Added: 3. März 2010
Tags: AIG, Bailout, Banks, Bill Clinton, Bubble, CO2, Commodities, Derivatives, Derivatives market, Economy, Financial Crisis, Global News, Goldman Sachs, Government, Henry Paulson, Internet, Larry Summers, Mortgage crisis, Mortgages, Oil, Oil Prices, Politics, Robert Rubin, Timothy Geithner, U.S., Wall Street
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An oil spill has reached Italy’s River Po after the suspected sabotage of a former refinery led to large amounts of oil pouring into a tributary.
The spill began early on Tuesday when someone broke into the plant near Monza, now an oil depot, and opened the taps, Italian news reports said.
They said an estimated 600,000 litres (158,500 gallons) of petrol and oil were released in to the River Lambro.
Efforts to prevent the spill reaching the Po failed.
Tags: Environment, Italy, Oil
Traders at the Kuwaiti Stock Exchange
“The Gulf monetary union pact has come into effect,” said Kuwait’s finance minister, Mustafa al-Shamali, speaking at a Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) summit in Kuwait.
The move will give the hyper-rich club of oil exporters a petro-currency of their own, greatly increasing their influence in the global exchange and capital markets and potentially displacing the US dollar as the pricing currency for oil contracts. Between them they amount to regional superpower with a GDP of $1.2 trillion (£739bn), some 40pc of the world’s proven oil reserves, and financial clout equal to that of China.
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar are to launch the first phase next year, creating a Gulf Monetary Council that will evolve quickly into a full-fledged central bank.
The Emirates are staying out for now - irked that the bank will be located in Riyadh at the insistence of Saudi King Abdullah rather than in Abu Dhabi. They are expected join later, along with Oman.
The Gulf states remain divided over the wisdom of anchoring their economies to the US dollar. The Gulf currency - dubbed “Gulfo” - is likely to track a global exchange basket and may ultimately float as a regional reserve currency in its own right. “The US dollar has failed. We need to delink,” said Nahed Taher, chief executive of Bahrain’s Gulf One Investment Bank.
The project is inspired by Europe’s monetary union, seen as a huge success in the Arab world. But there are concerns that the region is trying to run before it can walk. Continue reading »
Tags: Bahrain, Dollar, Economy, Euro, Global News, Gulf States, Kuwait, Middle East, Oil, Oil Prices, Politics, Qatar, Saudi Arabia
Map shows 15 Iraqi oil fields that will be bid upon by foreign companies
BAGHDAD — A consortium led by Russia’s private oil giant won the biggest prize of Iraq’s second oil auction this year, nabbing a field initially promised them a decade ago by Saddam Hussein while other companies Saturday showed little interest in offerings outside the secure southern part of the country.
Lukoil and Norway’s Statoil ASA won rights to develop the 12.88 billion barrel West Qurna Phase 2 field in the Basra region, beating out three other consortiums led by France’s Total SA, Malaysia’s state-run Petronas and British giant BP PLC.
The field was the crown jewel of Iraq’s second international oil auction, which has placed some of the country’s most coveted sites up for grabs compared with the riskier fields that drew little interest in the first auction in June. In all, 15 fields were offered over two days, and of the seven offered Saturday, four were awarded.
A is for Aspartame - The magic powder that turns diet soda into brain poison.
B is for Bailout money - Because all we really need is another trillion dollars.
C is for Codex Alimentarius - Because we all need to be protected from dangerous vitamins, right?
D is for Dumbing Down - No matter how uneducated the kids are, there’s always a public school willing to compromise its standards just enough to let them pass.
E is for Environmental Policy - Because treating the rivers and waterways like America’s toilet makes for fascinating beach swimming.
F is for FDA (or Foreclosures) - Just what we need: A Big Pharma tyranny enforcement branch in Washington D.C.
G is for Genetically Modified Organisms - Because playing God with the food supply sounded like such a great idea, we just couldn’t resist.
H is for Health insurance (or lack thereof) - Just another financial scam to enslave Americans in a medical police state while denying them access to real health services. Continue reading »
Tags: Aspartame, Bailout, Big Pharma, CDC, CODEX Alimentarius, Corporate Media, Corporations, Debt, DHS, DNA, Drugs, Education, Environment, FDA, Fed, Federal Reserve, Food, Genetically Modified Organisms, GMO, Government, Healthcare, helath, Medicine, Oil, Pharmaceutical Industry, Politics, Real Estate, Society, U.S., Unemployment, Vaccination, Vaccine, Wall Street
Production of North Sea oil has halved in the past decade Photo: EPA
What was the industry that powered Britain towards prosperity in the 1980s, and made us one of the most dynamic and successful nations in the Western world? I’ll give you a clue: it was described by a prime minister as “God’s gift” to the British economy; its revenue stream pumped ever larger amounts of cash into the Exchequer - and its subsequent collapse has helped send the public finances spiralling towards disaster.
If your first reaction was “the City”, think again. The answer is North Sea oil. One of the peculiarities of British politics - and economics - is the reluctance to take into account the critical contribution of oil to the economy. We spend so much time droning on about our excessive reliance on the financial sector that we tend to ignore this elephant in the room. But the truth is that, for the past quarter of a century, Britain has been a petro-economy. In 1999, we were producing more oil than Iraq, Kuwait or Nigeria. The following year, we pumped out almost twice as much natural gas as Iran - a country with reserves that are the envy of the world.
The result is that while we are apt to attribute the sudden spurt in Britain’s prosperity in the mid- to late-1980s to a deregulated and reinvigorated City, it owed far more to the massive windfall from the North Sea. Take a look at the numbers. In 1979, when Margaret Thatcher came to power, the amount Britain owed, as a nation, was £88.6 billion. In the subsequent six years, taxes from the North Sea (which had been pretty much non-existent previously) generated an incredible £52.4 billion.
This was no temporary windfall: last year, thanks to record oil prices, the Treasury had its largest ever haul from the North Sea, at £13 billion. This colossal sum equates to more than 3p on the basic rate of income tax - and it was thanks in great part to such revenue that Labour was able to sustain public spending in recent years without a drastic increase in interest rates or having to pass the extra costs on to consumers in the form of higher taxes.
The benefits went far beyond the public finances. Were it not for the cushion provided by oil exports, the deficit in Britain’s current account - its international ledger - would have been one of the worst in the Western world. Moreover, much of the massive rise in business investment in the years before the financial collapse was due entirely to spending in the North Sea. In short, without oil, recent history would have been vastly different. Growth would have been weaker, consumer spending less and the public finances decidedly more parlous. That’s not to say Britain would have been an economic pygmy - just that oil is a luxury that has permitted us to live much more comfortably.
Tags: Economy, Oil, Oil Prices, Politics, U.K.
This is a MUST-READ.
This is “winning the hearts and minds of people” in action. This is how the US creates real terrorists.
Soldiers wake up! You die for nothing in Afghanistan except corporate profit benefiting only the elite.
The following videos were posted to YouTube by the Real News Network on Oct. 26 and Nov. 4, 2009.
The CIA relied on intelligence based on torture in prisons in Uzbekistan, a place where widespread torture practices include raping suspects with broken bottles and boiling them alive, says a former British ambassador to the central Asian country.
Craig Murray, the rector of the University of Dundee in Scotland and until 2004 the UK’s ambassador to Uzbekistan, said the CIA not only relied on confessions gleaned through extreme torture, it sent terror war suspects to Uzbekistan as part of its extraordinary rendition program.
“I’m talking of people being raped with broken bottles,” he said at a lecture late last month that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network. “I’m talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I’m talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on.”
Former UK ambassador Craig Murray
Human rights groups have long been raising the alarm about the legal system in Uzbekistan. In 2007, Human Rights Watch declared that torture is “endemic” to the country’s justice system.
Murray said he only realized after his stint as ambassador that the CIA was sending people to be tortured in Uzbekistan, country he describes as a “totalitarian” state that has never moved on from its communist era, when it was a part of the Soviet Union.
Suspects in Uzbekistan’s gulags “were being told to confess to membership in Al Qaeda. They were told to confess they’d been in training camps in Afghanistan. They were told to confess they had met Osama bin Laden in person. And the CIA intelligence constantly echoed these themes.”
“I was absolutely stunned — it changed my whole world view in an instant — to be told that London knew [the intelligence] coming from torture, that it was not illegal because our legal advisers had decided that under the United Nations convention against torture, it is not illegal to obtain or use intelligence gained from torture as long as we didn’t do the torture ourselves,” Murray said.
IT’S THE PIPELINE, STUPID
Murray asserts that the primary motivation for US and British military involvement in central Asia has to do with large natural gas deposits in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. As evidence, he points to the plans to build a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan that would allow Western oil companies to avoid Russia and Iran when transporting natural gas out of the region.
Murray alleged that in the late 1990s the Uzbek ambassador to the US met with then-Texas Governor George W. Bush to discuss a pipeline for the region, and out of that meeting came agreements that would see Texas-based Enron gain the rights to Uzbekistan’s natural gas deposits, while oil company Unocal worked on developing the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline.
“The consultant who was organizing this for Unocal was a certain Mr. Karzai, who is now president of Afghanistan,” Murray noted.
Tags: Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaida, Children, CIA, Craig Murray, Crimes, Gas, George Bush, Hamid Karzai, Human Rights, Interrogation, Military, NATO, Oil, Osama Bin Laden, Politics, Rendition, Terrorism, Terrorists, Torture, U.K., U.S., Uzbekistan, War, War Crimes, War on Terror
Saudi Arabia on Wednesday decided to drop the widely used West Texas Intermediate oil contract as the benchmark for pricing its oil, dealing a serious blow to the New York Mercantile Exchange.
The decision by the world’s biggest oil exporter could encourage other producers to abandon the benchmark and threatens the dominance of the world’s most heavily traded oil futures contract. It is the main contract traded on Nymex.
The move reveals the growing discontent of Riyadh and its US refinery customers with WTI after the price of the price of the benchmark became separated from the global oil market this year.
Tags: Economy, NYMEX, Oil, Politics, Saudi Arabia
Alex continues his discussion with pastor Lindsey Williams about the plans of the elite to crash the economy.
Added: 23rd Oct 09
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Continue reading »
Tags: Alex Jones, Bailout, Banks, Bonds, China, Chrysler, Debt, Dollar, Economy, Euro, Fed, Federal Reserve, General Motors, Global News, GM, Gold, Great Depression, Hyperinflation, Hyperinflationary Depression, Inflation, Lindsey Williams, New World Order, Oil, Oil Prices, Police State, Politics, Quantitative Easing, Silver, Society, Stock Market, Treasury, U.S., Wall Street
- Iran to drop US dollar from forex reserves
BEIJING, October 14 (RIA Novosti) - Russia is ready to consider using the Russian and Chinese national currencies instead of the dollar in bilateral oil and gas dealings, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday.
The premier, currently on a visit to Beijing, said a final decision on the issue can only be made after a thorough expert analysis.
“Yesterday, energy companies, in particular Gazprom, raised the question of using the national currency. We are ready to examine the possibility of selling energy resources for rubles, but our Chinese partners need rubles for that. We are also ready to sell for yuans,” Putin said.
He stressed that “there should be a balance here.”
On Tuesday, Russia and China agreed terms for Russian gas deliveries at a level of up to 70 billion cubic meters a year. China also imports oil from Russia.
The Russian prime minister said the issue would be addressed among others at a meeting of Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) finance ministers, who are to convene before the end of the year in Kazakhstan.
Britain’s Independent newspaper reported last Tuesday that Russian officials had held “secret meetings” with Arab states, China and France on ending the use of the U.S. dollar in international oil trade.
Tags: China, Dollar, Economy, Gas, Government, Iran, Oil, Politics, Russia, Vladimir Putin
