WHY GHANA WAS WRONG: In paying tribute to Margaret Thatcher

President John Dramani Mahama

Published on April 18

The Ghana Government has described the late Margaret Thatcher as “one of the greatest British Prime Minister of the 20th Century” because of “British financial support to Ghana during her reign”. This is in spite of he fact that nearly half of the UK population are jubilating over her death. In the following article, a former British Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, explains why Mrs. Thatcher does not deserve a glowing tribute.

I despised everything she stood for - she may have been a woman, but in her policies she showed no compassion to the sick, needy and the desperate.

Enemy within: Thatcher and Prescott at a remembrance service

When Margaret Thatcher’s death was announced I was bombarded with media requests to pay tribute to her. I refused. Honour Thatcher? No, no, no.

“Tribute” would be the last word that could be used to describe what I wanted to say. So I decided to wait six days to share my thoughts with you.

I despised everything she stood for. She may have been a woman, but in her policies she showed no compassion to the sick, needy and the desperate.

She won the election off the back of her famous Saatchi and Saatchi adverts... “Labour isn’t working.” She was the biggest spin-merchant going.

Remember when she stood on the doorstep of No 10 in 1979 and quoted St Francis of Assisi? This was meant to be her personal manifesto.

So let’s judge her record in a cold and dispassionate way. It’s what she would have wanted.

“Where there is discord, may we bring harmony.”

 Thanks to her failed economic policies, Britain went through two recessions and unemployment was deliberately allowed to skyrocket above three million. Under her, crime went up 79 per cent. Her reign started with riots in Brixton and Toxteth and ended with civil disobedience and more riots against the Poll Tax, a regressive taxation that hit the poor the hardest.

“Where there is error, may we bring truth.”

Tell that to the families of the 96 football fans who died at Hillsborough. Her Government and South Yorkshire Police conspired with Murdoch’s Sun to smear the victims as drunks and louts, then covered up the truth for years.

“Where there is doubt, may we bring faith.”

Thatcher never had faith in society. She claimed it didn’t exist. Her belief in the individual led to selling off council homes and refusing to build new ones, leading to record waiting lists for social housing and homelessness. She also showed no faith to Nelson Mandela, whom she branded a terrorist, but called Chilean fascist dictator General Pinochet a “staunch true friend”.

 

“Where there is despair, may we bring hope.”

 She destroyed mining communities, setting family against family and short-sightedly closed pits that were still economically viable. As many as 200,000 miners lost their jobs just to show she could prove who was boss. Since then, the price of coal rose from $30 a ton in 1987 to $130 in 2008. Forty per cent of our electricity is powered by coal, and we import the vast majority!

 

The late Margaret Thatcher

It made no economic sense. It was a cold-hearted political decision.

Election win: Thatcher on the step on No.10 after her victory Getty 

Under Thatcher, inequality increased and the number of people in poverty rose by nearly five million to 12.2million... nearly a quarter of the UK population.

When she was elected, one in seven children lived in poverty. By the time she was sacked, by her own Cabinet, it was one in three.

Manufacturing collapsed under her strategy of deindustrialisation and we became beholden to the bankers, the very people who caused the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s depression.

Remember “Tell Sid”? Well Sid might have bought shares in British Gas but today he has to make the choice between heating or eating now that the average dual-fuel bill is more than £1,400.

Thatcher’s “shareholder democracy” vision didn’t stop the privatised British Gas in 2012 making £606million profits and its five bosses sharing £16.4million in pay and bonuses. She left this country in a terrible state... bitter, selfish and­ ­divided. Her legacy is the out-of-touch Tory ­ministers hell-bent on replicating her nasty and twisted politics today.

The antithesis of Thatcher was a prime minister who helped lead this country, with Churchill, against the scourge of fascism and then rebuilt this country.

Clement Attlee, who served as Churchill’s deputy prime minister in the wartime cabinet, led Labour to victory in 1945, with policies to defeat the five evils of the pre-war Tory government:  “Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.”

He introduced a national system of benefits to protect people “from the cradle to the grave”.

He brought in free secondary education, employed 25,000 extra teachers and achieved near full employment with only 500,000 people out of work. He built more than one million new homes fit for heroes.

And his crowning achievement, a National Health Service with free medical treatment for all, based on need, not your ability to pay.

In 1997 Labour didn’t look back to Margaret Thatcher’s divisive government. We used Attlee’s administration as our template to deliver what I called “traditional values in a modern setting”.

We rebuilt crumbling schools, recruited 42,000 teachers and 123,000 teaching assistants which saw the number of pupils getting five good GCSEs rise from 54 per cent in 1997 to 69 per cent when we left office in 2010.

We breathed life into a neglected NHS by ­employing over 44,000 more doctors and 89,000 more nurses, and building over 100 new hospitals, cutting waiting times for treatment from 18 months to 18 weeks.

We introduced the minimum wage, the New Deal, tax credits to lift over a million children out of poverty and created two million new jobs, reducing unemployment to 1.5million. It led to the longest period of continuing growth.

We invested £20billion to bring two million social housing homes up to a decent standard: warm, weatherproof and with modern facilities.

John Prescott

We put 32,000 more bobbies and PCSOs on the beat, introduced community policing and ASBOs which helped to slash crime by more than 40 per cent. And we pumped £400million into the former coalfield communities to help regenerate the areas. So do I believe Thatcher’s claim that New Labour was her “greatest achievement”?

Absolutely not.

Even in death, she is spinning from her grave.

She claimed she never wanted a state funeral, but she planned to give herself the same ceremonial one as the Queen Mother.

And her “children”, the out-of-touch Tory Boys Cameron and Osborne, are getting YOU to foot the £10million bill for the biggest political propaganda exercise this country has ever seen.

This is what “Operation True Blue” is about. It’s not a remembrance. It’s a rebrand.

Firstly, they brought back Lords and MPs for a combined total of 12 hours of fawning and ­mourning from Tories, using it as a platform to kick the Labour governments of the 1970s.

When Attlee died in 1967, just 40 minutes was given for parliamentary tributes. For Churchill, the tributes in the House of Commons lasted little more than half an hour.

At Churchill’s funeral, Attlee was a pall bearer along with Tory Premiers Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan. That showed how united Labour and Conservative had been during the war.

But Thatcher split this country, North and South, the haves and have nots, “one of us” or “the enemy within”.

This country paid enough thanks to that woman. So why the hell should we continue to pay now she’s dead?

So I’ve an idea. Get the 13,000 millionaires who’ve just received £100,000 each from this Government to each stump up £770. Privatise her funeral. It would be a fitting tribute.

On Wednesday I’ll remember the wasted lives, the blighted childhoods and the lost industries that were the result of Margaret Thatcher’s policies.

And I’ll pay tribute to a former PM who made Britain stronger, healthier and happier, not weaker, sicker and despondent.

Clement Attlee, Prime Minister 1945-1951.

EDITORIAL

AN AMBASSADOR?

The Israeli Ambassador to Ghana is taking her host country for granted is developing an attitude of superiority complex.

Somehow this woman assumes that it is within her power to talk down to the leaders of Ghana and to dictate the country’s foreign policy.

It is still extremely difficult for us to fathom what made this Ambassador imagine that her own country has better judgment when it comes to foreign policy.

Is Israel not the state which appointed a certified racist as its foreign Minister? A Foreign Minister who even Israel’s western backers were ashamed to be associated with.

Was it sound foreign policy for Israel to supporting apartheid in South Africa?

Could Israel have been showcasing sound judgment when its leader ordered the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists?

The Israeli Ambassador went to far when she warned that Ghana could suffer consequences if it maintained friendly relations with Iran.

The Insight is still waiting to see what Ghana foreign Ministry will does to knock some sense into the hard skull of the Israeli Ambassador.

 She must not be allowed to get away with her blatant arrogance. 

 

YAO GRAHAM TO SPEAK

Dr. Yao Graham of TWN

 By Ebow

Dr Yao Graham of the Third World Network will deliver this year’s Freedom Centre anniversary lecture in Accra on May Day.

The lecture which is organized to mark the sixth anniversary of the Centre  will be chaired by comrade Kyeretwie Opoku, convener of the Socialist Forum of Ghana.

The theme will be “The left  in contemporary Ghanaian Politics”.

People from all walks of life have been invited to participate in the event.

Previous lecturer include, Professor Akilagpa Sawyer, former Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana, MR Tsakatu, a leading lawer, Professor Agyemang Badu Akosa, of the Convention Peoples Party  (CPP), Dr Gamel Nasser Adam of the University of Ghana and Mr Kwesi Pratt, Jnr.  Editor of The Insight.

Dr Yao Graham is expected to examine the role of the Ghanaian left in shaping up both domestic and foreign policy and how this has generally impacted on the wellbeing of the working people .

The Freedom Centre was established six years ago by the Socialist Forum of Ghana(SFG) as a watering hole for left forces.

It has a library, an office and a meeting hall.

It promotes the discussion of both national and international issues and promotes the arts including poetry, music and art.

The Centre also organizes film shows for its patrons.

Our King Has Gone Mad Again

By Adekoya Boladale

Shadows have taken over our land, our soul is in captive, our minute hope has just been crumbled. Who could have thought of this? Who could have seen this coming? Yes, we had no faith in him. Yes, we had no desire in his actions. But like a prodigal son we hope he finds his way back. How sorrowful that the beast of darkness has built a castle in his soul, how pathetic that he derives more pleasure in the crumbs from the Pigs table.

438 days ago this same beast took over his soul; just like the lost dog he could hear us no more. We tried all we could to bring back sanity to his abode, but the more we try, the more we fail. With heavy heart we took to the market square and made it our home, we stood neck-hooked to the gods to bring back his memories. The memories of his promise before his coronation, the memories of his pledged for truthfulness, his oath of allegiance to us and just us, the vow to make uphold the grundnorm. ​

After 14days the gods heard our plea, he could see, he could talk, he could walk but from that day onward the rythmns of our voices became a stranger to his ears. We were contented with the little we had and went home merry. We endured the pains, we swallowed the agony. Even when his wife was sick and died, he needed our pleas to the gods, we denied him not. The gods saw our tears and gave him reason to smile again. Even while we eat from the dust of the grounds and he feeds fat on Antelopes and Catfish we send no curse to his household but open our lips wide to heaven for manna.

 Again he made a pledge to us; he came back on his knees just like he did before coronation. He sworn before heaven and earth, before gods and wizards. He appealed to our sentiment and pray we give him just 12 moons to make amends. We calm our nerves again and allowed the gentle breeze of the high Ogudu Mountain to take over our soul. But we forgot the words of our forefathers, we ignored the saying of the past, that no matter how well you scrub the ‘egbolo’ leaf the scent of faeces never departs from it. Just when we were hoping for his magical touch, when we were waiting for the aroma of his relief, he dealt us a huge blow.

You remember Alams, the crook from the creek. No, not the one cooling off in his new found paradise in Queensland that is James from the linage of Ibori. You should remember him, the one who sneaked to his home disguised as the daughter of eve, the governor who brought shame to our land through his heroic escaped from the London's watchmen, the one who made his home in London the treasury bank of his state, yes, the one who laid down the foundation for Michael Scofield. 

He is a saint now; our king cleansed his inequities with the blood of the throne. After all the sorrows and pain he brought to the Kingdom of Bayelsa, after all the agony and suffering he caused his people, our king made him a knight. He is a man of honor now; his robes would be sowed in seven colours while maids flower’s his path. He is better than the soldiers who have fought to make us live, his integrity now supersedes the five pillars that fought for our freedom. Now his name has been written in gold.

To Alams rejoice for your kingdom has come, beat the great ‘gangan’ and take to the street of Babylon, shout to the top of Everest and seat at the zenith of the Eiffel tower. Today a battle you have won, a battle against justice, a battle against fairness, a battle against sanity. But remember our world is but a market we all have to go home. Back to the abode of a Supreme Being who never drinks from the stream of impurity nor hold feast for corruption.

Oh our king has lost his sanity; oh our king has lost his mind. He sees a hero in a tyrant, he sees gods in beast, he sees peace in hurricane. Let our neighbours hear our cry, let our friends and foes feel our plight. Let the thunderous echoes of our speechless but wary hearts fill the ears of our gods. Our heart is heavy, our soul bleeding, our body seeks for change. For how long do we have to wait? How long must patience stays in our homes? Our palms are hitching, our toes swelling.

Oh our gods, oh our ancestors why take Musa from us and give us this. Insanity is but a plague only the gods can cure. The tears of our toddlers is enough to worth your mercy. Oh our gods, bring back our good fortune, bring back the luck of our King, bring back to him the memories of the shoeless yesterday.

Adekoya Boladale is a political scientist and wrote via adekoyaboladale@gmail.com

The Seeds Of Suicide: How Monsanto Destroys Farming 

 By Dr. Vandana Shiva

Monsanto’s talk of ‘technology’ tries to hide its real objectives of control over seed where genetic engineering is a means to control seed, “Monsanto is an agricultural company.

We apply innovation and technology to help farmers around the world \produce more while conserving more.”

“Producing more, Conserving more, Improving farmers lives.”

These are the promises Monsanto India’s website makes, alongside pictures of smiling, prosperous farmers from the state of Maharashtra. This is a desperate attempt by Monsanto and its PR machinery to delink the epidemic of farmers’ suicides in India from the company’s growing control over cotton seed supply — 95 per cent of India’s cotton seed is now controlled by Monsanto.

Control over seed is the first link in the food chain because seed is the source of life. When a corporation controls seed, it controls life, especially the life of farmers.

Monsanto’s concentrated control over the seed sector in India as well as across the world is very worrying. This is what connects farmers’ suicides in India to Monsanto vs Percy Schmeiser in Canada, to Monsanto vs Bowman in the US, and to farmers in Brazil suing Monsanto for $2.2 billion for unfair collection of royalty.

Through patents on seed, Monsanto has become the “Life Lord” of our planet, collecting rents for life’s renewal from farmers, the original breeders.

Patents on seed are illegitimate because putting a toxic gene into a plant cell is not “creating” or “inventing” a plant. These are seeds of deception — the deception that Monsanto is the creator of seeds and life; the deception that while Monsanto sues farmers and traps them in debt, it pretends to be working for farmers’ welfare, and the deception that GMOs feed the world. GMOs are failing to control pests and weeds, and have instead led to the emergence of superpests and superweeds.

The entry of Monsanto in the Indian seed sector was made possible with a 1988 Seed Policy imposed by the World Bank, requiring the Government of India to deregulate the seed sector. Five things changed with Monsanto’s entry: First, Indian companies were locked into joint-ventures and licensing arrangements, and concentration over the seed sector increased.

Second, seed which had been the farmers’ common resource became the “intellectual property” of Monsanto, for which it started collecting royalties, thus raising the costs of seed.

Third, open pollinated cotton seeds were displaced by hybrids, including GMO hybrids. A renewable resource became a non-renewable, patented commodity.

Fourth, cotton which had earlier been grown as a mixture with food crops now had to be grown as a monoculture, with higher vulnerability to pests, disease, drought and crop failure. Fifth, Monsanto started to subvert India’s regulatory processes and, in fact, started to use public resources to push its non-renewable hybrids and GMOs through so-called public-private partnerships (PPP).

In 1995, Monsanto introduced its Bt technology in India through a joint-venture with the Indian company Mahyco. In 1997-98, Monsanto started open field trials of its GMO Bt cotton illegally and announced that it would be selling the seeds commercially the following year. India has rules for regulating GMOs since 1989, under the Environment Protection Act.

It is mandatory to get approval from the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee under the ministry of environment for GMO trials. The Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology sued Monsanto in the Supreme Court of India and Monsanto could not start the commercial sales of its Bt cotton seeds until 2002.

And, after the damning report of India’s parliamentary committee on Bt crops in August 2012, the panel of technical experts appointed by the Supreme Court recommended a 10-year moratorium on field trials of all GM food and termination of all ongoing trials of transgenic crops.

But it had changed Indian agriculture already.

Monsanto’s seed monopolies, the destruction of alternatives, the collection of superprofits in the form of royalties, and the increasing vulnerability of monocultures has created a context for debt, suicides and agrarian distress which is driving the farmers’ suicide epidemic in India. This systemic control has been intensified with Bt cotton. That is why most suicides are in the cotton belt.

An internal advisory by the agricultural ministry of India in January 2012 had this to say to the cotton-growing states in India — “Cotton farmers are in a deep crisis since shifting to Bt cotton. The spate of farmer suicides in 2011-12 has been particularly severe among Bt cotton farmers.”

The highest acreage of Bt cotton is in Maharashtra and this is also where the highest farmer suicides are. Suicides increased after Bt cotton was introduced — Monsanto’s royalty extraction, and the high costs of seed and chemicals have created a debt trap.

According to Government of India data, nearly 75 per cent rural debt is due to purchase inputs. As Monsanto’s profits grow, farmers’ debt grows. It is in this systemic sense that Monsanto’s seeds are seeds of suicide.

The ultimate seeds of suicide is Monsanto’s patented technology to create sterile seeds. (Called “Terminator technology” by the media, sterile seed technology is a type of Gene Use Restriction Technology, GRUT, in which seed produced by a crop will not grow — crops will not produce viable offspring seeds or will produce viable seeds with specific genes switched off.) The Convention on Biological Diversity has banned its use, otherwise Monsanto would be collecting even higher profits from seed.

Monsanto’s talk of “technology” tries to hide its real objectives of ownership and control over seed where genetic engineering is just a means to control seed and the food system through patents and intellectual property rights.

A Monsanto representative admitted that they were “the patient’s diagnostician, and physician all in one” in writing the patents on life-forms, from micro-organisms to plants, in the TRIPS’ agreement of WTO. Stopping farmers from saving seeds and exercising their seed sovereignty was the main objective. Monsanto is now extending its patents to conventionally bred seed, as in the case of broccoli and capsicum, or the low gluten wheat it had pirated from India which we challenged as a biopiracy case in the European Patent office.

That is why we have started Fibres of Freedom in the heart of Monsanto’s Bt cotton/suicide belt in Vidharba. We have created community seed banks with indigenous seeds and helped farmers go organic. No GMO seeds, no debt, no suicides.

Vandana Shiva is a philosopher, environmental activist, and eco feminist.Shiva, currently based in Delhi, has authored more than 20 books and over 500 papers in leading scientific and technical journals.She was trained as a physicist and received her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Western Ontario, Canada. She was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 1993. She is the founder of Navdanya http://www.navdanya.org/

TRIBUTES TO THATCHER; WHY LABOUR MPS BOYCOTTED AND...

Empty seats during tributes to Thatcher

 There were empty seats in parliament as many MPs chose to stay away

No shows: There were many empty seats on the Opposition benches

When Labour MPs boycotted the Commons debate on Margaret Thatcher's death, there were howls of outrage from Tories and the right-wing press who branded them disrespectful. 

But the stayaway MPs, from across the UK, and from different parties, were motivated by deeply held principles.

Many felt it would have been hypocritical to honour a woman their constituents blame for problems still blighting their lives today . 

Here, some of the defiant MPs explain why they were absent from the green benches.

Grahame Morris - Easington, Co Durham, Labour

Factories, shipyards and coal mines were closed throughout Easington and County Durham during Thatcher's 11 years. 

Haverton Hill Shipyard closed in 1979, taking 900 jobs. Consett Steel Works closed a year later, leaving 4,000 men jobless - and unemployment hit 35%.

Dozens of collieries were forced to shut in Durham - including Eccles, Eden and South Medomsley, Blackhall, Houghton and Boldon.

The nearby Shildon Wagon Works shut in 1984, leaving the town with the highest unemployment in the country.

Mr Morris said: "The True Blue celebration of Thatcher's legacy is at odds with the hardship many individuals and communities in East Durham suffered and are still suffering as a result of her policies.

"Many of her policies were viewed as vindictive and lacking in compassion. They have had long-term consequences for areas like mine.

Margaret Thatcher

"Easington is still struggling to get over the Thatcher era. It had the most people on sickness benefits in the country, the worst obesity rate and poorest pensioners.

"She broke the backs of communities and families for at least a generation. That is simply unforgiveable."

Steve McCabe - Selly Oak, Birmingham, Labour

Mr McCabe said he mourned the loss of major factories and mass employers throughout the West Midlands in the 1980s.

Once the workshop of the world, the region has been left with the second highest unemployment rate in the country. A quarter of under-fives live in child poverty.

Mr McCabe said: "My constituency is still suffering from her attacks on manufacturing."

Dawn Primarolo - Bristol South, Labour

Bristol's inner city exploded into riots in 1980 as brutal austerity piled misery on an area of high unemployment. Even today, a quarter of all children in the city still live in poverty.

Ms Primarolo said: "The agenda pursued by the Thatcher government led to destruction of many communities across the country, the effect of which is still felt today.

"Margaret Thatcher could not have been more wrong to say there was no such thing as society, only individuals. The challenges we face today have their roots in the consequences of her policies.

"Many reflect on how she was viewed internationally, for me the misery and humiliation of the Bristol South communities is writ large and saying she did it with conviction will not take make it any more acceptable to those who remember it vividly."

Huw Irranca-Davies - Ogmore, South Wales, Labour

Mr Irranca-Davies joined the party in 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher came to power.

He said: "A dire Thatcherite legacy stands out in former coal-mining communities . The enduring memories here are bitter. 

"She broke the back of these communities and families for at least a generation, and that is simply unforgiveable."

In South Wales, 150 collieries closed and 70,000 miners lost their jobs.

Suicide rates, unemployment, crime, drug use and alcoholism all soared and not just miners were affected.

Steelwork privatisations led to closures with 14,500 unemployed when Ebbw Vale shut. Parts of once-prosperous South Wales are now poorer than Bulgaria and Romania.

Caroline Lucas - Brighton Pavilion, Green

Ms Lucas said the city's large gay community still remembered Lady Thatcher's hostility.

"I opted to spend my time working on constituency issues rather than join in the seven-hour display of Tory hero worship in the House of Commons for someone who caused the British people so much misery," said Caroline.

"In my constituency, people remember all too well Thatcher's opposition to gay rights, her reckless housing policies and cruel indifference to inequality.

"She may have been Britain's first female Prime Minister, but Thatcher did little for women either inside or outside the House of Commons. 

"And she pursued a destructive agenda that marginalised the poor, divided communities and undermined the principles of the welfare state." 

Bill Esterson - Sefton Central, Merseyside, Labour

The people of Liverpool suffered as much as anyone in the 1980s. Unemployment rates in the city were amongst the highest in the UK and an estimated 15% of the city was vacant or derelict.

In 1981 the Toxteth Riots kicked off - with tear gas used by police against the public. In the same year, the Tate & Lyle sugar works closed down.

Maggie Thatcher

 Unemployment among Liverpool men then was 25%. Youth unemployment was up to 90% in some parts of the city, which still contains five of the UK's 10 poorest areas.

Mr Esterson said: "People here on Merseyside remember the Thatcher years and how they caused real poverty. A lot of people here were employed on the docks and thousands lost their jobs.

"People remember how that was done without a thought for their families and how industry in the North West was destroyed.

He added: "The riots in Liverpool

Tom Watson - West Bromwich East, Labour

Party deputy chair Mr Watson said Thatcher's legacy in the West Midlands was "catastrophic".

When she came to power in 1979, unemployment was 4% in the area. By 1987 it had hit 17%.

Unemployment across the West Midlands, at around 9% today, has yet to recover, and the area's industrial base has been destroyed. Mr Watson said: "Industry was devastated and communities broken."

David Hamilton - Midlothian, Scotland, Labour

Former miner Mr Hamilton, who lost his job under Thatcher, said: "I'm an old-fashioned lad - you don't go to a funeral and start criticising the individual.

"It took me two and a half years to get a job and that was as a part-time landscape gardener. I only saw her cry when she left office. She shed no tears for the miners in my area."

By 1990 there were no pits left in Midlothian. 

Bilston Glen Colliery once produced 1,000,000 tons of coal a year, and employed 2,300 men. The site is now used as an industrial estate, with food processing plants, but the area has an unemployment rate of 25%.

Mark Durkan - Foyle, Northern Ireland SDLP

Mr Durkan represents Northern Ireland's second city Derry, where Thatcher was a particularly divisive figure. Republicans blame her for the deaths of 10 hunger strikers - three from the city - in 1981.

He said: "She had a controversial impact here. But I don't think anyone's death is a matter for celebration and rejoicing ." One in three Derry children still lives in poverty.

 

Goodluck Jonathan: From Demigod To Mammon

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan

By taju tijani 

The sentimental genealogy of the president's dirt poor background that worked so proudly on our emotions to the point of fanatical adulation has turned out to be a deliberate mass manipulation. When the wizards and witches of Abuja made that fatal decision to exchange the soul of ex-president Umaru Yar' Adua for Jonathan's,  little did Nigerians knew that they were entering the galactic realm of outer darkness.  Even professional political prophets could neither discern Jonathan's pathological proclivity to dithering nor foresee his cabalist approach to politics.

In 2011 in the heat of the brouhaha of his political campaign every of his words was holy writ. We embraced the eloquent voices that proclaimed the virtues of his commoner background. In 2011, we were made to believe that he was a man of the people. All his paid artists were creatures of creative imagination. These recreative artists succeeded in delivering up Jonathan, with a touch of folklorist tale, that the president was a demigod!

The first salvo among the shibboleths released to the public realm was that he was a shoeless boy from Otueke. That is, he was born a plebeian. We were also given the image of a humble low lifer whose claim to enjoying life did not go beyond eating gari and more gari. Then for bluff and chutzpah in the evening under the glorious Otueke moonshine,  Jonathan and his kinsmen found joy in settling for bottles of ogogoro, paraga and opa eyin! His dietary oscillography was pure carb and apeteshi. The remorseless plebbing of his ghetto origin was enough catalyst to galvanise our collective sympathy. And sure enough we kept the faith. Our 22 million votes - rigged or not - enabled Jonathan to gain an unfettered access to the seat of Nigeria's most coveted trophy: the presidency.

As a professional contrarian who is proud enough to stick out his head above the parapets of hypocrisy, fawning patronage and flattery, I am raising an accusation against President Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan that he has failed Nigeria and Nigerians. I am saying that the deceit and shibboleth of his sainthood has fallen to reveal a dithering, slumbering, clueless, cowardly, ignorant, paralytic and corrupt creature pretending to be the leader of the most populous black nation on earth. The documented pathology of his laziness has stalled Nigeria's journey to redemption. We should have been forewarned that  a lazy, drunken zoologist does not belong to Aso Rock but in the midst of baying cheetahs, lions and crocodiles.

When he rode to power under the shower of our empathy, he made a proclamation. He promised transformation. Under the crisp air of our new hope and his own air of certitude, we embraced his oration of transformation without modulating it with doubt and cynicism.

We trust that Jonathan is not part of those rentier politicians who have destroyed Nigeria soul, mind and body. Even the avowedly pessimistic had to yield to reason. They had to yield to the common song of the time that Jonathan was a blast of fresh air. Today, Nigerians are paying for that strange flirtation with his political rhetoric and choreographed sound bite. Let us test the evidence. First, President Jonathan is yet to declare his worldly asset, a written demand from the constitution of this nation. His official bombast that he would not divulge his asset on pages of newspaper proves his capacity to desecrate and do violence to the constitution he swore to uphold.  The price being exerted by his failure to obey the constitution of the land echoes in both the states, senate and the legislature.

 Both governors, senators and legislators  have carved out their own republics within a republic. At will they disrespect, disrobe and distort the law in the grandest of political impunity not seen anywhere in the world. They take their cue from the dotard in Aso Rock who rules without any oblique hint of concern for the rule of law. We are govern not by law but by the opinionated prejudice and herd mentality of our overpaid politicians. Governors spend state money as a personal fortune. Senators and legislators live lawless lives. They divine immunity clauses in the constitution. They self-award themselves huge salaries which give them lavish access to gracious  and opulent living in a land teeming with 60 million jobless Nigerians.

Secondly, Jonathan is living in a cocoon world of political profligacy. He epitomises the lies, chicanery, duplicity, impunity, waste, favouritism and hypocrisy of Africa's brand of liberal democracy. He has abandoned the folklorist tale of his carefully choreographed background of frugality, moderation and austerity. He has developed a lofty distaste for material prudency and transparent husbandry of national resources and wealth. There are many examples that boggle the mind.  He has been a supporter of his wife's obsessive madness for provocative obscenities.  In bedroom arm-twisting, Patience Jonathan has worked her sorcery on the president and succeeded in her inclusion of First Lady Peace Mission Building in the 2013 Federal Capital Territory appropriation budget . Elsewhere, revolution is made of this!

Patience Jonathan's ghoulish dream of a N4 billion white sepulchre under the skyline of Abuja is a monument to ego and waste. This is a democratic profligacy.  Under our bemused watch she appealed to the Senate and the House of Representatives to pass the Wonga (money)  budgeted for the project. In a fit of irrationality she explained that the building was not for her but for Nigerians. According to her, when Maryam Babangida and Mariam Abacha built the Women Centre and the National Hospital they did not carry the buildings when they left government. She added that she will not go with the peace mission building when her tenure expires. Explaining further, she said the peace mission project was initiated by late President Yar’Adua, adding that other countries lobbied for the mission to be in their countries but it was given to Nigeria on a platter of gold.  She revealed that the United Nations and ECOWAS buildings are being maintained by Federal Capital Territory Administration.

Patience Jonathan's argument with its illogic is nothing but a homage to lawlessness, impunity and a revelation of the ways prudence and accountability have retreated from the realm of polity in our country.  "When my tenure expires", did I read that right? This statement from Patience Jonathan is absolute poppywash, of course! She is a thief. She has stolen a public space outside the constitution of Nigeria. It is only in Nigeria you will find the wife of a president live a parallel life with her husband in coveting office, usage of presidential jets and private staffers. It is only in Nigeria you will find huge amount of public money allocated for the profligate use of the "Office Of First Lady".  Elsewhere, revolution is made of this!!

   

Mr and Mrs Jonathan

Michelle Obama, the self-effacing wife of the president of America has no private fiefdom in the Oval. Only recently, she said that she was a single parent as an endearing  deference to the job of staying at home to look after her children and the painful deprivation of missing her husband due to presidential duties. She harbours no competitive space with her man. Samantha Gwendoline Cameron, wife of David Cameron (Kamoru) the British Prime Minister is a businesswoman with no access to prime ministerial jet to fly her to expensive hospitals in Dubai, France and Germany.  

Jonathan's habit of projecting Nigeria as the father Christmas and bank manager to all the weak, tired and the dispossessed of the earth is a felonic behaviour.  This desperation to showcase Nigeria as giant of Africa does not stand the test of reality. The revelation that Nigeria (FCT) foots the bill of maintaining both buildings of ECOWAS and United Nations is scandalous. Funds meant for the enjoyment of Nigerians are criminally diverted on daily basis to pay for laundering our bad, soiled and damaged reputation as a nation. As I write, discussion is ongoing to deploy billion of naira to surrendered Boko Haram jihadists under the weepy leniency of amnesty. In less than two years, President  Jonathan has transformed himself from a demigod to mammon.

President Jonathan's dream of transforming the Tower of Babel of our corruption has continued to receive divine retribution. It is still blasphemous to attempt to transform the temple of corruption in Nigeria. And who else to prove that he is  incapable of cracking the monolith of our national disgrace than President Jonathan.  In a touch of pantomime to his drive to fight corruption at all levels, he gives it a gloss of respectability in the recent announcement of his presidential pardon.  Everyday, you reach a frustration point with this Otueke journeyman. He extended kinship loyalty to former excellent thief of Bayelsa state, Diepreye Alamieyesiegha the man who brought Nigeria into international disrepute and gave him pardon for his criminal rape of public funds.

That action or pardon was the clearest assault against corruption and good governance in Nigeria. And to make matter worse, senior mad dog, Dr. Doyin Okupe came up with marijuana-fuelled riposte when he said that Mr. Alamieyeseigha had “impacted positively on the overall economy of the nation".  Another junior mad dog, Dr Reuben Abati, on a TV programme, described those who are criticising Jonathan over Alams pardonable pardon as suffering from “sophisticated ignorance”.  These ingratiating comments from Okupe and Abati have an apt epitaph in Proverbs 28:21 "for a piece of bread a man will transgress" .

Before his reinvention President Jonathan was a subject of fascination. Today, he is a subject of intense revulsion. Today, he is surrounded by high-minded sinners, unrepentant thieves,  money cannibals, Jezebellian wife, soul-eating ritualists, cabal-driven cabinet, predators, brigands, incompetents and phoneys.  Today, we have been forced to admit that this nation is saddled with a brainless drone who has taken Nigeria to the tipping point of social despair, political tension, insecurity, barbaric corruption, hopelessness and a sustaining sense of helplessness. Now peel back his layer, you can see how President Jonathan has morphed from a demigod to mammon.   

tajutijani@hotmail.com

Everything You Know About Money Is Wrong

 By Washington's Blog

We Can’t Fix What We Don’t Understand

Bloomberg notes this week that the conventional theory of why money was created is wrong:

There are, broadly speaking, two accounts of the origin and history of money. One is elegant, intuitive and taught in many introductory economics textbooks. The other is true.

The financial economist Charles Goodhart, a former member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, laid out the two views in a 1998 paper, “The Two Concepts of Money: Implications for the Analysis of Optimal Currency Areas.”

The first view, the “M View,” is named after the Austrian 19th century economist and historian Karl Menger, whose 1882 essay “On the Origins of Money” is the canonical statement of an argument that goes back to Aristotle:

As subsistence farming gives way to more complex economies, individuals want to trade. Simple barter (eight bushels of wheat for one barrel of wine) quickly becomes inefficient, because a buyer’s desires won’t always match up with a seller’s inventory. If a merchant comes through the village with wine and all a farmer has to offer is wheat, but the merchant wants nuts, there’s no trade and both parties walk away unfulfilled. Or the farmer has to incur the costs of finding another merchant who will exchange wheat for nuts and then hope that the first merchant hasn’t moved on to the next village.

But if the merchant and the farmer can exchange some other medium, then the trade can happen. This medium of exchange has to be what Menger calls “saleable,” meaning that it’s easily portable, doesn’t spoil over time and can be divided. Denominated coins work, shells and beads also fit the bill. So do cigarettes in POW camps and jails and Tide laundry detergent for drug dealers. This process, Menger argues, happens without the intervention of the state: “Money has not been generated by law. In its origin it is a social, and not a state institution.” [Menger's view is the commonly-accepted theory of  money.]

Goodhart points out, however, that Menger is just wrong about the actual history of physical money, especially metal coins. Goodhart writes that coins don’t follow Menger’s account at all. Normal people, after all, can’t judge the quality of hunks of metal the same way they can count cigarettes or shells. They can, however, count coins. Coins need to be minted, and governments are the ideal body to do so. Precious metals that become coins are, well, precious, and stores of them need to be protected from theft. Also, a private mint will always have the incentive to say its coins contain more high-value stuff than they actually do. Governments can last a long time and make multi-generational commitments to their currencies that your local blacksmith can’t.

But why oversee money creation in the first place? This brings us to the second theory of money, which Goodhart calls the “C View,” standing for “cartalist” (chartalist is a more common spelling). To simplify radically, it starts with the idea that states minted money to pay soldiers, and then made that money the only acceptable currency for paying taxes. With a standard currency, tax assessment and collection became easier, and the state could make a small profit from seiginorage.

 The state-coin connection has far more historical support than Menger’s organic account. As Goodheart points out, strong, state-building rulers (Charlemagne, Edward I of England) tend to be currency innovators, and he could have easily added Franklin D. Roosevelt’s taking the U.S. off the gold standard in 1933 or Abraham Lincoln financing the Civil War with newly issued greenbacks. The inverse is true too: When states collapse, they usually take their currencies with them. When Japan stopped minting coins in 958, the economy reverted to barter within 50 years.  When the Roman Empire collapsed in Western Europe, money creation splintered along new political borders.

If money came about independent of states, as according to the M View, one would think it would outlast transient political structures. Historically, however, this tends not to be the case, a strong argument in favor of the C View.

Anthropologist David Graeber – who has extensively studied the history of money and debt – agrees:

There’s a standard story we’re all taught, a ‘once upon a time’ — it’s a fairy tale.

***

Rather than the standard story – first there’s barter, then money, then finally credit comes out of that – if anything its precisely the other way around. Credit and debt comes first, then coinage emerges thousands of years later and then, when you do find “I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow” type of barter systems, it’s usually when there used to be cash markets, but for some reason – as in Russia, for example, in 1998 – the currency collapses or disappears.

***

Taxes are also key to creating the first markets that operate on cash, since coinage seems to be invented or at least widely popularized to pay soldiers – more or less simultaneously in China, India, and the Mediterranean, where governments find the easiest way to provision the troops is to issue them standard-issue bits of gold or silver and then demand everyone else in the kingdom give them one of those coins back again. Thus we find that the language of debt and the language of morality start to merge.

***

How did this happen? Well, remember I said that the big question in the origins of money is how a sense of obligation – an ‘I owe you one’ – turns into something that can be precisely quantified? Well, the answer seems to be: when there is a potential for violence. If you give someone a pig and they give you a few chickens back you might think they’re a cheapskate, and mock them, but you’re unlikely to come up with a mathematical formula for exactly how cheap you think they are. If someone pokes out your eye in a fight, or kills your brother, that’s when you start saying, “traditional compensation is exactly twenty-seven heifers of the finest quality and if they’re not of the finest quality, this means war!”

Money, in the sense of exact equivalents, seems to emerge from situations like that, but also, war and plunder, the disposal of loot, slavery. In early Medieval Ireland, for example, slave-girls were the highest denomination of currency. And you could specify the exact value of everything in a typical house even though very few of those items were available for sale anywhere because they were used to pay fines or damages if someone broke them.

But once you understand that taxes and money largely begin with war it becomes easier to see what really happened.

Graeber provides an example:

We tend to forget that in, say, the Middle Ages, from France to China, … money was … whatever the king was willing to accept in taxes.

Graeber also notes that the first word for “freedom” in any language is the word for “debt-freedom”, and that much of the language of the great religious movements revolved around forgiveness of debts.  And the founders of the Christian and Jewish religions focused on the importance of debt jubilees.

In addition, most Americans don’t realize that our current money system does not serve the public good, but instead continuously sucks the prosperity and vitality out of our economy.  As Henry Ford noted:

Barter Trade

It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.

Some claim that public banking is the answer. Others look to gold or Bitcoin as a saner alternative to fiat currencies.

As we noted in 2011, maybe we should get beyond all systems which keep track of exactly to the penny who owes what to whom … in the manner required for warfare and slavery:

Graeber hints at one possibility [for a way out of the money-debt trap]:

[French anthropologist Marcel Mauss] was one of the first anthropologists to ask: well, all right, if not barter, then what? What do people who don’t use money actually do when things change hands? Anthropologists had documented an endless variety of such economic systems, but hadn’t really worked out common principles. What Mauss noticed was that in almost all of them, everyone pretended as if they were just giving one another gifts and then they fervently denied they expected anything back. But in actual fact everyone understood there were implicit rules and recipients would feel compelled to make some sort of return.

What fascinated Mauss was that this seemed to be universally true, even today. If I take a free-market economist out to dinner he’ll feel like he should return the favor and take me out to dinner later. He might even think that he is something of chump if he doesn’t and this even if his theory tells him he just got something for nothing and should be happy about it. Why is that? What is this force that compels me to want to return a gift?

This is an important argument, and it shows there is always a certain morality underlying what we call economic life.

In other words, in communities or webs of human interaction which are small enough that people can remember who gave what, we might be able to set up alternative systems of money and credit so we can largely “opt out” of the status quo systems of money and debt measurement.

I’m not arguing for becoming Luddites and living in mud huts (but that is fine, if you wish to do so). Nor am I suggesting that we all have to become selfless saints who give away all of their possessions without any reasonable expectation of something in return.  

I am arguing that it might be possible to empower ourselves – and create our own systems for keeping track on a local or people-centered basis, and create our own vibrant economies using the resources we have – by moving away from the national and global systems dominated by the biggest banks and oligarchs, and towards a system where we “spend” resources and goodwill into our local communities in a way in which trust is built from the ground-up, and the energy of trade and commerce can be re-started. [Trust is - after all - the basis for all prosperous economies.]

Postscript: Mainstream economists will argue that we need a universal, fungible type of money in order to trade on a global basis. But because currencies are now unpegged from anything in the real world and are traded on the currency markets, their values fluctuate wildly in the modern world. In other words, one of the essential characteristics for money – that they represent a universal, fixed yardstick – has disappeared. And fiat currencies have a very short lifespan. So how valuable are they, really, for anyone but forex speculators?

Until we learn what money, credit and debt really are, we will remain victims … getting poorer and poorer.

Postscript: The Bible says that the love of money is the root of all evil.  On the other hand, the father of modern economics (Adam Smith), Ronald Reagan, economist Milton Friedman, Wall Street titan Ivan Boesky and students who take economics classes all say that greed is good.

Both are naive.

Money and currency are good to the extent that they help create abundance for ourselves and our communities.  They are bad to the extent that they are used to promote warfare and slavery, and that they suck prosperity out of the system.

CIA Targeted Assassinations by Induced Heart Attack and Cancer

CIA Boss John Brennan

 By Global Research News

In 1975, during the Church Committee hearings, the existence of a secret assassination weapon came to light. The CIA had developed a poison that caused the victim to have an immediate heart attack. This poison could be frozen into the shape of a dart and then fired at high speed from a pistol. The gun was capable of shooting the icy projectile with enough speed that the dart would go right through the clothes of the target and leave just a tiny red mark. Once in the body the poison would melt and be absorbed into the blood and cause a heart attack! The poison was developed to be undetectable by modern autopsy procedures.
Can you give a person cancer?

If cancer in animals can be caused by injecting them with cancer viruses and bacteria, it would certainly be possible to do the same with human beings!
In 1931, Cornelius Rhoads, a pathologist from the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, purposely infects human test subjects in Puerto Rico with cancer cells; 13 of them died. Though a Puerto Rican doctor later discovers that Rhoads purposely covered up some of the details of his experiment and Rhoads himself gives a written testimony stating he believes that all Puerto Ricans should be killed, he later goes on to establish the U.S. Army Biological Warfare facilities in Fort Detrick Maryland (origin of the HIV/AIDS virus, the Avian Flu virus and the Swine Flu / A-H1N1 virus), Utah and Panama, and is named to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, where he begins a series of radiation exposure experiments on American soldiers and civilian hospital patients.

The answer to the question – Can you give a person cancer – is yes.  After nearly 80 years of research and development there is now a way to simulate a real heart attack and to give a healthy person cancer. Both have been used as a means of assassination. Only a very skilled pathologist, who knew exactly what to look for at an autopsy, could distinguish an assassination induced heart attack or cancer from the real thing.

Is death by heart attack, burst aneurysm, of cerebral hemorrhage a “natural cause”? Not if government agencies have found a way to influence your heart rate, blood pressure, or vascular dilatation. Neurological research has found that the brain has specific frequencies for each voluntary movement called preparatory sets. By firing at your chest with a microwave beam containing the ELF signals given off by the heart, this organ can be put into a chaotic state, the so-called heart attack. 

In this way, high profile leaders of political parties who are prone to heart attacks can be killed off before they cause any trouble. Jack Ruby died of cancer a few weeks after his conviction for murder had been overruled in appeals court and he was ordered to stand trial outside of Dallas – thus allowing him to speak freely if he so desired. There was little hesitancy in Jack Ruby killing Lee Harvey Oswald in order to prevent him from talking, so there is no reason to suspect that any more consideration would have been shown Jack Ruby if he had posed a threat to people in the US government who had conspired to murder the president of the United States – John F Kennedy.

Matt Simmons, an oil industry expert, was assassinated for turning whistle blower over the Obama administration coverup of the BP Gulf Oil Spill. Investment banker Matt Simmons, who died suddenly, was an energy industry insider and presidential adviser whose profile soared when he wrote that Saudi Arabia is running out of oil and world production is peaking. Simmons, 67, died at his vacation home in Maine. An autopsy by the state medical examiner’s office concluded Monday that he died from accidental drowning “with heart disease as a contributing factor.”

A heart attack inducing gun

His 2005 best-selling book, Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, brought him a wider audience. The book argued that Saudi Arabia vastly overstated the size of its oil reserves and that the world was on the verge of a severe oil shortage as the largest oil fields become depleted. This revelation is backed up by Iran. Iran knows the Middle East oil supply is quickly drying up and for that reason it is now focusing on building nuclear reactors. Once the oil runs out Iran will be the only country in the Middle East that will be energy self-sufficient. All of the other Middle Eastern countries, including Saudi Arabia will become Third World impoverished states.

Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was also assassinated. He was found dead in the detention center at The Hague tribunal. Mr Milosevic faced charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his alleged central role in the wars in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo during the 1990s. He also faced genocide charges over the 1992-95 Bosnia war, in which 100,000 people died.

Milosevic wrote a letter one day before his death claiming he was being poisoned to death in jail. An autopsy verified his claim as it showed that Milosevic’s body contained a drug that rendered his usual medication for high blood pressure and his heart condition ineffective, causing the heart attack that led to his death.

Former MI6 agent Richard Tomlinson told reporters that he saw documents in 1992 that discussed assassinating Milosevic by means of a staged car accident, where the driver would be blinded by a flash of light and remote controlled brake failure enacted to cause the crash. This exact same technique was utilized for real in the murder of Princess Diana.
If Milosevic was murdered, who would ultimately be responsible? NATO.
Why NATO?

Because, though the ICTY (or ‘Hague Tribunal’) presents itself to the world as a UN body, NATO officials have themselves made clear, in public, that it really belongs to NATO. NATO appointed the prosecutors, and the judges who ruled out investigating any war crimes accusations against NATO. It follows that Slobodan Milosevic, who was a prisoner of the Hague Tribunal’s Scheveningen prison when he died, was a prisoner of NATO. NATO had both motive and opportunity to kill him.

In March 2002, Milosevic presented the NATO controlled Hague tribunal with FBI documents proving that both the United States government and NATO provided financial and military support for Al-Qaeda to aid the Kosovo Liberation Army in its war against Serbia. This didn’t go down too well at the Pentagon and the White House, who at the time were trying to sell a war on terror and gearing up to justify invading Iraq.

NATO Forces

 During Milosevic’s trial for war crimes NATO alleged that the Serbs had committed a massacre of Albanian civilians in the Kosovo town of Racak. Evidence presented in the court showed that NATO’s claim was a hoax. This is especially embarrassing because the allegation of a massacre at Racak was the excuse that NATO used to begin bombing the Serbs on 24 March 1999 (the carpet bombing were done by the United States Air Force -authorized by then president Bill and Hillary Clinton). 

Then NATO claimed that the Serbs had supposedly been murdering 100,000 Albanian civilians. However, NATO’s own forensics reported that they could not find even one body of an Albanian civilian murdered by Milosevic’s forces. The failure to find any bodies eventually led to NATO’s absurd claim that the Serbs had supposedly covered up the genocide by moving the many thousands of bodies in freezer trucks deep into Serbia (while Bill Clinton was carpet bombing the place) without leaving a single trace of evidence. But the Hague tribunal showed these accusations to be entirely fraudulent as well.

Milosevic made several speeches in which he discussed how a group of shadowy internationalists had caused the chaos in the Balkans because it was the next step on the road to a “new world order.”

During a February 2000 Serbian Congressional speech, Milosevic stated,
“Small Serbia and people in it have demonstrated that resistance is possible. Applied at a broader level, it was organized primarily as a moral and political rebellion against tyranny, hegemony, monopolism, generating hatred, fear and new forms of violence and revenge against champions of freedom among nations and people, such a resistance would stop the escalation of modern time inquisition. Uranium bombs, computer manipulations, drug-addicted young assassins and bribed of blackmailed domestic thugs, promoted to the allies of the new world order, these are the instruments of inquisition which have surpassed, in their cruelty and cynicism, all previous forms of revengeful violence committed against the mankind in the past.”

Evidence linking Milosevic to genocides like Srebrenica, in which 7,000 Muslims died, was proven to be fraudulent. In fact, Srebrenica was a ‘UN safe zone’, yet just like Rwanda, UN peacekeepers deliberately withdrew and allowed the massacre to unfold, then blamed Milosevic. Milosevic’s exposure of UN involvement in the Srebrenica massacre was another reason why tribunal transcripts were heavily edited and censored by NATO, and another contributing factor for NATO to murder him while he was in their custody.NATO’s Hague Tribunal was clearly a kangaroo court whose sole purpose was to convince ordinary people all over the world that NATO’s destruction of Yugoslavia was justified.
 

Bill Clinton committed genocide in Yugoslavia

Since NATO failed to show this in its own court (a total absence of evidence did make this difficult), there is indeed a powerful NATO motive to murder Milosevic – to prevent his acquittal. In this way, NATO can continue to claim that Milosevic was guilty, and nobody would begin to look into the mountain of evidence that showed that it was NATO leaders (particularly US president Bill Clinton) who committed war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Yugoslavia.

So many people have been done in by cancer at a convenient time in history that it is now time to ask the question “who is assassinating people by giving their target cancer or inducing a massive heart attack”? Who ordered the hits and why?

Mr. Charles Senseney, a CIA weapon developer at Fort Detrick, Maryland, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in September 1975 where he described an umbrella poison dart gun he had made. He said it was always used in crowds with the umbrella open, firing through the webing so it would not attract attention. Since it was silent, no one in the crowd could hear it and the assassin merely would fold up the umbrella and saunter away with the crowd.

Video footage of the assassination of John F Kennedy shows this umbrella gun being used in Dealey Plaza. Video evidence of the events of November 22, 1963 shows that the first shot fired on the fateful day had always seemed to have had a paralytic effect on Kennedy. His fists were clenched and his head, shoulders and arms seemed to stiffen. An autopsy revealed that there was a small entrance wound in his neck but no evidence of a bullet path through his neck and no bullet was ever recovered that matched that small size.

Charles Senseney testified that his Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick had received assignments from the CIA to develop exotic weaponry. One of the weapons was a hand-held dart gun that could shoot a poison dart into a guard dog to put it out of action for several hours. The dart and the poison left no trace so that examination would not reveal that the dogs had been put out of action. The CIA ordered about 50 of these weapons and used them operationally.

Senseney said that the darts could have been used to kill human beings and he could not rule out the possibility that this had been done by the CIA.A special type of poison developed for the CIA induces a heart attack and leaves no trace of any external influence unless an autopsy is conducted to check for this particular poison. The CIA revealed this poison in various accounts in the early 1970s. The CIA even revealed the weapon that fired those darts that induces a heart attack at a congressional hearing.

The dart from this secret CIA weapon can penetrate clothing and leave nothing but a tiny red dot on the skin. On penetration of the deadly dart, the individual targeted for assassination may feel as if bitten by a mosquito, or they may not feel anything at all. The poisonous dart completely disintegrates upon entering the target. The lethal poison then rapidly enters the bloodstream causing a heart attack. Once the damage is done, the poison denatures quickly, so that an autopsy is very unlikely to detect that the heart attack resulted from anything other than natural causes.

A former CIA agent disclosed that the darts were made of a frozen form of the liquid poison. She disclosed that the dart would melt within the target and would only leave a very tiny red dot at the entry point – the same type of small entrance wound that was found during the autopsy of John F Kennedy.For over 50 years assassinations have been carried out so skillfully as to leave the impression that the victims died from natural causes. Details of some of the techniques used to achieve this were brought to light in 1961 when professional KGB assassin Bogdan Stashinskiy defected to the West and revealed that he had successfully performed two such missions. 

In 1957 he killed Ukrainian emigré writer Lev Rebet in Munich with a poison vapor gun which left the victim dead of an apparent heart attack. In 1959, the same type of weapon was used on Ukrainian emigré leader Stepan Bandera, although Bandera’s death was never fully accepted as having been from natural causes.

Among the witnesses, important people and conspirators who might have been eliminated by induced heart attack and cancer are: Jack Rudy (died of a stroke due to an undiagnosed form of aggressive cancer, just weeks after he agreed to testify before Congress about the JFK assassination), Clay Shaw, J. Edgar Hoover, Earlene Roberts (Oswald’s land-lady), Marlyn Monroe, Slobodan Milosevic, Kenneth Lay (former CEO of ENRON – the largest political campaign contributor of George W Bush and Dick Cheney), Matt Simmons, Mark Pittman (a reporter who predicted the financial crisis and exposed Federal Reserve misdoings. Pittman fought to open the Federal Reserve to more scrutiny), Elizabeth Edwards (suddenly diagnosed with cancer while her husband was campaigning against Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the presidency of the United States.

During a campaign speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in May 2007, Edwards called the War on Terrorism a slogan that was created for political reasons and that it wasn’t a plan to make the United States safe. He went further to compare it to a bumper sticker and that it had damaged the US’s alliances and standing in the world.), … enter here the names of every politically outspoken person, whistle blower or witness who died unexpectedly of a heart attack or who quickly died of an incurable cancer.

Time for a New Theory of Money

By understanding that money is simply credit, we unleash it as a powerful tool for our communities

By Ellen Brown

The reason our financial system has routinely gotten into trouble, with periodic waves of depression like the one we’re battling now, may be due to a flawed perception not just of the roles of banking and credit but of the nature of money itself. In our economic adolescence, we have regarded money as a “thing”—something independent of the relationship it facilitates. But today there is no gold or silver backing our money. Instead, it’s created by banks when they make loans (that includes Federal Reserve Notes or dollar bills, which are created by the Federal Reserve, a privately-owned banking corporation, and lent into the economy). Virtually all money today originates as credit, or debt, which is simply a legal agreement to pay in the future.

Money as Relationship
In an illuminating dissertation called “Toward a General Theory of Credit and Money” in The Review of Austrian Economics (vol. 14:4, pages 267-317, 2001), Mostafa Moini, Professor of Economics at Oklahoma City University, argues that money has never actually been a “commodity” or “thing.” It has always been merely a “relation,” a legal agreement, a credit/debit arrangement, an acknowledgment of a debt owed and a promise to repay.

The concept of money-as-a-commodity can be traced back to the use of precious metal coins. Gold is widely claimed to be the oldest and most stable currency known, but this is not actually true. Money did not begin with gold coins and evolve into a sophisticated accounting system. It began as an accounting system and evolved into the use of precious metal coins. Money as a “unit of account” (a tally of sums paid and owed) predated money as a “store of value” (a “commodity” or “thing”) by two millennia; the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations using these accounting-entry payment systems lasted not just hundreds of years (as with some civilizations using gold) but thousands of years. Their bank-like ancient payment systems were public systems—operated by the government the way that courts, libraries and post offices are operated as public services today. 

In the payment system of ancient Sumeria, goods were given a value in terms of weight and were measured in these units against each other. The unit of weight was the “shekel,” something that was not originally a coin but a standardized measure. She was the word for barley, suggesting the original unit of measure was a weight of grain. This was valued against other commodities by weight: So many shekels of wheat equaled so many cows equaled so many shekels of silver, etc. Prices of major commodities were fixed by the government; Hammurabi, Babylonian king and lawmaker, has detailed tables of these. Interest was also fixed and invariable, making economic life very predictable. 

 Grain was stored in granaries, which served as a form of “bank.” But grain was perishable, so silver eventually became the standard tally representing sums owed. A farmer could go to market and exchange his perishable goods for a weight of silver, and come back at his leisure to redeem this market credit in other goods as needed. But it was still simply a tally of a debt owed and a right to make good on it later. Eventually, silver tallies became wooden tallies became paper tallies became electronic tallies.

The Credit Revolution
The problem with gold coins was that they could not expand to meet the needs of trade. The revolutionary advance of medieval bankers was that they succeeded in creating a flexible money supply, one that could keep pace with a vigorously expanding mercantile trade. They did this through the use of credit, something they created by allowing overdrafts in the accounts of their depositors. Under what came to be called “fractional reserve” banking, the bankers would issue paper receipts called banknotes for more gold than they actually had. 

Their shipping clients would sail away with their wares and return with silver or gold, settling accounts and allowing the bankers’ books to balance. The credit thus created was in high demand in the rapidly expanding economy; but because it was based on the presumption that money was a “thing” (gold), the bankers had to engage in a shell game that periodically got them into trouble. They were gambling that their customers would not all come for their gold at the same time; but when they miscalculated, or when people got suspicious for some reason, there would be a run on the banks, the financial system would collapse, and the economy would sink into depression.

Today, paper money is no longer redeemable in gold, but money is still perceived as a “thing” that has to “be there” before credit can be advanced. Banks still engage in money creation by advancing bank credit, which becomes a deposit in the borrower’s account, which becomes checkbook money. In order for their outgoing checks to clear, however, the banks have to borrow from a pool of money deposited by their customers. If they don’t have enough deposits, they have to borrow from the money market or other banks.
As British author Ann Pettifor observes:

[T]he banking system . . . has failed in its primary purpose: to act as a machine for lending into the real economy. Instead the banking system has been turned on its head, and become a borrowing machine. 

The banks suck up cheap money and return it as more expensive money, if they return it at all. The banks control the money spigots and can deny credit to small players, who wind up defaulting on their loans, allowing the big players with access to cheap credit to buy up the underlying assets very cheaply. 

That’s one systemic flaw in the current scheme. Another is that the borrowed money backing the bank’s loans usually comes from shorter-term loans. Like Jimmy Stewart’s beleaguered savings and loan in It’s a Wonderful Life, the banks are “borrowing short to lend long,” and if the money market suddenly dries up, the banks will be in trouble. That is what happened in September 2008: According to Rep. Paul Kanjorski, speaking on C-Span in February 2009, there was a $550 billion run on the money markets.

Securitization: “Monetizing” Loans Not with Gold But with Homes
The money markets are part of the “shadow banking system” where large institutional investors park their funds. The shadow banking system allows banks to get around the capital and reserve requirements now imposed on depository institutions by moving loans off their books. Large institutional investors use the shadow banking system because the conventional banking system guarantees deposits only up to $250,000, and large institutional investors have much more than that to move around on a daily basis. The money market is very liquid, and what protects it in place of FDIC insurance is that it is “securitized,” or backed by securities of some sort. Often, the collateral consists of mortgage-backed securities (MBS), the securitized units into which American real estate has been sliced and packaged, sausage-fashion. 

Like with the gold that was lent many times over in the 17th century, the same home may be pledged as “security” for several different investor groups at the same time. This is all done behind an electronic curtain called MERS (an acronym for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc.), which has allowed houses to be shuffled around among multiple, rapidly changing owners while circumventing local recording laws. 

As in the 17th century, however, the scheme has run into trouble when more than one investor group has tried to foreclose at the same time. And the securitization model has now crashed against the hard rock of hundreds of years of state real estate law, which has certain requirements that the banks have not met—and cannot meet, if they are to comply with the tax laws for mortgage-backed securities. (For more on this, see here.) 

The bankers have engaged in what amounts to a massive fraud, not necessarily because they started out with criminal intent (although that cannot be ruled out), but because they have been required to in order to come up with the commodities (in this case real estate) to back their loans. It is the way our system is set up: The banks are not really creating credit and advancing it to us, counting on our future productivity to pay it off, the way they once did under the deceptive but functional façade of fractional reserve lending. Instead, they are vacuuming up our money and lending it back to us at higher rates. In the shadow banking system, they are sucking up our real estate and lending it back to our pension funds and mutual funds at compound interest. The result is a mathematically impossible pyramid scheme, which is inherently prone to systemic failure.

The Public Credit Solution
The flaws in the current scheme are now being exposed in the major media, and it may well be coming down. The question then is what to replace it with. What is the next logical phase in our economic evolution? 

Credit needs to come first. We as a community can create our own credit, without having to engage in the sort of impossible pyramid scheme in which we’re always borrowing from Peter to pay Paul at compound interest. We can avoid the pitfalls of privately-issued credit with a public credit system, a system banking on the future productivity of its members, guaranteed not by “things” shuffled around furtively in a shell game vulnerable to exposure, but by the community itself.

The simplest public credit model is the electronic community currency system. Consider, for example, one called “Friendly Favors.” The participating Internet community does not have to begin with a fund of capital or reserves, as is now required of private banking institutions. Nor do members borrow from a pool of pre-existing money on which they pay interest to the pool’s owners. They create their own credit, simply by debiting their own accounts and crediting someone else’s. If Jane bakes cookies for Sue, Sue credits Jane’s account with 5 “Favors” and debits her own with 5. They have “created” money in the same way that banks do, but the result is not inflationary.  Jane’s plus-5 is balanced against Sue’s minus-5, and when Sue pays her debt by doing something for someone else, it all nets out. It is a zero-sum game. 

Community currency systems can be very functional on a small scale, but because they do not trade in the national currency, they tend to be too limited for large-scale businesses and projects. If they were to grow substantially larger, they could run up against the sort of exchange rate problems afflicting small countries. They are basically barter systems, not really designed for advancing credit on a major scale. 

The functional equivalent of a community currency system can be achieved using the national currency, by forming a publicly owned bank. By turning banking into a public utility operated for the benefit of the community, the virtues of the expandable credit system of the medieval bankers can be retained, while avoiding the parasitic exploitation to which private banking schemes are prone. Profits generated by the community can be returned to the community. 

A public bank that generates credit in the national currency could be established by a community or group of any size, but as long as we have capital and reserve requirements and other stringent banking laws, a state is the most feasible option. It can easily meet those requirements without jeopardizing the solvency of its collective owners. 

For capital, a state bank could use some of the money stashed in a variety of public funds. This money need not be spent. It can just be shifted from the Wall Street investments where it is parked now into the state’s own bank. There is precedent establishing that a state-owned bank can be both a very sound and a very lucrative investment. The Bank of North Dakota, currently the nation’s only state-owned bank, is rated AA and recently returned a 26 percent profit to the state. A decentralized movement has been growing in the United States to explore and implement this option. [For more information, see www.public-banking.com.]

We have emerged from the financial crisis with new clarity: Money today is simply credit. When the credit is advanced by a bank, when the bank is owned by the community, and when the profits return to the community, the result can be a functional, efficient, and sustainable system of finance. 

Ellen Brown wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Ellen is an attorney and the author of eleven books. In Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System and How We Can Break Free, she shows how the Federal Reserve and “the money trust” have usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her websites are webofdebt.com, ellenbrown.com, and public-banking.com.