The measure of a slave – a few simple tests - International Injustice/Law

Recently captured former Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, is facing war crimes charges at the Hague; he is accused of complicity in the murder of 8000 civilians during the Bosnian war. Karadzic is currently incarcerated and will remain in detention throughout the entire proceedings.

Years prior to Karadzic’s arrest, an internationally respected British medical journal, ‘The Lancet,’ assessed that approximately 655,000 innocent civilians died as a direct result of the American led invasion of Iraq. This report is now dated, however, a more recent report from John Hopkins university in the U.S. places the civilian death toll closer to 750,000! At this stage some astute slaves would have pre-empted the test.

Eight thousand deaths pale against three-quarters of a million deaths, notwithstanding one innocent civilian death is one too many. It is now public knowledge that Bush took the nation to war based on lies and more lies after the initial lies, and more lies after that (torture). Yet Bush continues to occupy the highest office in the land. Assuming you are not in the ranks of the fully retarded, THE DOUBLE STANDARD IS OBVIOUS! But that is not the point of the test, YOU are!

How does that legal double standard sit with you? If you accept this outrage, which defies every civilised and moral code of conduct, you would be an extremely compliant and spineless slave; and there’s no escaping the fact! Forget excuses like it has nothing to do with me, etc – you will soon discover it has EVERYTHING to do with you!

Tolerating such a monumental hypocrisy and double standard comes at a very high price! How many civil liberties and democratic rights have YOU LOST since Bush came to office? Bush is now able to spy on YOU and other citizens, LEGALLY! Doesn’t affect you, ay? Nothing to do with you, ay? Sticking your head in the sand simply makes your arse an easier target! Tolerating or failing to act against your leaders in the face of screaming hypocrisy, double standards and criminal behaviour invites the same injustices on YOU.

Now consider the financial elites and bankers responsible for destroying the economy and our quality of life; consider the vast amounts of remuneration they receive AND CONTINUE TO RECEIVE! When we make mistakes we are forced to accept responsibility and pay for our mistakes, when bankers make mistakes they increase financial pressure on the public by increasing rates in order to recover THEIR losses! In other words WE PAY when THEY make mistakes – who said banking was a thieves paradise? But again, that’s not the point, the point is YOU TOLERATE HUGE INJUSTICES FROM ROGUES AND THIEVES without demanding reform.

Now consider futures and commodities markets -- the playground of filthy rich SPECULATORS.

Oil suppliers have been able to meet ALL their international orders to date, which means that prices should have remained low and stable yet the price of oil went through the roof! Why? It certainly does not reflect the normal cycle of supply and demand. SPECULATORS began investing HEAVILY in commodities markets.

BIG players work together against small players. After extracting huge profits from the markets they pull out leaving YOU, the public, with the bill. At the moment it's an artificially inflated, $130/barrel oil price, which you pay on top of all those other unfair artificial increases – the Hague has NOTHING to do with YOU, ay! The ‘Hague’ is a lot closer than you think.

You’re probably wondering why anyone would take the time to state the obvious; a slave is a slave regardless. Try and answer it yourselves. Failure to act in the face of the most heinous criminality gives license for greater crimes. Why do you think your rights and liberties have been evaporating; to what end is the surveillance on citizens, which has very little to do with foreign threats but everything to do with social control.

People have plans for you; the need to tighten their grip on you clearly indicates those plans are anything but pleasant – good fuckin luck you pathetic, bunch of spineless shits – YOU DESERVE EVERYTHING THAT’S COMING and it won’t be pleasant. I’ll give you a hint; it has everything to do with survival and population control – YOU SEE, YOU’RE EXPENDABLE!

The cure is simple, arrest the criminals, restore integrity to the judicial system, regulate the economy and distribute wealth widely and equitably – perhaps declaring open season on speculators may help send a very clear unambiguous message to the rogues that have hijacked the nation!

There is now a growing discomfort about the role of speculative finance in the US, the capital of global finance. In an open letter addressed to all airline customers, leaders of airlines in the US have recently requested the passengers to join them in pushing legislation to add more transparency and disclosure in the oil markets.

They argue that "twenty years ago, 21% of oil contracts were purchased by speculators who trade oil on paper with no intention of ever taking delivery. Today, oil speculators purchase 66% of all oil futures contracts, and that reflects just the transactions that are known. Speculators buy up large amounts of oil and then sell it to each other again and again. A barrel of oil may trade 20-plus times before it is delivered and used; the price goes up with each trade and consumers pick up the final tab. Some market experts estimate that current prices reflect as much as $30 to $60 per barrel in unnecessary speculative costs."

Speculators have indeed sharply increased their allocation to commodity markets from $13 billion in 2003 to $260 billion in 2008 and at present they are not adequately constrained by rules about margin requirements and other regulations about buying and selling which apply to equity trades. In fact, there has been further deregulation in the US in recent years with respect to speculative futures trading in oil and commodity indices covering a wide spectrum of commodities including food and metals.

Eminent financiers such as George Soros and powerful US senators, such as Joe Lieberman, are arguing that commodity index speculators are a big part of the increase in commodity prices. Michael Masters, a hedge fund manager in his testimony before the US Congress, has said that gasoline prices could fall to $2 a gallon, half of today's price with legislation barring commodity index funds. There are now more than 10 legislative proposals before the US Congress calling for better regulation of commodity index markets.

At the same time, there are powerful forces in the US against regulation of such transactions. Investment funds managers and investment houses such as Morgan Stanley are benefiting from these speculative activities and they are mobilising public opinion against increased regulations. California's public employees' pension fund, the world's largest, earned a 68% rate of return on its investments in commodity futures and other investors are rushing in commodity markets.

The vested interests are trying to divert the attention from regulation by arguing that other factors, including growing demand from emerging markets such as China and India, is responsible for commodity price increases. This game of blaming emerging economies in which the President of the US has also joined is patently absurd because the rapid growth in India and China has been going on for more than a decade with no increase in commodity prices even in nominal terms and cannot explain the sharp increase in last two years.

Other factors such as drought in Australia and switch of corn to biofuels can explain part of the increase in food prices but none of them can explain increases of more than 100% in many commodity prices in a single year as it has happened in 2007 and 2008. There is little doubt that speculative finance is a key factor in sudden price increases in oil, food and metals in the last two years. Amartya Sen in his classical work on famines pointed out that even when supply situation for food is healthy, famines can occur because of collapse of purchasing power of the common man. Today we are witnessing a phenomenon of food riots caused by food price increases due not to demand-supply imbalance but to greed of speculators facilitated by lax regulatory system in the key trading centre of the world.

Given the play of vested interests in US Congress it is not clear which way the legislation on regulating speculative finance in commodity futures will move. Policymakers in developing countries in which price increase in fuel and food are matters of life and death for the poor cannot remain silent and accept vulnerability to the price fluctuations originating in developed countries' financial markets. This must reflect on what they can do to safeguard their people against the onslaught of the speculators in foreign lands?

Over the long-term, the dominant role of a few commodity markets in the West must be reduced. As the centre of gravity of the world economy shifts to the South and South is becoming a dominant source of both demand and supply for commodities, it must develop its own markets with its own rules.

However, in the short run when the contagion effects of the markets in developed countries are still strong, the South must stake its claim in contributing to reform of the regulatory systems in the developed countries because its vital interests are involved. It should not remain silent when the contagion from developed economies is leading to mass starvation in its economies. It should demand, perhaps through international forums such as G-20, proper regulations in the developed countries so that the greed of the few in developed countries does not lead to misery of the many in the developing countries. It should also use its leverage through institutions such as Opec to persuade the developed countries to check the excesses of speculators which could have adverse effects in the long run on both producers and consumers of oil.

© 2008 Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd

Doubts about anthrax story
by Stephen Kiehl via rialator - Baltimore Sun Wednesday, Aug 6 2008, 1:24am

Survivors of the 2001 anthrax attacks and relatives of those killed by the deadly powder said yesterday that they want a full accounting from the FBI of its investigation to date, and they are not yet convinced that Bruce Ivins, the government scientist who killed himself last week, was responsible.

Federal authorities are expected to meet this week with the victims' families in Washington to discuss their investigation, after which the FBI could close its nearly seven-year-old anthrax case and publicly release its findings. But with reports emerging that the case against Ivins is largely circumstantial, some wonder if real closure will ever come.

"I don't know whether this is the right person or not," said Maureen Stevens, the widow of Robert Stevens, a photo editor at the Sun, a supermarket tabloid, who was the first killed in the fall 2001 attacks. Stevens said she has gone to Washington twice before for meetings, but nothing came of them. She said she received an e-mail from the FBI informing her of this week's meeting.

"I don't know if we'll hear anything from them that will convince me that they've gotten to the bottom of it," Stevens said.

Ivins died last Tuesday after federal investigators had spent a year watching his house near Fort Detrick in Frederick, following him, and interviewing him and his colleagues at the U.S Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Ivins' lawyer has said the scientist was innocent.

"I think he's a convenient fall guy. They can say, 'OK, we found him, case closed, we're going home,'" said Dr. Kenneth W. Hedlund, the former chief of bacteriology at Fort Detrick who hired Ivins. "The FBI apparently applied a lot of pressure to all the investigators there [at Detrick], and they found the weakest link."

The FBI has not yet said how it was able to connect Ivins to the attacks.

But the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal, relying in part on unnamed sources, reported that investigators employing new technology were able to find a genetic link between the specific anthrax strain recovered from the letters and the bodies of victims and the one found in an office and other "nonlaboratory space" where Ivins worked in 2001.

The New York Times reported that investigators intensively questioned his children, Andrew and Amanda, now both 24. One former colleague, Dr. W. Russell Byrne, said the agents pressed Ivins' daughter repeatedly to acknowledge that her father was involved in the attacks.

"It was not an interview," Byrne said. "It was a frank attempt at intimidation."

Byrne said he believed Ivins was singled out partly because of his personal weaknesses. "If they had real evidence on him, why did they not just arrest him?"

The Associated Press, quoting unnamed government sources, reported yesterday that Ivins had a lengthy obsession with the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, which has a chapter house near the Princeton, N.J., mailbox from which the anthrax letters were sent. However, the report says the FBI can't place Ivins in Princeton the day the letters were mailed.

Hedlund said Ivins was a bacteriologist and lacked the expertise to convert the anthrax into the deadly form that was used in the 2001 mailings to government offices and newsrooms.

Rep. Rush Holt, who represents the central New Jersey district where the anthrax letters were mailed, said circumstantial evidence is not enough, especially after the series of mistakes made in this case. The FBI spent years investigating Steven J. Hatfill, another scientist who worked in the same lab as Ivins. The government recently agreed to pay a $5.82 million settlement to Hatfill.

Holt sent a letter to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III asking that Mueller appear before Congress to provide an account of the investigation.

"One of the reasons they need to lay this out is so that the public can be confident that they are protected," Holt, a Democrat, said in an interview yesterday. "The post office workers, the general public, the local police - they are all owed an explanation. They would like to have closure."

David Hose, 65, contracted anthrax while working at a mail facility in Sterling, Va. He said he didn't believe Ivins was responsible for the attacks, nor does he have any faith in the FBI's ability to close the case.

"They just mumble and bumble around," he said. "It's like a TV show."

(Frank Roylance contributed to this article)

© 2008 The Baltimore Sun

Topics

Other Press

Cleaves on Disc/Stick