DOC: UN’s Big Five Facilitate Arms Transfers to Rights Violators

UNITED NATIONS, Jul 19 (IPS) - The five permanent members of the Security Council - the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China - are accused of facilitating the transport of conventional weapons and cluster munitions to countries where they could be used to commit human rights violations and war crimes.

The pointed accusations come from the London-based Amnesty International (AI) which singles out recent arms shipments by transport companies and airlines registered in the five nations.

These weapons shipments "pose a substantial risk of being used to facilitate serious violations of international human rights…" says a new AI report released Monday.

Brian Wood, AI’s arms control manager, says "lax controls on arms shippers and flyers who increasingly move conventional arms around the world are not confined to jurisdictions with weak arms export and import laws".

He said to save lives and protect human rights, the Arms Trade Treaty, currently under negotiation at the United Nations, must address the role of transporters and other intermediaries in the arms supply chains - not just specify what states’ export and import licensing procedures should be.

Dr. Natalie J. Goldring, a senior fellow with the Center for Peace and Security Studies in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, told IPS although U.S. President Barack Obama has begun to reverse the damage from policies on arms transfers by the administration of former President George W. Bush, "much more needs to be done".

The U.S. government claims to have stronger standards for arms transfers than other countries, she said. But, she explained, "While this may be true on paper, in reality, the United States regularly transfers weapons to countries that its own State Department lists as violating human rights standards."

Goldring said the new Amnesty report highlights the need to set global standards for arms transfers.

"Many participants in the ongoing preparatory committee meetings on an arms trade treaty have paid lip service to this idea," Goldring said referring to the current negotiations on a new international treaty to curb the flow of illicit small arms.

The talks, which began last Jul. 12, are expected to conclude Jul. 23.

The preparatory committee will have three meetings during 2011 and 2012, followed by a major conference scheduled for 2012, which will negotiate the final treaty.

"But the real test will be whether the draft treaty sets consistent, high standards that respect international human rights and humanitarian law," said Goldring.

The world’s major arms suppliers have been consistently accused of providing weapons to countries with non-democratic governments or politically repressive regimes accused of human rights violations.

These include Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Indonesia, Kuwait, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda and Yemen.

Some of examples highlighted in the AI study include deliveries of cluster munitions and their components on ships registered in the UK, and managed by UK and German shipping companies. The weapons were transported from South Korea to Pakistan between Mar. 2008 and Feb. 2010 for use by the country’s army.

"These deliveries took place despite the UK and Germany having committed to comprehensively ban the transfer and use of cluster munitions," says the report titled ‘Deadly Movements: Arms Transportation Controls in the Arms Trade Treaty.’

The AI report also cites the example of machine gun/anti-aircraft gun parts from Bulgaria flown on a regular Air France passenger flight from Sofia to Charles de Gaulle airport, Paris, in Sep. 2008. The shipment was then flown to Nairobi with the final destination listed in the transport documents as Kigali, Rwanda.

There was a clear and substantial risk that machine gun/anti-aircraft gun parts procured by the Rwandan government might be diverted.

Such weapons were used in the fighting taking place in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where more than 220,000 people had been displaced and serious violations of human rights were perpetrated, AI said. The Bulgarian, French and Kenyan governments - which permitted the export and transit of the arms shipment through their territories - failed to stop the transfer, the report said.

Goldring told IPS that U.S. representatives continue to claim that it is important to reach decisions on the proposed Arms Trade Treaty through consensus.

"In theory, this sounds like a nice idea, but countries need to agree in order to move forward. In reality, this means that any one country can halt progress, even when all of the other participants are in agreement," she noted.

Its also unfortunate, she pointed out, that the countries participating in the current Arms Trade Treaty negotiations have chosen to conduct much of their work behind closed doors.

Representatives of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have been blocked from the most recent sessions of the preparatory committee, and are scheduled to be excluded from many of the meetings this week as well.

"Excluding the non-governmental organisations means that much of the expertise on these issues is outside the room, rather than inside," she said.

"To be credible, these negotiations must be conducted in an open and transparent manner," Goldring declared.

The chair negotiating the treaty, Ambassador Roberto Garcia Moritan of Argentina, announced last Wednesday that civil society groups would no longer be allowed to be present during crucial discussions.

In a statement released last week the Campaigners of the Control Arms Alliance voiced their protest against NGOs being shut out.

The decision to close the meeting came as a surprise as numerous member states had made earlier statements on the importance of openness and transparency in the process.

Denis Mizne, Director at Sou da Paz in Brazil said that some states want to hide behind closed doors because they don’t want people to see how much they are prepared to protect trading interests at the expense of protecting the people that bear the brunt of illicit arms deals.

"This was a major let down during the first week of negotiations," he added.

(END/2010)



By Thalif Deen

http://ipsnews.net/newsTVE.asp?idnews=52204

DOC: No Sign of Financial Regulation

BERLIN, Jul 20 (IPS) - More than three years after the start of the financial crisis that brought the world economy to the brink of collapse, the governments of industrialised countries are still struggling to reach a consensus on the minimum regulation required for the operations of international banks and hedge funds.

This was confirmed just ahead of the meeting of the Group of Twenty (G-20) in Toronto last month, a summit of the world's largest economies, including several developing countries, like India, Brazil and Indonesia, and the European Union (EU).

Even though the EU agreed to propose at the summit the introduction of a tax on international financial transactions, also called Tobin tax, this scheme was not approved at the meeting. Canadian minister of finance Jim Flaherty told the press ahead of the meeting: "I can assure you that the majority of the G- 20 is opposed to this tax."

The German finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble, also excluded the possibility of Germany alone raising the tax. At a press conference in Berlin late last month, he contended that the EU collectively must raise the tax.

The German government is the main supporter of the Tobin tax in Europe. Most European countries except Britain support a tax on financial transactions. Britain opposes it vehemently, arguing that the tax would raise costs of financial operations, compelling operators to operators to move their base of operation elsewhere.

The tax, as originally suggested by Nobel laureate economist James Tobin in 1972, was intended to put a penalty on short-term financial round-trip speculative transactions in foreign currencies. In its most modern version, a very small levy on all international financial transactions is supposed to persuade investment and hedge funds to reduce their speculative operations, which are blamed for the global financial crisis.

The lack of unity among the industrialised countries on the Tobin tax is exemplary for all other areas of international financial transactions. Stern regulations, experts say, are necessary to introduce transparency in the operations of investment banks and funds. But despite this, no regulations have been put into practice.

For instance, at the G-20 summit of Pittsburgh a year ago, industrialised nations promised to "make sure our regulatory system for banks and other financial firms reins in the excesses that led to the crisis. Where reckless behaviour and a lack of responsibility led to crisis, we will not allow a return to banking as usual."

The G-20 leaders also promised then "to implement strong international compensation standards aimed at ending practices that lead to excessive risk-taking, to improve the over-the-counter derivatives market and to create more powerful tools to hold large global firms to account for the risks they take."

But industrialised countries did not live up to these promises.

Investment banks in all the industrialised countries are again paying high dividends and extremely high bonus to their shareholders and brokers, and independent investigations have shown that several international investment banks and funds are using illegal schemes in their operations. The most common of them is front running, an illegal stock exchange scheme, in which a stock broker operator executes orders on a security for its own account by taking advantage of advance knowledge of pending orders from its own customers.

Goldman Sachs, the world's leading investment fund, has repeatedly faced accusations of practicing front running and charges of deceiving its customers. Just last week, it agreed to pay a penalty worth 550 million dollars to avoid prosecution by the U.S. financial authorities. Last May, Deutsche Bank's president Joseph Ackermann announced an equity return before taxes of 25 percent for the company for 2010. Such a return is unthinkable, analysts say, unless the bank engages in highly speculative transactions which involve major risks.

With the help of modern computer software, analysts say, investment banks and funds are able to carry out such front running transactions within fractions of a second, thus duping their own customers.

In addition, there is a broad consensus among leading economists on the need to introduce five general operational rules into the financial markets.

The first two rules concern the operations of banks. "Banks must operate only as saving banks," Gerhard Leithaeuser, professor of international finance at the university of Bremen, near Berlin, told IPS. "Or they must otherwise increase the own capital in such a way that they can pay for their own bailout in case of a collapse of their risky investments."

A similar rule, he says, must be introduced for investment banks.

"It (is unacceptable to use) taxpayers' money again to rescue investment banks and funds from their own folly," Leithaeuser said. Such bailout leads to reckless investment behaviour of financial operators, who take it for granted that governments will bail them out in case of financial collapse.

A third rule should be the state approval of all financial products to reduce the scope of operations of investment banks and funds in order to forbid the most risky derivates, such as credit default swaps and short selling. Conversely, new regulations should only allow those financial products which correspond to transactions with real goods, experts say.

The fourth rule focuses on controlling the operations of hedge funds and tax havens, Sven Giegold, German member of the European Parliament, told IPS.

"State control upon hedge funds should go as far as to create an operating licence for them, based upon a strict leverage cap to reduce their ability to operate with borrowed money, tough limits to incentives for their brokers, and absolute transparency in the funds' operations," said Giegold, who is also the funding member of the ATTAC group in Germany.

ATTAC has been promoting the introduction of a Tobin tax for speculative financial transactions since the late 1990s.

The fifth rule, analysts say, should aim at regulating the private rating financial agencies, also considered responsible for the financial crisis as a result of their wrong positive assessment of junk bonds and credits throughout the last decade. (END/2010)

Analysis by Julio Godoy
http://ipsnews.net/newsTVE.asp?idnews=52210

The Hidden Hand of the Control System...

Dictators and Empires throughout all of history have strived for one single thing… control and power. How do the Elite control the masses of people today?

Fear - Make them think that the world is a very dangerous place, and they need the protection of someone more powerful than they are to step in and save them or protect them. Show them the power of your weapons, images of death, animals attacking, tell them stories about murderers and rapists, make them never want to leave their home. Give them imaginary enemies which can never be conquered, such as "the war on terror", "the economy", or "global warming", to keep them in perpetual fear of the boogeyman.

Separatism – Divide them up in every way possible. Make them want to divide themselves. Have competitions, sports, winners and losers, beautiful and ugly, smart and dumb, Christian and Muslim, light and dark, rich and poor. Make them see the differences in others before seeing the similarities. That way they will never organize and attempt to overthrow you. (Or realize their true potential and power) This also gives them other forms of distraction…

Distraction – Eat their minds up, make sure they don’t have an ounce of free time to even begin to think outside the box. Give them video games, gambling, television shows, sports, drugs, fashion, politics, sex, and money. Make them continuously want to strive to get more and be more, always working towards some goal. Brainwash their minds with images of rich homes, skinny models, and fancy toys. Keep them busy busy busy with chores, work and soccer practice, and make them think that this is the way life is supposed to be.

Dumb Them Down – Limit their access to knowledge. Make them think being smart is un-cool. Control all of their primary sources of information including the news, the education system, major news publications, major magazines, and the major radio stations. Put the "important" books in the back of the bookstore. Label the important knowledge as "evil" or "rubbish" or "crazy talk". Put chemicals like fluoride in the water which affects their brain function. Medicate their children to reduce their creative spark. Feed them lies, and lies about the lies, to keep them running in circles.

Dependence – Make sure they need you for food, energy, protection and medicine. Withhold any technology or medicine that would eliminate their dependence on you.

Rights and Freedoms - Label any type of though or action that goes against the established system as "terrorism". Any person expressing their unique ideas, or peacefully protesting the sytem should be labeled a "terrorist". Any time a group tries to exercise their right to peacefully protest, hire anarchists and thugs to initiate violence, in order to justify police brutality and dispersement of the mob. Slowly begin eroding their rights, through illegal checkpoints, surveillance, and searches, all in the name of "homeland security".

And just think, they pay for all of this with your own tax money.

Exclusive: A Supreme Study of the Woes of the Gospel

All major modern Jewish movements consider themselves descendants of Pharasaic Judaism; as such, Jews are especially sensitive to criticisms of "Pharisees" as a group. The Woes of the Pharisees is a list of criticisms by Jesus against Scribes and Pharisees and Lawyers that i...s present in the Gospel of Luke 11:37-54 and Gospel of Matthew 23:1-36. Seven are listed in Matthew, and hence Matthew's version is known as the seven woes, while only six are given in Luke, whose version is thus known as the six woes.

The woes themselves are all woes of hypocrisy:

Hypocrisy: They taught about God but did not love God - they did not enter the kingdom of heaven themselves, nor did they let others enter. (Mat. 23:13-14)

Hypocrisy: They preached God but converted people to dead religion, thus making those converts twice as much 'sons of hell' as they themselves were. (Mat. 23:15)

Hypocrisy: They taught that an oath sworn by the temple or altar was not binding, but that if sworn by the gold ornamentation of the temple, or by a sacrificial gift on the altar, it was binding. The gold and gifts, however, were not sacred in themselves as the temple and altar were, but derived a measure of lesser sacredness by being connected to the temple or altar. The teachers and Pharisees worshipped at the temple and offered sacrifices at the altar because they knew that the temple and altar were sacred. How then could they deny oath-binding value to what was truly sacred and accord it to objects of trivial and derived sacredness? (Mat. 23:16-22)

Hypocrisy: They taught the law but did not practise some of the most important parts of the law - justice, mercy, faithfulness to God. They obeyed the minutiae of the law such as titheing spices but not the real meat of the law. (Mat. 23:23-24)

Hypocrisy: They presented an appearance of being 'clean' (self-restrained, not involved in carnal matters), yet they were dirty inside: they seethed with hidden worldly desires, carnality. They were full of greed and self-indulgence. (Mat. 23:25-26)

Hypocrisy - They exhibited themselves as righteous on account of being scrupulous keepers of the law, but were in fact not righteous: their mask of righteousness hid a secret inner world of ungodly thoughts and feelings. They were full of wickedness. They were like whitewashed tombs, beautiful on the outside, but full of dead men's bones. (Mat. 23:27-28)

Hypocrisy: They professed a high regard for the dead prophets of old, and claimed that they would never have persecuted and murdered prophets, when in fact they were cut from the same cloth as the persecutors and murderers: they too had murderous blood in their veins. (Mat. 23:29-36)

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