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jpb world bank press passes wrecking ball 2

I have always had a bad attitude toward official secrets regardless of who is keeping them. That prejudice and John Kenneth Galbraith are to blame for an unauthorized withdrawal I made from the World Bank.

When I lived in Boston in the late 1970s, I paid $25 to attend a series of lectures by Galbraith on foreign aid and other topics. The louder Galbraith praised foreign aid, the warier I became. His hokum spurred my reading and led me to recognize that foreign aid is one of the worst afflictions that poor nations suffer. As one critic quipped, foreign aid is money from governments, to governments, for governments.

After I moved to Washington, foreign aid became one of my favorite targets as an investigative journalist. When I talked to the chief of the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), Peter McPherson, in 1985, my blunt questions had him literally screaming at me within four minutes of the start of the interview. McPherson probably screamed even louder when he saw the article I wrote thrashing AID.

Foreign aid was revered by the Washington establishment, and the World Bank epitomized the arrogance of the financial masters of the universe (at least in their own minds and press releases). The World Bank, heavily subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, profited from every debacle it spawned. The more loans the bank made, the more prestige and influence it acquired. After a profusion of bad loans to Third World governments helped ignite a debt crisis, I warned in a 1985 Wall Street Journal piece that expanding the World Bank’s role “would be akin to appointing Mrs. O’Leary’s cow as chief of the Chicago Fire Department.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Only Obstacle To A Healthy World Is Government Secrecy And Propaganda

July 21, 2020

The Only Obstacle To A Healthy World Is Government Secrecy And Propaganda

If people in power were no longer able to hide secrets and spin lies about what’s going on in the world, all of our major problems would come to an end. Because secretive and manipulative power structures are the source of all of our major problems.

If the public could see what’s actually happening in their world, they would immediately begin using the power of their numbers to overhaul our current system. This is why our current system pours so much energy into preventing the public from seeing what’s actually happening in their world.

If it weren’t for the constant campaign of obfuscation and manipulation of public perception via veils of government secrecy and propaganda, humanity would naturally find its way out of the power-driven tribulations it now faces, as surely as you’ll avoid obstacles and hazards in your path when you are walking with your eyes open. The only problem in this case is that our eyes have not been permitted to open.

It isn’t actually necessary to hold a bunch of hard, rigid ideas about exactly what kind of society we should have, what kind of political system we should have, what kind of economic system we should have. There’s nothing wrong with promoting ideas and having preferences of course, but really if you just gave humanity the ability to navigate through its own troubles by removing the blindfolds of propaganda and power opacity, it would organically create a healthy society, and realistically such a society probably won’t look a whole lot like our mental models.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Exclusive: They Spy With Their Little Eye

January 19, 2019

Exclusive: They Spy With Their Little Eye

The Five Eyes, a part of what the NSA calls internally its “global network,” have their dirty fingerprints all over the latest spying scandal engulfing New Zealand, writes exiled Kiwi journalist and activist Suzie Dawson.

NZ Spy Scandal: Elephants In The Room; US Used NZ Spies to Spy on Third Countries, Including France; US Army Ready for Unrest

I’ve spent six years alternately begging major NZ journalists to investigate state-sponsored spying on activists including me, and, out of sheer necessity, reporting extensively on it myself from within the vacuum created by their inaction. So it is somewhat bemusing to now observe the belated unfolding of what ex-Member of Parliament and Greenpeace NZ Executive Director Russel Norman is describing as New Zealand’s “Watergate moment“.

In the wake of the bombshell release of a State Services Commission report into the affair, Norman wrote: “My key takeaway is that under the previous government, no one was safe from being spied on if they disagreed with government policy.”

This is a remarkable statement from Norman, who once sat on the very government committee tasked with oversight of New Zealand’s intelligence agencies. The futility of that lofty position was reflected in my 2014 piece “Glenn Greenwald and the Irrelevance of Electoral Politics“ which quoted Greenwald, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leaks, saying of Norman:

“You had the Green Party leader here in New Zealand say in an interview that I watched that he was on the committee that oversees the GCSB [ Government Communications Security Bureau – NZ’s electronic spying agency] and yet he learned far more about what the agency does by reading our stories than he did in briefings. They really have insulated themselves from the political process and have a lot of tools to ensure that they continue to grow and their power is never questioned.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Julian Assange and the Fate of Journalism

August 23, 2018

Julian Assange and the Fate of Journalism

Photograph Source Jeanne Menjoulet | CC BY 2.0

Julian Assange is the Australian founder of Wikileaks—a website dedicated to the public’s right to know what governments and other powerful organizations are doing. Wikileaks pursues this goal by posting revelatory documents, often acquired unofficially, that bring to light the criminal behavior that results in wars and other man-made disasters. Because Wikileaks’ very existence encourages “leaks,” government officials fear the website, and particularly dislike Julian Assange.

Essentially, Wikileaks functions as a wholesale supplier of evidence. Having identified alleged official misconduct, Wikileaks seeks to acquire and make public overwhelming amounts of evidence—sometimes hundreds of thousands of documents at a time—which journalists and other interested parties can draw upon. And since the individuals and organizations being investigated are ones ultimately responsible to the public, such a role as wholesale supplier of evidence can be seen as a public service.

Unfortunately, that is not how most government officials see the situation. They assert that government cannot be successful unless aspects of its behavior are conducted in secret. The fact that those aspects in question thereby lose any accountable connection to the public is discounted. The assumption here is that most citizens simply trust their governments to act in their interests, including when they act clandestinely. Historically, such trust is dangerously naive. Often government officials, even the democratic ones, feel no obligation to their citizens in general, but rather only to special interests.

One reason for this is that large and bureaucratic institutions that last for any length of time have the tendency to become stand-alone institutions—ones with their own self-referencing cultures, loyalty to which comes to override any responsibility to outside groups other than those with particular shared interests. In other words, long-lasting institutions/bureaucracies take on a life of their own.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bilderberg Meetings – Just An “Occasional Supper Club”?

June 7, 2018

Bilderberg Meetings – Just An “Occasional Supper Club”?

The European online “news” service, Independent, published an article about this years annual Bilderberg meeting being held in Italy. Why is it wherever Bilderberg goes economic chaos follows? Remember Greece? Greece was tagged on both sides of their economic problems first in 2008 at the beginning of their problems and then again in 2017 after Prime Minister Tsirpas had sold his soul and betrayed the people to the Troika.

As the Independent described the annual meeting.

Annual meeting of American and European elite attracts huge amount of suspicion and paranoia but is it really just an ‘occasional supper club’? Source

Not really sure I would describe these meetings as a “supper club”. More like a club meeting of treasonous criminals coming together to decide issues like the EuroZone, the euro currency and the like. When you have global corporate heads and government officials from around the world meeting behind closed doors with a 100% complicit media blackout this is the very definition of treason. The media is happy to oblige the request for secrecy.

A collective of elite North American and European politicians, business leaders, financiers and academics, the group has attracted a good deal of suspicion over the last half-century, with conspiracy theorists confidently asserting that its members are plotting the New World Order and are hell-bent on global domination.

Protesters who believe the Bilderbergers represent a “shadow world government” regularly picket their yearly meet-ups, creating a need for high security at all times, but attendees insist the group is simply a debating society taking place outside the glare of the political spotlight. Source

Why would a bunch of “sign carriers” create enough of a threat to warrant high-powered, fully automatic, assault rifles for the protection of these treasonous meeting attendees?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What Does The Federal Reserve Have to Hide?

January 14, 2016

What Does The Federal Reserve Have to Hide?

Over the years, dissidents in Congress (notably including former US Representative Ron Paul and current Republican and Democratic presidential contenders Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders) have periodically proposed legislation to audit the Federal Reserve. The legislation is always rejected and, when it gets any significant attention at all, roundly denounced by the Federal Reserve itself and groups like the US Chamber of Commerce.

Such was the case on January 12, when the US Senate defeated a motion to bring the latest version of “Audit the Fed” to the floor for full debate and a vote. What’s up with that?

Supporters paint a Fed audit as simple common sense; opponents as an attempt to “politicize” US monetary policy.

It seems to me that logic and reason are entirely with the pro-audit side. The Federal Reserve system was established by Congress in 1913 for the express purpose of manipulating the national currency pursuant to statutory objectives (creating and maintaining “maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates”). That’s inherently “political.”

It’s not “politicization” that audit opponents really object to. What they object to, their dark references to “conspiracy theory” and other attempts at distraction notwithstanding, is transparency.

Why? Well, given that the primary opposition to an audit comes from the the political class and the usual Wall Street suspects — the rest of us either support an audit or, more likely, don’t think much about the matter at all — it’s pretty obvious:

The Federal Reserve operates, its statutory goals be damned, for the purpose of protecting the interests of “the 1%” in preference to the interests of, and when necessary at the expense of, the rest of us.

That’s the only plausible motive for audit opponents’ insistence that the Fed be allowed to operate in secrecy, immune from public inspection or even inspection by the political authority that created it and gave it its alleged mission.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Global Angst over US Secrecy Fetish

December 3, 2015

Global Angst over US Secrecy Fetish

With the reach of U.S. surveillance now global – and with the U.S. military deployed all over the world – anger at President Obama’s unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers who disclose the U.S. government’s abuses and crimes has gone international, as this Norwegian opinion piece by Victor Wallis shows.

The more extreme the crimes of state, the more the state seeks to shroud them in secrecy. The greater the secrecy and the accompanying lies, the more vital becomes the role of whistleblowers – and the more vindictive becomes the state in its pursuit of them.

Whistleblowers are people who start out as loyal servants of the state. Their illusions about the state’s supposed moral agenda – and the wholeheartedness of their own patriotic commitment – make them all the more shocked when they discover evidence of the state’s wrongdoing.

Given the extreme concentration of weaponry (as well as surveillance capabilities) in the hands of the state, and given the disposition of the state to apply such resources even against nonviolent mass movements, the type of defection practiced by whistleblowers – an option available to military and intelligence operatives at all levels – is crucial to any eventual triumph of popular forces over the ruling class.

Whistleblowers thus not only embarrass the government, disrupt its policies, and (assuming adequate diffusion) educate the citizenry; they also are harbingers of a broader crumbling of the capitalist state and the order it defends. Acting largely in isolation and at great risk to themselves, they embody the conviction – or at least the hope – that basic decency has a more universal grounding than does any possible scheme of oppression.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

€100,000 Reward for Europe’s Most Wanted Secret

November 30, 2015

€100,000 Reward for Europe’s Most Wanted Secret

India Drives Forward First GMO Crops Under Veil of Secrecy

November 4, 2015

India Drives Forward First GMO Crops Under Veil of Secrecy

shutterstock_236726830

A secret application has been made to India’s GEAC (Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee) for a new variety of GMO mustard to be released for cultivation.

If accepted, this would be the first GMO variety to be approved in India – and could open the way for many more such applications for other major crops including staple foods like rice, wheat and chickpeas.

According to India’s Business Standard magazine, Deepak Pental, developer of the ‘Dhara Mustard Hybrid 11’ (DMH11) mustard seed at Delhi University, said that he had sent the proposal to the GEAC in mid-September. The GEAC is expected to meet again next week to consider the application.

The GEAC, part of the Ministry of Environment, Forests & Climate Change, is the statutory authority that appraises proposals for field trials and commercial sale of GM crops. The final decision rests with the Union environment, forests and climate change minister.

The official website of the GEAC makes no mention of this or any other recent application – indeed the entire website appears to be many years out of date and unmaintained. The most recent ‘status of pending projects’ reports dates from March 2007. No minutes of meetings have been posted since April 2012.

India’s Economic Times also reported on 3rd September that a secret meeting of the GEAC had been called that day to discuss 17 applications for field trials of six GMO including varieties of cotton, corn, brinjal, chickpea, rice and wheat.

“The GEAC did meet today and certain decisions were taken. However, they cannot be shared at this stage as minutes have to be made and the minister’s approval is required as well”, an unnamed “senior official from the Union Ministry of Environment & Forests (MoEF)” told ET, which added:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The TPP is Supply Management

October 18, 2015

The TPP is Supply Management

Despite the talk from the establishment about how the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is about global free trade – and therefore Canadian cows, chickens and cars can no longer be protected by supply management – the reality is, is that the TPP is supply management.

It’s supply management on an international level so executive bureaucrats, politicians and crony-capitalists can create rules to further solidify their statist-social order.

Meanwhile, there is rampant supply management in the domestic economy where you and I are burden by thousands of government regulations that determine what kind of, how much of, and how soon we can provide goods and services to each other.

It’s not supply management strictly in the sense that the Canadian dairy industry is considered supply management. But the definition of words don’t seem to really matter for the TPP architects.

The TPP is a perfect example of Orwellian newspeak where “free trade” means two different concepts (managed statist-trade and actual free-market trade) and thus narrows the range of thought, or as Tom Woods would say, “the range of allowable opinion.”

For if the TPP is identified with free trade, no one will seriously ask whether staying out of the TPP will result in a lack of free trade. Of course gettin’ involved with the TPP will mean free trade! derr!!

But if the TPP was truly about free trade, then it would allow all individuals to homestead, contract and exchange without being inundated with tariffs, duties, levies, or other arbitrary restrictions on the movement of people, goods and services.

Real free trade doesn’t require a treaty, nor secrecy where citizens must rely on WikiLeaks for information.

Politicians seem to serving themselves but not in the way we’d like ’em to.

They sign international treaties with each other that award special interests in the short-term instead of policies that promote everyone’s prosperity in the long-run.

This isn’t going to end well for them.

Trans-Pacific Partnership text won’t be available before election

October 15, 2015

Trans-Pacific Partnership text won’t be available before election

Government officials say haggling by lawyers from 12 countries delaying release of trade agreement

Trade deal details 2:54

Canadians won’t be able to see the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal before they vote.

Government officials told CBC News on Wednesday that the exact wording of the full agreement in principle announced Oct. 5 won’t be finalized until next week.

The federal election is next Monday, Oct. 19.

Twelve countries have signed on to the Pacific Rim free trade deal in principle, although it will require a separate ratification process in each country before it takes effect.

In an interview with CBC News Network’s Power & Politics, Canada’s trade minister said the government was pressing the other 11 countries to release “any form” of the text.

Trade Minister Ed Fast told the Vancouver Board of Trade last Thursday that the full text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal would be available within days. Now, government officials say it won’t be available until after the election. (CBC News)

“What I did say is that we’re working with our 11 other partners to secure at least a provisional text,” Conservative Ed Fast told CBC’s Rosemary Barton on Wednesday.

“What I’m saying,” Fast said, “I don’t have full control over it but I can tell you we’ve been very, very assertive with our partners explaining to them that Canadians — in the middle of an election — have a right to know what’s in the text.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Neil Macdonald: Government sensitivity over you hearing about ‘sensitive’ information

October 13, 2015

Neil Macdonald: Government sensitivity over you hearing about ‘sensitive’ information

Deputy minister calls in the RCMP after media leaks at her department

Canadian democracy has, we are told, been maliciously undermined at Citizenship and Immigration, and the department’s top public servant is determined to set things right, on behalf of the Canadian people.

Deputy Minister Anita Biguzs has declared herself “deeply concerned.” What has happened, she says, is an ethical erosion of the very cornerstone of the trust and democratic function of government.

Now, before you go leaping to conclusions, Biguzs was not talking about the prime minister’s political staff overriding the professionals in her department who were choosing which Syrian refugees will be lucky enough to end up in Canada.

Anita Biguzs, deputy minister of citizenship and immigration, has called in the RCMP to investigate leaks from her department to the media. (Citizenship and Immigration Canada)

Nor is she talking about the near-total absence of public transparency in her department, which has made it nearly impossible for a member of the public to reach anything other than a voice mail message. (“If we started taking public calls, we’d never get any work done,” a departmental spokeswoman told me a few weeks ago, with no evident irony.)

No, what has provoked Bigusz’s anger, and determination for a reckoning, is that someone under her command apparently had the gall to tell a journalist — and thereby the Canadian public — about the PMO overriding the professionals in her department.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

TPP Chapter Released by WikiLeaks Would Let Governments Curtail Trials So as to Contain Information

October 11, 2015

TPP Chapter Released by WikiLeaks Would Let Governments Curtail Trials So as to Contain Information

T / CC BY-ND 2.0

What WikiLeaks claims to be the full intellectual property chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership appears to give countries greater power to stop sensitive information from going public.

The Guardian reports:

One chapter appears to give the signatory countries (referred to as “parties”) greater power to stop embarrassing information going public. The treaty would give signatories the ability to curtail legal proceedings if the theft of information is “detrimental to a party’s economic interests, international relations, or national defense or national security” – in other words, presumably, if a trial would cause the information to spread. …

Among the provisions in the chapter (which may or may not be the most recent version) are rules that say that each country in the agreement has the authority to compel anyone accused of violating intellectual property law to provide “relevant information […] that the infringer or alleged infringer possesses or controls” as provided for in that country’s own laws.

The rules also state that every country has the authority to immediately give the name and address of anyone importing detained goods to whoever owns the intellectual property.

That information can be very broad, too: “Such information may include information regarding any person involved in any aspect of the infringement or alleged infringement,” the document continues, “and regarding the means of production or the channels of distribution of the infringing or allegedly infringing goods or services, including the identification of third persons alleged to be involved in the production and distribution of such goods or services and of their channels of distribution.”

The Guardian further reports that a drafter’s note says every participating country’s individual laws about whistleblowing would still apply—though whether or not they would be applied would of course be up to the officials empowered to execute those laws.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Canada’s Biggest Political Scandal You Never Heard Of

October 5, 2015

Canada’s Biggest Political Scandal You Never Heard Of

Big oil, taxpayers’ millions, call girls and a ‘mechanic’ named Bruce Carson.

It’s probably the biggest political scandal you’ve never heard of.

The tale involves Big Oil, millions of taxpayer dollars, call girls and someone the RCMP describes as “one of the prime minister’s longest serving advisors”: Bruce Carson.

And it largely took place at Stephen Harper’s alma mater: the University of Calgary between 2009 and 2011 with a cast of industry CEOs as well as several Harper ministers and aides, including Nigel Wright.

CANADA’S NO-TEETH LOBBYING ACT

The 1989 Lobbying Act bans public office holders from lobbying for five years after they have left office.

The act requires anyone paid to communicate or set up meetings with federal public office holders on a variety of subjects set out in the statute to register their activities in the Registry of Lobbyists, a federal list with more than 5,000 names.

The act, however, is weakly enforced and full of loopholes. Between 2005 and 2010, the nation’s lobbying commissioner referred only 11 cases to the RCMP. No charges were laid.

Since then the Office of the Lobbying Commissioner, the RCMP and Crown prosecutors have decided not to penalize 67 lobbyists caught violating the act and Lobbyists’ Code of Conduct.

Their identities have been kept secret.

To date, only one person has been found guilty of violating the act, and only two other people have been charged with violating it, including Bruce Carson.

Democracy Watch calculates that nearly 1,600 people have violated the Lobbying Act and Lobbyists’ Code of Conduct since 2004, but that 95 per cent of them were not caught and that 81 per cent were left off the hook.

“Lobbying Commissioner Karen Shepherd has clearly failed to enforce the federal lobbying law and code effectively as she has failed to even name and shame 81 per cent of the lobbyists caught violating the law,” saidDuff Conacher, co-founder of Democracy Watch and visiting professor at the University of Ottawa in a 2015 press release.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Central Banks’ secrecy and silence on gold storage arrangements

October 2, 2015

Central Banks’ secrecy and silence on gold storage arrangements

Whereas some central banks have become more forthcoming on where they claim their official gold reserves are stored (see my recent blog post ‘Central bank gold at the Bank of England‘), many of the world’s central banks remain secretive in this regard, with some central bank staff saying that they are not allowed to provide this information, and some central banks just ignoring the question when asked.

In the ‘Central bank gold at the Bank of England’ article, I said that “A number of central banks refuse to confirm the location of their gold reserves. I will document this in a future posting.” As promised, this blog post explains what I meant by the above statement.

Some of those central banks may have made it into the Bank of England storage list if they had been more transparent in providing gold storage information. However, since they weren’t transparent, these banks make it into the alternative ‘non-cooperative’ list. One subset of this list is central banks, which to be fair to them, did actually respond and said that they cannot divulge gold storage information. The other subset is central banks which didn’t reply at all when I asked them about their official gold storage location details.

The below list, although not complete, highlights 7 central banks and 1 official sector financial institution (the BIS), which, when asked where do they store their gold reserves, responded with various similar phrases saying that they could not provide this information. Between them, these 7 central banks claim to hold 1,500 tonnes of gold. Adding in the BIS which represents another 900 tonnes, in total that’s 2,400 tonnes of gold where the central banks in charge of that gold will not provide any information as to its whereabouts. Much of this 2,400 tonnes is no doubt stored (at least in name) at the FRBNY and the Bank of England, with some stored in the home countries of some of the central banks.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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