David Cameron's Diary

Dear Diary,

I’m still in my Vampire costume as I write this, soaked in that £25,000 bottle of wine that George was spraying us with.

He used up a whole case of it. Showing off.

He is an idiot, even though he is Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Like that Hungarian ass who was trying to do a line of cocaine on an open double-decker bus. Of course it kept blowing away, but he kept trying, saying “I can afford it!” Now he’s saying I fucked up relations with the EU! Or was it the Polish ass who said it. I’m so sozzled I can’t tell!

But to get back to George. He really is an idiot. Can you believe he bought a staffer to a strictly Bullers Only party, and a foreigner by the sound of him. Chabra or something.

Did you forget the rules, George? I said to him when he appeared with Chabra in tow at the door of Number 10.

No, but he’s writing a book about me, so he needs to know that I’m not just a policy wonk. Also, I needed someone to carry the wine, George said, leaving me aghast.

Wine wasn’t all Chabra was carrying. After a while, when we were in the middle of the “Vee vant Blood!” soft-shoe number, I saw him surreptitiously clicking away with his i-phone.

I sidled up under Boris to tell him what was happening. Boris was swinging from the chandelier and came crashing down when he realized what I was saying.

He dusted off the glass from his hair and said not to worry. He was quite drunk, but then he almost always is, so that’s neither here nor there.

I have powers as Mayor, he said. I’ll see our foreign friend loses his phone before he can do any damage. Give me a moment to call Scotland Yard.

That made me think of another bit of shit George got me into. Andy Coulson. The phone hacker at the News of the World. It was George who got me to give him a job as my Communications Director.

Why did you do that! I screamed at him when Coulson’s shit hit the fan.

Well I was just returning a favour, George said, quite unfazed. Andy put a lid on that story about me doing cocaine with Natalie Rowe, so I know he’s got his heart in the right place.

That reminded me William had said something kind about Coulson too. He was helpful in putting a lid on that story about William spending nights at a hotel “occasionally” with one of his male staffers.

And that in turn reminded me how Tony’s rumored affair with the Chinese Murdoch also had a lid put on it. Although it didn’t stay on for long, for Rupert found out and dumped the woman. He wasn’t going to keep her after he found out. Even if the other man was a former British PM!

Perhaps Andy was pretty effective after all. Although he never did anything about that cartoonist fellow who always draws me with a condom on my head. Well, I guess we can’t win every time. Maybe I can get him a Queen’s pardon.

I was just getting back in the swing of the “Vee vant blood” routine when that greasy Pole Sikorsky hove into sight and said “You really fucked up on Juncker! What were you thinking!”

I threw a champagne bottle at his head but missed. It hit one of the servers and knocked him out.

What do you mean telling the Press I fucked up, I screamed at him. Juncker’s a drunk, you know that. He has cognac for breakfast. What’s he going to do at the head of the EU?

Sikorsky grinned. Anything Angela tells him. It’s the truth. He flung a butter dish back at my head. I ducked and it bounced off a table and out of the window.

You think it’s a joke I said grimly. But if the EU doesn’t reform, we’re going to pull out!

Only the dumb fascists in Hungary believe that nonsense about reform, Sikorski said. The rest of us know you just want the EU to back off on banking regulations so you can continue laundering money.

Well, is that a bad thing, I asked him. Why do you think we’re all so rich? Where would we be without The City to launder all our organized crime money?

I’m rich honestly Sikorski said, proving just how dumb he is.

You can’t get rich honestly I said, letting my deep scorn show. Do you know how much money from international organized crime we launder? Eight to 15 per cent of world GDP, that’s how much.

Sikorski was impressed . How much is that, he asked.

About $4 trillion to $7 trillion every year, I said. You can’t make that kind of money without drinking the blood of millions of people. Why do you think the Bullers love the “Vee vant blood” routine? It’s what we do. What we’ve done for five hundred years. African blood, Arab blood. Indian blood. American blood. We drink it all. That's why the Vampire is our cultural creation, why the "License to Kill" is our national fantasy.

American blood? Sikorsky was intrigued.

Well, the Red Indians we massacred to begin with, and then all the wars the Yanks fought to save democracy! They’re like a bunch of hounds after a stuffed rabbit.

Sikorski was not convinced.

If you're making all that money, why is your Foreign Office writing to corporations to sponsor the Queen's birthday party?

We don't want the British people knowing about our black money, you idiot! If we're sticking them with all kinds of austerities do we want them to know we're making trillions on the side?

Then what exactly do you use the money for?

To run the world. Consider the ISIS take-over of Iraq. You really think 4000 of them are winning against an Iraqi army of 70,000 without our help? We’re paying off the Iraqi generals big time. Just as we greased the Taliban to power in Afghanistan. It leaves the Yanks mystified every time.

But why?

Sikorski is dumb as a post. No wonder there are so many Polish jokes.

It’s what I was saying, I explained patiently. We need war. Blood. With the developing countries rising so fast, we need to pull them down and safeguard our money laundering and drug trafficking businesses. We do that by creating conflicts all over Africa, Asia and Latin America. The Chinese are working with us. They need diversions too. War works every time. Hatred sells. Violence works! That’s the secret of our success. Always has been. That’s why Vampire parties have always been a Buller tradition.

Vee vant blood!

 

Money Launderers Discover Their Inner Policemen

In a comic opera turn of events those who run the global money-laundering system are declaring their sudden discovery of the need to oppose themselves.

Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain has written to other European Union leaders, urging that the June G-8 Summit he is hosting initiate "radical" international action to crack down on tax evasion and avoidance.

His Minister for Middle East affairs, Alistair Burt, told the Deutsch Press Agency (DPA) that the British Foreign Office would create a special team to help with the return of stolen assets to the “Arab Spring” countries. (The former dictator of Tunisia is reported to have decamped with about a ton of gold.)

Prime Minister Juliana O’Connor-Connolly of the Cayman Islands (among the most active of offshore tax havens), wrote to her British counterpart pledging support for the initiative on a multilateral automatic exchange of tax information. She called on other national leaders to participate in the system to “ensure efficiencies of cost and resources,” and “avoid the risk of multiple competing standards.” (More plainly, Don't bother investigating the specifics of who actually drained trillions of dollars from developing countries.)

Juergen Fitschen, executive head of Deutsche Bank AG declared on German Radio that there would be "zero tolerance" for tax evasion. "Tax evasion is a criminal offense. That says it all," he said.

The reason for all this righteous zeal?

The secrecy surrounding the payments system of the global black market is falling away under pressure from the American and German governments; also, developing countries, newly aware of their losses, are raising the issue in international forums.

African countries especially, have made it a joint priority to stop the haemorrhage and have established a high-level panel on the matter chaired by former South African President Thabo Mbeki. They have made it a key target of their post-Millennium Development Goals (MDG) development agenda.

Meanwhile, the super-rich around the world have been making their own adjustments to the loss of hideouts. Businessweek reported last week on how a number of Russian and Western European billionaires were running for cover. Reuters carried a story saying wealthy Americans were filing tax returns showing their long-standing secret accounts as if they were newly opened.

But does all this mean the end of money laundering and the Global Black Market?

Not by a long shot.

Last week Indian mass media ignored or reported sotto voce that British telephone giant Vodafone would be partnering with ICICI bank to introduce the “mpesa” in India. The “mpesa” is Vodafone’s system for moving money over mobile telephones, and it can undercut all efforts to make financial institutions responsible for knowing their clients and monitoring suspicious transactions.

Which part of the government authorized the launch of the “mpesa” system in India has not been reported, but the Finance Ministry cannot be without a role.

There should be an investigation to see who specifically was involved.

Did they take into consideration that ICICI bank is currently being probed for money laundering? Or that Vodafone’s massive tax problems with the Income Tax authorities centre on the use of tax haven funds to buy into the Indian mobile market? Or that the company it acquired was a joint venture of ESSAR, which was caught funding the Naxalites, and Hutchinson Whampoa, the Hong Kong conglomerate with close links to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA)?

The “mpesa” mobile phone currency would make it impossible to track the funding of violent individuals and groups in India.

There are many other ways that money can be laundered and moved, and the government should consider carefully the implications of “economic reforms” that make the country increasingly vulnerable to groups with a long record of international criminality.

Rather than pussy-foot around this issue, perhaps it is time to do some plain speaking to British governmental and corporate leaders.

Buckle Seat Belts! World Economy Going Off Cliff!

The world economy is about to fall off a cliff.

We've known that will happen ever since the 2008 failure of Lehman Brothers, but after massive interventions by Western central bankers saved the world economy from collapse then, there has been a desperate hope that happy times would return if everyone just believed in financial fairies. It is now clear that this will not work. 

All that governments have done since 2008 is kick the can down the road, and now they have run out of road. When banks in Cyprus open later today – if they open today – there will be a run and unavoidable contagion.

Whether or not that will send the world economy into a free fall will depend on how successfully European governments contain the situation. All over Europe there are contingency plans to deal with riot and disorder. In Washington, a delegation from London is reported to be in tense meetings with Pentagon brass who are tight-lipped about the agenda.

There are two reasons why tiny Cyprus will have a global impact. One is visible: the “deal” imposed on it by the European Union (read Germany), requiring a heavy 40% “tax” on bank deposits has demolished the foundation of trust necessary for the functioning of a modern banking sector, and it cannot be restored in the short term.

The second reason is that the crisis will hit one of the nodal points of the British-run global money-laundering system. What we are seeing is not an ordinary sovereign debt crisis but a power struggle pitting Germany and the United States against Britain’s criminal empire.

The global impact will come from the sudden collapse of confidence in Britain's capacity to manage the world's enormous stock of black money. That confidence has been dipping ever since the United States charged HSBC last year with money laundering and imposed a fine of nearly $2 billion on Britain's largest bank; the developments in Cypress will push it over a cliff.

Those who hold large undeclared funds in tax havens like Cyprus do so without benefit of official rules and guarantees. They have no legal way of getting their money back if those holding it throw up their hands and plead force majeure. Their only redress is violence. The Russian mafia, which is estimated to have some $19 billion in Cyprus, is probably behind the sudden "suicide" in London of former Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky. We should expect an increasing number of sudden deaths among money-men around the world. 

There will also be a range of other humungous developments as some $30 trillion in black assets freezes over. The huge Hedge funds that have kept commodity markets soaring through three years of recession in all developed countries will probably be less energetic. Prices of real estate, gold and oil will collapse. So will a great deal of luxury consumption. As recent surges in stock markets indicate, the in-crowd has realized that equities will be the safest haven; valuations can be expected to soar.

The Indian economy is among the best for investors to be in right now for it is driven mainly by domestic demand. This explains David Cameron’s two visits to India in the past year, Finance Minister Chidambaram’s stop-over in London as he returned from Davos, and the strange proposals he included in the 2013 budget.

The fall in commodity prices, especially energy, will be a boon for India, but the sailing will not be easy by any means. There will be an enormous amount of economic volatility -- perhaps hyper-inflation -- as black money seeks every which way to enter the legitimate economy. Without careful handling incoming financial flows could send the value of the Rupee skyrocketing. The Reserve Bank better have contingency plans in place to prevent successive waves of deflation and hyper-inflation from roiling our lives too violently. (This would be the right time for the government to float a new family of infrastructure bonds and turn a blind eye to the source of funds.)

There is also the chance that the British elite, in an apre moi le deluge mood, will use their Taliban/ISI proxies to set off a major crisis. A nuclear attack on India will bring down the whole global order and give the vampires a new lease of life.

If something cataclysmic like that does not happen, we can expect that when the dust settles there will be a new world economic order. The Euro probably will not be around. A handful of national currencies, especially those of the United States, Germany and India, might be the foundations of a new (fixed-rate?) international financial system. Britain, China and Japan could also be players if their heavily internationally dependent economies have not taken too severe a beating.

But before we get to that point it’s going to be a wild ride. Buckle your seat belts!

Reality Check for David Cameron's India Quest

Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain began his three-day visit to India by invoking the "huge ties" between the two countries of "history, language, culture and business."

One wonders which particular aspect of the shared history of the two nations he found supportive of his current quest for broadened economic linkages.

Could it be what the East India Company did  after bribing its way to control of Bengal, the richest province of Mughal India? Within a decade of the so-called "Battle of Plassey" (Pilashi) in 1757, Bengal lay in ruins. The destruction of its economy was so severe a third of the population, some five million people, died of starvation in the first of the great "man-made famines" British rule spread across India. A conservative estimate of the overall toll of such famines is 100 million.

Or perhaps Mr. Cameron found inspiring the theft of the fabled Kohinoor diamond after the British defeated the Sikhs almost a century later. Maharaja Ranjit Singh's 11-year old son went with the diamond to Britain where it became part of the "Crown Jewels" and he was comprehensively debauched with drugs and sex to disable his potential as a leader.

Or maybe the Prime Minister is enthralled by the post-1857 "pacification" that involved the indiscriminate slaughter of some 10 million civilians, men, women and children. 

Mr. Cameron's historic admission that the 1919 Jallianwalla Bagh massacre was a "deep shame" does not begin to address the long line of British atrocities in India, most of which remain officially unacknowledged. They are systematically ignored or downplayed even in works of history by British scholars supposedly engaged in the pursuit of truth.

That is true not just of the colonial era. There is no honest British account of the cold-blooded manipulation of communal violence that led to Partition, the killing of well over a million people and the biggest migration in history as 14 million people were forced from their ancestral lands.

Nor is there admission that Britain created Pakistan as its proxy in South Asia and that it is the real sponsor of the terrorist "war of a thousand cuts" against India.

Such denial is not to safeguard national pride and honor. It is to hide the fact that Britain has maintained its imperial interests in the region, and indeed, globally, without benefit of the apparatus of colonialism. This has been achieved primarily by keeping control of the illicit trade in drugs, which Britain pioneered in the 18th Century by exporting Indian opium to China. It is now far and away the most lucrative sector of the world economy, with revenues of over $500 billion annually.

In South Asia the control of the drug trade has involved the use of the ISI, Pakistan's notorious spy agency established in 1948 by a serving British Army officer, to godfather Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Together, they have kept Afghanistan as the lawless badlands necessary to produce opium; it now supplies over 90 percent of the world's illicit supply.   

Where Britain does not maintain operational control of drug trafficking, as in Latin America, it provides money laundering facilities. Last year American authorities slapped a $1.98 billion fine on HSBC, Britain's largest bank, after investigators discovered that it had been laundering billions of dollars of Mexican drug money into the United States. The fine made not a blip in the stock market value of HSBC shares because investors have known of its primary source of profit since traffickers established the company during Britain's 19th Century "Opium Wars" to force the drug into China.

An interesting sidelight to the increased American pressure on British money laundering is that the terrorist "Left" insurgency in Colombia that has for decades provided the cover for drug running, has sued for peace and is now engaged in talks with the government.

The global money laundering system Britain put in place as its colonies dwindled is the core element of its new Empire. It consists of a string of tax havens around the world operating with London as a global hub. The system now caters to all sorts of criminals, ranging from super-rich tax evaders and corporate bigwigs hiding the proceeds of mispricing of trade to mafiosi engaged in garden variety organized crime. 

The tax haven system washes an estimated $2 trillion annually into the "legitimate" world economy. According to a recent report from Washington-based Global Financial Integrity, an NGO headed by a former World Bank economist, it also drained about $6 trillion out of poor countries over the last decade . Adding up the estimates made by a number of experts indicates that the total of illicit assets in tax havens is some $30 trillion, double the GDP of the United States.

That massive pool of money generates the multi-billion dollar "hedge funds" that have made a travesty of free market mechanisms, especially commodity markets. Indians struggling with the ever increasing cost of petrol and diesel can blame it on hedge fund manipulations that have kept oil prices over $100 per barrel amidst the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. They can also blame the system for India's pandemic of mega scams: without a convenient way to stash black money the corrupt would be far less prone to steal on such a scale.

All this is becoming generally known because Germany and the United States, increasingly irate at the loss of billions of dollars in revenues to tax havens, have begun to push for change. Mr. Cameron's recent threats of a referendum that might take Britain out of the European Union is a response to pressure from Germany for uniform application of EU banking standards on all its members. The announcement last week that the next head of the Bank of England will be a Canadian is probably the result of pressure from the United States to clean up the City (financial center) of London.  

Against this background, Mr. Cameron's push for India to open up its financial sector to British investment should be seen as an invitation to national suicide. His vision of a string of "business centres" around the country to facilitate British-Indian trade should be seen in the same light.

So what is the future of the British-Indian "partnership"?

It is difficult to see how we can build one when Britain is using its proxies to subvert and destabilize India. Perhaps the only way to make a new beginning is to be utterly blunt about Indian perceptions of and expectations from Britain.

Britain should stop whitewashing its colonial record and consider the grim reality that its Empire was the bloodiest construct of power the world has ever seen. In Africa, Asia and the Americas no nation has been as oppressive of other races. Britain was by far the leading slave trader out of Africa and transporter of indentured labor out of Asia. It has killed with famine, sword and fire more people than Genghis Khan, Atilla the Hun, Hitler or Stalin. In the defense of its imperial interests it has precipitated two World Wars and is now presiding over an empire of crime that drains the poorest countries of their hard earned wealth. During the days of Empire and now, treachery has been a staple in Britain's international relations.

How can Britain respond to such criticism? 

At the minimum it can review its history books and initiate soul-searching among academic propagandists of the imperial record like Niall Ferguson, touted by The Times of London as the “most brilliant British historian of his generation.” A "Truth Commission" such as the one that eased South Africa out of the apartheid era might help. So could a national discourse on the value and meaning of life. In that journey of mind and spirit the British might find useful guides in the Sermon on the Mount, the Eightfold Path and the Bhagavad Gita.

In terms of state policy, a renewed British-Indian relationship will require Britain to withdraw support from terrorist groups and insurgencies, wind up its involvement in the drug trade, and stop running the global black market.

If all this seems a very tall order, it indicates how far Mr. Cameron's proposals stand from Indian perceptions of reality.

Occupy the Global Black Market!

The Times of India on 10 December had a front-page story explaining why Britain had refused to join a European Union deal to move towards closer economic cooperation. It said that Prime Minister David Cameron had been unable to “secure a halt in ongoing EU efforts to curb the City of London’s huge financial services sector.”

It quoted Cameron saying he had failed to get “safeguards” from EU colleagues. French premier Nicolas Sarkozy noted that the British had asked for “something we all judged unacceptable – for a protocol to be inserted into the treaty granting the United Kingdom a certain number of exonerations on financial services regulations.”

None of them – Cameron, Sarkozy or TOI – explained what exactly the British were trying to protect. A keyword Internet search yielded not a single story, Indian or foreign, that spelled out the matter.

This is not because the issue is too difficult to explain.

The City (financial center) of London is the Wild West of international finance, where drug runners, organized crime groups, dictators, mega-corporations and garden-variety tax cheats can all invest with the greatest of ease. What Cameron wanted to protect was Britain's role as the manager and epicenter of the global black market. Without exemption from EU regulations, that cannot continue.  

Among the many interesting questions that float around this situation is how, given the much touted “freedom of the Press” in democratic countries, this total media blackout has been achieved.

There are several factors. One is that the rich won’t talk about it, and the poor can't. Another is British propaganda presenting London as the center of virtuous “free enterprise.” A third is that most media bigwigs probably have a secret stash in some tax haven.

There is no one to bell the cat.

In this situation, the London Olympics offers civil society activists an unprecedented opportunity to draw attention to the black hole of criminality in The City. It would be a perfect time to launch "Occupy the Global Black Market!"

Clueless UN Debate

The United Nations is engaged in its annual "General Debate" in New York. It is the opening ritual of the gathering of the organization's 193 members, meant to map the world's problems and set the context for the work to be done in the next three months.


In theory, a "Report on the Work of the Organization" from the Secretary-General is meant to give focus and substance to the talk. That does not happen, for the Report has for decades been a scissors and paste job reflecting the morally challenged world view of weak-kneed UN bureaucrats.

As a result, the debate is a collection of national speeches, each centred on the concerns of the ruling elite, without coherence or focus. Attempts to give it focus by setting a "theme" for the debate ("mediation" this year), have been ineffective. The only focusing factor is media coverage by the major news agencies, all Western except for Xinhua, which caters to the global underdog with its own special blend of propaganda and (mis)information.

For the rest, the media, represented at the UN by some 600 correspondents (some more notional than real), report what they are paid for; that is to say, they report mainly for national outlets with very narrow interests.

Not surprisingly, the net result is a "debate" out of Bizzaro World, providing a fractured, incoherent view of a deeply troubled time.

In keeping with tradition, the debate began this year with speeches by Brazil (represented for the first time by a woman, newly elected President Dilma Rousseff), and the United States in the person of President Barack Obama, one sounding the keynotes for the underprivileged majority of the world's countries, the other the view of the most powerful member State.

The global media majors focused on one element in the US speech, Washington's refusal to back a bid by the Palestinian Observer Delegation to upgrade its membership to that of full statehood. They genuflected disbelievingly in the direction of Brazil's call for Security Council reform.

The coverage of the Palestine item was entirely without meaningful background. Not a single major spent any time on what the Palestine issue is really about, how it was manufactured, and the uses to which it has been put. It was as if they were covering a football game. Who ran the ball, who kicked in the goals. Except, of course, there are no goals in this endlessly futile game.

Not that the major interventions on the subject provided any historical perspective. Nicolas Sarkozy of France offered to host a time-bound negotiating process to resolve the problem of statehood without spending a second on the deeply negative French/British role in the region. Britain's David Cameron was similarly lacking in hindsight.

On another aspect of Britain's manipulative record in the region, he credited the UN (i.e. Britain and France), for avoiding a "Srebrenica" in Libya. He forgot to mention that Mouammar Gadhafi was a British proxy, replacing "King Idriss" who its Secret Intelligence Service had earlier placed on the throne of Libya.

In general, the debate was soporific.

Manmohan Singh made a pitch for international cooperation to face the current spate of global economic problems. It had as much impact as Antigua and Barbuda calling for compensation for the slave trade out of Africa.