Angry community groups yesterday called on mayor Bob Abbot to tell the State Government to stop interfering with the region’s green objectives.

Mr Abbot has been told to tell Planning Minister Stirling Hinchliffe that changes to critical planning documents for the region were totally unacceptable. Council briefed key stakeholders, including land owners and community groups, on the implications of changes it was ordered by the state to make to Palmview green field development precinct.

The government has altered maximum population numbers set by council to minimums, stripped out provisions for energy efficiency and other sustainability initiatives and slashed the size of buffers to ecologically sensitive wetlands and the Bruce Highway. Regional strategy and planning head Vivien Griffin issued a call to arms and will push for the setting up of a campaign committee to send a loud community voice to the government.

Ms Griffin said the region’s future was now at the crossroads. She said the council had a significant role to play; she said the State Government was proposing a new community whose minimum size would be equal to what Maroochydore holds; and she warned the government’s rejection of key sustainability measures made this a fight that affected communities from Beerburrum to Kin Kin.

Sippy Downs and District Community Association President, Murray Lyons, whose members would be most impacted by the development, said State Government changes would kill off any chance of building a sustainable community; ‘we have been telling the council since day dot that appeasement doesn’t work; Council has been saying it had to work with the government or planning would be taken from it; Council needs to stand up and say no to the impacts of the changes; if the State goes forward with this let it be on their head’.

Johanne Wright, who heads OSCAR, which represents the region’s community associations, said Mr Abbot would be expected to tell the government that “enough was enough”. The council’s sustainability advisory panel head Ian Christesen said population size was the number one issue that needed to be confronted if the council was to achieve sustainability.

He said carrying capacity should be based not just on biophysical constraints but also on the look, feel and character this community wanted for the future.
‘The SEQ plan dwelling targets are legally binding and mandatory; he said; we want them seen only as projections and a proper planning exercise started that fully involves the community and not just developers and their mates in George Street; by ripping out any mention of sustainability, Mr Hinchliffe has clearly shown where the State Government’s really at; it’s clear they want business as usual, development as usual to continue to be rolled out across the Coast. If that happens we can kiss goodbye to sustainability’.

Sunshine Coast Environment Council Manager Narelle McCarthy accused the government of arrogance, saying it had made no attempt to understand the region’s aspirations. Ms McCarthy urged residents to make submissions to the document which need to be completed within the next 30 business days and to get publicly vocal about how they feel about what the government has done.

She said the community had been given a window to how the state would treat the regional planning scheme now being developed by the council.

It’s time to fight Bligh’s growth

http://www.sunshinecoastdaily.com.au/story/2010/03/06/its-time-to-fight-blighs-growth/

Climate Cover-Up – The Crusade to Deny Global Warming is a new book by James Hoggan (Chair of the David Suzuki Foundation and the Canadian Climate Project), which provides a timely and alarming overview of a global propaganda campaign that has – for over two decades and largely funded by the oil and gas industry, successfully – made the public believe that climate science is controversial, unproven and unworthy of united global action.

These industry funded PR campaigns represent a fundamental breach of public trust Hoggan argues and have meant that we have lost two decades when we should have taken much strong climate action – two critical decades. His book charts a litany of scientists and right wing think tanks who have been paid off by the energy industry to become the mouthpieces of climate confusion and denial.

In 1998 the American Petroleum Institute (API) created a `Global Climate science communications plan’ aimed at convincing the media and public of `uncertainties’ in climate science, as opposed to promoting a genuine understanding of the science. Among the key aims of the communications plan was the intention, working on behalf of industry, to change conventional wisdom regardless of science and to overwhelm the media by injecting `balance’ into coverage – regardless of whether that balance reflected the true nature of the science.

We have obviously forgotten how the cigarette industry lied and bribied its way for years as did many chemical companies invloved in GM, so it comes as no surprise to know that the API communications plan begins with the mission statement that: “Victory will be achieved when average citizens understand (recognise) uncertainties in climate science; recognition of uncertainties becomes part of conventional wisdom (and) Media understands (recognises) uncertainties in climate science.”

Following this, Hoggan documents how influential think tanks took on the call of promoting this uncertainty, largely funded in doing so by ExxonMobil. In November 2006, conservative think tanks began offering cash to scientists who would agree to write critiques of the IPCC fourth assessment report. Ken Green of the American Enterprise Institute (who received significant funding from Exxon) offered US$10 000 plus expenses for such a critique, at a time prior to the IPCC Report being released. The AEI were clearly determined to criticise the findings of the IPCC report, whatever those findings were.

Meanwhile, the Climate Science Coalition (who have chapters in USA, New Zealand and Australia) were responsible for submitting a stream of sceptic articles to mainstream newspapers in an organised campaign of spreading oped’s around the world. The transparent purpose of this organisation is not to debate science, but to plant seeds of doubt in the public mind.

While the think tanks were doing their dirty work, the tactic spread all the way to the US congress. In 2007 the Republican Party pollster and spin doctor Frank Luntz wrote a memo advising the Bush Administration on how best to deal with the environmental movement; on climate change, he wrote, ‘the party should remind voters (sic) that scientific debate remains open; voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate, and defer to the scientists and other experts in the field…. The scientific debate is closing (against us) but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science.”

In January 2007 the Fraser Institute, a Canadian Think Tank, released an Independent Summary for Policy Makers of the IPCC report which concluded “there remains an unavoidable element of uncertainty as to the extent that humans are contributing to future climate change, and indeed whether or not such change is a good or bad thing.” The Fraser Institute is also a recipient of Exxon funding.

Meanwhile, Greenpeace USA started to expose the impact Exxon was having on the climate debate. Greenpeace set up an ExxonSecrets website which found that in the ten years after the creation of the Kyoto Protocol, Exxon had invested more than US$20 Million in think tanks dedicated to questioning climate change science.

Shortly after, two academics from the University of Central Florida, Peter Jacques and Mark Freeman, released a paper entitled `The Organisation of Denial: Conservative think-tanks and Environmental Scepticism’ found that 92% of 141 books had recently been published downplaying the importance of climate change received funding from ExxonMobil. [The Exxon Valdez oil carrier of ExxonMobil is still the largest oil spill polluter and have not paid the original penalty for gross pollution of some otherwise pristine environment and wiped out a complete fishing community]

Finally, the UK Royal Society contacted Exxon and asked them to stop funding think tanks that undermined climate science. In 2007 Exxon reported that it had stopped funding organisations `whose positions on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion of how the world will secure energy the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.’ However, shortly after that, a new denier think-tank came to the fore – the Heartland Institute.

In 2008, Heartland offered an all expenses paid trip to New York and a US$1000 honorarium to any scientist willing to “generate international media attention to the fact that many scientists believe forecasts of rapid warming and catastrophic events are not supported by sound science.” They brought these scientists together for major international climate sceptic conferences in 2009.

One strategy of Heartland has been to generate public `petitions’ of scientists who refute climate change science. However, many of these petitions have been found to contain names that are either fictional or of scientists who do not endorse the positions espoused. Many of these scientists have written to Heartland expressing their dismay at the use of their name, but Heartland refuses to remove them.

For example Dr. Svante Bjorck, a geo Biosphere scientist from Lund University, whose name was included in a Heartland Paper prepared by Dennis T. Avery and published on Heartland’s website under the headline `500 Scientists Whose Research Contradicts Man-made Global Warming Scares’ wrote in a letter to Heartland “please remove my name. What you have done is totally unethical !!” Despite this and many other similar complaints, the article and the list of names remains on Heartlands website. No apology. No correction.

A trend that Hoggan identifies in his book is that of the `echo-chamber effect’ among climate deniers. It relies on the echo chamber model of PR – sending out messages that reverberate through a series of think tanks, blogs, and sympathetic media outlets. This means that false claims made on climate denier websites are often repeated until they slip into the mainstream media.

A good example is UK Botanist David Bellamy writing in New Scientist that `555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Gracier Monitoring Service in Zurich have been growing since 1980′. When Guardian columnist George Monbiot contacted the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich to verify the claim he was told “This is complete bullshit.” Monbiot later tracked the figure to the denier website Junk Science and globalwarming.org and discovered it was written by long time industry funded denier Candace Crandall.

Another key example is that of the Hockey Stick graph designed by paleoclimatologist Michael Mann, and used in the third IPCC Report. A retired Mining executive and investor, Stephen MacIntyre, launched his attack on the Hockey Stick Graph in 2003 in an obscure Journal Energy and Environment after more reputable journals refused to publish it.

Although Mann rebuffed most of the criticisms, he did add a clarification for the record, and this was enough for the news to spread through the deniers echo-chamber that the graph was discredited. By the time the story was spun back into mainstream media, it was often used by right wing columnists to discredit the entire science of climate change. That was despite the National Academy of sciences affirming the legitimacy of the Hockey Stick graph.

Also identified in Hoggans book are a new category of climate sceptics – the nondenier denier. These people, typified by Bjorn Lomborg, put themselves forward as reasonable interpreters of the science, even allies in the fight against climate change, but then undermine the public appetite for action. Despite Lomborg’s book The Sceptical Environmentalist being heavily criticised by the Danish government for `fabricating data’, as well as being `misleading’ and containing `plagiarism’, Lomborg became the toast of the sceptics movement, receiving awards from conservative think-tanks in the US and UK.

The problem is that in the interests of traditional journalistic balance, people like Lomborg can appear to be `centrist’ voices. Falling between the environmental side of the debate and industry funded lobbyists who were regularly overstating the anti-warming side, people like Lomborg who might argue – there is warming but we need to direct money to more pressing issues like AIDS – were given a large space in the media.

James Hoggan refers to the work of a number of researchers who have tried to find peer-reviewed papers doubting the science of climate change, but is those cases, researchers such as Benny Peiser in the US and Lawrence Solomon in the UK could not find a single peer-reviewed article in the past 15 years denying anthropogenic climate change or a single well qualified “denier” of the human contribution to climate change.

In this climate of deliberate manipulation and misinformation James Hoggan concludes that the alleged controversy around global warming should now be identified for what it is – a carefully constructed ruse to keep people from supporting the kinds of actions that will compromise the profit potential of large energy organisations, including the largest corporation in the world – ExxonMobil.

The book is essential reading.

Market demand for the scheme from new large-scale projects, such as wind farms and solar energy plants, has stalled partly because the government used it to reward households installing rooftop solar panels with an $8000 rebate; however, the government intends, from January 2011 to split the scheme into two parts: one for large-scale projects and a second for small-scale technologies such as solar panels and solar hot water systems.

‘We anticipate under these changes we will exceed our 20 % target by 2020′ Climate Change Minister Penny Wong told reporters in Canberra today. But she was reluctant to nominate by how much the target would be exceeded, saying that depended on (1) the take-up by households.

Large-scale projects will deliver about 41,000 kilowatt hours, the “vast majority” of the 2020 target [45,850 kilowatt hours]; ‘what that will deliver is certainty to the large-scale market,” Senator Wong said, adding the change aimed to drive investment. Small-scale projects will be covered by an uncapped fixed price – $40 per megawatt hour of electricity produced – scheme.

The changes mean the average household will pay $3 to -$4 more a year in electricity charges, Senator Wong said, but Parliament will need to approve the changes. And while the Australian Greens have welcomed the decision, questions remain unanswered about how it will operate. The Greens – Senator Christine Milne – said the changes meant thousands of Australians employed in building and running renewable energy power stations could breathe a sigh of relief that their jobs were secure, but with the details still to be clarified, important questions remained about how the scheme would now operate.

‘While the fixed price removes some uncertainty for solar investors, we need to know what long-term certainty the government will offer the industry, given that the solar multiplier will phase out over the coming few years’ she said. The Greens are calling for a gross national feed-in for all forms of renewable energy and a parallel energy efficiency scheme.

Australia’s largest electricity retailer AGL Energy managing director Michael Fraser said today the changes could see construction begin on new wind farm projects “sooner rather than later”. AGL had put a hold on any investment in its proposed Macarthur wind farm, about 300 kilometres west of Melbourne. [The Macarthur project is a joint venture with New Zealand's Meridian Energy] But Mr Fraser said the changes to the scheme could spark investment in new renewable energy projects. ‘We’d like to congratulate them on being decisive in trying to address that issue’ he told analysts at the company’s half-year results presentation. ‘We obviously need to work through the detail of what is being proposed … we’ll work through the detail, get that legislation worked out; I’d like to think that once we understand the detail and see that legislation in place we’ll see projects like Macarthur begin construction much sooner rather than later’.

But really is it still just smoke and mirrors ? The Green Loan program – that could have seen thousands of Australians led by the hand in making changes in energy consumption reductions as well as energy production via solar power – has been neutered.

But the last word comes from someone far smarter and with simple logic, Albert Bartlett.
The now world famous professor of Physics, Al Bartlett, took Australia’s Climate Change Minister Penny Wong’s figures apart on climate change emissions and population numbers, showing that Ms Wong is wrong.

He said ‘to accommodate the projected population growth AND to reduce overall annual emissions by 60% would require an annual rate of decrease of per capita emissions of polluting greenhouse gases of 3.543 % per year over the next forty years; the per capita annual emissions would have to be cut in half every 19.6 years !’

Bartlett went on to say that at its present rate of growth, Australia’s population will double by 2050, so thats not 35 million as touted by the federal government, thats almost 45 million people … and we have to import much of our food now; and despite the heavy rainfall and some billions spent of water infrastructure, we’ve had probelms getting water to half the projected national population in 2050.

In Australia we use the Rule of 72 to calculate the effects of growth and reduction; so we can apply this Rule to anything … numbers of patients per doctor; average waiting time patients per doctor then injecting (pun intended) additional patients, you can calculate the new wait time … road / traffic density, add additional users and we could see what I saw in Argentina in Buenos Aires; imagine Queen street 20 lanes wide.

Why local, state and federal governments don’t seem to want to acknowledge this simple calculation is anyone guess … but one thing is for sure, if you educate the population in ways to reduce GHG emissions, not only will they have more disposable income (to pay fat bankers) but it will reduce massive infrastructure costs associated with the soon to be required power stations to supply electricity to 40+ million Aussies and have cut our emissions in half … yer right …

As I am often wont to say, there are three organisations that run society; religion, corporations and government (which includes monarchy) and each has repeatedly been proven to lie, steal and cheat and operated like any ‘good business’, with the books (for tax purposes) and then there are the cooked books, which invite people to buy into what is being sold.

Long before I considered it, there were people who wanted to rule the world and when I became aware of it, I figured it couldn’t happen because in such a like minded group, you would always have those who feel they are more deserving, better suited or clinical enough to dispose of all in their path.

Problem is, who has your back when the chips are down and they know your weaknesses ? And more importantly, will those who see the ultimate slip from their grasp decided – suicide bomber like – to take everyone else with them in a all or nothing nuclear war ?

This article is not based on factual history but more on the history of human nature.  
In our times – the last 100 odd years – the Germans and Japanese tried their hand at world domination, then the Russians and Americans had a crack at it (the Americans will die trying; if not physically, definitely financially) and the Chinese probably think its their time.  Separately, in the Arab states, there is jocking for superiority; India and Pakistan are at each other’s throats, Latin America is sort of in agreement but more with the USA as the main protagonist (yet there are underlying grudges there as well) then you have Europe but more as a financial amalgamation; there is the fragmented previous USSR with more financial, environmental and identity crisis than you can poke a stick at, rife with corruption and over-populated to such a degree that life is of little value.

There are no real threats in the Australasian region purely because each country has over-extended itself by several generations; fortunately Australia is far enough away (fuel and supply support wise) to keep on the ‘country’s to do list’.

If we consider the USA as a quieter young man suddenly having responsability thrust on him, then you can perhaps understand the excesses of the country, the strong doing the grunt work and the less strong controlling the paperwork; eventually the manipulation started.  The Great Depression gave the USA a strong lesson in many areas, the need to watch the excesses of the wealthy and how corporate government was used to create a war machine to support any American company that chose to take over another country’s resources and make them their own.

Wall Street was chosen as the financial heartbeat and responsible for making the United States the wealthiest country in the world, yet, today the the USA is in debt in the trillions of dollars. How did having access to so many countries resources and having such a quality life-style result in the majority of US States becoming bankrupt … why are so many Americans losing their homes … why – in the ‘richest nation on Earth ? As in America, Australians likewise find the lower class have to work multiple jobs to feed their families and in middle class families, both parents have to work, when one parent could easily support the family fifty years ago ?

In sales, you learn that asking questions is a more dramatic way of alerting people to what they ‘lack’; so we see advertising companies used to market a corporate government philosophy and media (television stations and newspapers) collude to maintain advertising $’s rather then report real story’s; we in Australia – as in America and the USSR – need a change, a new order because the old guard have reamed us out until there is no more; just as in Latin American countries, the re-distribution of wealth has to take place; the excesses of the so called world order have had their day; what they consider a necessity, most of us consider a luxury.

If the United States is no longer the richest country in the world, shouldn’t we be choosing our own path instead of following their lead ? Australia is pretty much solvent; however, political manipulation and incuring debt with us drowning in debt like the USA is not the answer.

How America ended up down the shute is due to the very core of their banking system, headed by the Federal Reserve and cartel member Wall Street banks like JP Morgan Chase and is based on nothing but debt. The tool that America, the IMF and World Bank have long used on others has finally got them, as the saying goes ‘there are two ways to conquer and enslave a country; one is by the sword and the other by debt’.

The complex façade of high finance and current state of the US economy is that Wall Street puts people, businesses and governments in debt; no longer content to suck the lifeblood of the taxpayer, financial instutions suck the interest payer, the taxpayer and the government. The more indebted Americans and Australians are, the more short-term bonus money the banks (under whatever name they use) make. When Wall Street and the babks should otherwise have gone bankrupt from excessive debt-based profiteering, corporate government props them back up because it too is also controlled by debt.

The monopolizing by financial instutions / banks cartel only exists because of the government. Corporate government came about when senior public servants and politicians sold their services off more for personal gain, they implemented policies that helped create the cartels. The rise of the fortune of financial institutions / banks go hand in hand with the decline of America and Australia may well soon follow. Bank cartels – with government protection – adds no productive value to the economy, it merely sucks value from everything else; like a bush tick, it eventually sucks the life-blood out the host and kills it.

I read somewhere that real value comes from community relationships, effective local governments and businesses, farming, manufacturing, construction, etc; whereas the financial institutions / banks are massive mining operations that lord over people and institutions doing those activities. It is just a different version of the feudal kings of old who staked controlling claims around the world to mine people and resources.

In America, once the Federal Reserve Act created the Wall Street cartel with a permanent controlling stake over the entire system, the American republic was doomed, guaranteed to be converted into a voracious corporate empire in a matter of a couple generations.  Due to its compounding nature, having interest attached to all the money in the system creates the need for exponential growth. It must continuously expand. This is why we have seen so many developing countries conquered by debt in the last several decades.

A steady state is not possible. Neoclassical economics inexcusably ignores this by implying that our system is driven by production and money is simply a medium of exchange that facilitates it. On the contrary, the very nature of the debt-based money pumped out by Wall Street and the banking system requires growth. We see such growth in ever-expanding shopping malls, ever-decreasing quality of franchise food, ever-increasing number of manufacturers moving offshore to find lower cost labor, and many other ways. These are bad enough, but if growth is not driven by production that can maintain more stable levels of debt, how else can the system grow?

An illusion of growth can be created by simply issuing more debt or changing the value of something.  In the USA, there was a downturn of fuel consumption yet the industry showed a profit; not a real profit, but a papre profit. What they did was increase reserve holdings and slow delivery of refined oil which they then said was worth (say) USA $3 a gallon when it was actuall selling for USA $2.50 a gallon. People need to borrow more money to live and this credit inflation is for the most part, the type of growth in the Australian and US economy. Ever since 1971 when the dollar was changed to allow for infinite credit inflation, the banking system acted like a casino; credit inflation is like passing out extra free chips to everyone, which makes people think they are more wealthy. How banks in Australia and the USA did this was by over-valuing property.

Now those running the casino knew which chips were real and which ones were fake and as the real chips came across their counter, they took the real chips and sent more fake ones out. Argentina was a classic example; the IMF and World Bank colluded with the government and allowed the Peso to be pegged at the same value as the US$; when Argentineans banked US$’s that was OK but when they wanted a withdrawal, the banks would only pay in Peso’s; the switcharoo ripped billions out of the country.

Wall Street epitomises that corporate greed; the wealthy are so wealthy they control government including police forces; they extract their rigged profit from an expanded game with far more chips, but the reckoning with the truth eventually comes when everyone else tries to cash out their chips. The money will not be there. This is what the world is facing as we approach a massive deleveraging decline in the economy.

Credit inflation spirals total debt out of control because more and more must be borrowed in order to payback all the interest in the system. It is not hard to understand the problem with such a pyramid system, it must crash. Is should have crashed in the 80’s, but the financial system worked overtime to prevent it.

The USA Government changed laws in the 90’s to prevent it again by allowing Wall Street to engage in chicanery that created a near infinite amount of credit inflation; the fraudulent derivatives market.

We are now entering an era in which our choices are being limited by several immovable realities, resources available, like the easiest oil, coal and gas has already been dug up, exported and now is part of global warming and our individual ability to borrow or allocate more money to maintain a growth that was only possible by our previous ability to access said weatlh. Our economic future is more a product of the political choices and increasingly difficult; we have no good choices, we have to tighten the belt, but our whole financial structre cannot allow it; the system really only leaves a choice of bad options.

We know more about what is happening around the world and can see other countries going down the gurgler; we may feel isolated here, but just as the bird-flu affected ‘them’, so too did in affect us here; but really the human immune system is a lot better than a financial system; what is happening elsewhere will happen here.

Are you wondering how America will make Afghanistan a safe democracy (like Iraq) when its own system is in turmoil and overseas investment (thats loans the Americans are applying for and many fund managers are selling their clients out to line their own pockets in perhaps the last big payoff).

What is the EU doing / going to do Greece falling over; they have 3 choices, bail out Greece, let Greece sink (into an economic depression) or just pretend to bail out Greece. The problem is there is not enough productive activity in Europe to really support all the members of the European Union in the style they’re accustomed to, (just like in the USA and the UK)

A reformed Europe has likewise painted itself into a corner, the monetary union seemed like a great idea as long as the members appeared to play straight in the revolving credit racket; Europe had never been so peaceful and happy for so long, yet the global financial crisis has opened a yawning black hole in the operating system and into it has been sucked all the elaborately constructed abstract markers of wealth — in the form of credit-gone-bad — and now the sad truth is that there really isn’t enough wealth to go around.

Places like Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Ireland will have to return to their previous condition as economic backwaters; either that or Germans and Frenchmen have to work an extra seventeen hours a week to prop these places up, and somehow that seems unlikely to happen.  Europe has plenty of other things to worry about in the bigger picture; where are they supposing to get the oil and natural gas they need to keep things running; ?

The UK once had quite bit but wasted it on building freeways and suburbs;
Norway – with around one-twelfth the UK’s population – still has a bit of oil and gas, but not enough to keep the rest of the gang in Europe humming. Romania has bugger all left and for the moment, Europe, gets its fossil fuels from Russia.

Europe can only depend on Russia’s energy bitch for so long before it too runs out; can they compete with China, Japan, India and the USA for whatever comes out of the Middle East, Africa, and Venezuela ? Meanwhile, all the exporters see their own exports dwindling as their populations grow and grow and they pour more bunker oil into the new electric power stations, and evermore new cars leave the showrooms in Riyadh, and Hugo Chavez keeps pumping 35-cent gasoline for el gente.

So what happens if Greece leaves / is kicked out, is it too late; the UK has financial troubles; its farming is on the ropes and the population is growing; will it return to the 19th century ? The UK is out of oil, out of banking credit (which is all it had the last forty years) and out of time and all it’s bad paper (for now hidden in their bank vaults) is enough to blow the black hole even wider.

What happens to the peacefulness of contemporary Europe and the UK now that the narcotic of universal prosperity is wearing off; will the populace be too shellshocked for a while to do anything; or will old and new animosities bubble to the surface and see riots on the streets ? As one writer said ‘effete cafe layabouts will be transformed into warrior societies, whose sheer power of testosterone in idle, unemployed young men will clear the streets’.

England is desperatley looking for oil in the Falklands and Europe may well join the global contest for the world’s remaining oil resources. Germany and France will not have the luxury to drink espresso and watch Iran become a mad dog nuclear power, with missiles capable of striking Frankfort and Lyon. The USA will struggle with very similar problems of capital and economy and fall into bankruptcy; one can imagine the political mischief there and in Europe.

The financial arrangements are so intermingled that the collapse of a major bank or of a country over there is going to blow more holes through all floundering institutions; thanks to the banks and financial instutions, we are all infected with the financial equivalent of AIDS, with no treatment excpet termination of the carriers.

If we look again at Greece and how it arrived there, we have to look at the creation of the EU and the Euro. Most of the Mediterranean countries that are now in trouble were allowed into the union with an exchange rate that overvalued their currencies relative to the northern countries, but especially to Germany.

That meant that Greek consumers could then buy products and services that previously may have been out of their reach; plus with government debt at low rates, the Greek government could borrow more to finance deficit spending to appear as though it had good management (similar to Anna Bligh and Kevin Rudd). But Greece began to increase its debt with abandon and as it turns out, Greece basically lied about its finances (who would have thought that of politicans) in order to gain admission to the union; it never complied with the fiscal discipline that was required for entrance.

With the high exchange rate, however, came the consequence of higher labor costs relative to, above all, Germany. Greek workers had the second highest level of actual hours worked, but even with that, Greece was running a trade deficit that is currently 12.7% of its GDP. At the onset of the current recession, their fiscal deficit went from bad to worse; their total debt is now €254 billion and they need to finance another €64 billion this year and €30 billion of it in the next few months.

Bottom line, without some help or a bailout, they simply will not be able to borrow that money. And since a lot of that money is for “rollover” debt, that means a potential for default if they cannot borrow it.  European leaders said  Greece will not be allowed to fail, hinting of a bailout. But there are a lot of “buts” and conditions, not the least of which is where will the money come from if all economies are suppressed ?

German Chancellor Merkel has indicated a willingness to help, but the German finance minister and other politicians are suggesting German cooperation will either not be forthcoming or only be there at a very high price; and the price is a severe round of “austerity measures,” otherwise known as budget cuts. Greece is being told that it must cut its budget to an 8.7% deficit this year and down to 3% within three years.

That would mean huge cuts in entitlements, Social Security, defense, education, wages, subsidies, and on and on. The Americans tried to freeze their budget and tried to grow out of it as they did in the ’90s, or gradually cutting the budget a few hundred billion a year while raising taxes; however, tax increases and budget cuts will guarantee a recession and with high unemployment climbing higher, it translates into Depression.

Some 30% of Greece’s economy is underground, meaning it is not taxed. In a country of 10 million people, only 6 (!!!!) people filed tax returns showing in excess of €1 million in income. Yet over 50% of GDP is government spending, and Greece has one of the highest public employee levels as a percentage of population in Europe. And its unions are very powerful. Nearly all of them have gone on strike over this proposal.

If Greece bites the bullet and makes the budget cuts, that means that nominal GDP will decline by (at least) 4-5% over the next 3 years and tax revenues will also decline, even with tax increases, meaning that it will take even further cuts, over and above the ones contemplated to get to that magic 3% fiscal deficit to GDP that is required by the Maastricht Treaty will bring on a depression.

The fear is one of contagion. Some argue that Greece is only 2.7% of European GDP. But Bear Stearns held less than 2% of US banking assets, and look what happened.  The largest holders of Greek debt are French, followed by the Swiss and then the Germans. The percentage of GDP for Germany is just over 1%; off more concern is France at nearly 3% and Belgium 2.5%.

For Germany, the debts of Ireland, Portugal and Spain are much bigger problems, nearly 15 times the size of the Greek issue. The recent credit crisis was over a few trillion in bad, mostly USA mortgage debts, with most of that at US banks. Greek debt is $350 billion, with about $270 billion of that spread among just three European countries and their banks.

It could bankrupt the bulk of the European banking system, which is why it is unlikely to be allowed to happen; just as the USA Fed (under Volker!) allowed US banks to mark up Latin American debt that had defaulted to its original loan value and only slowly did they write it down; it took many years; the same thing may well happen in Europe.

Debt is a constraint on growth.

Then there is Latvia, as areas were colonized as export markets and bank markets, they were stripped of their economic surpluses, skilled labor and working-age labor generally, their real estate and buildings, and whatever was inherited from the Soviet era.  Latvia has experienced one of the world’s worst economic crises. It is not only economic, but demographic. Its 25.5% plunge in GDP over just the past two years (almost 20% in this past year alone) is already the worst two-year drop on record.

Like the USA, the Latvian government is rapidly accumulating debt, from just 7.9% of GDP in 2007, Latvia’s debt is projected to be 74% of GDP in 2010 and supposedly stabilizing at 89% in 2014 in the best-case – IMF projected – scenario, making it fall outside the debt Maastricht debt limits for adopting the Euro. Trying to enter the EU has caused Latvia’s Central Bank to implement painful austerity measures to keep its currency peg and burned through currency reserves that otherwise could have been invested in its domestic economy.

What has caused this economic plight has been Western bankers and investors who financialized these economies with the usiness friendly reforms so roundly pushed by the World Bank, Washington and Brussels; the same ‘brains’ behind the world economic collapse.

What should strike fear into every nations heart is the IMF’s suggestion that it head a new world curency.

The pattern of a ruling kleptocracy at the top and an indebted work force, non – or weakly unionized, with few workplace protections is always applauded as a business-friendly model for the rest of the world to emulate. The result has been an economic experiment seemingly gone mad, a dystopia whose victims are now being blamed. Neoliberal trickle-down ideology – apparently being prepared for application to Europe and North America with an equally optimistic rhetoric – was so economically destructive that it is almost as if these nations were invaded militarily.

So it is indeed time to start worrying about whether the Baltics may be a dress rehearsal for what we are about to see in the United States. Debt peonage has replaced outright serfdom; mortgages far in excess of actual market values ripples around the world, with Australia high on the over-valued real estate wave, ready to meet the beach of reality.  Property values have plunged by 50-70% in the past year (depending on housing type) in Latvia as well as the USA; and the volume of foreign-currency debt is far beyond what all countries can earn by exporting the products of their labor, industry, agriculture and resources.

Back in the late 70’s -as an employee of Westpac’s AGC Finance – I noticed a progresive trend towards a centralization of decision making; some three decades have passed since this centralization was introduced and the results are disastrous; even a crime against humanity (as one person suggested) The much touted economic growth has not occurred, what protection of one’s own industries did was protect domestic industry, public infrastructure spending, progressive taxation and legal prohibitions against insider dealing and looting; the new order allowed for and encouraged the Gordon Gecko free-market ideology.

This philosophy of the U.S. banking regulation in the 1930’s and which West Europe and Japan followed from the 1950s through the 1970s to promote investment in manufacturing led to today. Instead of checking the financial sector’s ability to engage in speculative excess, the USA overturned these regulations in the 1980; from a bit below 5% of total U.S. profits in 1982, the financial sector’s after-tax profits rose to an unprecedented 41% in 2007.

In effect, this zero-sum activity was an overhead tax on the economy, the buying and selling of shares, futures, currency exchanges, bonds, debentures, promissory notes, gold in hard form or certificates, anything was bought and sold even before a sod of earth was turned. The USA’s ‘no product’ financial market grew to almost 4 times the size of the USA’s GDP of actual goods and services.

People borrowed against property on top of future earnings and various tax deductions flowing on from these loans resulted in a revenue that society was supposed to collect as the tax base that invested in economic and social infrastructure to make society richer, instead became debt to the banking system. But make no mistake, this was not government being duped by corporations, this was the beginning of corporate government. One has but to look at America to see the bloated carcass that was once a justifibly proud nation

Its strange in a way to see that despite the cultural and political differences, that Latvia (once part of the USSR) and the USA have similar unemployment and both suggest that the bottom of the crisis has been reached, exports finally have begun to pick up, yet the economy is still in desperate straits. Unemployment at more than 22%, people looking to leave the country, tens of thousands more deciding not to have children; all natural responses to saddling the people of a country with billions / trillons of public and private debt.

And what of the 8th largest economy in the world … California ? JP Morgan chief
Jamie Dimon has warned that American investors should be more worried about the risk of default of the state of California than of Greece’s current debt woes.

California poses more of a risk, given the state’s $20 billion budget deficit, which Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is desperately trying to reduce; the state’s legislature passed bills that will cut the deficit by $2.8 billion through budget cuts and other measures; however, Arnie is looking for $8.9 billion of cuts over the next 16 months and $7billion of handouts from the federal government.
Will the USA government give the money to California or Chile, or Pakistan or cut back military operations ?  Stop laughing, I’m serious (and don’t bring New Orleans into the conversation …)

Last summer, California issued $3 billion in IOU’s to creditors including residents owed tax refunds as a way of staving off a cash crisis.  Better go out and by some paper to make some classy IOU’s which might be better received than the Greenback …

Acknowledgements to Michael Hudson (Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City and president of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET) for much of the data.
Micheal is the author of books including Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (new ed., Pluto Press, 2002) and Trade, Development and Foreign Debt: A History of Theories of Polarization v. Convergence in the World Economy. He can be reached via his website, mh@michael-hudson.com

Like a well accomplished conman, America is borrowing money to maintain a lifestyle it can’t afford and treading the world stage like it rules the world; those it can’t crush, it buys off and those suffering from earthquakes they offer money and asssistance while their own are doing it tough.

They started a massive anti Toyota campaign not to assist people, but to try and punish the Japanese who have pumped almost USA$1 trillion into the USA economy which would otherwise already collapsed. American car manufactureres have long had a poor reputation for finish, quality and safety, yet Toyota – now the biggest car manufacturer in the world must suffer for their success and America’s failure.

So Bill Clinton is a ‘patron’ for Haiti and his wife Hillary Clinton is in Chile offering hundres of millions in aid and President Obama’s plan is a $50M advertising campaign in Pakistan to raise awareness and build a brand for America. The goal is to raise awareness of projects aimed at reversing anti-American sentiments, and a substantial amount will be spent on media, especially private TV channels, to reduce tension and bring Pakistan-US relations back on the right path.

The Pakistan media will be asked to report on the Obama administration’s plan for $1.45 billion in aid for Pakistan this year, funding water, energy and other projects as well as a media campaign to counter extremist views, according to Reuters.

Houston, I think you’ve got a problem back home !

The Americans just don’t seem to get it; they believe they can buy the Pakistani people at the same time as reduce the ability of al Qaeda and other extremists to influence public perceptions and attitudes; they feel they that support for the government will establish a more secure, prosperous and lasting state. Military spending in the region for some 10 years and costing anywhere up to USA$20 $10 billion has not been effective at building better relations with Islamabad … well hello !

The realy funny part is the Obama administration plans to help Pakistan’s democratic government meet budget shortfalls and deliver services to a population increasingly angry about economic and security troubles, yet it doesn’t have it’s own house in order; is it any wonder the USA is doomed; those financially attached to the USA will be dragged down.

Movies made in America purport a rough, tough fighting machine, yet more and more males in Amercia are well … showing distinct female traits, so this over-compensation of making war on other people, killing, raping and torture are suppose to imply ‘masulinity?

Atrazine is one of the most commonly used weedkillers and its been proven to turn male frogs into females researchers in the US have found; experiments show the complete effects of atrazine, which disrupt hormones and is one of the chief suspects in the decline of amphibians around the world.

Atrazine-exposed males were both demasculinised (chemically castrated) and completely feminised as adults,” researchers from the University of California Berkeley wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The chemical had been shown to disrupt development and make frogs develop both male and female features – termed hermaphroditism.

Tyrone Hayes from the University of California Berkeley says the study of 40 male frogs shows the process can go even further; ‘before we knew we got fewer males than we should have, and we got hermaphrodites; clearly shown that many of these animals are sex-reversed males; Atrazine has caused a hormonal imbalance that has made them develop into the wrong sex, in terms of their genetic constitution’.

The European Union banned Atrazine in 2004 but Australia still uses the toxic chemical widely in agriculture. The report shows that approximately 36,287 tonnes are applied annually in the United States alone and atrazine is the most common pesticide contaminant of ground and surface water. Atrazine can be transported more than 1,000 kilometres from the point of application via rainfall and – as a result – contaminates otherwise pristine habitats, even in remote areas where it is not used. Even more scary is the fact that more than 227 tonnes of Atrazine is precipitated in rainfall each year in the United States. The largely toothless US Environmental Protection Agency said (in October 2009) that it was reviewing the health impacts of atrazine.

Funny its not, but funnily enough Syngenta AG – one of several companies that makes atrazine – has long defended its safety, citing it as one of the best-studied herbicides available and pointed to safety reviews from the EPA and World Health Organisation, among others.  Hayes and colleagues studied 40 African clawed frogs, keeping them in water contaminated with 2.5 parts per billion (ppb) of atrazine. The EPA’s current drinking water standard is 3ppb. The study said in part ‘10% of the exposed genetic males developed into functional females that copulated with unexposed males and produced viable eggs; so regardless of the mechanism, the impacts of atrazine on amphibians and on wildlife in general are potentially devastating’.

The negative impacts on wild amphibians is especially concerning given that the dose examined - 2.5ppb – is in the range that animals experience year-round in areas where atrazine is used as well within levels found in rainfall, in which levels can exceed 100ppb in the midwestern United States. Perhaps a simple human survey would reveal a higher concentration in sexually ‘confused’ males in that region.

Funny thing is though, with all this continued investment, growth and politicians talking up the ‘recovery’ around the world … world trade actually fell by 12% last year, the biggest drop since the Second World War according to the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

America has been fudging the figures for so long, even they don’t know where fact ends and fiction starts, but in Australia we know the federal government has been talking up the economy and the Reserve Bank has been pretending that that don’t have the same agenda (that they are poles apart) but raising interest rates ‘because of economic growth, when all along they – and we - know that it has been money the federal government has been borrowing and pumping into the system to make it appear  their is growth; that is barely 0.2% growth is ‘growth.

But there figures you just can’t fudge and the level of trade between nations – which had been expected to decline by 10% in 2009 – has had a sharp fall says Pascal Lamy (the Director-General) of the WTO.

Negotiations which began in 2001 and currently at a standstill, were aimed at removing barriers to trade for poor nations by striking a deal that would cut agriculture subsidies and tariffs on industrial goods.

These talks have been hampered by disagreements on how much America and Europe should reduce farm aid and the extent to which developing countries such as India and China should lower tariffs.

The German economy (the biggest in Europe), had stagnated in the fourth quarter of last year after 0.7 per cent growth in GDP between July and September, adding further pressure to the Euro, which has been battered by recent weeks over Greece’s ability to reduce its debt. It has also dimmed hopes that Germany might be able to bail out Greece, as Germany’s public deficit was revised upwards to €79.3 billion / 3.3% of GDP.  Under the European Union’s Stability and Growth Pact, EU members are supposed to run deficits no larger than 3% of GDP and work towards a balance or even a surplus in times of economic growth.

While the Euro has fallen 10% against the USA$ since the end of November 2009 amid growing worries about the debt problems of Greece and other highly indebted eurozone countries such as Portugal and Spain, one must wonder how and why every country’s debt is growing, yet they all appear to have such viable company value / returns – reflected in share values – yet business everywhere is depressed and even more worrying is the fact that the USA$ is really worth far less than the value accorded it by exchange rates.  As I have said previously, if the Americans thought they could borrow money endlessly and print money faster than Zimbabwe to write down the value of their debt, is this how the finance ministers around the world intend to counter this move, by devaluing their own currencies … if other countries around the world have refused or been unable to repay monies borrowed via the IMF and World Bank and these debts have been written off, why not the USA ?

Who said dishonesty doesn’t pay?

The image of banks locking their doors to keep customers from making withdrawals during a bank run is what immediately came to mind when we heard that Citigroup was telling customers it has the right to prevent any withdrawals from checking accounts for seven days.

“Effective April 1, 2010, we reserve the right to require (7) days advance notice before permitting a withdrawal from all checking accounts. While we do not currently exercise this right and have not exercised it in the past, we are required by law to notify you of this change,” Citigroup said on statements received by customers all over the country.

What’s going on?

It seems that this is something of an error. The seven day notice policy only applies to customers in Texas, Ira Stoll reports at The Future of Capitalism. It was accidentally included on customer statements nationwide.

“Whatever the explanation, it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in Citi,” Stoll writes. “But it’s hard to believe a bank would be sending out a notice like that on its statements.”

UPDATE: According to Stoll, Citi issued a statement saying that it has been required to make this change by Federal regulations–and it no longer sounds like it’s limited to Texas:

Update: Citibank has now released the following statement by way of explanation: “When Citibank moved to unlimited FDIC coverage in 2009, we had to reclassify many checking accounts to allow for immediate withdrawals in order to ensure all customers qualified for the additional coverage. When we moved back to standard FDIC coverage with most major banks in 2010, Citibank decided to reclassify those accounts back to make them eligible again for promotional incentives. To do so, Federal Reserve Reg D requires these accounts, called NOW accounts, to reserve the right to require a 7-day notice of withdrawal. We recently communicated this technical requirement to our customers. However, we have never exercised this right and have no plans to do so in the future.”

http://www.businessinsider.com/citigroup-warns-customers-it-may-refuse-to-allow-withdrawals-2010-2

Is it because our media is more focused on directives from our governments, that we remain ignorant of the other side of the story or even know the full story.

Just as Cosgrove was the ‘go to’ man in Australia, Lieutenant-General Hamid Gul (a military commander in the Pakistani Army in the 1980s), served as the head of the country’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency from 1987 to 1989.

But Gul’s rise to fame came during the Pakistan-Saudi-US effort to keep  funds and logistical support flowing to the Afghanistan mujahidin, who were eventually credited with defeating Soviet military and political forces.

However, as is the practice of leaving no witnesses or ‘loose ends’, during the Bush administration, the US sought to put Gul on a UN list of international terrorists but their efforts were blocked by the Chinese delegation.

Domestically, Gul has been an outspoken opponent of Asif Ali Zardari, the Pakistani president, and has called for the Supreme Court to be reinstated as the rule of law in Pakistan, so he hardly represents lawlessness, which seemingly is what America and its toadies do want.

Al Jazeera interviewed Gul during a short visit to Doha and asked: ‘You recently said ‘the Taliban is the future, the Americans
are the past in Afghanistan’. Isn’t that a little far-fetched ?

Hamid Gul: ’Taliban is the future; the Americans are defeated. It isn’t necessarily because their firepower and their might has weakened, but it is because their own people are sick and tired [of engagement in Afghanistan]. There is fatigue now, fatigue is the threat and is the worst thing for a nation to suffer from. There is no way that the Americans can hold on to Afghanistan.

Al Jazeera: Could that lead to [Afghanistan President] Hamid Karzai’s government being toppled ?’

Hamid Gul: Karzai is no more. He is now fighting for his life. They have already started telling him that by the end of this year he will have to shoulder the responsibility of security in Afghanistan. But what are they giving him for this? Nothing at all. In fact, more civilian casualties in military operations are going to weaken Karzai’s position.

Al Jazeera: Some in Afghanistan believe that the extent of civilian casualties has empowered the Taliban’s resurgence’.

Hamid Gul: It is not only that. While the civilian casualties have certainly made the Taliban a popular movement in Afghanistan – some 80 per cent of the population support them – the people of Afghanistan are fed up with corruption. They are sick of the influence of warlords and drug barons, and the continued American occupation.

If it was a shot stint – come in and get out after completing the job – the situation would have been different. But the Americans didn’t do that. If they wanted to disperse al-Qaeda, they succeeded after the first year, and after that they should have pulled out. The fact they stayed on betrays their real intentions in Afghanistan until Barack Obama, the US president, came and started talking about withdrawal.It was only last December that Obama announced that the US will pull out of Afghanistan. Hillary Clinton said the same thing, but there is a dichotomy.

On the one hand they say ‘We are not here to stay in Afghanistan’, but on the other hand they carry out surges and want to prop up and build the Afghan Army. However, they don’t give the money to build the Afghan Army – just $140mn. Compare this to how much it costs the US to keep just one soldier in Afghanistan – $1mn dollars per soldier per year in Afghanistan. They have now about 68,000 US troops. It is currently costing them $65bn just to maintain these troops. There are another 30,000 US troops now coming, so it will cost the US $100bn a year to maintain its forces in Afghanistan.  The US is a heavily indebted nation so how are they going to afford this? Some 57 per cent of Americans in the polls say they don’t like this war and want their boys to return home. The Americans can’t take casualties, that is their problem. To compensate, they started employing security contractors, some 104,000 security contractors currently in Afghanistan.

Mercenaries to be used where troops cannot be deployed; we have already seen what mercenaries did in Iraq. The Americans are more and more inclined – because the US military cannot suffer casualties – to employ mercenaries, not just from the US but also from the local population. This is a very dangerous trend if we are to believe that mercenaries can win wars and carry forward the political objectives of the country. This means that whoever has more money can employ more mercenaries, win wars, win territories, etc.

Al Jazeera: Given everything you have just said, how do you think the latest US and Nato offensive against the Taliban is going to play out ?

Hamid Gul: It is not going to work. I think it is an ‘eye wash’, it has political purpose back home. But there is no political purpose for Afghanistan. They are saying that they are protecting the civilian population, but they are dislodging the civilians from their homes in very harsh weather conditions in Afghanistan. The cold winds from the steppes of Central Asia sweep these regions.
When you launch such military operations, the people are inevitably dislodged and their fields abandoned. In this situation, what are the Americans trying to achieve – I don’t know. There is much ambiguity about their political objectives. Every military conflict must have a political purpose. I cannot discern that there is any political purpose.

Al Jazeera: From a strategic point of view, Pakistan’s involvement in Afghanistan has been seen as setting up a buffer, or deterrent, to India. But now that Pakistan has nuclear capability, how important is Afghanistan to Islamabad ?

Hamid Gul:  We want a friendly Afghanistan; we know India is playing havoc with us. The Pakistani Taliban are being sponsored by the Indian intelligence and the Mossad, by the way, to carry out their attacks in Pakistan. The Mossad is very active in Pakistan and they are providing all the guidance and technical support to the Indian intelligence. So, Pakistan has to have its back covered – no country can fight on two fronts.We have to have a friendly Afghanistan, this does not mean that we dominate Afghanistan. No one can dominate Afghanistan, a country which has already buried two superpowers and the third one is about to be buried there. No, that’s not the purpose Pakistan has in Afghanistan.

Al Jazeers: Is the failure to stabilise Afghanistan adversely affecting Pakistan’s own security?*

Hamid Gul:  Yes, indeed it is. The conflict is not just derivative of the failures of the Kabul government – that is a puppet government. The real cause of the conflict is the occupation of Afghanistan by the Americans. If they go out, and after such a time – post-US occupation, the OIC and the Muslim countries have to come in and play their part. Then Afghanistan can redeem itself. I do not think that Afghanistan will be another Vietnam for the Americans because they have said they will pull out. Obama is a president who is very clear. In his State of the Union address, I think it was clear he was not addressing terrorism but instead focusing on such internal issues as healthcare, unemployment and debt servicing.  It appears he is more focused on the domestic front than foreign affairs. You can’t focus on both at the same time.

Al Jazeera: There has been a surge in violence in Pakistan since the exit of Pervez Musharraf, the former president. The Pakistani Taliban threaten towns and cities, and there are tensions between the PPP and MQM in key ports like Karachi. What is needed to stabilise Pakistan right now ?

Hamid Gul:  Political cleaning up of the mess. The rule of law must take root in Pakistan. Unfortunately, the more powerful among the politicians and generals, when it comes to their turn – whether by martial law or civilian democracy – they want to run the affairs of the country according to their own predilections and propensities. And that is where we go wrong.

The political institution has to be set right; the Supreme Court and Parliament must be empowered. Right now, all the power is vested under the 17th Amendment, which was an amendment to the constitution passed by the dictator Musharraf in 2003. This gave more power to the office of the president and the ability to bypass the constitution and remain in leadership irrespective of elections.

Asif Ali Zardari, the Pakistani president, now has that power and he is refusing to budge. So, the 17th Amendment has to go, Parliament has to be empowered, rule of law by the Supreme Court has to be established and the army must not interfere. Then things will begin to fall in place and we will take the right direction.

Al Jazeera: Do you think the US is helping Zardari stay in power because he is seen as co-operating in the so-called war on terror ?

Hamid Gul: I think there is ambivalence in their position and they sometimes do criticise him. The American press has in the past bashed Zardari, but it has gone quiet now. The Americans fear the return of the Supreme Court in Pakistan because it could rule that the US drone attacks are violations of the country’s sovereignty.  If that happens, Parliament would have to act on the Supreme Court’s decision and reverse the policy. The Americans are sceptical and suspicious that if the Supreme Court is given free reign in Pakistan, it is likely to rule against their interests and agenda in Pakistan.

Al Jazeera: Do you think the government will survive until the next national elections ?

Hamid Gul: The government will survive but I am almost certain Zardari will not. I do not want to appear to be clairvoyant, but I doubt Zardari has many days left in government.

Al K\Jazeera: In recent years, US officials have accused you of having close ties with the Taliban and al-Qaeda. How do you respond to that ?

Hamid Gul: No, this is wrong, I have no such ties. As far as al-Qaeda is concerned, I simply say come up with the evidence for 911. You haven’t even charged Osama bin Laden so far, that means you don’t have hard evidence against him. The full story is yet to come out.In my opinion, all this is a gimmick, an inside job.In regards to the Taliban, I support their cause of Afghan resistance. I lend them my moral support because I have in the past had strong connections with them. Incidentally, I maintained strong connections with both sides. Many in the Afghan government are my good friends. But since the Taliban are representing the national spirit of resistance, I have given them my voice. The Americans sent my name to the UN Security Council to put me on a sanctions list and declare me an international terrorist. But they failed because the Chinese knew the
truth well and blocked that move.

Basically, the Americans have nothing against me. I saw the charges and I replied to them in the English-language press in Pakistan. I said if they have anything against me to bring it forward, put me on trial. Tell me what wrong I have done. I have been taking moral stands. The Americans talk of freedom of speech, but apparently my speech hurts them because it counters their excesses. I won’t use the word ‘interests’ because what US policy-makers are doing runs against the interests of the American people. If I say this is right and this is wrong, I am exercising my right and ultimately, this is to the benefit of the American people.

Al Jazeera: But Zardari once told a western journal that you are a “political ideologue of terror”.

Hamid Gul: I wrote a letter to Zardari that I am an ideologue of jihad, which is common between us. He is a Muslim like me and believes in the Quran. Terror is a totally different thing. I do not support terror at all, but jihad is our right when a nation is oppressed. According to the United Nations Charter, national resistance for liberation is a right. We call this a jihad.

Aljazeera.net/english 2003 – 2010 ©

Now Garrett is supposed to be smart, a solicitor no less, but when it comes to asking the right questions (apart from Chinese making our armed forces’s uniforms) he proved a right dullard; now maybe standing in front of loud-speakers pumping out volumes of sound may have affected him, but his responses always show a mind in action taking careful steps in the mine-field of saying something someone could hang on him later.

His ‘in a jocular fashion’ about reversing anything said about helping the environment has truned out to be 100% right; but why does he lie, side-step an or just not show up at pre-arranged meetings?

I’ve heard rumours of when he dabbled in the the Wildlife Association and the Greens, of screaming rants and accusing people of all sort of things, but pretty much him taking responsability for his stances.

Does he believe he could be prime minister one day and wants to keep as low a profile as possible; does he think the constituants in his electorate will ‘forget’ his coniving, deciet and missing in action/s ?  Didn’t he realize that he could have said anything he wanted, made the Labor party come to heel by exposing their transgressions, or is he that arrogant and ignorant that he believes the Labor party can help him more that his voters ?

So far he has stood up many people in pre-arranged appointments and meetings, like the Electrial trade union and his appearance at the Australian National University; taking to ground like a coward, when there are now safety concerns over another program run by his department.  Hasn’t he heard of ‘I made a mistake and I’m going to fix it’; what a poor example of a parent … how irresponsible would his kids be ?

It really is simple; make all non-compling insulation, solar power and solar hot water systems illegal; make the companies who fitted them the opportunity of going back and making them safe / compliant by June 30th 2010 and then send out auditors; those solar panels, solar hot water and insulation installations that do not comply, ASIC or state office of Fair Trading pursue the companies, sole traders whoever was running the show.

I don’t like Labor, I don’t like Liberal or National (none of them have assisted making Australia #1 in solar power manufacture or use) and the Greens have a ways to go to prove they are fair dinkum, so my comments are not political, they’re intended to achieve an outcome, those who have not achieved the outcome must pay.