OIL FOR EUROS

Finally, a long time after it became a well-known topic for discussion on the Internet and private newsletters, the threatened switch from the American dollar to Euros has featured in a mainstream newspaper. The Sydney Morning Herald, (22/4/03) carried an article from Washington headed MUSLIMS EYE EURO AS NEW OIL CURRENCY. The article pointed out that since 1901, whether it was Alaska, Norway or Bahrain, today's customers pay for oil in US dollars. It continued:
"But when the United States launched its military attack against Iraq last month, many Muslim clerics began demanding that Arab countries sell oil for euros, not US dollars. That move could send shock waves through the world oil market and the US economy. Newspaper columnists and antiwar activists in countries from Morocco to Indonesia have now rallied behind the sentiments shouted in a Nigerian street protest witnessed by a Wall Street Journal reporter this week: "Euro yes! Dollar no!" The author pointed out the tremendous benefits accruing to Americans in having their unit of currency in demand worldwide by importers and exporters. This gives the US consumer a loaded advantage in cheaper imports, and forces nations with excess US dollars to seek investments within the US.

He pointed to the change that occurred in 2000:
"…When Arabs started looking for ways to harm the US economy in the 1970s, there was no real competitor to the US dollar. This changed on January 1, 2000, when about 300 million Europeans in 12 nations exchanged their national currencies for the euro. This campaign against petrodollars was launched by Iraq's ousted leader Saddam Hussein himself. In September 2000, his regime announced it would no longer accept dollars for oil being sold under the United Nations' "oil-for-food" program. A government statement said that to confront the "daily American Zionist aggression", oil would have to be paid for in euros. While that move had a negligible impact on the US economy, it gave Iraq a boost when the euro appreciated by 30 per cent against the US dollar in recent months.

Now that the US military forces control Iraq, that nation is expected to once again accept greenbacks for oil. But if other Arab countries make the switch to euros, or even to a dollar-euro blend, the entire global oil industry would become less profitable …." All of which explains a lot; for instance, why the United States is so keen to preclude the United Nations from any role in post-war reconstruction; and why millions of US dollars have been rushed into Iraq to provide a currency unit to get people working.

One unconfirmed Internet article claims that a significant development is taking shape in Iraq - a gradual strengthening of the old Saddam Hussein Dinar against the Greenback. Shortly after hostilities ended the Dinar was practically worthless. Now it has strengthened significantly. If this report is confirmed, could it be that the Islamic clerics, who are gradually asserting their authority over ordinary Iraqi people, are launching an initiative to 'sideline' the Greenback as a viable currency?
In which case the US military administration will quickly become an unwanted insignificance, if it isn't so already.

It is patently obvious that the Achilles Heel of the otherwise invincible United States is its financial debt and its vastly overstretched currency. Once the Islamic world understands this - and leaders like Malaysia's Dr Mahathir have been pointing to the fact for some time - the United States money barons will meet a foe immune to "weapons of mass destruction".

On 19 August 2002 a conference was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the International Conference on Stable and Just Monetary Systems. From this it emerged that three Islamic countries intend to trade between themselves in "Gold Dinars". The GD will not exist in physical form, being merely defined in terms of gold. New Zealander Colin Whitmill reported:
This is their way of releasing the stranglehold which the IMF has over them. More Muslim countries are expected to follow suit when feasibility aspects have been resolved…"

The 300 male academics and bankers who attended from all over the world were boosted to 450 by large numbers of women who had heard that the proposals of the British Christian leader Peter Challen - one of the speakers - included ways of financially empowering destitute women in the Third World. Papers from the Conference - including Challen's - are being sent to Islamic centers in many countries. (This last information courtesy New Zealand On Target, March/April 2003).

IMPORTED SLAVES

A Press Release from Senator Len Harris, (Queensland) dated April 23, claimed that Telstra has imported Indian IT contractors to work in Australia. He points out that this is a precursor and direct result of the World Trade Organisation's GATS (General Agreement in Trade and Services) He said:
"GATS specifically allows workers from overseas to come into Australia on a temporary basis and provide a service. Mode 4 of the GATS refers to international mobility or 'the movement of natural persons'. He added: "GATS is all about labour mobility, moving cheap third world labour around the globe. It's the modern version of the day labourer.

It is interesting to note also that under mode 4, 'temporary stay' is not defined, a temporary stay could be renewed indefinitely …. The reported scenario at Telstra could happen in any of the service sectors that GATS defines. These include: business services, communications, construction and engineering, distribution, education, environment, financial, health, tourism and travel, recreation, culture, sporting and transport services. …. GATS removes the national interest test, which has traditionally allowed Australian companies to favour other Australian companies. If a foreign company can provide the same service cheaper than an Australian company, then under GATS, the foreign company gets the contract …."

The average Australian has never heard of GATS. Most international arrangements are kept at a level of obscurity and secrecy generally beyond the man and woman in the street. But asked whether foreign workers should be allowed to work for lower wages in Australia, the vast majority would have a definite opinion. It is quite clear our Federal Government is involved in international arrangements without in any way spelling them out or consulting the Australian people.

TURNING BLACK INTO WHITE - COSTELLO'S BUDGET

The Tricks of Treasurers have been changed into a new art form. A first look at the Budget which was brought down last night leads straight to incredulity. This morning's headlines scream "TAX CUTS!" There's been a little 're-arranging'. But tax-cuts? What a joke!

The figures reveal that Direct Tax will be increased from $90.3 billion (2002-03) to $95.6 billion (2003-04) a 4.8% increase.
Indirect Tax will increase from $27.1 billion (2002-03) to $27.5 billion (2003-04), a 1.4% increase. This does not include such things as Fringe Benefits Tax, Agricultural levies, and a number of other taxes.

Total Tax Receipts, direct and indirect, will rise from $159.8 billion (2002-03) to $166.5 billion (2003-04) a 4.2% increase. That's a rise of about $350 per head of population, or $7 per week for each living Australian.

This does not include the GST, which the Commonwealth Government still refuses to include in its own Budget figures, against all traditional accounting standards. The Australian Financial Review (14/5/03), said:
" …. The budget papers said total GST revenue for the states in 2002-03 was about $1.3 billion higher than expected, reaching $30.5 billion …. That caps an average annual growth of 9.3 per cent in the four years since the GST was introduced….." Add the GST onto other areas of direct and indirect taxation, and total tax receipts are now $197 billion - near enough to a nice, round $10,000 for every man, woman and child in Australia, or $40,000 for the average Mum, Dad and 2 kids.

On top of this must be added remaining State taxes and Local Government rates. We are still suffering the highest taxing government in Australia's history. Is it any wonder that average household debt in Australia is now 130 per cent of household income? Ordinary battlers - and there are more and more of them - are being bankrupted to keep our politicians and bureaucrats in the style to which they have become accustomed. This vast array of imposts is - every dollar of it - costed into prices; of labour, goods and services.

The increase in wages, extorted out a naturally-reluctant employer group, delivers hardly anything to ordinary wage earners. But government has its hand out for the inevitable 'bracket creep', which it sees as an anticipated bonus on its own tax estimates. Aspects of this will be exposed by an agitated Opposition, which wants to cash in without in any way challenging the whole top-heavy edifice of debt and tax, which is near enough to toppling over. We can expect plenty of rhetoric from Simon Crean and Bob McMullan about the plight of low income Australia. But, when it comes down to it, all they want to do is to re-arrange the allocation of taxes to favour their own programme.

Costello will probably get away with this tissue of deceit - until an inevitable moment of decision exposes the mess that is the real Australia. There is now open speculation about an early election. If the Senate knocks back any items of expenditure, it will be on for young and old.

IT'S ALL IN THE NAME…

I met her after many years. When we first met nearly thirty years ago, she was a young girl working alongside folk such as the League's South Australian state director, Frank Bawden. Theirs was the task of helping those who had fled from Rhodesia with nought but the clothes on their backs and what little money they could manage to get out. She is again helping those who have recently fled Zimbabwe with nought but the clothes on their backs. Her task is to organise food, clothing and shelter.

I thought Australians should hear from a source, other than the established media, as to what is going on in Zimbabwe and asked could she arrange a speaker. She declined. She reminded me the folk still have relatives living in Zimbabwe and they would be in great danger of retaliation and revenge by Mugabe's Marxist goons. I should have known better. Married to a Latvian, I knew all about the post-WW2 migrants' fears for their relatives back in the home country, living in "Uncle Joe" Stalin's Marxist paradise.

The younger generation need to understand the forces that were at work against that sturdy little nation of Rhodesia, now called Zimbabwe. They need to understand who betrayed them and why. Two of the best writers of the time were Douglas Reed and Ivor Benson.

Journalist and author Douglas Reed wrote that not only had he been in the position in Vienna in 1936, to warn of the coming Second World War, but found himself doing it again in Salisbury, Rhodesia in 1966. Reed wrote that ten years before, a major war beginning in Africa was inconceivable. Africa was a continent of order. It was steadily moving to an improving future for all its peoples under the colonial powers, as they pursued the established policy of gradually uplifting the tribes-people towards an increasing part in the management of affairs.

Only one power in the world admittedly desired war. Lenin, in 1920, decreed that the expulsion of the colonial powers from their territories was vital to the achievement of world communism. In the years 1960-66 Western 'liberals' openly supported this Leninist aim. This partnership, indeed, between the governments of the "free world" and communism, their professed enemy, is the basic fact of the years 1960-1966 in Africa. Only when that is understood does the picture become plain of what has happened, and is now happening.

Further reading: "Far and Wide" & "Grand Design" by Douglas Reed.
"Message from Southern Africa" & "Truth out of Africa" & "Undeclared War: the Struggle for Africa" & "The Way of Dispossession" by Ivor Benson. All books are available from League Book Services.

PEOPLE AND POLITICS - SHARON'S BANTUSTANS

From: ReporterNoteBook@aol.com 14/5/2003 by Akiva Eldar

"During his visit two weeks ago to Israel, former Italian prime minister Massimo D'Alema hosted a small group of Israelis - public figures and former diplomats - to a dinner at a Jerusalem hotel. The conversation quickly turned to the conciliatory interviews Prime Minister Ariel Sharon gave to the press for their Independence Day editions. One of the Israelis, of the type for whom it's second nature, no matter who is in government, to explain and defend Israeli policy, expressed full confidence in Sharon's peace rhetoric. He said the prime minister understands the solution to the conflict is the establishment of a Palestinian state beside Israel.

The former premier from the Italian left said that three or four years ago he had a long conversation with Sharon, who was in Rome for a brief visit. According to D'Alema, Sharon explained at length that the Bantustan model was the most appropriate solution to the conflict.
The defender of Israel quickly protested. "Surely that was your personal interpretation of what Sharon said." D'Alema didn't give in. "No, sir, that is not interpretation. That is a precise quotation of your prime minister."

Supplementary evidence backing D'Alema's story can be found in an expensively produced brochure prepared for Tourism Minister Benny Elon, who is promoting a two-state solution - Israel and Jordan. Under the title "The Road to War: a tiny protectorate, overpopulated, carved up and demilitarized," the Moledet Party leader presents "the map of the Palestinian state, according to Sharon's proposal."
Sharon's map is surprisingly similar to the plan for protectorates in South Africa in the early 1960s. Even the number of cantons is the same - 10 in the West Bank (and one more in Gaza).

Dr. Alon Liel, a former Israeli ambassador to South Africa, notes that the South Africans only managed to create four of their 10 planned Bantustans. The Bantustan model, says Liel, was the ugliest of all the tricks used to perpetuate the apartheid regime in most of South Africa's territory. By 1986, unrest in the Bantustans turned into ongoing rioting and terror, which descended into coups in the so-called independent regimes, and South African intervention. The minuscule support the Bantustan governments did enjoy evaporated, so by January 1994, they were finally dismantled and became integrated into the united South Africa of black majority rule. No country recognized the Bantustans nor did any drop embargoes against South Africa.

But veteran leaders of the black struggle against apartheid remember that business people from Israel and Taiwan were the only foreigners who developed business relations with the Bantustan governments. The permission given to the largest of the Bantustans, Bophutatswana, to open a diplomatic office in Tel Aviv infuriated American opponents of the apartheid regime, including Senator Ted Kennedy, and some of the Jewish congressmen of the time.

An Israeli who spent many years nurturing Israeli relations with Africa was also at the dinner hosted by the Italian prime minister.He said that whenever he happened to encounter Sharon, he would be interrogated at length about the history of the protectorates and their structures.

Powell as Uriah

Presumably, the CIA has got its hands on a copy of the instructions sent to Israel's foreign legations on how to explain Israeli policy regarding "The Middle East after Saddam Hussein." After all, the document received only low-level classification. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell could have saved himself the trip to Jerusalem by reading in it what he heard in the Prime Minister's Office on Sunday: "Israel accepts the central principles presented in President Bush's speech of June 24, 2002, and regards them as the basis for the continuation of the political process. Israel welcomes any 'road map' that matches the above-mentioned presidential vision and which will lead to its implementation on the basis of a new and different Palestinian leadership and implementation of the reforms there." The document also said that all the commitments are conditioned on the test of a Palestinian campaign against terror. That, more or less, is what Sharon told Powell.

A strange argument broke out between the two, however, over their interpretations of Bush's "vision." Sharon argued the road map is not a precise translation of the "vision," which is the only peace plan the prime minister has accepted. Powell, who just happens to be the person who was appointed by Bush and gets his salary from Bush's government, replied that actually, the president thinks the road map is a faithful reflection of his vision.

Document doesn't reflect President's 'vision'

Now, all that's left is to ask Bush why he sent his ambassador to Israel, Daniel Kurtzer, to Jerusalem two weeks ago, to give the Israeli prime minister a copy of a peace plan that does not reflect the president's vision. Between the lines, the leader of the free world should be insulted. In effect, the prime minister is saying the president did not notice he was hoodwinked by the Quartet, including Powell, who sold him a road map that leads somewhere Bush did not intend to go…" Oh dear!

THE 'ELON PEACE INITIATIVE'

THE 'WILDLY DIFFERENT' ECONOMY AND STOCK MARKET

THE FEDERAL LABOR OPPOSITION IN CANBERRA

TO : Geoff. Muirden, Research Officer, Australian Civil Liberties Union.

The proposed ASIO Bill: The Australian Civil Liberties Union has only been one of many community groups concerned at the trend in Australian politics to follow the US experience since 9/11 towards crushing civil liberties, using "terrorism" as a pretext. Any threat of "terrorism" cannot be allowed to obscure the need to preserve what few freedoms remain, such as the freedom from false arrest, the right to a lawyer, the right to remain silent, and safeguards against arrest to crush dissent, the hallmark of a totalitarian society. If no safeguards exist, the State itself becomes a terrorist, set up in the name of "fighting terrorism.

The way in which previous bills of this type have been rushed through Parliament, intending little or no discussion of the threat to destruction of civil liberties, does not inspire confidence. This latest act of attempting to push through a destructive bill of this kind, while attention is focused on the alleged evil actions of the Governor-General in the past, smacks of political opportunism.

The Labor Party can use its power to help stop totalitarian bills of this nature, and I appeal to the ALP to do so, under the leadership of Simon Crean, who will have a leading role in this matter, and who should be fully aware of the threat to basic freedoms posed by this bill. The ALP can defeat this Bill in the Senate if it wants to and sees the dangers.

The ASIO bill is a step towards the USA Patriot Act II which in effect destroys the constitution of the United States and eliminates the Bill of Rights. It tries to destroy freedom in the name of "saving it". The Australian experience is headed in the same insane direction. It is a move towards the enhancement of powers, with the danger that it can press towards the goal of seizing and holding indefinitely, without charge, anyone over 14 years, who does not need to be accused or even suspected of having committed a crime, but is merely suspected of having knowledge of terrorist situations. This has been the previous trend of legislation, and it may well be re introduced.

Once again, and this is to reiterate what has been said many times, the burden of proof should be on the State to produce hard evidence that an arrest is justified.

There is a danger that "terrorism" will be defined in terms of anyone taking action against any government, not only the Australian government, but also foreign governments, even if this takes the form of a peaceful protest. Previous legislation had given no indication that anyone arrested would have the comfort of knowing that family and friends had been notified of his plight and could produce evidence that might exonerate any false arrest. The right to remain silent has been removed and if anyone arrested refuses to answer questions or produce whatever is demanded, they could be arrested for up to 5 years.

It hardly needs demonstrating that this would be a totalitarian and draconian piece of legislation, making a mockery of "democracy" and "individual rights". To say that terrorism could be defined as anything "likely to endanger the security or integrity of the Commonwealth or any other country" is too vague, general and liable to abuse. The intent of the legislation is to create a population of sheeple, who can be dragooned into obedience to oppressive regulations, for their "safety", except that a totalitarian government will not create safety but threaten it, something like the "Committee of Public Safety" during the French Revolution.

Laws now in place, including Measures to Combat Serious and Organised Crime Act 2001 already give the government more than enough power to combat any terrorism that exists. Already universal invasion of privacy is guaranteed by the Defence Signals Directorate, which is allowed to spy on any Australian citizen or organization without apparent hindrance or accountability. The powers sought are excessive, for example the intention that anyone having a thing that might be used for a terrorist act can be found guilty and sentenced to 25 years' gaol. It would be possible to create a One-Party dictatorship by this means, as under Hitler, Stalin and Lenin. Safeguards to eliminate abuses of State Power are lacking.

Lord Acton said: "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". This warning should be taken to heart before it is too late, and "1984" is upon us. The tradition of political liberty should not be thrown in the trash can so easily.

MP UNDER FIRE FOR IGNORING ATTACKS ON UK NATIONALS

Chris McGreal of The Guardian, UK, 7/5/2003 reports of the concerns expressed by the relatives of British citizens killed in Israel.

"The father of a British peace activist left in a coma by an Israeli army bullet has accused the Foreign Office of showing more concern at the killings of Israeli citizens than investigating Israeli responsibility for the shootings of Britons. Anthony Hurndall said he would press for a meeting with the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, to express his dissatisfaction at the government's failure to apply serious pressure to Israel for an open investigation into the shooting of his son, Tom, 21, in Gaza and two other UK citizens by the Israeli army in recent months.

In November, 2002 Iain Hook, who was working for the UN, was killed in the Jenin refugee camp. Last week, a British cameraman, James Miller, was shot dead in the Gaza Strip. In all three cases, the Israeli army has claimed the victims were in the presence of Palestinian gunmen or caught in crossfire, despite compelling evidence to the contrary. Mr Hurndall said Britain was allowing an Israeli cover-up, despite having promised there would be a full inquiry into the shooting of his son…
Last week, Britain also demanded a "full and transparent investigation" into the killing of James Miller, but colleagues are sceptical that the issue will be pressed…
The tone of the inquiry was quickly set by Israeli military officials who anonymously suggested Mr Miller was shot by a Palestinian or was caught in crossfire. The defence minister, General Saul Mofaz, told the Israeli cabinet that there had been "an exchange of fire in the area, and that it is still unclear as to how he was killed". Numerous witnesses at the scene said the cameraman was killed by fire from an Israeli armoured vehicle while carrying a white flag and wearing large and clear identification that he was a journalist."

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