation? The potential wonder of this technology is crippled by corporations that use it only for private corporate profit.

The sequencing of the Human Genome in 2000 kicked off the next bio gold rush. By claiming that they had discovered the function of a given gene, corporations then patented them. The classic, and highly notorious, case is that of the so-called Breast Cancer genes, BRCA I and BRCA II, which, if you have them, are associated with breast cancer. Here’s how Wikipedia describes what happened:

A patent application for the isolated BRCA1 gene and cancer-cancer promoting mutations, as well as methods to diagnose the likelihood of getting breast cancer, was filed by the University of Utah, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and Myriad Genetics in 1994; over the next year, Myriad, in collaboration with other investigators, isolated and sequenced the BRCA2 gene and identified relevant mutations, and the first BRCA2 patent was filed in the U.S. by Myriad and the other institutions in 1995. Myriad is the exclusive licensee of these patents and has enforced them in the US against clinical diagnostic labs.

This business model led from Myriad being a startup in 1994 to being a publicly traded company with 1200 employees and about $500M in annual revenue in 2012; it also led to controversy over high prices and the inability to get second opinions from other diagnostic labs, which in turn led to the landmark Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics lawsuit. The patents begin to expire in 2014.” (4)

Their “business model” was to demand that anyone who wanted to be tested for the genes had to pay Myriad to access their “intellectual property”, even though the genes existed in their body. Strangely, the cost of access was… exorbitant.

 

Notes

2) Rebecca Skloot. “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” New York Times, February 2, 2010

3) Terry Baynes. “U.S. appeals court finds DNA testing constitutional”, February 23, 2013: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/24/us-usa-dna-database-idUSTRE81N04020120224

4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRCA2

 

To be continued.

 

Steven Miller has taught science for 25 years in Oakland’s Flatland high schools. He has been actively engaged in public school reform since the early 1990s. When the state seized control of Oakland public schools in 2003, they immediately implemented policies of corporatization and privatization that are advocated by the Broad Institute. Since that time Steve has written extensively against the privatization of public education, water and other public resources. You can email him at nondog2@hotmail.com

 

photo credit: mknowles via photopin cc

Crossposted at Daily Censored

 

Privatizing the Brain

Guest Post by Steven Miller

(This is the 1st of three guest blogs by Steven Miller about Obama’s BRAIN Initiative and Wall Street’s broader agenda of privatizing all aspects of medical treatment and research. In this post, Miller describes a parallel process in which Big Pharma used their relative monopoly on anti-retrovirals to exclude third world countries who were the most severely impacted by AIDS. )

On April 2, President Obama announced the next step in research of the human brain. This is the BRAIN Initiative – Brain Research through Advanced Neurotechnologies. The US government will finance research into the next generation of technology to map the human brain with $100 million in seed money. The next step is to develop new electrical, optical, computer-assisted technology to investigate how the brain works at the level of neurons to determine how they work and how they link up in neural networks.

The current level of brain research is already pretty amazing. Without invading the skull, scientists can map the areas of the brain, and even neural pathways, that respond to specific stimuli. For example, a given area of the brain will respond to stimulus by increasing the blood flow when it is being used. This area radiates more heat, which is easily detected.

When someone is shown a picture of their pet dog, for example, science can detect exactly which part of the brain activates. Scientists are thus able to detect which brain structures are involved when you dream, when you drive the car, when you fall in love or when you do your taxes. The brain, however, is perhaps the most complex thing in Nature. It has 10 billion cells that make 100 trillion connections. Getting down into the individual neurons and connections themselves offers the possibility of actually determining the structures of the mind, human personality and memory.

 These amazing advances will all be privatized. Corporations intend to claim parts of the brain as private property and sell access for a price. The privatization trend has been rampant in biology and medicine for 30 years.

Can You Own the Sun?

Polio epidemics swept the United States every summer in the early 1950s, terrifying families and entire communities. Sometimes whole birthday parties of kids would be affected, since bodily fluids in swimming pools could spread the virus. At the peak, in 1952, there were 58,000 new cases of children who were crippled or paralyzed.

 Dr Jonas Salk became an international hero in 1955 by proving that a killed virus could easily be made into medicine that could immunize people against the disease. By 1957, 100 million doses had been administered in the US. Treatment on a similar scale spread rapidly across the industrial world. In 2002, over 500 million children were immunized in almost 100 countries. Today the Americas are polio free and the disease is close to extinction around the world.

Salk was asked, in a television interview, who owned the patent. His famous response was, “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

This response would be impossible today. Equally impossible would be the massive immunization rapid-response by the public. The single thing that prevents this sort of public health response is that corporations now control the development of science and medicine through patents. And, yes, they do intend to patent the sun!

 Fast-forward 40 years to the 1990s. Consider what happened with the next modern scourge, AIDS. After fighting the disease for 15 years, scientists had developed the cocktail of anti-viral drugs that would prolong life indefinitely by containing the virus. This time however the patents were all controlled by Big Pharma, the cartel of drug-makers like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKlein. By that time, drugs now were the considered private property of corporations; thus they were protected by international treaties over intellectual property enforced by the United States.

 The public no longer had the right to use the anti-virals without paying billion-dollar corporations for them. As AIDS swept across Africa, India and Asia, these corporations, demonstrating once again their great concern for the improvement of humanity, offered them for sale for a mere $15,000 a year. They claimed that the drugs were expensive to manufacture. Besides, they reported, Africans could not use them effectively. Maybe that was because they lived on less than $2 a day.

In India, Dr Yusuf Hamied broke the patents and began manufacturing the anti-virals so easily that they were available for only $350 a year. Big Pharma responded with the true compassion that only corporate-persons can evince. They used their political power to force governments across the world to criminalize anyone who dared to distribute the inexpensive drugs. Some ten million people died as a result.

The response of the public to these police actions was so massive that the governments of Brazil and India were forced to declare that they would break the patents. Corporations could no longer control the distribution of generic AIDS drugs. Thousands of lives were saved. Big Pharma still works actively today to prevent the distribution of life-saving generic drugs today. (1) They innocently strive to maximize profit, even at the expense of human life.

 This is a terrible crime against humanity, one committed by corporate-persons against real persons. Such crime is inevitable when corporations control the resources of health, medicine, science, research and, in fact, any and all forms of technology.

NOTES

1) Democracy Now, “Fire in the Blood”, January 13, 2013

Steven Miller has taught science for 25 years in Oakland’s Flatland high schools. He has been actively engaged in public school reform since the early 1990s. When the state seized control of Oakland public schools in 2003, they immediately implemented policies of corporatization and privatization that are advocated by the Broad Institute. Since that time Steve has written extensively against the privatization of public education, water and other public resources. You can email him at nondog2@hotmail.com

photo credit: krischall via photopin cc

Crossposted at  Daily Censored

 

 

Boston Bombers: All in the CIA Family

 

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According to Daniel Hopsicker in MadCow Morning News, it turns out Ruslan Tsarni, the uncle of the two alleged Boston bombers, was married to the daughter of former top CIA official Graham Fuller. Uncle Ruslan, in turn, had a decade-long business relationship with Halliburton, the oil company/defense contractor formerly run by Dick Cheney that awarded billions of dollars in no-bid contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Back in the nineties, Tsarni served for two years as a “consultant” for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), in the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan. It’s been well-documented that USAID (which is funded by the US State Department) is often used as a front for CIA and other US intelligence operations.

In the early 1990s Ruslan Tsarni married the daughter of former top CIA Graham Fuller, who spent 20 years as operations officer in Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Hong Kong. In 1982 Fuller was appointed the National Intelligence Officer for Near East and South Asia at the CIA, and in 1986, under Ronald Reagan, he became the Vice-Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, with overall responsibility for national level strategic forecasting.

At the time of their marriage, Ruslan Tsarni was known as Ruslan Tsarnaev, the same last name as his nephews Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the alleged bombers.

It is unknown when he changed his last name to Tsarni.

Coincidentally Graham Fuller is listed as one of the American Deep State rogues on FBI translator whistleblower Sibel Edmonds’ State Secrets Privilege Gallery. According to Edmonds, the gallery features subjects of FBI investigations she became aware of during her time as an FBI translator.

She asserts that these individuals engaged in criminal activities subsequently protected under the doctrine of State Secrets. After Attorney General John Ashcroft went all the way to the Supreme Court to silence her, she posted the twenty-one photos to the Internet with no names.

One photo has been subsequently identified as

All this is just the tip of the iceberg. Read full post here: MadCow Morning News

photo credit: ford via photopin cc

Crossposted at Daily Censored

The Government Attacks the Price of Gold

It’s hard to read any investment or economics blogs without being bombarded with recommendations to buy gold. The conventional wisdom is that it’s the only safe investment banks stop paying interest and stock prices are vastly overinflated due to the current Wall Street bubble and unstable real estate market. While real estate and other investments linked to specific currencies (such as the US dollar) can become virtually worthless the currency collapses, gold supposedly has intrinsic value as a precious metal. Unless, of course, food and other necessities are in such short supply that no one will trade them for gold. With so many Americans, and governments such as China, India and Russia buying gold, investors have been baffled that the price of gold has been dropping. According to supply and demand, the price should rise. In a recent essay in Global Research, former Reagan economic adviser Paul Craig Roberts reveals that the Federal Reserve has been actively suppressing the price of gold through “naked” short selling.  In short selling an investor sells a stock or commodity he expects to drop in price, then buys it back at the lower price. In “naked” short selling, an investor sells a stock or commodity he doesn’t own. The effect of a large number of investors selling short is to drive the price of a stock or commodity down. According to Roberts, the Fed short sold 500 tons of gold on April 12th, at a cost of $1.16 billion (remember they didn’t own the gold to begin with).  No individual or bank could handle that kind of loss, but it’s no problem for the Fed. They just print the money, via Quantitative Easing, to cover it.

In the video below, Greg Hunter interviews Roberts about his recent article. Roberts explains that the US government has no choice but to suppress the price of gold to protect the value of the US dollar. In the last four years the Fed has “printed” one trillion dollars pure year, using “quantitative” easing to purchase bad bank debt. This would be fine if there were sufficient demand with the US economy or overseas to soak up $5 trillion and thus prevent inflation. Thus to prevent a run on the dollar, through massive conversion of dollars to gold, the Fed discourages investors from buying good by effectively capping the price.

According to Roberts, attacking the price of gold helps the dollar by propping up bond prices (especially of bonds based on derivatives) that are the life blood of investment banks. Because private banks, rather than government, have primary responsibility for issuing money (by issuing loans not covered by reserves) the health of the US dollar is intimately connected to the health of investment banks and the bonds they issue and hold.

Other mechanisms the US uses to prop up the dollar include persuading other governments to inflate their own currencies by printing more money. If the euro and yen are also over inflated, currency traders aren’t tempted to exchange all their dollars for European and Japanese currency.

He mentions that Australia, which has much closer ties with China than the US, has refused to print money by engaging in the quantitative easing game. All you need to do is look at the exchange rate to get a real sense how rapidly the US dollar is losing value. When I first moved to New Zealand, $1.00 Aus sold for $0.90US. Now it sells for $1.03 US.

The change in New Zealand’s exchange rate (China has just exceeded Australia has our major export partner) is even more extreme. In 2002 $1.00 NZ sold for $0.50 US. Now it sells for $0.88 US.

The most interesting part of the interview is toward the end, in which Hunter and Roberts discuss the likelihood the US dollar will collapse and the US government will seize depositors’ savings accounts (like they did in Cyprus) and private pensions. Hunter asks if this is why the government is trying to restrict citizens’ access to guns. Roberts makes the very astute observation that no police state can operate in a society with an armed population.  “As we move closer and closer to a police state, they’re going to have to take the guns away. . . The police state has doomed the 2nd amendment. It’s just a question of time.”

 

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How the US Tried to Steal the Venezuelan Elections

 

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BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast published a fascinating article in Vice Magazine this week (Nicolas Maduro Did Not Steal the Venezuelan Election) about being hired by Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro in 2004 to investigate the possibility the US might tamper with Venezuela’s elections (following Palast’s 2001 expose detailing how Florida governor Jeb Bush stole the election for his brother).

The article describes how he presented Chavez and Maduro with a collection of secret FBI memos revealing that ChoicePoint Corp – under a no-bid contract (from the US government) – had “shoplifted” Venezuela’s voter rolls, as well as the voter rolls of Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua, Mexico and Honduras, all of whom were on the verge of electing presidents from the political left.

By coincidence it was a subsidiary of ChoicePoint Jeb Bush engaged in 2000 to illegally “purge” more than 56,000 voters, the vast majority black and poor, from Florida’s voter rolls. A maneuver which would ultimately give George Bush the US presidency by just 537 ballots.

After reading Palast’s report, Chavez moved swiftly to establish a virtually tamper-proof electoral system. In Venezuela every voter gets TWO ballots. One is electronic; the second is a paper print-out of the touch-screen ballot, which the voter reviews, authorizes and places in a locked ballot-box. Fifty-four percent of the boxes are opened at random and checked against the computer tally – making the system virtually tamper proof.

When Maduro’s opponent Henrique Capriles officially challenged the recent outcome, he was allowed to add as many precincts as he wanted (12,000) to this automatic audit.

It would appear the US State Department doesn’t have a leg to stand on in backing opposition claims that Maduro’s win is fraudulent. Thus, according to Palast, they have turned to another old CIA trick, violent street demonstrations protesting the electoral outcome. He points out that most, but not all, of the voters killed in street protests are Chavistas.

photo credit: sterno_inferno via photopin cc

Crossposted at Daily Censored

Reagan’s Ex-Budget Director Slams Crony Capitalism

 

An attack on “crony capitalism” David Stockman, Reagan’s former budget director, published in the the March 31st New York Times has come in for major attack from both the right and left. Given the piece provides a fairly accurate analysis of America’s current economic woes, I find this quite sad.

Stockman also attacks  crony capitalism (i.e. government corrupted by corporate interests) in his latest book The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America.

I find  it a little astonishing to see a so-called conservative come up with so many progressive-sounding solutions for America’s economic mess. For example: 1) 100% public financing of elections 2) Restricting the duration of campaigns (like they do in New Zealand). 3) Prohibiting lobbying, for life, by anyone who has been on a legislative or executive payroll. 4) Overturning Citizens United. 5) Ending the corrosive financialization that has turned Wall Street into a giant casino since the 1970s. 6) Eliminating access by Wall Street Banks to cheap Federal Reserve loans 7) Banning banks from trading, underwriting and money management in all its forms [I wonder if this means he supports the IMF proposal to end the ability of private banks to create money in the form of loans?] 8) Reigning in the Federal Reserve by ending their ability to buy government debt and micromanage the economic [some of us would go all the way and abolish it].

Here’s an excerpt from the end of the oped:

“All this would require drastic deflation of the realm of politics and the abolition of incumbency itself, because the machinery of the state and the machinery of re-election have become conterminous. Prying them apart would entail sweeping constitutional surgery: amendments to give the president and members of Congress a single six-year term, with no re-election; providing 100 percent public financing for candidates; strictly limiting the duration of campaigns (say, to eight weeks); and prohibiting, for life, lobbying by anyone who has been on a legislative or executive payroll. It would also require overturning Citizens United and mandating that Congress pass a balanced budget, or face an automatic sequester of spending.

It would also require purging the corrosive financialization that has turned the economy into a giant casino since the 1970s. This would mean putting the great Wall Street banks out in the cold to compete as at-risk free enterprises, without access to cheap Fed loans or deposit insurance. Banks would be able to take deposits and make commercial loans, but be banned from trading, underwriting and money management in all its forms.

It would require, finally, benching the Fed’s central planners, and restoring the central bank’s original mission: to provide liquidity in times of crisis but never to buy government debt or try to micromanage the economy. Getting the Fed out of the financial markets is the only way to put free markets and genuine wealth creation back into capitalism.”

I guess America’s stubborn economic difficulties have at least one silver lining. In the mad scramble to identify workable solutions, conventional notions of right, left and progressive are rapidly breaking down. I have always found such labels arbitrary, artificial and too easily hijacked by the two major parties – who can’t see beyond the banks and corporations who are funding their next campaign.

 

photo credit: The Aspen Institute via photopin cc

 

Crossposted at Daily Censored

Lady Gaga Backs Anti-Fracking Campaign

In October 2012, Lady Gaga joined a coalition of 200 artists started by Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon called Artists Against Fracking. She simultaneously urged her 90 million Facebook and Twitter fans to support the organization and sign a petition asking New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to ban fracking. Seems pretty newsworthy to me. Wonder how the corporate media missed this explosive story.

A list of all the artists in the coalition can be found at http://artistsagainstfracking.com/, along with an inspiring rendition of “Don’t Frack My Mother.”

Readers unacquainted with the term fracking – aka hydraulic fracturing – can also use the website and the video below to get up to speed.

photo credit: PVBroadz via photopin cc

Crossposted at Daily Censored