TOKYO MASTER BANNER

MINISTRY OF TOKYO
US-ANGLO CAPITALISMEU-NATO IMPERIALISM
Illegitimate Transfer of Inalienable European Rights via Convention(s) & Supranational Bodies
Establishment of Sovereignty-Usurping Supranational Body Dictatorships
Enduring Program of DEMOGRAPHICS WAR on Europeans
Enduring Program of PSYCHOLOGICAL WAR on Europeans
Enduring Program of European Displacement, Dismemberment, Dispossession, & Dissolution
No wars or conditions abroad (& no domestic or global economic pretexts) justify government policy facilitating the invasion of ancestral European homelands, the rape of European women, the destruction of European societies, & the genocide of Europeans.
U.S. RULING OLIGARCHY WAGES HYBRID WAR TO SALVAGE HEGEMONY
[LINK | Article]

*U.S. OLIGARCHY WAGES HYBRID WAR* | U.S. Empire's Casino Unsustainable | Destabilised U.S. Monetary & Financial System | U.S. Defaults Twice A Year | Causes for Global Financial Crisis of 2008 Remain | Financial Pyramids Composed of Derivatives & National Debt Are Growing | *U.S. OLIGARCHY WAGES HYBRID WAR* | U.S. Empire's Casino Unsustainable | Destabilised U.S. Monetary & Financial System | U.S. Defaults Twice A Year | Causes for Global Financial Crisis of 2008 Remain | Financial Pyramids Composed of Derivatives & National Debt Are Growing | *U.S. OLIGARCHY WAGES HYBRID WAR*

Who's preaching world democracy, democracy, democracy? —Who wants to make free people free?
[info from Craig Murray video appearance, follows]  US-Anglo Alliance DELIBERATELY STOKING ANTI-RUSSIAN FEELING & RAMPING UP TENSION BETWEEN EASTERN EUROPE & RUSSIA.  British military/government feeding media PROPAGANDA.  Media choosing to PUBLISH government PROPAGANDA.  US naval aggression against Russia:  Baltic Sea — US naval aggression against China:  South China Sea.  Continued NATO pressure on Russia:  US missile systems moving into Eastern Europe.     [info from John Pilger interview follows]  War Hawk:  Hillary Clinton — embodiment of seamless aggressive American imperialist post-WWII system.  USA in frenzy of preparation for a conflict.  Greatest US-led build-up of forces since WWII gathered in Eastern Europe and in Baltic states.  US expansion & military preparation HAS NOT BEEN REPORTED IN THE WEST.  Since US paid for & controlled US coup, UKRAINE has become an American preserve and CIA Theme Park, on Russia's borderland, through which Germans invaded in the 1940s, costing 27 million Russian lives.  Imagine equivalent occurring on US borders in Canada or Mexico.  US military preparations against RUSSIA and against CHINA have NOT been reported by MEDIA.  US has sent guided missile ships to diputed zone in South China Sea.  DANGER OF US PRE-EMPTIVE NUCLEAR STRIKES.  China is on HIGH NUCLEAR ALERT.  US spy plane intercepted by Chinese fighter jets.  Public is primed to accept so-called 'aggressive' moves by China, when these are in fact defensive moves:  US 400 major bases encircling China; Okinawa has 32 American military installations; Japan has 130 American military bases in all.  WARNING PENTAGON MILITARY THINKING DOMINATES WASHINGTON. ⟴  

February 28, 2015

American Media 6 / CIA & the Media (Bernstein)

AMERICAN MEDIA 6





6 Corporations
Control 90% of The Media In America >> 


[Image source: blacklistednews.com]



SEE ALSO

THE CIA AND THE MEDIA
How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up

Link:  Carl Bernstein








Radio Moscow



Found some really cool soviet pics I'd like to share.



Radio Moscow logo [source Wikipedia]




Radio Moscow stamp 1979
[source Postmaster USSR - Wikipedia]


I love how the light over the radio tower looks like an interrogation light overhead.  Well, it does if you have a vivid imagination.

Russia is all imagination to me. 




February 26, 2015

ASSANGE - Supreme Court Appeal, Sweden - Feb 2015


















Now: Supreme Court Appeal Swe 
Next: European Court of Human Rights [should appeal fail]

ASSANGE is not a threat to the United States; he is a threat to corrupt authority.
This is the only threat within WikiLeaks.  [Hrafnsson]

...........................................................................................................
While this might sound pessimistic, I think it's realistic to expect the appeal to be denied, going by Sweden's appalling role in keeping Assange on hold for the Americans for over 4 years now.  Nonetheless:   good luck with the appeal.




CLOUD COMPUTING & SURVELLANCE: Caspar Bowden - European Parliament - Oct 2012 (Video)
















Caspar Bowden forsees PRISM in October 2012

Secret access by foreign govts
in context of cloud computing:
Cloud providers are transnational companies ...
[Caspar Bowden 2012]

subject to conflicts of international public law.
Biggest threat not from Patriot Act
but from a law still largely unknown.

... the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendment Act 2008
Cloud computing a grave threat
to sovereignty of European data

None of the regulatory proposals so far [2012]
appreciated the gravity of the situation.

Details of FISA unknown to Commission or data protection authorities until 2011.

... without any of the safeguards applicable to US citizens (in direct contradiction to what public told in EU Parliament).

FISAAA passed 2008 to legalise surveillance which US govt began circa 9/11, which became known as 'warrantless wiretapping'.

Mass surveillance of interl communications using super computers to trawl through data has been practised for a long time.

The system known as Echelon was itself investigated by the European Parliament in 2000.

Question that led to warrantless wiretapping scandal was: *had Americans had been caught up in intl surveillance systems?*

Note: 'warrantless wiretapping' (ie mass US surveillance) scandal = issue in 2012, prior to Snowden expose (May 2013)

Recommended: Find speech of William Binney, one of whilsteblowers @ NY conference in June & consider yourself implications.

William Binney: a crypto-mathematician & NSA senior official nearly 40 years
LINK:
Interview: June 14, 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErRQeQd39zw

William Binney was NSA engineer who built a vast data mining system for NSA, designed for mass surveillance, foreign & intl.

European policy makers have not understood that they were intended the targets of the surveillance system that Binney built.

Under Euro Convention of Human Rights & EU fundamental rights = illegal to discriminate protection according to nationality.

Everyone in the jurisdiction of Europe has an equal right to have their privacy protected from unjustified surveillance.

FISAAA only protects US persons. Europe
= legitimate purpose of covert surveillance
is LIMITED to combating serious crime & national or economic security.

Europe: one member state cannot lawfully spy on another member's citizens merely for some foreign policy objective/advantage.

FISAAA expressly authorises surveillance of info with respect to foreign-based political organisation (or territory) ...

[FISAAA authority] ... that relates to the affairs of the United States. [Pretty much covers everywhere - blanket authority]

FISAAA vastly broader definition than anything that is lawful under ECHR, so foreigners' data in the cloud could be scanned

ie. Given broad FISAAA authority 2008, foreign data in the cloud could be scanned by USA for purely political surveillance.

Any data that was moved to cloud that was previously processed on EU org premises has been vulnerable.

A.29 working party issued opinion on cloud computing Far from waking up to risks of mass surveillance, they endorse mechanisms

A.29 endorse mech's devised decade ago eg. outsourcing direct marketing & call centres as suitable 4 cloud computing COLOSSAL RISK

A.29 warning prohibit direct disclosures by cloud providers to non-EU govts, unless this falls within established international agreements

However, A.29 believes the real risk comes from Patriot Act & case by case demands for data. No appreciation of risk ..

A.29 no appreciation of risk of continuous & systematic mass surveillance of cloud data.

Software fabric of US cloud providers is maintained from ops centres in US, so mass surveillance possible through remote control

[Cloud providers: ops centres in US] so, USG can secretly order companies to comply to demand for access to Euro cloud data.

Any data put into clouds can be accessed directly & secretly by USA, to bypass agreements covering law enforcement sector

US can bypass:
eg
PNR & Swift Agreements etc.
A.29 fully envisage & *permit* secret disclosures of data / loopholes have already been built in.

Encrypt. data to & from cloud irrelevant b/c FISAAA lets data extraction from inside data centre after data decrypted for processing

No way EU data protect. authority can know if cloud is wiretapped, if software powering cloud controlled out EU jurisdiction

Mass surveillance of cloud would be done in software using power of cloud itself to scan & filter data for further analysis

Huge new data centres belonging to NSA are being built for this purpose.

No commercial audit process can possibly uncover secret use of national security laws of another country.

Until problem is fixed by revising US legislation or treaty, only prudent policy is a) physically confining cloud facilities ...

.. under exclusive EU jurisdiction. b) using open-source software b/c backdoor insertion risk in closed-source software.

FISAAA can order backdoor insertion into closed-source software.

Closing legal loopholes for cloud surveillance is not enough, however.

Not credible that national data protection authorities can mount effective enforcement actions v. coys size of Microsoft or Google

$1-billion fine on Microsoft for competition offences took the EU nearly 10 yrs, while Microsoft derived profits in excess.

Coys can afford to lawyer up to tie cases in knots. Same thing will happen w. fines under regulations & 2% = small cost of business.

ie. 2% = small cost of doing business to access the 5-million consumers of the EU

Need: dedicated & centrally operating prosecution authority for major cases of transnational data protection enforcement.

Also need: capacity to fight long legal battles with adequate professional resources.  New Board & independence of Comm. influence.

Only in this way can enforcement become sufficiently credible to alter corporate behaviour.

Deterrent to US companies ignoring EU protection law = very substantial rewards to be offered to corporate whistleblowers

Need: corporate whitleblower rewards of sufficient size to overcome US secrecy laws & cast-iron legal protection, as well.

Such methods have been effective against tax evasion & competition cases; why not data protection?

It is not too late to wake up from the long sleepwalk towards an irreversible loss of data sovereignty.

Unless 3rd countries prepared to offer Europeans the same protections they offer own citizens, the clouds will have to part.

COMMENT

Found this very interesting and have transcribed a rough take of what was presented before the EU Parliament by Caspar Bowden, in 2012.

The current status of the proposals is unknown to me.

What was also conveyed is that:
European law prohibits state surveillance of the ordinary, lawful, democratic, political activities of individuals or groups.
Somebody ought to let the British police and authorities know about this, as they're forever conducting aggressive spying and infiltration campaigns against political activists and protesters (Oh, and mass surveillance of ordinary citizens).



Totalitarian Britain, CIA Lawsuit, Sacred Cows & Incongruous Libertarian Package




UK Police State

Unbelievable harassment of politically active university students by the police state in Britain:

Monitoring of protest groups “raw, unvarnished intimidation and activist-busting." 

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/feb/25/police-covert-recruit-activists-spies-cambridge?CMP=share_btn_tw
.........................................................
VIDEO

UK Police try to recruit activist to spy on Cambridge students & political groups
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_hGQETyhXk
.........................................................

CIA IS SUED

CIA sued by “non-official cover” operative 
“Madhouse: A Forbidden Novel of the CIA" 
http://triblive.com/usworld/nation/7805012-74/cia-lawsuit-officer
.........................................................
SACRED COWS & INCONGRUOUS LIB PACKAGE

Snowden praised for fighting government surveillance… by group that LOVES corporate surveillance

By Mark Ames 
Last Friday, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden Skyped into a Washington DC Marriott Hotel conference hall to proudly accept “The Students For Liberty Alumnus of the Year Award.”
 http://pando.com/2015/02/20/strange-bedfellows/

The Gist
NSA whistleblower, Snowden, accepts Students for Libery award.

Peter Thiel, founder of one of NSA’s biggest contractors,
Palantir Technologies Gets Students For Liberty award 

"Snowden’s nemesis, former NSA chief Keith Alexander, praised Palantir’s usefulness to the spy agency" 
Greenwald has characterized Pando’s criticism of him as
CIA plot hatched by Thiel 
Thiel Founders Fund $300k in Pando previously

Students for Liberty is anything but that:
awarded “Event of the Year” to anti-Marxist 'libs' at Honduras’ National University

Hey, Students of Liberty:
Leftists & journalists in Honduras
terrorized since 2009 US-backed coup!!!!!!
 
Snowden 
“If the government will not be stewards of our rights, we can encode our rights into our system.”  
Source:  http://pando.com/2015/02/20/strange-bedfellows/
Students For Liberty 
  • gets most of its money from Koch brothers
  • worked closely with US govt
  • big corporate sponsors
Students For Liberty’s Board Advisors
incl Prince von Liechtenstein
offshore banking tax haven
of global billionaires / Switzerland too transparent

Students For Liberty
f. 2008 Alexander McCobin
(emp @ Cato Institution, neé “The Charles Koch Foundation”)
💥 Koch Alarm 💥

Students for Liberty
Ron Paul + Andrew Napolitano, Cato Institution / FoxNews truther
Ron Paul presidential campaign 2012
Thiel funded /Snowden & Greenwald support

Sen. Rand Paul
Presidential campaign 2016
funded by Thiel’s co-founder at Palantir:
Joe Lonsdale (Rand Paul’s finance team)

2011
Palantir sponsored
Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Awards
winners incl:
  • >Glenn Greenwald
  • >Laura Poitras
  • >Tor Project
  • >EFF co-founder Mitch Kapor
  • >EFF Fellow Cory Doctorow

Palantir & Peter Thiel  
bravely fighting type of govt surveillance ably assisted by … Palantir & Peter Thiel  
[LOL ... Pando]
.........................................................
COMMENT


Above are some of the things that caught my attention.

The police attack on what is supposed to be a democratic right in Britain is disgraceful and, really, quite frightening and totalitarian, if you stop to think about what's going on.  And this is just the tip of an iceberg in Britain.

More press on the CIA lawsuit would be good:
The officer filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia under a pseudonym, Mack L. Charles. The CIA declined to comment but did not dispute the plaintiff's former association with the agency. [1]
CIA stands accused of illegally barring publishing of a novel (which isn't a first, as I recall).

Finally, there's the hilarious Pando article (I love those guys).  No idea if they're really the 'bad' guys, if they're just funny bastards poking at some sacred cows, or if there is indeed something very odd about the convergence of these incongruous relationships.
Trying to keep an open mind, but Koch, Thiel (NSA praise), Students for Liberty and the rest of it is a package way hard to swallow.

Koch is 'cook' in German, by the way.

Hmmmm ...




February 25, 2015

UKRAINE Puppet State 'Ministry of Truth': Calling On Warrior-Trolls




Facebook frontline: Kiev calls up 'online army' amid information war
Published time: February 25, 2015 04:40


A day after Ukraine announced it is joining the information war by creating an 'online army,' the Information Policy Ministry entered into its first controversy. It has reportedly called on bloggers to create accounts to spread information useful to Kiev.

The ministry has begun accepting applications from people wanting to join the online army. Once users are registered, they reportedly receive instructions on how to proceed.

One of the users published the first set of instructions he allegedly received from the “internet army headquarters.”

The task outline is to create as many fake accounts on social media as possible without raising suspicion. The instructions explain that it is preferable to set up a new email account that uses a Western server. It also advises to set up new Twitter, Facebook, and VKontakte accounts (the Russian equivalent of Facebook).

The instructions also detail that users must use real names, be careful not to add too many friends (in order to seem legitimate), and select their geographic location to be in eastern Ukraine or Crimea.

In order for the account to seem more authentic, users are encouraged to write a few personal posts and comment on non-political issues.

However, another instruction was distributed to bloggers on the same day. It gave the same blueprint for creating a fake account in Crimea or Donbass, but claimed that is the way “information agents of Kremlin work.”

The fact that two versions of the text were being passed around received some negative comments on the Facebook page where in the information was published.

Vesti, a Ukrainian media source, reported that blogger Aleksander Baraboshko – who is an aide to Ukrainian Information Policy Minister Yury Stets – said the version regarding “information agents of the Kremlin” is the correct one, while the other version may have been sent out to some users due to a computer glitch.  [Wow, in attacking Russians, they're constantly showing themselves up as obviously manipulative and rather vulgar.]

Ukraine’s Information Policy Ministry was created in late 2014 to pursue information security in the country. Journalists dubbed the new institution the ‘Ministry of Truth after the propaganda ministry in George Orwell's novel '1984.'

In early December, the ministry announced the creation of an information warfare department.

“You don’t need trolls and bots to deliver truthful information to those communicating on the internet. It is obvious for social network veterans,” Tass news agency quoted Ukraine’s information policy minister, Yury Stets, as saying back in January. “To do so we need to unite people influential in social media and they will tell the truth to everyone who reads them.” [Ukraine's top trolls & bots are MFA:  Lithuania, Latvia, Sweden, as well as NATO & US Embassy UKR (Pyatt)].

These tactics follow Stets’ official announcement on Sunday, which revealed plans to create a national TV channel called ‘Ukrainian Tomorrow,’ which would broadcast to an international audience. [How about 'Ukraine Pillaged'?]

Ukraine is taking the information war very seriously. On Saturday, Kiev said it is stripping more than 100 Russian media outlets of their accreditation. The list includes TASS, Rossiya Segodnya, and all Russian TV channels except Dozhd, according to government spokesperson Yelena Gitlyanskaya. The outlets will reportedly be without accreditation until the end of the Ukraine conflict.

Russia has criticized Kiev’s decision. “The openly discriminatory decision by Ukraine's parliament to strip Russian mass media of accreditation at the bodies of state power is an extension of the policy to clear the country's media space of alternative points of view,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in a statement on Saturday.  [Lavrov's really cool.  Seems really savvy & laid back.]

The decision comes as a “backdrop to the latest resolutions (the Minsk peace agreement) by the Normandy Quartet's leaders” and “calls into question Kiev's interest in a peace settlement,” Lavrov added.

Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov told TASS on Saturday that Moscow will not respond to Kiev’s actions by limiting the work of Ukrainian media. “Russia is a country where media activity is regulated by law, and where Russian and foreign journalists have equal rights to obtain information,” he said.  [The Russian govt is actually a real govt that knows how to conduct itself with dignity, unlike the clowns on a string in Ukraine.]

SOURCE: http://on.rt.com/vjbnul

COMMENT

Saw an article about this elsewhere yesterday, but I dismissed the call for social media trolls as the effort of some desperate 'lone wolf' of the Ukraine troll world, as the site I checked out was registered on a hidden identity basis.

Ukraine 'Ministry of Truth' can put lipstick on a pig all it likes, there's no hiding the truth from people:

s

 Source:  thicktoast.com


Read about United Arab Emirates & US weapons to Ukraine:
"Nothing says you want peace like shopping for weapons from the same country arming ISIS."






February 18, 2015

Events Leading to WWII List, Italian Colonialism in Africa & Current Events Libya


Gol (gol = river)
Noticed the list of events leading to WWII while I was reading about the Russians fighting off the Japanese invaders of Soviet Russian/Mongolian territory.

Came across the Khalkhin Gol battles while reading about Russia's Georgy Zhukov, who is said to have excelled at operational and strategic command (wikipedia). Was interested in him because I'd seen him in the WWII Germany footage.


Source: Wikipedia

Khalkhin Gol doesn't get a mention in the list, maybe because it was an undeclared war.  It would be part of Japan's expansionism attempts, which would have started with the invasion of Manchuria 1931 (above).  No, scratch that.  It looks like the Japanese were at it in 1918-22 when they invaded Siberia while Russia was in revolutionary turmoil (but maybe historians aren't counting Japanese expansionist attempts from there).  Scrap that as well.  The Japanese in Siberia scenario appears to have been spurred on by the West (British-US sending warships to Vladivostok) to counter the communist revolutionaries, and the Japanese wanted the action.  The 'international coalition' withdrew its forces but the amassed Japanese troops (and thousands of civilian settlers) moved inland and stayed on).  Looks the Japanese pulled out because (a) the Bolsheviks got the upper hand in Russia and (b) the occupation came at a high cost for Japan (over half the national budget for 2 years). 

The following were also players in the Khalkhin Gol battles:
Grigori Shtern (shot/executed after confessing under torture that he had been German spy).  Shtern was in charge of the front line & in command of Zhukov, if I understand correctly.

Yakov Smushkevich (in charge of aviation, shot/executed 1941)
Khorloogiin Choibalsan (Mongolian nationalist)


source:  wikipedia
Grigori Shtern (shot/executed 1941, left) and Georgy Zhukov (right).
Khorloogiin Choibalsan (centre).

Wikipedia on Smushkevich and Shtern indicates they were both executed and both subsequently 'rehabilitated' in the early 1950s, so I guess that means their honour was restored.

Smushkevich's daughter recalled the arrest in an interview with Moscow News, concluding that maybe Nazi intelligence services had the Soviet Russians convinced that 'faithful fighters are enemies' (here).

Finding the who's who hard to follow.  Problem with remembering the names.  Find it hard to keep the names straight.  Some of the histories are quite involved as well.  

The list of WWII lead-up events will keep me busy with look-ups, but I'll only be skimming the surface.  Even though it's only surface information, the embarrassing part is I'll probably not take a great deal of this in.  But something's better than nothing (and it's interesting information), so I'll keep checking things out.

Italian colonialism in Africa struck me as extremely brutal:
Italian Somaliland Colony 1889-1936
from 1936 > = Italian East Africa colony
ie Italian Somaliland + Italian Eritrea + Ethiopian Empire

No probs killing monks & nuns at monastery, plus 30,000 Ethiopians in 3 days.

[see wikipedia] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_East_Africa
Right now the Italians are agitating for military intervention in Libya, so the guess is Italian industrialists have investments there and their politicians are pushing for intervention to protect Italian corporate interests.  So it's like colonialism has never ended.
The push for intervention comes after an alleged ISIS execution of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians in Libya, which is quite a convenient event for the Western backed Tobruk government (yes, there's two Libya governments:  Tripoli (not recognised by West) and Tobruk), and convenient for those in the West that seek to intervene in the region.
Having a hard time believing this event is genuine (rather than staged).  On the other hand, maybe it is genuine.  I don't know.  It's just weird that it plays into the hands of those who seek Western military intervention.
The video is said to have come out of the Al Hayat Media Center (HMC), which is supposed to be Islamic State controlled.  
Back in June 2014, Daily Mail reported that IS were publishing an English language propaganda magazine via "AlHayat Media Center - the propaganda wing of ISIS".  

So maybe the Libya report is genuine. 







February 17, 2015

VIDEO Series - Berlin 1900 - 1945








Berlin 1900 (final scenes 1914)





SOURCE >> https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=C1IGNLg-RSU



........................................



Berlin 1900 / 1910
Video [12:10] Part 2 



SOURCE >> https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-dF1IjU0Njc



........................................





Berlin 1935-6 in Farbe / Colour 
Video [8:25]  German narration





SOURCE >> https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ywiHc6PCfWg



........................................





BERLIN - May 14, 1945 (HD)
Video [4:57]



SOURCE >> https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wP_PRwiRkmw



........................................





Mixed WWII footage, incl. Japanese surrender
VIDEO [5:37]



SOURCE >> https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=BPF7LkC_kkc






Amazing watching these videos, particularly the turn of the century (1900) video, which is first in the set.

History, heritage, the labour of generation upon generation, life -- what was ordinary life -- is captured.
It's captured not only on film, but also in the splendour of the streets; in beautiful parks; in cafes; by the seaside; in the shop signs; in shop windows; in architecture; in clothing; in hair arrangements; in rituals; and in a host of artefacts of progress and civilisation. 
The film footage captures ordinary life on cusp of great and devastating change, in the heart of Europe.
Watching this amazing and moving footage is also like watching a nightmare or a horror movie unfold, unable to call out in warning.

The footage is also mesmerising to watch because life 70-100 years ago seems surprisingly modern and much closer to our time than one would expect.  If you can see past the horses and the vintage vehicles, those streets seem so much like our streets today.  I can imagine myself there.

Another thing I find really mind-blowing is knowing all those people on film and in that era, as well as all those generations before them that built that amazing city (on the verge of being destroyed), have also lived there before us and have all died and disappeared for all time. 
Even though I know that life is finite, I am still amazed by how short life is, how eternal death is, and how small and unimportant we are.  Overall existence is just one long stream of indifferent life and indifferent death, or that's how it seems to me.




February 15, 2015

USA Controlled IMF - Screws the Entire World



Pillaging the World. The History and Politics of the IMF
By Ernst Wolff
Global Research, December 17, 2014


The following text is the forward to Ernst Wolff’s book entitled : Pillaging the World. The History and Politics of the IMF, © Tectum Verlag Marburg, 2014, ISBN 978-3-8288-3438-5, www.tectum-verlag.de. The book is available in English and German

No other financial organization has affected the lives of the majority of the world’s population more profoundly over the past fifty years than the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Since its inception after World War II, it has expanded its sphere of influence to the remotest corners of the earth. Its membership currently includes 188 countries on five continents.

For decades, the IMF has been active mainly in Africa, Asia and South America. There is hardly a country on these continents where its policies have not been carried out in close cooperation with the respective national governments. When the global financial crisis broke out in 2007, the IMF turned its attention to northern Europe. Since the onset of the Euro crisis in 2009, its primary focus has shifted to southern Europe.

Officially, the IMF’s main task consists in stabilizing the global financial system and helping out troubled countries in times of crisis. In reality, its operations are more reminiscent of warring armies. Wherever it intervenes, it undermines the sovereignty of states by forcing them to implement measures that are rejected by the majority of the population, thus leaving behind a broad trail of economic and social devastation.
Ernst Wolff

In pursuing its objectives, the IMF never resorts to the use of weapons or soldiers. It simply applies the mechanisms of capitalism, specifically those of credit. Its strategy is as simple as it is effective: When a country runs into financial difficulties, the IMF steps in and provides support in the form of loans. In return, it demands the enforcement of measures that serve to ensure the country’s solvency in order to enable it to repay these loans.

Because of its global status as “lender of last resort” governments usually have no choice but to accept the IMF’s offer and submit to its terms – thus getting caught in a web of debt, which they, as a result of interest, compound interest and principal, get deeper and deeper entangled in. The resulting strain on the state budget and the domestic economy inevitably leads to a deterioration of their financial situation, which the IMF in turn uses as a pretext for demanding ever new concessions in the form of “austerity programs”.

The consequences are disastrous for the ordinary people of the countries affected (which are mostly low-income) because their governments all follow the same pattern, passing the effects of austerity on to wage earners and the poor.

In this manner, IMF programs have cost millions of people their jobs, denied them access to adequate health care, functioning educational systems and decent housing. They have rendered their food unaffordable, increased homelessness, robbed old people of the fruits of life-long work, favored the spread of diseases, reduced life expectancy and increased infant mortality.

At the other end of the social scale, however, the policies of the IMF have helped a tiny layer of ultra-rich increase their vast fortunes even in times of crisis. Its measures have contributed decisively to the fact that global inequality has assumed historically unprecedented levels. The income difference between a sun king and a beggar at the end of the Middle Ages pales compared to the difference between a hedge fund manager and a social welfare recipient of today.

Although these facts are universally known and hundreds of thousands have protested the effects of its measures in past decades, often risking their lives, the IMF tenaciously clings on to its strategy. Despite all criticism and despite the strikingly detrimental consequences of its actions, it still enjoys the unconditional support of the governments of all leading industrial nations.

Why? How can it be that an organization that causes such immense human suffering around the globe continues to act with impunity and with the backing of the most powerful forces of our time? In whose interest does the IMF work? Who benefits from its actions?

It is the purpose of this book to answer these questions.

The Bretton Woods Conference:

Starting out with Blackmail

While the Second World War was still raging in Europe, in July 1944, the United States invited delegations from 44 countries to the small ski resort of Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. The official aim of the conference, held for three weeks in the luxurious “Mount Washington” hotel, was to define the basic features of an economic order for the post-war period and to provide the cornerstones of a system that would stabilize the world economy and prevent a return to the situation that had existed between the two world wars. The 1930s in particular were distinguished by high inflation, trade barriers, strongly fluctuating exchange rates, gold shortages and a decline in economic activity by more than 60 %. Furthermore, social tensions had constantly threatened to break down the established order.

The conference had been preceded by several years of secret negotiations between the White House and Downing Street which had already been working on plans for a new world monetary order since 1940. A recorded comment from the head of the British delegation, the economist Lord Keynes, sheds light on the former elite’s attitude towards the interests and concerns of smaller countries: “Twenty-one countries have been invited which clearly have nothing to contribute and will merely encumber the ground… The most monstrous monkey-house assembled for years.

It did not take long before their contemptuous attitude rebounded on Lord Keynes and his compatriots. During the course of the conference, it became increasingly clear how much the global balance of power had shifted to the disadvantage of Great Britain. Excessive war spending had turned the country, already severely weakened by the First World War, into the world’s biggest debtor and pushed it to the brink of insolvency. Great Britain’s economy was on its knees and the rise of the liberation movements around the world already heralded the final breakup of its once global colonial empire.

The undisputed victor of the Second World War, however, was the United States. Having become the largest international creditor, it held nearly two-thirds of the world’s gold reserves and commanded half of all global industrial production. In contrast to most European countries its infrastructure was intact and while its delegation engaged in negotiations at Bretton Woods, the US army’s general staff planned a nuclear assault on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to emphasize America’s claim to global dominion.

As a result of this new balance of power, Lord Keynes’ plan for a new economic order was flatly rejected. Representing a country with substantial balance of payments problems, he had proposed an “international payments union” that would have given countries suffering from a negative balance of payments easier access to loans and introduced an international accounting unit called “Bancor” which would have served as a reserve currency.

The US, however, was unwilling to take on the role of a major creditor that Keynes’ plan had foreseen for it. The leader of their delegation, economist Harry Dexter White, in turn presented his own plan that was finally adopted by the conference. This White Plan conceptualized a world currency system never before seen in the history of money. The US dollar was to constitute its sole center and was to be pegged to all other currencies at a fixed exchange rate while its exchange relation to gold was to be set at $ 35 per ounce of fine gold. The plan was supplemented by US demands for the establishment of several international organizations designed to monitor the new system and stabilize it by granting loans to countries facing balance of payments problems.

After all, Washington, due to its size and rapid economic growth, had to move ahead in order to obtain access to raw materials and create global sales opportunities for its overproduction. This required replacing the hitherto most widely used currency, the British pound, by the dollar. Also, time seemed ripe for replacing the City of London by Wall Street, thus establishing the US in its new position as the focal point of international trade and global finance.

The gold-dollar peg and the establishment of fixed exchange rates partially reintroduced the gold standard, which had existed between 1870 and the outbreak of World War I – albeit under very different circumstances. By fixing all exchange rates to the US dollar, Washington deprived all other participating countries of the right to control their own monetary policy for the protection of their domestic industries – a first step towards curtailing the sovereignty of the rest of the world by the now dominant United States.

The distribution of voting rights suggested by the US for the proposed organizations was also far from democratic. Member countries were not to be treated equally or assigned voting rights according to the size of their population, but rather corresponding to the contributions they paid – which meant that Washington, by means of its financial superiority, secured itself absolute control over all decisions. The fact that South Africa’s racist apartheid dictatorship was invited to become a founding member of the IMF sheds a revealing light on the role that humanitarian considerations played in the process.

The US government sensed that it would not be easy to win over public opinion for a project so obviously in contradiction with the spirit of the US constitution and many Americans’ understanding of democracy. The true goals of the IMF were therefore obfuscated with great effort and glossed over by empty rhetoric about “free trade” and the “abolition of protectionism”. The New York Herald-Tribune spoke of the “most high-powered propaganda campaign in the history of the country.”

The IMF’s first task was to scrutinize all member states in order to determine their respective contribution rates. After all, the Fund was to exert a long-term “monitoring” function for the system’s protection. The US thus claimed for itself the right to be permanently informed about the financial and economic conditions of all countries involved.

When half a year after the conference the British insisted on an improvement in their favor to the contracts, they were unambiguously made aware of who was in charge of the IMF. Without further ado Washington tied a loan of $ 3.75 billion, urgently needed by the U.K. to repay its war debts, to the condition that Great Britain submit to the terms of the agreement without any ifs, ands, or buts. Less than two weeks later Downing Street gave in to Washington’s blackmail and consented.

On December 27, 1945, 29 governments signed the final agreement. In January 1946, representatives of 34 nations came together for an introductory meeting of the Board of Governors of the IMF and the World Bank in Savannah, Georgia. On this occasion, Lord Keynes and his compatriots were once again left empty-handed: Contrary to their proposal to establish the headquarters of the IMF, which had in the meantime been declared a specialized agency of the United Nations, in New York City, the US government insisted on its right to determine the location solely by itself. On March 1, 1947, the IMF finally took up its operations in downtown Washington.

The rules for membership in the IMF were simple: Applicant countries had to open their books and were rigorously screened and assessed. After that they had to deposit a certain amount of gold and pay their financial contribution to the organization according to their economic power. In return, they were assured that in the case of balance of payments problems they were entitled to a credit up to the extent of their contribution – in exchange for interest rates determined by the IMF and the contractually secured obligation of settling their debts to the IMF before all others.

The IMF finally received a starting capital of $ 8.8 billion from shares of its member states who paid 25 % of their contributions in gold and 75 % in their own currency. The United States secured itself the highest rate by depositing $ 2.9 billion. The amount was twice as high as Great Britain’s and guaranteed the United States not only double voting rights, but also a blocking minority and veto rights.

The IMF was run by a Board of Governors, to whom twelve executive directors were subordinated. Seven were elected by the members of the IMF, the other five were appointed by the largest countries, led by the US. The offices of the IMF as well as those of its sister organization, the World Bank, were set up on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington within walking distance from the White House.

The original statutes of the IMF state that the organization’s objectives were, among others,

To promote international cooperation in the field of monetary policy,
To facilitate the expansion and balanced growth of international trade,
To promote exchange rate stability and assist in the establishment of a multilateral system of payments,
To provide member countries facing balance of payments difficulties with temporary access to the Fund’s general resources and under adequate safeguards,
To shorten the duration and lessen the degree of disequilibrium in the international balances of payments of member countries.

These official terms make it seem as if the IMF is an impartial institution, placed above nations and independent of political influences, its main objective consisting in running the global economy in as orderly a manner as possible, swiftly correcting malfunctions. This is no coincidence. This impression was intended by the authors and has in fact achieved its desired effect: It is exactly this notion that has been conveyed to the global public for more than six decades by politicians, scientists and the international media.

In actual fact, the IMF has, from the very beginning, been an institution launched by, controlled by, and tailored to the interests of the United States, designed to secure the new military superpower economic world domination. To conceal these intentions even more effectively, the founding fathers of the IMF in 1947 started a tradition which the organization has held to this day – appointing a non-American to the post of managing director[LMAO, how sneaky!]

The first foreigner, selected in 1946, was Camille Gutt from Belgium. As finance minister of his country during World War II, the trained economist had helped the British cover their war expenses by lending them Belgian gold. He had aided the war effort by supplying his government’s allies with cobalt and copper from the Belgian colony of Congo and supporting the US government with secret deliveries of Congolese uranium for its nuclear program. In 1944 he had carried out a drastic currency reform (later known as the “Gutt operation”) that had cost the working population of Belgium large amounts of their savings.

Gutt headed the IMF from 1946 to 1951. During his time in office he largely focused on the implementation and monitoring of fixed exchange rates, thus ushering in a new era of hitherto unknown stability for US and international corporations when exporting goods and purchasing raw materials. He also paved the way for major US banks seeking to deal in credits on an international scale and opened up markets all over the world for international finance capital searching for investment opportunities.

The world’s major political changes after World War II caused considerable headaches for the IMF, because they limited the scope of the organization. Above all, the Soviet Union took advantage of the post-war situation, characterized by the division of the world among the major powers and the drawing of new borders in Europe. Still relying on the socialization of the means of production by the Russian Revolution of 1917, Stalin’s officials sealed off the so-called “Eastern bloc” from the West in order to introduce central economic planning in these countries. The Soviet bureaucracy’s primary objective, however, was not to enforce the interests of working people, but to assure the subordination of the Eastern Bloc under its own interests for the purpose of pillaging these countries. In any case, the fragmentation of Eastern Europe meant that Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and several other markets became blank areas for international financial capital.

The seizure of power by Mao Zedong in 1949 and the introduction of a planned economy in China by the Communist Party deprived Western investors of another huge market and eventually led to the Korean War. Implementing their policy of “containment” of the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence, the US tacitly accepted the loss of four million lives only to deliver a clear message to the rest of the world: that the largest economic power on earth would no longer remain passive if denied access to any more global markets[LOL ... it's not about 'democracy', it's about access to markets (ie profits).  Sickos.]

The Post-War Boom: The IMF Casts its Net

The post-war years were characterized by the rapid economic growth of all leading industrial nations, referred to as the “Wirtschaftswunder” (“economic miracle”) in Germany. Although IMF lending played only a minor role during this time, the organization’s leadership did not remain inactive. On the contrary: the second IMF chief Ivar Rooth, a former Governor of the Swedish Central Bank and ex-Director of the Basel Bank for International Settlements, set out on a course that was to acquire major significance in the later history of the organization – introducing conditionality, i.e. establishing obligatory requirements for granting loans.

Harry Dexter White had already made a proposal along these lines at the Bretton Woods Conference, but encountered fierce resistance from the British. Meanwhile, however, Britain’s position had continued to deteriorate. Former colonies, mainly in Africa, were fighting for their independence, and in the Middle East the Suez crisis was looming – providing the US with an opportunity to advance its own interests in the IMF more forcefully.

By establishing so-called “stand-by arrangements”, Ivar Rooth added the principle of “conditionality” to the IMF’s toolbox. The granting of loans was now subjected to conditions that went far beyond the specification of loan deadlines and the level of interest rates.

In implementing these measures, which were tightened after Britain’s defeat in Suez led to a rise of tensions in Anglo-American relations, the IMF’s strategists developed a strategy that helped them to cleverly deceive the public. Starting in 1958, they obliged the governments of debtor countries to draw up “letters of intent” in which they had to express their willingness to undertake “reasonable efforts” to master their balance of payments problems. This made it seem as though a country had itself proposed the measures that were actually required by the IMF.

But even that did not go far enough for the IMF. As a next step, loans to be disbursed were sliced into tranches (“phasing”) and thus made conditional upon the respective debtor country’s submissiveness. In addition, the IMF insisted (and still insists) that agreements between the IMF and its debtors should not be considered international treaties and therefore should not be subject to parliamentary approval. Finally, the IMF decreed that any agreements with it were not intended for the public eye and had to be treated as classified information – a scheme that applies to this day. [Hey, it's one of those shifty opaque deals that US interests profit from.]

Conditions were to be continually tightened in the course of the IMF’s history and would prove to be a crucial mechanism for increasing foreign domination of developing countries. They also contributed to the growing power of the IMF, because the World Bank, most governments and the vast majority of international commercial banks from now on only granted loans to those countries which, on the basis of the fulfillment of the IMF’s criteria, had received its “seal of approval”.

In 1956 a meeting was held in Paris that was to win landmark importance for the later development of the IMF. Struggling to repay a loan, Argentina had to sit down with its creditor countries and representatives of the IMF in order to have new conditions dictated to it. The meeting took place in the offices of French Finance Minister Pierre Pflimlin, who also chaired it. It did not remain the only one of its kind. In subsequent years, meetings between IMF representatives, creditors and debtors were held frequently in the same place, gradually developing into fixed monthly conferences that were to become known as the “Paris Club”. A scope of extremely important decisions were taken within this framework – without parliamentary consent and hidden from the eyes of the public. Commercial banks around the world soon recognized the importance of these conferences, and therefore started their own “London Club”, whose meetings usually took (and still take) place simultaneously with those of the Paris Club.

Barely noticed by the global community, the IMF subsequently turned to a field of activity that was to boost its power massively in a relatively short time. The wave of declarations of independence by African states at the beginning of the 1960s marked the beginning of a new era. Countries that had been plundered for decades by colonialism and lay in tatters economically, now had to find their proper place in the world and especially in the world economy under rapidly changing conditions. Their governments therefore needed money. Since most of these countries offered commercial banks too little security due to social tensions, political unrest and barely existing infrastructure, the IMF took advantage of the situation and offered its services as a creditor.

Although most African countries were so poor that they were only granted relatively modest sums, even these had consequences. The maturity dates of interest and principal payments relentlessly ensured that states that had just escaped from colonial dependence were seamlessly caught in a new network of financial dependence on the IMF.

As credit lending required the debtor’s membership in the IMF, the organization, whose founding members had only included three African countries – Egypt, Ethiopia, and South Africa – was joined by more than 40 additional African states between 1957 and 1969. In 1969, 44 out of 115 members were African. Although they made up more than one third of the overall organization, their voting rights that same year amounted to less than 5 %.

Chile 1973:

Embarking upon the Path of Neoliberalism

The beginning of the 1970s marked the end of the post-war boom, a twenty-five year period of economic expansion in which workers in the leading industrial nations had been granted great social concessions and experienced a hitherto unknown improvement of their living standards. It was the internal disintegration of the Bretton Woods system that brought about the end of that period. As a result of rising US investment abroad and escalating military spending – particularly for the Vietnam War – the amount of dollars globally in circulation had continually increased. All attempts by the US government to bring this proliferation under control had failed because US capital had blended with foreign capital and no nation on earth was capable of reining in this massive concentration of financial power.

In 1971, the United States, for the first time in its history, ran a balance of payments deficit. At the same time the imbalance between the global dollar supply and US gold reserves stored in Fort Knox assumed such dimensions that even raising the gold price to $ 38.00 and then to $ 42.20 could no longer guarantee its exchange against an ounce of gold. On August 15, 1971, US President Nixon pulled the brakes and severed the link between gold and the dollar, displaying the typical arrogance of a superpower by not consulting a single ally.

In December 1971, a conference of the G10 group, founded in 1962 by the world’s top ten industrialized nations, decided on an alignment of exchange rates, which brought about a readjustment of the dollar’s value against other currencies. This led to a devaluation of the dollar, ranging from 7.5 % against the weak Italian lira to 16.9 % against the strong Japanese yen. In February 1973, the dollar was devalued again, but it soon became clear that the system of fixed exchange rates could no longer be upheld. In March 1973, the G10 and several other industrialized countries introduced the system of flexible exchange rates to be established by the central banks – without consulting a single country outside the G 10 and despite the fact that the new regime blatantly contradicted article 6 of the founding document of the IMF on fixed exchange rates and monetary stability.

The abolition of fixed exchange rates historically terminated the core tasks of the IMF. The only role left for it was that of a lender in charge of the allocation of funds and their conditionality, entitled to inspect the accounts of applicants and thus exercise direct influence on their policies. However, it was exactly this function for which extremely favorable conditions would soon arise.

In 1973, the members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which had been founded in 1960, used the Yom Kippur War between Egypt and Israel to curb the amount of oil supplied to the West (“oil embargo”) and drastically raise oil prices. This led to a huge increase in the profits of oil companies and oil-producing countries. These gains ended up in commercial banks, which in turn tried to use them for profitable investments. As the global economy slipped into a recession in 1974 / 75 and investment opportunities in industrialized countries dwindled, the lion’s share of the money took on the form of loans to third world countries in Asia, Africa and South America, which – due to their increased expenditures after the rise in oil prices – urgently needed money. The IMF itself responded to the increased credit needs of developing countries by introducing the “Extended Fund Facility” in 1974, from which member countries could draw loans of up to 140 % of their quota with terms of four and a half to ten years.

Although the facility had been specifically set up to finance much-needed oil imports, the IMF – as well as the banks – cared little about what the money was actually spent on. Whether it went straight into the pockets of dictators such as Mobutu in Zaire, Saddam Hussein in Iraq or Suharto in Indonesia – who either squandered it, transferred it to secret foreign accounts or used it for military purposes, in each case driving up the national debt – did not matter to the IMF and the banks as long as they received their interest payments regularly.

However, the situation changed abruptly when Paul Volcker, the new chairman of the US Federal Reserve, raised its prime rate (the interest rate at which commercial banks can obtain money from central banks) by 300 % in order to reduce inflation in 1979. The United States slipped into another recession, which meant that fewer raw materials were needed due to lower economic activity.

For many developing countries the combination of receding demand, falling raw material prices and skyrocketing interest rates meant that they could not meet their payment obligations to international banks. A massive financial crisis loomed. The debt burden of developing countries at the beginning of 1980 amounted to a total of $ 567 billion. A payment default of this magnitude would have led to the collapse of many Western banks and therefore had to be prevented at all costs.

It was at this point that the IMF was given its first great chance to enter the stage as a lender of last resort. While its public relations department spread the news that the organization was working on bail-outs in order to “help” over-indebted countries, the Fund took advantage of its incontestable monopoly position and tied the granting of loans to harsh conditions. In doing so, it was able to draw on two different experiences gained in the preceding years.

Firstly, a CIA-supported military coup in Chile in September 1973 had ended socialist president Salvador Allende’s rule and brought fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet to power. Pinochet had immediately reversed Allende’s nationalizations, but found no remedy against galloping inflation. In an attempt to regain control of the situation, he had turned to a group of 30 Chilean economists (known as the “Chicago Boys” because they had studied at the Chicago School of Economics under Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman) and proposed to them a clearly defined division of labor: He would provide for the suppression of any kind of political and trade union opposition and crush all labor disputes, while they were to carry out a radical austerity program on the basis of neoliberal ideas. [This is the neo-classical school of economics -- the root of all evil!]

Within a few weeks an extensive catalog of measures was developed. It called for a drastic limitation of money supply, cuts in government spending, layoffs in the public sector, privatization in health care and education, wage cuts and tax increases for working people, while at the same time lowering tariffs and corporate taxes. The program was openly referred to as a “shock therapy” by either side.  [Ukraine is about to get an IMF shock therapy jolt.  History is repeating itself.  IMF, USA & Wall Street win.]

Both Pinochet and his partners, who were presented to the public as a “government of technocrats”, fulfilled their side of the agreement to the hilt. While the dictator violently smashed any opposition to the government’s drastic measures and ensured that many political dissidents disappeared forever, the “Chicago Boys” launched a frontal assault on the working population. They drove up unemployment, which had stood at 3 % in 1973, to 18.7 % by the end of 1975, simultaneously pushing inflation to 341 % and plunging the poorest segments of the population into even deeper poverty. The impacts of the program actually aggravated the problem of social inequality for decades to come: In 1980, the richest 10 % of the Chilean population amassed 36.5 % of the national income, expanding their share to 46.8 % in 1989, while at the same time that of the poorest 50 % fell from 20.4 % to 16.8 %.

During his bloody coup, Pinochet had fully relied on the active support of the CIA and the US Department of State under Henry Kis­singer. When implementing the toughest austerity program ever carried out in a Latin American country, the “Chicago Boys” received the full backing of the IMF. Regardless of all human rights violations, IMF loans to Chile doubled in the year after Pinochet’s coup, only to quadruple and quintuple in the following two years.

The IMF’s other experience concerned the UK. Great Britain’s inexorable economic decline over two and a half decades had made the country the IMF’s largest borrower. From 1947 to 1971, the government in London had drawn loans totaling $ 7.25 billion. After the recession of 1974 / 75 and speculative attacks on the pound, it had come under even greater pressure. When in 1976, the British government once again turned to the IMF for help, the United States seized the opportunity to demonstrate their power. Allying themselves with the resurgent Germans, they forced the Labour government under Prime Minister Harold Wilson to limit public spending, impose massive cuts in social programs, pursue a restrictive fiscal policy, and refrain from import controls of any kind. This drastic intervention represented a hitherto unknown encroachment on the sovereignty of a European borrower country, resulting in the fact that no leading Western industrialized country ever again applied for an IMF loan.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/pillaging-the-world-the-history-and-politics-of-the-imf/5420397

COMMENT

Came across this article while checking out what the Bretton Woods system was about.

No wonder the Russians didn't want a bar of this.

This is such an obscenity.  The murder of millions of people for 'global markets' -- ie profit -- is sick beyond belief.

IMF is bailing out Ukraine by doling out these partial advances and demanding austerity measures, so the Ukraine public is in for that 'shock therapy' that Chile got (while the corrupt rich in Ukraine will get richer).
The mark-ups are my way of trying to remember the content of the article.  Probably not reader-friendly, so it might be best to link up to the article itself, to read through it without the distraction of highlights.