We seem to have got ourselves embroiled in yet another war, leaving us trying to figure out just what happened when it’s too late to do anything about it. For a while, the world faced a dilemma of letting the people of Benghazi be slaughtered or let in NATO under a dark suspicion that their motive may not be humanitarian but oil. Was it really like that?
Analysts are working on it, but there were dire warnings in the UK Parliament against mission creep. It now seems that that is exactly what is happening. Surely, if the mission is to protect the population in an area, the remedy is not to send in the bombers, but to set up a UN protectorate and send in UN peace-keeping troops, under a mandate that allows them to do just that and nothing more.
The President of the Public Banking Institute, which campaigns for banking reform in the US, thinks that the motive may be to do with banking. Writing in Global Research, Ellen Brown reports on
“the odd fact that the Libyan rebels took time out from the rebellion in March to create their own central bank – this before they even had a government”.
It appears that the Central Bank of Libya is state owned, and that it has nearly 144 tons of gold. Retired US General Wesley Clark is reported to have said that after 9/11 there were plans to take out seven countries, including Iraq and Libya.
“What do these countries have in common?” asks Ellen Brown, “In the context of banking, one that sticks out is that none of them is listed among the 56 member banks of the Bank for International Settlements ... The most renegade of the lot could be Libya and Iraq”.
If wars are really manufactured for financial gain, then it makes sense to try to figure out how the rich and powerful operate, and that means looking fundamentally at the banking system.
I’ve been following the development of a group called Positive Money (http://www.positivemoney.org), which is campaigning in the UK for fundamental reform of the banking system.
At first I thought they wouldn’t stand a chance against the gigantic vested interests of the top bankers, so I went to a public meeting at Oxford University on ‘The Future of Banking’ at which Ben Dyson of Positive Money was one of the speakers, in order to hear what the mainstream economic gurus had to say about his ideas.
I was expecting them to say that they had already studied such proposals before, but they didn’t. It was as if it was all new to them, too. I was interested to hear that the Governer of the Bank of England himself is sympathetic to reform. “Of all the ways of organising banking, the worst is the one we have today”, he is quoted as saying. Positive Money have opened up an office in London, and are, or have been, looking for volunteers to man it. They are engaged in research, education, and promotion of ideas on banking reform.
I went to a meeting in London on 5th April, which they were videoing for the purposes of producing a DVD. Ben Dyson explained the problems of the current banking system, and how it is open to abuse.
One statement that amazed me was that most of the mainstream economists, including many financial journalists, don’t understand how the fractional reserve system works. I suspect in many cases it’s just that they don’t want to.
Watch 'Money as Debt'
In the subsequent discussion, I said that I had first had it explained to me by people I happened to meet in Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square on 9/11 truth demonstrations and Iraq war demonstrations. I had been amazed to hear that banks just create money out of thin air whenever a loan is made. They were telling me of the forthcoming economic crisis long before it actually happened. It would be contrived, they said, and that is how it appears to have been.
I recently saw the film ‘Inside Job’ about the financial corruption leading to the economic crisis:
From Academy Award nominated filmmaker, Charles Ferguson (“No End In Sight”), comes INSIDE JOB, the first film to expose the shocking truth behind the economic crisis of 2008. The global financial meltdown, at a cost of over $20 trillion, resulted in millions of people losing their homes and jobs.
Even the credit rating agencies seem to have been corrupted, which is very worrying, considering that the fete of Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Spain, and any other country with a vulnerable economy is largely determined by such agencies.
Positive Money are now asking people to write to their MPs, and one early MP to speak out is 9/11 truther Michael Meacher, who agrees with two reforms:
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"One is that the bank payments system is separated from risky lending activity" and the other "is that the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) should influence money supply, not by the indirect and uncertain method of setting interest rates, but directly through the creation of new money when necessary, though only within strict constraints to avoid inflationary and deflationary pressure."
It seems that banking reform, because of the high impact that the economic crisis is having on everyday life, is getting reasonable coverage in the mainstream media where other topics, such as what really happened in 9/11 and 7/7 remain taboo (although Mr Meacher did write the foreward to the revised edition of David Griffin's "The New Pearl Harbour"). It seems, though, that the government will be more concerned in appearing to do something than actually doing something.
Positive Money have produced a video response to the government’s Independent Banking Commission’s interim report, saying that it gives a biased and misleading summary of the proposals that they spent three hourse explaining to them.
Just after I had sent out my last newsletter I heard that Muad’Dib, the author of the ‘7/7 Ripple Effect’ video, had been released from Wandsworth prison on bail. This was a surprise, since the previous day he had been refused the right to attend his own bail hearing. So we invited him to an informal meeting of the London ‘9/11 Keep Talking’ group, which we held one afternoon because of a curfew being imposed. We heard how the prison authorities had been making excuses for not taking Muad’Dib to court, but eventually were forced to do so by the judge who “got serious” with them. It was also a good meeting from the point of view of exchanging information on 7/7, even though Muad’Dib had not been able to keep up with the inquest hearings from his prison cell.
Later, he was interviewed on Kevin Barrett’s Truth Jihad Radio, which is run as part of American Freedom Radio. He explained how he had sent a padded envelope of DVDs to the court administrators. On receiving it, they called in the bomb squad, and then the anti-terrorist branch of the police.
“They’re treating me as though I’m a terrorist”, he said, “It’s absolutely ridiculous”.
His trial is set for 9 May, three days after the verdict of the 7/7 inquest is to be announced. I see that there are legal procedures for submitting information to a court of law under ‘amicus curiae’; you can’t just send the material to the court.
But to get a conviction, the prosecution would have to prove intent to pervert the course of justice, which is not proven merely by showing that the accused has not followed proper procedures. I should have thought that common sense would dictate that the court administrators would merely send a copy of the legal procedures to anyone approaching them. It’s not as if he had approached jurors individually. Muad’Dib told us that others had sent the DVDs to the court and had not been arrested, so clearly he was arrested because he was the author. I got a bit concerned at the meeting, when Muad’Dib said that he was going to challenge the jurisdiction of the court on a religious argument concerning the authenticity of the coronation stone. But then he assured us that if that failed, he would have proper legal representation in the court to defend him on the specific charge. The question of the coronation stone doesn’t mean much to me personally, since I don’t believe in divine rights of the monarchy anyway. I see state religion as being a pretext for power rather than an authority for power. But then, if they justify themselves on religious grounds, I suppose they should expect to be challenged on religious grounds. It seems to me that the court will reject Muad’Dib’s argument on the grounds that it is not in their interests to accept it.
The people who really matter in the power structure are the people who control the wealth of the nation. They are now generally believed to be the power behind the monarchy. They are also widely believed to be the people behind the current economic crisis and lots of other things.
Two days before Muad’Dib’s interview on Truth Jihad Radio, I was interviewed on the contents of my previous newsletter, in which I had reported Hillary Clinton’s statement that they, whoever they were, were losing the information war.
Kevin Barratt did a nice write-up on his website before the interview, quoting the relevant text from my newsletter. I felt quite honored to be interviewed on an American radio channel about Hillary Clinton.
Essentially, if they are losing the information war, then we in the truth movement are winning it. But it’s not quite that simple, because here in the UK the truth movement seems to lurch from crisis to crisis, and the truthers seem to be plagued by various types of trolling by enigmatic people.
During the interview I gave an example of how people can be accepting of authority, and not see the obvious, even when it is presented before their own eyes.
The phenomenon, together with the sense of discomfort they experience, is called ‘cognitive dissonance’, and it’s the same whether we’re talking about the collapse of Building 7 of the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, or the financial chart of Esperanto Association of Britain, which shows the opposite of what members had been led to believe.
I went to the Annual General Meeting of Esperanto Association of Britain, which was held during the British Esperanto Congress in Eastbourne. I was a presidential candidate, standing on a platform of openness, though few would have known it because my election statement wasn’t published this year. They seem to get everything wrong all the time, then blame it on cock-up theory or play dumb.
Before going to Eastbourne, I sent an email round to the Keep Talking group to ask for their impressions of the description on the congress website. I got just one answer, which stated: “Language buffs should go for it if your web page gets an airing ... I’m not into languages at all though, so my judgement might be marred by a lack of awareness”. Exactly. You wouldn’t think that the Esperanto movement was meant to be a popular movement promoting an easy-to-learn second language for people who aren’t necessarily into languages. They’ve presented it as if it were some sort of deviant Klingon club with a pussy cat on the committee. Their congress theme of ‘Lumturoj, Lumuloj, Lumaĵoj’ wasn’t translated on the English-language page, and if it had been it wouldn’t have thrown much light on the matter. It means: ‘Light houses, luminants, illuminations’. If the topic had had anything to do with what the association existed for I might even have gone to the congress. When I was there for the AGM I told two people that I hadn’t joined the congress because no programme had been published. They both looked non-plussed. One of them was on the organising committee and insisted that you first join, then you get the programme. What’s happened to these people? They would have been amongst the first to insist on common sense until recently.
Now if you look back to how those of us who were organising the ‘Renewal’ congress of 2007 were castigated by the editor of The British Esperantist, you have to wonder what’s going on.
We had at that stage published quite a full programme, focusing on renewal of the Esperanto movement in Britain, yet the Esperanto association itself was putting out that we only had a ‘vague programme’ and that there was little on renewal in it, saying that at the end of January the organisation of the May congress seemed ‘still chaotic’. It was hypocritical negative propaganda undermining the concept of ‘renewal’, and was put out with the backing of the president. If you want a case study to see how brainwashing works, you couldn’t do better than to study the Esperanto movement in Britain. At the AGM the president did, to his credit, allow me to read out my 200 word election statement, but I had prepared a five-minute address as presidential candidate, which I was not allowed to present, because it was “not on the agenda”. No discussion on the candidates was allowed. That idea was introduced in 2002 when there were vigorous protests from members, but the then Director of Development, who chaired the meeting during the voting, insisted that he had strict instructions from the Management Committee. So this year I handed out copies of my election address to members as they were voting. It pointed out that two of the people they were just about to elect to the committee had been openly castigating the objectives of the Esperanto movement. One of them had written obsene stuff about not giving “two f**ks about harassing MPs into accepting Esperanto”, and the other had sabotaged proper discussion about furthering Esperanto in the Yahoo email group esper-brit. I had been trying to warn of negative things going on covertly in the Management Committee, but now they seem to be openly admitting it. This reminds me of the report by the think tank DEMOS, ‘The Power of Unreason’ which I reported on in my newsletters last year. They were essentially saying that the public are now so brainwashed that it is no longer necessary to infiltrate groups covertly when you can do it overtly. That’s exactly what seems to be happening. I had eventually managed to persuade the editor of the association’s newsletter to publish my financial chart, which had brought about the personal attacks and condemnations for ‘behaviour’ by the president, Professor John Wells, after I had delivered it to him in December 2005. It showed that, contrary to popular belief, the capital of the association had not been ‘eaten up’ before the sale of their property in 1999, but had been rising dramatically. I had expected to be ignored again, but this time I was delighted to receive a full page of invective, in which he stated that he would consider publishing an article including the chart if it wasn’t critical of the committee.
So I sent him a purely historical article, and he published it. After the AGM I wrote the whole thing up in the Esperanto web newspaper La Libera Folio.
The new treasurer has added an agressive comment, saying that she was a professional accountant, and “as a trustee of the association, I of course have already studied and, to use Ian’s preferred expression, ‘researched’ the accounts of EAB”, adding that her professional opinion is that everything is in order and that there has been no fraud. I suppose a new treasurer would by the end of her first week, as a matter of course, have checked all the accounts of the association back to about the time she was in nappies. Yet no-one was suggesting that the accounts weren’t in order; I had merely compared them with what members were being led to believe at the time.
Last November, the association’s secretary, Dr David Kelso, disappeared without trace in the hills of Calabria. The President, in his election statement, stated that David Kelso should now be presumed dead.
Yet the statistics from the Missing Persons Bureau give a 90% probability of a missing adult being alive, and a 64% probability of having preplanned his own disappearance, perhaps in order to take on a new identity. So why should the President want members to believe he is dead?
I wrote this up in La Libera Folio, and added in previously published material on the problems of the association. This caused something of a storm. A retired lawyer told me the other day that he thought there was something weird about the Kelso case. Normally, in his experience, you would expect such a disappearence to be widely reported, but in this case it was as if people were uninterested.
Also, he said, you would expect the police to be contacting virtually everyone who knew him. “Would that include me?”, I asked. “Definately”, he replied, “That’s their job”. I suppose from the police’s point of view it could be potentially an investigation of murder, abduction or concealment. Any decent investigation would quickly have revealed that David Kelso had been a top civil servant who took early retirement and then became heavily involved in a voluntary organisation, where he became involved in some sort of major dispute for five years before his disappearance. Of course they would have been contacting people.
This makes me think of the failure of Thames Valley Police to open a murder investigation into the death of Dr David Kelly, on which I have reported in previous newsletters.
I am particularly concerned because Thames Valley Police is the police force for my area. Several years ago I reported to my local police station the apparent theft of a thousand pounds from a charity based in Oxford; I had been following the story as editor of the now defunct news website ‘Esperanto Britain’. The administrator of the charity was reluctant to contact the police herself, but agreed to my doing it. I was amazed that as soon as I mentioned Esperanto they played dumb. So I tried the Oxford police station and they did the same. I had at that stage no thoughts of the possibility that there could be some sort of blacklist of taboo topics. It’s all fascinating stuff when you follow through how it works. And, of course, it can happen in any social movement that is promoting something that the Establishment doesn’t want to happen. It tells us how propaganda works at the microlevel, which is really important to understand if we want to preserve democracy at all levels. There must be something resiliant about Esperanto. “There must be something irresistable about it” said the Polish ambassador to the UK at the opening of Esperanto House in Barlaston in 2002. Indeed, it took over a century to do to the Esperanto movement what it took less than a decade to do to the 9/11 truth movement. The problems of the Esperanto movement and the 9/11 Truth Movement are essentially the same: most people want to believe what they are told by authority, however ridiculous it may be. A hundred years ago, when the Esperantists were complaining of ‘fraud and treachery’, there was no talk of ‘paranoia’ or ‘conspiracy theories’. I first became aware of ‘paranoia’ following the resignation of the president of the Universal Esperanto Association, Professor Ivo Lapenna, in 1974, when John Wells – yes the same John Wells – told me: “Lapenna is paranoid”. I was puzzled about that, but put it out of my mind until Autumn 2004, when I had asked John Wells for a chat, and he went into histrionics saying “You are childish and like Lapenna”. Then in December 2005, on seeing my financial chart, he said: “Ian is paranoid”. Now we all know what ‘paranoid’ means: it says more about the speaker than the accused. It seems that a whole set of psychological vocabulary has been brought into force since the end of the Second World War. Breaking that now seems to me to be of the highest priority in winning the information war. They seem to be succeeding in the US. Can we do that here in the UK?
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