In These New Times

A new paradigm for a post-imperial world

Author Archive

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

The ‘false’ pandemic: Drug firms cashed in on scare over swine flu, claims Euro health chief

Posted by seumasach on January 12, 2010

Daily Mail

11th January, 2010

The swine flu outbreak was a ‘false pandemic’ driven by drug companies that stood to make billions of pounds from a worldwide scare, a leading health expert has claimed.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Ecological and Public Health Crisis, WHO corruption | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Hatoyama to Nanjing, Hu to Hiroshima?

Posted by seumasach on January 11, 2010

Kosuke Takahashi

Asia Times

12th January, 2010

With the world economy’s center of gravity shifting from the West to the East, led by China’s rising economic and corresponding political power, the year 2010 may witness a series of epoch-making events in Asia.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Multipolar world | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

In time of crisis, barter works and may have saved Russia in 1998

Posted by seumasach on January 11, 2010

Richard C.Cook

richardccook.com

After the collapse of the Soviet Union caused it to split up into its components, the newly-established nations each faced an economic crisis. In Russia the crisis lasted for a decade. Inflation had destroyed the currency. There was no banking sector to speak of. And the central government had failed to monetize the nation’s potential production through a functioning monetary system.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

The Wealth of Nations 2010

Posted by seumasach on January 10, 2010

Dr. Mahathir Mohamad
rense.com
9th January, 2010
1. Adam Smith (http://www.humanities.mq.edu.au/Ockham/y6402.html )wrote about the above title a long time ago (1757). He talked about invisible hands which were instrumental in growing the wealth of nations.
2. In the latest financial crisis in the United States the invisible hands certainly played a big role. It took the form of abuses of the banking, monetary and financial system.
3. Pushed out of the international market place by the cheaper and better manufactured goods of the East Asian countries the West turned towards the financial system in order to enrich themselves. The opportunities for abuses were abundant.
4. They discovered that banks could create money out of thin air; without Government control (free market) any amount of loans of non-existent money could be given by the banks; the sale of commodities need not involve the commodities at all. It is the same with selling shares and currencies; having physical possession is not necessary. Sell and buy imaginary shares and make tons of profit.
5. Their fertile brain soon gave birth to hedge funds, short selling, leveraged purchases, junk bonds, currency trade, free markets etc etc.
6. All these systems promised great wealth to speculators and manipulators without the need to produce or possess anything. Better still they need not employ substantial number of workers who may make demands and threaten business with industrial action.
7. A good example is the trade in commodities. Without possession of the physical commodity, a speculator may sell huge quantities of it. The effect of this dumping is to depress the price of the commodity. When the price reached a low level the sellers would buy the commodity to deliver to the buyers that they had sold to earlier at a higher price. Thus without ever touching or seeing, much less possessing the commodity, the manipulators would make handsome profits. They call this short selling and the public is persuaded that this is fair trade.
8. Individuals cannot do this. The amount of money involved is too big. So funds were set up and managed by smart people.
9. The fate of the real producers is not the concern of these fund managers. As the price of the commodity become depressed the producer countries and their people would suffer.
10. If the producer country bought the non-existent commodity from the speculators at the low prices for future delivery, and if at the delivery date the speculators could not deliver the commodity, they would be forced to buy the physical commodity at prices higher than they had sold. They would lose money. This is as it should be. But no. Their market controllers would save them by declaring that they need not honour their contracts.
11. This was what happened when tin prices were depressed through the short selling of non-existent tin by the speculators. In desperation Malaysia bought the tin knowing that the sellers had no physical tin, whereas Malaysia had. When the delivery date arrived the sellers would be forced to buy physical tin from Malaysia at Malaysian prices in order to deliver. The price of the physical (real) tin would of course be higher. The sellers would lose money having to purchase at the higher prices in order to deliver to the buyers (Malaysia) at the lower prices.
12. When the short sellers faced this threat of losing a lot of money from their short selling price depressing activities, the London Metal Exchange which controlled the market ruled that the sellers need not honour their contract to deliver physical tin, allegedly because the purchasers were trying to corner the market.
13. Clearly the players in the financial market are protected. They can make tons of money selling non-existent commodities but they need not deliver if they have no physical commodities.
14. And so the financial market expanded until it became much bigger than the real market. The trade in currencies for example is twenty times bigger than total world trade. Hedge funds, through mysterious investments pay as much as 30% to their investors. Pyramid schemes gave huge returns and banks calculate their earnings on the amount of money they lent out, whether the borrowers were able to pay or not.
15. There were numerous schemes which gave huge profits to the investors, far more than investments in the production of goods and services.
16. With these financial schemes the wealth of these developed countries and their rich investors appeared to grow at a high rate every year and the people appeared to have the capacity to buy unlimited amounts of imported goods. These countries were apparently the locomotives of growth for the whole world.
17. Then the balloons bursts.
18. The wealth of the West, acquired through the financial market is not real wealth. Their Per Capita and GDP figure are not based on reality. Their money also has a bloated value, guaranteed by no reserves or gold. (Their money is truly fiat money).
19. Their Governments were forced to bail out their banks and companies with trillions of dollars. It can be said that their Presidents and Prime Ministers are all responsible for the trillions of dollars lost by their countries.
20. I am waiting for a good unemployed journalist to investigate and write a book on these leaders who presided over the trillion-dollar losses by their countries

Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Was the attempt to blow up Detroit bound plane a false flag? Part 3 (Final)

Posted by seumasach on January 10, 2010

NW_Flt_copy_copyUS, January 7, 2010 (Pal Telegraph) – The dust has now settled but the mass hysteria continues as the US and the UK pull in their best media experts to blind us with political spin. It is time to reflect on this so called failed attempt to blow up Northwest/Delta Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

Orange sunset as Ukraine poll heralds turn to Russia

Posted by seumasach on January 10, 2010

Guardian

10th January, 2010

Five years ago, Ukraine‘s Orange Revolution was hailed as a new start for a country that had begun to look west towards the European Union and Nato. But as voters prepare to go to the polls next Sunday in the first presidential election since they cast out the country’s Soviet-era leadership, Europe’s most famous colour-coded reform movement seems to have run out of steam.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Multipolar world | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

The airplane bomb plot: Obama continues the cover-up

Posted by seumasach on January 8, 2010

Patrick Martin

WSWS

8th January, 2010

The statement made by President Barack Obama Thursday about the Christmas Day attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit is a continuation of a government-wide cover-up, aided and abetted by the media, of the actions of US intelligence and security agencies in the period leading up to the failed terrorist attack.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , | 1 Comment »

The US and China: One Side is Losing, the Other is Winning

Posted by seumasach on January 8, 2010

James Petras

Voltairenet

3rd January, 2010

Asian capitalism, notably China and South Korea are competing with the US for global power. Asian global power is driven by dynamic economic growth, while the US pursues a strategy of military-driven empire building, illustrating the great divide in the world today. Expanding on an article recently published in the Financial Times, James Petras highlights the stark contrast between these two strategic visions, a woefully misguided one in the case of the US.

One Day’s Read of the Financial Times

Even a cursory read of a single issue of the Financial Times(December 28, 2009) illustrates the divergent strategies toward empire building. On page one, the lead article on the US is on its expanding military conflicts and its ‘war on terror’, entitled Obama Demands Review of Terror List. In contrast, there are two page-one articles on China, which describe China’s launching of the world’s fastest long-distance passenger train service and China’s decision to maintain its currency pegged to the US dollar as a mechanism to promote its robust export sector. While Obama turns the US focus on a fourth battle front (Yemen) in the ‘war on terror’ (after Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan), the Financial Timesreports on the same page that a South Korean consortium has won a $20.4 billion dollar contract to develop civilian nuclear power plants for the United Arab Emirates, beating its US and European competitors.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Drive to Global War | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

Another Iranian Revolution? Not Likely

Posted by seumasach on January 8, 2010

Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

AlethoNews

5th January, 2010

THE Islamic Republic of Iran is not about to implode. Nevertheless, the misguided idea that it may do so is becoming enshrined as conventional wisdom in Washington.

For President Obama, this misconception provides a bit of cover; it helps obscure his failure to follow up on his campaign promises about engaging Iran with any serious, strategically grounded proposals. Meanwhile, those who have never supported diplomatic engagement with Iran are now pushing the idea that the Tehran government might collapse to support their arguments for military strikes against Iranian nuclear targets and adopting “regime change” as the ultimate goal of America’s Iran policy.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Iran | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Karzai: I don’t need foreign forces in Afghanistan

Posted by seumasach on January 8, 2010

“The president’s remarks come after thousands of Afghan people took to the streets to protest the rising civilian death toll by the US-led forces in the country.

Afghans have held several anti-occupation demonstrations in different cities in the past month to show their anger towards the issue. Protesters in Kabul and several other major cities have burned effigies of US President Barack Obama”

PressTV

8th January, 2010

Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai says he does not need anymore ‘the favor’ of the US-led foreign forces in his war-weary country.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Obama’s Yemeni odyssey targets China

Posted by seumasach on January 8, 2010

“Besides, history has no instances of a declining world power meekly accepting its destiny and walking into the sunset. The US cannot give up on its global dominance without putting up a real fight. And the reality of all such momentous struggles is that they cannot be fought piece-meal. You cannot fight China without occupying Yemen”

M. K. Bhadrakumar

Asia Times

8th January, 2010

A year ago, Yemeni President Ali Abdallah Saleh made the startling revelation that his country’s security forces apprehended a group of Islamists linked to the Israeli intelligence forces. “A terrorist cell was apprehended and will be referred to the courts for its links with the Israeli intelligence services,” he promised.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »