GATEWAY TO AFRICA | In Africa the cost of all medications, including generic drugs, exceeds the means of most and many people are faced with a grim choice: purchase counterfeit medications, ingredients unknown, or go without treatment.
With 30% of the total available pharmaceuticals in Uganda believed to be counterfeit, the country, like many others, is struggling to keep control of a business that is both deadly and lucrative.
“A lot of deaths occur. But nobody reports these and nobody is going to investigate,” said Suraj Ali, a partner at the Ugandan legal firm Muwema & Mugerwa.
The situation in Uganda is typical in much of sub-Saharan Africa, and the reasons are economic. In regions of high prevalence of poverty the cost of all medications, including generic drugs, exceeds the means of most. Few people have medical insurance, and they are faced with a grim choice: purchase counterfeit medications – ingredients unknown – or simply go without treatment.
The big pharmaceutical firms are worried. “When you visit a market in Tanzania, you see that they are being sold everywhere,” Ed Wheatley, AstraZeneca’s investigations director for the region, said at June’s Visiongain Pharmaceutical Anti-Counterfeiting conference, in which representatives from major drug makers gathered to deliberate the problem.
This big problem is also a big business – it is widely estimated that counterfeit drugs have an annual turnover of US$75 billion worldwide, with a profit margin of about 70%. This means that the global share of counterfeit medications is 10% of the pharmaceutical market. Around the world 200,000 people die annually due to counterfeits.
Most of the fakes hail from factories in China, India and Pakistan, and counterfeiters are more concerned with matching the packaging than the ingredients of the original. Criminals steal hospital vials with branded labels, print their own hologrammed boxes – even buy tablet-making presses on eBay.
The World Health Organisation estimates that 32.1% of these drugs do not contain any active ingredients; 20.2% have incorrect quantities of active ingredients; 21.4% include wrong ingredients and 8.5% have high levels of impurities or contaminates.
The loss of sales and reputation is significant, as users of the fake drugs may still associate their illness with the genuine article. In some countries, drug makers can also be liable for harm caused by fakes.
In Germany, for example, a company can be called to account if it can be proven that it did not utilise all the possibilities provided by state-of-the-art technology to prevent counterfeiting. In most US states, any part of the manufacturing and sales chain can be liable for damages to the consumer arising from faults in a product’s construction, manufacturing or labelling.
Given this risk it is understandable why pharmaceutical companies are keen to intervene in the African counterfeit market. Some assist local governments with on-the-ground intelligence, leading to raids and prosecutions. This assistance is necessary in countries where awareness is low, resources devoted to the problem are scarce and corruption is high.
“There is a lot of corruption,” Ali said. “A lot of the magistrates are underpaid and they get bribed.
“We have a national drug authority that is supposed to prevent counterfeiting, but it is underfunded,” he added. “There are very few inspectors; they don’t have the equipment to check drugs properly… Things find their way into the country – the borders are very porous.”
The headlines of an article in yesterday’s Market Watch says, IMF Bombshell: Age of America Nears End (see story below).
This article covers a report by the International Monetary Fund that predicts the end of what they call “The Age of America.” The IMF says that China will overtake the American economy in 2016.
The fact of the matter is that the data and statistics cited by the IMF are flawed.
But this does not dismiss the fact that the Chinese economy is growing at a much more rapid rate than the American economy; and if we do not change the way in which we are operating our economy, and stop the annual trillion dollar budget deficits, the Chinese economy will indeed surpass that of America.
But that is not the point of this blog post. No, the point of this post is that this story is IMF black propaganda about the U.S. The point of Crisis by Design the Untold Story of the Global Financial Coup is that the financial crisis was created in order to take down the US and the US dollar as the stable point in international finance and to replace them with a “Global Monetary Authority.”
Those of you that have followed my writings and/or this blog, know that in fact a Global Monetary Authority was put in place in April of 2009. That’s a done deal. But America still clings to economic leadership.
The significance of this statement issued by the IMF is not the phony facts and figures. No, it’s that the article is consistent with the IMF’s jihad, along with the Bank for International Settlements, to destroy the dollar and America as an economic power by putting out this kind of black PR.
And that’s what it is. This is Black Propaganda that aimed at driving home the message that America is on her way out.
Let be honest here, we have brought this on ourselves. We cannot continue to enjoy any semblance of economic prosperity or, for that matter, be the strongest economy in the world with trillion-dollar-per year budget deficits. But the point I am making here is that the IMF is doing everything it can PR-wise to create the impression that America’s best days are behind her. We need to restore fiscal sanity to Washington government to ensure that that is not the case.
Keep your powder.
John Truman Wolfe, author of America the Litigious, Mind Games, and The Gift has released his latest stunning bestseller – Crisis By Design: The Untold Story of the Global Financial Coup and What You Can Do About It. Wolfe draws on experience as a senior credit officer in two banks, and co-founder of a prestigious Los Angeles based business management company, where as a registered investment adviser he oversaw the financial and investment matters of some of the biggest names in Hollywood.
IMF Bombshell: Age of America Nears End
Commentary: China’s economy will surpass the U.S. in 2016
MarketWatch
April 25, 2011
The International Monetary Fund has just dropped a bombshell, and nobody noticed.
For the first time, the international organization has set a date for the moment when the “Age of America” will end and the U.S. economy will be overtaken by that of China.
And it’s a lot closer than you may think.
According to the latest IMF official forecasts, China’s economy will surpass that of America in real terms in 2016 — just five years from now.
Put that in your calendar.
It provides a painful context for the budget wrangling taking place in Washington, D.C., right now. It raises enormous questions about what the international security system is going to look like in just a handful of years. And it casts a deepening cloud over both the U.S. dollar and the giant Treasury market, which have been propped up for decades by their privileged status as the liabilities of the world’s hegemonic power.
According to the IMF forecast, whomever is elected U.S. president next year — Obama? Mitt Romney? Donald Trump? — will be the last to preside over the world’s largest economy.
Most people aren’t prepared for this. They aren’t even aware it’s that close. Listen to experts of various stripes, and they will tell you this moment is decades away. The most bearish will put the figure in the mid-2020s.
But they’re miscounting. They’re only comparing the gross domestic products of the two countries using current exchange rates.
That’s a largely meaningless comparison in real terms. Exchange rates change quickly. And China’s exchange rates are phony. China artificially undervalues its currency, the renminbi, through massive intervention in the markets.
The comparison that really matters
The IMF in its analysis looks beyond exchange rates to the true, real terms picture of the economies using “purchasing power parities.” That compares what people earn and spend in real terms in their domestic economies.
Under PPP, the Chinese economy will expand from $11.2 trillion this year to $19 trillion in 2016. Meanwhile the size of the U.S. economy will rise from $15.2 trillion to $18.8 trillion. That would take America’s share of the world output down to 17.7%, the lowest in modern times. China’s would reach 18%, and rising.
Just 10 years ago, the U.S. economy was three times the size of China’s.
Naturally, all forecasts are fallible. Time and chance happen to them all. The actual date when China surpasses the U.S. might come even earlier than the IMF predicts, or somewhat later. If the great Chinese juggernaut blows a tire, as a growing number fear it might, it could even delay things by several years. But the outcome is scarcely in doubt.
This is more than a statistical story. It is the end of the Age of America. As a bond strategist in Europe told me two weeks ago,
“We are witnessing the end of America’s economic hegemony.”
We have lived in a world dominated by the U.S. for so long that there is no longer anyone alive who remembers anything else. America overtook Great Britain as the world’s leading economic power in the 1890s and never looked back. And both those countries live under very similar rules of constitutional government, respect for civil liberties and the rights of property. China has none of those. The Age of China will feel very different.
Victor Cha, senior adviser on Asian affairs at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me China’s neighbors in Asia are already waking up to the dangers.
“The region is overwhelmingly looking to the U.S. in a way that it hasn’t done in the past,” he said. “They see the U.S. as a counterweight to China. They also see American hegemony over the last half-century as fairly benign. In China they see the rise of an economic power that is not benevolent, that can be predatory. They don’t see it as a benign hegemony.”
The rise of China, and the relative decline of America, is the biggest story of our time. You can see its implications everywhere, from shuttered factories in the Midwest to soaring costs of oil and other commodities. Last fall, when I attended a conference in London about agricultural investment, I was struck by the number of people there who told stories about Chinese interests snapping up farmland and foodstuff supplies — from South America to China and elsewhere.
This is the result of decades during which China has successfully pursued economic policies aimed at national expansion and power, while the U.S. has embraced either free trade or, for want of a better term, economic appeasement.
“There are two systems in collision,” said Ralph Gomory, research professor at NYU’s Stern business school. “They have a state-guided form of capitalism, and we have a much freer former of capitalism. What we have seen, he said, is “a massive shift in capability from the U.S. to China. What we have done is traded jobs for profit. The jobs have moved to China. The capability erodes in the U.S. and grows in China. That’s very destructive. That is a big reason why the U.S. is becoming more and more polarized between a small, very rich class and an eroding middle class. The people who get the profits are very different from the people who lost the wages.”
The next chapter of the story is just beginning.
U.S. spending spree won’t work
What the rise of China means for defense, and international affairs, has barely been touched on. The U.S. is now spending gigantic sums — from a beleaguered economy — to try to maintain its place in the sun. See: Pentagon spending is budget blind spot .
It’s a lesson we could learn more cheaply from the sad story of the British, Spanish and other empires. It doesn’t work. You can’t stay on top if your economy doesn’t.
Equally to the point, here is what this means economically, and for investors.
Some years ago I was having lunch with the smartest investor I know, London-based hedge-fund manager Crispin Odey. He made the argument that markets are reasonably efficient, most of the time, at setting prices. Where they are most likely to fail, though, is in correctly anticipating and pricing big, revolutionary, “paradigm” shifts — whether a rise of disruptive technologies or revolutionary changes in geopolitics. We are living through one now.
The U.S. Treasury market continues to operate on the assumption that it will always remain the global benchmark of money. Business schools still teach students, for example, that the interest rate on the 10-year Treasury bond is the “risk-free rate” on money. And so it has been for more than a century. But that’s all based on the Age of America.
No wonder so many have been buying gold. If the U.S. dollar ceases to be the world’s sole reserve currency, what will be? The euro would be fine if it acts like the old deutschemark. If it’s just the Greek drachma in drag … not so much.
The last time the world’s dominant hegemon lost its ability to run things singlehandedly was early in the past century. That’s when the U.S. and Germany surpassed Great Britain. It didn’t turn out well.
IMF and the World Bank Destroying Countries
The IMF/World Bank are systematically tearing nations apart. It’s not privatization. They steal from the people and hand it over to themselves. The World Bank/IMF pays off politicians to transfer a nation’s water systems, railways, telephone companies, nationalized oil companies, gas stations, etc. to IMF-backed transnational companies, which they later destroy after transferring the assets to dummy corporations.
By Richard Salbato, UnityPublishing.com
March 22, 2002
The World Bank/IMF is owned and controlled by NM Rothschild and 30 to 40 of the wealthiest people in the world. For over 150 years they have planned to take over the world through money.
The former chief economist of the World Bank, Joe Stiglitz, was fired recently. He pointed out to top executives that every country in which the IMF/World Bank is involved has ended up with a crashed economy, a destroyed government, and sometimes in flames with riots.
Before Joe Stiglitz was fired, he took a large stack of secret documents out of the World Bank. These secret documents from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund reveal that the IMF required nations:
to sign secret agreements of 111 items
in which they agreed to sell off their key assets — water, electric, gas, etc.
in which they agreed to take economic steps which are really devastating to the nations involved
in which they pay off the politicians billions of dollars to Swiss bank accounts to do this transfer of a countries fixed assets
If they do not agree to these steps they are cut-off from all international borrowing. Today no one can survive if they can’t borrow money in the international marketplace, whether you are people or corporations or countries. If that does not work, they overthrow the government and plant lies about the former government and/or even rewrite history.
The Argentina Plan
Inside documents from Argentina show the secret Argentine plan. This is signed by Jim Wolfensen, the president of the World Bank. Argentina has had six presidents in five weeks because their economy is completely destroyed. This happened because they started out in the end of the 80s with orders from the IMF and World Bank to sell-off all their assets, public assets, like their water system. Then they taxed the people.
They created big government and big government handed it off to the private IMF/World Bank. They pay off the politicians billions in Swiss bank accounts.
The Enron Connection
The water system of Buenos Aires was sold off for a song to a company called Enron. A pipeline that runs between Argentina and Chile was sold off to Enron.
Then the globalists blew out Enron after transferring the assets to another dummy corporation.
They come in, pay off politicians to transfer the water systems, the railways, the telephone companies, the nationalized oil companies, gas stations, etc. — the politicians then hand it over to the IMF for nothing. The Globalists pay off politicians individually, billions a piece in Swiss bank accounts.
The plan is total slavery for the entire population. Enron is a dummy corporation for money laundering, drug money, etc.
IMF Planed Riots
The IMF/World Bank are systematically tearing nations apart, whether it’s Ecuador or Argentina. It’s not privatization. They steal it from the people and hand it over to the IMF/World Bank.
They hand it over, generally to the cronies — like Citibank grabbed half the Argentine banks. British Petroleum grabbed pipelines in Ecuador. Enron grabbed water systems all over the place.
The problem is that they are destroying these systems as well. You can’t even get drinking water in Buenos Aires. It is not just a question of the theft. You can’t turn on the tap.
It is more than someone getting rich at the public expense.
And the IMF just got handed the Great Lakes. They have the sole control over the water supply now.
The IMF and the World Bank is 51% owned by the United States Treasury.
Every country IMF/World Bank has meddled in, they have destroyed and the economies ended up in flames.
They even plan the riots. They know that when they squeeze a country and destroy its economy, you get riots in the streets. And they admit that it an IMF riot. Because you have riot, all the capital runs away from your country and that gives the opportunity for the IMF to then add more conditions.
California Utilities & Enron
It is really an imperial economy war to implode countries, and now they are doing it here with Enron.
They are getting so greedy — they are preparing it for America. The chief investigators of Enron for the State of California said that that it’s not just the stockholders that got ripped off. They sucked millions, billions of dollars out of the public pocket in Texas and California in particular.
Where are the assets? See, everybody says there are no assets left since Enron was a dummy corporation — from the experts I’ve had on — and they transferred all those assets to other corporations and banks.
According to the investigations, they are telling me that California’s electric bills were pumped up unnecessarily by 9 to 12-billion dollars. California’s paid, but I don’t know who they are going to get it back from now. Well they actually caught the Governor buying it for $137 per megawatt and selling it back to Enron for $1 per megawatt, and doing it over and over and over again.
Enron’s Auditor – Lord Wakeham
The men who designed the system in California for deregulation then went to work for Enron right after.
Lord Wakeham, who was on the audit committee of Enron, is the head of NM Rothschild. There isn’t anything that he doesn’t have his fingers in. He’s on something like fifty Boards. And he was supposed to be head of the audit committee watching how Enron kept the books. In fact, they were paying him consulting fees on the side. He was in Margaret Thatcher’s government, and he’s the one who authorized Enron to come into Britain and take over power plants in Britain.
Enron owned a water system in the middle of England. This is what Lord Wakeham approved and then they gave him a job on the board. On top of being on the board, they gave him a huge consulting contract. Lord Wakeham is supposed to be in charge of the audit committee to see how they were handling their accounts, but he is also the head of the board to regulate the media.
Lord Wakeham is trying to pass laws in England where you can’t own your own water. He can’t be touched because he regulates the media.
Rothschild and the Illuminati
Burrow into NM Rothschild, you’ll find it all there: The IMF/World Bank implosion, how they bring down a country and destroy the resources of the people.
First you open up the capital markets. That is, you sell off your local banks to foreign banks. Then you go to what’s called market-based pricing. That’s the stuff like in California where everything is free market and you end up with water bills no one can pay. Then open up your borders to trade — complete free marketeering. Its like the opium wars. This isn’t free trade; this is coercion trade. This is war.
They are taking apart economies through this. China has a 40% tariff on the USA, but the USA has a 2% on them. That’s not free and fair trade. It’s to force all industry into a country that the globalists fully control, and they control China.
Wal-Mart
The Illuminati owns Wal-Mart and Wal-Mart has 700 plants in China. There is almost nothing in a Wal-Mart store that comes from the United States of America, despite all the eagles on the wall. They have big flags saying “Buy American” and there’s hardly anything from America in their stores.
What’s even worst is they will hire a factory and right next to it will be the sister factory which is inside a prison. You can imagine the conditions of these workers producing this lovely stuff for Wal-Mart.
Briberization
Sell off the water company and that’s worth, over ten years, let’s say about 5 billion dollars, ten percent of that is 500 million. A Senator from Argentina said that he got a call from George W. Bush in 1988 saying ‘give the gas pipeline in Argentina to Enron.’ Enron was going to pay one-fifth of the world’s price for their gas. The Argentine Senator asked ‘how can you make such an offer?’ The answer was that if they only pay one-fifth that leaves quit a little bit for you to go in your Swiss bank account. This is the same George W. Bush who said he didn’t get to know Ken Lay of Enron until 1994. Now they are having these white-wash hearings.
Bill Clinton, to get even with Bush’s big donor, cut Enron out of the California power market. He put a cap on the prices they could charge. They couldn’t charge more than one-hundred times the normal price for electricity. That upset Enron. So Ken Lay personally wrote a note to Dick Cheney saying get rid of Clinton’s cap on prices. Within 48 hours of George W. Bush taking office, his energy department reversed the clamps on Enron.
Step Two
Argentina is an example of step two of the IMF. A fifth of the population of Argentina is unemployed, and they said cut the unemployment benefits drastically, take away pension funds, cut the education budgets.
Now if you cut the economy in the middle of a recession (created by the IMF), you absolutely demolish the nation.
You don’t start cutting the budget in a recession: you start spending money to stimulate the economy. You don’t raise taxes, you cut them. But they tell these countries you’ve got to cut, and cut, and cut. Why? Well, according to the inside documents, it’s so you can make payments to foreign banks — the foreign banks are collecting 21% to 70% interest. This is loan-sharking. If fact, it was so bad that they required Argentina to get rid of the laws against loan-sharking because any bank would be a loan-shark under Argentine law.
Part 3 and Part 4
Then they open up the borders for trade; that’s the new opium wars. They destroy an economy so that it can not produce anything, and then open the borders to sell their own goods.
They force nations to pay horrendous amounts for things like drugs, legal drugs. That’s how you end up with an illegal drug trade. What’s there left to survive on except sell us smack and crack?
And so, drive the whole world down, blow out their economies, and then buy the rest of it up for pennies on the dollar.
What’s Part 4 of the IMF/World Bank Plan?
In Part 4, they take apart the government by the coup d’etat and they install their own corporate government. In Venezuela where they have an elected president of the government, the IMF has announced that they would support a transition government if the president were removed. They are not saying that they are going to get involved in politics — they would just support a transition government.
What that effectively is saying is: we will pay for the coup d’etat if the military overthrows the current president, because the current president of Venezuela has said no to the IMF. He told those guys to go packing. They brought their teams in and said you have to do this and that. And he said, I don’t have to do anything. He said what I’m going to do is double the taxes on oil corporations because we have a whole lot of oil in Venezuela. And I’m going to double the taxes on oil corporations and then I will have all the money I need for social programs and the government — and we will be a very rich nation.
Well, as soon as he did that, they started fomenting trouble with the military. And watch this because the President of Venezuela will be out of office in three months or shot dead. They are not going to allow him to raise taxes on the oil companies.
Bush Administration Signals End to Open Government
1) The Bush administration invoked executive privilege to keep Clinton-era documents secret. The move shocked Republican lawmakers. Why would Bush want to cover up for Bill Clinton? Representative Dan Burton, who is the Chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, even threatened to hold Bush in contempt of Congress unless he releases several sets of subpoenaed Justice Department documents that he has hidden. It does not matter. Bush promises to never comply with congressional investigators. Bush is determined to keep Clinton’s crimes concealed.
2) Bush flatly refuses to hand over records of internal energy task force meetings. These records could either incriminate or exonerate Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney regarding allegations of conflict of interest in the Enron scandal. Even the General Accounting Office is suing the White House (a first) to obtain the records. Again, Bush refuses to comply. The president is even willing to ignore court orders demanding the release of documents.
3) Just this week, the United States Government’s top lawyer told the U.S. Supreme Court that officials have the right to lie to American citizens. No, he did not explain how that assertion jives with Bush’s Christian testimony.
4) Two days ago, the White House ordered all federal agencies to delete their web sites of all “sensitive information.” The White House did not say what information it considered “sensitive.”
5) Vice President Cheney is already the stealthiest Vice President in U.S. history. Seldom does anyone know where he is or what he is doing.
6) President Bush admitted to forming a mysterious “shadow government” comprised of unknown persons who are living in underground bunkers at secret sites outside Washington, D.C. Not even top legislators know who these people are or what instructions have been given them. Furthermore, how does a “shadow government” mesh with the U.S. Constitution? These questions have never been (and never will be) answered.
When asked by a reporter about these and other matters, Bush said,
“I have a duty to protect the executive branch from legislative encroachment.”
Congress, for the most part, only learns of Bush’s clandestine carryings-on as brief sketches leak out in the press.
However, none of this seems to bother the American people or members of the press. Bush is a wartime president (even though no one officially declared war) and, therefore, can do anything he pleases with total impunity. In truth, the Bush administration signals the end to both open government and constitutional government — and few people seem to even notice.
Christians cannot comment on Government in USA
Congress has decided to silence you, me, and any other Christian who dares express a moral view that may impact a political campaign! The U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate have both passed a so-called “campaign finance reform” bill … and now President Bush has said he will sign it into law! In spite of all the propaganda in the media, this legislation actually silences Christian and conservative organizations — banning them from commenting on key moral issues during election campaigns … while allowing the liberal media to speak out freely.
This new law is a SLAP IN THE FACE to our right to free speech. It is absolutely, blatantly UNCONSTITUTIONAL!
This legislation effectively strips church and conservative leaders and organizations of religious free speech during elections.
For me or any other conservative spokesperson to comment and inform you with a Christian perspective would be illegal … and the threat of jail a reality!
Even your own pastor cannot inform you on key political and moral issues when it comes time to vote!
So where will you get all your information about the political and moral views of candidates? FROM THE BIASED, SECULAR MEDIA!
From The Wilderness Publications, http://www.copvcia.com, see a related article on how scientists and academics are viewing the possibility of reducing the world’s population by more than four billion people and doing so selectively with DNA biological weapons. See how hundreds of microbiologists are being assassinated world-wide to keep this plan in the hands of only a few people. [www.rense.com, http://www.narconews.com]
The G20: The New Ruling Aristocracy of the World?
Share the World’s Resources
November 2007
The finance ministers and reserve bank governors of the G20 countries gather with leading International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank officials. They tell us that these politicians come to create a better world for us. The biggest joke of all is that they will expect us to believe this lie. Of course, if you look past the superficial pomp, glitz and sheer propaganda that are part of their gatherings, you will find that a better world is not being created for us; a better world is being created for the global elite and their transnational companies to our detriment.
The G20 only cares about economic growth for the richest companies on earth; they really don’t care about us — we are inconsequential to them until we rise up in protest. Indeed, at their meetings the G20 will be formulating plans to further exploit the workers and poor of the world to produce more wealth for transnational companies and their greedy capitalist owners.
The G20’s Composition and Agenda
The G20 comprises of the 20 biggest economies in the world, in the form of the US, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Canada, Russia, Japan, South Africa, China, Brazil, Australia, Argentina, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and Turkey. Together these countries account for 90% of the world gross product and over 80% of world trade. Added to this, with their combined voting power in the IMF and the World Bank, these countries completely dominate these institutions. Indeed, the President of the World Bank and Managing Director of the IMF are required to attend all the G20 meetings.
The G20 was established by the G8 in 1999 in the wake of the Asian economic crisis. At the time of the Asian financial crisis, some of the largest economies in the South came under speculative attack, for which neo-liberal policies such as financial liberalisation had created the space. When the crisis initially broke, billions of dollars were wiped out in a matter of hours and it threatened to spread to the countries of the North.
Indeed, the Asian economic crisis shook the most powerful countries and economic institutions, such as the IMF and the World Bank, to their core. It actually endangered the entire neo-liberal global project that had been formulated to supposedly overcome the crisis that capitalism had first began to experience in the 1970s, which was and is based on the problem of over-accumulation of capital.
To shore up the neo-liberal system, the giants of the G8, led by the United States, realised that they needed to further draw in the biggest countries of the South, such as South Africa, India, China, and Brazil into the global financial governance system. The G20 was one attempt to do this and in effect rescue the global neo-liberal agenda, which had been — and still is — so favourable to the interests of transnational companies.
The G20’s self-stated purpose is to meet annually to discuss policies that will promote continuous high economic growth for transnational corporations across the world, whilst at the same time attempting to limit any possible financial crisis that may pose a threat to high economic growth. To do this, the G20 has opted to promote neo-liberal globalisation even further.
The most important document that has been produced by the G20 so far is the Accord for Sustained Growth. It outlines the policies that the G20 countries aim to promote in order to create an environment in which the largest companies in the world can maintain high growth.
One of the most important pillars of the G20’s Accord for Sustained Growth is financial liberalisation. As such, the G20 has called for countries across the world to further open up their economies to capital flows. The goal of this is to increasingly allow companies to move money in and out of any economy in the world.
Thus, the G20 wants to entrench an environment where corporations can look for countries and areas of investment that offer the highest rates of return. This includes allowing companies to buy assets in any country and speculate on any stock market in the world.
Of course, financial liberalisation has already spawned speculation on currencies and stock markets on an unprecedented scale, which in turn has created financial volatility and increased the likelihood of another financial crisis. Due to the fact that the G20 believes in financial liberalisation, their answer to this increased financial volatility is not for countries to impose financial controls to stop speculation but rather for countries to build up their currency reserves and strengthen their capital markets.
The G20 countries, including South Africa, believe that countries could use these reserves to defend their currencies and stock markets when they are attacked by speculators. Building up reserves means that countries have to divert money away from social spending. Thus, the G20 countries believe that speculation should be allowed to continue, and its negatives effects, such as currency and stock market crashes, should be borne by the poor, who will lose further social services so that vast reserves can be built up to defend currencies and stock markets when the corporate speculators descend on them.
Through the Accord for Sustained Growth, the G20 has also called for all countries to advance the privatisation of state-owned assets and public services. This creates further investment opportunities for transnational corporations, who can now swoop into the countries of the South and buy up the ex-state owned assets that offer the best possibilities for future profiteering.
In fact, under South Africa’s chairmanship, the G20 has been pushing countries to privatise state assets at an increasingly rapid rate in order to use the money received from this to service debts to the IMF, the World Bank, and private Northern banks. Since much of the debt owed by the South is illegitimate, this call for the countries of the South to sell their public assets to pay the IMF, the World Bank and Northern private banks is especially sickening.
It will translate into a situation where people across the globe will lose the few remaining social services that they still have so that the Northern private banks can grow richer.
The G20 countries have also sought to assist the largest transnational corporations to increase their profits in a variety of other ways. The G20 has promoted policies to create a flexible labour market on a global scale. In other words, the G20 are promoting policies that strip workers of their few remaining rights so that corporations can pay them less and less and thereby drive up their profit rates.
Along with this, the G20 has implemented policies that are aimed at protecting the intellectual property rights (IRPs) of corporations, including patents on medicines. In doing so, the message being sent by the majority of the G20 countries is that the interests of transnational corporations are more important than people’s lives.
Through the Accord for Sustained Growth, the G20 countries have also committed themselves to implementing and furthering trade liberalisation. Indeed, all of the G20 countries are firm believers in free trade because it is the transnational companies that are based within their territories that benefit from free trade regionally and globally. For this reason, the G20 countries have used the G20 meetings as a forum to discuss how they could collectively kickstart the stalled WTO negotiations. In fact, the G20 countries are the driving force within the WTO: they are the ones that have driven the entire WTO process through the exclusive green room meetings in which they participate to the exclusion of smaller countries of the South.
At their meetings, the G20 will also be discussing the possibility of implementing a number of reforms within the World Bank and the IMF. However, the reforms that have been suggested by the G20 countries are only superficial. The largest countries of the South involved in the G20, such as South Africa, Brazil, China, and India, want to reform the World Bank and the IMF in order to receive greater voting rights for themselves within these institutions. They have, however, not called for equal voting rights for all countries in IMF and the World Bank, which is significant. In effect, this means that South Africa, Brazil, China, and India are still willing to deny larger voting rights for smaller nations within the IMF and the World Bank.
It, therefore, appears as if these G20 countries wish to use the G20 to push for greater voting rights for themselves in the IMF and the World Bank so that they can join the older imperial powers in using these institutions to promote the expansionary agendas of their own capitalist elite. Certainly the reforms that are proposed by the G20 countries regarding the IMF and the World Bank have not extended to questioning the neo-liberal policies these institutions have forced upon poorer nations of the South. This is because all of the G20 countries are firm believers in neo-liberal economics.
In fact, the G20 countries have openly stated that as part of the proposed IMF and the World Bank “reform” process, the control that these institutions have over smaller countries’ economies should be strengthened. This would entail the further imposition of neo-liberal economic policies on smaller countries.
It is telling that the G20 countries, especially South Africa, India, and Brazil, wish to extend the powers and reach of the IMF and the World Bank at the very moment that these institutions have lost much of their power and credibility in the South. Indeed, the IMF and the World Bank, and the neo-liberal agenda that they push, are being openly challenged by countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, and Ecuador. The defence that G20 countries, such as South Africa and Brazil, have mounted on behalf of the IMF and the World Bank clearly demonstrates that these countries are far more aligned with the older imperial powers than they are with progressive countries, such as Venezuela and Ecuador.
The Consequences of the Policies Pushed by the G20
The consequences of the neo-liberal policies that have, and are, being pushed by the G20 countries are familiar: the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. While most of the G20 countries are now richer than ever under neo-liberal globalisation; as many as 80 other countries are now poorer than they were in the 1970s.
Although trade has increased under the global neo-liberal ‘free’ trade regime, it has only been an elite who have benefited. The portion of exports from the poorest countries has declined markedly. In fact, the poorest 48 countries now only account for 0.4% of global exports. This is because the industries in these countries have been destroyed by imports flooding in under the banner of ‘free’ trade. All of this translates into a world of growing inequality: a world where the richest 400 people, the new global capitalist aristocracy, now have more money than the poorest 3 billion people combined.
While companies have made massive profits due to neo-liberal policies that are promoted by the G20 countries, the people of the world have suffered. Due to privatisation, billions of people have lost all access to social services, such as education, water, sanitation, and healthcare. This is because, in most countries, these services are now being sold by private companies as commodities: if you can’t afford to pay for such services, you don’t get them! The macabre result: over 1 billion people have lost access to clean drinking water; 2.6 billion people lack basic sanitation; over 1 billion people are illiterate; 820 million people suffer from malnutrition; over 1 billion people lack access to any form of healthcare; and 30 000 children die every day from poverty.
This takes place in a world where the amount of money spent by American and European companies on entertainment each year could give every person in the world access to enough food, proper healthcare, basic education, and clean water.
The Reasons Why the G20 Emerged
The event that led to the formation of the G20 was the Asian financial crisis. However, the actual reasons why the G20 was formed are more systemic and relate to the steady decline of US imperial power and the growing breakdown of US hegemony — the Asian crisis was simply the catalyst for the formation of the G20, not the reason why it was formed.
Since the early 1970s, and the beginning of the global capitalist crisis, the US’s global economic dominance and hegemony has been on the decline. In 1950, the US supplied 50% of the world’s gross product; by 2003 this had dropped to 20%. In 1950, 60% of all manufactured goods were produced in the US, today only 20% of manufactured goods derive from the US. Non-US companies now dominate most of the industries in the world. For example, 9 of the 10 largest electronics companies, 8 of the 10 largest car manufacturing companies, 7 of the 10 largest oil companies, and 19 out of the 25 largest banks in the world are non-American. Since 2002, the US has also been paying out more to foreign investors than it has received from its investments abroad. This, along with declining exports, has seen its current account deficit balloon.
As early as the mid-1970s, the global position of the US state and capital was declining and that they were losing market share and economic power to other imperial countries, such as France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan. Certain sections of US capital realised that the growing importance of countries such as Japan and Germany, along with decline of the US, could spark inter-imperial rivalry on a global scale, which would be detrimental to the capitalist system as a whole.
Some of the most important sections of the US capitalist class have been firm believers that the largest capitalists across the globe have a common interest in ensuring that there is a stable global environment that favours capital accumulation, even though they may compete with one another as individual capitalists. Thus, these influential US capitalists believe that the most powerful capitalist states should work together to create a global environment that favours the interests of the most powerful corporations in the world.
The influence that this section of US capital exerted over the US state led to the US forming the G7 in 1978. The formation of the G7 was aimed at persuading Western Europe and Japan that the US was willing to work with other capitalist powers to create a global environment that would favour the interests of all of the most powerful capitalists. On this basis, and through the G7, a collective imperialism was formed, which was headed up by the US, but included lesser imperial powers like the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, and Japan.
By the 1990s a number of countries in the South had also begun to emerge as regional imperialists. For example, since the 1990s, sections of Brazilian capital, with the assistance of the Brazilian state, have been rapidly expanding into other Latin American countries. In East Asia, China has emerged as a major player and now looks set to rival the US globally. Similarly, South Africa has emerged as a regional imperialist in Africa. The South African state has been working hand in glove with South African corporations to assist them to expand into other African countries. This has seen South Africa becoming the largest foreign direct investor in Africa.
With countries such as South Africa, Brazil, India, Australia, and China emerging as regional powerhouses, the US was faced with a further devolution of its power in the regions where these countries were and are acting as imperialist powers. Again the US indicated to these countries that it would be willing to cooperate with them. In doing so, the US co-opted South Africa, Brazil, and India into the collective imperial system that it had created with lesser imperial powers like the UK, Germany, France, etc. It did this in a number of ways. For example, South Africa, China, Brazil, and India were welcomed into the inner circles of the World Economic Forum.
The World Economic Forum has been one of the central institutions through which capitalists and leaders from the South have been inducted into the emerging global capitalist aristocracy. Along with this, regional emerging imperialists, such as South Africa, were drawn into the centres of power in the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank. Similarly, the G20 was established to entice the emerging regional imperial powers into the global collective imperial system. The aim of this was to ensure global stability so that a climate which favours capital accumulation globally could be assured. Of course, the new regional imperial powers like South Africa have not joined as equal partners; they are lesser partners in the global collective imperial system. This can be seen by the fact that the G20 is not yet a highly formal structure like the G8.
Despite acting as a collective globally, through such institutions as the G20, each of the powers involved in the collective imperial system has its specific region of the world in which it operates as the prominent imperialist power to further its own capitalist entities interests. For example, the US’s main strategic imperialist spheres are Latin America, the Middle East, parts of Africa, and parts of Asia; while Britain’s imperialist ambitions are mainly restricted to some of its ex-colonies.
Similarly, South Africa’s imperialist sphere covers much of sub-Saharan Africa. As a result, where two or more imperial powers’ interests clash in a certain region or country, they will compete in that region or country, even though globally they will remain aligned through institutions such as the G20 and the World Economic Forum. Hence, although not in conflict globally, in certain areas in Africa, South African, British, and US interests do clash. This, however, does not preclude South Africa, Britain, and the US from working together in other areas of Africa where they have common interests.
Within the collective imperial system, the various countries continuously jostle to increase their powerbases. Specifically, under George Bush Jr, the US has acted unilaterally on a number of occasions to strengthen its leadership position within the global collective imperial system. It has targeted strategically located countries such as Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and Zimbabwe through military actions and sanctions. Such actions were not just directed at these countries — they were actually warnings to the regional and global imperial powers located close to these countries or with interests in these countries, such as the EU, Russia, China, and South Africa.
For example, the US invasion of Iraq was aimed at seizing oil interests in Iraq for US companies to the detriment of European oil companies. Added to this, the military attack on Iraq was also meant as a veiled warning to the European powers not to openly challenge the US’s leadership role in the global imperial system.
Such action by the US has even extended into a bid to gain global dominance as the sole imperial power. However, because of its declining economic and political power, the US has failed dismally in these actions. It has become bogged down in a war in Iraq, which it is losing. It has also failed to intimidate North Korea into submission and thereby undermine China’s power. Similarly it has also failed to get rid of the ZANU-PF in Zimbabwe, which was aimed at curbing South Africa’s imperial influence and power in sub-Saharan Africa.
By undertaking these actions, and failing to reach its goals, the US has found itself in a serious crisis. Due to these failures its leadership position in the global collective imperial system has been further eroded.
As a result of the costly wars it is waging, the US is now borrowing at an unprecedented rate: its debt now stands at over $9 trillion. Most of this debt is owed to countries such as China, Russia, India, Brazil, and South Africa. If the dollar continues to weaken, there is a real danger for the US that these countries will withdraw the money that they have invested in US bonds. If this happens, the US economy will be in severe crisis and may even experience an economic meltdown, which will have knock-on effects globally.
At this point the US is at a crossroads. It can try and maintain its leadership position through military might: abandon initiatives such as the G8, the G20, and the World Economic Forum, and attack the emerging regional and global imperial powers militarily and/or economically. This is an unlikely option. Iraq has proved that despite all of its high tech weapons the US is militarily over-stretched. It could not fight wars on multiple fronts like the British Empire of old.
Added to this, a global imperial war — along with the trade barriers that would accompany it — are not in the interests of the biggest US transnational companies. The largest transnational companies, and their global capitalist owners, want a global neo-liberal free trade regime. They need such a global free trade regime to function as truly transnational companies and maximise their profits.
The other option that the US has — to deal with its declining power — is to further broaden and strengthen the global collective imperial system. This would perhaps involve replacing the G8 with the G20 and granting the reforms in the IMF and the World Bank that have been demanded by China, South Africa, India, and Brazil. This would also further undermine the US’s power, but it would further bind the global elite in the G20, and their project, together. Such an option is actually favoured by some sections of the US capitalist elite, and seems the most likely path the US will follow.
Even if the G20’s power is increased, and the global collective imperial system is strengthened, there are no guarantees that capitalism will not experience a massive crisis in the future. Neo-liberalism has created a form of capitalism that is volatile, highly unstable, and susceptible to crises. Added to this, capitalism has created an unprecedented environmental crisis.
Conclusion
The meetings of the G20 are meetings of the global elite. Despite the rivalries between the countries involved, they have proven and continue to prove a willingness to work together to force neo-liberal economic policies on the people of the planet.
The aim of such policies is to maximise the profits of the largest transnational corporations in the world. Like the US, the people of the world also face a choice. We can sit by and watch the G20 — along with the other forums that the collective imperial powers use — push through neo-liberal policies, or we can join together and resist.
We can join hands with the movements that have emerged across the world, like the Zapatistas, to struggle against neo-liberal capitalism and the collective global imperial system. We can also join with the countries — like Venezuela and Ecuador — that have used the decline of the US to embark upon a path away from capitalism.
The choice is ours: we can choose to struggle to make another world possible or we can sit in silence and let the likes of Trevor Manuel and his allies in the G20 do what they want.
Building the NWO by Stealth
BibleBelievers.org.au
Once the City of London (the financial sector within London) used British Military Forces to carve out a physical empire for the British East India Company and the bankers. Nowadays the ruling Venetian oligarchy and its Khazar Monarchy is dividing and conquering the world by a different form of imperialism. Globalization.
It has been estimated that the Monarchy presently dominates over 90% of the present international financial system. The money-power has long been transferring its wealth from paper to hard assets in order to position itself to rule following the complete collapse of the financial structure. Control of resources, trade, financial markets, currency and commodity prices have enabled asset-stripping, sometimes by destroying national economies as in Russia and Asia, or through commanding debt-reduction strategies involving privatization of state assets like banks, airlines and water utilities as in Australia.
The final objective in globalization is world depopulation and a return to serfdom as directed by UN and national policies in place since at least the 1980’s.
The UN is an agency for legitimizing and enforcing the designs of the City of London for their planned NWO. By dividing a nation so as to gain a foothold in some strategic area they can destabilize that nation, bringing it under economic restraint or blackmail by the IMF and World Bank. Then UN “peacekeeping” troops can occupy the troubled region indefinitely, making as it were, a UN colony defended by “the rest of the world” team in behalf of what Benjamin Disraeli called the “Hidden Hand”.
The IMF is “bag man” for the International Bankers. It assembles guarantees and collateral from nations like Australia, whose leaders are controlled by the City, in order to salvage the bad debts of private banking consortia when nations default. And it ensures collection of usury by enforcing “conditionalities,” which, if ignored, can mean the boycott of international credit.
The Australian League of Rights stated in their weekly Newsletter, On Target (Vol.35, No.37 – September 24, 1999),
“East Timor is merely the most recent of a long list of countries destroyed by the apparent inaction of the United Nations. And it is not the first time Clinton has stood by and refused to commit Combat Troops that could have prevented the slaughter of thousands of innocent people. Populations the length and breadth of Africa have been decimated with exactly the same treatment.”
(Half of all newborn babies in Africa have AIDS, a disease made by the USDOD and distributed in Africa by WHO vaccinations. Average life expectancy for these newborn babies will be 25 years, the continent will be depopulated as planned and control or resources will revert to the oligarchy through their presence and geopolitical predominance).
“Another independent nation threatened by the actions of the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization (formerly GATT), both part of the United Nations and the evolving ‘World Government’, is Taiwan.”
“The purpose of the UN force currently taking control (in East Timor) is explained by UN spokesman David Wimhurst: “that mission includes as everybody knows the eventual formation of transmission of administration which would allow at some point East Timor to become independent.”
“Independent” in this context means independent only of Indonesia. The UN is the political and military arm of the World Bank. The essential criterion for East Timor to achieve independent nation status is that it submits to becoming a subsidiary of the World Bank. The people were allowed a referendum on whether they wanted to be free from Jakarta, but they will never be allowed a say in their relationship to the debt merchants.
“ABC news reports that the World Bank says it is ready to “offer” financial help to rebuild East Timor. “Bank president James Wolfensohn says a team will be sent to the territory as soon as it is safe. Mr. Wolfensohn continues ‘the people that will be running the (reconstruction) program… will be the UN, but subject to what the UN decides, I think we will certainly be trying to work with and embrace the East Timorese. And I would expect that representatives of the potential East Timorese government will in fact be in Washington in the next several days and we will be ready to talk to them.'” They are currently talking to East Timor’s independence leader, Xanana Gusmao.”
“In scenes reminiscent of John Howard’s first days as Prime Minister, if Mr. Gusmao says what the UN wants to hear, and signs the fledgling state into eternal debt bondage, he will be allowed to become head of state. If not, agreeable replacements will be swiftly and professionally vetted. Nothing will be left to chance on this issue. Disraeli wrote over 100 years ago that the world is run by people very different to those that most people are aware of.”
“It is an illusion also that East Timor is reliant on the World Bank for its reconstruction. The reconstruction of East Timor is reliant on the physical amount of the natural resources and technology available to it. The finance system is a man-controlled one which should not be allowed to restrict these physical realities” (end of On Target quote).
US Secretary of Defense, William Cohen said in Jakarta today, that unless Indonesia disarms the militia, prosecutes those responsible for the violence and stops the massacres in East Timor, the US will do severe damage to Indonesia.
We should view events in East Timor as a continuation of what has happened in Kosova. The City of London created the situation in East Timor to splinter Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous nation, and in the process pick-up the vast oil, gas and mineral riches of the Timor Sea as they position themselves to maintain power following the collapse of world currencies.
Until the Asian Economic Meltdown was inflicted in 1997, Indonesia was prospering, with a national oil, industry, manufacturing, forestry and mining development and a poverty rate lower than the US. Within six-months the economic gains achieved in the previous 25 years were lost when at the insistence of lackies of the City of London in the Australian government, and the pro-IMF oligarchy installed through US efforts in 1965, the nation capitulated to the IMF.
It now becomes clear that the Timor Gap Treaty, whereby one man, ex-Foreign Minister Gareth Evans, granted Indonesia sovereignty over hundreds of billions of dollars worth of proven oil and gas reserves, was a conspiracy. We see now the Senator’s loyalties lay with the City of London who plan to hold the world’s resources in a NWO. Doubtless he has purchased the reward he has long coveted, of high office with the UN (at US$300,000.00) following his resignation from the Australian Parliament last week (with a A$2.3 million Superannuation payout).
And Prime Minister John Howard’s complicity as an agent of the City is demonstrated by Australia’s call for a referendum in East Timor after helping to make it an economic cripple by enticing it into IMF conditionalities following the Asian Economic Meltdown.
Small wonder Indonesian troops inflicted a scorched earth policy in East Timor. Their government know they have been betrayed by Australia. When Indonesia accepted IMF help it destroyed their economy and their society. By withstanding ex-Prime Minister Paul Keating’s bullying tactics, Dr. Mahathir rejected the IMF and Malaysia has prospered. On the other hand, Kosova was destroyed and given to drug lords and criminals because Yugoslavia was independent of the IMF and refused to privatise state assets. As with World War II, the strategy behind the aggression against Serbia is for the break-up of Russia.
There was more than altruism behind John Howard’s guaranteeing a bankrupt Indonesia to the IMF with Australian surety. If would be drawing a long bow to suppose John Howard was unaware of his part in this plan to break-up that nation for the benefit of the City. Now he is supervising — with the lives of Australian soldiers as surety.
The current edition of The Philadelphia Trumpet compares Australia’s army with “Dad’s Army” of the 1970’s British TV comedy series. It exposes Australia’s defense unpreparedness and the dismantling of the Australian Security and Intelligence Organization (ASIO) by successive Fabian socialist governments since 1972 and quoting The Bulletin (August 3), rehearses “a decade of disastrous intelligence and economic judgments at bureaucratic and academic levels” with intelligence bungling and constant failure to foresee situations before they arise.
According to On Target, Australia’s Defense spending has averaged 1.9% of GDP whereas ABC Radio National today estimated that Australians spend 1% of GDP purchasing marijuana.
Keep listening to see if International Narcotics, a common denominator associated with recent conflict in Kosova, Colombia, Chechynia, Turkey, Afghanistan, Kurdistan and Dagestan turns out to be an important factor in the East Timor situation. Drug money laundering through City of London-controlled banks provides an important sounce of physical cash (as distinct from electronic funds) is big business, and when you say IMF think drugs.
Strauss-Kahn Screws Africa
By Greg Palast, The Guardian
May 20, 2011
Now that I’ve dispensed with the obvious and obnoxious teaser headline, let’s drop the towel and expose Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s history of arrogant abuse. The truth is, the grandee of the IMF has molested Africans for years.
On Wednesday, the New York Times ran five – count’em, FIVE – stories on Strauss-Kahn, Director-General of the International Monetary Fund. According to the Paper of Record, the charges against “DSK,” as he’s known in France, are in “contradiction” to his “charm” and “accomplishments” at the IMF.
Au contraire, mes chers lecteurs.
Director-General DSK’s cruelty, arrogance and impunity toward African and other nations as generalissimo of the IMF is right in line with the story told by the poor, African hotel housekeeper in New York City.
Let’s consider how the housekeeper from Guinea ended up here in New York. In 2002, this single mother was granted asylum. What drove her here? It began with the IMF rape of Guinea.
In 2002, the International Monetary Fund cut off capital inflows to this West African nation. Without the blessing of the International Monetary Fund, Guinea, which has up to half the world’s raw material for aluminum, plus oil, uranium, diamonds and gold, could not borrow a dime to develop these resources.
The IMF’s cut-off was, in effect, a foreclosure, and the nation choked and starved while sitting on its astonishing mineral wealth. As in the sub-prime mortgage foreclosures we see today, the IMF moved quickly to seize Guinea’s property.
But the IMF did not seize this nation’s riches for itself. Rather, it forced Guinea to sell off its resources to foreign corporations at prices much like the sale of furniture on the lawn of a foreclosed house.
The French, Americans, Canadians, Swiss (and lately, the Chinese) came in with spoons out and napkins tucked in under their chins, swallowing the nation’s bauxite, gold and more. In the meantime, the IMF ordered the end of trade barriers and thereby ruined local small holders.
As a result of the IMF attack, Guineans who could, fled for freedom and food. This week, then, marked the second time this poor African was molested by the IMF.
Now we have the context of how these two, the randy geezer of globalization and the refugee ended up, in quite different positions, in that New York hotel room.
Since taking over the IMF in 2007, erstwhile “Socialist” Strauss-Kahn has tightened the screws in an attempt to maintain the free-market finance mania that ruined this planet in the first place. [That’s worth a story in itself – and that’s coming. Our team has a stack of inside documents from the IMF that we will be releasing in my new book in the Fall.]
DSK’s lawyers say the relationship with the housekeeper was “consensual.” But DSK says that about all IMF agreements with nations over whom it holds life and death powers. That’s like saying a bank robbery is consensual so long as you don’t consider the gun.
Whether it was agreed-upon sex or brutal rape, it could only have been “consensual” in the same way that the people of Guinea consented to IMF-ordered financial rapine.
The Times article quotes an IMF crony of Strauss-Kahn saying DSK gets his way by “persuasion” not “bullying.” Tell that to the Greeks.
It was DSK who, last year, personally insisted on brutal terms for the so-called bail-out of Greece. “Strong conditionality” is the IMF term. Strauss-Kahn demanded not just a devastating cut in pensions and a deliberate increase in unemployment to 14%, but also the sell-off of 4,000 of 6,000 state-owned services. The DSK IMF plan allowed the financiers who set the financial fires of Greece to pick up the nation’s assets at a fire-sale price.
The Strauss-Kahn demands were not “tough love” for Greece: The love was reserved solely for the vulture bankers who received the IMF funds but were not required to accept one euro in lost profit in return. DSK, despite the advice of many, refused to ask the banks and speculators to reduce their usurious interest charges that were the root of Greece’s woes.
Requiring Greece to sell assets, drop trade barriers, and even end the rule that Greek ships use Greek sailors has nothing to do with saving Greece, but everything to do with DSK’s commitment to protect every banker’s balance sheet from unwanted violations.
I do not consider it a stretch to say that a predator in the bank boardroom suite assumes his impunity applies to the hotel suite.
Forensic economist and journalist Greg Palast, author of the New York Times bestsellers, Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, has investigated the IMF and World Bank for BBC Television Newsnight and the Guardian Newspapers (London) and Democracy Now! (New York).
Former IMF Chief (and sexual predator) DSK gets the boot at a protest rally of more than 100,000 in Greece on May 29th
Flashback: The Big Privatisation Debate – African Experiences (Excerpt)
With the intensified push for economic liberalization by the IMF, World Bank and other creditor institutions, more and more African leaders are agreeing to privatize. Over the past decade, African governments, often under pressure from creditor institutions to act quickly, have sold off thousands of state-owned enterprises. – Privatization shifts gears in Africa, African Recovery, April 2000
Africa Policy E-Journal
November 13, 2002
…Beginning in the 1970s, and gaining momentum throughout the 1980s and 1990s, has been the global trend away from state ownership and control towards privatisation.
Recent studies on privatisation in several African countries have shown that:
Privatisation led to the loss of over 60,000 jobs in Zambia while several hundred thousand workers were retrenched in Ghana.
Privatisation led to increases in the price of services. In Zambia, a privatised bus company dramatically increased the bus fares and closed down unprofitable — mostly rural — bus routes. As a result many Zambians now walk many kilometres to their workplaces and schools because they can no longer afford the bus fares or because the buses no longer service the areas where they live.
In Nigeria the prices for Kerosene increased by 6,000% between 1985 and 1995. Postal and telecommunications services increased their prices by 2,500 – 5,000% during that period while electricity prices increased by 883%.
In Ghana the introduction of cost recovery programmes were part of privatisation and resulted in increased fees for health and education services. As a result, they became unaffordable for the poor.
In Zimbabwe, privatisation also led to retrenchments and increased prices for services. The Cotton Company of Zimbabwe, for example, reduced its workforce from 3,000 to 500 after privatisation.
Flashback: IMF Forces African Countries to Privatise Water http://www.afrol.com
February 8, 2001
A review of IMF loan policies in forty random countries reveals that, during 2000, IMF loan agreements in 12 countries included conditions imposing water privatization or full cost recovery. In general, it is African countries, and the smallest, poorest and most debt-ridden countries, that are being subjected to IMF conditions on water privatization and full cost recovery.
Ironically, the majority of these loans were negotiated under the IMF’s new Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF), says Sara Grusky from the Globalization Challenge Initiative [http://www.challengeglobalization.org]. The reform was announced with great fanfare in 1999 when IMF officials claimed that the new loan facility would re-focus the IMF’s controversial structural adjustment measures on activities that borrowing government’s would identify as leading to poverty reduction.
An example is tiny Sao Tome and Principe. The island government has been put under pressure to pursue the implementation of a public enterprise reform through privatization and liquidation of nonperforming public enterprises for which buyers cannot be found. Nine public enterprises will be privatised, including the water and electricity utility and the national airline (Air Sâo Tomé).
The objective is said to be “to increase access to safe drinking water through rehabilitation of the waterworks system,” according to the IMF.
Some 20 percent of the population does not have access to safe water at present, but this number could rise if market prices are set on the service.
Rather than contributing to poverty reduction, water privatization and greater cost recovery make water less accessible and less affordable to the low income communities that make up the majority of the population in developing countries. The alternative is to revert to unsafe water sources or more distant sources.
The most immediate impact of reducing the accessibility and affordability of water falls on women and children. Worldwide, more than five million people, most of them children, die every year from illnesses caused from drinking poor quality water.
“When water become more expensive and less accessible, women and children, who bear most of the burden of daily household chores, must travel farther and work harder to collect water — often resorting to water from polluted streams and rivers,” says Sara Grusky.
This is confirmed by Ghanaian activist, Rudolf Amenga-Etego of the non-governmental Integrated Social Development Centre (ISODEC), who was in Washington recently highlighting the implications of having the poor pay “market rate tariffs” for water in Ghana. The World Bank has been pushing decentralisation in Ghana since 1988 and Ghana’s Water Sector Restructuring Project is expected to be approved by the Bank’s Board of Directors this year.
“Where cost-recovery becomes the underlying policy, water will become unaffordable for many poor people in Ghana,” Amenga-Etego told the news agency IPS.
The significance of finding such a high number of conditions relating to water privatization and water cost recovery in IMF loans is twofold. First, in the hierarchy of international financial institutions the IMF is at the top. Compliance with IMF conditions enables governments to receive the “seal of approval” that permits access to other international creditors and investors. Thus IMF conditions weigh especially heavily upon borrowing governments.
Second, it is quite common that World Bank loans have, as their first condition, compliance with certain IMF conditions. This is known as “cross conditionality.” In the division of labor between the two institutions, it is the World Bank that has primary responsibility for “structural” issues such as the privatization of state-owned companies.
Therefore, it can be presumed that in every country where IMF loan conditions include water privatization or full cost recovery, there are corresponding World Bank loan conditions and water projects that are implementing the financial, managerial, and engineering details required for such ‘restructurings’, says Sara Grusky.
In Ghana, civil society has announced its intention to resist the privatisation pushed for by the World Bank. Figures from the Government of Ghana have shown that only 36 percent of the rural population have access to safe water and 11 percent have adequate sanitation within the existing system. Water is also scarce in the capital, Accra. In typical working class areas of Accra such as Medina, it would cost a family 3,000 cedis to use 10 buckets of water a day if prises were to follow market rate tarrifs. Yet, the minimum wage per day is 7,000 cedis.
Also in South Africa, protest is spreading. The South African Anti-Privatisation Forum, a collective of community based organisations and labour unions, has mobilised against the privatisation of local government services, including water. Various strikes over social issues have marked the last year. The recent spread of cholera in South Africa is directly linked to the poor water quality in many working class areas. More expensive water could exclude even more people from clean and safe water.
The table identifies 8 African countries and paraphrases the specific IMF loan conditions relating to water privatization or water cost recovery, as mapped by the Globalization Challenge Initiative. In most of the countries, the IMF conditions require some form of privatization, and in several countries the conditions require both privatization and greater cost recovery…
– 14 –
Gong practitioners who had come from all over the country to Tian an men Square in Beijing to appeal or protest were arrested. Those who revealed their identities to their captors would be shipped back to their home localities. Their families would be implicated in their Falun Gong activities and pressured to join in the effort to get the practitioners to renounce Falun Gong. Their workplace leaders, their co-workers, their local government leaders would be held responsible and penalized for the fact that these individuals had gone to Beijing to appeal or protest.To protect their families and avoid the hostility of the people in their locality, many detained Falun Gong declined to identify themselves. The result was a large Falun Gong prison population whose identities the authorities did not know. As well, no one who knew them knew where they were.Though this refusal to identify themselves was done for protection purposes, it may have had the opposite effect. It is easier to victimize a person whose whereabouts is unknown to family members than a person whose location the family knows. This population is a remarkably undefended group of people, even by Chinese standards.This population of the unidentified was treated especially badly. As well, they were moved around within the Chinese prison system for reasons not explained to the prisoners.Was this the population which became the source of harvested Falun Gong organs?Obviously, the mere existence of this population does not tell us that this is so. Yet,the existence of this population provides a ready explanation for the source of harvested organs, if the allegations are true. Members of this population could just disappear without anyone outside of the prison system being the wiser. Information about this population of the unidentified is attached as an appendix to this report.In fact, there are many missing Falun Gong practitioners
In December, the Council of Europe released a report alleging that Hashim Thaçi, the prime minister of Kosovo, is the leader of a criminal ring that smuggles contraband — including human organs — throughout Eastern Europe. While organ-trafficking stories are hardly new, Thaçi’s has a bizarre twist: According to the COE, the prime minister used money generated from human organ sales to cement his political power in Kosovo, and he continues to profit from the traffic, along with many members of his Cabinet.
Thaçi’s ring traces its roots to the Kosovo war of 1998-1999. At that time, NATO forces shelled the region in an attempt to expel Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic, whose Serbian forces were committing acts of genocide. At the same time, the Kosovo Liberation Army was fighting against the Serbians on the ground. Thaçi rose to power as leader of the “Drenica Group,” a prominent part of the KLA.
Consolidation Through Coercion
According to the COE report, while Thaçi owed much of his power to his relationship with the U.S. and other Western powers, he also controlled illegal trade throughout the region. In addition to human trafficking and the sex trade, the Drenica Group sold weapons, narcotics, stolen motor vehicles, cigarettes and other contraband, according to the COE.
As it expanded its smuggling operations into Western Europe, the group consolidated power through assassinations, beatings and other forms of coercion. By mid-1999, the Drenica Group was in charge of Kosovo’s construction and fuel industries, and Thaçi had appointed himself prime minister.
At the same time, the COE report asserts, Shaip Muja, a high-level Drenica official, set up a series of detention facilities that were designed to transport captives from the Serbian war front to Tirana, the capital of Albania. In addition to Serbian prisoners of war, the KLA also gathered alleged traitors, including “large numbers of ethnic Albanians, as well as Roma and other minorities.”
A Wartime Atrocity, a Peacetime Business
While most of the detention facilities were repurposed farmhouses, at least one was built for the specific purpose of organ trafficking. Located near Tirana, it included what the report describes as “A state-of-the-art reception centre. . . . It was styled as a makeshift operating clinic, and it was the site at which some of the captives held by the KLA members and affiliates had their kidneys removed against their will.” These kidneys were then sold “to private overseas clinics as part of the international ‘black market’ of organ trafficking for transplantation.” Many of these allegedly went to Istanbul, where they were used by Yusuf Ercin Sonmez, a Turkish doctor.
After the war, the organ extraction program gained a level of respectability through the development of the Medicus clinic, a hospital located near Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. Dr. Sonmez, who had been barred from practicing medicine in Turkey’s public health sector, went to work at the clinic, performing transplants for wealthy German, Polish, Canadian and Israeli patients. Donors came from Russia, Moldova, Kazakhstan and Turkey, where they were solicited with promises of huge payoffs.
In 2008, EULEX, the European Union’s legal mission in Kosovo, began an investigation into the clinic for its role in the organ trade. Recently, five doctors were indicted for “trafficking in human organs, organized crime, unlawful exercise of medical activities and abusing official authority.” In addition to claims that Medicus was illegally transplanting organs, it also was accused of cheating its donors: After removing their organs, the clinic allegedly refused to pay the donors, transporting them to the airport before they had fully recovered from their surgeries.
In China, Turning Political Prisoners into Profit
Kosovo isn’t the only country with an extensive, state-sponsored transplantation program. In China, organs are routinely harvested from condemned political prisoners and are often sold to foreigners for prices far below the transplantation costs in other countries. While China’s program doesn’t have Kosovo’s genocidal component, it is still used as a revenue generator and a means of disposing of enemies of the state.
China has been performing organ transplants since the 1960s, but the roots of its organ trade trace back to the early 1980s. As part of its move away from socialism, the country began slashing health care expenditures. In 1980, China covered 36% of health care costs for the country. By 2005, that number had dropped to 17%. Over the same period, the percentage of health care costs covered out-of-pocket by patients almost tripled, from 20% to 59%.
To make up the difference, hospitals began searching for high-profit operations that could shore up their bottom lines. The military, which is permitted to engage in commerce, also was searching for ways to improve its finances. What resulted was a military/medical collaboration: Many of China’s leading transplantation centers were either owned or extensively staffed by the military.
A Prime Source of Healthy Organs
Having developed an extensive transplantation infrastructure, China needed a steady source of organs. It is illegal to transplant organs without a donor’s consent in China, but a 1984 law allowed the state to harvest organs from condemned prisoners who agreed to the operation. In the following decades, China developed an extensive prisoner organ harvest industry, offering low-price transplants to both domestic and international patients. In the face of international condemnation, it has developed a more traditional postmortem organ donation program, but the bulk of China’s transplanted organs still come from condemned prisoners.
While Chinese authorities emphasize that prisoner organ donation is voluntary, there is evidence to suggest otherwise. Dr. Wang Guoqi, a Chinese physician who was closely involved with the organ trade, alleged that it was “rife with corruption” and that prisoners often didn’t give consent for harvesting. Moreover, he also described brutal transplant conditions, including one incident in which he and several fellow doctors harvested organs from a prisoner who was still alive.
There have also been allegations that China’s organ harvesting system is being used as a weapon in its war against Falun Gong, a political and religious group that opposes the Communist government. Falun Gong exhorts its members to refrain from smoking, drinking, premarital sex, homosexuality and drug use, policies that make them prime candidates to be organ donors.
Following mass arrests, many members of Falun Gong refused to identify themselves to captors, fearing that their families would face retribution. Many of these prisoners subsequently “disappeared.” According to a report by David Matas, a human rights lawyer, and David Kilgour, a former member of the Canadian parliament, some transplant coordinators have openly admitted that their organs come from Falun Gong prisoners.
State Trade in Human Organs
Like any valuable commodity, the high price of organs has fueled a trade that is often shady and exploitative. Some pundits have argued that the problem could be solved through a program of voluntary organ donation and sale. The libertarian Cato Institute, for example, theorized that if 0.06% of healthy people aged 18 to 65 sold one of their kidneys, there would no longer be a waiting list for the organs.
Outside of China and Kosovo, where the definition of “voluntary donation” is highly questionable, other countries have experimented with organ sales. Some, like India and the Philippines, outlawed the market in legal organ sales after discovering that it was subject to rampant abuse and that many “voluntary donors” were being coerced into selling their organs. Other countries, including Iran, continue to operate legal organ-selling markets, not only allowing citizens to sell organs but flying in donors from other countries such as Jordan.
Unfortunately, the organ donation problem has no clear solution. China’s program is morally repugnant, while those of Iran and India are subject to serious corruption. For that matter, even the U.S. system of organ procurement is susceptible to manipulation by extremely wealthy patients, as Steve Jobs’s 2009 liver transplant demonstrated.
Ultimately, only one thing about this is certain: State-run organ-transplant programs are a prescription for human rights disasters.
Across the United States the exploitation of gas and oil from shale rocks using Halliburton’s hydraulic fracturing technology continues amid rising disasters.
Unregulated drilling practices, rendered legal by the “Halliburton Loophole” engineered in 2005 by Vice President Dick Cheney, have had staggering health and environmental effects.
Lured by the prospect of reducing oil dependence, President Obama has adopted an ambivalent approach, which ultimately yields ground to industry.
With the same expectancy, countries all around the world have joined the shale-gas craze, arguing that if the U.S. has been “fracking” it must be safe. Energy independence would undoubtedly represent a game changing opportunity for many countries, but at what cost?
There is a global rush to embrace a new source of extracting hydrocarbons from the Earth. From Germany to Poland and France, from China and above all in the USA where the technique of hydraulic fracturing of shale rocks is most developed, governments and major oil companies are producing huge volumes of gas.
A number of energy importing countries around the world are planning a major investment in extracting natural gas from their shale rock formations. The most ambitious plans are coming from China and from Poland in the EU.
The US Government’s Department of Energy together with a Washington energy consultancy has just released a mammoth global report estimating resources of shale gas. Significantly, the report estimates that the largest untapped shale gas reserves worldwide lie in China. The study puts Poland and France at the top of the shale gas list in the EU. The rest of Europe they estimate simply lacks the geology where substantial shale rock is present. [1]
Even in Germany some cash-strapped states are seriously looking at Shale gas. ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company is planning major projects in the densely-populated North-Rhein Westphalia region. The company’s head for Central Europe, Gernot Kalkoffen in a recent interview stated, “Germany is most definitely an interesting market. We cannot achieve the energy strategy shift without gas.”
ExxonMobil estimates shale gas is potentially available in six of Germany’s 16 states. [2] The US Energy Department estimates that Germany could have some 8 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable shale gas, three years’ total consumption. Citizen protest groups and Parliamentary skepticism about health and safety of shale gas so far is braking a German shale gas bonanza. [3] Not only ExxonMobil but also BASF’s Wintershall, Gaz de France, BNK Petroleum from the US and a daughter of Britain’s Royal Dutch Shell are salivating over German shale gas prospects.
The Polish government is in a state of near euphoria over the prospects of exploiting its shale gas resources. Prime Minister Donald Tusk calls shale gas Poland’s “great chance,” because it could cut its dependence on Russian gas, create tens of thousands of jobs and fill state coffers. In tests at one well in northern Poland done last August, the Polish Geological Institute claimed that Hydraulic fracturing didn’t affect the quality or quantity of surface and ground water and didn’t cause tremors that would pose a threat to buildings or other infrastructure. The US oilfield services giant Schlumberger did the fracking. [4] Of course one test in one well is hardly conclusive, though the Tusk government doesn’t seem to care as they push Brussels to launch a major Polish shale gas exploitation program.
In China, shale gas looks about to take off as a major new focus for the country’s enormous energy requirements. The governing State Council has recently approved shale gas as an “independent mineral resource” and the Ministry of Land and Resources will conduct an appraisal of shale gas resources this year to expedite discovery and development of China shale deposits.
Until now China’s rough mountainous terrain and lack of shale gas fracking know-how has kept it out of the shale gas, with coal far the major source of electric power. The French oil giant, Total, has just signed a deal with China’s Sinopec to produce shale gas in China. China has around 31 trillion cubic meters of natural gas trapped in shale, some 50% greater than the United States according to the US Department of Energy estimate. [5] These are volumes to make the head of any respectable state official spin.
One exception to the shale gas rush is Germany where the Federal Government just decided to prohibit ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company, from fracking in the eastern part of the country, stating they were “very skeptical” of industry claims it would not poison ground water or cause earthquake damage. [6]
Myth and reality: The Halliburton Loophole
Fracking techniques have been around since the end of World War II. Why then suddenly is the world going gaga over shale gas hydraulic fracking? One answer is the record high oil and gas prices of the recent few years have made the costly fracking profitable. The second reason is the advance of various horizontal underground drilling techniques that allow companies like Schlumberger to enter a large shale rock formation and inject substances to “free” the trapped gas.
But the real reason for the recent explosion of fracking in the country where it has most been applied, the United States, is the passage of legislation in 2005 by the US Congress that exempts the oil industry’s hydraulic fracking activity from regulatory supervision by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The oil and gas industry is the only industry in America that is allowed by EPA to inject known hazardous materials — unchecked — directly into or adjacent to underground drinking water supplies. [7]
The law is known as the “Halliburton Loophole.” That’s because it was introduced on massive lobbying pressure from the company that produces the lion’s share of chemical hydraulic fracking fluids—Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton. When he became Vice President under George W. Bush in early 2001, Bush immediately gave Cheney responsibility for a major Energy Task Force to make a comprehensive national energy strategy. Aside from looking at Iraq oil potentials as documents later revealed, Cheney’s task force used Cheney’s considerable political muscle and industry lobbying money to win exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act. [8].
During Cheney’s term as vice president he moved to make sure the Government’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would give a green light to a major expansion of shale gas drilling in the US. In 2004 the EPA issued a study of the environmental effects of fracking. That study has been called “scientifically unsound” by EPA whistleblower Weston Wilson.
In March of 2005, EPA Inspector General Nikki Tinsley found enough evidence of potential mishandling of the EPA hydraulic fracturing study to justify a review of Wilson’s complaints. The Oil and Gas Accountability Project conducted a review of the EPA study which found that EPA removed information from earlier drafts that suggested unregulated fracturing poses a threat to human health, and that the Agency did not include information that suggests “fracturing fluids may pose a threat to drinking water long after drilling operations are completed.” [9]
The Halliburton Loophole is no minor affair. The process of hydraulic fracking to extract gas involves staggering volumes of water and of some of the most toxic chemicals known. During the uproar over the BP Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the Obama Administration and the Energy Department formed an advisory commission on Shale Gas. Their report was released in November 2011. It was what could only be called a “whitewash” of the dangers of shale gas.
The commission was headed by former CIA director John Deuss. Deuss sits on the board of Citigroup, one of the world’s most active energy industry banks, tied to the Rockefeller family. He also sits on the board of Schlumberger, along with Halliburton, the major company doing hydraulic fracking. In fact, of the seven panel members, six had ties to the energy industry. Little surprise that the Deuss report called shale gas, “the best piece of news about energy in the last 50 years.” Deuss added, “Over the long term it has the potential to displace liquid fuels in the United States.” [10]
In the US oil industry people have forgotten the scare about oil and gas depletion, popularly known as the Peak Oil theory in their new euphoria over huge new volumes of gas and also oil obtained by fracking of shale and coal beds. Now even the Obama Administration is talking about a renaissance in domestic oil production.
The reason is the dramatic rise in domestic extraction of gas from hydraulic fracking of shale, using new fracking techniques first developed by Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton, made financially lucrative with the advent of $100 a barrel oil since 2008. Reportedly under pressure from then Vice President Cheney, chemical or hydraulic fracking of shale rock and coal beds has been left unregulated under what has become known as the Halliburton Loophole in the 2005 US National Energy Bill. [11]
To access the gas, the shale needs to be fractured using a mixture of hot water, sand and chemical additives, some of which are highly poisonous. Attempts by citizen organizations and individual litigants to force oil services company disclosure of the composition of chemicals used in hydraulic fracking have met a stone wall of silence. The companies argue that the chemicals are proprietary secrets and that disclosing them would hurt their competitiveness.
They also insist the process is “basically safe and that regulating it would deter domestic production.” [12] This legal sleight of hand lets the fracking lobby have their cake and eat it too. They claim it is safe, refuse to say what chemicals are used and insist it be free from the Environmental Protection Administration rules under the Safe Drinking Water Act. If they are right about how safe their chemical fracking fluids are why are they afraid of regulation like other chemical companies?
To understand what is going on, in a typical shale gas fracturing operation, a company drills a hole several thousand meters below surface; then they drill a horizontal branch perhaps one kilometer in length. As one expert described the fracking, once the horizontal drilling into the shale formation is done, “you send down a kind of subterranean pipe bomb, a small package of ball-bearing-like shrapnel and light explosives. The package is detonated, and the shrapnel pierces the bore hole, opening up small perforations in the pipe. They then pump up to 7 million gallons of a substance known as slick water to fracture the shale and release the gas. It blasts through those perforations in the pipe into the shale at such force—more than nine thousand pounds of pressure per square inch—that it shatters the shale for a few yards on either side of the pipe, allowing the gas embedded in it to rise under its own pressure and escape.” [13]
The shale rock in which the gas is trapped is so tight that it has to be broken in order for the gas to escape. Therein come the problems. A combination of sand and water laced with chemicals — including benzene — is pumped into the well bore at high pressure, shattering the rock and opening millions of tiny fissures, enabling the shale gas to seep into the pipeline.
Not only does it liberate gas or in the case of Bakken, oil. It floods the shale formation with millions of gallons of toxic fluids. A study conducted by Theo Colburn, PhD, director of the Endocrine Disruption Exchange in Paonia, Colorado, identified 65 chemicals that are probable components of the fracking fluids used by shale gas drillers. These chemicals included benzene, glycol-ethers, toluene, 2-(2-methoxyethoxy) ethanol, and nonylphenols. All of those chemicals have been linked to health disorders when human exposure is too high. [14] Dr. Anthony Ingraffea, D. C. Baum Professor of Engineering at Cornell University, who has researched fracture mechanics for more than 30 years, has said that drilling and hydraulic fracturing “can liberate biogenic natural gas into a fresh water aquifer.” [15]
Not only possibly poisoning the fresh water underground aquifers, hydraulic fracking is done with such force that it has been known to cause earthquakes. In the UK, Cuadrilla was doing shale gas drilling in Lancashire. They suspended their shale gas test drilling in June 2011, following two earthquakes—one tremor of magnitude 2.3 hit the Fylde coast on 1 April, followed by a second of magnitude 1.4 on 27 May. [16] A UK Government study of the earthquakes, released in April concluded that the fracking drilling operations had caused the quakes. [17] Earthquake activity in fracking regions across the US have also been reported.
Executions are carried out by hanging, shooting in the back of the head or lethal injection. In many years there are several times more reported executions in China than the rest of the world combined. Even then according to Amnesty International: “Only a fraction of death sentences and executions carried out in China are publicly reported.” The annual toll is not released and is treated as a state secret.
These days many executions are carried out with a lethal injection as opposed to gunshots. Executions generally take place in specialized chambers or vans, away from public view. In 2009, the city of Beijing began using lethal injections in the execution of condemned prisoners instead of shooting them. In January 2008, the Chinese government announced it would expand the use of lethal execution and phase out executions by gunshot.
Severe punishments have traditionally been regarded as a warning, summed by the old Chinese saying “killing a chicken to scare the monkeys.” During the Cultural Revolution executions were often performed in public, and Chinese citizens were often forced to watch as “a form of solidarity with the people against the people’s enemies.”
On August 30, 1983, 30 convicted criminals were executed in a sports stadium before a cheering crowd of 60,000 people. In the 1970s some executions were broadcast on prime time television. Even today there are mass sentencing rallies and public executions.
There have been cases of innocent people being executed. Defendants who face the death penalty are often denied their rights. In one case involved a migrant worker who killed four people the ruling on his appeal was done by the same judge who made the initial ruling.
A suspended death sentence is usually commuted to life imprisonment after two years if the person shows good behavior. This can later be reduced to 20 years or less with good behavior. In 2007 prisoners that received these “death penalties with reprieves” outnumbered prisoners that were executed.
Studies seem to indicate that the threat of capital punishment does little to deter crime. The official position in China is that someday China will abolish the death penalty but that “conditions aren’t right” to do so now.
Wang Shouxin Execution in 1980
Websites and Resources
Good Websites and Sources: Wikipedia article on the Death Penalty in China Wikipedia ; Execution Buses news.sky.com/skynews ; Execution Day in Zhengzhou http://www.connexions.org ; Wikipedia articles on Prisons in China Wikipedia ; 2009 Article in Asia Times atimes.com ; Site on Chinese Prisons laogai.org
Justice System: China Law Blog chinalawblog ; Internet Chinese Legal Research Center ls.wustl.edu ; Asian Law Center Links on China law.unimelb.edu ; Basic Info on China’s Legal System asnic.utexas.edu ; China.org, official Chinese government source on Constitution and Legal System china.org.cn ; China.org, on People’s Courts china.org.cn ; China’s Criminal Justice System lectlaw.com ; China’s Legal System lawinfochina.com ; faculty.cua.edu ; Book: Bird in a Cage, Legal Reform in Chinese and Mao by Stanley B. Lubman (Stanford, 2001)
Links in this Website: CRIME IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; TRIADS AND ORGANIZED CRIME IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; POLICE IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; JUSTICE SYSTEM IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; EXECUTIONS AND PRISONS IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; HUMAN RIGHTS IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; DISSIDENTS, POLITICAL ACTIVISTS AND POLITICAL PRISONERS IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; TERRORISM AND BOMBINGS IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; GOVERNMENT IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; POLITICS IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; COMMUNIST PARTY IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; RIOTS AND DEMONSTRATIONS IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; CORRUPTION IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; FIGHTING CORRUPTION IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China
Wang Shouxin Execution in 1980
Execution Numbers in China
China executes more people than the rest of the world combined. According to Amnesty International of the 2,400 execution performed in 2008, 1,700 were in China. Hong-Kong-based activist group Dui Hua estimates that 5,000 executions were carried in China in 2009, down from 7,000 in 2007 and 10,000 a year in the 1990s. As many as 6,000 people put to death in 2010. By comparison, according to Amnesty, the country with the next-highest recorded rate of executions in 2010 was Iran, with 252, followed by North Korea with 60, Yemen with 53 and the United States with 46.
Death penalty numbers are derived from press reports. Many human rights believe the real number of executions is much higher. Information on executions is a carefully guarded state secret. Dui Hua’s Joshua Rosenzweig told AFP, “There are a number of problems and uncertainties in the way the death penalty process is carried out. One of the major problems is that it is a very untransparent system.” In March 2010, Amnesty International slammed the Chinese government for not revealing the true number of people executed each year.
John Kamm, founder of the Dui Hua Foundation wrote Washington Post: “Ten years ago, China was executing more than 10,000 prisoners a year. The human rights group I direct estimates the annual rate to be less than 5,000 now, a reduction due in part to President Hu Jintao’s effort to develop a “harmonious society” When Hu took office as Communist Party chairman in 2002, the country was executing as many as 12,000 convicted criminals a year. The annual number of executions could be down to roughly 2,000 by the time Hu leaves office at the end of 2012. Opponents of the death penalty will argue, passionately and correctly, that that number is still a human rights violation of the most serious kind. But the sharp drop in executions is a positive step toward the government’s goal of ensuring that only “the most vile and serious crimes” are punishable by death — and its stated goal of eventually abolishing the death penalty in China. [Source: John Kamm, Washington Post, August 16, 2010]
According to Amnesty International there were 470 executions in China in 2007, the most of any country in the world but way down from previous years. Many see the drop as temporary and a result of new rules on judicial reviews and teh fact that China wants to look good with the Olympics coming up. China has cut back on executions and execution are no longer carried out as swiftly as they were before since China’s highest court was given authority to review death penalty cases in early 2007. According to one human rights group the number of executions in China has dropped 40 percent since Beijing was awarded the Olympics in 2001.
Wang Shouxin Execution in 1980 Amnesty International estimated there were at least 1,770 executions in 2005, 80 percent of the world’s total that year. Many believe the true figure is much higher, perhaps around 8,000 or even 10,000. The Chinese don’t release any statistics on executions. Amnesty International comes up with its number from publicized cases. An internal document quoted in a book about the Chinese leadership reported about 15,000 executions a year between 1998 and 2001.
In 2003, according to Amnesty International, at least 5,000 people were executed, or 90 percent of all the world’s executions that year. In 2002, there were 1,060 documented executions in China. In 2001, a total of 2,468 of the 3,048 documented executions worldwide were in China, 139 were in Iran, 79 were in Saudi Arabia and 66 were in the United States. These four countries accounted for 90 percent of all executions, with China accounting for 80 percent.
During one three-month period in 2001, in the midst of an aggressive “Strike Hard” anti-crime campaign, 1,781 people were executed. Amnesty International described the campaign as “nothing short of an execution frenzy” and said, “More people were executed in China in three months than in the rest of the world for the last three years.”
In 1996, a year in another “Strike Hard” ant-crime campaign was aggressively carried out, there were 4,367 (a dozen a day) confirmed executions. More than 1,000 people were executed in the first two months alone and 222 people were executed in a massive one-day crackdown on drug trafficking. On World Anti-Drugs Day on June 26, 769 of the 1,725 people sentenced on drugs charges were given the death penalty.
In 1997, 2,700 people executed; 2,050 were executed in 1994, 1,411 were executed in 1993 and 1,079 were executed in 1992. Between 1983 and 1986, the early years of the Deng reforms, some 10,000 people were executed. In 1995, according to Amnesty International the were 2,190 executions in China, compared to 192 in Saudi Arabia, 95 in Nigeria, 56 in the United States, 50 in Singapore, 47 in Iran, 41 in Yemen, 28 in Russia, 19 in South Korea, 16 in Taiwan and 12 in Jordan.
The majority of executions are for murder, robbery, intentional injury and drug trafficking.
China to Reduce Executions
Wang Shouxin Execution in 1980 In August 2009, China’s Supreme Court said the death penalty needed to be used more sparingly and should be reserved for only the most serious cases. In February 2010, China’s top court issued instructions to lower courts to limit the use of the death penalty to a small number of “extremely serious” cases.
In July 2009 Zhang Jun, vice-president of the supreme people’s court, said it would tighten restrictions on the use of capital punishment. But he stressed that the country would not abandon the death penalty, saying it was ‘impossible’ to do so under current conditions. [Source: Tania Branigan, The Guardian, July 29, 2009]
Zhang said the death penalty should be applied to ‘an extremely small number’ of serious offenders. He said the highest court was extremely cautious in imposing the sentence on those who killed relatives or neighbors in disputes. People who pleaded guilty, compensated their victims’ relatives, or were pardoned by the latter also tended to receive more lenient punishments. “Judicial departments should use the least number of death sentences possible, and death penalties should not be given to those having a reason for not being executed,” Zhang said. [Ibid]
In 2008, China’s most senior judge said only ‘extremely vile criminals’ were executed in 2007 as a result of ‘kill fewer, kill carefully’ reforms that gave the supreme court the right to overturn capital sentences handed down by lower courts. The China Daily said the supreme people’s court overturned 15 percent of death sentences handed down in 2007 and 10 percent in 2008. Independent analysts suggested the policy had caused a drop in executions of as much as 30 percent year-on-year. [Ibid]
In September 2007. China’s top court order judges to use the death penalty more sparingly and show more mercy to criminals that cooperate with authorities. A law that went into effect on January 1, 2007 gave China’ highest court—the Supreme People’ Court—the authority to review the death penalty. Before then the final say was in the hands of provincial courts. The law was enacted in part because of complaints about arbitrary decisions and miscarriages of justice involving capital punishment on the local level.
In the early 2000s, high courts were ordered to review all death-penalty cases before the executions were carried out. Before only a small number of cases were reviewed by the high courts. Most were only reviewed by local courts. Some cases have been overturned, including that of a farmer in Anhui who was sentenced to death for the murder of another farmer based on confessions the farmer said was acquired through torture.
In 2004, there was a discussion of reforming the justice system to reduce the number of death sentences given out. The reforms were supported by many in the central government and justice system but opposed by many local officials and police. The issue was addressed partly as a result of growing discontent with the judicial system and law enforcement, which had increasingly been viewed as corrupt, unfair and overly harsh. The reforms were seen by some as a way for the central government to address concerns by ordinary Chinese without relinquishing their control of the courts.
Crimes Punishable by Death in China
Wang Shouxin Execution in 1980 According to Amnesty International there are 68 crimes punishable by death in China, or about a forth of all criminal offenses in China, are punishable by death, up from 32 in 1980. Among those that face the death penalty are pimps, embezzlers, livestock rustlers, tax receipts forgers, drunk drivers, credit card thieves, bicycle thieves, bribe takers, arsonists, drug dealers, spies, thieves, prostitutes, cultural relic traders, dike saboteurs and organizers of secret religious groups. In recent years, the group, says people in China has been put to death for tax fraud, stealing VAT receipts, damaging electric power facilities, selling counterfeit medicine, embezzlement, accepting bribes and drug offenses.
Of the 68 crimes, 44 do not involve violence. People have been executed for tax fraud, embezzling money and even petty theft. In December 2004, two Hong Kong men were sentenced to death for smuggling digital player components into southern China. In April 2006, death sentences were given to cooking oil smugglers that bribed customs officials and evaded $300 million in tariffs.
In 1992 a merchant was executed for trademark for infringement because he labeled ordinary moonshine as Maotai, a powerful and popular Chinese liquor. In 1996, a peasant was executed for selling the head for a Buddha statue he found on the ground for $36. In 1997, two peasants in Yunnan were executed for stealing runway lights from the airport in Kunming. In 2001, a 19-year-old was executed for stealing the 60 yuan ($7) and another man was executed for stealing ball point pens and badminton rackets.
Death sentences are arbitrarily meted out with the rules often varying from place to place. Sometimes people are executed for things like prostitution and smuggling, which are largely tolerated in most places in China.
Death Penalty for Corruption, See Corruption
Reducing the Number of Crimes Punishable by Death
In July 2010, the National People’s Congress began considering amending the criminal code. Reforms were said to include reducing from 68 the number of crimes punishable by death, as well as the age at which convicted criminals can be executed. If such reforms are enacted, nonviolent crimes in China will, for the most part, be exempted from the death penalty. The proposals are part of a movement aimed at reining in the indiscriminate use of the death penalty.
In the mid 2000s, the Chinese government was considering scraping the death penalty for some non-violent crimes so that corrupt officials that had fled abroad could be more easily extradited. As its stands now many foreign governments refuse to extradite suspects to China out of concerns their human rights will be denied and they will be executed.
In August 2010, the Chinese government said it was considering dropping the death penalty for 13 “economic-related, nonviolent offenses” from the list of 68 crimes punishable by execution. Among the offenses that were considered were are carrying out fraudulent activities with financial bills and letters of credit, forging and selling invoices to avoid paying taxes, and smuggling cultural relics and precious metals out of the country. There has also been discussion of ending the death penalty for elderly convicts 70 or over. [Source: AP]
In 2007, 15 percent of death sentences handed out by lower courts were overturned by higher courts, citing poor evidence and procedural errors. In late July 2010 the Chinese Supreme Court tightened rules on introducing evidence obtained by torture, particularly in death penalty cases. A number of death the sentences handed down in corruption trials are often said to be politically motivated
New Death Penalty Rules in China
Wang Shouxin Execution in 1980 Keith B. Richburg wrote in the Washington Post, “Legal changes that went into effect in May 2011 reduced the number of crimes punishable by death from 68 to 55. The crimes removed were mostly economic-related and nonviolent, such as smuggling cultural relics and robbing graves.” [Source: Keith B. Richburg, Washington Post, June 25 2011]
Most significantly, the new rules give provincial courts the option of suspending an execution for two years. If the condemned prisoner behaves well during those two years, his or her sentence can then be commuted to life, which in China usually means 25 years. The Supreme People’s Court said in its 2010 report, released in May, that says lower-level courts should “ensure the death penalty only applies to a very small number of criminals who have committed extremely serious crimes.” It adds that the lower courts “should try their best not to sentence the death penalty with immediate execution.”
The legal experts said the government’s changing attitude toward capital punishment may reflect sensitivity to international criticism — and in this case, unlike criticism of its politics or economic policies, in an area that does not touch on the core ideology of the ruling Communist Party.
The first to benefit under the suspension rule was Hou Qinzhi, a fruit vendor in Nanjing who had his scale seized in August by a city government inspector. The vendor wrestled with the inspector and ended up stabbing him with his fruit knife. He was sentenced to death, but last month the execution was suspended for two years.
But in another high-profile case, public opinion has taken the opposite view. Xia Junfeng was a laid-off worker who sold kebabs from a cart in Shenyang, in China’s northeast. He was convicted of killing two city security guards in 2009 when they confronted him over his unlicensed cart; Xia asserts he acted in self-defense, when the city officials began to beat him. Xia has attracted enormous sympathy around the country as a poor man set upon by local officials. He was sentenced to death, but his lawyers are asking the Supreme Court to spare his life, and the final decision is pending.
Public Executions in China
Wang Shouxin Execution in 1980 Often the biggest event during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 70s was when a criminal was executed. Often the whole town would become as lively as festival time. The writer Yu Hua told the New York Times he remembers the executions as the most thrilling scenes of his childhood, seeing the criminal kneeling on the ground, a soldier aiming a rifle at the back of his head and firing. [Source: Pankaj Mishra, New York Times, January 23, 2009]
Public executions still occur. The Washington Post reported that after the attacks before th Olympics in 2008 the local government inYengishahar county in Xinjiang bused several thousand students and office workers into a public square and lined them up in front of a vocational school to watch the execution of three prisoners, who been convicted on terrorist charges in connections with a plot by the East Turkestan Islamic Movement to disrupt the Olympics.
In August 1983 as part of a “Strike Hard” campaign against crime the authority to execute people was transferred from the Supreme Court in Beijing to provincial officials. Thousands were executed by the next spring festival, six months on. Such spectacles remained commonplace, however, especially in the countryside, prompting Beijing to issue regulations against public executions in 1986. Rumors of executions in sports stadiums plagued China’s bid for the 2000 Olympics, and when bidding for the 2008 Games, Beijing made clear that public executions were not permitted.[Source: John Kamm, Washington Post, August 16, 2010]
Recalling what he witnessed while traveling through the countryside outside Guangzhou in the summer of 1983, John Kamm wrote Washington Post: “As I passed through a small town, a man and his two sons, each tilting forward from the weight of the large white boards strapped to their backs, were driven past, en route to an execution ground. The boards proclaimed their death sentences; the men’s arms were tied behind them. I remember the elder screaming his innocence as a throng of feral youth rushed ahead to get in position to witness the shootings. Farther up the road I encountered another execution scene, this time in a sports stadium with a throng of enthusiastic onlookers.
Wang Shouxin Execution Photos
In the late 2000s there was an Internet fascination with a series of photos from 1980 chronicling the execution of Wang Shouxin, a corrupt female government official from Heilongjiang province and the subject of Liu Binyan’s reportage “People or Monsters.” According to Xinhua she and others were arrested in April 1979 for the crimes of sharing illegal profits and then hiding and covering up the loot. She was sentenced to death on February 28, 1980, paraded in a public meeting and taken in a truck to a field and shot as a crowd looked on.
Wang reportedly embezzled several hundred thousand RMB. According to the People’s Daily: “You can call her a ‘corrupt official’ but she is a merely a manager of a combustible fuel company. Nobody knows what the rank might be in the hierarchy of officialdom but it is probably the lowest possible.” In the late 2000s, the process of her execution was published by the photographer at the scene and then broadly circulated on the Internet. Within a few days after being posted on Sohu.com. they had been seen by 1.132 million persons. Another series of photos entitled Mao Zedong Personally Signed the Approval to Execute Seven Criminals has also been popular on the Internet recently.
Wang Shouxin Execution in 1980
Execution Trials in China
Death penalty justice can be very quick. In November 2004, a 21-year-old man was caught after he broke into a high school dormitory and stabbed nine Chinese boys to death in the city of Fuzhou in the central province of Henan. Within two months he was tried, sentenced to death and executed. By contrast prisoners on death row in the United States wait for years before they are executed. In Japan the wait can be more than ten years.
Some courts sentence people to death within only a few days after they are arrested. Amnesty International reported one case that began with three men allegedly stealing a car filled with banknotes on May 21. On May 24, they were arrested; on May 27 they were sentenced to death; On May 28 their appeal was rejected; on May 31 they were executed. In another case a man was executed for murder six days after he committed the crime.
Verdicts are usually foreordained. Victims are sometimes sentenced in public rallies or paraded through the streets on the back of flatbed trucks after sentence. Sometimes tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of people gather in town squares and stadiums and cheer the verdicts at “mass sentencing rallies,” which are also commonly shown on the television news. The executions themselves are not usually viewed by the public. Prisoners are often lead away to vacant fields and executed in neat rows when the rally is over.
Photographs of prisoners who have received the death penalty are posted at railroad stations and post offices. After they have been executed a red mark is placed next to the prisoner’s name.
Executions often take place immediately after the final appeal. If a suspect receives a death sentence and then is given a two year reprieve that usually means their sentence will commuted to life in prison.
Wang Shouxin Execution in 1980
Typical Execution in China
Prisoners scheduled to be executed are photographed on the night before their execution and the keys to their handcuffs and leg shackles are tested to make sure they can be easily removed after death. On the morning of the execution, prisoners sometimes eat a meal of steamed cornbread and hard boiled eggs with their executioners, who sometimes, before the execution, place a cord around the prisoners’ neck to keep them from shouting anti-government slogans. “They’re trussed up just like pigs before slaughter,” one witness told the Washington Post. [Source: Lena H. Sun, the Washington Post]
The prisoners are rarely blindfolded but sometimes they are granted a final request, such as washing or praying. A 19-year-old soldier executed in 1985 was allowed to eat a large bowl of dumplings. At the execution site the prisoners are forced to their knees, their heads are forced down, and often their pant legs are tied together in case they shit in their pants. [Source: Lena H. Sun, the Washington Post]
When a whistle is blown a soldier fires a bullet from a carbine rifle—selected for its large bullets—into the back of the skull where spinal cord joins the brain. Even though the soldiers fire from point blank range, they sometimes miss. If this occurs another bullet is fired. Both women and men are executed in this fashion.
Many executions are performed at the Beijing Supreme People’s Court 86, located on an arid hill overlooking the capital. “Under an open sky,” Lena H. Sun wrote in the Washington Post, “the prisoners, arms tied behind their backs, their legs in shackles, kneel on the black earth. At the signal, a paramilitary soldier fires a single rifle shot. It is usually to the back of the head”.
“The prisoner topples into the dirt. Death is almost always immediate. Sometimes the corpses are immediately put into a waiting ambulance to be whisked to the hospital ..In some cases, the prisoners family is even billed for the bullet—the equivalent of about 6 cents.” Another frequently-used execution site is near Route 302 in Jiangxi Province, The bodies are often dumped by the side of the road. [Source: Lena H. Sun, the Washington Post]
Wang Shouxin Execution in 1980
Online Mob Demands Death Penalty
Keith B. Richburg wrote in the Washington Post, A 21-year-old music student named Yao Jiaxin was executed this month for a particularly grievous crime: After accidentally hitting a female bicyclist with his car, Yao saw she was still alive, so he stopped, got out and stabbed her eight times to make sure she was dead and could not identify him…The fact that Yao was sentenced to death was not uncommon. At least on the Internet, his crime was widely denounced, with citizens demanding Yao’s death. [Source: Keith B. Richburg, Washington Post, June 25 2011]
What was unusual was the intense public soul-searching the case also unleashed. Many legal professionals and others openly questioned whether justice was served by executing a young man who voluntarily turned himself in and confessed, and whose family offered to pay compensation. His crime touched a nerve here — a young man of privilege who killed a poor woman on a bicycle — but many blamed an online mob mentality for forcing a supposedly dispassionate court into imposing a death sentence.
When Yao was on trial, several lawyers declared publicly that he should be spared the death penalty. Li Fenfei, a law professor at Remnin University, wrote a blog post arguing that Yao had turned himself in, that he had acted in the heat of the moment and had not planned to kill the bicyclist. Also, Li said, “he’s quite young, in his 20s. In China, we believe young people can make a mistake.” But after his blog post appeared, Li was bombarded with rude and threatening comments. “You mean that if you have money you have the right to kill? So where do you live?” one anonymous commenter wrote.
“Yao’s case had a big influence on society,” said Xu Zhiyong, a legal scholar and member of a small group called China Against the Death Penalty. “A lot of people felt shocked. They felt shocked by the process. Some people thought the netizens pushed the court into giving Yao the death penalty.”
Opposition to the Death Penalty in China
Keith B. Richburg wrote in the Washington Post, “The voices arguing for fewer executions seem to be limited to legal scholars, the urban elite and some newspaper and online commentaries. A majority appears to back executions, particularly in cases involving corrupt officials or those perceived to be members of the elite. [Source: Keith B. Richburg, Washington Post, June 25 2011] Abolitionists acknowledge that the majority of Chinese still back capital punishment. “I feel the number of people against the death penalty has grown very dramatically” in just the past year, said He Weifang, a law professor at Beijing University who has always opposed capital punishment. “In the last 15 years, only two or three people in this country were trying to abolish the death penalty.” Now, he said, the abolitionists are gathering strength so fast that “you can call it a movement.”
Drug Executions in China
execution People found guilty of trafficking amphetamines or caught smuggling more than 50 grams of heroin and/or 1,000 grams of opium face the death penalty. Some of those are spared the death penalty are sent to re-education camps or given long prison sentences.
Drug traffickers are routinely executed. International Anti-Drugs Day on June 26 is popular time to execute people for drug-related crimes. In 2001 and 2002, 43 and 64 people respectively were executed in anti-drug day rallies on that day. IIn 1995, 22 drug traffickers were shot to death in a single public execution in Mangshi, near the Myanmar border.
In 1994, courts ordered 466 executions for 6,000 drug-related arrests. On International Anti-Drugs Day in 1996 1,725 people were convicted on drugs charges. Of these 769 were sentenced to death. In the first six months of 2001, 1,457 people were executed on drug charges.
Global anti-drug day in June 2009 was marked with the execution of at least 20 people, the condemnation of around the same number and putting hundreds on trial. Among those executed was a Nigerian man caught with six kilograms of heroin and a Chinese man caught smuggling 197 grams of methamphetamines from North Korea. In Xinjiang authorities destroyed six tons if heroin, opium and cannabis smuggled in from Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Foreign nationals caught with drugs in China are not spared. In 2004, a Japanese man in his 60s was caught trying to smuggle 1.25 kilograms of stimulant drugs out of China into Japan. He was caught at Shenyang’s airport as he prepared to board a plane to Osaka. He pleaded not guilty but was sentenced to death in 2006. Two other Japanese convicted drug smuggling have been given death sentences.
The widow of an executed man who occasionally smoked heroin in cigarettes and later was recruited to carry heroin told the New York Times, “Our family was always poor and a guy from the Fujian province said to my husband that he would give him a lot of money if he would transport drugs. Our daughter was very sick and we needed money badly.” His last words were “take care of our daughter and try to avoid heavy work in the fields.”
The executions haven’t been much of a deterrent. Many dealers can bribe their way out of trouble if they get caught or purchase protection from Communist Party officials, PLA soldiers or the police. The execution and crackdowns have also had little effect on the drug trade.
Foreigners Executed for Drugs in China
executed girls In December 2009, a British man, Akmal Shaikh, was executed on drugs charges. The first European citizen to be executed China in more than half a century, he was arrested in 2007 for carrying in suitcase with almost four kilograms of heroin on a flight from Tajikistan to China. He told police he did not know about the drugs and the suitcase was not his according to Reprieve, a London-based prisoner advocacy group.
Shaikh was a 53-year-old father of three. His family said he suffered from a bipolar disorder. The protested the execution, , saying Shaikh was mentally unstable and lured into the crime by men taking advantage of his dream to record a pop song about world peace. His trial lasted only half an hour. During his appeal the judges reportedly laughed at his rambling remarks. The incident strained relations between Britain and China. British Prime Minister Gordon voiced his outrage over the execution. [Source: AP]
In December 2009, four foreigners were arrested along with five Chinese in connection with the seizure of 144.5 kilograms of heroin found in 289 bags hidden in bales of cotton in Shenzhen. The drugs had come from Pakistan and were found with the help of a tip and tracker dogs. The four foreigners might face execution.
In April 2010, four Japanese men convicted of drug smuggling charges in China were executed. All four men were caught trying to smuggle or sell more than one kilogram of illegal drugs–in most cases, amphetamines. They included 65-year-old Mitsunobu Akano who was caught with 2.5 kilograms of methamphetamine as he tried to board a plane to Japan at China’s Dalian airport in September 2006. In China, people caught smuggling over one kilogram of drugs are often executed.
The executions marked the first time that Japanese nationals were executed in Japan since China and Japan normalized diplomatic relations in 1972. The Chinese government went somewhat out of its way to make sure the executions did not harm Japan – China relations. Akano was allowed to meet with his family before he was executed, which normally is not done. All the Japanese are believed to have been killed by lethal injection.
After the Execution and Organs in China
China executes British drug smuggler After the execution the body is photographed. If no organs are to be removed the body is taken away to a crematoria. The family of the prisoner is not allowed to see the corpse but they do have to pay the costs of cremation and transport to the crematoria. Recently execution sites have been moved to remote locations partly because too many prisoners were yelling anti-government slogans before they were killed. According to a 1986 regulation: “Execution grounds are not allowed to be set up near busy sections of town, near key roads or near tourist sites.”
Organs, corneas and skin used in transplant operations are often taken from executed prisoners. Sometimes the organs are removed in the ambulance two or three minutes after an execution take place. It is not uncommon for prisoners to receive and anti-coagulant hours before the execution to make organs transplants easier. Afterwards the body is taken to crematoria where skin and corneas are removed and the body is quickly cremated, which destroys any evidence that the organs had been removed.
According to some sources most organs used in transplant operations are harvested from prisoners sentenced to death. The use of bullet to the back of the head is ideal for transplants because the bullet does not contaminate the organs with poisonous chemicals as lethal chemicals do and does not directly affected the circulatory system as a bullet through the heart does. “If they want the [corneas] they shoot in the chest,” one official told Sun. “If they want the internal organs, they shoot in the head.” When lethal injection was introduced in the 1990s chemicals were chosen that were suitable to organ harvesting [Source: Lena H. Sun, the Washington Post]
The reliance on prisoners for organs is the result of a scarcity of donors partly resulting from the deep-seated cultural taboo against damaging the integrity of the body. Chinese rarely give doctors permission to take organs from deceased family members. Executed prisoners are treated with different standard. The organs are usually removed without the prior consent of the prisoners or their families. Permission from family members for organs taken from executed prisoners is rarely asked for or given.
Chinese Government, Prisoners, Organs and Transplants
organ harvesting Organ harvesting from executed prisoners has been going on for some time. In 1991, according to the People’s Daily, 2,900 kidneys from executed criminals were transplanted into patients. Hong Kong patients who need kidneys were referred to a medical center run by Guangzhou University if they had enough money. One physician there said he welcomed criminal activity and an increased number of execution to supply the transplant market.
An official report obtained by Human Rights WatchAsia read: “the use of the corpses or organs of executed criminals must be kept strictly secret. Attention must be paid to [avoiding negative] repercussions.” Other countries harvest organs from executed prisoners. Taiwan does but reportedly does so with the consent of the prisoners.
Beijing said on several occasions that allegations that organs were harvested from prisoners were “vicious slander” and “sensational lies.” Finally in 2005, the Chinese government fessed up and admitted for the first that organs were harvested from executed criminals and said it would regulate the trade. Before then the only laws on the books was a 1984 draft document that stipulated that operations for harvesting organs can only take place with the consent of the prisoner’s family or if the body has not been claimed.
The Chinese government insists that organ harvesting is done only with prior consent of the prisoners or their family. Huang Jiefu, the Vice Minster of Health said in November 2006, “Apart from a small portion of traffic victims, most of the organs from cadavers are from executed prisoners. The relevant authorities strongly require the informed consent from prisoners or their families for the donation of organs.” A spokesman of the Health Ministry admitted that poor government supervision has led to a number of “improper” organ transplants.”
In July 2006 a law went into affect that specifically bans the sale of human organs. The law requires that donors give written permission for their organs to be transplanted and restricts transplant surgery to top-ranked institutions that must verify that organs are from legal sources and that surgery is safe and justified.
An August 2009 Ministry of Health statement acknowledged that 65 percent of the 10,000 transplants in China involved organs from executed prisoners.
David Matas, an award-winning Canadian human rights lawyer, and David Kilgour, a former Canadian secretary of state (Asia/Pacific) and crown attorney, co-authored a report on organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners in China. The pair estimate that in the six-year period 2000—2005, 60,000 transplantation operations were done in China and Falun Gong practitioners were the likely source for the organs for 41,500 operations. CQ Global Researcher, a leading global affairs journal, quotes Kilgour and Matas and Gutmann as independently estimating over 62,000 practitioners have been killed for their organs in the period 2000—2008. [Source: Matthew Robertson, The Epoch Times, February 15, 2012]
Organ Harvesting Methods
Matthew Robertson wrote in The Epoch Times: Researchers investigating China’s organ transplantation practices were troubled by the remarks and what they implied. “The so called ‘research scene’ that Wang Lijun refers to is either an outright execution site with medical vans, or possibly a medical ward, where peoples’ organs are surgically removed,” said Ethan Gutmann, who has published extensively on organ harvesting from Chinese prisoners of conscience. He added that the injections that the award refers to are probably “anti-coagulants and experimental medications that lower the chance of immune-system rejection as the organ is passed between one living body—heart still beating, soon to expire from the trauma—to another.” Gutmann added that this is “normal medical practice” in China, where hospitals, military hospitals, and public security bureaus intersect.[Source: Matthew Robertson, The Epoch Times, February 15, 2012]
“There is zero guarantee that consent was involved,” Gutmann said. “Ample evidence has come to light that the victims could well have been Uyghur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, ‘Eastern Lightning’ Christians or—exponentially more likely—Falun Gong practitioners. In other words, Wang Lijun received an award for, at best, barbarism.” It is not possible to know what proportion of victims Wang referred to in his remark about “thousands” of on-site transplants were criminal prisoners and how many were political prisoners or prisoners of conscience, such as Falun Gong practitioners. Further, in China there is a range of nonviolent crimes that can be punished with the death penalty, but the communist state does not publish statistics detailing the numbers of people executed and their crimes.
In the eyes of experts, a significant question left worryingly open in Wang’s remarks is whether the prisoners actually died before their organs were taken from their bodies. Given the reference to drug injections, it is highly possible that the hearts of the victims were still beating when their organs were removed, these experts say.
“It used to be that China would shoot for execution, then they shifted from shooting to using injections,” says Matas. “In effect they’re not killing by injection, but paralyzing by injection, and taking the organs out while the body is still alive.” When an organ is removed from a still-live body, it is fresher and rejection rates are lower. “It’s possible to source an organ immediately after the victim is brain dead, but much more complicated,” says Matas. “The organ deterioration is more marked once they are brain dead, but if you keep the body alive through drugs you can harvest organs over a longer period of time.”
Wang’s conversations with the U.S. consular officials in Chengdu might shed light on such details as the function of the drugs he used in transplantation operations in Liaoning Province. In any case Wang’s visit to the consulate provides the best opportunity to date of confirmation from a Chinese official of the ongoing practice of forced organ harvesting in China. At a press conference on Monday in Washington, D.C., Falun Gong spokesperson Dr. Tsuwei Huang called on the U.S. government to release the contents of Wang Lijun’s conversations.
Description of Organ Harvesting in China
organ harvesting One medical official told The Times of London that hospitals contact local police and make requests for organs. Later, the police notify them if donors are available. Doctors then travel to execution grounds in specially equipped ambulances with a team of nurses to harvest the organs as quickly after death as possible.
An exiled Chinese doctor, Dr. Wang Guoqi, described the harvesting of organs from prisoners before a U.S. Congressional Committee. He said he participated in the removing of skin and corneas from 100 execution victims, including one who was still alive, at the Tianjin Paramilitary Police General Brigade Hospital.
Dr. Wang told the Washington Post, security officials are paid $37 a corpse to tip off the hospital that executions were imminent. Removing the skin, he said, took 20 minutes or less. “A circumferential cut was made around the wrist, the neck and the shoulder joint as deep as the subcutaneous fat layer or the layer above the muscles. A longitudinal cut was made on the inner side of the upper limb linking both circumferential cuts, either from top to bottom or in the opposite direction.”
“After all extractable tissues and organs were taken, what remained was an ugly heap of muscles, the blood vessels still bleeding, all viscera exposed.” The skin was processed and chilled for transplants recipients, mostly burn victims, who are charged about $12 for 10 square centimeters of skin.
Wang said he was told to work on a man who was not killed by the bullet to the head and was convulsing on the ground. Doctors were ordered to extract the organs and remove the skin and told the removal of the organs would kill him.
Transplant Operations with Organs from Prisoners in China
selling prisoner organs Wealthy Thais, Filipinos, Russians, Indians, Indonesians, Malaysians and Taiwanese with serious kidneys aliments sometimes travel to China to receive transplanted kidneys taken from executed prisoners. According to AFP the desperate patients pay up to $40,000 for operations performed by unscrupulous and in many cases unqualified doctors. Agents who arrange the operations make huge profits while the patents only have about a 40 percent chance of survival.
The prisoners are often killed in batched. In some cases patients are told in advance when batches of prisoners are going to be killed and waiting in hospitals in anticipation of organs being made available. Potential recipients are often told to be ready around the Chinese Lunar New Year because many executions tale place around that time.
On man from Taiwan told U.S. News and World Report, “We were lucky that there happened to be an execution of a convict…whose blood type marched my dad’s.” A satisfied Israeli customer told The Times of London, “If I had never had my kidney transplant in China. I would already be dead. A Chinese sentenced to death saved my life.”
A Malaysian man who underwent a kidney transplant in a hospital in Guangzhou told the International Herald Tribune:, “They just tell you it was a convict. They don’t tell you what he did.” But often they were “young men” who commit “serious,” “violent” crimes.
Image Sources: 1) Reuters; 2) Wang Shouxin Execution photos from Liu Binyan’s reportage “People or Monsters” ; YouTube
Text Sources: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Times of London, National Geographic, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, Lonely Planet Guides, Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.
Russia
Russia has at least two official surveillance agencies. One agency, the Federal Security Service (Federal’naya sluzhba bezopasnosti, or FSB) not only possesses investigatory powers, but even has its own troops. FSB also is authorized to conduct intelligence operations inside and outside Russia to enhance “the economic, scientific-technical and defense potential” of Russia. Thanks to regulations such as SORM (System for Ensuring Investigated Activity), FSB essentially has the power to monitor Internet transmissions coming in and out of Russia.
In addition, the Federal Agency for Government Communications and Information (Federal’noye agentstvo paravitel’stvennykh svyazi i informatsii, or FAPSI) apparently has unlimited technical capabilities for monitoring communications and gathering intelligence, including monitoring of private networks. It too has its own troops (estimated at 54,000).
People’s Republic of China
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) created a Ministry of State Security in 1983. Not surprisingly, one of its chief tasks is to stop “enemy agents, spies and counterrevolutionary activities designed to … overthrow China’s socialist system.” As a part of this effort, a special Internet police agency was started in 1998, which has launched several cybersurveillance initiatives to track dissidents as well as conduct espionage on foreigners. In addition, Chinese authorities are planning to build more advanced Internet monitoring systems that rival those of the West, including the United States’ Carnivore.
Germany
Germany’s Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) has been engaged in intelligence gathering for nearly fifty years. Their official website is in German. Their official website is in German (Deutsch).
Israel
Israel actually has at least three official intelligence-gathering organizations, commonly known as Mossad, Shin Bet, and Aman. Mossad handles surveillance outside of Israel, while Shin Bet conducts surveillance inside the country. Aman is charged with military intelligence. Israel receives its information from a variety of sources, including a growing spy satellite program.
France
Reports indicate that 2 subdivisions of France’s SGDN (Secretariat General de la Defense Nationale), the DRM (Direction du Renseignement Militaire) and the DGSE (Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure), have created a French equivalent of ECHELON, or “Frenchelon.” Some observers have charged that this system not only conducts surveillance, but also passes pertinent information along to French private companies. These allegations are documented in an article from ZDNet France. Further information in French (Francais) is available in an article from Le nouvel observateur.
India
India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is tasked with “preservation of values in public life” as well as “ensuring the health of the national economy”. Besides national security matters, CBI also coordinates investigations with Infopol.
Echelon Participants/Constituents
United States – National Security Agency (NSA)
United Kingdom – Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)
Canada – Communications Security Establishment (CSE)
Australia – Defense Signals Directorate (DSD)
New Zealand – Government Communications Security Bureau
Other Surveillance Systems
United States – Total Informational Awareness
A project of the United States Department of Defense, Total Informational Awareness (TIA) is designed to gather personal data on a grand scale, including emails, phone calls, financial records, transportation habits, and medical information. Its proponents believe that by scanning and analyzing this massive pile of data, government agents will be able to predict and prevent crime. Many specifics concerning this plan have yet to be determined, including methods to protect the security of the warehoused information and other prevent unauthorized access. It is known, however, that the U.S. government is already funding projects to develop tools that could be used as part of this system, including software to predict an individual’s behavior based on what that person does online. Reports indicate the state of Florida (with Federal support) is developing a system (called the MATRIX) that is broadly similar to TIA.
United States – Carnivore
This Internet surveillance program, which is currently being used by the United States government, is somewhat similar to ECHELON. Contrary to prior assertions, a subsequent government-commissioned review panel found that Carnivore is indeed capable of collecting all communications over the segment of the network being surveilled: “The results show that all TCP communications on the network segment being sniffed were captured by Carnivore.” Moreover, the default configuration is to do just that: “When turning on TCP full mode collection and not selecting any port, the default is to collect traffic from all TCP ports.” Carnivore is now being replaced by an even more powerful system, known as DCS 1000 or Enhanced Carnivore, which reportedly has higher capacity in order to deal with speedier broadband networks. The United States government also has issued a controversial field guidance memorandum regarding the installation and operation for this family of surveillance tools.
United States – Oasis & Fluent
United States intelligence officials have developed two programs which many experts believe may be used to enhance ECHELON’s capabilities. One of these programs, Oasis, automatically creates machine-readable transcripts from television and audio broadcasts. Reports indicate that Oasis can also distinguish individual speakers and detect personal characteristics (such as gender) then denote these characteristics in the transcripts it creates. The other program, FLUENT, allows English-language keyword searches of non-English materials. This data mining tool not only finds pertinent documents, but also translates them, although the number of languages that can currently be translated is apparently limited (Russian, Chinese, Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, Korean and Ukrainian). In addition, FLUENT displays the frequency with which a given word is used in a document and can handle alternate search term spellings.
European Union – Enfopol
Enfopol is a special document created with the blessing of a special European Union council. It lists various “technical requirements” that essentially would make it easier for law enforcement officials to wiretap European communications networks. Efforts are now underway to implement these standards in the telecommunications systems of EU member countries.
United States – CALEA
The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) generally requires telecommunications carriers both to modify their existing networks and to design and deploy new generations of equipment (including software), all to ensure that carriers can meet certain specified “capability” and “capacity” requirements related to the ability of authorized government agencies to engage in wiretapping.
United States – TEMPEST
Reports have indicated the existence of another NSA project that is designed to capture computer signals (such as keystrokes or monitor images) through walls or from other buildings, even if the computers are not linked to a network. Details about this project, which is apparently codenamed TEMPEST, are only just becoming available. One NSA document, entitled “Compromising Emanations Laboratory Test Requirements, Electromagnetics”, was prepared by the NSA’s Telecommunications and Information Systems Security group. It describes test procedures for measuring the radiation emitted from a computer — both through radio waves and through telephone, serial, network, or power cables attached to it. A second document the NSA released describes the agency’s “Technical Security Program,” which is responsible for assessing electronic security and providing “technical security facility countermeasures.” Two subsequent research articles how the blinking patterns of LEDs and changes in the light intensity of cathode-ray tube displays, even from a distance, can allow someone to eavesdrop on the data passing through a given computer. Source
A South Korean documentary crew is accusing Chinese pharmaceutical companies of selling dead baby pills as stamina boosters.
China’s Big Pharma is literally making a killing from a new endeavor. According to a South Korean SBS TV documentary team, their industry is selling pills with ground dead babies as stamina boosters.
The team documents the horrific and disturbing story behind the dead baby pills, a secretive, lucrative business.
Chinese hospitals and abortion clinics apparently have connections with the business and alert pharmaceutical companies of their dead babies, mainly from abortions or still births.
The companies buy the corpses, and allegedly keep them in various families’ refrigerators to prevent detection. Then, they place the corpses in a drying microwave and grind them, placing them into capsules. They are then ready to be sold, according to the Korean documentary.
Is there any proof of this grim practice? The team acquired the pills and ran some DNA tests. The results showed that the pills were 99.7 percent human. Hair and nail remnants were also detected; even the baby’s gender was identified. This documentary was aired (with visuals) on August 6th, in South Korea.
What’s more, SBS revealed that the South Korean market for the baby capsules was fulfilled because there have been business networks between China and South Korea for some time now.
Aside from the dead baby pills, Chinese hospital staff are supposedly openly involved with the business of microwave dried placenta.
This writer has not been able to locate any documentary links. Sometimes, a story or photo on the internet cause wide spread knee jerk reactions before validated. One example, is the claim that in Taiwan, barbecued fetuses are available in some restaurants. The photo supposedly turned out to be a conceptual art piece (we hope).
However, this not the first time the dead babies as stamina pills scandal has been brought forth. In 1995, U.S. Representative Frank Wolf asserted that he had credible reports of the same exact practice listed above. He called for the Clinton administration and human rights groups to investigate and take action, but nothing became of it.
It is with sincerest hope that this information be proven incorrect or at least overstated.
~Health Freedoms
Mar 9, 2012 Spies aren’t just after government secrets these days: An indictment unsealed last month spotlights US efforts to crack down on corporate spying. The government has filed criminal espionage charges against a China-owned firm, saying Pangang Group was after DuPont chemical secrets—specifically, its efficient method for producing the white pigment titanium dioxide, the Wall Street Journal reports. It’s the first time such charges have been lodged against a state-owned foreign firm, the Justice Department says, as federal agents crack down on foreign governments’ attempts to pilfer US intellectual property.
A couple living in California has been charged with trying to steal and sell secrets about the 50-year-old DuPont technology to Pangang, and the Journal relates how the Liews were busted: After DuPont filed a civil suit against them last year, the FBI got a search warrant for their home. While there, it found a safe deposit box key—and an agent who speaks Mandarin overheard Walter Liew tell his wife in Chinese to say that she didn’t know about the bank … which is where she drove right after the agents left. Prosecutors say the couple’s box housed documents related to the plot. China says accusations that the state-owned company asked businessmen to obtain DuPont trade secrets are “groundless.” But “what we’ve learned since the end of the Cold War is that when it comes to the economy, our adversaries and even our allies will spy on us when it’s in their economic interest,” says an FBI director.Source
CRIME DOES NOT PAY... PLUS, THE BUTLER DID IT! AND REMEMBER: WHAT DOESN'T KILL YOU, WILL -MOST LIKELY- TRY AGAIN... AND DON'T FORGET: TODAY IS A GOOD DAY FOR SOMEONE ELSE TO DIE.
const4dia
1rex22
Insomniacs II 