One Ring To Rule Them All.

The Core Sorcery: Centralized Control of Fiat Money + Interest.

Source: The New Scientist - October 24, 2011

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."

Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.

Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates."

"It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are," agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.

Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system's behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.

Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Sugihara says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.

One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in nature," says Sugihara.

Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, "is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups". Or as Braha puts it: "The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy."

So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.

When this article was first posted, the comment in the final sentence of the paragraph beginning "Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power…" was misattributed.
The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies

1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depository Trust Company
40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company

The final coup was completed in 2001, what had preceded it in 1963, 1913 and various dates of import in the nineteenth century were aims at total control of the most militarized and economically powerful country in the world. That is what Bush's famous 'Mission Completed' on board an American aircraft carrier meant, it was the completion of an age long agenda. Now only a face like a mask remains, where presidents, surrounded and ruled by psycho-phant oracles inevitably fall to those most base desires any person of power and isolation must feel, the lures of global prestige and visions of personal grandeur. Under the War Powers Act presidents move with relative impunity, therefor what president would abrogate such power, and what set of handlers would ever allow that to happen? In 2001 the military stood down, there was a final and sweeping coup and the military stood down, and has never risen since, except to do the bidding of the criminally insane war hawks and their global paymasters who profit from death and destruction.

Good men leave, only to be replaced with those of compliance, this process will go on until the eventual cataclysm, which will indeed come. I can almost hear the train over the horizon right now.

Weather wars comprise a good deal of what today is considered climate change, the technological tug of war battle for moisture is the hidden element that pursuades markets and alters the course of entire societies. Attached at the hip to this growing turmoil is the economic warfare sphere, which profits and exacerbates the growing food dislocations around the world, primarily felt by its intended targets, the 'infrastructural poor', who have no leverage in the system of global trade, and who rely on seasonal climate cycles which no longer apply, discontinued as they increasingly are by means of technological force, ecological ruination and soil degradation.


Source: Global Research - July 8, 2011

The countries comprising the Horn of Africa face the threat of famine, after a series of failed and poor rainy seasons has created the worst drought in 60 years.

The 2010 late rainy season failed completely in many parts of the area and the April-May rains were very low, with northeast Kenya getting only 10 percent of the usual rainfall. The impact is worst in Somalia and Ethiopia, but Kenya, Djibouti and parts of Uganda are also affected.

The current USAID Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWSNET) map of the area, indicating levels of food insecurity, shows large parts of Ethiopia and Somalia classed as in emergency and most of the remaining parts of each country classed as in crisis. Large areas of northeastern Kenya are classed as in crisis. In total, around 10 million people are affected.

...

Sarah Robinson from the Irish humanitarian agency on the ground in Somalia explained, “A combination of hunger and despair means that many people simply go to sleep and do not have the energy to wake up. This has the potential to be as bad as anything since 1991.”

A major famine in 1991 killed around a quarter of a million people and left two million displaced.

In Somalia the drought and threatened famine are compounded by the ongoing civil war and social upheaval. Some people leaving the drought ravaged rural areas have trekked to the capital, Mogadishu, but many more have headed for Ethiopia and Kenya.

Hundreds of thousands of people are on the move, some walking for weeks and covering hundreds of miles in search of relief. One woman, Fatuma, speaking to the Save the Children Fund said she had walked for six weeks with her four children, all under 11, from Somalia to a refugee camp in Kenya.

She explained, “The weather was very harsh. It was so hot, and there was very little shelter. I left my husband in Somalia. I do not know if I will see him again. The war in Somalia is very bad for families. The drought is just too much. We cannot cope. We had 15 goats. But they died one by one because of the drought. We had a well in my village, but it dried up. Then the one in the next village dried up.”

One refugee camp at Dadaab, in the northeastern area of Kenya, was built to hold 90,000 people but is now trying to cope with more than four times that number, with thousands squatting on the perimeter hoping to get in. Dadaab has now become the largest refugee camp in the world.

The Horn of Africa area has been accustomed to scarce water supplies at some times of the year, but the pattern of rainfall does seem to be changing. In much of the area of Ethiopia and Somalia the failure of two successive rainy periods is something that would occur every 10 years or so, but now appears to occur every two years. United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) spokesman for the area, Michael Klaus, explained, “We realised these recurrent droughts used to happen every 5-10 years but what we see now is it basically every other year… an indication of climate change conditions.”

According to the UN World Food Programme (WFP), the rainfall data for 2010-11 for much of Kenya and Ethiopia was the driest or second driest for 60 years. Climate researchers are beginning to attribute extreme weather patterns to climate change. Peter Stott at the Met Office Hadley Centre in Britain recently stated, “We’ve certainly moved beyond the point of saying that we can’t say anything about attributing extreme weather events to climate change.”

Adapting to the harsh conditions of the area, many people live in pastoral communities moving their herds of animals to pasture and water in neighbouring areas to be able to maintain their herds. This way of life had been sustainable and was a big contribution to the GDP of countries in the Horn of Africa. The current drought is killing hundreds of thousands of herd animals, destroying the pastoral people’s livelihoods.

Until recent days there had been little international media coverage of the fast developing potential catastrophe in the Horn of Africa. It has now received some coverage, but there is still a big shortfall in the levels of aid been offered to alleviate the situation.

Aid agencies have appealed for around $530 million in donations for Kenya and the same for Somalia, but so far have received only about half of what is needed. The WFP issued a statement last week saying, “The humanitarian response in Somalia and Ethiopia in particular is hampered by large funding shortfalls. New contributions are urgently needed or suffering will grow.”

The situation is being exacerbated by rising food prices. Kenya is currently experiencing double-digit inflation and, according to a UN IRIN news report, the price of maize, one of the main food staples has risen threefold since January. In Djibouti, wheat flour rose by 17 percent in the course of one month earlier in the year.

A World Development Movement (WDM) report on responses to the recent hike in food prices quoted a Nairobi transport worker saying. “Maybe it’s time we went the way of Egypt.”

A WDM report issued in June warned of a summer of speculation boosting food prices. The report notes, “The price of maize—more of which is grown than any other staple food crop—has increased by 102 percent since April 2010. New research from the World Development Movement reveals that hedge funds, investment banks and others own futures contracts for maize worth $15.7 billion up 127.5 percent from a year ago.”

This is NOT standard fare for the CBC, I was stunned by this piece, I'm still actually a little in shock at how the published interview finished, I was expecting the usual insertion of derision on the part of the CBC, but it just wasn't there. Something to think about maybe....


Source: CBC - June 30, 2011

Canadian Stanton Friedman is a superstar in the UFO world, a man who can walk into a conference about aliens and be recognized the way that golf fans recognize Tiger Woods prowling the fairways of the Masters.

Roswell, Area 51, UFOs, aliens — the New Brunswick resident can cite fine details about each.

A nuclear physicist by training, Friedman keeps busy writing books, doing interviews and attending numerous conferences (he's lectured in 18 countries so far), as well as appearing in documentaries, all geared to one of the great mysteries of the human experience: do aliens exist and have they visited Earth?

Friedman will quickly tell you they have, and he will quickly tell you it is being covered up on a grand scale. Doubters beware: he will also tell you he has not lost a debate yet about the existence of extraterrestrial life.

"I have had only 11 hecklers of whom two were drunk. In addition, I have appeared on hundreds of TV and radio shows, been involved in five books, numerous documentaries and won several debates, and lost none," Friedman responded in an emailed answer to questions from CBCNews.ca.

One of the main lecturers this year at the annual UFO conference in Roswell, which starts July 1, he clearly doesn't shrink from defending his great quest, more than 40 years in the making, as you can see in this interview with CBCNews.ca.

Do you remember the moment, or moments, that you looked at the skies and thought, 'There's life out there?'

There were no epiphany moment. I read a lot of science-fiction stories when I was young and pretty much assumed there was other life out there. I read my first serious book, The Report On UFOs by air force captain Edward J. Ruppelt, former head of United States Air Force project Blue Book, in 1958.

I was a 24-year-old nuclear physicist working at the General Electric Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion Department in Cincinnati. The USAF was co-sponsor with the Atomic Energy Commission and we spent $100 million that year and employed 3,500 people of which 1,100 were engineers or scientists. In the next three years I read about a dozen other books, some of which were trash.

Then, to my surprise, in about 1961, at the library of the University of California, Berkeley, I found a copy of a privately published version of the largest study ever done for the U.S. government — Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14.

It hadn't been mentioned in any of the books I had read and had over 200 charts, tables, graphs and maps about the more than 3,200 UFO cases studied.

Most astonishing was the widely distributed press release of Oct. 25, 1955, in which the secretary of the air force, Donald Quarles, flat out lied when he said: "Even the unknown three per cent could have been identified as conventional phenomena or illusions if more complete observational data had been available."

In reality, 21.5 per cent of the cases couldn't be explained, completely separate from the 9.3 per cent listed as "insufficient Information." Thus began my crusade in the early 1960s.

How do people react to you in a social setting when they find out what you do?

No, I don't get taken to be a nut. Many people have seen me on TV and heard me on radio. Some have even read one of my books. Most people agree with me once they hear the evidence.

Fewer than two per cent have read any of the five large-scale scientific studies on which I focus. I raise the objections of the debunkers and then demolish them. It is a complete myth that most people, especially professionals, think the subject is nonsense.

I have spoken to many professional groups. There is an entire chapter in my 2008 book Flying Saucers and Science about the actual opinion poll results.

Despite the false claims of a small group of nasty, noisy negativists, most people accept ET reality even though they think most others don't. I check my audiences and find at the end of my lecture that about 10 per cent of the attendees have had a sighting. But 90 per cent didn't report it because of a fear of ridicule.

I am trying to lift the laughter curtain.

What will happen to the Earth when we discover for certain that aliens exist? And will the aliens be friendly or will they do harm to us?

I have no idea how the world will respond. I believe it will depend entirely on how the information is presented.

If we are told the visitors are evil and plan to destroy us, that would give a very different reaction from what would happen if we find out they are here primarily to make sure that we don't go out there until we learn to behave in a civilized fashion.

Clearly, from an alien viewpoint, we are a primitive society whose major activity is tribal warfare. In the Second World War, we earthlings killed 50 million of our own kind and destroyed 1,700 cities. This year we will spend $1 trillion on things military, while more than 25,000 children die needlessly of preventable disease or starvation every day.

Roswell, Area 51 and other U.S. locations play a big role in what you and others are investigating. Are there any Canadian connections to the UFO mystery?

I am the original civilian investigator of the Roswell incident and will once again be there in early July for the annual festival.

Area 51 is not a primary focus at all despite a new book with an outlandish explanation for Roswell. [The book suggests the Russians were behind UFO sightings.]

There is real evidence from all over the world including more than 4,000 physical trace cases from more than 70 countries. The Mutual UFO Network receives more than 300 reports per month.

Some interesting (Canadian) cases include the Shag Harbor, N.S., crash, in October 1967. I will be there in early August for their conference. The Stephen Michalak case of Falcon Lake, Man., was an excellent case. Chris Rutkowski of Winnipeg collects reports from all over the country.

Seek and ye shall find.

When people doubt that there are aliens and doubt they have visited here, what do they say is needed to convince them?

There aren't many doubters. The four primary rules for the debunkers are: (A) Don't bother me with the facts, my mind is made up. (B) What the public doesn't know, I won't tell them. (C) If one can't attack the data, attack the people. (D) Do one's research by proclamation, because investigation is too much trouble. All together the attitude is to put down what one is not up on.

I deal with such silly objections as governments can't keep secrets, or one can't get here from there in Flying Saucers and Science and also in Science Was Wrong, co-authored by Kathleen Marden. We also wrote Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience. Marden is Betty's niece. Again, the skeptics haven't done their homework. Their disbelief is primarily a result of ignorance of the evidence.

There are some who insist that religion teaches there are no aliens. I refer them to Dr. Barry Downing's excellent book The Bible and Flying Saucers.

It seems more people believe these days that life is out there in the stars. Are they getting sucked in by the hype of popular movies or is it something more?

I think most people have come to realize that we live in an enormous universe, which is not only huge but billions of years old and there seems to be nothing special about Earth that would lead us to believe our situation is unique.

It is easy to forget that it was less than 90 years ago that we realized that there is more than one galaxy. It is less than 20 years since we discovered many exoplanets.

The Kepler spacecraft in just a short part of its life seems to have found more than 1,200 exoplanets in a relatively tiny portion of the heavens. Many more will follow. We didn't realize until less than 75 years ago that nuclear fusion provides 10 million times as much energy per reaction as does chemical combustion. I worked on a study of fusion rockets.

We are slowly beginning to realize that technological progress comes from doing things differently in an unpredictable way and the future is not an extrapolation of the past.

Until Copernicus, we thought we were at the centre of the universe and all the heavenly bodies including the sun revolved around the Earth. Now we know the sun isn't in the centre either, and we are clearly not the big shots we would like to think we are.

People aren't being sucked in by science fiction, but a growing awareness of our relative unimportance in the larger scheme of things.

Some say the world will change more than we can understand if aliens reveal themselves to us. Do you think this is true? How might things change?

Again I can't predict how people will react since it will depend upon how information about alien reality is presented and what facts are given.

It is easy to forget that from the viewpoint of many governments of alien visitation, there is a strong national security concern. Namely how can we duplicate the alien technology for military benefit and not permit our "enemies" to know what we have learned.

I talk about this in my paper to be presented at the 42nd annual Mutual UFO Network symposium in Irvine, Calif., on July 31.

'It is time for a wake-up call. We are not alone.'
—Stanton Friedman, UFO hunter

The biggest problem is with nationalism. No government wants its citizens to owe their allegiance to the planet instead of that individual government.

People in power want to stay in power. Governments have a past history of often not taking courageous steps for the benefit of their people, but rather looking out for themselves first. The wave of unrest in the Middle East suggests some things are changing and more freedom is being sought.

One more thing that certainly needs to change is for the press to do its job and dig out the facts. One of a dozen PhD theses about UFOs (By Dr. Herbert Strentz) has some strong comments to make about the inadequacy of the press efforts. For example, how could the New York Times blindly accept the crazy notion that crash test dummies dropped in New Mexico were the explanation for bodies supposedly seen in Roswell in 1947.

In fact, none were dropped until at least six years later and all were the size and weight of pilots (175 pounds and six feet tall) and were in pilot uniforms. Witnesses talked of short skinny guys with big heads. Hardly the same thing.

It is time for a wake-up call. We are not alone.