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IMF Allocation
The G-20 also agreed to an allocation of $250 billion in Special Drawing Rights, the artificial currency that the IMF uses to settle accounts among its member nations. The move is akin to a central bank such as the Federal Reserve effectively creating money out of thin air, except it’s on a global scale.
The increase in Special Drawing Rights will allow countries to tap IMF money without having to accept changes to economic policies often demanded as a condition of aid. The cash is disbursed in proportion to the money each member-nation pays into the fund. Rich nations will be allowed to divert their allocations to countries in greater need.
http://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/facts/sdr.htm
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Former FBI counter-terrorism chief John O’Neil resigned from the FBI in disgust, stating that he was ordered not to investigate Saudi-Al Qaida connections because of the Enron pipeline deal. Loftus has confirmed that it was O’Neill who originally discovered the AL Qaida pipeline memo after the Embassy bombings in Africa. O’Neill gave an overview of the Enron block to two French authors who will soon be publishing in the United States. The FBI is currently investigating Loftus’ links to John O’Neill, and is also refusing FBI agent Robert Wright permission to publish his own findings about the Enron block. Loftus asserts that the Enron block, which remained in force from January 2001 until August 2001 when the pipeline deal collapsed, is the reason that none of FBI agent Rowley’s requests for investigations were ever approved. As numerous British and French authors have concluded, the information provided by European intelligence sources prior to 9/11 was so extensive, that it is no longer possible for either CIA or the FBI to assert a defense of incompetence. It is time for Congress to face the truth: In order to give Enron one last desperate chance to complete the Taliban pipeline and save itself from bankruptcy, senior levels of US intelligence were ordered to keep their eyes shut and their subordinates ignorant. The Enron cover-up confirms that 9/11 was not an intelligence failure or a law enforcement failure (at least not entirely). Instead, it was a foreign policy failure of the highest order. If Congress ever combines its Enron investigation with 9/11, Cheney’s whole house of cards will collapse".
What Congress Does Not Know about Enron and 9/11
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4219.htm
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There is no doubt that these secret negotiations existed, and that they were known to Al Qaida. Loftus recently received an FBI translation of a highly classified and encrypted Al Qaida document, circa 1997-1998, which was retrieved and decrypted from a computer laptop following the Embassy bombing in Africa. The document was written by Osama Bin Laden’s military commander, Mohammed Atef, under his nom de guerre, Abu Haf, and reveals extensive knowledge of the supposedly secret pipeline negotiations, and their potential economic worth to the Taliban, Pakistan and the U.S.
Former Afghanistan CIA agent Robert Baer has recently published a book charging that the cover-up of the 1990’s pipeline negotiations revealed extensive financial corruption inside the Clinton administration, and contributed to the lack of intelligence before 9/11. The Taliban negotiations temporarily collapsed in 1999 after Clinton reversed his NSC advisor’s policy, and ordered a missile strike against terrorists in Afghanistan.
However, in January 2001, Vice President Cheney allegedly reinstated the intelligence block and expanded it to effectively preclude any investigations whatsoever of Saudi-Taliban-Afghan oil connections. Former FBI counter-terrorism chief John O’Neill resigned from the FBI in disgust, stating that he was ordered not to investigate Saudi-Al Qaida connections because of the Enron pipeline deal. Loftus has confirmed that it was O’Neill who originally discovered the AL Qaida pipeline memo after the Embassy bombings in Africa.
O’Neill gave an overview of the Enron block to two French authors who will soon be publishing in the United States. The FBI is currently investigating Loftus’ links to John O’Neill, and is also refusing FBI agent Robert Wright permission to publish his own findings about the Enron block.
http://www.democracynow.org/2002/9/24/corporate_welfare_how_enron_halliburton_and
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But there’s another story about Enron, Halliburton and other companies like them.
While the World Bank has often been the target of criticism for the social and environmental impacts of its lending practices, another type of international financial institution has escaped much public attention.
They are Export Credit and Investment Insurance Agencies. ECAs are like department store credit cards. Rich countries use them to provide credit (loans) to poor countries so that they will buy the goods and services from the rich country and its corporations, like Halliburton, Boeing, Enron. The result is that nearly half of the debt incurred by developing countries to the industrial world, is because of ECAs.
The US companies even have a lobbying group, the Coalition for Employment Through Exports, that lobby Congress to make sure the money keeps flowing. Since 1994, Enron received more than $650 million dollars from the ECAs. The Justice Department is currently investigating Enron’s dealings with all federal agencies.
Guests:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_credit_agency
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International regulation
Both officially supported export credits and tied aid credit and grants are extended on terms controlled by governments. Therefore, there is a constant temptation to use these financial instruments to subsidize commercial exports in order to win a temporary advantage on an export market or to counterbalance such an action from another government (matching). However, the end result of such action is negative for importing countries (usually developing countries), who are rendered unable to choose the best combination of quality and price but consider financing first. It is also negative for tax payers, who foot the bill. It may only to the benefit of exporters whose government have the deepest pockets and the greatest willingness to subsidize, even though the macro-economic outcome of the subsidy is doubtful. In the past, there have been big, government-sheltered companies that were kept alive to a very large extent by export credits and tied aid credits. To avoid these traps, it was considered useful to standardize export credit conditions and to monitor matching and tied aid credits.
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/hr_block_enron.html
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H&R Block Charged in Enron Collapse
11/08/2004 | ConsumerAffairs.com
NASD has charged H&R Block Financial Advisors with fraud in the sale of millions of dollars worth of Enron Corporation bonds after Enron's finances, and its bond ratings, had begun to collapse.
NASD has charged H&R Block Financial Advisors with fraud in the sale of millions of dollars worth of Enron Corporation bonds after Enron's finances, and its bond ratings, had begun to collapse.
NASD charged that during the five-week period preceding the Enron bankruptcy filing -- while Enron's financial crisis was unfolding publicly and official investigations were being launched -- H&R; Block's brokers made affirmative misrepresentations to customers, touted the supposed benefits of the Enron bonds, and failed to disclose the serious and significant risks associated with an investment in the bonds.
NASD is the private-sector regulator of the securities industry.
- U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX)
- Aaron Goldzimer, social scientist with the organization Environmental Defense in its International Environment and Finance division. He has done extensive research on ECAs and in particular, their relationship to Enron, one of their biggest clients.
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The SDR is an international reserve asset, created by the IMF in 1969 to supplement its member countries' official reserves. Its value is based on a basket of four key international currencies, and SDRs can be exchanged for freely usable currencies. With a general SDR allocation that took effect on August 28 and a special allocation on September 9, 2009, the amount of SDRs increased from SDR 21.4 billion to SDR 204 billion (equivalent to about $324.1 billion, converted using the rate of March 31, 2011).
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Echo_chamber
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http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Echo_chamber
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Worse Than the World Bank? Export Credit Agencies--The Secret Engine of Globalization
Worse Than the World Bank? Export Credit Agencies--The Secret Engine of Globalization
by Aaron Goldzimer*Also available in PDF format (286kb).
Bankers are always very secretive about the precise structuring of their deals, but essentially the strategy is simple. The key is to get as high a return as possible, while palming the risk off on somebody else. That is why you should never listen when people tell you that export credit agencies are...dinosaurs. What could be nicer in times of turmoil than having the risk picked up by the taxpayer? --Euromoney1
The Three Gorges dam project in China is probably the biggest and most controversial construction project on the planet. Its reservoir is nearly half the length of California, in a watershed that is home to more than 370 million people. Many experts predict the outcome will be a nightmare: enormous amounts of residential and industrial waste and 530 million tons of silt a year--currently flushed out to sea--will instead collect in the reservoir; by some estimates, the odds of the dam's breaking are 1 in 1,000 (not counting a military or terrorist attempt to destroy it), endangering tens of millions of lives downstream; and already nearly 2 million people are being forcibly evicted to make way for the reservoir.2
Under intense pressure from nongovermental organizations (NGOs), the World Bank has refrained from financing the project due to the environmental, social, and economic controversies surrounding the dam. But few people know that other institutions run by the leading industrial nations have provided almost $1.5 billion in taxpayer-backed loans, guarantees, and insurance to construct the dam.3 These institutions are export credit and investment support agencies (ECAs).
Special Drawing Rights (SDRs)
March 31, 2011The SDR is an international reserve asset, created by the IMF in 1969 to supplement its member countries' official reserves. Its value is based on a basket of four key international currencies, and SDRs can be exchanged for freely usable currencies. With a general SDR allocation that took effect on August 28 and a special allocation on September 9, 2009, the amount of SDRs increased from SDR 21.4 billion to SDR 204 billion (equivalent to about $324.1 billion, converted using the rate of March 31, 2011).
The role of the SDR
The SDR was created by the IMF in 1969 to support the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system. A country participating in this system needed official reserves—government or central bank holdings of gold and widely accepted foreign currencies—that could be used to purchase the domestic currency in foreign exchange markets, as required to maintain its exchange rate. But the international supply of two key reserve assets—gold and the U.S. dollar—proved inadequate for supporting the expansion of world trade and financial development that was taking place. Therefore, the international community decided to create a new international reserve asset under the auspices of the IMF.However, only a few years later, the Bretton Woods system collapsed and the major currencies shifted to a floating exchange rate regime. In addition, the growth in international capital markets facilitated borrowing by creditworthy governments. Both of these developments lessened the need for SDRs.
The SDR is neither a currency, nor a claim on the IMF. Rather, it is a potential claim on the freely usable currencies of IMF members. Holders of SDRs can obtain these currencies in exchange for their SDRs in two ways: first, through the arrangement of voluntary exchanges between members; and second, by the IMF designating members with strong external positions to purchase SDRs from members with weak external positions. In addition to its role as a supplementary reserve asset, the SDR, serves as theunit of account of the IMF and some other international organizations.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Echo_chamber
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Echo chamber is a colloquial term used to describe a group of media outlets that tend to parrot each other's uncritical reports on the views of a single source, or that otherwise relies on unquestioning repetition of official sources.
In the United States, the Republican Party uses a network of conservative foundations, coordinated by the Philanthropy Roundtable, and described in an extensive report (March 2004) by Jerry M. Landay for Mediatransparency.org, supporting conservative think tanks, industry-friendly experts and subsidized conservative media that systematically spread their messages throughout the political and media establishment. Typically, the message starts when conservative voices begin making an allegation (e.g., Democratic candidates are engaged in "hate-mongering" with regard to Bush). Columns are written on this theme, first in conservative media (including blogs), but eventually appearing in mainstream media like the New York Times. This process can be used to turn an unsupported allegation or a partisan talking point into an "accepted fact."
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