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Found 24 results

  1. Al-Halboosi says plaintiffs in his trial are "corrupt", defends contract with U.S. firm Iraq NewsBreakingAl-Halboosi 2023-11-30 16:11 Font Shafaq News/ The former speaker of the Iraqi parliament, Mohammad al-Halboosi, on Thursday accused plaintiffs, naming rival Sunni politicians, who filed lawsuits against him following his ouster of "corruption" as he defended a contract his party had signed with a U.S. firm. Al-Halboosi, who was dismissed from office by the Iraqi Federal Supreme Court in November, said that the plaintiffs included former lawmaker Jamal al-Karboli, who was convicted of corruption charges, and former al-Anbar governor Sohaib al-Rawi, who was also accused of corruption. The former speaker said that the contract his party, Takaddom, with the U.S. firm was not secret, and that "it was not illegal for political parties to contract with foreign firms" . He said that the contract was for the purposes of promoting the party's activities in the United States, and that it could include outreach to U.S. officials.
  2. https://basedunderground.com/2021/07/14/blackrock-same-shady-people-who-own-pharma-and-media-want-your-house/ "BlackRock May Control the World’s Economic Future" "To put this into perspective, BlackRock, an investment firm, has more power than most governments on Earth, and it also controls the Federal Reserve, Wall Street mega-banks like Goldman Sachs and the WEF’s Great Reset, according to F. William Engdahl, a strategic risk consultant and lecturer who holds a degree in politics from Princeton University.13 Engdahl believes that, left unchecked, BlackRock will soon control the economic future of the world, and states, “BlackRock is the epitome of what Mussolini called Corporatism, where an unelected corporate elite dictates top down to the population.”14 For instance, three influential economic appointees of the current administration come from BlackRock." Home About Contact BlackRock: Same Shady People Who Own Pharma and Media Want Your House by Dr. Joseph Mercola July 14, 2021 Editor’s Commentary: The last time we covered BlackRock, it was the first time I had to deal with non-CCP bots and shills. The comments, hundreds of them, were filled with various defenses of the company. While I won’t accuse them directly of participating in the attempt to redirect or mislead, it’s conspicuous that of all the companies to have such an allegedly strong fanbase, it’s one of the most shrouded giant corporations in the land. This article by Dr. Joseph Mercola is both eye-opening and concerning. We often discuss globalist corporate agendas and how they both drive and are driven by an evil that is far more dangerous than greed alone. This deep dive into one of the many facets of the company should be spread far and wide. But first, here’s a video to set the stage… STORY AT-A-GLANCE In the first quarter of 2021, 15% of U.S. homes sold were purchased by corporate investors — not families looking to achieve their American dream The average American has virtually no chance of winning a home over an investment firm, which may pay 20% to 50% over asking price, in cash, sometimes scooping up entire neighborhoods at once BlackRock, one of the largest asset management firms, is among the firms buying up U.S. houses; they also control the media and Big Pharma If the average American is pushed out of the housing market, and most of the available housing is owned by investment groups and corporations, you become beholden to them as your landlord This fulfills part of the Great Reset’s “new normal” dictum — the part where you will own nothing and be happy; this isn’t a conspiracy theory — it’s part of WEF’s 2030 agenda Homeownership has long been considered an important tool for building financial security and wealth, but it’s becoming more difficult for Americans to achieve. Younger generations are less likely to own a home than those from older generations, with millennials’ homeownership rate 8% lower than that of generation X and baby boomers at the same age.1 If the rate had remained steady, about 3.4 million more people would own homes in the U.S. today but, instead, younger adults are increasingly choosing to either rent or live with their parents. There are a number of reasons why homeownership has become less attainable than it was decades ago, from rising debt in younger generations to increased cost of living. A report by the Urban Institute found half those aged 18 to 34 were spending upward of 30% of their income on rent, making them “rent-burdened.”2 Meanwhile, median housing prices increased 28% in the last two years,3 pricing some out of the market. However, the shift is not all happenstance. In the first quarter of 2021, 15% of U.S. homes sold were purchased by corporate investors4 — not families looking to achieve their American dream. While they’re competing with middle-class Americans for the homes, the average American has virtually no chance of winning a home over an investment firm, which may pay 20% to 50% over asking price,5 in cash, sometimes scooping up entire neighborhoods at once so they can turn them into rentals.6 BlackRock Is Buying Up US Houses BlackRock is one of a number of companies mentioned by The Wall Street Journal in a recent exposé. “Yield-chasing investors are snapping up single-family homes, competing with ordinary Americans and driving up prices,” they warned.7 The question is, why would institutional investors and BlackRock, which manages assets worth $5.7 trillion,8 be interested in overpaying for modest, single family homes? To understand the answer, you must look at BlackRock’s partners, which include the World Economic Forum (WEF),9 and their extreme political and financial clout. In a Twitter thread posted by user Culturalhusbandry, it’s noted:10 “Black Rock, Vanguard, and State Street control 20 trillion dollars worth of assets. Blackrock alone has a 10 billion a year surplus. That means with 5-20% down they can get mortgages on 130-170k homes every year. Or they can outright buy 30k homes per year. Just Blackrock. … Now imagine every major institute doing this, because they are. It can be such a fast sweeping action that 30yrs may be overshooting it. They may accomplish feudalism in 15 years.” If the average American is pushed out of the housing market, and most of the available housing is owned by investment groups and corporations, you become beholden to them as your landlord. This fulfills part of the Great Reset’s “new normal” dictum — the part where you will own nothing and be happy. This isn’t a conspiracy theory; it’s part of WEF’s 2030 agenda.11 The unstated implication is that the world’s resources will be owned and controlled by the technocratic elite, and you’ll have to pay for the temporary use of absolutely everything. Nothing will actually belong to you, including your home. All items and resources are to be used by the collective, while actual ownership is restricted to an upper stratum of social class. The wealth transfer has already begun. BlackRock’s Unrivaled Control The New York Times and a majority of other legacy media are largely owned by BlackRock and the Vanguard Group, the two largest asset management firms in the world, which also control Big Pharma. And it doesn’t end there. BlackRock and Vanguard are at the top of a pyramid that controls basically everything, but you don’t hear about their terrifying monopoly because they also own the media. You can watch all the details about BlackRock’s monopoly in this video, but Humans Are Free summed it up this way:12 “The power of these two companies is beyond your imagination. Not only do they own a large part of the stocks of nearly all big companies but also the stocks of the investors in those companies. This gives them a complete monopoly. A Bloomberg report states that both these companies in the year 2028, together will have investments in the amount of 20 trillion dollars. That means that they will own almost everything. Bloomberg calls BlackRock ‘The fourth branch of government,’ because it’s the only private agency that closely works with the central banks. BlackRock lends money to the central bank but it’s also the advisor. It also develops the software the central bank uses. … BlackRock, itself is also owned by shareholders … The biggest shareholder is Vanguard … The elite who own Vanguard apparently do not like being in the spotlight but of course they cannot hide from who is willing to dig. Reports from Oxfam and Bloomberg say that 1% of the world, together owns more money than the other 99%. Even worse, Oxfam says that 82% of all earned money in 2017 went to this 1%. In other words, these two investment companies, Vanguard and BlackRock hold a monopoly in all industries in the world and they, in turn are owned by the richest families in the world, some of whom are royalty and who have been very rich since before the Industrial Revolution.” BlackRock May Control the World’s Economic Future To put this into perspective, BlackRock, an investment firm, has more power than most governments on Earth, and it also controls the Federal Reserve, Wall Street mega-banks like Goldman Sachs and the WEF’s Great Reset, according to F. William Engdahl, a strategic risk consultant and lecturer who holds a degree in politics from Princeton University.13 Engdahl believes that, left unchecked, BlackRock will soon control the economic future of the world, and states, “BlackRock is the epitome of what Mussolini called Corporatism, where an unelected corporate elite dictates top down to the population.”14 For instance, three influential economic appointees of the current administration come from BlackRock. “There is a definite pattern and suggests that the role of BlackRock in Washington is far larger than we are being told,” Engdahl says.15 The Campaign for Accountability also released a report in 2019 detailing how BlackRock “implemented a strategy of lobbying, campaign contributions, and revolving door hires to fight off government regulation and establish itself as one of the most powerful financial companies in the world.”16,17 BlackRock founder and CEO Larry Fink also has close ties to WEF’s head Klaus Schwab, and joined WEF’s board in 2019. According to Engdahl: “Fink … now stands positioned to use the huge weight of BlackRock to create what is potentially, if it doesn’t collapse before, the world’s largest Ponzi scam, ESG [Environment, Social values and Governance] corporate investing. Fink with $9 trillion to leverage is pushing the greatest shift of capital in history into a scam known as ESG Investing. The UN ‘sustainable economy’ agenda is being realized quietly by the very same global banks which have created the financial crises in 2008. This time they are preparing the Klaus Schwab WEF Great Reset by steering hundreds of billions and soon trillions in investment to their hand-picked ‘woke’ companies, and away from the ‘not woke’ such as oil and gas companies or coal. … Oil companies like ExxonMobil or coal companies no matter how clear are doomed as Fink and friends now promote their financial Great Reset or Green New Deal … And we can expect that the New York Times will cheer BlackRock on as it destroys the world financial structures.” Blackstone Is the Largest Landlord in the US Another giant private equity firm, Blackstone, is also deeply entrenched in U.S. real estate. Blackstone is the largest landlord in the U.S. as well as the largest real estate company worldwide, with a portfolio worth $325 billion.18 In June 2021, Blackstone agreed to buy Home Partners of America, a company that rents single-family houses, and its 17,000 houses, for $6 billion. Blackstone and BlackRock sound alike for a reason. Blackstone’s co-founder, billionaire Steve Schwarzman, said during an interview on Squawk Box that he and Fink “started in business together. We put up the initial capital.” BlackRock used to be called Blackstone Financial, but Fink went off on his own. Schwarzman said, “Larry and I were sitting down and he said, ‘What do you think sort of about having a family name with ‘black’ in it,'”19 and BlackRock was born. Blackstone became notorious for swooping in after the housing bubble burst and buying tens of thousands of homes at deeply discounted prices. They then turned them into single-family rentals, taking advantage of the recession. In 2017, Bloomberg reported:20 “Blackstone built its rental-home business with an advantage few if any other buyers could match: billions of dollars in credit from large banks. Its Invitation Homes subsidiary quickly became the largest single-family home landlord in the U.S., with 50,000 properties. Altogether, hedge funds, private-equity firms and real estate investment trusts have raised about $20 billion to purchase as many as 200,000 homes to rent.” Now, with many struggling due to yearlong business shutdowns and lockdowns, and home prices rising, many Americans are having difficulty finding affordable single-family homes to buy.21 BlackRock Owns Your House, Gates Owns Your Farmland Both BlackRock CEO Fink and Bill Gates are pushing for “net zero” carbon emissions.22 But as BlackRock is busy buying up houses, Gates is hard at work amassing farmland and is now the largest owner of farmland in the U.S.23 By 2030, Gates is pushing for drastic, fundamental changes, including widespread consumption of fake meat, adoption of next generation nuclear energy and growth of a fungus as a new type of nutritional protein.24 The deadline Gates has given to reach net zero emissions is 2050,25 likely because he wants to realize his global vision during his lifetime. But according to Vandana Shiva, in order to force the world to accept this new food and agricultural system, new conditionalities are being created through net zero “nature-based” solutions. Navdanya’s report, “Earth Democracy: Connecting Rights of Mother Earth to Human Rights and Well-Being of All,” explains:26 “If ‘feeding the world’ through chemicals and dwarf varieties bred for chemicals was the false narrative created to impose the Green Revolution, the new false narrative is ‘sustainability’ and ‘saving the planet.’ In the new ‘net zero’ world, farmers will not be respected and rewarded as custodians of the land and caregivers, as Annadatas, the providers of our food and health. … ‘Net Zero’ is a new strategy to get rid of small farmers in first through ‘digital farming’ and ‘farming without farmers’ and then through the burden of fake carbon accounting. Carbon offsets and the new accounting trick of ‘net zero’ does not mean zero emissions. It means the rich polluters will continue to pollute and also grab the land and resources of those who have not polluted — indigenous people and small farmers — for carbon offsets.” A New Wave of Colonization Ultimately, we’re heading for a new wave of colonization in the name of sustainability and net zero carbon emissions. The solutions are complex. Some have suggested that one solution is to make building homes less expensive, so that new construction homes become less expensive. This, in turn, would drive down the cost of existing homes.27 The video at the top of this article goes into detail about another solution: ending the Federal Reserve to stop the central planning of our money supply and interest rates, which are artificially suppressed in a way that is most taken advantage of by the top 1%, contributing to growing wealth inequality.28 This engineered pandemic has catalyzed the transfer of wealth to the rich and, while the major players pushing for the Great Reset are still emerging, BlackRock and Blackstone are names to keep your eye on. 1, 2 CNBC November 25, 2020 3, 4 Slate June 19, 2021 5, 27, 28 YouTube June 10, 2021 6, 7 The Wall Street Journal April 4, 2021 8, 9 World Economic Forum, BlackRock 10, 21 Bitcoin.com, News June 11, 2021 11 Forbes November 10, 2016 12 Humans Are Free May 5, 2021 13, 14, 15, 17 WilliamEngdahl.com June 18, 2021 16 Campaign for Accountability September 5, 2019 18 ZeroHedge June 22, 2021 19 Yahoo Finance June 22, 2017 20 Bloomberg January 3, 2017 22 YouTube June 25, 2021 23 Fortune March 13, 2021 24 ZeroHedge February 16, 2021 25 Fox Business February 21, 2021 26 Navdanya, Earth Rights Are Human Rights. Page 14
  3. Integrity controls a printing press to forge the origin of products and manipulate purchase receipts Tuesday 29 December 2020 45 Baghdad: Morning The Integrity Commission revealed that it had implemented duties in three governorates, during which it seized manipulation of purchase prices and receipts, a printing press, to forge the origin of products, and illegally transferring property ownership. The first duty in Basra, as the work team of its directorate managed to arrest five accused members of the procurement and price moderation committees in the Basra Municipality Directorate. Because of their manipulation of prices and purchase receipts for the materials of the project of rehabilitation of the imports division in the municipality, and it was decided to arrest them in accordance with the provisions of Article (315) of the Penal Code. The second duty is in Diyala, as its team was able to control major laboratories for refining burning car oil, and manufacturing plastic and iron containers in the province. Al-Nazaha clarified in a statement that the team's investigations revealed that the plant performs the process of refining and recycling the oil by adding granules of poor origin, and refilling it with plastic or iron cans of various sizes, as well as placing forged posters of known international origins that are printed inside the plant, and the printing press was set while working. As well as a factory that includes machines for making iron and plastic cans, with all the machines used in forging operations for their original manufacturing facilities. In Nineveh, the third duty was, where an accused person was arrested for promoting transactions of illegally transferring property ownership and in contravention of instructions in the Directorate of Real Estate Registration - Flowers, and in possession of the transactions and copies of those real estate registration and receipt receipts, as well as an amount of money and it was decided to arrest him and conduct an investigation with him in accordance with the provisions of the two articles (289,298) of the Penal Code. ”
  4. Economists: changing some corporate positions is an important step towards reforms Tuesday 17th November 2020 38 Baghdad: Hussein Faleh is an economist, making changes to some positions in economic institutions is an important step towards financial and economic reforms, and while they indicated that reforms need to re-establish the functional structure in institutions, they stressed the need to develop practical plans to combat corruption and stop the waste of public money. Economist Safwan Qusay said in a statement to "Al-Sabah": "The process of changing some of the positions of important institutions, especially the economic ones, is required in order to achieve real reforms in the state apparatus," stressing the need for appointments to be in accordance with the data of scientific specialization, experience and competence. Functional structure He added, "If a specialized and competent person is chosen to head a department, there will be a change for the better in the work and management of this institution." He stressed "the necessity of forming the Federal Service Council to impose its will in the appointment process, away from the various influences," noting that "financial and economic reform can be achieved through redrawing the functional structure within each state institution, as well as defining the relationship between ministries and agencies." The Independent. Financial reforms He explained, "The accumulation of mistakes of previous years and the existence of corruption files led to the administrative structures to defend themselves and prevent real changes in order to hide previous mistakes." He continued, "We aspire to see effective financial reform through reducing operating spending and diversifying the economy by increasing Iraqi resources," noting that "the top of the pyramid in the institution helps in the process of developing reforms, especially when it sets up economic development programs and works in a transparent manner." Fight corruption For his part, the expert in financial affairs, Ahmed Al-Majidi, said, "The changes made by Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kazemi in some important positions in the state, especially the governor of the Central Bank, the head of the National Investment Authority, the head of the Securities Commission, bank directors and others fall within the real economic reforms That the government promised Hold it. " He added, "The vision of the prime minister and his government staff is to maximize the state’s financial revenues in terms of diversifying the economy and reducing operational spending, as well as eliminating corruption," indicating that reforms are not achieved without fighting Corruption. He pointed out that "the government is determined to fight corruption, and these are good indicators towards achieving financial and economic reform in Iraq." Country.
  5. Go to link for video Hunter Biden email story: Computer repair store owner describes handing over laptop to FBI The man, John Paul Mac Isaac, said he “can’t be 100 percent sure” it was Hunter Biden who dropped off the computer for repair. By Thomas Barrabi, Jacqui Heinrich, Tara Prindiville | Fox News NY Post: Emails indicate Hunter Biden introduced dad to Burisma exec Fox News talks to computer shop owner who found hard drive with emails; Jacqui Heinrich reports The owner of a Delaware computer repair store where a man he believes was Hunter Biden dropped off a laptop that allegedly contained emails detailing an opportunity for a meeting between former Vice President Joe Biden and a top Burisma executive and other "disturbing" items, told Fox News on Wednesday that he was frightened by what he saw. The man, John Paul Mac Isaac, said he has a condition that affects his vision and “can’t be 100 percent sure” it was Hunter Biden who dropped off the computer for repair. The Wilmington shop owner said he contacted the FBI out of concern, but declined to specify what he meant. John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of a Delaware computer repair store where Hunter Biden allegedly dropped off laptops in April 2019. (Jacqui Heinrich/Fox News Channel) HUNTER BIDEN EMAILS UNDER INVESTIGATION BY SENATE HOMELAND SECURITY AFTER HARD-DRIVE REPORT EMERGES Isaac’s claim that the laptop in question belonged to Hunter Biden has yet to be substantiated. Isaac told the New York Post, which first published the emails earlier Wednesday, that he determined it was Hunter Biden because the laptop had a sticker from the Beau Biden Foundation, which is named after his late older brother. “I just don't know what to say, or what I'm allowed to say,” Isaac said. “I know that I saw, I saw stuff. And I was concerned. I was concerned that somebody might want to come looking for this stuff eventually and I wanted it out of my shop.” When asked, Isaac, whose social media posts indicate is a supporter of President Trump, rejected the possibility that the laptop did not belong to Hunter Biden and was an attempt to set him up. FACEBOOK REDUCING DISTRIBUTION OF HUNTER BIDEN STORY IN NY POST The Mac Shop, John Paul Mac Isaac's computer repair store in Delaware. (Jacqui Heinrich/Fox News Channel) Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings drew renewed scrutiny following the New York Post’s publication of a 2015 email purportedly exchanged between him and an executive at Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings. At the time, Hunter Biden served on the company’s board of directors. Isaac said the man who he believes to be Hunter Biden dropped off three laptops at his store in April 2019, only one of which was salvageable. While repairing the laptop, Isaac said he discovered disturbing material. The customer did not return for the laptop within 90 days and Isaac could not get in touch with him. Isaac said he first searched the emails by keyword in June or July of 2019. TRUMP CAMPAIGN BLASTS BIDEN OVER NEW HUNTER BIDEN-UKRAINE STORY, CLAIMS IT SHOWS HE ‘LIED’ “If I'm somebody that has no journalistic ability, no detective ability or investigative ability and I was able to find stuff in a short period of time, somebody else should have been able to find something to show,” Isaac said. In September, he contacted an intermediary about the emails. The intermediary then contacted the FBI. Isaac said the intermediary is an American citizen who he has known for decades, but declined to provide further details about their identity. According to Isaac’s account, the FBI first made a forensic copy of the laptop, then returned weeks later with a subpoena and confiscated it. When he stopped hearing from the FBI, Isaac said he contacted several members of Congress, who did not respond. At that point, his intermediary reached out to Rudy Giuliani’s attorney, Robert Costello. An attorney for Hunter Biden told the New York Post that Giuliani “has been pushing widely discredited conspiracy theories about the Biden family, openly relying on actors tied to Russian intelligence.” An FBI spokesperson declined Fox News' request for comment, citing the bureau's practice of neither confirming nor denying the existence of an investigation. Representatives for Delaware's U.S. Attorney's office did not immediately respond to multiple requests for comment. When contacted by the New York Post, a spokesperson for the Delaware U.S. Attorney's office said, “My office can neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation." The New York Post published photos of a Delaware federal subpoena that detailed the FBI's seizure of a laptop and hard drive. When asked what he hoped would come of the information once it went public, Isaac was ambivalent about his motives. He acknowledged the current political landscape had played a role in his actions and specifically referenced Trump’s impeachment as a motivating factor. “I wanted -- above all, I wanted safety and security,” Isaac said. “I wanted anonymity. I wanted just to be [able] to wash my hands of it, and like it never happened. And that did not happen.” In the email published by the New York Post, Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, thanked Hunter Biden for introducing him to then-Vice President Joe Biden. Less than a year after the meeting took place, Biden is accused of pressuring the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor who had launched an investigation into Burisma. “Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” the email reads. In an earlier email from May 2014 which was obtained by Fox News, Pozharskyi, who was said to be Burisma’s No. 3 executive, asked Biden for “advice on how you could use your influence” to help the company. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is investigating the newly released emails, Fox News confirmed. The Biden campaign pushed back on the allegations in the report, asserting that a review of the former vice president’s “official schedules from the time” showed that “no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.” "Investigations by the press, during impeachment, and even by two Republican-led Senate committees whose work was decried as 'not legitimate' and political by a GOP colleague have all reached the same conclusion: that Joe Biden carried out official U.S. policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing,” Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement. “Trump administration officials have attested to these facts under oath.” Critics have long alleged that Hunter Biden leveraged his father’s position in the Obama administration to enrich himself in his personal business dealings. The Trump campaign has repeatedly attacked Biden on the campaign trail regarding his son’s conduct. When pressed on the matter by Trump during the first presidential debate last month, Joe Biden again denied Hunter had engaged in any wrongdoing. “My son did nothing wrong at Burisma. He doesn’t want to let me answer because he knows I have the truth,” Joe Biden said. “His position has been totally, thoroughly discredited -- by the media, by our allies, by the World Bank, by everyone.”
  6. The President of the Judicial Council discusses with the US ambassador frameworks for cooperation in cases involving accused persons two hours ago 489 The head of the Supreme Judicial Council, Judge Faeq Zaidan, discussed with the US ambassador in Baghdad Matthew Toller, frameworks for cooperation in completing the investigation of cases involving accused persons from Iraq and America. A statement from the office said, "The President of the Supreme Judicial Council, Judge Faik Zidan, received in his office today the Ambassador of the United States of America in Baghdad, Matthew Tueller." He explained that "the two sides discussed frameworks for cooperation between the Iraqi judiciary and the American investigation authorities in completing the investigation in cases involving accused persons from Iraq and America." https://takadum-news.com/رئيس-مجلس-القضاء-يبحث-مع-السفير-الامري/
  7. I honestly don't know who the Chinese guy in this video is. I don't know the youtuber either, but apparently he/she is a Chinese tanslator. I do know the video has almost 300,000 views since it was posted Sept 24, which tells me a lot of people are interested in it. It is in Chinese with English subtitles. Sometimes the titles go by fast, so you may want to slow down the playback speed down to .75. He talks about 3 hard drives that some people in the Chinese government who apparently would like to take down the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), gave to the Trump administration last month. Interestingly, the first hard drive seems to corroborate the sex and pedo stuff, along with Biden-China deal information, that was found on Hunter's laptop that was only just reported about this past week. Also interesting is that the second hard drive is about Xi Jinping's assets and the third is about a bioweapon which I assume is Covid. According to this guy, he thinks this may actually take down the CCP. On a side note, he says copies of the 3 drives were also given to Nancy Pelosi by the CCP to remind her and the other corrupt politicians that China owns them and that they better make sure Biden wins the election. This could explain why Nancy is particularly crazy lately. But if Trump wins in a big landslide which I think he will, it will be hard for the Dems to try and forge enough ballots in time to overturn his victory and that could cause a world of hurt for the crooked politicians (probably mostly Dems, but no doubt also some republicans) and hopefully topple Xi Jinping and the CCP, too. However, as I said, I know nothing about who this guy, so I almost hesitate to post it. Still, some of what he says does match other things that I know to be true, and that makes me think the other things he's talking about might be true as well. In any event, I like to hope it's true because I pray every day for Trump to drain the swamp and get rid of the corrupt and unjust people in government and also for Xi Jinping to lose power and for the CCP to collapse so I'm happy to learn of a potential plan that might actually make that happen soon. Sept.24th Lude's broadcast: 3 hard drives.Jiang Zemin, Zeng Qinghong, Meng Jianzhu made the move - provided 3 hard drives to the DOJ of America, and another copy to Nancy Pelosi. However, with the help from our fellow fighter, these hard drives reached the hands of President Trump.The 1st hard drive: sex tapes & pedo tapes of Hunter Biden, as well as his 4.5 billion dollars secret deal with Xi & Wang;The 2nd hard drive: the allocation of Xi & Wang's overseas wealth, and 'the architecture & art project', which is the information of their illegitimate children;The 3rd hard drive: CCP's bioweapon
  8. The government launches an anti-corruption campaign to hold 1,000 people accused of corruption accountable Fighting corruption is one of the most prominent demands of the demonstration squares in Iraq Reports Economy News - Baghdad The Iraqi government campaign began with the arrest of figures accused of corruption in state institutions, including ministers, deputy ministers, heads of investment agencies and businessmen, whose number is determined to be 1000. Iraq has a number of institutions that follow the file of corruption, such as the Integrity Commission, the Supreme Council for Combating Corruption, the Parliamentary Integrity Committee and others, and the country ranks last in the classification of Transparency International. A member of the Parliamentary Economic Committee, Ali Al-Lami, said that the despicable quota system produced corruption by distributing positions to parties, indicating that there are 27 people accused of corruption who will be arrested in the coming days, including 2 ministers, heads of investment bodies, deputy ministers and general directors. He pointed out that more than 5,000 corruption files exist with the Integrity Commission, and all of them contain evidence, but the lack of will disrupted the issue of combating corruption. And Iraq entered more than a trillion dollars since 2003 until now, but the country is still experiencing economic deterioration as a result of rampant corruption, and a large number of Iraqis welcomed any measures that limit corruption. The Anti-Corruption Council has identified 1,000 individuals accused of corruption since it began operating during the previous government. Informed sources indicated that the arrest of the former head of the retirement authority, Ahmed Abdul Jalil and the head of the Baghdad Investment Commission, Shaker Al-Zamili, is due to corruption files, indicating that there are 4 former ministers who will be arrested in the coming days, especially since there is international coordination to recover the corrupt figures. Meanwhile, a member of the Parliamentary Integrity Committee, Alia Nassif, said that corruption in Iraq exists in the country's leaders, and they own economic bodies, and thus requires political will to eliminate corruption, noting that the black box for corrupt files resides in the Ministry of Oil. She stressed that the contracts of the ministries of oil, electricity, trade and defense are marred by a lot of corruption, explaining that tax evasion has damaged the Iraqi economy, which is an important file of corruption. In the meantime, the head of the Reform and Change Foundation, Sabah Al-Kinani, said that corruption has become a reality in Iraq, and if there is an employee who is not corrupt, he fights and may be referred to retirement, explaining that there are contracts signed by state institutions, with fake companies under the pretext of social security for employees and retirees. Pointing out that one institution gives these companies amounts between 7-9 billion dinars per month. He noted that the arrest of the former head of the retirement authority, Ahmed Al-Saadi, was due to the signing of a contract with a fake company regarding social security, as 7 billion dinars were deducted per month from the retirees. Number of observations 55 Date of addendum 09/17/2020
  9. 01/30/2020 09:20 Views 194 Section: Iraq Al-Tamimi: Iraq can request assistance to recover $ 500 billion in smuggled money Baghdad / Obelisk: Legal expert Ali al-Tamimi confirmed, on Wednesday, January 29, 2020, that the Administrative and Financial Anti-Corruption Agreement of 2005, which Iraq joined in 2007, allows the country to request assistance in recovering the smuggled money estimated at $ 500 billion. Al-Tamimi told Al-Masalla, the possibility of fighting administrative and financial corruption in Iraq with the help of international law: 1- There is the Administrative and Financial Anti-Corruption Agreement of 2005, which Iraq joined in 2007, and it allows Iraq to request assistance in recovering the smuggled money, which was estimated at 500 billion dollars. 2- Article 50 of the Charter of the United Nations allows Iraq to request international assistance, as Security Council Resolution 2170 of 2014, which placed ISIS under Chapter VII, allows that. 3- Iraq can also ask the Security Council to refer the file to the International Criminal Court, where corruption crimes are considered genocide and crimes against humanity. Follow the obelisk http://almasalah.com/ar/news/186976/التميمي-العراق-يستطيع-طلب-المساعدة-لاسترجاع-500-مليار-دولار-من-الاموال-المهربة
  10. It included 9 ministers, 12 deputies and 11 governors ... Integrity announces its full procedures within a month The Integrity Commission'spolicy is to detainarrest officials 09/12/2019 03:10:38 + Shafaq News / The Integrity Commission disclosed all its procedures in arrest and recruitment orders issued during the month of last November against ministers and their ranks with special degrees, indicating that orders were issued against (226) accused of them. The Commission's investigations department indicated that orders were issued to bring in (9) ministers and their ranks, including two current ministers and five previous ones, in addition to two previous ministers, explaining that the orders also included (12) members of the House of Representatives, including (10) members in the current session, In addition to a current deputy minister, (3) former agents and (2) two precedents. She drew attention to the issuance of arrest and recruitment orders against an existing governor, (11) ex-governors, (118) members of the current governorate council, (26) former members and (11) former members, explaining the inclusion of (32) general managers of those orders, including ( 19) Currently Director-General in the Ministries of Oil, Electricity, Education, Health, and Industry and the Sunni Endowment Bureau, and (11) Former Director in the Council of Ministers, the Baghdad Municipality, the Ministries of Higher Education, Scientific Research, Health, Municipalities, Public Works, Transport, and Industry, in addition to two former general managers in the Ministries of Health and Transport. The department confirmed that the total number of arrest and recruitment orders issued against the accused amounted to (256) orders, including (221) recruitment orders and (35) arrest warrants, indicating the implementation of (51) orders, while (68) defendants were referred to another investigation court and the trial court or To other investigative agencies. https://www.shafaaq.com/ar/سیاسة/شملت-9-وزراء-و12-نائبا-و11-محافظا-النزاهة-تعلن-مجمل-اجراءاتها-خلال-شهر/
  11. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/15/world/middleeast/iran-iraq-iranian-power.html Middle East Middle East|Iran Dominates in Iraq After U.S. ‘Handed the Country Over’ Tehran's Turn Iran Dominates in Iraq After U.S. ‘Handed the Country Over’ By Tim Arango July 15, 2017 Image Members of the Popular Mobilization Forces, a mostly Shiite militia group, at their post at the Iraqi border with Syria.Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times BAGHDAD — Walk into almost any market in Iraq and the shelves are filled with goods from Iran — milk, yogurt, chicken. Turn on the television and channel after channel broadcasts programs sympathetic to Iran. A new building goes up? It is likely that the cement and bricks came from Iran. And when bored young Iraqi men take pills to get high, the illicit drugs are likely to have been smuggled across the porous Iranian border. And that’s not even the half of it. Across the country, Iranian-sponsored militias are hard at work establishing a corridor to move men and guns to proxy forces in Syria and Lebanon. And in the halls of power in Baghdad, even the most senior Iraqi cabinet officials have been blessed, or bounced out, by Iran’s leadership. When the United States invaded Iraq 14 years ago to topple Saddam Hussein, it saw Iraq as a potential cornerstone of a democratic and Western-facing Middle East, and vast amounts of blood and treasure — about 4,500 American lives lost, more than $1 trillion spent — were poured into the cause. From Day 1, Iran saw something else: a chance to make a client state of Iraq, a former enemy against which it fought a war in the 1980s so brutal, with chemical weapons and trench warfare, that historians look to World War I for analogies. If it succeeded, Iraq would never again pose a threat, and it could serve as a jumping-off point to spread Iranian influence around the region. In that contest, Iran won, and the United States lost. Over the past three years, Americans have focused on the battle against the Islamic State in Iraq, returning more than 5,000 troops to the country and helping to force the militants out of Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul. But Iran never lost sight of its mission: to dominate its neighbor so thoroughly that Iraq could never again endanger it militarily, and to use the country to effectively control a corridor from Tehran to the Mediterranean. “Iranian influence is dominant,” said Hoshyar Zebari, who was ousted last year as finance minister because, he said, Iran distrusted his links to the United States. “It is paramount.” The country’s dominance over Iraq has heightened sectarian tensions around the region, with Sunni states, and American allies, like Saudi Arabia mobilizing to oppose Iranian expansionism. But Iraq is only part of Iran’s expansion project; it has also used soft and hard power to extend its influence in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan, and throughout the region. Iran is a Shiite state, and Iraq, a Shiite majority country, was ruled by an elite Sunni minority before the American invasion. The roots of the schism between Sunnis and Shiites, going back almost 1,400 years, lie in differences over the rightful leaders of Islam after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. But these days, it is about geopolitics as much as religion, with the divide expressed by different states that are adversaries, led by Saudi Arabia on one side and Iran on the other. Iran’s influence in Iraq is not just ascendant, but diverse, projecting into military, political, economic and cultural affairs. At some border posts in the south, Iraqi sovereignty is an afterthought. Busloads of young militia recruits cross into Iran without so much as a document check. They receive military training and are then flown to Syria, where they fight under the command of Iranian officers in defense of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. Passing in the other direction, truck drivers pump Iranian products — food, household goods, illicit drugs — into what has become a vital and captive market. Iran tips the scales to its favor in every area of commerce. In the city of Najaf, it even picks up the trash, after the provincial council there awarded a municipal contract to a private Iranian company. One member of the council, Zuhair al-Jibouri, resorted to a now-common Iraqi aphorism: “We import apples from Iran so we can give them away to Iranian pilgrims.” Politically, Iran has a large number of allies in Iraq’s Parliament who can help secure its goals. And its influence over the choice of interior minister, through a militia and political group the Iranians built up in the 1980s to oppose Mr. Hussein, has given it substantial control over that ministry and the federal police. Perhaps most crucial, Parliament passed a law last year that effectively made the constellation of Shiite militias a permanent fixture of Iraq’s security forces. This ensures Iraqi funding for the groups while effectively maintaining Iran’s control over some of the most powerful units. Now, with new parliamentary elections on the horizon, Shiite militias have begun organizing themselves politically for a contest that could secure even more dominance for Iran over Iraq’s political system. To gain advantage on the airwaves, new television channels set up with Iranian money and linked to Shiite militias broadcast news coverage portraying Iran as Iraq’s protector and the United States as a devious interloper. Partly in an effort to contain Iran, the United States has indicated that it will keep troops behind in Iraq after the battle against the Islamic State. American diplomats have worked to emphasize the government security forces’ role in the fighting, and to shore up a prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, who has seemed more open to the United States than to Iran. But after the United States’ abrupt withdrawal of troops in 2011, American constancy is still in question here — a broad failure of American foreign policy, with responsibility shared across three administrations. Iran has been playing a deeper game, parlaying extensive religious ties with Iraq’s Shiite majority and a much wider network of local allies, as it makes the case that it is Iraq’s only reliable defender. A Road to the Sea Iran’s great project in eastern Iraq may not look like much: a 15-mile stretch of dusty road, mostly gravel, through desert and scrub near the border in Diyala Province. But it is an important new leg of Iran’s path through Iraq to Syria, and what it carries — Shiite militiamen, Iranian delegations, trade goods and military supplies — is its most valuable feature. It is a piece of what analysts and Iranian officials say is Iran’s most pressing ambition: to exploit the chaos of the region to project influence across Iraq and beyond. Eventually, analysts say, Iran could use the corridor, established on the ground through militias under its control, to ship weapons and supplies to proxies in Syria, where Iran is an important backer of Mr. Assad, and to Lebanon and its ally Hezbollah. At the border to the east is a new crossing built and secured by Iran. Like the relationship between the two countries, it is lopsided. The checkpoint’s daily traffic includes up to 200 Iranian trucks, carrying fruit and yogurt, concrete and bricks, into Iraq. In the offices of Iraqi border guards, the candies and soda offered to guests come from Iran. No loaded trucks go the other way. “Iraq doesn’t have anything to offer Iran,” Vahid Gachi, the Iranian official in charge of the crossing, said in an interview in his office, as lines of tractor-trailers poured into Iraq. “Except for oil, Iraq relies on Iran for everything.” The border post is also a critical transit point for Iran’s military leaders to send weapons and other supplies to proxies fighting the Islamic State in Iraq. After the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh, swept across Diyala and neighboring areas in 2014, Iran made clearing the province, a diverse area of Sunnis and Shiites, a priority. It marshaled a huge force of Shiite militias, many trained in Iran and advised on the ground by Iranian officials. After a quick victory, Iranians and their militia allies set about securing their next interests here: marginalizing the province’s Sunni minority and securing a path to Syria. Iran has fought aggressively to keep its ally Mr. Assad in power in order to retain land access to its most important spinoff in the region, Hezbollah, the military and political force that dominates Lebanon and threatens Israel. A word from Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s powerful spymaster, sent an army of local Iraqi contractors scrambling, lining up trucks and bulldozers to help build the road, free of charge. Militiamen loyal to Iran were ordered to secure the site. Uday al-Khadran, the Shiite mayor of Khalis District in Diyala, is a member of the Badr Organization, an Iraqi political party and militia established by Tehran in the 1980s to fight against Mr. Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war. On an afternoon earlier this year, he spread a map across his desk and proudly discussed how he helped build the road, which he said was ordered by General Suleimani, the commander of the Quds Force, the branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps responsible for foreign operations. General Suleimani secretly directed Iran’s policy in Iraq after the American invasion in 2003, and was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers in attacks carried out by militias under his control. “I love Qassim Suleimani more than my children,” he said. Mr. Khadran said the general’s new road would eventually be a shortcut for religious pilgrims from Iran to reach Samarra, Iraq, the location of an important shrine. But he also acknowledged the route’s greater strategic significance as part of a corridor secured by Iranian proxies that extends across central and northern Iraq. The connecting series of roads skirts the western city of Mosul and stretches on to Tal Afar, an Islamic State-controlled city where Iranian-backed militias and Iranian advisers have set up a base at an airstrip on the outskirts. “Diyala is the passage to Syria and Lebanon, and this is very important to Iran,” said Ali al-Daini, the Sunni chairman of the provincial council there. Closer to Syria, Iranian-allied militias moved west of Mosul as the battle against the Islamic State unfolded there in recent months. The militias captured the town of Baaj, and then proceeded to the Syrian border, putting Iran on the cusp of completing its corridor. Back east, in Diyala, Mr. Daini said he had been powerless to halt what he described as Iran’s dominance in the province. When Mr. Daini goes to work, he said, he has to walk by posters of Iran’s revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, outside the council building. Iran’s militias in the province have been accused of widespread sectarian cleansing, pushing Sunnis from their homes to establish Shiite dominance and create a buffer zone on its border. The Islamic State was beaten in Diyala more than two years ago, but thousands of Sunni families still fill squalid camps, unable to return home. Now, Diyala has become a showcase for how Iran views Shiite ascendancy as critical to its geopolitical goals. “Iran is smarter than America,” said Nijat al-Taie, a Sunni member of the provincial council and an outspoken critic of Iran, which she calls the instigator of several assassination attempts against her. “They achieved their goals on the ground. America didn’t protect Iraq. They just toppled the regime and handed the country over to Iran.” The Business of Influence The lives of General Suleimani and other senior leaders in Tehran were shaped by the prolonged war with Iraq in the 1980s. The conflict left hundreds of thousands dead on both sides, and General Suleimani spent much of the war at the front, swiftly rising in rank as so many officers were killed. “The Iran-Iraq war was the formative experience for all of Iran’s leaders,” said Ali Vaez, an Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group, a conflict resolution organization. “From Suleimani all the way down. It was their ‘never again’ moment.” A border dispute over the Shatt al Arab waterway that was a factor in the hostilities has still not been resolved, and the legacy of the war’s brutality has influenced the Iranian government ever since, from its pursuit of nuclear weapons to its policy in Iraq. “This is a permanent scar in their mind,” said Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a lawmaker and former national security adviser. “They are obsessed with Baathism, Saddam and the Iran-Iraq war.” More than anything else, analysts say, it is the scarring legacy of that war that has driven Iranian ambitions to dominate Iraq. Particularly in southern Iraq, where the population is mostly Shiite, signs of Iranian influence are everywhere. Iranian-backed militias are the defenders of the Shiite shrines in the cities of Najaf and Karbala that drive trade and tourism. In local councils, Iranian-backed political parties have solid majorities, and campaign materials stress relationships with Shiite saints and Iranian clerics. If the Iraqi government were stronger, said Mustaq al-Abady, a businessman from just outside Najaf, “then maybe we could open our factories instead of going to Iran.” He said his warehouse was crowded with Iranian imports because his government had done nothing to promote a private sector, police its borders or enforce customs duties. Raad Fadhil al-Alwani, a merchant in Hilla, another southern city, imports cleaning supplies and floor tiles from Iran. He slaps “Made in Iraq” labels in Arabic on bottles of detergent, but the reality is that he owns a factory in Iran because labor is cheaper there. “I feel like I am destroying the economy of Iraq,” he said. But he insists that Iraqi politicians, by deferring to Iranian pressure and refusing to support local industry, have made it hard to do anything else. Najaf attracts millions of Iranian pilgrims each year visiting the golden-domed shrine of Imam Ali, the first Shiite imam. Iranian construction workers — many of whom are viewed as Iranian spies by Iraqi officials — have also flocked to the city to renovate the shrine and build hotels. In Babil Province, according to local officials, militia leaders have taken over a government project to set up security cameras along strategic roads. The project had been granted to a Chinese company before the militias intervened, and now the army and the local police have been sidelined from it, said Muqdad Omran, an Iraqi Army captain in the area. Iran’s pre-eminence in the Iraqi south has not come without resentment. Iraqi Shiites share a faith with Iran, but they also hold close their other identities as Iraqis and Arabs. “Iraq belongs to the Arab League, not to Iran,” said Sheikh Fadhil al-Bidayri, a cleric at the religious seminary in Najaf. “Shiites are a majority in Iraq, but a minority in the world. As long as the Iranian government is controlling the Iraqi government, we don’t have a chance.” In this region where the Islamic State’s military threat has never encroached, Iran’s security concerns are mostly being addressed by economic manipulation, Iraqi officials say. Trade in the south is often financed by Iran with credit, and incentives are offered to Iraqi traders to keep their cash in Iranian banks. Baghdad’s banks play a role, too, as the financial anchors for Iraqi front companies used by Iran to gain access to dollars that can then finance the country’s broader geopolitical aims, said Entifadh Qanbar, a former aide to the Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi, who died in 2015. “It’s very important for the Iranians to maintain corruption in Iraq,” he said. The Militias’ Long Arm For decades, Iran smuggled guns and bomb-making supplies through the vast swamps of southern Iraq. And young men were brought back and forth across the border, from one safe house to another — recruits going to Iran for training, and then back to Iraq to fight. At first the enemy was Mr. Hussein; later, it was the Americans. Today, agents of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards openly recruit fighters in the Shiite-majority cities of southern Iraq. Buses filled with recruits easily pass border posts that officials say are essentially controlled by Iran — through its proxies on the Iraqi side, and its own border guards on the other. While Iran has built up militias to fight against the Islamic State in Iraq, it has also mobilized an army of disaffected young Shiite Iraqi men to fight on its behalf in Syria. Mohammad Kadhim, 31, is one of those foot soldiers for Iran, having served three tours in Syria. The recruiting pitch, he said, is mostly based in faith, to defend Shiite shrines in Syria. But Mr. Kadhim said he and his friends signed up more out of a need for jobs. “I was just looking for money,” he said. “The majority of the youth I met fighting in Syria do it for the money.” He signed up with a Revolutionary Guards recruiter in Najaf, and then was bused through southern Iraq and into Iran, where he underwent military training near Tehran. There, he said, Iranian officers delivered speeches invoking the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, the revered seventh-century Shiite figure whose death at the hands of a powerful Sunni army became the event around which Shiite spirituality would revolve. The same enemies of the Shiites who killed the imam are now in Syria and Iraq, the officers told the men. After traveling to Iran, Mr. Kadhim came home for a break and then was shipped to Syria, where Hezbollah operatives trained him in sniper tactics. Iran’s emphasis on defending the Shiite faith has led some here to conclude that its ultimate goal is to bring about an Iranian-style theocracy in Iraq. But there is a persistent sense that it just would not work in Iraq, which has a much larger native Sunni population and tradition, and Iraq’s clerics in Najaf, including Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the world’s pre-eminent Shiite spiritual leader, oppose the Iranian system. But Iran is taking steps to translate militia power into political power, much as it did with Hezbollah in Lebanon, and militia leaders have begun political organizing before next year’s parliamentary elections. In April, Qais al-Khazali, a Shiite militia leader, delivered a speech to an audience of Iraqi college students, railing against the United States and the nefarious plotting of Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Then, a poet who was part of Mr. Khazali’s entourage stood up and began praising General Suleimani. For the students, that was the last straw. Chants of “Iran out! Iran out!” began. Scuffles broke out between students and Mr. Khazali’s bodyguards, who fired their rifles into the air just outside the building. “The thing that really provoked us was the poet,” said Mustafa Kamal, a student at the University of al-Qadisiya in Diwaniya, in southern Iraq, who participated in the protest. Mr. Kamal and his fellow students quickly learned how dangerous it could be to stand up to Iran these days. First, militiamen began threatening to haul them off. Then media outlets linked to the militias went after them, posting their pictures and calling them Baathists and enemies of Shiites. When a mysterious car appeared near Mr. Kamal’s house, his mother panicked that militiamen were coming for her son. Then, finally, Mr. Kamal, a law student, and three of his friends received notices from the school saying they had been suspended for a year. “We thought we had only one hope, the university,” he said. “And then Iran also interfered there.” Mr. Khazali, whose political and militia organization, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, is deeply connected with Iran, has been on a speaking tour on campuses across Iraq as part of an effort to organize political support for next year’s national election. This has raised fears that Iran is trying not only to deepen its influence within Iraqi education, but also to transform militias into outright political and social organizations, much as it did with Hezbollah in Lebanon. “It’s another type of Iranian infiltration and the expansion of Iran’s influence,” said Beriwan Khailany, a lawmaker and member of Parliament’s higher-education committee. “Iran wants to control the youth, and to teach them the Iranian beliefs, through Iraqis who are loyal to Iran.” Political Ascendancy When a group of Qatari falcon hunters, “including members of the royal family, were kidnapped in 2015 while on safari in the southern deserts of Iraq, Qatar called Iran and its militia allies — not the central government in Baghdad. For Mr. Abadi, the prime minister, the episode was an embarrassing demonstration of his government’s weakness at the hands of Iran, whose proxy militia Kataibb Hezbollah was believed to be behind the kidnapping. So when the hostage negotiations were about to end, Mr. Abadi pushed back. Around noon on a day in April, a government jet from Qatar landed in Baghdad, carrying a delegation of diplomats and 500 million euros stuffed into 23 black boxes. The hunters were soon on their way home, but the ransom did not go to the Iranian-backed militiamen who had abducted the Qataris; the cash ended up in a central bank vault in Baghdad. The seizure of the money had been ordered by Mr. Abadi, who was furious at the prospect of militias, and their Iranian and Hezbollah benefactors, being paid so richly right under the Iraqi government’s nose. “Hundreds of millions to armed groups?” Mr. Abadi said in a public rant. “Is this acceptable?” In Iraq, the kidnapping episode was seen as a violation of the country’s sovereignty and emblematic of Iran’s suffocating power over the Iraqi state. In a post on Twitter, Mr. Zebari, the former finance minister, who was previously foreign minister, called the episode a “travesty.” Mr. Zebari knows firsthand the power of Iran over the Iraqi state. Last year, he said, he was ousted as finance minister because Iran perceived him as being too close to the United States. The account was verified by a member of Parliament who was involved in the removal of Mr. Zebari, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering Iran. Mr. Zebari, who recounted the events in an interview from his mountainside mansion in northern Iraq, said that when President Barack Obama met with Mr. Abadi last September at the United Nations, the American leader personally lobbied to save Mr. Zebari’s job. Even that was not enough. Mr. Abadi now finds himself in a difficult position. If he makes any move that can be seen as confrontational toward Iran, or as positioning himself closer to the United States, it could place a cloud over his political future. “He had two options: to be with the Americans or with the Iranians,” said Izzat Shahbander, a prominent Iraqi Shiite leader who once lived in exile in Iran while Mr. Hussein was in power. “And he chose to be with the Americans.” Mr. Abadi, who took office in 2014 with the support of both the United States and Iran, has seemed more emboldened to push back against Iranian pressure since President Trump took office. In addition to seizing the ransom money, he has promoted an ambitious project for an American company to secure the highway from Baghdad to Amman, Jordan, which Iran has opposed. He has also begun discussing with the United States the terms of a deal to keep American forces behind after the Islamic State is defeated. Some are seeing an American troop commitment as a chance to revisit the 2011 withdrawal of United States forces that seemingly opened a door for Iran. When American officials in Iraq began the slow wind-down of the military mission there, in 2009, some diplomats in Baghdad were cautiously celebrating one achievement: Iran seemed to be on its heels, its influence in the country waning. “Over the last year, Iran has lost the strategic initiative in Iraq,” one diplomat wrote in a cable, later released by WikiLeaks. But other cables sent warnings back to Washington that were frequently voiced by Iraqi officials they spoke to: that if the Americans left, then Iran would fill the vacuum. Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador in Iraq from 2007 to 2009, said that if the United States left again after the Islamic State was defeated, “it would be effectively just giving the Iranians a free rein.” But many Iraqis say the Iranians already have free rein. And while the Trump administration has indicated that it will pay closer attention to Iraq as a means to counter Iran, the question is whether it is too late. “Iran is not going to sit silent and do nothing,” said Sami al-Askari, a senior Shiite politician who has good relationships with both the Iranians and Americans. “They have many means. Frankly, the Americans can’t do anything.”
  12. 2019/07/24 11:37 Number of readings 115 Section: Iraq Legal Committee: the judiciary demands lifting the immunity of 60 deputies libel suits and defamation BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The judiciary has called on parliament to lift the immunity of "60" deputies from slander, defamation and corruption cases, deputy chairman of the parliamentary legal committee Mohamed al-Ghazi said on Wednesday (July 24th, 2019). Al-Ghazzi said in a press statement that the number of requests to lift the immunity of deputies and their introduction by the judiciary up to about 60 applications distributed between libel suits and defamation, "pointing out that" the Presidency of the House of Representatives referred these requests in the past to the advisers in the Department Oh ". He explained that "there are 22 previous requests reached from the judiciary to parliament in the previous session has not been decided while in the current parliamentary session, the number of requests about 38 applications relating to defamation suits and another section of corruption and waste of public funds." "The new requests sent by the Judicial Council to the parliament require lifting the immunity of deputies accused of corruption until the completion of investigations and return to parliament in the event of acquittal of these charges against them." The Supreme Judicial Council called on parliament to lift the immunity of (5) deputies for their involvement in corruption deals. He called on the President of the Supreme Judicial Council Judge Faik Zaidan, the House of Representatives to lift the immunity of its members accused of corruption cases while taking executive duties, while stressing the cooperation between all organs in the fight against corruption. Continue to the http://almasalah.com/ar/news/175414/اللجنة-القانونية-القضاء-يطالب-برفع-الحصانة-عن-60-نائبا-بدعاوى-القذف-والتشهير
  13. Integrity: Fact teams follow the movement of money senior government officials Political Since 03.04.2017 at 13:00 (Baghdad time) Baghdad balances News Integrity Commission revealed on Saturday that the prevention of the Department of Investigation of the teams followed the movement of senior government officials and monitor the funds expected to bribery in some cases governmental institutions. She Prevention Department of the Authority in a statement received / balances News / copy of it, it was "carried out in one month (135) a visit to a group government and private banks and the board of the Securities and the General Directorate of Traffic and the Registrar of Companies and public body was for taxes and Baghdad Chamber of Commerce and the Iraqi market for securities to match the installed information the disclosure of financial accounts provided to them by government officials charged with the duty of disclosure forms for their financial interests, "indicating that" the number of taxpayers who have been research and investigation and matching their assets amounted to (500) is expensive. " The circle to "do its teams to (30) visit to government agencies included the office of the Inspector General in the Ministries of Education, Interior and directorates general of passports public statements in sub-Kadhimiya and Adhamiya national card and conditions of New Baghdad, Sadr City, in addition to the directorates of education Karkh first, second and third, and equipment Karkh and breeding Rusafa first, second and civil education and vocational education. " Circle Amnesty said it was "carried out the anti-bribery teams of the Department of Prevention during the same period (24) field visit included some of the ministries of health and finance departments, labor and social affairs." The Integrity Commission has launched a page on its official spokesman (I'm an inspector) and called on all citizens, who have evidence and proof and documents available have about the existence of inflation is normal in other resources than doubted he enters the door of graft or exploit the career office, to report it across the page ( I inspector) the requirement to be unsubstantiated and the evidence (as possible) and to be a far cry from attempts miscarriage personal and targeting hopes of whistleblower Ajtnabhma. It is noteworthy that the Commission had referred the seven files from senior officials last year to eliminate the pretext of inflated money and graft was the most prominent deputies of the three Prime Minister and Minister of Justice and water resources, as well as the Mayor of Baghdad and former director of the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces Office Alsabak.anthy 29 / D 24
  14. God bless the patriot who let this cat out of the bag ... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-26/dutch-regulator-accidentally-posted-soros-s-short-positions Dutch Regulator Accidentally Posts Soros’s Short Positions by Ellen Proper and Colin McClelland January 26, 2017, 2:18 AM EST January 26, 2017, 8:12 AM EST Bets against stocks were revealed briefly on AFM’s website ‘Human error’ blamed for publication of positions back to 2012 George Soros Some of hedge fund billionaire George Soros’s short positions dating back to 2012 were published on the Dutch financial market regulator’s website this week due to “human error,” according to the regulator AFM. The short positions, bets on a stock declining, were “between 0.2 percent and 0.5 percent,” of shares outstanding in the companies shorted, AFM spokesman Ward Snijders said by phone on Thursday. The Dutch regulator publishes shorts of 0.5 percent or higher on its website on a daily basis. The smaller amounts were posted by mistake, he said. The Financial Times earlier reported that some of the positions, including bets against Dutch banks, including ING Groep NV, appeared briefly on the website on Tuesday evening. ING declined to comment on Thursday. Soros, whose fortune is estimated at $25.2 billion by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, is in the same league as Warren Buffett when it comes to investors copying their trades as they try to ride the coattails of the super successful. Short positions, which are typically closely guarded, in Deutsche Bank AG jumped when it was revealed in June that Soros had bet that the stock would fall after the U.K. voted to leave the European Union. The German bank fell 14 percent on the first day after the ballot. Trump Loss The Dutch regulator’s spokesman couldn’t disclose whether there has been contact with Soros following Tuesday’s error. A spokesman for Soros didn’t respond to an e-mail seeking comment. The 86-year-old investor lost about $1 billion by betting against the market after the election of U.S. President Donald Trump, according to the Wall Street Journal this month. The hiring of a chief investment officer may reduce Soros’s role, the paper reported. Soros has managed as much as $30 billion as founder and chairman at New York-based Soros Fund Management LLC. Currency bets on the pound in 1992, the Thai baht five years later and the yen in 2012-13 helped Soros attain a fortune ranked 26th globally by Bloomberg. He’s donated $8 billion to charities since founding the pro-democracy Open Society Foundations in 1979. Regulators have pushed for more transparency around short positions. The European Union imposed rules in 2012 on short bets against some securities in the political bloc to reduce the risk of destabilizing sovereign-debt markets. The U.K.’s Financial Services Authority introduced a regulation in June 2008 requiring disclosure of short positions of more than 0.25 percent for companies that are selling new shares in rights offerings.
  15. Luigi asks...could Iraq greed & corruption weaken the IQD RV when it's our time to exchange? The In Country RV has been halted. Treat this article as a rumor. Not verified. Your opine. 8-31-2017 Intel Guru RayRen98 An article surfaced indicating that PM Abadi was called on to "curb the depletion of hard currency" due to passport carriers of VISA's exchanging 1,200 dinar for $3,000 USD noting these are currency dealers, not basic travelers indicating in the loss of state funds. (Unless I'm misreading this article) Let's see what tomorrow brings!
  16. Former French ambassador in Baghdad arrested Political Since 05/24/2017 11:11 am (Baghdad time) Baghdad balances News Web site French RFI, Wednesday that former French ambassador in Iraq Boris Bouillon faces trial before the French judiciary after his arrest at the train station in France. The Web site said in a report, said that "Bouillon nicknamed" Sarko Boy "who played an active role in improving relations between Sarkozy, former Libyan Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, facing charges of fraud and money laundering after his arrest in the Gardonor train station carrying a bag stuffed with 350 thousand euros and 40 thousand dollars, "noting that" French law prohibits the transfer of the amount of more than 10 thousand euros in secret to any country of the European Union countries. " He added that "Bouillon insists that the funds were payments to him as an intermediary for an Iraqi company in a major construction project was the French judge of the Court Ghali satrap had commented earlier in the presence of the smell of corruption in it disturbing." The site said that "the accused after brought money to France from Iraq without being advertised in any of the two countries, he hid in four, two of which packages in his apartment in Paris and one in the basement of the building and another in a hole in the same basement" .anthy 29 / d 24
  17. Iraqi Kurdistan oil minister connected to missing $31.4 mil. from South Korea’s HSBC Posted on March 11, 2015 SEOUL,— The National Assembly is moving to have HSBC CEO Stuart Gulliver answer key questions regarding the disappearance of $31.4 million of taxpayers’ money in a project undertaken as part of the failed “energy diplomacy” under the previous Lee Myung-bak government. Rep. Chun Soon-ok of the main opposition New Politics Alliance for Democracy (NPAD) told The Korea Times that she is sending Gulliver questions about the case, which she believes could escalate into an international bribery scandal involving former presidential aides. “First and foremost, we want to know who took the money,” Rep. Chun said, referring to the “signature bonus” given by the state-run Korea National Oil Corp. (KNOC) to the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq on Jan. 16 and Dec. 19, 2008, in return for the right to explore and develop the Bazian Block oilfield on its territory. She said that the money disappeared after it was sent to the KRG through HSBC in London. “We assume that the money was shared by the former aides of President Lee, Kurdistan officials and Choi Kyu-sun, the middleman,” she said. Chun belongs to the party’s committee to uncover the outflow of national wealth under the previous government. But Choi denied this occurred, former President Lee couldn’t be reached and Kurdistan officials were not available for comment. HSBC also declined to comment. Chun said that the global bank is under an obligation to promote transparency regarding its operations in general and, in particular, in this kind of case in which there are strong suspicions of bribery. She said that she is willing to enlist the help of an ongoing bipartisan probe into the failed policies of the former President in order to uncover the truth about the missing millions in taxpayers’ money. “We are not ruling out another avenue of using a government-to-government contact to get an answer from HSBC,” she said. At the center of the case is Ashti Hawrami, the KRG’s natural resources minister, who designated HSBC headquarters in London’s Canary Wharf business district as the bank through which to send the KNOC money. The money could have been a bribe given to Hawrami, Chun said. Making the HSBC deal more dubious is that it was different from those involving other parts of the deal conducted by Commerzbank in Frankfurt. When the KNOC sent $100 million in August 2012 and $10 million in January 2014 as SOC construction costs to build a hospital and other facilities in Kurdistan, the oil company used Commerzbank as the intermediary. Certificates exist, clearly showing that the money arrived at the Kurdistan International Bank via Commerzbank. The copy of the request for remittances acquired by The Korea Times listed 31 banks as intermediaries. But the request involving the $31.4 million, a copy of which The Korea Times also obtained, only cited HSBC’s headquarters in London. Gulliver recently appeared before the Treasury Select Committee at the House of Commons, London, to be questioned over allegations that the bank’s Swiss branch helped wealthy customers dodge paying tax. The bank has endured a string of scandals and paid millions in penalties to regulators around the world http://ekurd.net/iraqi-kurdistans-oil-minister-connected-with-missing-31-4-mil-from-south-koreas-hsbc-2015-03-11
  18. Okay, so why am I posting this? I watched an interview with Doug Casey & Peter Schiff concerning Peter's father Irwin that is serving a very stiff 13 yr prison sentence - That interview led me by interest to watch a video of Doug Casey concerning "HIS" views on voting - I was absolutely in agreement with so much that he said but pushed it aside until I read Ezrapounds thread earlier this morning - We are cursed if we do and cursed if we don't -- It reminds me of an old wise tale "If you get up I'm going to beat you with this stick. If you keep sitting there I"m going to beat you with this stick" ----- so what do you do? I have my answer do you have yours? Doug Casey's Top Five Reasons Not To Vote Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/22/2012 23:42 -0400 Submitted by Doug Casey of Casey Research, L: Doug, we've spoken about presidents. We have a presidential election coming up in the US – an election that could have significant consequences on our investments. But given the views you've already expressed on the Tea Party movement and anarchy, I'm sure you have different ideas. What do you make of the impending circus, and what should a rational man do? Doug: Well, a rational man, which is to say, an ethical man, would almost certainly not vote in this election, or in any other – at least above a local level, where you personally know most of both your neighbors and the candidates. L: Why? Might not an ethical person want to vote the bums out? Doug: He might feel that way, but he'd better get his emotions under control. I've thought about this. So let me give you at least five reasons why no one should vote. The first reason is that voting is an unethical act, in and of itself. That's because the state is pure, institutionalized coercion. If you believe that coercion is an improper way for people to relate to one another, then you shouldn't engage in a process that formalizes and guarantees the use of coercion. L: It's probably worth defining coercion in this context. I know you agree with me that force is ethical in self-defense. A murderer I shoot might feel coerced into accepting a certain amount of hot lead that he did not consent to, but he intended the same, or worse, for me, so the scales are balanced. What you are talking about is forcing innocent, non-consenting others to do things against their wills, like paying taxes that go to pay for military adventures they believe are wrong, etc. Doug: Right. The modern state not only routinely coerces people into doing all sorts of things they don't want to do – often very clearly against their own interests – but it necessarily does so, by its nature. People who want to know more about that should read our conversation on anarchy. This distinction is very important in a society with a government that is no longer limited by a constitution that restrains it from violating individual rights. And when you vote, you participate in, and endorse, this unethical system. L: It's probably also worth clarifying that you're not talking about all voting here. When you are a member of a golfing club and vote on how to use the fees, you and everyone else have consented to the process, so it's not unethical. It's participating in the management of the coercive machinery of the state you object to, not voting in and of itself. Doug: Exactly. As Mao correctly said, "The power of the State comes out of the barrel of a gun." It's not like voting for the leadership of a social club. Unlike a golfing club or something of that nature, the state won't let you opt out. L: Even if you're not harming anyone and just want to be left alone. Doug: Which relates to the second reason: privacy. It compromises your privacy to vote. It gets your name added to a list government busybodies can make use of, like court clerks putting together lists of conscripts for jury duty. Unfortunately, this is not as important a reason as it used to be, because of the great proliferation of lists people are on anyway. Still, while it's true there's less privacy in our world today, in general, the less any government knows about you, the better off you are. This is, of course, why I've successfully refused to complete a census form for the last 40 years. L: [Chuckles] We've talked about the census. Good for you . Doug: It's wise to be a nonperson, as far as the state is concerned, as far as possible. L: Not to digress too much, but some people might react by saying that juries are important. Doug: They are, but it would be a waste of my time to sign up for jury duty, because I would certainly be kicked off any jury. No attorney would ever let me stay on the jury once we got to voir dire, because I would not agree to being a robot that simply voted on the facts and the law as instructed by the judge – I'd want to vote on the morality of the law in question too. I'd be interested in justice, and very few laws today, except for the basic ones on things like murder and theft, have anything to do with justice. If the case related to drug laws, or tax laws, I would almost certainly automatically vote to acquit, regardless of the facts of the case. L: I've thought about it too, because it is important, and I might be willing to serve on a jury. And of course I'd vote my conscience too. But I'd want to be asked, not ordered to do it. I'm not a slave. Doug: My feelings exactly. L: But we should probably get to your third reason for not voting. Doug: That would be because it's a degrading experience. The reason I say that is because registering to vote, and voting itself, usually involves taking productive time out of your day to go stand around in lines in government offices. You have to fill out forms and deal with petty bureaucrats. I know I can find much more enjoyable and productive things to do with my time, and I'm sure anyone reading this can as well. L: And the pettier the bureaucrat, the more unpleasant the interaction tends to be. Doug: I have increasing evidence of that every time I fly. The TSA goons are really coming into their own now, as our own home-grown Gestapo wannabes. L: It's a sad thing… Reason number four? Doug: As P.J. O'Rourke says in a recent book, and as I've always said, voting just encourages them. I'm convinced that most people don't vote for candidates they believe in, but against candidates they fear. But that's not how the guy who wins sees it; the more votes he gets, the more he thinks he's got a mandate to rule – even if all his votes are really just votes against his opponent. Some people justify this, saying it minimizes harm to vote for the lesser of two evils. That's nonsense, because it still leaves you voting for evil. The lesser of two evils is still evil. Incidentally, I got as far as this point in 1980, when I was on the Phil Donahue show. I had the whole hour on national TV all to myself, and I felt in top form. It was actually the day before the national election, when Jimmy Carter was the incumbent, running against Ronald Reagan. After I made some economic observations, Donahue accused me of intending to vote for Reagan. I said that I was not, and as sharp as Donahue was, he said, "Well, you're not voting for Carter, so you must be voting Libertarian…" I said no, and had to explain why not. I believed then just as I do now. And it was at about this point when the audience, which had been getting restive, started getting really upset with me. I never made it to point five. Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised. That same audience, when I pointed out that their taxes were high and were being wasted, contained an individual who asked, "Why do we have to pay for things with our taxes? Why doesn't the government pay for it?" I swear that's what he said; it's on tape. If you could go back and watch the show, you'd see that the audience clapped after that brilliant question. Which was when I first realized that while the situation is actually hopeless, it's also quite comic… L: [Laughs] Doug: And things have only gotten worse since then, with decades more public education behind us. L: I bet that guy works in the Obama administration now, where they seem to think exactly as he did; the government will just pay for everything everyone wants with money it doesn't have. Doug: [Chuckles] Maybe so. He'd now be of an age where he's collecting Social Security and Medicare, plus food stamps, and likely gaming the system for a bunch of other freebies. Maybe he's so discontent with his miserable life that he goes to both Tea Party and Green Party rallies to kill time. I do believe we're getting close to the endgame. The system is on the verge of falling apart. And the closer we get to the edge, the more catastrophic the collapse it appears we're going to have. Which leads me to point number five: Your vote doesn't count. If I'd gotten to say that to the Donahue audience, they probably would have stoned me. People really like to believe that their individual votes count. Politicians like to say that every vote counts, because it gets everyone into busybody mode, makes voters complicit in their crimes. But statistically, any person's vote makes no more difference than a single grain of sand on a beach. Thinking their vote counts seems to give people who need it an inflated sense of self-worth. That's completely apart from the fact – as voters in Chicago in 1960 and Florida in 2000 can tell you – when it actually does get close, things can be, and often are, rigged. As Stalin famously said, it's not who votes that counts, it's who counts the votes. Anyway, officials manifestly do what they want, not what you want them to do, once they are in office. They neither know, nor care, what you want. You're just another mark, a mooch, a source of funds. L: The idea of political representation is a myth, and a logical absurdity. One person can only represent his own opinions – if he's even thought them out. If someone dedicated his life to studying another person, he might be able to represent that individual reasonably accurately. But given that no two people are completely – or even mostly – alike, it's completely impossible to represent the interests of any group of people. Doug: The whole constellation of concepts is ridiculous. This leads us to the subject of democracy. People say that if you live in a democracy, you should vote. But that begs the question of whether democracy itself is any good. And I would say that, no, it's not. Especially a democracy unconstrained by a constitution. That, sadly, is the case in the US, where the Constitution is 100% a dead letter. Democracy is nothing more than mob rule dressed up in a suit and tie. It's no way for a civilized society to be run. At this point, it's a democracy consisting of two wolves and a sheep, voting about what to eat for dinner. L: Okay, but in our firmly United State of America today, we don't live in your ideal society. It is what it is, and if you don't vote the bums out, they remain in office. What do you say to the people who say that if you don't vote, if you don't raise a hand, then you have no right to complain about the results of the political process? Doug: But I do raise a hand, constantly. I try to change things by influencing the way people think. I'd just rather not waste my time or degrade myself on unethical and futile efforts like voting. Anyway, that argument is more than fallacious, it's ridiculous and spurious. Actually, only the non-voter does have a right to complain – it's the opposite of what they say. Voters are assenting to whatever the government does; a nonvoter can best be compared to someone who refuses to join a mob. Only he really has the right to complain about what they do. L: Okay then, if the ethical man shouldn't vote in the national elections coming up, what should he do? Doug: I think it's like they said during the war with Viet Nam: Suppose they gave a war, and nobody came? I also like to say: Suppose they levied a tax, and nobody paid? And at this time of year: Suppose they gave an election, and nobody voted? The only way to truly delegitimize a corrupt system is by not voting. When tin-plated dictators around the world have their rigged elections, and people stay home in droves, even today's "we love governments of all sorts" international community won't recognize the results of the election. L: Delegitimizing evil… and without coercion, or even force. That's a beautiful thing, Doug. I'd love to see the whole crooked, festering, parasitical mass in Washington – and similar places – get a total vote of no-confidence. Doug: Indeed. Now, I realize that my not voting won't make that happen. My not voting doesn't matter any more than some naïve person's voting does. But at least I'll know that what I did was ethical. You have to live with yourself. That's only possible if you try to do the right thing. L: At least you won't have blood on your hands. Doug: That's exactly the point. L: A friendly amendment: you do staunchly support voting with your feet. Doug: Ah, that's true. Unfortunately, the idea of the state has spread over the face of the earth like an ugly skin disease. All of the governments of the world are, at this point, growing in extent and power – and rights violations – like cancers. But still, that is one way I am dealing with the problem; I'm voting with my feet. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. It's idiotic to sit around like a peasant and wait to see what they do to you. To me, it makes much more sense to live as a perpetual tourist, staying no more than six months of the year in any one place. Tourists are courted and valued, whereas residents and citizens are viewed as milk cows. And before this crisis is over, they may wind up looking more like beef cows. Entirely apart from that, it keeps you from getting into the habit of thinking like a medieval serf. And I like being warm in the winter, and cool in the summer. L: And, as people say: "What if everyone did that?" Well, you'd see people migrating towards the least predatory states where they could enjoy the most freedom, and create the most wealth for themselves and their posterity. That sort of voting with your feet could force governments to compete for citizens, which would lead to more places where people can live as they want. It could become a worldwide revolution fought and won without guns. Doug: That sounds pretty idealistic, but I do believe this whole sick notion of the nation-state will come to an end within the next couple generations. It makes me empathize with Lenin when he said, "The worse it gets, the better it gets." Between jet travel, the Internet, and the bankruptcy of governments around the world, the nation-state is a dead duck. As we've discussed before, people will organize into voluntary communities we call phyles. L: That's the name given to such communities by science fiction author Neal Stephenson in his book The Diamond Age, which we discussed in our conversation on Speculator's Fiction. Well, we've talked quite a bit – what about investment implications? Doug: First, don't expect anything that results from this US election to do any real, lasting good. And if, by some miracle, it did, the short-term implications would be very hard economic times. What to do in either case is what we write about in our big-picture newsletter, The Casey Report. More important, however, is to have a healthy and useful psychological attitude. For that, you need to stop thinking politically, stop wasting time on elections, entitlements, and such nonsense. You've got to use all of your time and brain power to think economically. That's to say, thinking about how to allocate your various intellectual, personal, and capital assets, to survive the storm – and even thrive, if you play your cards right. L: Very good. I like that: think economically, not politically. Thanks, Doug! Doug: My pleasure. Irrespective of whether one agrees with Doug's politics, his investing record speaks for itself. And just like him, the analysts and editors at Casey Research dig deep in their respective fields and are blunt in their assessments. One thing many agree that the US will have to face, no matter the outcome of the presidential election, is its growing debt crisis. http://www.caseyresearch.com/cdd/doug-casey-voting-redux
  19. I was reading through the Dept. of the Army publication that was brought to my attention dated for Aril 2014. After having read through the information, and watching the tactics being deployed on television with the media storm in Missouri, I noticed something unsettling. On pg. 123 in the glossary, the abbreviation of MO = Missouri if referenced. The only state mentioned. DC=mentioned by not a defined "State". I found it to be very ironic and non coincidental that all of these recent events happened in Ferguson Missouri. How is that a civil defense document targets the SHOW ME STATE of Missouri, several months before the alleged killing of Mr. Brown. Is there an ulterior motive to deploy police forces and divide the nation for the government to conceal the real stories or perhaps I am just a loony tune. I highly doubt the latter. Seems as this could be a possible false flag. Thanks- B could not post the link. Its a PDF. Can be found online though. The glossary lists acronyms with Army or joint definitions. SECTION I – ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS AA ADP ADRP AR ATP ATTN CFR COA CONUS DA DC DCSA DD DM DOD DODD DODI FCMT Fed FM G-2 GRM HIV HN IPB JP LEA METT-TC MI MISO MO MSCoE MWD MTTP NGR No. NLW OCONUS OIC PIO PSG assembly area Army doctrine publication Army doctrine reference publication Army regulation Army techniques publication attention Code of Federal Regulation course of action continental United States Department of the Army District of Columbia Defense Support of Civil Authorities Departement of Defense designated marksman Department of Defense Department of Defense directive Department of Defense instruction forced cell move team federal field manual Assistant Chief of Staff, Intelligence graduated-response matrix human immunodeficiency virus host nation intelligence preparation of the battlefield joint publication law enforcement agency mission, enemy, terrain and weather, troops and support available, time available, and civil considerations military intelligence military information support operations Missouri Maneuver Support Center of Excellence military working dog multi-Service tactics, techniques, and procedures National Guard regulation number nonlethal weapons outside the continental United States officer in charge police intelligence operations platoon sergeant
  20. Upper respond to party Maliki: Nntkdkm of the assumption of power and kills around you sons of the country and the rampant corruption Tuesday, 01 October 1 / Okrudolf 2013 12:13 [baghdad - where] Said independent MP in the House of Representatives Hassan Alawi that "criticism of the Islamic Dawa Party returns to his rule and its response to the institutions of the state administration" denying "مساسه the criticism Chkhosa the, or parties, in particular." The Islamic Dawa Party, which holds its General Secretariat Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has launched an attack on the top after accusing the latter of the party "sectarianism" returned his ahaadeeth misleading statements which represent the remains of the wreckage of the defunct Baath Party ideas and express their hatred ugly., According to a party. The upper in a statement Tuesday the agency received all of Iraq [where] a copy of "over more than three decades, I did not think time to engage in مساجلة with a person or party or sect, because المساجلات turn into a scene the benefit of lookers and losers when they Almtlakmon in the fray who he strikes one another, and Asmah myself to be in this scene, and this rule was my relationship with the parties and personalities who lived with her at one stage, including the Islamic Dawa Party, which did not mention once only Antceft of martyrs and sacrifices. " However, "but the call is now the ruling party and is subject to criticism and criticism of various forms of attack peaceful, if he wanted the party to be Mtptla reluctant متصوفا he that excludes the public right and manages institutions and ministerial and security and financial, and years ago, said the jeweler [The struggle task يعيا by Almatrab, then it can be for our voices to shut up. " He said the top "As for the party addresses the responsibility of the first in the country and kill him every day for at least thirty Iraqis and enter into the world of disabled more than 100 human right, and destroyed dozens of shops and businesses Statistics, while blessed with those in power Almtsdon to rule on behalf of the Shiites, including reward the boy, are a different story, Here are the screens various Iraqi agree that corruption under this government has risen to levels of flood plunging the state institutions and Mrajauha bribery and the fall of the receivables, and this is who we turn him cash, but leave the martyrs of the call who have been subjected to genocide organization Hanin in the drawer of immortality, and the people of corruption, they certainly are not the people of the martyrs and their heirs. " He pointed out, "On a personal note, keep in my speech on the language dealing with shrines Bhjovernma, did yesterday people in person and Ahzba his party, but talked about the performance of the unfortunate and the programs have not seen any of them for the highest level of theoretical nor practical level, if such talk is a departure Arts and political traditions and customs, we certainly Outlaws on these traditions. " The upper "and is as much a personal I would like to mention these preachers be at the forefront of the first chapters of my memoirs personal message mission from exile on 14.02.1984 to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Kuwait at the time I take the fault of Kuwaitis in their opposition to the Dawa Party, and that the result will not be in favor of Kuwait , and the letter written my hands, and remind them that I won the Dawa party in the circumstances it was approaching them as if approaching from the gallows, and this is confirmed by the newspaper Jihad spokesperson Dawa Party between 1982 - 1984 has overseen the development of Damascus when he was Urubi Dr. Ali Tamimi responsible for Party branch in Damascus. " "And so I said in my books, I've won the call when he was opposed and attacked him when he became governor, also won for Saddam Hussein when taken captive after Garath over a quarter of a century, this is like the souls large clean and fair and that were not days echo to the sound of the high-neighborliness" . He went on saying, "I will not be a thief Food Iraqis and former trade minister leading member of the Dawa Party, the heir to Abdul-Sahib intruder who was tearing his body alive in the palace of the end, not those illiterates who surround the Prime Minister and the heirs of the Sheikh of the world Mahdi الآصفي, and will not be spokesmen call now Class historian Hassan inch, nor the mantle for the purest of the mantle of a martyr of Islamic thought I Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr. " And sealing the upper statement "You are definitely the people power, the martyrs and the scientists They face God in sheep's clothing Sondos Khadr says the poet Abu Tamam al-Tai [deteriorated clothing death Hamra what came her night except one of the Sondos Khadr, the threat and use of state power prime minister I know of other how much he writer he'd lines in the face of death even as he filed eighty by the will of the fighters in the first national, citing the words of the poet jeweler what Ykhovna the [Alokrmon] ومم afraid Salal Fala? أيسلب them Naim Alhger the and sand نفح, and Aera opulence]. " The Islamic Dawa Party has criticized the top in his remarks about the party said in a statement, "not the Islamic Dawa Party sectarian one day; but that his positions against sectarianism since its inception and to this day remarkable and clear conversations misleading to the loft in his press represent the remains of the wreckage ideas Baath Party buried expresses hatred and ugly against the party and against the Mujahid Islamic personalities that Garat Baathist dictatorship as sectarian and تهجمه scientists and religious authority and describing them Ehnoteh represents a significant encroachment can not be tolerated. " The statement continued, "There is no doubt that they paid as usual conversations from unknown destinations aimed at breaking the relationship between the reference and the Islamic Dawa Party on the one hand and the Iraqi people Quran on the other hand, however, the honorable people of Iraq know very well the opportunistic nature of the personal spoken." The Islamic Dawa Party "top that does not forget the day he came to the Council of the Islamic Dawa Party in Damascus, apologizing regret seek forgiveness and pardon and forgiveness for his services to the naughty criminal Saddam and his gang. According to the statement. Ended.
  21. Views : 1 Integrity begins audited accounts of officials outside of Iraq and calls for Parliament to lift the immunity of the accused of corruption Thursday, August 22 / August 2013 14:40 | | | {Baghdad: Euphrates News} Integrity Commission announced the commencement audited financial accounts of senior officials outside Iraq, and conducted refund procedures and wanted fugitives outside the country, demanding the House of Representatives to lift the immunity of MPs accused of corruption to facilitate consideration of their cases . The authority said in a statement received by the agency {Euphrates News} copy of it on Thursday, "they began to audit the accounts of Finance of senior officials located outside Iraq and direct actions refund and wanted fugitives to other countries, and called for the House of Representatives to respond to lift the immunity of MPs accused of corruption to facilitate consideration of their cases. " She said, "It referred to the judiciary during the first six months of this year {2541} accused of corruption," indicating that "the courts looked at files {1303}, accusing Fberot yard {549} and ruled on the {754} convicted provisions ranging from life imprisonment and imprisonment for various terms and payment fine in addition to paying the embezzled money before releasing. " She added, "It's made in a report on the performance of its departments during the first half of this year, tables of names of senior officials who revealed ذممهم Finance with the Director-General of the Department of Prevention journalists finalization of the names of the first meal of the officials who did not disclose their financial interests to the legal department to organize and prosecution of criminal proceedings before the competent courts. " It is said that the text of the Constitution that the members of the presidencies of the three bodies to provide financial ذممهم disclosures to the Integrity Commission, which is a three reports of the detection offers the first of them in the first month of taking charge of the position and the second at the end of the service in addition to the final report . The statistics of the Integrity Commission has reported that senior officials in response to the detection of financial ذممهم recorded during the month of July, up slightly from the rates of the first half of this year, despite warnings from the Commission that it would soon begin moving the lawsuits in court against the abstainers . ended
  22. Integrity: al-Jaafari and Allawi did not يكشفا the financial ذممهم Orr News Agency - 06/11/2013 - 3:51 pm | Hits: 5 Baghdad / Orr News Integrity Commission revealed in the latest report of financial disclosure for members of the House of Representatives that only 100 Vice made a financial Khovathm of 325 five months after the deadline for them this year. The report said that the body "100 deputy out of 325 deputies presented financial Khovathm to the Integrity Commission which is a response rate of 30.7% up to the end of May last year." The report indicates that only a third of the deputies responded to the financial disclosure five months after the deadline for submission of financial statements, including only 19 women. Among the most prominent absentee from the list to provide financial disclosure Chairman of the National Alliance, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, head of the Iraqi List, Iyad Allawi, Fuad Masum, head of the Kurdistan Alliance, in addition to a number of other MPs, including Maha league and Jawad Alshahyla and Prince Kanani and Hanan al, Yassin Majeed and high Nassif The list included Parliament Speaker Osama Najafi and his deputy Qusay al-Suhail. The Parliamentary Integrity Committee has announced an amendment to the Integrity Commission Act includes a stop the salaries of officials who abstain from detect financial ذممهم. The promise of a member of the Parliamentary Integrity Committee Haval Said disclosure of financial receivables form of the deputies and officials are useless and will not eliminate corruption, revealing that 25% of the House of Representatives only provided financial ذممهم, questioning their credibility. He Said that "the form of annual detection receivables officials of Finance is able to detect the properties that a lot of politicians who exploit their positions to achieve the benefits and personal gains are familiar with high-law and know blobs blacks and gaps in it that will enable them to circumvent it." He added that "most politicians do not register their names Asset where are recorded the names of their relatives or their agents and the disclosure of financial accounts can not disclose financial receivables." http://www.alrafedain.net/index.php?show=news&action=article&id=103331
  23. http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2013-06-03/holder-laid-groundwork-%E2%80%9Ctoo-big-jail%E2%80%9D-1999 CLICK ON LINK TO SEE RELATED LINKS EMBEDDED IN ORIGINAL ARTICLE Holder Laid the Groundwork for “Too Big to Jail” In 1999 Submitted by George Washington on 06/03/2013 17:34 -0400 Everyone knows that Eric Holder – the head of the Department of Not-Much Justice – has said that the big banks are too big to jail. And many people know that – prior to becoming the Attorney General – Holder was a partner at a big firm which did some despicable things to represent the big banks and MERS. But Holder’s see-no-evil act actually started more than a decade ago. Specifically, in 1999, as Deputy Attorney General, Holder wrote a memo arguing against prosecuting large financial service companies: Prosecutors may consider the collateral consequences of a corporate criminal conviction in determining whether to charge the corporation with a criminal offense. *** One of the factors in determining whether to charge a natural person or a corporation is whether the likely punishment is appropriate given the nature and seriousness of the crime. In the corporate context, prosecutors may take into account the possibly substantial consequences to a corporation’s officers, directors, employees, and shareholders, many of whom may, depending on the size and nature (e.g., publicly vs. closely held) of the corporation and their role in its operations, have played no role in the criminal conduct, have been completely unaware of it, or have been wholly unable to prevent it. Further, prosecutors should also be aware of non-penal sanctions that may accompany a criminal charges, such as potential suspension or debarment from eligibility for government contracts or federal funded programs such as health care. Whether or not such non-penal sanctions are appropriate or required in a particular case is the responsibility of the relevant agency, a decision that will be made based on the applicable statutes, regulations, and policies. Virtually every conviction of a corporation, like virtually every conviction of an individual, will have an impact on innocent third parties …. Matt Taibbi points out that – when the Department of Justice subsequently prosecuted accounting giant Arthur Andersen for covering up Enron’s fraudulent schemes – Anderson ran with Holder’s argument, and threatened the DOJ “using their employees as human shields”. Specifically, Andersen said that – unless the DOJ dropped the prosecution – innocent Andersen employees would lose their jobs. Andersen was prosecuted and convicted, and some innocent employees – as well as the big time fraudsters – lost their jobs. Since then, the Justice Department has gotten so gun-shy that we basically haven’t had any criminal indictments against a large financial services company since then. In the wake of the recent revelations that the big banks manipulate virtually every market in the world, and that HSBC blatantly laundered drug cartel money, Holder has said that we can’t indict big companies because that might harm the U.S. or world economy. And Matt Taibbi notes that – for the first time - Holder is now saying that not only can’t we indict the companies, but we can’t even indict any of the individual criminals at the companies. In other words, Holder is implementing a permanent shield for employees and executives at large institutions. The Big Banks and Commodities Future Trading Commission Conspired to Hide Speculation from Congress One of our favorite topics is the many ways that big banks manipulate prices. Last night, Rolling Stone financial writer Matt Taibbi gave some very interesting details about how the big banks have gamed commodities prices. For 60 to 70 years, the regulations preventing speculators from betting on commodities worked pretty well. Only commodity producers or buyers – you know, the people who are supposed set prices – could hedge their bets. But in the early 1990s, the big financial companies starting applying to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) for “exemptions” … so that they could speculate on commodities. Specifically, they asked to be artificially treated as real commodity producers or consumers – even though they weren’t producing or buying commodities – so that they could “hedge” bets (in name only) on products they didn’t even possess. (Sound familiar?) In 1991, the CFTC issuing exemption letters. The first letter was written to J. Aron, a subsidiary of … Goldman Sachs. Pretty soon, every major bank in the U.S. was given an exemption. Congress didn’t know about the exemptions. Indeed, the House Agricultural Commission – which oversees the CFTC – didn’t even find out about the exemptions until 6 years later … in 1997. When a congressman on the Agricultural Commission asked the CFTC for a sample of one of the exemption letters, the CFTC official said he had to ask Goldman Sachs whether or not the CFTC could show a copy to Congress. In other words, the banks were already running D.C. by the 90s. Commodities speculation has exploded since the exemption letters were issues. For example, in 2003, there was only $29 billion in speculative activity in the commodities markets. By 2007-2008, there was over $300 billion in commodities speculation. Icelandic Parliament: Big Icelandic Banks Were Public Banks … Which Were Privatized FOR FREE Shortly Before They Tanked Birgitta Jonsdottir is a member of the Icelandic parliament. She knows a good deal about the financial crisis. Indeed, before being elected to parliament, she made a documentary about the collapse of Iceland’s economy as an investigative journalist. Last night, Jonsdottir (pronounced “yont-Daughter”) disclosed a stunning fact in a speech I attended: All our banks were actually public. They were privatized a few years prior to the financial crisis. Jonsdottir explained that Iceland’s banks grew to 5-7 times the size of the country’s GDP during the county’s brief bubble after privatization. And the Icelandic parliament – in a fact-finding report – later found that the bankers never paid anything to “buy” the banks from the government or the people. In other words, sweetheart deals and corruption meant that a handful of people looted the banks without paying a penny. America is analogous. The prosperity which our ancestors worked so hard to build – and the very vision of prosperity of the Founding Fathers – has been looted. Jonsdottir says that it wasn’t just the bankers who were corrupt … it was also the Icelandic politicians, media, academia … all of the people in a position of power. She points out that - as bad as things are in America - they were as bad in Iceland. And yet they took the bulls by the horn and turned things around
  24. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/everything-is-rigged-the-biggest-financial-scandal-yet-20130425 Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There's no price the big banks can't fix Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything. You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it "dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets." That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world's largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps. Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget. It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks – including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland – that serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive manipulation of one form or another (in addition to Libor, some were caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, detailed in Rolling Stone last year, to rig municipal-debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall Street culture. The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia Why? Because Libor already affects the prices of interest-rate swaps, making this a manipulation-on-manipulation situation. If the allegations prove to be right, that will mean that swap customers have been paying for two different layers of price-fixing corruption. If you can imagine paying 20 bucks for a crappy PB&J because some evil cabal of agribusiness companies colluded to fix the prices of both peanuts and peanut butter, you come close to grasping the lunacy of financial markets where both interest rates and interest-rate swaps are being manipulated at the same time, often by the same banks. "It's a double conspiracy," says an amazed Michael Greenberger, a former director of the trading and markets division at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and now a professor at the University of Maryland. "It's the height of criminality." The bad news didn't stop with swaps and interest rates. In March, it also came out that two regulators – the CFTC here in the U.S. and the Madrid-based International Organization of Securities Commissions – were spurred by the Libor revelations to investigate the possibility of collusive manipulation of gold and silver prices. "Given the clubby manipulation efforts we saw in Libor benchmarks, I assume other benchmarks – many other benchmarks – are legit areas of inquiry," CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton said. But the biggest shock came out of a federal courtroom at the end of March – though if you follow these matters closely, it may not have been so shocking at all – when a landmark class-action civil lawsuit against the banks for Libor-related offenses was dismissed. In that case, a federal judge accepted the banker-defendants' incredible argument: If cities and towns and other investors lost money because of Libor manipulation, that was their own fault for ever thinking the banks were competing in the first place. "A farce," was one antitrust lawyer's response to the eyebrow-raising dismissal. "Incredible," says Sylvia Sokol, an attorney for Constantine Cannon, a firm that specializes in antitrust cases. All of these stories collectively pointed to the same thing: These banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their financial holdings – in the United States, the top six banks, many of them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets equivalent to 60 percent of the nation's GDP – are beginning to realize the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that would come with colluding instead of competing. Moreover, it's increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system. If true, that would leave us living in an era of undisguised, real-world conspiracy, in which the prices of currencies, commodities like gold and silver, even interest rates and the value of money itself, can be and may already have been dictated from above. And those who are doing it can get away with it. Forget the Illuminati – this is the real thing, and it's no secret. You can stare right at it, anytime you want. The banks found a loophole, a basic flaw in the machine. Across the financial system, there are places where prices or official indices are set based upon unverified data sent in by private banks and financial companies. In other words, we gave the players with incentives to game the system institutional roles in the economic infrastructure. Libor, which measures the prices banks charge one another to borrow money, is a perfect example, not only of this basic flaw in the price-setting system but of the weakness in the regulatory framework supposedly policing it. Couple a voluntary reporting scheme with too-big-to-fail status and a revolving-door legal system, and what you get is unstoppable corruption. Every morning, 18 of the world's biggest banks submit data to an office in London about how much they believe they would have to pay to borrow from other banks. The 18 banks together are called the "Libor panel," and when all of these data from all 18 panelist banks are collected, the numbers are averaged out. What emerges, every morning at 11:30 London time, are the daily Libor figures. Banks submit numbers about borrowing in 10 different currencies across 15 different time periods, e.g., loans as short as one day and as long as one year. This mountain of bank-submitted data is used every day to create benchmark rates that affect the prices of everything from credit cards to mortgages to currencies to commercial loans (both short- and long-term) to swaps. Gangster Bankers Broke Every Law in the Book Dating back perhaps as far as the early Nineties, traders and others inside these banks were sometimes calling up the company geeks responsible for submitting the daily Libor numbers (the "Libor submitters") and asking them to fudge the numbers. Usually, the gimmick was the trader had made a bet on something – a swap, currencies, something – and he wanted the Libor submitter to make the numbers look lower (or, occasionally, higher) to help his bet pay off. Famously, one Barclays trader monkeyed with Libor submissions in exchange for a bottle of Bollinger champagne, but in some cases, it was even lamer than that. This is from an exchange between a trader and a Libor submitter at the Royal Bank of Scotland: SWISS FRANC TRADER: can u put 6m swiss libor in low pls?... PRIMARY SUBMITTER: Whats it worth SWSISS FRANC TRADER: ive got some sushi rolls from yesterday?... PRIMARY SUBMITTER: ok low 6m, just for u SWISS FRANC TRADER: wooooooohooooooo. . . thatd be awesome Screwing around with world interest rates that affect billions of people in exchange for day-old sushi – it's hard to imagine an image that better captures the moral insanity of the modern financial-services sector. Hundreds of similar exchanges were uncovered when regulators like Britain's Financial Services Authority and the U.S. Justice Department started burrowing into the befouled entrails of Libor. The documentary evidence of anti-competitive manipulation they found was so overwhelming that, to read it, one almost becomes embarrassed for the banks. "It's just amazing how Libor fixing can make you that much money," chirped one yen trader. "Pure manipulation going on," wrote another. Yet despite so many instances of at least attempted manipulation, the banks mostly skated. Barclays got off with a relatively minor fine in the $450 million range, UBS was stuck with $1.5 billion in penalties, and RBS was forced to give up $615 million. Apart from a few low-level flunkies overseas, no individual involved in this scam that impacted nearly everyone in the industrialized world was even threatened with criminal prosecution. Two of America's top law-enforcement officials, Attorney General Eric Holder and former Justice Department Criminal Division chief Lanny Breuer, confessed that it's dangerous to prosecute offending banks because they are simply too big. Making arrests, they say, might lead to "collateral consequences" in the economy. The relatively small sums of money extracted in these settlements did not go toward reparations for the cities, towns and other victims who lost money due to Libor manipulation. Instead, it flowed mindlessly into government coffers. So it was left to towns and cities like Baltimore (which lost money due to fluctuations in their municipal investments caused by Libor movements), pensions like the New Britain, Connecticut, Firefighters' and Police Benefit Fund, and other foundations – and even individuals (billionaire real-estate developer Sheldon Solow, who filed his own suit in February, claims that his company lost $450 million because of Libor manipulation) – to sue the banks for damages. One of the biggest Libor suits was proceeding on schedule when, early in March, an army of superstar lawyers working on behalf of the banks descended upon federal judge Naomi Buchwald in the Southern District of New York to argue an extraordinary motion to dismiss. The banks' legal dream team drew from heavyweight Beltway-connected firms like Boies Schiller (you remember David Boies represented Al Gore), Davis Polk (home of top ex-regulators like former SEC enforcement chief Linda Thomsen) and Covington & Burling, the onetime private-practice home of both Holder and Breuer. The presence of Covington & Burling in the suit – representing, of all companies, Citigroup, the former employer of current Treasury Secretary Jack Lew – was particularly galling. Right as the Libor case was being dismissed, the firm had hired none other than Lanny Breuer, the same Lanny Breuer who, just a few months before, was the assistant attorney general who had balked at criminally prosecuting UBS over Libor because, he said, "Our goal here is not to destroy a major financial institution." In any case, this all-star squad of white-shoe lawyers came before Buchwald and made the mother of all audacious arguments. Robert Wise of Davis Polk, representing Bank of America, told Buchwald that the banks could not possibly be guilty of anti- competitive collusion because nobody ever said that the creation of Libor was competitive. "It is essential to our argument that this is not a competitive process," he said. "The banks do not compete with one another in the submission of Libor." If you squint incredibly hard and look at the issue through a mirror, maybe while standing on your head, you can sort of see what Wise is saying. In a very theoretical, technical sense, the actual process by which banks submit Libor data – 18 geeks sending numbers to the British Bankers' Association offices in London once every morning – is not competitive per se. But these numbers are supposed to reflect interbank-loan prices derived in a real, competitive market. Saying the Libor submission process is not competitive is sort of like pointing out that bank robbers obeyed the speed limit on the way to the heist. It's the silliest kind of legal sophistry. But Wise eventually outdid even that argument, essentially saying that while the banks may have lied to or cheated their customers, they weren't guilty of the particular crime of antitrust collusion. This is like the old joke about the lawyer who gets up in court and claims his client had to be innocent, because his client was committing a crime in a different state at the time of the offense. "The plaintiffs, I believe, are confusing a claim of being perhaps deceived," he said, "with a claim for harm to competition." Judge Buchwald swallowed this lunatic argument whole and dismissed most of the case. Libor, she said, was a "cooperative endeavor" that was "never intended to be competitive." Her decision "does not reflect the reality of this business, where all of these banks were acting as competitors throughout the process," said the antitrust lawyer Sokol. Buchwald made this ruling despite the fact that both the U.S. and British governments had already settled with three banks for billions of dollars for improper manipulation, manipulation that these companies admitted to in their settlements. Michael Hausfeld of Hausfeld LLP, one of the lead lawyers for the plaintiffs in this Libor suit, declined to comment specifically on the dismissal. But he did talk about the significance of the Libor case and other manipulation cases now in the pipeline. "It's now evident that there is a ubiquitous culture among the banks to collude and cheat their customers as many times as they can in as many forms as they can conceive," he said. "And that's not just surmising. This is just based upon what they've been caught at." Greenberger says the lack of serious consequences for the Libor scandal has only made other kinds of manipulation more inevitable. "There's no therapy like sending those who are used to wearing Gucci shoes to jail," he says. "But when the attorney general says, 'I don't want to indict people,' it's the Wild West. There's no law." The problem is, a number of markets feature the same infrastructural weakness that failed in the Libor mess. In the case of interest-rate swaps and the ISDAfix benchmark, the system is very similar to Libor, although the investigation into these markets reportedly focuses on some different types of improprieties. Though interest-rate swaps are not widely understood outside the finance world, the root concept actually isn't that hard. If you can imagine taking out a variable-rate mortgage and then paying a bank to make your loan payments fixed, you've got the basic idea of an interest-rate swap. In practice, it might be a country like Greece or a regional government like Jefferson County, Alabama, that borrows money at a variable rate of interest, then later goes to a bank to "swap" that loan to a more predictable fixed rate. In its simplest form, the customer in a swap deal is usually paying a premium for the safety and security of fixed interest rates, while the firm selling the swap is usually betting that it knows more about future movements in interest rates than its customers. Prices for interest-rate swaps are often based on ISDAfix, which, like Libor, is yet another of these privately calculated benchmarks. ISDAfix's U.S. dollar rates are published every day, at 11:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m., after a gang of the same usual-suspect megabanks (Bank of America, RBS, Deutsche, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, etc.) submits information about bids and offers for swaps. And here's what we know so far: The CFTC has sent subpoenas to ICAP and to as many as 15 of those member banks, and plans to interview about a dozen ICAP employees from the company's office in Jersey City, New Jersey. Moreover, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, or ISDA, which works together with ICAP (for U.S. dollar transactions) and Thomson Reuters to compute the ISDAfix benchmark, has hired the consulting firm Oliver Wyman to review the process by which ISDAfix is calculated. Oliver Wyman is the same company that the British Bankers' Association hired to review the Libor submission process after that scandal broke last year. The upshot of all of this is that it looks very much like ISDAfix could be Libor all over again. "It's obviously reminiscent of the Libor manipulation issue," Darrell Duffie, a finance professor at Stanford University, told reporters. "People may have been naive that simply reporting these rates was enough to avoid manipulation." And just like in Libor, the potential losers in an interest-rate-swap manipulation scandal would be the same sad-sack collection of cities, towns, companies and other nonbank entities that have no way of knowing if they're paying the real price for swaps or a price being manipulated by bank insiders for profit. Moreover, ISDAfix is not only used to calculate prices for interest-rate swaps, it's also used to set values for about $550 billion worth of bonds tied to commercial real estate, and also affects the payouts on some state-pension annuities. So although it's not quite as widespread as Libor, ISDAfix is sufficiently power-jammed into the world financial infrastructure that any manipulation of the rate would be catastrophic – and a huge class of victims that could include everyone from state pensioners to big cities to wealthy investors in structured notes would have no idea they were being robbed. "How is some municipality in Cleveland or wherever going to know if it's getting ripped off?" asks Michael Masters of Masters Capital Management, a fund manager who has long been an advocate of greater transparency in the derivatives world. "The answer is, they won't know." Worse still, the CFTC investigation apparently isn't limited to possible manipulation of swap prices by monkeying around with ISDAfix. According to reports, the commission is also looking at whether or not employees at ICAP may have intentionally delayed publication of swap prices, which in theory could give someone (bankers, cough, cough) a chance to trade ahead of the information. Swap prices are published when ICAP employees manually enter the data on a computer screen called "19901." Some 6,000 customers subscribe to a service that allows them to access the data appearing on the 19901 screen. The key here is that unlike a more transparent, regulated market like the New York Stock Exchange, where the results of stock trades are computed more or less instantly and everyone in theory can immediately see the impact of trading on the prices of stocks, in the swap market the whole world is dependent upon a handful of brokers quickly and honestly entering data about trades by hand into a computer terminal. Any delay in entering price data would provide the banks involved in the transactions with a rare opportunity to trade ahead of the information. One way to imagine it would be to picture a racetrack where a giant curtain is pulled over the track as the horses come down the stretch – and the gallery is only told two minutes later which horse actually won. Anyone on the right side of the curtain could make a lot of smart bets before the audience saw the results of the race. At ICAP, the interest-rate swap desk, and the 19901 screen, were reportedly controlled by a small group of 20 or so brokers, some of whom were making millions of dollars. These brokers made so much money for themselves the unit was nicknamed "Treasure Island." Already, there are some reports that brokers of Treasure Island did create such intentional delays. Bloomberg interviewed a former broker who claims that he watched ICAP brokers delay the reporting of swap prices. "That allows dealers to tell the brokers to delay putting trades into the system instead of in real time," Bloomberg wrote, noting the former broker had "witnessed such activity firsthand." An ICAP spokesman has no comment on the story, though the company has released a statement saying that it is "cooperating" with the CFTC's inquiry and that it "maintains policies that prohibit" the improper behavior alleged in news reports. The idea that prices in a $379 trillion market could be dependent on a desk of about 20 guys in New Jersey should tell you a lot about the absurdity of our financial infrastructure. The whole thing, in fact, has a darkly comic element to it. "It's almost hilarious in the irony," says David Frenk, director of research for Better Markets, a financial-reform advocacy group, "that they called it ISDAfix." After scandals involving libor and, perhaps, ISDAfix, the question that should have everyone freaked out is this: What other markets out there carry the same potential for manipulation? The answer to that question is far from reassuring, because the potential is almost everywhere. From gold to gas to swaps to interest rates, prices all over the world are dependent upon little private cabals of cigar-chomping insiders we're forced to trust. "In all the over-the-counter markets, you don't really have pricing except by a bunch of guys getting together," Masters notes glumly. That includes the markets for gold (where prices are set by five banks in a Libor-ish teleconferencing process that, ironically, was created in part by N M Rothschild & Sons) and silver (whose price is set by just three banks), as well as benchmark rates in numerous other commodities – jet fuel, diesel, electric power, coal, you name it. The problem in each of these markets is the same: We all have to rely upon the honesty of companies like Barclays (already caught and fined $453 million for rigging Libor) or JPMorgan Chase (paid a $228 million settlement for rigging municipal-bond auctions) or UBS (fined a collective $1.66 billion for both muni-bond rigging and Libor manipulation) to faithfully report the real prices of things like interest rates, swaps, currencies and commodities. All of these benchmarks based on voluntary reporting are now being looked at by regulators around the world, and God knows what they'll find. The European Federation of Financial Services Users wrote in an official EU survey last summer that all of these systems are ripe targets for manipulation. "In general," it wrote, "those markets which are based on non-attested, voluntary submission of data from agents whose benefits depend on such benchmarks are especially vulnerable of market abuse and distortion." Translation: When prices are set by companies that can profit by manipulating them, we're fucked. "You name it," says Frenk. "Any of these benchmarks is a possibility for corruption." The only reason this problem has not received the attention it deserves is because the scale of it is so enormous that ordinary people simply cannot see it. It's not just stealing by reaching a hand into your pocket and taking out money, but stealing in which banks can hit a few keystrokes and magically make whatever's in your pocket worth less. This is corruption at the molecular level of the economy, Space Age stealing – and it's only just coming into view.
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