Lord James of Blackheath, House of Lords [VIDEO 11:10] from 2010, now circulating
Breaking news Lord James of Blackheath has spoken in the House of Lords holding evidence of three transactions of 5 Trillion each and a transaction of 750,000 metric tonnes of gold and has called for an investigation.
I think there are three possible conclusions that may come from it. I think there may have been a massive piece of money laundering committed by a major government which ought to know better and that it has effectively undermined the integrity of the British bank the Royal Bank of Scotland, in doing so. The second alternative is that a major American department has an agency that has gone rogue on it because it has been wound up and has created a structure out of which they are seeking to get at least 50 billion Euros as a payoff. And the third possibility is that this is an extraordinarily elaborate fraud which has not been carried out but which has been prepared in order to provide a threat to one government or more if they don't pay them off. So there are three possibilities and this all needs a very urgent review.
My Lords, it starts in April and May of 2009, with the alleged transfer to the United Kingdom, to HSBC of a sum of 5 trillion dollars and seven days later, in comes another 5 trillion dollars to HSBC, and then 3 weeks later another 5 trillion. 5 trillion in each case. Sorry. A total of 15 trillion dollars is alleged to have been passed into the hands of HSBC for onward transit to the Royal Bank of Scotland and we need to look at where this came from and what the history of this money is. And I have been trying to sort out the sequence by which this money has been created and from where it has come from for a long time.
Occupy the SEC has submitted a 325 page letter to the SEC, FDIC, the Federal Reserve and the OCC, to comment on the notice of proposed rulemaking for the Volcker Rule. In our comment letter, we answered 244 out of 395 questions asked by the Agencies.
The Agencies involved in the Volcker rulemaking process have an historic opportunity to redress many of the economic wrongs of the past, and create a future that privileges the interests of the many rather than the few. We ask that the Agencies vigorously implement the considerable responsibilities that have been discharged to them by Congress, remain faithful to the statute’s intent and consider the comments contained in this letter. PDF of our Comment Letter
A march commenced Feb 13 to mark the submission deadline for public commenting
In my opinion, one of the most important books written in recent years on the subject of the global arms trade and its corrupting effects is Andrew Feinstein's, The Shadow World, Inside the Global Arms Trade. This voluminous book is mind numbing in its detail, but it is thoroughly sourced and, I believe, it will become a standard reference over time. Anyone trying to understand the dark and dangerous corner of the global economy and its politics must read this book. (To be sure, I am biased because I was a minor source in this book and I consider Andrew a good friend.)
Naturally, the arms makers are not too happy with the Shadow World and want to keep it hidden in the musty stacks of your local library. I am attaching two recent essays to help you determine if this book should be forgotten. They were published on the Lexington Institute' Early Warning Blog. Lexington is funded in large part by defense contractors and is hardly impartial on all matters regarding defense spending, so the first essay is quite expected; the second, however, comes as a surprise, to Lexington's credit.
The first essay is a predictable critique of Andrew's book by Robert Trice, a retired Senior Vice President of Lockheed Martin. Think of his effort as an attempt to move Andrew's book to a forgotten corner in the back room.
To understand the saliency of Trice's effort, consider his career. Robert Trice is a case study in the quintessential pattern of gorging oneself on cash flow pumped out by the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex's big green spending machine. Holding a PhD in political science, he began his defense career in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon, where he eventually became Director for Technology and Arms Transfer Policy — or in plain english, a resident shill in the Pentagon for promoting international arms sales — the subject painted in not so flattering terms by Feinstein. Trice then moved to Capital Hill and worked as the defense Legislative Assistant to Senator Dale Bumpers (D-AR) for about three years. I met him in this position because Bumpers was interested in the military reform work my colleagues (Pierre Sprey and John Boyd) and I were doing in the Pentagon. But Trice, as Bumpers' advisor, was clearly a reluctant reformer. (Although Bumpers showed initial and enthusiastic interest in our work, nothing came of it.) In the essay below Trice now slings a little mud, saying the three of us are not just wrong but wrongly motivated, because we are “anti-defense.” Soon thereafter, the presumably pro-defense Trice cashed out of Bumpers office to work in the Defense industry, serving first as a Vice President for Business Development at McDonnel Douglas (in plain english this is a marketing job and in the MICC, marketing, or business development, means greasing the skids in Congress and the Pentagon for your firm's tinker toys — which is a good position for a poly sci type, because he couldn't design airplanes at McAir or Lockheed). Trice then moved to Lockheed Martin where his business development portfolio including shaping L-M's new business strategies and operations for the global market, which of course is the subject of Andrew's book. Obviously a person with his background of bottom feeding so successfully in the MICC's money machine, especially in the international arms trade arena, comes to the reviewing table with … shall we say … a certain amount of bias.
The second essay is Andrew Feinstein's polite repost to Trice's bucket of grease. Andrew's background could not be more different than that of Trice. Whereas Trice gorged himself and became a wealthy ‘pillar of the establishment' by slopping in America's defense trough, Andrew put his ass on the line trying to rein in the excesses of that trough's South African equivalent. In the late 1980s, Andrew, a young white South African, joined Nelson Mandella's African National Congress (ANC), because he opposed Apartheid. In 1994, after the fall of Apartheid, he was elected in South Africa's first democratic election to be an ANC member of parliament. But Andrew took his parliamentary oversight responsibilities seriously, and while in parliament, he set up a kind of one man Truman Committee to investigate allegations of ANC corruption in some international weapons deals. And he hit pay dirt, but rather than shutting up when he was pressured by party elders to close down his investigation into a £5bn arms deal that was tainted by allegations of high-level corruption, he resigned in protest from Parliament. His political memoir, After the Party: A Personal and Political Journey Inside the ANC, was published in 2007 and became a bestseller in South Africa.
With the backgrounds of these two protagonists in mind, I urge you to read Trice's critique of Andrew's latest book first (Attachment 1 below) and then Andrew's repost (Attachment 2 below) and judge for yourself who is closer to being a straight shooter — and read The Shadow World.
Most discussions of possible United States military operations in the Persian Gulf, should Iran try to prevent maritime traffic from going through the Strait of Hormuz, generally say that while it would not be a cakewalk, it would not be an enormously difficult task either.
But that conventional wisdom is wrong, according to a recent report issued by an independent, non-profit public policy research institute in Washington DC. The report found that the traditional post-Cold War US military ability to project power overseas with few serious challenges to its freedom of action may be rapidly drawing to a close.
. . . . . . .
It stressed that “a Strait of Hormuz closure could trigger a much larger price spike, including by limiting offsetting supplies from other producers in the region”.
Phi Beta Iota: Two themes are emerging in the open source world. First, the depth and breadth of Israel's clandestine agreements with its Arab neighbors is not clearly understood–a National Intelligence Estimate is required, but the collection, processing, and analysis capabilities are simply not there, and the management will to do this as a multinational task is not there either. Second, as the US loses its ability to actually project force, the finance of war is being replaced by the theater of war, such that oil prices can still be manipulated, but at a fraction of the blood, sweat, and tears previously mobilized – financial fraud on the cheap, as it were.
Economic imbalances and social inequality risk reversing the gains of globalization, warns the World Economic Forum in its report Global Risks 2012. These are the findings of a survey of 469 experts and industry leaders who worry that the world’s institutions are ill-equipped to cope with today’s interconnected, rapidly evolving risks. The findings of the survey fed into an analysis of three major risk cases: Seeds of Dystopia; Unsafe Safeguards and the Dark Side of Connectivity. Report also analyses the top 10 risks in five categories – economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal and technological.
Phi Beta Iota: The report fails to address the absence of both intelligence and integrity among all “institutions” be they public or private. This is the entire point of the global Occupy movement. This is also the entire point of this website, which predates Occupy by some time.
