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Kenya, Tanzania to Fast-Track Dar es Salaam-Mombasa Gas Pipeline in Bid to Cut Fuel Costs

By Fantine Gardinier – Samizdat – 10.10.2022

During a visit to the Tanzanian port city of Dar es Salaam on Monday, Kenyan President William Ruto and Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu agreed to fast-track construction of a new gas pipeline connecting the city to Mombasa, Kenya’s main port.

“We will now expedite the gas pipeline from Dar es Salaam to Mombasa and eventually to Nairobi so that we can use the resources that we have in our region to lower energy tariffs, both for industry, commercial and domestic purposes,” Ruto said, according to Kenyan online news portal Tuko.

“In the shortest time possible, we can access the gas resources that you have in your country to drive industrialization in our country. I am confident that as the ministers get down to work, they will provide a brief to you and me to fast-track the project,” he told Suluhu.

She and Ruto’s predecessor, Uhuru Kenyatta, signed a memorandum of understanding on the long-awaited pipeline last year, which would extend 373 miles and cost $1.1 billion.

Just days after Ruto took office last month, he was forced to slash fuel subsidies, thanks to an International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout that included such neoliberal stipulations in its contract. By mid-October, the prices of several types of fuel are expected to increase sharply in Kenya, putting a dent in Ruto’s plans to improve the country’s economic life for millions of Kenyans.

Ruto’s visit, his fourth foreign trip since taking office but his first focused on bilateral deals, is aimed at further bolstering Kenya’s burgeoning trade with Tanzania, its southern neighbor and fellow former British colony.

“We want to double trade, which is doable,” he said. Kenya-Tanzania bilateral trade amounted to nearly $1 billion last year, according to The East African. Years ago, their rivalry led to mountains of trade barriers being imposed, but both countries have labored in recent years to slash them as competition has turned toward cooperation.

“In total, our experts identified 68 barriers which were reviewed and 54 non-tariff barriers were removed and now we want our cabinet secretaries to deal with the remaining 14 so as to ensure there is freewill to trade,” Suluhu said on Monday.

Last month, Suluhu also penned a deal with Mozambican President Felipe Nyusi to expand trade ties as well as defense cooperation, with both nations desiring to quell a cross-border insurgency and re-establish and expand trade.

Last year, Uganda, Tanzania, French-owned oil giant Total, and China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) signed a series of deals to build a massive 900-mile-long gas pipeline from western Uganda’s oil fields to the Tanzanian port of Tanga. The East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) will pass along the southern edge of Lake Victoria, circumventing Kenya before crossing northern Tanzania. It is expected to begin pumping oil in 2025 and cost $10 billion.

In March, Tanzania also announced a massive new liquefied natural gas (LNG) project expected to draw $10 billion in investment. Rising energy costs thanks to a global inflation problem and Western sanctions on Russia, the world’s largest energy exporter, have created problems for nations like Kenya, that import much of their energy, but opportunities for nations like Tanzania, which export it or have untapped reserves.

October 10, 2022 Posted by | Economics | , , , , | Leave a comment

Dominique Strauss-Kahn Revisited

BY LARRY ROMANOFF • UNZ REVIEW  • SEPTEMBER 2, 2022

Introduction

Dominique Strauss-Khan (DSK) was a former minister in various French governments and most latterly the Managing Director of the IMF. In 2011 he was involved in a sexual scandal in New York, eventually exonerated but ruined nonetheless. This story is of vital importance in understanding and making sense of our current geopolitical circumstances, important not because the event happened but because it was possible for such an event to happen, and that there are people with the power to make it happen.

The conspiracy theorists should have had a field day with this one, and all indications are that they would have been correct. The general rule is that if a story doesn’t make sense, it’s usually not true. As with most fabricated stories, this one has many gaps that cannot easily be plugged, and serious questions that were either not addressed or were riddled with implausible explanations.

This episode began on May 14, 2011, at the Sofitel Hotel in NYC. Around noon, a hotel maid, Nafissatou Diallo, a ~35-year-old immigrant from Guinea, entered DSK’s room to clean it. Initial reports were that the man emerged naked from the bathroom and sexually assaulted the maid who eventually broke free and notified the authorities. In the meantime, DSK checked out of the hotel and left for the airport to take a flight to Germany. The NYC police took him off the plane, arrested and charged him with seven criminal acts that included four felony charges of attempted rape and sexual abuse, plus misdemeanor offences including unlawful imprisonment.[1] DSK was denied bail on the grounds of being a flight risk, and was incarcerated at Rikers Island. The following day, he was offered bail on condition that he resign his position as Managing Director of the IMF; he agreed a day later and was released into house arrest pending a hearing.

On 19 May, DSK was indicted by a grand jury on all seven charges, and ordered to stand trial. He was required to post a $1 million cash bail, wear an electronic monitoring device, surrender all his passports, and hire armed guards to ensure he didn’t violate his house arrest. He was also required to post a $5 million bond.[2]

The prosecution’s case began to fall apart almost immediately, progressively disintegrated over the following six weeks, and by July 1 prosecutors told the judge that they had “reassessed the strength of their case in the light of the housekeeper’s diminished credibility”, and sent a letter to DSK’s lawyers admitting serious inconsistencies in the maid’s tale.[3] [4] Also on July 1, DSK was freed from house arrest and had his bail dropped because the circumstances of the case had “changed substantially”.[5]

However, further hearings were still necessary to determine the extent of the charges to be prosecuted, with the next hearing date set for July 18, an important date as we will see. These hearings lingered until August 23 when all charges against DSK were finally dropped and he was free to return home to France.[6][7] [8]

However, the man’s problems weren’t over. Almost immediately upon his return to France, a young woman named Tristine Bannon attempted to file charges against DSK for an “attempted rape” that had occurred some 9 years earlier. In October, after much media publicity, the French prosecutors dropped the investigation from a lack of evidence.[9][10]

But a few months later, in March 2012, French prosecutors announced another investigation on DSK about his “possible connection” to a gang rape that supposedly occurred in Washington, D.C. At about the same time, authorities began yet another investigation in France, this time with allegations about his supposed involvement in hiring prostitutes for sex parties at hotels in Lille, Paris and Washington.[11] [12]

By October of 2012, prosecutors announced that they were discontinuing the investigation of the gang rape allegations,[12] but troubles remained. Amid a continuing media frenzy, in July of 2013 French prosecutors announced that DSK was to stand trial on allegations of “aggravated pimping” at the Carlton hotel in Lille.[13]

The accusations were that orgies had been held at this hotel and DSK had been instrumental in hiring prostitutes for the events. This court case dragged on for two years, the French media providing weekly details with very specific references to DSK and his conduct, some claiming “he had sex with every girl in the room”.[14] DSK was acquitted of all these charges in June of 2015.[15]

Still more. While the French media were hyperventilating over the juicy details of DSK’s real or imagined sexual exploits, Able Ferrara produced a feature film titled “Welcome to New York“, starring Gérard Depardieu as DSK and Jacqueline Bisset as his wife Anne Sinclair.[16] The film was built around the story in the Sofitel hotel and apparently “portrayed both characters in an unforgiving light”. Ms. Sinclair, who is by all accounts a thoroughly lovely person, said the film was “disgusting”, and DSK sued the film’s producers for libel. Then still more. In 2020, there was a Netflix “documentary” titled “Room 2806: The Accusation“, based on the Sofitel event and the other alleged accusations against DSK.[17]

By this time, after months of unfavorable exposure in the US and nearly four years of the same in France, it could be truly said that Strauss-Khan’s political, public, and social careers were at an end. After years of publicity, investigations and trials, DSK had been acquitted on all charges in all countries. It appears there never was sufficient evidence to support any of the allegations made against him, but the man would never again hold any international positions and was by this time much too toxic to ever re-enter French politics. DSK has since remarried and is doing “financial consulting” and giving speeches. The end. Well, almost the end.

The Handmaid’s Tale – a Futuristic Dystopian Novel (with due apologies to Margaret Atwood)

According to her claims to the police and her testimony at the Grand Jury hearing, and according to the New York Times, the New York Post, the New York Daily News, the Wall Street Journal and many others:

The maid inserted her card-key, opened the door, and called aloud several times to learn if the room were occupied. Receiving no response, she entered and began her tasks. Then, “the married Strauss-Kahn” emerged naked from the bathroom, chased the maid around his suite, “locked the door” so she couldn’t escape, then dragged her into a bathroom and “engaged in a criminal sexual act”. There was much confusion as to whether the criminal sexual act was anal, oral, or none of the above. However, while chasing and dragging her around the suite, DSK was apparently yelling “Don’t you know who I am? Don’t you know who I am?” When the maid begged the man to desist on grounds she could lose her job, DSK comforted her by saying “Oh, baby, don’t worry baby. You won’t lose your job”. There was also confusion as to injuries incurred by both parties, the maid apparently suffering “a torn shoulder ligament” in her struggles, while DSK was reported to have suffered severe bruises on his back when the maid forcefully shoved him into some furniture.

The maid then fled the man’s suite and cowered in fear in a hallway until a maintenance supervisor discovered her, after which they notified hotel security who performed an investigation, confirmed the torn pantyhose, discovered DSK’s DNA and semen on the walls and carpet, and eventually notified the police. In the meantime, DSK had dressed, packed his things, checked out of the hotel, and took a taxi to the airport in an attempt to flee the country.

But justice never sleeps. It seems that in his haste to flee the country DSK left behind one of his mobile phones. Taking a great risk, being as guilty as he was, he nevertheless called the hotel to ask if the phone had been left in his room; after some discussion, the hotel staff called him to say they had indeed found his phone and would deliver it to the airport. The NYPD then escorted DSK off the plane as the doors were closing for departure, and arrested him. You know the rest, except that none of “the rest” was as it appeared to be.

Some Chinks in the Armor

Ancillary Hotel Services, Turn-Downs Included

At the outset of this event, before all the wagons had been properly circled, the hotel security staff and the NYPD independently confirmed to DSK’s lawyers that the woman was known to act as a prostitute in the hotel, offering special services and “turn-downs”. That much appears certain, but when the claims became public too quickly, everyone rushed to deny them and a hotel representative said, “We have no knowledge about that”.

The Crime Scene: DNA “linked to Maid”

The first rule of criminal investigations is that you don’t contaminate the crime scene. Yet the maid returned to clean the room, no doubt doing so immaculately as is the standard with Accor Hotels everywhere. And she wasn’t the only one. Syed Haque, a room service employee, came to pick up the breakfast dishes which had already been collected several hours prior. Renata Markozani, the head of housekeeping, entered the room to examine the situation, and also Brian Yearwood, the hotel’s chief engineer, with no explanation as to his purpose. Then the hotel security staff who, with little or no training in criminal investigations, went to the room to perform such. Between all of these, any evidence actually existing would have been either contaminated, destroyed – or planted.

It should be noted that anyone with access to a hotel guest’s clothing, toiletry, bedding, linen or laundry, has access to everything necessary to spread that guest’s DNA (possibly including sperm and other body secretions) on any surface or clothing anywhere. In this context, it is not irrelevant that DSK apparently had a woman spend the night with him in that room. The simple fact is that nothing found in that room later by police investigators could possibly have qualified as “evidence” of the crime in question.

The mass media flooded the nation with news that DSK’s DNA had been found (almost) everywhere, linking it to ‘the maid’ without noting the method of linkage.[18][19][20]

The New York Times was there first, citing “a person briefed in the matter“, stating DSK’s DNA and semen were found on the maid, on her clothing, on the walls, on the carpet, and perhaps on the ceiling. After this information had been duly digested by the public, the police and prosecutors stated that no such evidence had actually been obtained or released. “A prominent US defense lawyer claimed that there was substantial doubt . . . [about] the so-called DNA evidence and the match . . . since accurate DNA testing normally takes several weeks.” However, the DNA linked to the maid was headline material, the denials not so much The Wall Street Journal reported that DSK’s DNA sample and semen were found on the woman’s shirt, quoting “sources close to the investigation” and citing “law enforcement officials” who immediately stated they had never said any such thing.[21]

In fact, there was never actual confirmation of any of this, and the investigators claimed to have found no traces of semen in the sink where the maid claimed it had been spit. The NYPD and the prosecutors simply let media speculation run wild and did nothing to combat it. All of the claims were based on leaked rumors.

Hotel security officers “conducted an investigation” and claimed to have found semen on the floor and wall. They then called the police, setting off the chain of events that led to the arrest at the airport. We are to believe that the mall-cop wannabes comprising hotel security were competent to perform a criminal investigation, and equipped and able to perform lab tests.

The Perpetrator Flees, Leaving Behind ‘Valuable Items”

The US media, led by the NYT, led us to believe that DSK attacked this woman, then fled to the airport in a panic, evidenced by his leaving behind a mobile phone and “other valuables”, the authorities apprehending him during the last seconds before his “fleeing the country”. But DSK didn’t flee; on the contrary, we have a witness account from a woman who used the elevator with him who said that she found him pleasantly calm. He waited patiently in line and checked out without anybody noticing anything wrong, took a cab to a restaurant where he had lunch with his daughter and then went to the airport to take a flight with a ticket that had been purchased days earlier. DSK was leaving the US for Germany where he had an arranged appointment with Angela Merkel. And, for the record, nothing was “left behind” including “other valuables”. What did happen was that one of his mobile phones was lifted from his room.

The NYT led us to believe DSK was arrested on, and then removed from, the airplane, just as the doors were closing for departure. But that description was a bald lie. The truth was that the hotel, on instruction, called DSK to tell them they had found his missing phone. Apparently, it was the police who then called to tell him that his phone was at the gate desk, and asked him to exit from the plane to retrieve it. When he deplaned, he was arrested. Leaving the Air France plane to recover the phone was a strong indication of a lack of guilt since while on the aircraft he was technically on French sovereign territory and could not have been taken into custody. If he were concerned, he could have asked a stewardess to get his mobile phone for him or the detectives to deliver it to the steward. All of his behavior suggests the acts of an innocent man.

The NYT seemed eager to leave the impression that DSK left the hotel in a panic, overcome with fear and anxiety, and was in a headlong rush to flee the country. We have this almost certainly fictitious account: “A guest at the hotel, . . .  said the livery driver who drove Mr. Strauss-Kahn to Kennedy Airport was also his driver on Saturday night. “He said Strauss-Kahn was in a huge hurry, . . . He wanted to leave as soon as possible. He looked upset and stressed.”[22] The BBC claimed this “was not the first time Mr. Strauss-Kahn had been involved in such an incident” (even though it was the first time), and further that “he had been arrested attempting to flee the country”, which of course was not true.[23]

The Mysterious Telephone Call

“Investigators with the Manhattan district attorney’s office learned that the woman made a recorded call to a prison inmate on May 15, the day after DSK’s arrest, with words to the effect of, “Don’t worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I’m doing”.[24] This would seem to confirm claims by DSK’s lawyers that the encounter (if indeed there had been an encounter) was consensual and that the woman was attempting extortion. The woman later claimed her words had been “mistranslated”. In a 3-hour interview with Newsweek, the woman said she hopes God punishes him. “We are poor, but we are good,” she said. “I don’t think about money.”[25] Diallo’s lawyer said she mentioned Strauss-Kahn’s money in the telephone call only to say that her alleged attacker was influential.[26]

More interesting was that the authorities required a full 6 weeks to translate the conversation because, according to them, it was in a “unique dialect of Fulani,” a language from the woman’s native country, Guinea. But there are no ‘unique dialects’ of the language, Fulani being one of the three major West African languages and extremely common, with the NYC area having more than 100,000 Fulani speakers. Moreover, the courts knew this, the police knew it, and local interpreting agencies claimed they had many occasions to provide Fulani interpreters, often on a daily basis. The New York Times was one of the principal promoters of this falsehood (and of many more). It is obvious the authorities lied about needing 6 weeks to arrange the translation, and it is just as obvious that they withheld the information until DSK was out of the running for the French Presidential Primaries.

The Money and the Phones

One of the threads running through the media presentations was that the prosecutors discovered flaws in the woman’s testimony and evidence of criminal activity, immediately notifying DSK’s lawyers. The NYT particularly pushed this narrative, stating “Still, it was the prosecutor’s investigators who found the information about the woman.”[27] Their claim appeared to have been almost entirely untrue. DSK’s legal team hired a private investigation company, Guidepost Solutions, which uncovered the claimant’s criminal background and reported that to the DA’s office, and which eventually exonerated DSK. Such investigations are rarely if ever done by police to help a defendant who has already been indicted.

The first discovery made by the private investigators was that someone had opened five different bank accounts in the woman’s name, with five different banks, in five different states (Arizona, Georgia, New York, Pennsylvania, and one unidentified)[28]

 and had deposited US$20,000 in each one. Standard CIA practice for payoffs.[29][30][31]

Given that the woman’s ‘friend’ was in prison for minor drug offenses, the US media, led by the NYT at full volume, tried to relate the payments partially to her friend’s drug dealing, but the depositors were never identified, another sure sign of a CIA payoff. This apparently wasn’t enough of an issue for the media to question. We will never know where the money came from, but the simple fact that the media refused to touch this part of the story makes the conclusion almost certain. The NYT made a small concession to reality, stating there had been “unusual activity in her bank accounts”.[32]

The private investigators also discovered that the woman had at least 3 mobile phones with three different phone companies and was spending over $500 every month on calls. On a maid’s salary? On calls to whom? As a reporter, that’s the first question I would ask. Another almost sure sign of CIA involvement. The media reported every other trivial detail but weren’t interested in this one.

The Timeline

The maid’s account and the prosecution’s case began to unravel in many other directions at the same time. The maid initially told investigators she had hidden after the attack until she saw her alleged attacker leave, after which she reported the assault to a supervisor. But the hotel’s card key register proved that she first mysteriously entered another room for a few minutes, then cleaned a nearby room, then returned to the room in which the alleged attack took place, cleaned it, then spoke to supervisors.[33]

 There is another curiosity here: the maid’s cleaning assignments until that day had always involved rooms scattered on various floors, but on this day was given the 28th floor exclusively, so there would be no other hotel staff on that floor that day. The story was that she assumed duties of a colleague on leave, but the lawyers believed this was a method to give her access to DSK “for some nefarious reason.”

According to the card key records, the maid entered another room adjacent to that of DSK three times prior to entering his room, and again immediately when leaving his room after the alleged assault occurred. This information was omitted from her police reports and her Grand Jury testimony. The hotel refused to identify the (probably CIA) occupant of that room. All indications are that she was reporting to her handlers for last-minute instructions, then reporting her success afterward. The media omitted the fact of the second hotel employee entering the room while the maid was still there. This appears to be when DSK’s mobile phone went missing.

Edward Jay Epstein wrote an excellent article that was published in the NYT’s Review of Books.[34] The full version is available here on the Financial Times;[35]

I urge you to read it; it contains scores of questionable details, excellently-researched and documented, that cast a very dirty light on everything that occurred. Also, an article in the Business Insider[36] is excellent, asking “So is Strauss-Kahn the target of some form of political plot? Even if the alleged victim isn’t a witting part of a honey trap, what has been released so far by the New York police looks like railroad job, with a rush to discredit the target for the rest of his life. Even the latest pictures are designed to make the Frenchman look guilty?” The Guardian[37] and Forbes[38] also have excellent articles that identify the inconsistencies. And two others you may care to read.[39][40]

A Few More Inconsistencies

The woman’s account is riddled with inconsistent statements. She told the grand jury in sworn testimony that she left the room, waited in the corridor until DSK left and then reported the incident, and only when confronted with electronic card key evidence, did she admit she cleaned another room and then returned to the scene of the crime before reporting the incident. She told investigators that she fled the room as soon as she could, but she told the rape counselor at the hospital that she waited in the room for DSK to get dressed. Why would she do that, after having been raped? She claimed in testimony that the two never spoke, then told ABC-TV anchor Robin Roberts that they spoke at some length. In fact, she had three completely different versions of the events that transpired and of her activity following.

If the woman had sustained injuries – including a “torn shoulder ligament” as authorities claimed, how would she then proceed to clean rooms? If the woman had been raped and injured, why wouldn’t she seek help and medical attention immediately? A “torn ligament” would be painful and require immediate treatment.

There was much more. It was discovered that the woman had “had practice at this kind of storytelling before”. “Further investigation revealed that the [maid] had lied on her 2004 asylum claim about being gang-raped in her home country of Guinea. More damaging still, she had rehearsed the narrative of lies for asylum so often, listening to them over and over on an audiotape supplied by a male accomplice, that even years later she would break down crying as she told the story—until, finally, under very tough questioning by assistant district attorneys, she admitted the asylum narrative was a fabrication.”[41] Her stories were apparently so well-told that listeners would often be driven to tears as well.

“The most seasoned professionals in the office working on this case were brought to tears by this woman’s life story. I mean literally brought to tears,” says Linda Fairstein, former chief of the Sex Crimes Prosecution Unit. “She was so convincing that cops, advocates, professionals, bought the story. And then the prosecutors got to work.” But with the Arizona phone call and the asylum stories as background, the more investigators examined the accuser’s story, the more anomalies began to multiply.”[42][43][44][45][46][47]

There were also questions raised about the physical possibilities of such an assault being able to take place. The maid was young with DSK in his 60s, at 5’10” much taller than DSK and more heavily-built, with one observer stating “She could have kicked the crap out of him”. “. . she’s a big woman, how could he have overpowered her?”[48] Many news reports from Europe claim the woman agreed (or offered) to perform oral sex, then attempted blackmail and extortion. Olivier Mazerolle, a senior political journalist at France’s BFM television, claimed to have obtained details from sources in the US, and maintains this is what actually occurred.[49]

“Is it reasonable to believe that a 62-year-old man, even one as oversexed as DSK is supposed to be, would emerge naked from the bathroom of his hotel suite sexually to confront a maid whom he had never met before, and whom he did not expect? Is it reasonable to believe that stark naked and wielding no weapon he could have forced a taller, younger and more muscular woman to commit oral sex twice [in 6 minutes], and that the transaction would have resulted without some level of participation on her part? And is it believable that she didn’t offer any resistance, cry out or flee when she presumably knew where the door was, having worked in the hotel for three and one-half years?”[50]

“It strains credulity to think an internationally respected financial leader would hurl himself naked from his hotel bathroom onto a decidedly unattractive maid who happened to be cleaning his room, then force her to perform oral sex on him. It’s all made to sound like the actions of a psychopath more than a lustful Frenchman.” It would seem absurd for a man who can hire young models or woo women from higher brackets, to forcibly rape a woman, then have a leisurely lunch with his daughter and finally get caught only because he himself gave away his whereabouts in multiple calls when trying to recover his mobile phone.

In the final version of events, the alleged victim committed multiple counts of perjury, tax fraud, visa and passport fraud, conspiracy to commit extortion, possible drug-related offenses, but neither the police nor the media appear to have any interest in pursuing these details. Nor was there any interest in the five bank accounts. The woman told 37 substantial lies, mostly under oath but, according to her lawyer, “She made some mistakes here, but that doesn’t mean she is not a rape victim.” Mistakes? It will be almost certain proof that this entire bizarre event was a political fraud organised at the highest levels, when we realise that no action was ever taken against the woman for her string of crimes and the unexplained cash.

The Missing Blackberry

This is exceptionally curious and one of the keys to the entire entrapment process. One of DSK’s mobile phones, a Blackberry that he used for IMF work and very personal calls, went missing. It seems that DSK had already packed his things, including his phones, prior to taking a shower and dressing to leave the hotel. After the encounter with the maid, he used this phone to call his daughter and confirm their lunch appointment. The maid admitted to remaining in the room at that time, and perhaps the other hotel employee was there at the same time. DSK then apparently placed the phone in his briefcase, after which it disappeared, and was never found.[51]

DSK had already been warned that his phone had been hacked. A friend working in Sarkozy’s election office notified him that personal messages sent to his wife from that phone had been intercepted and read at Sarkozy’s office. The records obtained from BlackBerry show that the missing phone’s GPS circuitry was disabled at 12.51, preventing the phone from sending out signals identifying its location. It appears the phone never left the Sofitel. “Evidently unaware of what was happening at the Sofitel, he called the hotel from the taxi, asking if his phone had been found. When he was called back 13 minutes later, he told a hotel employee that he was at JFK airport. The police rushed there and, at 4:45, called him off the flight and took him into custody.”[52] Blackberry could not explain how the phone had been disabled, being something requiring extreme technical knowledge.

The “Dancing Israelis”

After the maid alleged that DSK sexually harassed her, the security team called John Sheehan, the security director for Accor, the French company that owns the Sofitel. His boss has ties to Ange Mancini, who was then Sarkozy’s coordinator for intelligence. Sheehan was seen on surveillance footage with an unidentified man who accompanied Diallo to the hotel security celebrating shortly before the police arrived: “The two men high-five each other, clap their hands, and do what looks like an extraordinary dance of celebration that lasts for three minutes.” One of DSK’s attorneys, William Taylor, who claims to have seen the footage, tells the Post, “They could have won the lottery. It seems directly related to speaking with Diallo and calling the police.”[53][54][55]

Media Frenzy and Speculation

“When police and prosecutors convict a suspect in the media before he is even charged, it typically means that there is no evidence against him and that demonisation is serving as the substitute.” Everything about this story has a stink of conspiracy, of sexual entrapment of the kind that got Julian Assange, Mordechai Vanunu and many others. Even more curious was that none of the mainstream media cared to connect the dots to see where they led.

When reviewing the accounts of this tale, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the mass media, at least in the English-speaking world, had been instructed to speculate as wildly as possible and to fabricate any details they considered useful or titillating. “James Cox, law professor at Duke University, said: he was surprised that the prosecution had not done more homework on their witness before making such strong statements about the case and the strength of its witness.”[56] There were many serious questions over their handling of the case, especially the notorious “perp walk”, which saw DSK paraded in front of press cameras.

The media focus centered on the story of the alleged victim rather than on who was pulling the strings behind the scenes in what visibly appears to have been a political frame-up. The NYPD, the prosecutor, the CIA, were letting the media speculate publicly. The entire story, based only on speculation and a complete absence of facts, has the look and feel of giving the gullible public just enough information to come to the wrong conclusion.

The NYT

In fact, the most likely hypothesis, which is that DSK was deliberately set up, was not only totally avoided by the mainstream media, but any reader comments at the time were either not posted (NYT ) or were deleted immediately after posting. There is ample evidence that the media – especially in the US – had been instructed to monitor and control all comment on this issue.

At the time, it was fascinating to watch the NYT during the three months of this episode. There was no way to avoid the conclusion that the editors were firmly controlling the reader comments on all their DSK articles. Not even a hint of a suggestion of a setup was permitted until one article on July 6, long after all the damage had been done. The comment threads were constantly led to topics like “rich white man, poor black woman”, or the US legal system, or how money can buy freedom or how even liars can be raped. Whenever a comment was posted that was “off-topic”, more correct ones were inserted to bring readers back into focus.

There seemed little doubt that the NYT was on the same page as the NYPD, the DA and, we must assume, the CIA and the City of London. Not only did the editors control the posts, they added some of their own, to the “Highlights”, to help readers focus. Among them was this gem: “While France will now criticize us, we should remember that French people enjoy few of the rights we do when accused. French “authorities” can hold people for up to one year without charges in an attempt to pressure them for cooperation in a criminal case. In Europe, the presumption generally is that the person accused is guilty and he must prove otherwise.”

It is astonishing that the Times had the gall to do this. France can retain a person for no more than 24 to 48 hours before release, and the NYT editors would surely be aware of this.[57] No newspaper would make such a claim without checking its accuracy, so we must conclude they knowingly made a false statement, seriously maligning France in the process and leaving a disturbingly dishonest impression on the 80% of Americans who are sufficiently uninformed and gullible to believe anything.

The “Settlement”

The New York Times first reported that DSK had agreed to pay the maid $6 million as a settlement, attributing the news to “French media sources”,[58] while the same French media sources attributed the claim to the NYT. Other media claimed that “friends of Strauss-Kahn” offered the chambermaid’s impoverished family in Guinea, West Africa, a ‘seven-figure’ sum to convince her to drop the charges. Then almost everyone joined in with the identical claim,[59][60][61] even posting a (surely) fictitious photo of the maid’s “family”.[62]

It became a circus, with DSK’s lawyers stating the claims as “flatly false”.

Perhaps another WHO Worldwide Pandemic

One of the more entertaining bits of the media having fun was the “evidence” suddenly surfacing from every corner that DSK was only one of perhaps thousands of such. My favorite was the UK Daily Mail’s claim that maids at the New York Hilton and “in various other hotels around the U.S.” were having to hide from male guests running around naked in the hotel corridors, screaming “I need sex”.[63] The newspaper helpfully suggested all hotel maids needed to wear ‘panic buttons’.

The Question of Diplomatic Immunity

This was curious. As Managing Director of the IMF, DSK should have had full diplomatic immunity, not that the US would honor it, and in fact the judge in the hearing dismissed this. But it appears the IMF had the power to demand immunity for its CEO, and in fact the IMF Board had at least one meeting to discuss the matter.[64][65]

No information was released, but IMF rules stipulate an 85% agreement on all decisions and, with the US controlling 18% of the vote, we can assume the US exercised its veto and killed DSK’s one chance to escape the trap. He would still have full immunity from civil suits, however. This aspect was totally ignored by all the media, and should not have been.

Rikers Island

Rikers Island is widely-known as one of the most brutal and dangerous prisons in the world. It “has always been a place of exceptional violence”, with weapons everywhere, with rival gangs ruling the cellblocks, a place notorious for the brutality of the prison guards and the deranged mental instability of most inmates, 1,000 of which are stabbed or killed each year.[66][67]

Only the dregs of society are sent there, and incarceration for a civilised person would be terrifying to say the least – which would have been the entire point of sending DSK there. The prospect of remaining there for months until trial, coupled with the slim prospects of survival, would encourage a man to comply with any conditions demanded for bail and removal – including resigning his job as MD of the IMF. DSK was sent to Rikers on May 17, presented with his options the next morning, and his official resignation processed on the following day, May 19, when he was released on bail.

Persons of Interest

In order to properly connect the dots, we need to identify some of the main players and their relations to each other.

Frank G. Wisner Sr.

Frank Wisner has been described as a “master diplomat” (Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under Dean Acheson) and also a “master spy”, (America’s least-known but most famous spy). He was none of those things. Wisner was a criminally-insane Jewish psychopath,[68] the co-founder of the CIA and the designer and operator of Operation Gladio in Europe[69] which he ran together with Allen Dulles (then head of the CIA), and which was one of the bloodiest terror programs ever inflicted on the world. He was largely responsible for the American coup that removed Mohammed Mossadegh as Prime Minister in Iran in 1953, and also primarily responsible for the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala in 1954, one of the dirtiest, bloodiest, and most unjust of such US government atrocities.

Frank G. Wisner Jr.

Young Frank, also seconded into the US Foreign Service, was an American Ambassador to several countries as well as Under Secretary of State for International Security Affairs under Bill Clinton. He also served as Deputy Executive Secretary of the Department of State under Cyrus Vance. Wisner Jr. was heavily involved in the tragedy in Yugoslavia and primarily behind the push for the independence of Kosovo to help Madeline Albright and George Soros “take over” the communications infrastructure there (an $800 million gift). However, Wisner Jr. is best known for his financial crimes for which the term “unscrupulous” would be something of an understatement. Wisner was part of the inner circle at Enron whose financial manipulations ruined countless thousands of investors, and he was the Vice-Chairman of AIG when its share prices collapsed by 95%, prior to the Khazar-dictated taxpayer bailout.[70]

Pál (Paul) Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa

This man, a Greek-Hungarian Jew, was the father of Nicolas Sarkozy who became the President of France. Paul married several times, Nicholas resulting from the first marriage with Andrée Mallah. His father and birth mother both abandoned Nicholas and he was taken in by Paul’s third wife Christine de Ganay after her divorce with Paul. Christine de Ganay subsequently married Frank Wisner Jr, who more or less raised Nicholas and taught him everything he knew (at least all the dirty parts of American and French politics and finance). “It was [Wisner] who introduced then-teenage Sarkozy to CIA insiders and facilitated his entry into French political circles”, and one of Wisner’s sons was Sarkozy’s campaign manager.

Cyrus Vance Sr.

Cyrus Roberts Vance Sr. was an American lawyer and Secretary of State under President Jimmy Carter. He was also Deputy Secretary of Defense, Secretary of the Army, and General Counsel of the Department of Defense.

Cyrus Vance Jr.

This is where things become interesting. Cyrus Vance was the Manhattan District Attorney, conveniently appointed just in time to handle the three most notorious sexual scandal cases in recent memory (all involving Jews): Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn. In the case of Jeffrey Epstein, Vance’s office argued in court for dismissal of charges and his removal from a sex offender’s list, claiming “there are no real victims here.”[71]

Vance would later argue that his “assistant DA” made these court representations without his knowledge. We are to believe that in the most spectacular sexual abuse and sexual-entrapment scheme ever recorded, and certainly the biggest case in his career, Vance had no idea what his own assistant was proposing in court. It was Vance (in an arranged plea bargain) who managed to free Epstein from a life sentence and give him only 13 months in prison where he was allowed out during the day (to look after business) and only slept in the prison at night.

Does anyone recall Epstein being given a ‘perp walk’? Was he incarcerated at Rikers Island? Did he have to post millions in bail, wear a bracelet and have to hire armed guards at his own expense ($240,000 per month for DSK)? Was Jeffrey Epstein denied bail because he was a flight risk? No.

Something similar occurred with Harvey Weinstein, with Vance declining to prosecute the Hollywood producer in spite of the huge amount of evidence against him. But it wasn’t all bad. Vance did manage to obtain a sentence of 428 years against another serial rapist who had the misfortune of not having been born Jewish.

Let’s review some connections. Nicholas Sarkozy, our Jewish-Hungarian midget, was raised by the Jew Frank Wisner who worked for Cyrus Vance Sr., and who introduced Sarkozy to the (Jewish-created) CIA and to US and French politics. Sarkozy and Cyrus Vance Jr. were of the same age (one year apart) and certainly knew each other well since their fathers worked together and their families socialised together. And who was appointed as the lead prosecutor against DSK? Cyrus Vance Jr. In what was clearly one of the most egregious set-ups in recent memory, Vance was later loudly applauded by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other US media, as well as by multiple government officials for “acting with integrity” in a case where a poor woman made “a credible accusation against a very powerful man”.

Sarkozy and Mossad

Nicholas Sarkozy was confirmed as a Mossad agent, the details revealed in articles by Le Figaro, an influential French daily, providing evidence of Sarkozy having been recruited as an Israeli spy, “one of the thousands of Jewish citizens of countries other than Israel who cooperate with the Mossad”. This information was apparently given to the French police in detail prior to Sarkozy’s election as president, but suppressed until the scandal emerged. “This was so important an issue that within 24 hours after Le Figaro’s exposé, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was on a state visit to France” – ostensibly to discuss Iran’s nuclear agenda, but in fact an attempt to deal with the fallout.

According to media reports, the French police were investigating documents concerning Sarkozy’s alleged espionage activities against France on behalf of Mossad, which Le Figaro claimed dated as far back as 1983, which was when Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin recruited the “young and promising” Sarkozy as part of the ordered infiltration of the French ruling Gaullist Party.

Tristane Banon

Tristane Banon, a 32-year-old journalist, claimed that DSK sexually assaulted and tried to rape her a decade earlier. She is “the daughter of one of Strauss-Kahn’s discarded mistresses and the goddaughter of his second wife.”[72] This woman, with her lingering memory of an encounter with DSK from 9 years prior, chose the correct moment to bring it to the public. And this latter is also surpassingly strange; the mother came to the defense of her daughter by “confessing” that she also had an affair with DSK at around the same time. How this would help her daughter’s case was not made clear. At least, not to me.

Her case was so weak (and 9 years too late) that there was no chance for it to lead anywhere, but it would help to keep DSK out of the Presidential Palace. Mrs. Banon worked for atlantico.fr, a pro-Sarkozy website which was co-founded by Arnaud Dassier, the man behind Sarkozy’s web campaign of 2007, and the man who started the smear campaign against DSK a few weeks before May 15th. Of interest is Banon’s claim that “politics played no part” in her decision to air this old issue again, that she “was not approached by the Right” to fire another torpedo into DSKs political career.[73][74]

Christine Lagarde

Christine Lagarde is a Jew.[75] Both the City of London and Israel wanted her as the new IMF head, which was why she had beforehand declared her availability and “eagerness to serve”. Lagarde was a hard-headed “corporatist” member of the Bilderberg Group and the WEF, and definitely in favor of the new world order intended to preserve Khazarian Jewish hegemony worldwide. The IMF Executive Board issued a press release on June 28 2011, confirming her appointment as IMF Managing Director.[76][77]

The report from the prosecutor was released to the media June 29, and presented to the court on July 1. Lagarde’s succession to the IMF occurred a few days prior to a New York Court ruling which completely exonerated Dominique Strauss Khan on the basis of lack of evidence. It apparently wasn’t of concern that Lagarde was under criminal investigation at the time for an illegal application of some $400 million in funds.

French Media Reports: Who Told Who What When?

One indication that DSK’s political enemies were implicated is the fact, made public by the French press, that Sarkozy’s political team in France knew about DSK’s arrest not only before the NYC police announced it, but before the actual arrest had occurred. In fact, Sarkozy’s office and the French media reported DSK’s arrest while he would still have been in a taxi on the way to the airport. No one has attempted to explain this. The evidence is that the NYC Hotel Manager called France’s Presidential Palace over an hour before the news was released in NYC, which is how the French media knew that DSK was going to be arrested before the arrest actually took place.

The first person in France to announce the arrest was Jonathan Pinet, a campaigner for Sarkozy’s party, who apparently tweeted the info at the time DSK was in the taxi to meet his daughter for lunch. And he apparently made other posts only minutes after the arrest itself. Shortly after, Arnaud Dassier, Sarkozy’s campaign director, was also commenting on the event, sooner than any journalist in the US. Confronted with this strange coincidence, he said he got the information from a friend who knew someone working in the NYC Sofitel hotel. How would anyone at the Sofitel know whether or when an arrest was made? Why would the NYPD report to the Sofitel, and why was all this information crossing the Atlantic in real time?

More interesting, Xavier Graff, the duty officer at Accor in Paris, sent e-mails several weeks after DSK’s arrest claiming full credit for “bringing down” the IMF chief.[78] Also worthy of note is that the top management of the ACCOR Hotel group in France was known to have close ties to Claude Gueant, Sarkozy’s closest advisor and his Minister of the Interior. The hotel’s Director of Security was a former agent of DGSE (French CIA), who had worked under Sarkozy personally. And finally, Ray Kelly, the head of the NYPD, had been decorated “Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur” by Sarkozy himself, the two men having had a close personal relationship with much contact since that time.

The French Presidential Election

DSK survived the first assault (in the US) because the widespread public feeling in France was that it was clearly a staged event, a “set-up”, and still leaving him as the favorite and with a strong political base. Thus, he was wounded but not destroyed, so the charade proceeded to Plan B, with accusations of rape or attempted rape, and of arranging the hire of prostitutes for orgies. Just as in the US, all charges were eventually dropped because there had never been any supporting evidence for those allegations, but the court cases continued until the man’s name had been sufficiently blackened that his political career descended to ground zero.

Ruining DSK would not have raised Sarkozy’s standing in the polls; he was still widely disliked and considered “crazy”. But this would have removed his most dangerous opponent, leaving no one else with sufficient public status to challenge him. So, one clear purpose of the entire event was to ensure Sarkozy’s re-election by destroying his only credible opponent. Sarkozy was definitely running scared; not only being attacked on the streets in France, but in a then-recent appearance in Algeria the crowds were all yelling “Get out! F*** off, Sarkozy”.

A former justice minister, Robert Badinter, called DSK’s treatment “a lynching, a murder by media.” The “perp walk”, the unshaven pervert-in-a-trench-coat photos, is a perverted and sadistic US tradition resurrected from the medieval era, and forms an inexcusable and humiliating breach of the principle of the presumption of innocence. Besides that, we had the “suicide watch”, the grossly unreasonable bail conditions that included from the first day his resignation from the IMF.

It was all designed to inflict the maximum possible public humiliation to forestall any chance of DSK’s return to politics. Also, the charges were not dropped, nor his passport returned, until after the French election primaries. To represent the Socialist Party and be their leader, he would have had to have been in France for the primaries which closed on July 13. However, his court date was set for July 18. This was not a mere unfortunate coincidence.

You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to smell something fishy here; in fact, it requires a leap of faith to not smell the odor. The proverbial elephant in the room should be obvious to all readers. There appears to be little question that one of two pillars of Strauss-Kahn’s demise was a perceived necessary “regime change” at the IMF. The other would appear to be desperation on the part of Israel and the City of London to remove Strauss-Kahn from French Presidential contention in order to preserve Sarkozy – their “man in Paris”. The Jews and Zionists in Israel were desperate to maintain Sarkozy in power because he would ensure the protection of Israel’s practices and the status of French Jews, while containing the anti-Israel sentiment in France. Israel’s government and French Jews and Zionists were among Sarkozy’s strongest electoral support. “We can refer to Israel’s conceited triumphalism with which they greeted Sarkozy’s election: “we are persuaded that the new president will continue eradicating anti-Israeli resistance”.

“The arrest of [DSK] has all the appearances of a frame-up ordered by powerful members of the financial establishment, in liaison with France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, whose presidency has served the interests of the US and Israel at the expense of those of France and the European Union. Immediately following Strauss Kahn’s arrest, pressures were exerted . . . to speed up his replacement as Managing Director of the IMF.”

The IMF and the Dollar

As head of the IMF, DSK was far from a saint in dealing with indebted countries. It was he who oversaw the destruction and permanent colonisation of Greece – an enormous sovereign disaster of which too few people seem aware. And in this, he was definitely following the instructions and template of the Khazarian mafia in the City of London. If you don’t know the details, you may care to read this: Humanity at the Crossroads.[79] You need reference only the brief paragraphs on Greece.

One of the circumstances that many considered a precipitating cause of DSK’s removal, was his conviction of the need for a new world currency, suggesting that SDRs be used much more broadly instead of the US dollar for international trade and payments,[80] leading to a prevailing theory that the US$ be removed. Thierry Meyssan wrote a scholarly article on this,[81]and Mike Whitney wrote an opinion piece claiming “Dominique Strauss-Kahn Was Trying to Torpedo the Dollar.”[82]

But DSK was in no way arguing for the elimination of the US$ in international settlements as for the creation of more stability since poor nations were easily whipsawed by borrowing in US$ at low rates then subjected to bankruptcy when rates rose. It’s true this wouldn’t have earned him many friends since the bankruptcies were part of the plan. But in any case, no changes to the world system could have been made without the cooperation of the US. It doesn’t seem widely-known, but changes to IMF protocols require an 85% approval vote while the US controls 17% of the votes – giving the US a de facto veto on everything.

A larger part of the problem was that the IMF (under DSK) was pushing hard for other nations like China and Russia to obtain a larger and more realistic representation at the IMF. DSK tried to push through reforms that would have considerably increased the share of emerging countries, and that would have produced enemies in all the entrenched Western countries who would be loath to surrender their financial power over the rest of the world.

But much worse than this, DSK was strongly recommending that nations abandon much of their income tax regime and draw their revenue from inheritance taxes on the extremely wealthy. A suggestion like this to the same nations that house the Rothschilds, Sassoons, Warburgs and Sebag-Montefioris would be equivalent to a declaration of war. Almost as bad, DSK was also on record as stating that the FED’s excessively loose monetary policies (directed from the City of London) were responsible for the massive transfers of wealth to the top 1% in each economic cycle. He stated flatly that it was the FED’s excess liquidity that causes the sharp rises in inequality “because that liquidity does not fall into every pocket”.

And worse again, he also stated that the nationalisation of infrastructure, land, and even corporate interests, were “indispensable” for “national independence”. In his words, “The exhaustion of the traditional tools of social democracy, notably redistribution, has led us to redefine a new socialism . . . That rests on the correction of innate market inequalities at root. That leads to a society which permits each person to develop their talents independently of their social conditions at birth. That’s a new humanism which I think we need.”

Suggesting socialism, inheritance confiscations, nationalisations and wealth redistribution to the Satanist trillionaire capitalists who are at the pinnacle of world financial power, is not a way to win friends. Nor is any suggestion of “humanism”. I suspect this latter point alone would have caused his demise, since the template of the Khazar Jews for the past 100 years has been to push small countries into unpayable debt traps and then confiscate all the nation’s infrastructure, arable land, and water aquifers in lieu of cash payment. In these three items, I believe DSK signed his own death warrant three times.[83][84 One of his allies said: “Everyone knows that his weakness is seducing women. That’s how they got to him. . . the aim was to “decapitate the IMF”.

This is perhaps an aside, but where do you suppose the World Bank and IMF obtain their trillions to lend to undeveloped nations? They are not banks that have deposits to lend. The money comes from the Jewish financiers in the City of London, and it is they who direct the terms and who push for unrepayable loans, and it is they who confiscate the infrastructure and land.[85] This is so true that the Rothschilds recently established a new “bank” just to control all their holdings of arable land that has been confiscated from poor countries. In case you don’t know, the Jewish-controlled government of Ukraine, the “breadbasket of Europe”, amended its laws to permit huge swaths of the world’s most fertile soil to disappear forever into this Khazarian abyss.

Epilogue: Who Did This?

One fact I didn’t mention above is that DSK had been warned by friends in various positions that he would become the victim of a plot using some form of sexual entrapment. Also, the French media revealed from an interview with DSK’s wife that he had said to her several months prior, “They are out to get me“. Who were “they”? Certainly not the NYPD, who had neither cause nor leverage.

Why would NYPD detectives and prosecutors be so irresponsible as to set out, deliberately and apparently vengefully, to destroy the career of the second most relevant person in France, based solely on the word of a woman who was already known as a hotel prostitute? In a real world, they could have made a complete investigation and then arrested DSK on his return to the US. He would have to return, since the IMF offices are in Washington.

Nor could it have been the US State Department. The head of the World Bank is traditionally selected by the Jewish handlers of the US government, while the head of the IMF is traditionally filled by the Jewish financiers in Europe. Thus, the US administration also had no leverage, even if they felt they had cause.

It could not have been Nicholas Sarkozy and his election team. They might well have had considerable “cause”, but Sarkozy didn’t have the power to engineer something this vast, especially in the US where it required intense cooperation from the police, the prosecutors, the courts, the media – and the silence of the US government. Sarkozy’s team was clearly kept informed, on what would appear to be nearly a minute-by-minute basis, but they weren’t the engineers. There is no way the US government would give a (disliked) European politician the freedom and power to commit such an immense theatrical crime on US soil, merely to assist his own re-election. Nor would they permit him to use their police, courts and prosecutors to fraudulently force a rival’s resignation from an unrelated UN position.

If the US were concerned that DSK was trying to torpedo the dollar, it is conceivable the White House might have sent someone to the NYPD to say, “This guy is causing us trouble; give him a hard time”. But even the President of the United States hasn’t the power to approach the NYPD and the courts and instruct them to launch a trap based entirely on fraudulent charges and faked evidence to destroy the head of the IMF and force his removal. The President doesn’t have the power to engineer something that hugely illegal which would require participation from so many parties, including the obvious payment to the “victim” for her fraudulent testimony. Such a thing would be unprecedented and would leak. The US administration might well attempt to profit from such an event already in progress, but would never dare to plan and execute something of this nature.

The only people with the power to do this, to plan and execute all the portions of the US side of this theatrical performance, and to obtain the necessary silence from all participants, are the alphabet agencies. The (Khazar-controlled) CIA has the power to say, “This is a matter of the utmost national security. You will comply with our instructions in all details and, if you dare ever breathe a word of this, you will most likely disappear and your family along with you.” The CIA could enforce obedience from the NYPD, the hotel, the prosecutor’s office, the judges and the courts, the phone companies, the airport authorities, and could easily arrange the multiple bank accounts and mobile phones. They are skilled at creating and planting evidence, and they have the power to control media information and disinformation. That’s what they do, and their authority is more or less absolute.

This is an aside, but an important one. In an interview with the wife of Lee Harvey Oswald (JFK’s alleged assassin), she was quoted as saying, “The answer to the Kennedy assassination lies with the [Rothschild-controlled] Federal Reserve. It is wrong to blame it on only James Jesus Angleton and the CIA, per se. They are all fingers on the same hand. The people who control the money are above the CIA.”

The question then remains, from whom were the CIA taking their instruction? It would not have been from the US administration, and certainly not from Sarkozy’s election team. Who was it, who was “out to get” DSK? The answers to all the questions trace to the Jewish bankers in the City of London, the master to whom both Israel’s Mossad and the CIA ultimately report, and these are the people who, for their own reasons, wanted a final extermination of DSK, to utterly ruin the man for his disobedience, and remove him forever as a potential nuisance. DSK was released on bail (from Rikers Island) only on condition that he resign his position as MD of the IMF. This wasn’t the NYPD’s idea, nor the position of the US government. This could have emanated only from the Khazarian mafia in the City of London. It was they who wanted DSK removed from office.

DSK is a Jew, until recently one of the world’s most powerful men, yet still far removed from the “inner circle” of the Khazar mafia in London. If this is what these people will so freely do to one of their own, you can imagine the rickety scaffolding on which the rest of us stand. There is no shortage of unusual and suspicious deaths of those daring to reveal inconvenient truths – or threatening to reveal them. Think of Gary Webb, Michael Hastings and Anne Heche. Think of Robert Maxwell, the Jewish media mogul (real name: Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch) and Mossad’s ‘assisted suicide’ (see note 86) in helping him fall naked off his yacht in the middle of the night to drown in the Atlantic Ocean, shortly after boasting that “they can’t do anything to me because I know where all the bodies are buried.”

Lastly, it must not go unnoticed that the New York Times was a leader in this escapade, “setting the agenda for the nation”[87] and clearly being “a finger on the same hand” as the Khazarian mafia in the City of London. All the Western media lie to their readers and viewers, but the NYT carries a special responsibility for the power of its disinformation and misinformation practices. The day needs to come soon when the NYT is no longer respected as a source of information, but instead despised as a major link in the chain of fascism and fear that will soon bind all of us.

Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).

His full archive can be seen at https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ + https://www.moonofshanghai.com/

He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com*

Notes

[1] Strauss-Kahn arrest: IMF head detained at Rikers Island

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-13420440

[2] Strauss-Kahn indicted by grand jury, is granted $1 million cash bail

https://news.yahoo.com/news/strauss-kahn-indicted-grand-jury-granted-1-million-232344073.html

[3] Letter from prosecutors on Strauss-Kahn accuser’s story

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-strausskahn-accuser-idUSTRE76053W20110701

[4] Letter from prosecutors on the accuser of Strauss-Kahn

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/letter-from-prosecutors-on-the-accuser-of-strauss-kahn/article585251/

[5] Strauss-Kahn Is Released From House Arrest

https://www.npr.org/2011/07/01/137549786/strauss-kahn-sex-assault-case-may-be-crumbling

[6] Recommendation for Dismissal of Strauss-Kahn Case

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/08/22/nyregion/dsk-recommendation-to-dismiss-case.html ?

[7] All charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn dismissed

https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/nation-now/story/2011-08-23/all-charges-against-dominique-strauss-kahn-dismissed

[8] Strauss-Kahn Drama Ends With Short Final Scene

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/24/nyregion/charges-against-strauss-kahn-dismissed.html

[9] French Strauss-Kahn sex assault probe dropped

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-strausskahn-france-inquiry-idUSTRE79C3JT20111013

[10] La plainte de Tristane Banon contre Dominique Strauss-Kahn classée sans suite

https://www.lemonde.fr/dsk/article/2011/10/13/la-plainte-de-tristane-banon-contre-dsk-pour-tentative-de-viol-classee-sans-suite_1587468_1522571.html

[11] French prosecutor drops Strauss-Kahn ‘gang rape’ probe

https://edition.cnn.com/2012/10/02/world/europe/france-strauss-kahn/index.html

[12] DSK investigated over prostitution allegations

https://www.abc.net.au/lateline/dsk-investigated-over-prostitution-allegations/3916424

[13] Dominique Strauss-Kahn to stand trial for pimping, French prosecutors say

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/26/dominique-strauss-kahn-trial-pimping

[14] DSK’s extraordinary excuse: ‘I didn’t know I was sleeping with prostitutes at orgies because they were all naked at the time’

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2086022/Dominique-Strauss-Kahn-scandal-I-didnt-know-sleeping-prostitutes.html

[15] French Court Acquits Dominique Strauss-Kahn in Case That Put His Sex Life on View

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/13/world/europe/dsk-acquitted-aggravated-pimping-charges.html

[16] Why D.S.K. Won’t Go Away

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/opinion/sunday/why-dsk-wont-go-away.html

[17] Room 2806: The Accusation

https://www.netflix.com/pt-en/title/81068760

[18] Strauss-Kahn DNA ‘linked to maid’

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/strauss-kahn-dna-linked-to-maid-1.877071

[19] Dominique Strauss-Kahn DNA ‘linked to maid’

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-13519035.amp

[20] Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers complain about police leaks

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-strausskahn-leaks-idUKTRE74P57T20110526

[21] NYPD deny they are source of reports suggesting Strauss-Kahn’s DNA matched sample taken from alleged victim’s clothes.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2011/5/24/police-deny-leaking-strauss-kahn-dna-report

[22] Police Seek Evidence From I.M.F. Chief on Sex Attack

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/16/nyregion/maid-picks-imf-chief-as-attacker-in-lineup.html

[23] Strauss-Kahn arrest: IMF head detained at Rikers Island

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-13420440

[24] The Dominique Strauss-Kahn Affair: To Proceed Or Not To Proceed?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jameszirin/2011/08/05/the-dominique-strauss-kahn-affair-to-proceed-or-not-to-proceed/

[25] “DSK Maid” Tells of Her Alleged Rape by Strauss-Kahn: Exclusive

https://www.newsweek.com/dsk-maid-tells-her-alleged-rape-strauss-kahn-exclusive-68379

[26] Sex charges dismissed against Strauss-Kahn

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2011/8/23/sex-charges-dismissed-against-strauss-kahn

[27] Strauss-Kahn Prosecution Said to Be Near Collapse

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/01/nyregion/strauss-kahn-case-seen-as-in-jeopardy.html

[28] Strauss-Kahn Prosecution Said to Be Near Collapse

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/01/nyregion/strauss-kahn-case-seen-as-in-jeopardy.html

[29] Dominique Strauss-Kahn released on recognizance after questions emerge about accuser’s story

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/dominique-strauss-kahn-released-on-recognizance-after-questions-emerge-about-accusers-story/2011/07/01/AGsNY5tH_story.html

[30] Dominique Strauss-Kahn freed as case details aired outside court room

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/01/dominique-strauss-kahn-court

[31] Dominique Strauss-Kahn lawyers meeting with Manhattan prosecutors

https://www.silive.com/news/2011/07/dominique_strauss-kahn_lawyers.html

[32] Strauss-Kahn Is Released From House Arrest

https://www.npr.org/2011/07/01/137549786/strauss-kahn-sex-assault-case-may-be-crumbling ?

[33] Dominique Strauss-Kahn freed as case details aired outside court room

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/01/dominique-strauss-kahn-court

[34] What Really Happened to Strauss-Kahn?

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/12/22/what-really-happened-dominique-strauss-kahn/

[35] One afternoon in Manhattan: Dominique Strauss-Kahn: what happened in the New York hotel?

https://www.ft.com/content/11e061f0-1780-11e1-b157-00144feabdc0

[36] 10 Questions About Evidence In The Case Of The Chambermaid Versus Dominique Strauss-Kahn

https://www.businessinsider.com/fully-functioning-and-operational–ten-or-so-nave-questions-about-the-evidence-in-the-case-of-the-chambermaid-versus-dominique-strauss-kahn-2011-5

[37] Six out of 10 for the Dominique Strauss-Kahn conspiracy theory

https://www.theguardian.com/world/blog/2011/nov/28/dominique-strauss-kahn-conspiracy-theory

[38] The Dominique Strauss-Kahn Affair: To Proceed Or Not To Proceed?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jameszirin/2011/08/05/the-dominique-strauss-kahn-affair-to-proceed-or-not-to-proceed/?sh=35a036801bfb

[39] Investigative Journalist Implies DSK Was Set Up By Sarkozy’s Party

https://gothamist.com/news/investigative-journalist-implies-dsk-was-set-up-by-sarkozys-party

[40] The plot to destroy DSK

https://nypost.com/2011/11/27/the-plot-to-destroy-dsk/

[41] Christopher Dickey World News Editor Newsweek and The Daily Beast as Paris bureau chief

John Solomon Updated Jul. 13, 2017 6:57PM ET / Published Jul. 01, 2011 9:52PM ET

[42] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/01/dominique-strauss-kahn-court

Dominique Strauss-Kahn freed as case details aired outside court room

[43] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-strausskahn-accuser-idUSTRE76053W20110701

Letter from prosecutors on Strauss-Kahn accuser’s story

[44] Letter from prosecutors on the accuser of Strauss-Kahn

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/letter-from-prosecutors-on-the-accuser-of-strauss-kahn/article585251/

[45] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-strausskahn-prosecutors-idUKTRE77L6MK20110823

Strauss-Kahn accuser lies torpedo case

[46] Sex charges dismissed against Strauss-Kahn

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2011/8/23/sex-charges-dismissed-against-strauss-kahn

[47] Strauss-Kahn Is Released From House Arrest

https://www.npr.org/2011/07/01/137549786/strauss-kahn-sex-assault-case-may-be-crumbling?t=1661906528962

[48] Dominique Strauss-Kahn lawyers meeting with Manhattan prosecutors

https://www.silive.com/news/2011/07/dominique_strauss-kahn_lawyers.html

[49] Now disgraced ex-IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn to get $250,000 ‘golden parachute’… funded by U.S. TAXPAYERS

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1390651/Disgraced-banker-Dominique-Strauss-Kahn-250-000-golden-handshake–taxpayer.html

[50] The Dominique Strauss-Kahn Affair: To Proceed Or Not To Proceed?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jameszirin/2011/08/05/the-dominique-strauss-kahn-affair-to-proceed-or-not-to-proceed/

[51] One afternoon in Manhattan: Dominique Strauss-Kahn: what happened in the New York hotel?

https://www.ft.com/content/11e061f0-1780-11e1-b157-00144feabdc0

[52] https://www.theguardian.com/world/blog/2011/nov/28/dominique-strauss-kahn-conspiracy-theorym

Six out of 10 for the Dominique Strauss-Kahn conspiracy theory

[53] One afternoon in Manhattan: Dominique Strauss-Kahn: what happened in the New York hotel?

https://www.ft.com/content/11e061f0-1780-11e1-b157-00144feabdc0m

[54] Investigative Journalist Implies DSK Was Set Up By Sarkozy’s Party

https://gothamist.com/news/investigative-journalist-implies-dsk-was-set-up-by-sarkozys-party

[55] The plot to destroy DSK

https://nypost.com/2011/11/27/the-plot-to-destroy-dsk/

[56] Dominique Strauss-Kahn freed as case details aired outside court room

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/01/dominique-strauss-kahn-court

[57] Arrested in France – Legal Framework of Police detention

https://www.sba-avocats.com/criminal-defense-attorney-paris-france-police-custody.html

[58] Hotel Worker Settles Claim Strauss-Kahn Forced Sex

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/nyregion/strauss-kahn-and-hotel-maid-settle-suit-over-alleged-attack.html

[59] Strauss-Kahn’s friends ‘secretly tried to pay off “raped” hotel maid’s family in Guinea’.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1390165/Dominique-Strauss-Kahns-friends-secretly-tried-pay-hotel-maids-family-Guinea.html

[60] Strauss Kahn ‘will pay $6m to settle hotel maid’s civil suit’

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/strauss-kahn-will-pay-dollar6m-to-settle-hotel-maids-civil-suit-vtsg7gbj936

[61] Strauss-Kahn to pay hotel maid $6m

https://www.smh.com.au/world/strausskahn-to-pay-hotel-maid-6m-20121201-2anca.html

[62] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2012/11/30/strauss-kahn-lawyers-deny-6m-maid-settlement

Strauss-Kahn lawyers deny $6m-maid settlement

[63] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1390177/Call-New-York-hotel-maids-fitted-panic-buttons-horror-tales-dog-attacks-naked-men-emerge-Strauss-Kahn-attack.html

[64] 10 Questions About Evidence In The Case Of The Chambermaid Versus Dominique Strauss-Kahn

https://www.businessinsider.com/fully-functioning-and-operational–ten-or-so-nave-questions-about-the-evidence-in-the-case-of-the-chambermaid-versus-dominique-strauss-kahn-2011-5

[65] Former IMF boss claims immunity in civil case

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2011/9/27/former-imf-boss-claims-immunity-in-civil-case

[66] What Is Rikers Island?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/nyregion/rikers-island-prison-new-york.html

[67] Strauss-Kahn arrest: IMF head detained at Rikers Island

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-13420440

[68] Clinton’s Jewish US. Ambassadors:

http://www.jewwatch.com/jew-occupiedgovernments-usa-ambassadors.html

[69] CIA: Frank G. Wisner arrived in Cairo

https://www.voltairenet.org/article168337.html

[70] CIA: Frank G. Wisner arrived in Cairo

https://www.voltairenet.org/article168337.html

[71] Cyrus Vance’s Office Sought Reduced Sex-Offender Status for Epstein

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/09/nyregion/cyrus-vance-epstein.html

[72] The Dominique Strauss-Kahn Affair: To Proceed Or Not To Proceed?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jameszirin/2011/08/05/the-dominique-strauss-kahn-affair-to-proceed-or-not-to-proceed/

[73] How France hid the sleazy truth about the rutting chimpanzee

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1389291/Dominique-Strauss-Kahn-How-France-hid-sleazy-truth-rutting-chimpanzee.html

[74] Accused Rapist Dominique Strauss-Kahn To Settle With His Accuser

https://www.africanglobe.net/headlines/accused-rapist-dominique-strauss-kahn-settle-accuser/

[75] Promoting Peace, Tolerance, and Respect

https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2018/09/30/sp092618-promoting-peace-tolerance-and-respect

[76] Strauss-Kahn arrest: IMF head detained at Rikers Island

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-13420440

[77] Regime Change at the IMF: Christine Lagarde and The Frame-Up of Dominique Strauss-Kahn

https://www.globalresearch.ca/regime-change-at-the-imf-the-frame-up-of-dominique-strauss-kahn/24866

[78] The plot to destroy DSK

https://nypost.com/2011/11/27/the-plot-to-destroy-dsk/

Humanity at the Crossroads

[79] https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/humanity-at-the-crossroads-2/

[80] UK Telegraph – International Monetary Fund director Dominique Strauss-Kahn calls for new world currency

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/currency/8316834/International-Monetary-Fund-director-Dominique-Strauss-Kahn-calls-for-new-world-currency.html

[81] Obama, financial war and the elimination of DSK

https://www.voltairenet.org/article170083.html

[82] Dominique Strauss-Kahn Was Trying to Torpedo the Dollar

https://www.ibtimes.com/dominique-strauss-kahn-was-trying-torpedo-dollar-285599

[83] Dominique Strauss-Kahn: This Crisis Is Harder To Handle Than The Great Depression

https://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2020/05/28/dominique-strauss-kahn-this-crisis-is-harder-to-handle-than-the-great-depression/

[84] Strauss-Kahn affair turns French politics upside down

https://www.bbc.com/news/13407908

[85] World Map of Privatisation

https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/politics/5634/

[86] According to Wikipedia who always tell the truth about everything, especially everything Jewish, Maxwell’s “standard practice” when he wanted to urinate was to remove all his clothing and pee over the rail of his yacht into the Mediterranean. Documented evidence of this “standard practice” is of course non-existent, but if we can’t trust Wikipedia who can we trust.

[87] Propaganda and the Media — Part 3 – Establishing and Controlling the Narrative

https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/propaganda-and-the-media-part-3-establishing-and-controlling-the-narrative/

September 3, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Russia calls for reform of UN Security Council

Samizdat | August 3, 2022

The United Nations is in dire need of reform and the Security council must be “democratized” by expanding its representation, Russian foreign ministry official Alexey Drobinin has written in a keynote article published on Wednesday.

Drobinin, the Director of the Department of Foreign Policy Planning, commented on the current state of international relations and came to the conclusion that “more conscious effort and imagination is needed” to reform the UN.

He pointed out that the organization’s current agenda, which is primarily fueled by the West, is not necessarily in line with the interests of the majority of its international members.

Drobinin suggested that for most UN members the most important issues are things like access to cheap energy sources rather than the transition to “green” technologies, socio-economic development rather than human rights “in an ultra-liberal interpretation,” and security and sovereign equality rather than the artificial imposition of electoral democracy according to Western patterns.

He added that another topic that has once-again become relevant is the process of decolonization and ending the neo-colonial practices by transnational corporations in regards to the development of natural resources in developing countries.

However, international organizations such as the UN have essentially been “privatized” by the West, Drobinin points out. He suggests that the UN Secretariat and the offices of special envoys and special representatives of the Secretary General have all been saturated with the West’s own “tested” personnel, and that this also extended to non-UN organizations as well, such as the OPCW.

“The saddest thing is that this rust is eating away at the ‘holy of holies’ of the UN system – the Security Council,” Drobinin writes. “It devalues the meaning of the right of veto, which the founding fathers endowed to the permanent members of the Security Council with one single purpose: to prevent the interests of any of the great powers from being infringed, and thus save the world from a direct clash between them, which in the nuclear age is fraught with catastrophic consequences.”

While there are no “clear and simple recipes for correcting the situation here,” the diplomat continues, “clearly more conscious effort and imagination is needed when it comes to UN reform.” He goes on to suggest that the Security Council needs to be “democratized,” first of all by expanding the representation of African, Asian and Latin American countries.

Drobinin suggests that whatever the fate of international organizations such as the UN, WTO, IMF, World Bank or G20 is, the divisive policies of the West makes it “an absolute imperative for the coming years to form a new infrastructure of international relations.”

“After their frankly perfidious decisions and actions against Russia, its citizens and tangible assets, we simply cannot afford the luxury of not thinking about alternatives. Especially since many of our friends who have lost faith in Western benevolence and decency are thinking about the same thing,” the diplomat surmised.

August 3, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

African Governments to Western Eco-Imperialists Who Tell Them Not to Drill Their Own Oil and Gas – Get Lost

By Chris Morrison | The Daily Sceptic | May 5, 2022

It was never going to work. Telling African countries to stop developing their economies by banning cheap, reliable fossil fuel is little more than an eco-imperialist dream. Writing in Monday’s Daily Telegraph, Uganda President Yoweri Museveni lauded the discovery of oil in Lake Albert, but noted it was a battleground for the green NGOs and activists who claim that Armageddon is nigh at every opportunity.

“We are accustomed to these lectures, but we are tired of hearing them,” he added.

For the last decade, the West through the IMF and the World Bank has imposed a moratorium on support for African fossil fuel development – initially coal and more recently oil and gas as well. Museveni notes that in Africa the population is set to double by 2050, “and it is becoming increasingly clear that our energy needs cannot be met with a sudden shift to more expensive and less reliable solar and wind alone”.

Rich Western eco elites, of course, argue that the world must rid itself of fossil fuel as soon as possible. They believe the world is facing climate breakdown, although as articles in the Daily Sceptic show on a regular basis, that belief is backed by surprisingly few scientific facts. These Western elites effectively seek a command-and-control economy based on Net Zero, and a neo-pagan return to ancient Gaia goddess worship that elevates nature as sacred and denigrates humanity as destructive of it.

It might all play better in Africa if so-called global warming could be detected.

Atmospheric warming over the last 40 years has been more pronounced over the northern hemisphere, despite regular scare stories appearing about equatorial regions becoming uninhabitable. The GISS temperature database is run by NASA, and as with similar datasets it has been subject to considerable recent modifications, with the past cooled and later results warmed. Without these retrospective data adjustments, global recorded warming ran out of steam nearly two decades ago. Nevertheless, the contrast between the north, painted in fiery red, and most of Africa is clear from the GISS map (above).

The Lake Albert project is going ahead following a $10bn investment from the China National Offshore Oil Corporation and Total Energies of France. It includes the building of a 900 mile pipeline to the port of Tanga. According to Real Clear Energy, the project will provide $48.5m in annual payments to Ugandan employees living in one of the least developed countries in the world. But opposition is fierce. Writing in the New York Times the local green agitator Vanessa Nakate of StopEACOP said the project would bring “poverty and destruction to the people of Africa”. It is claimed by her activist group that building the East African crude oil pipeline would tip the world closer to “full blown climate catastrophe”.

It is comments such as these which mostly surface in mainstream media, rather than those of the President of Uganda. It might also be thought that most Africans are less impressed with other solutions advanced in the West to solve any problems caused by growing populations. Sir David Attenborough is on record as stating humans are a plague on the Earth, and it was “barmy” to send food to Ethiopia to solve the famine crisis. In Attenborough’s view, sending flour bags to under-developed countries was pointless.

In public in the West, many  African politicians pay lip service to the aims of COP, not least because plenty of aid cash is on offer. Others take a more challenging and outspoken view. N.J. Ayuk is the Executive Chairman of the African Energy Chamber and he recently called the idea that you could develop Africa with handouts, “preposterous and sickening”.

He continued: “You cannot take people of any colour and exempt them from the requirements of civilisation – including work, free markets, behavioural standards, personal responsibility, fossil fuels, financial literacy and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain – without ruinous consequences to them and society at large.”

In his view, no country has ever been developed by fancy wind and green hydrogen. Africans see oil and gas as a path to success and a solution to their problems. “The demonisation of oil and gas companies will not work,” he added.

Writing in 2015, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson commented that something deep inside the human psyche makes it receptive to apocalyptic warnings. By a cruel irony, he said, too many climate scientists and their hangers-on have become the high priests of a new age of unreason. Asking developing countries to abandon the cheapest available sources of energy is, at the very least, asking them to delay the conquest of malnutrition, to perpetuate the incidence of preventable diseases and to increase the number of premature deaths.

“Global warming orthodoxy is not merely irrational. It is wicked,” he concluded.

May 6, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | , , | 4 Comments

IMF to expedite $5 billion loan to Ukraine

Samizdat | April 20, 2022

Ukraine likely needs $5 billion a month in financial assistance to keep its economy operating and the immediate priority was finding ways to fill that gap in the next three months, according to International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva.

The Washington-based financial institution will start work on a future loan program, but it was “unfair” to expect Ukraine to implement a far-reaching package of reforms at the moment, Georgieva told a news conference on Wednesday.

On Sunday, Kiev requested $50 billion in financial support from the Group of Seven (G7) nations and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to cover a budget deficit largely created by the military conflict with Russia.

Ukraine is also considering issuing 0% coupon bonds to bridge the fiscal gap, as the country is currently facing an estimated $7 billion deficit a month, according to Oleg Ustenko, the top economic adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The IMF and World Bank have approved more than $2 billion in loans to Ukraine since the beginning of Russia’s military operation in the country. Meanwhile, the World Bank said it was preparing nearly $1.5 billion in extra funds to allow essential Ukrainian government services to continue.

Over the weekend, Georgieva said “more [funds] would be necessary … to keep the economy functioning and prevent inflation shooting up.”

April 20, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Economics | , | 3 Comments

“Pandemic Treaty” will hand WHO keys to global government

By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | April 19, 2022

The first public hearings on the proposed “Pandemic Treaty” are closed, with the next round due to start in mid-June.

We’ve been trying to keep this issue on our front page, entirely because the mainstream is so keen to ignore it and keep churning out partisan war porn and propaganda.

When we – and others – linked to the public submissions page, there was such a response that the WHO’s website actually briefly crashed, or they pretended it crashed so people would stop sending them letters.

Either way, it’s a win. Hopefully one we can replicate in the summer.

Until then, the signs are that what scant press coverage there is, mostly across the metaphorical back-pages of the internet, will be focused on making the treaty “strong enough” and ensuring national governments can be “held accountable”.

An article in the UK’s Telegraph from April 12th headlines:

Real risk a pandemic treaty could be ‘too watered down’ to stop new outbreaks

It focuses on a report from the Panel for a Global Public Health Convention (GPHC), and quotes one of the report’s authors Dame Barbara Stocking:

Our biggest fear […] is it’s too easy to think that accountability doesn’t matter. To have a treaty that does not have compliance in it, well frankly then there’s no point in having a treaty,”

The GPHC report goes on to say that the current International Health Regulations are “too weak”, and calls for the creation of a new “independent” international body to “assess government preparedness” and “publicly rebuke or praise countries, depending on their compliance with a set of agreed requirements”.

Another article, published by the London School of Economics and co-written by members of the German Alliance on Climate Change and Health (KLUG), also pushes the idea of “accountability” and “compliance” pretty hard:

For this treaty to have teeth, the organisation that governs it needs to have the power – either political or legal – to enforce compliance.

It also echoes the UN report from May 2021 in calling for more powers for the WHO:

In its current form, the WHO does not possess such powers […] To move on with the treaty, WHO therefore needs to be empowered — financially, and politically.

It recommends the involvement of “non-state actors” such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organisation and International Labour Organisation in the negotiations, and suggests the treaty offer financial incentives for the early reporting of “health emergencies” [emphasis added]:

In case of a declared health emergency, resources need to flow to countries in which the emergency is occurring, triggering response elements such as financing and technical support. These are especially relevant for LMICs, and could be used to encourage and enhance the timely sharing of information by states, reassuring them that they will not be subject to arbitrary trade and travel sanctions for reporting, but instead be provided with the necessary financial and technical resources they require to effectively respond to the outbreak.

It doesn’t stop there, however. They also raise the question of countries being punished for “non-compliance”:

[The treaty should possess] An adaptable incentive regime, [including] sanctions such as public reprimands, economic sanctions, or denial of benefits.

To translate these suggestions from bureaucrat into English:

  • If you report “disease outbreaks” in a “timely manner”, you will get “financial resources” to deal with them.
  • If you don’t report disease outbreaks, or don’t follow the WHO’s directions, you will lose out on international aid and face trade embargoes and sanctions.

In combination, these proposed rules would literally incentivize reporting possible “disease outbreaks”. Far from preventing “future pandemics”, they would actively encourage them.

National governments who refuse to play ball being punished, and those who play along getting paid off is not new. We have already seen that with Covid.

Two African countries – Burundi and Tanzania – had Presidents who banned the WHO from their borders, and refused to go along with the Pandemic narrative. Both Presidents died unexpectedly within months of that decision, only to be replaced by new Presidents who instantly reversed their predecessor’s covid policies.

Less than a week after the death of President Pierre Nkurunziza, the IMF agreed to forgive almost 25 million dollars of Burundi’s national debt in order to help combat the Covid19 “crisis”.

Just five months after the death of President John Magufuli, the new government of Tanzania received 600 million dollars from the IMF to “address the covid19 pandemic”.

It’s pretty clear what happened here, isn’t it?

Globalists backed coups and rewarded the perpetrators with “international aid”. The proposals for the Pandemic treaty would simply legitimise this process, moving it from covert back channels to overt official ones.

Now, before we discuss the implications of new powers, let’s remind ourselves of the power the WHO already possesses:

  • The World Health Organization is the only institution in the world empowered to declare a “pandemic” or Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).
  • The Director-General of the WHO – an unelected position – is the only individual who controls that power.

We have already seen the WHO abuse these powers in order to create a fake pandemic out of thin air… and I’m not talking about covid.

Prior to 2008, the WHO could only declare an influenza pandemic if there were “enormous numbers of deaths and illness” AND there was a new and distinct subtype. In 2008 the WHO loosened the definition of “influenza pandemic” to remove these two conditions.

As a 2010 letter to the British Medical Journal pointed out, these changes meant “many seasonal flu viruses could be classified as pandemic influenza.”

If the WHO had not made those changes, the 2009 “Swine flu” outbreak could never have been called a pandemic, and would likely have passed without notice.

Instead, dozens of countries spent millions upon millions of dollars on swine flu vaccines they did not need and did not work, to fight a “pandemic” that resulted in fewer than 20,000 deaths. Many of those responsible for advising the WHO to declare swine flu a public health emergency were later shown to have financial ties to vaccine manufacturers.

Despite this historical example of blatant corruption, one proposed clause of the Pandemic Treaty would make it even easier to declare a PHEIC. According to the May 2021 report “Covid19: Make it the Last Pandemic” [emphasis added]:

Future declarations of a PHEIC by the WHO Director-General should be based on the precautionary principle where warranted

Yes, the proposed treaty could allow the DG of the WHO to declare a state of global emergency to prevent a potential pandemic, not in response to one. A kind of pandemic pre-crime.

If you combine this with the proposed “financial aid” for developing nations reporting “potential health emergencies”, you can see what they’re building – essentially bribing third world governments to give the WHO a pretext for declaring a state of emergency.

We already know the other key points likely to be included in a pandemic treaty. They will almost certainly try to introduce international vaccine passports, and pour funding into big Pharma’s pockets to produce “vaccines” ever faster and with even less safety testing.

But all of that could pale in comparison to the legal powers potentially being handed to the director-general of the WHO (or whatever new “independent” body they may decide to create) to punish, rebuke or reward national governments.

A “Pandemic Treaty” that overrides or overrules national or local governments would hand supranational powers to an unelected bureaucrat or “expert”, who could exercise them entirely at his own discretion and on completely subjective criteria.

This is the very definition of technocratic globalism.

April 20, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , | 1 Comment

Africans Deflect Biden’s Demand To End Fossil Fuel Use

By Duggan Flanakin ~ PA Pundits – International ~ April 17, 2021

As the merger of climate change and COVID panic materializes in front of our eyes, “global leaders” have found plenty developing world voices to join the crusade to “save the planet” from carbon (dioxide) “pollution.” But like their Chinese and Indian counterparts, many Africans, from heads of state to captains of industry and beyond, intend to expand, not shrink, reliance on fossil fuels to build their economies.

According to Oxford University researcher Galina Alova, “Africa’s electricity demand is set to increase significantly as the continent strives to industrialise and improve the well-being of its people,” but those who hope for rapid decarbonization in Africa will likely be disappointed.

Alova’s research found that Africa is likely to double its electricity generation by 2030, with fossil fuels providing two-thirds of the total, hydroelectric another 18 percent, and non-hydro renewables providing less than 10 percent.

Such an energy mix flies in the face of the firm commitment from the fledgling Biden Administration to demand an end to all international financing of fossil fuel based energy projects. Biden climate envoy John Kerry won a strong endorsement from 450 organizations worldwide after telling World Economic Forum members of the “plan for ending international finance of fossil fuel projects with public money.”

The Biden plan, which comports with the Paris climate agreement, echos the call by European Union foreign ministers for an end to financing fossil fuel projects abroad (which means in Africa). Secretary of State Antony Blinken explained that “development finance is a powerful tool for addressing the climate crisis” that the U.S. will use to “help drive investment toward climate solutions.” [Translation: “We intend to ram decarbonization down their throats!”]

Many Africans feel the need to placate their self-appointed betters and accept the climate change tenets.

World Bank veteran Ede Ijjasz and Africa Growth Initiative Director Aloysius Ordu claim that Africans must take advantage of the COVID pandemic to initiate a “great reset” of Africa’s economies according to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and the principles of the Paris agreement. The world, they claim, cannot afford to give Africa a pass on decarbonization (though China and India get a pass).

Others prefer a more temperate approach.

In late March, investment professional Tariye Gbadegesin challenged President Biden to prioritize African nations as part of his global climate initiative. While admitting that Africa’s urban centers are swelling, “threatening more emissions,” she asserted that striking a balance between this ongoing development and its climate impact must be a global priority. For example, Nigeria could build a hybrid grid using plentiful natural gas and solar energy. But, Gbadegesin implied, such a hybrid grid would not meet the Biden-EU financing guidelines.

In early April, the African Development Bank (AfDB), the Global Center for Adaptation, and the Africa Adaptation Initiative held a virtual Leaders Dialogue in response to the State of the Climate in Africa 2019 report. Over 30 heads of state and other global leaders committed to prioritize actions that will help African countries both adapt to the presumed impacts of “climate change” and overcome widespread energy poverty. African Union chair Felix Tshisekedi listed “nature-based solutions, energy transition, an enhanced transparency framework, technology transfer, and climate finance” as critical areas for adaptation.

During the meeting, AfDB president Dr. Akinwumi Adesina noted the group intends to mobilize $25 billion in financing for the success of the Africa Adaptation Acceleration Program. “It is time,” he affirmed, “for developed countries to meet their promise of providing $100 billion annually for climate finance. And a greater share of this should go to climate adaptation.”

This African response to the Biden-EU decarbonization initiative – relying on adaptation and balance, not prohibition and eternal poverty, to achieve sustainability — reflects on the 1987 Brundtland Commission report, “Our Common Future.” In the report, the World Commission on Environment and Development defined sustainable development” as development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

Commission Chair Gro Harlem Brundtland acknowledged that, “A world in which poverty is endemic will always be prone to ecological and other catastrophe.” In her view, “Meeting essential needs requires not only a new era of economic growth for nations in which the majority are poor, but an assurance that those poor get their fair share of the resources required to sustain that growth.”

Sadly, U.S. and EU (and the UN) climate “monarchs” have long ignored Brundtland’s promises. The UN’s 20-year assessment of the document did not even mention “poverty” or “Africa.” CFACT reported that year that sub-Saharan Africa was “in very short supply of energy and power, especially electricity, and overland trade [was] greatly hindered by an almost total lack of infrastructure.” Worse. curable diseases ran rampant as people relied on toxic dung and wood for heating and cooking.

At the 2011 UN climate conference in Durban, South Africa, nuclear physicist (and CFACT advisor) Kelvin Kemm reported that the African representatives were not happy. “Their general feeling,” he recounted, “was that the First World is trying to push Africa around, bully African countries into accepting its opinions, and, even worse, adopting its supposed ‘solutions’.”

That feeling remains. Responding to the Biden-EU renewables-only energy financing plan, W. Gyude Moore, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and former Liberian minister of public works, mused that, “There’s this idea that because Africa is lacking in legacy infrastructure, it’s a good canvas to paint the energy future. But no African country has volunteered itself for that.”

With nearly 600 million Africans lacking access to electricity, Moore added, “it seems immoral to restrict options for energy sources” for the world’s poorest continent. Later, Moore, with Vijaya Ramachandran of The Breakthrough Institute, wrote that a ban on oil and gas projects in Africa would stifle economic growth and thus make poor populations even more vulnerable to climate change impacts.

Moore and Ramachandran explained that the top priority in most African countries is economic growth, first in agriculture, then in industry and services. For most Africans, worries of an increased carbon footprint generated from economic growth are a weak second to worries that growth may not happen at all. In their view, people in poverty don’t just need to power a single lightbulb at home; they need abundant, affordable energy at work too.

Overall, Moore and Ramachandran noted, Africa’s needs are too great to be met solely with current green energy technologies. Its finances too stretched to be able to afford the cost of carbon-neutral energy. Keeping Africa poor to fight climate change will do nothing to help the people most affected by it. But President Biden, his EU allies, and the “green 450” disagree.

This arrogance makes it quite clear that “Our Common Future” is still in the future, if at all.

The difference is that, today, Africans are no longer waiting for the UN, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, or even the African Development Bank to finally invest in sorely needed African infrastructure.

By hook or by crook, Africans are committed to using available resources to do the job.

Duggan Flanakin is the Director of Policy Research at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow. A former Senior Fellow with the Texas Public Policy Foundations, Mr. Flanakin authored definitive works on the creation of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and on environmental education in Texas.

April 18, 2021 Posted by | Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Argentine Government to Launch Legal Action Against Ex-President Over IMF Loan

Sputnik – 10.04.2021

Argentina’s President Alberto Fernandez issued a decree instructing the country’s special legal body to act as a plaintiff on behalf of the state in a case against his predecessor Mauricio Macri, stemmed from his decision to take a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the amount of $50 billion.

“Prosecutors representing the state as the claimant are ordered to pursue the case, ‘Mauricio Macri and others, fraud against state bodies’ … and to facilitate the advancement of the criminal process in order to determine those responsible for the crime,” the decree says.

The document further states that the case is related to Marci’s decision to take a loan from the IMF in the amount of $50 billion in 2018. The current government has repeatedly spoken about the difficulties surrounding paying off the debt and began negotiations with the IMF on a new assistance program.

In addition, lawyers were instructed to initiate actions leading to compensation for possible losses incurred as a result of the actions of the previous authorities.

The decree was signed by the country’s current president, prime minister, and ministers of economy and justice.

April 10, 2021 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | Leave a comment

Bolivia’s Central Bank Returns Añez’s Requested Loan To IMF

teleSUR | February 17, 2021

Bolivia’s Central Bank announced on Wednesday that it had returned US$346.7 million to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a loan irregularly managed by the de facto government of Jeanine Añez.

“This loan, in addition to being irregular and onerous due to its financial conditions, generated additional and millionaire economic costs to the Bolivian State, which as of February 2021 amount to US$24.3 million of which US$19.6 million are due to exchange rate fluctuations 19.6 million for exchange variation and 4.7 million for commissions and interest,” the institution explained in a statement.

The Central Bank denounced that the IMF jeopardized the “country’s sovereignty and economic interests” through its Rapid Financing Instrument (RFI), which conditioned the funds to fiscal, financial, exchange rate monetary duties, which violate the Bolivian legal framework.

Moreover, authorities explain that they would start an investigation to prosecute all officials involved in the IMF’s illegal arrangement.

February 18, 2021 Posted by | Corruption | , , | 1 Comment

HBO’s ‘Welcome to Chechnya’ Is Latest Anti-Russian Cold War Propaganda

By Max Parry • Unz Review • August 26, 2020

In 2017, explosive allegations first emerged that the authorities of the Chechen Republic were reportedly interning gay men in concentration camps. After a three year period of dormancy, the accusations have resurfaced in a new feature length documentary by HBO Films entitled Welcome to Chechnya. Shot between mid-2017 and early last year, the film has received widespread acclaim among Western media and film critics. Shortly after its release last month, the Trump administration and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced an increase in economic sanctions and imposed travel restrictions against Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and his family, citing the putative human rights abuses in the southern Russian republic covered in the film.

Most of the boilerplate reviews of Welcome to Chechnya have heaped particular praise upon the documentary’s novelty use of ‘deepfake’ technology to hide the identities of alleged victims in the cinematic investigation. Yet at the closing of the film, one subject who previously appears with his likeness concealed by AI reveals himself at a news conference without the disguise—rendering the prior use of synthetic media fruitless. Maxim Lapunov, who is not even ethnically Chechen but a Russian native of Siberia, is still the only individual to have gone public with the charges. Despite the obvious credibility and authenticity questions regarding the use of such controversial technology, it has not prevented critics from lauding it unquestioningly. Unfortunately, even some in alternative media have been regurgitating the film’s propaganda such as The Intercept, a slick online news publication owned by billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar whose financial ties to the national security state and U.S. soft power institutions conflict with the outlet’s purported mission. Notably, The Intercept’s glowing review of Welcome to Chechnya was written by Mehdi Hasan, a journalist who also works for Al-Jazeera, a news agency owned by the ruling emirs of Qatar, a theocratic dictatorship where homosexuality is actually illegal .

The documentarians follow the work of a purported network of activists who evacuate individuals like Lapunov out of the Caucasian republic. This is the film’s primary source of drama, despite their encountering seemingly no difficulty from the local authorities in doing so. We are then subjected to random cell phone clips of apparent hate crimes and human rights abuses going on, but at no point does the film crew even visit the Argun prison where the anti-gay pogroms are alleged to have taken place. In 2017, the imperial hipsters at Vice news were given unrestricted access to the facility where nothing was found and the warden adamantly denied the allegations — but not without expressing his own disapproval of homosexuality which was assumed by his interrogators to be evidence of the detentions having occurred. In the HBO documentary, a similar hatchet job is done to Ramzan Kadyrov, whose uncomfortable denial of the existence of homosexuality in the deeply conservative and predominantly Muslim republic is implied to be proof that the purges must be happening. One may recall this same sort of smear tactic was previously done to former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. However, Kadyrov and the warden’s predictable responses to the subject serve only as confirmation bias, not confirmation.

The selective outrage in response to the alleged purges, like all things Russia-related, is highly politicized. Western viewers would have no idea that of the 74 countries worldwide where homosexuality is still criminalized, Russia isn’t among them. In more than a dozen of those nations, same-sex activity is punishable by death, a few of which happen to be close strategic allies of the United States, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. As recently as 2017, the U.S. was one of 13 countries to vote against a United Nations Human Rights Council resolution condemning countries with capital punishment for same-sex relations to avoid falling-out with those allies, most of which have legal systems established on their respective interpretations of Sharia law. While the local authorities of the Muslim-majority Chechen Republic have been allowed to introduce some elements of the fundamentalist religious code by the Russian government such as the banning of alcohol and gambling and requiring the wearing of hijab by women, as a federal subject it is still ultimately beholden to Russia’s secular constitution. In fact, it was Kadyrov’s predecessor, Alu Alkhanov, who hoped to govern Chechnya with Sharia law, not the current administration. Credulous audiences would have no clue that Kadyrov actually represents the more moderate wing of Chechen politics because there is absolutely no history or context provided, a deliberately misleading choice on the part of the filmmakers.

The absence of any historical background deceptively suggests that the anti-gay sentiment in the mostly Muslim North Caucasus is somehow an extension of the homophobia in Russia itself, despite the autonomous differences in religion, culture, and society. In the last decade, the weaponization of identity politics has been central to Washington’s ongoing demonization of Russia and its President, Vladimir Putin, with the issue of LGBT rights particularly given significant attention. While homosexuality is decriminalized, there is admittedly no legal prohibition of discrimination against the LGBT community in Russia. In particular, human rights groups have condemned the notorious federal law passed in 2013 known as the ‘gay propaganda law’ that forbids the distribution of information promoting “non-traditional sexual relations” to minors, which entails the banning of gay pride parades and other LGBT rights demonstrations. However, the measure enjoys widespread support among the Russian people whose social conservatism has been resuscitated by the Orthodox Church since the breakup of the Soviet Union. It is rather ironic and hypocritical that the West has since taken issue with this turn, considering it facilitated that political transformation.

In reality, the reason for the relentless vilification of Putin has absolutely nothing to to do with the exaggerated plight of gays in Russia and a lot more to do with the reversal of policies under his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. In the nineties, the mass privatization of the former state-owned enterprises during Russia’s conversion to capitalism resulted in the instant impoverishment of millions and the rapid rise of the notorious ‘oligarchs’ which the West characterized at the time as progression towards democracy. In the loans-for-shares scheme, a new ruling class of bankers and industrialists accumulated enormous wealth overnight and by the middle of the decade, owned or controlled much of the country’s media outlets. The oligarchs held enormous power and influence over the deeply unpopular Yeltsin, who would surely have lost reelection in 1996 without their backing and the assistance of Western meddling in the form of massive loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

While economic disparity and corruption persists today, overall the Russian economy has been rebuilt after its energy assets were re-nationalized and brought back under state control by the Putin administration, resulting in improved living standards and income levels for the last two decades. By the same measure, the Russian people can hardly be blamed for associating homosexuality with the unbridled neoliberalism, vulture capitalism and draconian austerity imposed on their country by Western capital. It is also truly paradoxical that the notion of “Russian oligarchs” has become synonymous with Putin in the minds of Westerners when many of the most obscenely wealthy oligarchs of the Yeltsin era now live in exile as his most ardent political opponents after they faced prosecution for their financial crimes. Not coincidentally, the initial reports of the ‘gay gulags’ in Chechnya were published in Novaya Gazeta, an anti-Putin newspaper partly owned by former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, the very man who ushered in the economic liberalization which auctioned off the state assets to oligarchs like co-owner Alexander Lebedev.

Gorbachev’s reforms, particularly that of perestroika (“restructuring”), also had destructive consequences for the national question and ethno-regional interests. V.I. Lenin had famously called the Russian Empire a “prison house of nations”, in reference to its heterogeneous range of nationalities and ethnic groups. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 especially re-agitated ethno-national conflicts in the Caucasus, a region that had enjoyed several decades of relative harmony and stability under socialism with rights and representation that did not exist in pre-revolutionary Russia. While Azerbaijan and Georgia were granted independence, Chechnya and many other municipalities remained under federal control of the Russian Federation, as sovereignty did not constitutionally apply because it had never been an independent state. Not to mention, its oil and gas reserves are essential to Russia’s very economic survival.

The jihadism which plagued the Caucasus was an outgrowth of the U.S.-backed ‘holy war’ in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the brainchild of Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor in the Jimmy Carter administration. It was the Polish-born Brzezinski who not only authored the geostrategy of arming the mujahideen against the Soviets but the efforts to turn Russia’s own large Muslim minority community against them. This was mostly unsuccessful as the majority of its 20 million Muslims (10% of the population) are harmoniously integrated into Russian society, but the Atlanticists did fan the flames of a militant secessionist movement in Chechnya that erupted in a violent insurgency and became increasingly Islamist as the conflict dragged on. For Washington, the hope was that the West could gain access to Caspian oil by encouraging the al-Qaeda-linked separatists rebranded as “rebels” vulnerable to its domination in the energy-rich region. The collapse of the USSR already escalated hostilities between the intermingling ethnic communities of the region, but the antagonisms were intensified by CIA soft power cutouts like the Jamestown Foundation fomenting the secessionist insurrection. As the separatist movement grew increasingly Wahhabist thanks to U.S.-ally Saudi Arabia, its more moderate nationalist faction led by Akhmad Kadyrov eventually defected back to the Russian side. The elder Kadyrov would pay the price when he was assassinated in a 2004 stadium bombing in Grozny during an annual Victory Day celebration, with his son becoming one of his successors.

The Kremlin’s support for the Kadyrovs should be understood as a compromise which prevented the more radical Islamists from taking power, which apparently Washington would be happier with running the North Caucasus. What a human rights utopia Chechnya would be as a breakaway Islamic state, under the salafists which during the Chechen wars committed unspeakable acts of terrorism including the taking of hospital patients, theater goers, and even hundreds of schoolchildren as hostages. One can be certain that if there aren’t anti-gay pogroms going on in Chechnya now, there definitely would be without the likes of Kadyrov in power. In the documentary, what the Chechen leader does implicitly acknowledge may be occurring are individual honor killings within families and clans, a social problem common in other Muslim countries such as Pakistan, and certainly not a human rights issue particular to Chechnya. Many instances of honor killings in the Muslim world have included homosexuality as a motive for the extrajudicial killings by relatives of victims believed to have betrayed the family honor. On the other hand, Kadyrov himself has overseen the establishment of unprecedented reconciliation commissions to address the issue of honor culture, blood feuds and vendetta codes of Caucasian tribes. Kadyrov’s promotion of reconciliation has made significant progress in reducing such killings which were rampant during the Chechen Wars as family members would often seek to avenge the deaths of loved ones. Now that the region is in a period of relative stability, peace and economic recovery, with the once devastated city of Grozny now known as the ‘Dubai of the North Caucasus’, the West is suddenly feigning concern over human rights.

The swift end brought to the conflict by Putin was another reason for his becoming a target of Washington who had been counting on the balkanization of southern Russia. In a pinnacle of imperial projection, the explanation for Putin’s rise to power has since been revised by the Atlanticists to his having somehow secretly masterminded the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings while director of the Federal Security Service (FSB, the KGB’s successor), as if the neocons hope to deflect all of the longstanding rumors about the Bush administration and the 9/11 attacks onto the Kremlin. Except this Machiavellian conspiracy would be a lot more believable if the Chechen wars had not been going on since the early nineties, with much worse terrorist attacks already having been committed by the separatists, such as the taking of thousands of hospital patients as hostages in southern Russia. Since the end of the Chechen Wars, on the flip side the U.S. has also backed Russian opposition figure and Putin critic Alexei Navalny, a right-wing Islamophobe who has pledged to secede the North Caucasus while comparing its Muslim inhabitants to cockroaches. Despite his anti-immigrant rhetoric and minuscule 2% support among Russians, Navalny has been depicted as a “pro-democracy” and “anti-corruption” campaigner in Western media, who have been crying foul over his recent suspected poisoning in Russia and ensuing comatose airlift to Germany. If only the naive American liberals who read The New York Times and The Washington Post had any idea that Mr. Navalny has far more in common with the dreaded Mr. Trump than Putin does.

Meanwhile, the U.S. has already experienced blowback for its nurturing of terrorism in the Caucasus in the form of the Boston Marathon bombings, which recently returned to the news when convicted Chechen-American perpetrator Dzokhar Tsarnaev’s death sentence was vacated on appeal last month. In the aftermath of the April 2013 attacks, it was revealed that Tsarnaev’s deceased older brother and co-conspirator Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been radicalized attending seminars financed by the Jamestown Foundation while traveling abroad in Tblisi, Georgia, and the brothers’ uncle Ruslan Tsarni had previously been married to the daughter of high-ranking U.S. intelligence officer Graham Fuller, Brzezinski’s CIA station chief in Kabul, Afghanistan, during the Afghan-Soviet war. It also came to light that ‘Uncle Ruslan’ had previously worked for the CIA-linked United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and established a company called the Congress for Chechen International Organizations which funded Islamic militants in the Caucasus. Despite the astounding ‘coincidences’ surrounding the Tsarnaev clan, Uncle Ruslan was never considered a person of interest by the FBI, who had ignored warnings by the Russian FSB of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s extremism prior to the attacks.

Two years before Putin’s election, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the prime mover of the West‘s plan to dominate the globe by using Islam to bring down the USSR in delivering the Soviet equivalent of the Vietnam War, wrote in The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997):

“… The last decade of the twentieth century has witnessed a tectonic shift in world affairs. For the first time ever, a non-Eurasian power has emerged not only as a key arbiter of Eurasian power relations but also as the world’s paramount power. The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the rapid ascendance of a Western Hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole and, indeed, the first truly global power.”

Those words were written before the return of both Russia and China on the world stage, developments that have thrown a monkey wrench into Washington’s plans which the Russophobic Warsaw-native did not anticipate in his blueprint for Western hegemony. When the U.S.-backed headchoppers in the Syrian war nearly had control of Damascus, just a thousand miles or so from Sochi, the threat of jihadism returning to the Caucasus became very real. Beginning at the Munich Conference in 2007, Putin had begun to criticize the monopolistic expansion of NATO on Russia’s borders — but after the subsequent overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi where Moscow witnessed Libya transformed into a hotbed of terrorism like post-Saddam Iraq, the prospect of the same happening in Syria was an existential threat that could not be tolerated. In mainstream media, reality has been inverted where Moscow’s self-defense has been portrayed as expansionism, even though the so-called “annexation” of Crimea was virtually nonviolent compared to the Nazi junta initiated by Washington in Ukraine and the Russian-speaking people of Donetsk and Luhansk who voted to join Russia did not wish to end up like those massacred in Odessa. Besides, is the U.S. not currently annexing northeast Syria? The Crimean parliament and Syrian government invited Moscow, while the same cannot be said for the US presence in violation of international law.

Those in Washington with no respect for the sovereignty of nations would prefer Americans to see Russia as an adversary. During the Cold War, the threat was communism, but with capitalism restored in Eastern Europe, it became necessary to manipulate liberals into perceiving Russia as an ultra conservative regime. They must also keep Americans from knowing the true history of US-Russia relations — that Russia was the first nation to recognize American independence when Catherine the Great’s neutrality during the Revolutionary War indirectly aided the Thirteen Colonies in their victory against the Loyalists and Great Britain. During the War of Independence, the Russian Empress had maintained relations with the U.S. and rebuffed British requests for military assistance. The Russian Empire also later helped secure the Union victory during the Civil War, with an Imperial Navy fleet off the shores of the Pacific preventing the Confederates from landing troops on the west coast and deterring intervention by the British and the French. Then as Allies in WWII, while the U.S. was victorious in the Pacific, it was the Soviets who truly won the war in Europe, a feat the Anglo-Americans are still trying to take credit for to this day. Unfortunately, despite his promising rhetorical embrace of détente with Moscow that has made him the subject of political persecution, Donald Trump has proven to be every bit as hostile toward Russia as his forerunners. With the latest actions taken by his state department regarding Chechnya that are right out of the Brzezinski playbook, the idiom that “the more things change, the more they stay the same” certainly applies to Washington and US-Russia relations.

Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst. His writing has appeared widely in alternative media. Max may be reached at maxrparry@live.com

August 26, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Film Review, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

COVID-19 economic decline brings IMF back to Latin America

By Paul Antonopoulos | August 26, 2020

The economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic brought the International Monetary Fund (IMF) back to Latin America. In December 2005, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Argentine President Néstor Kirchner announced that they had paid the debts that South America’s two largest countries had with the IMF. At the time, Brazil paid $15.5 billion and Argentina about $9.81 billion, cancelling its debts. In addition to being historic, this transaction marked an era. The two South American powers freed themselves from the influence of the IMF and showed unprecedented political coordination, which was also complemented by political support from Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

The bloc also gave impetus to its neighbors: Uruguay, for example, cancelled its debt of $1.08 billion in 2006, while Bolivia freed itself from the fund that same year after an agreement allowed a $250 million debt to be forgiven.

However, everything seems to have changed 15 years later. Latin America is one of the world’s most affected regions from the COVID-19 pandemic – medically and economically. The IMF’s director, Kristalina Georgieva, predicts a 9.3% contraction for the region in 2020, compared to a 4.9% decline worldwide. Georgieva said that as a result of the new coronavirus pandemic, the organization has doubled access to emergency financing, disbursing a total of $25 billion to help 70 countries. Of those, about $5.5 billion went to 17 countries in South America, Central America and the Caribbean. The IMF director especially mentioned the cases of Chile, Peru and Colombia, which the IMF signed flexible credit line agreements totalling $107 billion.

An analysis by Teresa Morales, Nicolás Oliva and Guillermo Oglietti from the Latin American Strategic Center for Geopolitics (CELAG) shows that between April 17 and May 1, the IMF also helped Bolivia, Costa Rica, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Granada, Haiti, Panama, Paraguay and Saint Lucia with a total of $3.48 billion. CELAG researchers indicated at the end of May that “Latin American countries have started a new indebtedness process with the IMF.” In this sense, they warned that the IMF “will certainly mean short-term relief to face a very adverse external front, but that it certainly has its counterpart in the conditions of macroeconomic policies and their known consequences.”

However, we have not yet entered into a critical debt process. This is not so much because Latin American countries are not looking for it, but because of the very lukewarm response of multilateral organizations like the IMF to the pandemic. In this sense, the emergency financing lines provided by the organization have been of low magnitude and, for the time being, leave out the countries of the region with a low credit rating. Despite everything, this does not mean that the Fund has not returned to the region. The IMF has had a process of rapprochement with Latin America since the economic crisis of 2008 with loans of $57 billion to Argentina in 2018 and $4.5 billion to Ecuador.

It will depend on how much the countries in the region will need financing as a result of the pandemic to see if the IMF’s role as a financier in Latin America will be strengthened. One of the main changes is a nuance of the Washington Consensus, the traditional series of measures promoted by the IMF, the World Bank and the U.S. Treasury Department. The Washington Consensus pursues trade liberalization, fiscal adjustment, privatization policies and deregulation of the capital market, among others.

The Fund made a very strong self-criticism of the Washington Consensus. For example, now the reforms are not necessarily all implemented and, in some cases, the Fund recognized the importance of capital control by the State, the importance of counter-cyclical policies and the reduction of inequality through progressive fiscal policies. The organization is now more flexible and has started to allow government officials to participate in designing reform plans. It is likely this was allowed only after the IMF received massive criticism for choking Greece economically between 2008 and 2018 that tarnished the Fund’s image and reputation all around the world.

The Fund essentially has become more cunning and has learned that the same economic changes in all countries is counterproductive, not only in terms of economic results, but also in terms of the institution’s legitimacy. This change does not mean that it is a new institution, it still very much is the IMF with an orthodox bias, focused on liberalization policies. The IMF continues to have a preference for structural reforms, such as social security reform, tax reform, labor reform and, in some cases, trade reform.

In Georgieva’s address to the governments of Latin America and the Caribbean, the IMF will maintain its supposed solid commitment to the region in terms of capacity-building and economic policy advice. In this context, the IMF director asked Latin American countries to be able to reorient policies when the time comes to help workers get back to work and asked them to do so using fiscal stimulus with prudence. In her message, Georgieva said that as shocks dissipate, fiscal soundness and debt sustainability must become priorities for economic policy. However, it appears rather that Georgieva is attempting to prepare Latin America to once again be dominated by the IMF.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

August 26, 2020 Posted by | Economics | , | 1 Comment