House Prices. Share Prices. The Corporate World.

Average UK house price 1952 = £1,891.
Average UK house price 2004 = £153,788. This is 81 times higher.

Inflation: 1952-2004 20 times higher.

~~~

UK house price and share price rises 1952-1999:

(London Business School equity index and Nationwide Building Society House Price Index)

1952-59
Houses 15% Shares 344%

1960-69
Houses 99% Shares 168%

1970-79
Houses 409% Shares 197%

1980-89
Houses 180% Shares 720%

1990-1999
Houses 21% Shares 306%

~~~

December 1999 - January 2005
Houses rose in price 100% on average

~~~

The FTSE-100 Index in December 1999 stood at 6,930

The Index in March 2003 stood at 3,287

~~~

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/mar2005/ebb-m18.shtml

Patrick Martin, in WSWS 18 March 2005, wrote about WorldCom and US corporate criminality.

Former WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers was convicted on nine counts of conspiracy, securities fraud and filing false documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The WorldCom bankruptcy was the biggest in US corporate history.

WorldCom filed for bankruptcy in July 2002, 'its debts dwarfing its $104 billion in assets.'

The collapse was nearly twice the size of the previous largest bankruptcy, the 2001 failure of Enron.

Patrick Martin wrote that if the top people in the US government faced the same standards as Ebbers, "top officials of the Bush administration, including Bush himself, would stand convicted of far greater crimes—not only in falsifying the finances of the federal government on a scale which puts WorldCom in the shade, but in the systematic campaign of lying that has accompanied its foreign policy of military aggression.

"The case of Bernie Ebbers has shed further light on the increasingly criminal character of the practices of corporate America, which finds its concentrated political expression in the Bush administration."

~~~

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jun2004/enro-j15.shtml

Rafael Azul, in WSWS 15 June 2004, wrote that the Enron tapes expose the blatant criminality of corporate America.

Azul wrote: "The recent release of transcripts of taped conversations among Enron electricity traders in the summer of 2001 reveals that company insiders not only knew they were stealing from California and other states, but gloated about it. The partial release of thousands of hours of tapes is a powerful indictment of the energy companies that looted California and Washington of close to $11 billion, with the support and assistance of government officials.

"The tapes, during which Enron traders celebrate the misery caused to consumers and businesses by their practices, also provide a revealing glimpse into the depraved and truly criminal mentality of the American corporate elite."

'Former Bush cabinet member says government complicit in 9 11'

'Former Bush Cabinet Member Says Government Complicit In 9/11'

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/june2005/160605governmentcomplicit.htm

False news stories on Afghanistan and Iraq

http://www.globalnewsmatrix.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1398

Global News Matrix has an item worth reading in full.

Global News Matrix relates that Colonel Sam Gardiner (USAF, Ret.) has identified 50 false news stories created and leaked by a secretive White House propaganda department.

Some examples:

Iraqi agents meeting with 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta
Iraq's possession of chemical and biological weapons.
Iraq's purchase of nuclear materials from Niger.
The rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch.
The surrender of a 5,000-man Iraqi brigade.
Iraq executing Coalition POWs.
Iraqi soldiers dressing in US and UK uniforms to commit atrocities.
WMDs moved to Syria....

Every one of these stories was false.

The White House Coalition Information Center was set up in November 2001. The CIC used "the plight of women in Afghanistan" as an excuse for attacking Afghanistan.

Laura Bush : "Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out women's fingernails for wearing nail polish."

Cherie Blaire: "In Afghanistan, if you wear nail polish, you could have your nails torn out."

London's 15 Psychological Operations Group was the UK equivalent of the CIC.

Anthrax:

"Intelligence sources" provided unsourced allegations that Iraq and Al Qaeda were behind the anthrax letters.

In December 18, the White House confessed that it was "increasingly looking like" the anthrax came from a US military installation.

Do read the entire article at:

http://www.globalnewsmatrix.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1398

Drowning coastal cities

Climate Change:

1. Ideally, people should vote for parties that promise to abolish the military. It is primarily the military that keep the greedy elites in power. It is the Pentagon that decides who rules the USA and many other countries. It is the military in Indonesia that is responsible for much of the illegal logging. It is the military in China that defends the fat cats.

2. Ideally, people should vote for parties that will change transport policies. Journeys by car and plane must be made more expensive; journeys by train, bus and bike must be made easier and cheaper.

3. Ideally, people should vote for parties that will increase taxes on the rich. In Jakarta, at least 100,000 families are five-car families. In the USA, too many overweight people drive around in large vehicles which use petrol that is too cheap. In China, more and more people are buying cars rather than bikes. Governments need to persuade people not to be so greedy. When the 'poor' in the Third World become less poor and become better educated, there is the chance that they will produce fewer children. Income should be distributed in such a way that nobody starves and nobody has so much money that they always decide to travel by car rather than by bike or bus.

4. Ideally people should support political parties and religions and other institutions that promote a simpler and more intelligent way of life. Ideally, people would stop supporting the fundamentalists who (1) oppose birth control (2) oppose moderate life styles.

In the UK, people should not vote for New Labour or for the Conservatives. These parties are the parties of the greedy elite.

In the USA, voters should not vote Republican or Democrat.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1506672,00.html

The Guardian, 15 June 2005, had an article entitled: 'The boat is sinking'.

The UK's chief government scientist David King has explained:

Since the industrial period carbon dioxide levels have risen from 270 parts per million (classical for all previous warm periods) to 379ppm today, and are rising at 2ppm per year. In 10 years' time they will be at 400ppm.

At 500ppm, Greenland's ice will melt entirely - it's already receding by 10 metres a year - and the sea level will rise, drowning coastal cities and entirely changing the contours of the earth.

Most scientists now agree that unless we stabilise the earth's atmosphere by 2050, there will be no way to halt the disaster.

From the Guardian article:

Lord Oxburgh, Chairman of Shell, advocates that government uses the controls at its disposal: "Regulate biofuels. Or subsidise. Or tax" - any incentive really, but "what we don't want to see is in two years' time the government simply becoming bored with climate change after we've invested a lot of our shareholders' money. Remember, those shareholders are pension funds and other similar organisations." The prospect of big business forcing government to regulate it would be funny, if it weren't so serious.

A three hour school day; a school leaving age of 12

In the UK, school hours should be much shorter and the school leaving age should be 12.

The 1819 Factory Act in the UK limited the working day for children in cotton mills.

What we need now is a Schools Act limiting the school day to three hours.

I would suggest that school hours could be 9 am to 12 noon.

Very few children can concentrate on school work for more than 3 hours per day.

When children are not at school they can enjoy being children. Interests will vary:

1. Children can work at home or in libraries on interesting homework projects. It would help if every child was given a computer.

2. They can join clubs involved in everything from sport to music to carpentry to journalism ....

3. They can become apprentices in safe and interesting occupations.

4. They can explore their world.

Mothers of younger children will be able to spend more time with their offspring.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1505796,00.html

'She's being a total Kelly' wrote Zoe Williams, in the 14 June 2005 Guardian.

UK Education Secretary Ruth Kelly wants children to be at school from 8am to 6pm.

An official at the Department for Education and Skills stated: "If we want parents to go out to work to support the family, the days of schools simply being open from 9am to 3pm are over."

Zoe Williams writes: "8 till 6 is a bloody long day."

Dominic Lawson

http://www.bjr.org.uk/data/2000/no2_leigh.htm

David Leigh wrote about 'Britain’s security services and journalists: the secret story' in the British Journalism ReviewVol. 11, No. 2, 2000, pages 21-26.

According to Leigh: "British journalists – and British journals – are being manipulated by the secret intelligence agencies."

Leigh gave us an example from 1995 when the Sunday Telegraph published a story about the son of Col Gadafy of Libya and his alleged connection to a currency counterfeiting plan.

According to Leigh: "The story was written by Con Coughlin, the paper’s then chief foreign correspondent, and it was falsely attributed to a 'British banking official'. In fact, it had been given to him by officers of MI6, who, it transpired, had been supplying Coughlin with material for years."

According to leigh, former spy Richard Tomlinson heard that "within MI6 there was a 'national newspaper editor' who was used as an agent, and had received up to £100,000 in covert payments, accessed at an offshore bank, via a false passport obligingly supplied by MI6 itself." Dominic Lawson, then editor of the Sunday Telegraph, denied that he was a spy.

http://flatrock.org.nz/topics/money_politics_law/cia_needs_you.htm

Tomlinson's book The Big Breach: From Top Secret to Maximum Security, published by a Russian company, covered Tomlinson's 4 years in MI6 from 1991 to 1995.

Tomlinson claimed that Dominic Lawson worked for MI6 and his codename was 'Smallbrow'.

http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1506825,00.html

June 15, 2005:

"Sunday Telegraph editor Dominic Lawson has been fired after a decade in the job...

"The paper sold 666,031 copies in May, a decline of 5.9% on the previous year...

The Sunday Telegraph helped reveal the "nannygate" saga that forced the resignation of then home secretary David Blunkett last year.

~~

The Telegraph lost its libel case against George Galloway, with the judge awarding damages of £150,000 and ordering the Telegraph to pay Mr Galloway's costs of £600,000 for publishing a story alleging the MP was "in the pay" of Saddam Hussein.

Corrupt countries and the USA and UK

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1499462,00.html

Kenya: "the corruption of President Mwai Kibaki's new administration makes Daniel arap Moi's regime look almost restrained."

Ethiopia and Eritrea: their "leaders are arms-shopping while relying on the international community to feed their drought-hit millions."

~~~~

The 2004 survey by Transparency International.

The scores range from 10 ( clean) to zero (very corrupt).

Hungary (US ally; had troops in Iraq)
4.8

Italy (US ally; has troops in Iraq)
4.8

Kuwait (US ally over Iraq)
4.6

South Korea (US ally; troops in Iraq)
4.5

El Salvador (US ally over Iraq)
4.2

Bulgaria (US ally; troops killed in Iraq)
4.1

Slovakia (US ally; troops in Iraq)
4.0

Colombia (US ally)
3.8

Panama (US ally - The School Of the Americas was founded in Panama in 1946)
3.7

Thailand (US ally; Thais killed in Iraq)
3.6

Poland (US ally; troops killed in Iraq)
3.5

Saudi Arabia (US ally)
3.4

Egypt (US ally)
3.2

Morocco (US ally)
3.2

Turkey (US ally)
3.2

Romania (US ally; troops in Iraq)
2.9

Philippines (US ally; had troops in Iraq)
2.6

Uzbekistan (US has military base here; recently troops reportedly killed 500 protesters)
2.3

Kazakhstan (US ally in Iraq; US military base in Kazakhstan)
2.2

Ukraine (US ally in Iraq)
2.2

Pakistan (US ally)
2.1

Indonesia
http://smsmy.net/cgi-bin/balinuts/webbbs_config.pl?noframes;read=5160
2.0

Tajikistan (US has military base here)
2.0

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1505816,00.html

Quotes from an article by George Monbiot, 14 June 2005, in the Guardian:

"Corruption has seldom been a barrier to foreign aid and loans: look at the money we have given, directly and through the World Bank and IMF, to Mobutu, Suharto, Marcos, Moi and every other premier-league crook...

"Rwanda's Paul Kagame or Uganda's Yoweri Museveni are repeatedly cited by the G8 countries as practitioners of 'good governance'. Their armies, as the UN has shown, are largely responsible for the meltdown in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which has so far claimed 4 million lives, and have walked off with billions of dollars' worth of natural resources. Yet Britain, which is hosting the G8 summit, remains their main bilateral funder. It has so far refused to make their withdrawal from the DRC a conditionality for foreign aid...

"Kagame... has eagerly supplied us with the materials we need for our mobile phones and computers: materials that his troops have stolen from the DRC....

"To qualify for World Bank funding, our model client Uganda was forced to privatise most of its state-owned companies before it had any means of regulating their sale. A sell-off that should have raised $500m for the Ugandan exchequer instead raised $2m. The rest was nicked by government officials. Unchastened, the World Bank insisted that - to qualify for the debt-relief programme the G8 has now extended - the Ugandan government sell off its water supplies, agricultural services and commercial bank, again with minimal regulation...

"In the late 80s, the IMF and World Bank forced it to impose "user fees" for basic healthcare and primary education. The purpose appears to have been to create new markets for private capital. School attendance, especially for girls, collapsed. So did health services, particularly for the rural poor...

"The G8 governments claim they want to help poor countries develop and compete successfully. But they have a powerful commercial incentive to ensure that they compete unsuccessfully, and that our companies can grab their public services and obtain their commodities at rock-bottom prices.

"Attaching conditions ... to aid ... amounts to saying: 'We will give you a trickle of money if you give us the crown jewels.'"

http://www.monbiot.com/

Blair, McKinsey, Enron, CIA continued

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/whitehall/story/0,9061,1505868,00.html

Sandra Laville and Nils Pratley, in the Guardian 14 June 2005, relate "How McKinsey, the secretive global consultancy firm, is gaining influence at the heart of UK plc."

"Yesterday the Guardian revealed that David Bennett, a former partner at McKinsey, who has been hired by Tony Blair to head Downing Street's policy unit, will have a key role in deciding the appointment of the new £220,000-a-year cabinet secretary...

"Mr Bennett is one of a number of McKinsey-trained people already advising the government: Lord Birt, Nick Lovegrove and Adair Turner, who now heads the commission into the future of pensions, to name a few. The firm has landed contracts worth tens of millions of pounds...

"Enron was regarded as the house that McKinsey built."

~~~

http://www.apfn.org/enron/fedgov.htm

"The fact that Enron was in fact so CLOSELY allied with the Bush administration AND the CIA makes their proven connection to and involvement in negotiations by the Bush Mob, CIA and Big Oil with theTaliban last year an issue of definite interest...."

The answer to the crime problem

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-1650731,00.html

Simon Jenkins, in the Sunday Times 12 June 2005, declared that it was time that Tony Blair got tough on the causes of crime.

"He knows perfectly well what they are: alcohol abuse and drug abuse," wrote Jenkins.

What has Blair been doing?

1. he has reduced the cost of drink

2. he has relaxed the licensing laws

3. he has watched the inflow of heroin from Afghanistan increase tenfold

4. he has left it to the criminal world to sell the heroin and other drugs.

Jenkins points out that Britain took “responsibility” for Afghanistan’s opium output after the 2001 war.

Britain is Europe’s leading consumer of all forms of narcotics.

Jenkins names Britain's 'most intensive institutional user' of drugs - the Home Office’s own prisons, run by Charles Clarke.

Jenkins asks: "If Clarke cannot control the habit among prisoners, how can he expect parents or teachers to do better?"

Jenkins writes:

1. "we can regulate and tax the sale of drink."

2. "Heroin should plainly be nationalised... Drugs should be, like alcohol in Sweden, distributed through state outlets."

Iran and the CIA

June 2005

http://www.iranian.ws/iran_news/publish/article_7295.shtml

Iran's Gholamali Haddad Adel said recently that the US propaganda machine is appealing to Iranians not to go to the polls.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1505185,00.html

Explosions in Tehran and southern Iran killed at least nine people and injured 70 yesterday in attacks apparently aimed at disrupting this week's presidential elections.

http://www.iran-press-service.com/z_htdocs_z/dcforum/DCForumID2/622.html#1

"In 1978 the Shah doesn't renew a 25 yr agreement with British oil; in 1979 there is a revolution. The shah's time was up, no longer useful.

"America's plan was to set Iran against Iraq, to weaken both countries in the region.

"By introducing extremism through Khomeini, they knew it would slow down development and it would also slow down Arab nationalism in the region.

"Extremism also gave the West the enemy it needed after communism so that they could achieve their geopolitical goals, by having an excuse to wage wars based on war on 'terrorism' and 'extremism'.

"Then the plan was to one day come in on the pretext of beating 'extremism' - to clean up the mess - meaning to take control over the region's natural resources."

(Slight editing of forum post)

Enron, McKinsey, Tony Blair, Cabinet Secretary

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/02_27/b3790001.htm

"Enron, which was paying McKinsey as much as $10 million in annual fees, is just one of an unusual number of embarrassing client failures for the elite consulting firm. Besides Enron, there's Swiss-air, Kmart, and Global Crossing - all McKinsey clients that have filed for bankruptcy in relatively short order."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,3605,1505186,00.html

"A former management consultant controversially hired by Tony Blair to head Downing Street's policy unit will have a role in deciding the appointment of Britain's most senior civil servant, the Guardian has learned.

"The prime minister has delayed the decision on who should become the new £220,000-a-year cabinet secretary while he takes the advice of David Bennett, a former partner with the global US consultancy McKinsey, on the appointment."

http://www.the-catbird-seat.net/ENRON.htm

"There have been at least 20 CIA agents on the payroll of Enron."

Biowarfare

http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2005/06/biowarfare-and-domestic-violence.html

Rigorous-intuition has an article on Biowarfare which is worth reading in full. The following is a shortened version:

Recently Dr Leonid Strachunsky was found dead in Moscow.

According to MosNews, "some sources link Wednesday’s murder of...Strachunsky, who specialized in creating microbes resistant to biological weapons, to [a] hepatitis outbreak" which, according to the latest report, has afflicted more than 500 people in Russia's Tver region."

Last winter 120 children in North Ossetia were likely accidentally poisoned by contaminated milk, and the drops of mercury that Russians have found in fruit juice and candy are presumably isolated incidents of industrial sabotage. But there should be a degree of uncertainty....

In the Autumn of 1999, field tests began for a vaccine, developed by OraVax Corporation, under license to the Army biowarfare lab at Fort Detrick (from which the anthrax of the attacks of 2001 was sourced). http://www.rense.com/general3/profit.htm

The vaccine was to deal with a genetically-altered Japanese encephalitis virus the Army had created. Coincidentally encephalitis, in the form of West Nile Virus, also broke out in New York City.

Leonard Horowitz, in Death in the Air: Globalism, Terrorism and Toxic Warfare, cites the conclusions of researcher Patricia Doyle that "the sudden emergence of WNV, never before a public concern, was likely a deliberate release to 'test that city's biowarfare response, and make at least one corporation a sizable profit.'" (One year before becoming the exclusive manufacturer of WNV vaccine, OraVax had been delisted by NASDAQ, and was facing insolvency.)

In 1977 the Senate heard that, between 1949 and 1969, 239 "populated areas had been contaminated with biological agents."

In 1931 Dr. Cornelius Rhoads, under the aegis of the Rockefeller Institute was intentionally infecting Puerto Rican subjects with cancer cells.

Scotland a dump for nuclear waste?

http://www.sundayherald.com/50248


Rob Edwards, in the Sunday Herald 12 June 2005, wrote about the dumping of nuclear waste.

The UK radioactive waste agency is called Nirex.

Nirex has now been forced to publish details of all potential nuclear waste sites.

At present there are more than 92,000 cubic metres of nuclear waste stored at 34 locations around the UK.

According to the Sunday Herald, 'this is set to rise five times in volume over the next 100 years, even assuming no new nuclear power stations are built.'

Nirex has now published a list of 537 potential sites, of which 159 are in Scotland.

According to the Sunday Herald, "Much of the list reads like a roll call of Scotland’s famous islands. It included Iona, Islay, Jura, Canna, Eigg, Muck, Coll, Gigha, Colonsay, Tiree, Ulva, Raasay, Rhum, St Kilda, Foula, Ailsa Craig, the Summer Isles and the Isle of May in the Firth of Forth.

Chris Ballance, Green MP said: “The list shows that site selection in the past has been done on purely political grounds – where they think they can get away with it.”

Ballance points out that nearly a third of the 537 sites in the UK are in Scotland. “ Low population and low public opposition was a more important factor than geological and scientific suitability.”

'West Bank and Gaza not part of Israel' declares Israel's High court.

http://www.icej.org/cgi-local/view.cgi?type=headline&artid=2005/06/09/830988300

June 09, 2005

Israel's High Court of Justice voted in June 2005 that Gaza and the West Bank are not part of Israel.

"Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] and the Gaza area are lands seized during warfare, and are not part of Israel," said the judges.

Let us hope that Israel withdraws from these territories immediately.

Adults with learning disabilities need happy homes, not 'care in the community'.

Ideally, mentally backward adults are looked after in happy homes and they have lots of friends among other mentally backward people.

The Labour government's policy of 'care in the community' often means that vulnerable adults are removed from homes and shoved into lonely flats where they fail to make any friends.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1650798,00.html

Minette Marin wrote about the failure of the UK policy of 'inclusion' in the Sunday Times, 12 June 2005.

Marrin argues that the government policy of 'care in the community' leads too often to loneliness and exclusion.

Marrin writes about vulnerable adults living alone in bedsits, 'bored, neglected and stuck indoors watching television.'

Marrin continues: 'What’s also very sad is that although the theory is that people with learning disabilities should have the chance of making normal friends in the normal community, subsequent research suggests this doesn’t actually happen — as one might have predicted.'

A study in 2002 found that people with learning disabilities are happier when they have a larger number of people with learning disabilities that they can mix with.

'Special needs' children need 'special needs' schools.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1650799,00.html

The Sunday Times, 12 June 2005, had an article on 'special' schools in the UK.

Three-quarters of all children with “severe or complex” special needs are educated in mainstream comprehensive schools.

This often leads to 'handicapped' or 'special needs' children being bullied and not being given adequate care. It can lead to children with emotional problems causing havoc in the classroom.

One in five children in England and Wales have learning difficulties.

Blair's Labour government has closed 90 special schools since 1997. This saves the government money.

Baroness Warnock's 1978 report on special needs education favoured a policy of 'inclusion'. Now Warnock has changed her mind. She says 'inclusion' is not working.

David Cameron is the Conservative education spokesman. He has a three-year-old son with cerebral palsy and epilepsy. He wants parents to have a “proper choice between mainstream and special schools”.

Most special needs children are now educated in mainstream schools. But, Ofsted noted in its latest report that only “a minority of mainstream schools meet special needs very well”.

Leaked memo and the illegality of the Iraq war.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1650822,00.html

According to the Sunday Times, June 12, 2005, UK ministers were told in July 2002 that 'Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq' and 'they had to find a way of making it legal.'

A leaked Cabinet Office briefing paper shows Blair had agreed in April 2002, at the Bush ranch in Texas, to back military action.

The briefing paper, for a meeting of Blair’s inner circle on July 23, 2002, said that since regime change was illegal it was “necessary to create the conditions” which would make it legal.

We want to grab Africa's oil

http://www.sundayherald.com/50283
http://www.oxfam.org.uk/what_we_do/issues/trade/bp30_cotton.htm

Torcuil Crichton wrote in the Sunday Herald, 12 June 2005, that When it comes to Africa, Bush has more on his mind than aid.

What the US government wants from Africa:

1. oil from countries such as Nigeria and Gabon
2. raw materials such as managanese and cobalt
3. a market for American goods

Aid agencies such as Oxfam have pointed out that subsidies to US cotton farmers are helping to ruin Africa's cotton farmers.A T-shirt is sold in the UK for under £2.The T-shirt is not made with African cotton.The T-shirt is made with American cotton because subsidies make it artificially cheap.American cotton farmers receive $3.9bn (£2bn) a year in Government subsidies - three times the annual amount the US gives in aid to Africa.

As a proportion of national wealth only 0.16% of the US budget goes on aid. Less than 1% of the US aid budget goes to sub Saharan Africa.

A lot of the US aid funds go to Israel.

The United States normally only brings guns to Africa.

Torcuil Chriton points out that: 'the US bears a historical responsibility for numerous regional and tribal conflicts that have destabilised countries such as Angola, Liberia, Congo and Somalia.'

Reportedly the CIA murdered the Congo's Lumumba on the instructions of Eisenhower. http://www.leftwatch.com/archives/years/2000/000091.html

From Africa, America wants:

oil
manganese, for steel,
cobalt, for chrome and alloys,
gold,
fluorspar and germanium for industrial diamonds

The African Growth and Opportunity Act, a trade agreement between the US and Africa, 'forces participants to remove subsides from their industries (while allowing the US to subsidise its own) and insists on privatisation of social services such as water even in countries that face drought.'

According to Crichton, "the over-riding American concern in Africa, as it is across the entire globe, is oil security. Oil, its extraction and supply, will always be the top priority for the US. The biggest returns, and the most important product out of Africa for the coming decades, will be petroleum. The returns are not for Africans though."

70% of Nigerians exist on a dollar a day. Western oil companies in Nigeria have made billions of dollars from oil.

At present 12% of US oil comes from Africa
By 2015, 25% of US oil will come from Africa.

The US wants military bases near the oil.

Atta was working for the US military?

http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/

From rigorousintuition:

....for an agency which, before 9/11, appeared clueless that members of al Qaeda were training at flight schools, the FBI inexplicably and immediately knew, upon the attacks, which flight schools al Qaeda members had attended. And this was long before suspects should have been identified.

Venice Florida's Huffman Aviation was the principal flight school used by Mohammed Atta and associates, though used for what is a good question, as Atta was already a pilot. (The best answer may be a familiar one to students of deep politics: trafficking narcotics.) A former Huffman manager told investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker that a carload of FBI agents pulled up outside his house in the middle of the day, on the day of the attack.

"They were outside my house four hours after the attack," he says in Welcome to Terrorland. Hopsicker writes that "they didn't strong-arm him to make him think harder and cough up some useful leads, but to ensure he kept his mouth shut."

The shaken source had quit Huffman because he'd found the workplace to be something else than he'd expected. Something, well, spooky: "I had to leave and get out. I wish I didn't know as much as I know. I told them they had nothing to fear from me."

What did he know?

"These guys [Atta et al] were double agents.... I gleaned early on that the operation I was working for had government protection. They were let into this country. How did the FBI get here so soon? Ask yourself: How'd they get here so soon?"

And note: when he says "here," he doesn't mean Huffman Aviation; he means his own house. So, only four hours after the attack, the FBI didn't merely know enough to visit Atta's flight school; it knew enough to visit the home of a former employee of Atta's flight school who had quit because he suspected Atta and his cadres were double agents. It wasn't investigating the attacks, it was intimidating witnesses.

Why the lack of confidence in the US media?

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000954852

June 10, 2005

Gallup has an annual survey of "public confidence in major institutions" in the United States.

Those having a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in newspapers dropped from 30% to 28% in one year, the same total for television.

Confidence in the presidency plunged from 52% to 44%, with Congress and the criminal-justice system also suffering 8% drops. Confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court fell from 46% to 41%. The 22% confidence rating for Congress is its lowest in eight years.

~~~~

Why the lack of confidence in the US press?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterror/story/0,1361,584444,00.html

Two months before September 11 Osama bin Laden flew to Dubai for 10 days for treatment at the American hospital, where he was visited by the local CIA agent, according to the French newspaper Le Figaro...

Bin Laden is reported to have arrived in Dubai on July 4.

The CIA chief was seen in the lift, on his way to see Bin Laden, and later, it is alleged, boasted to friends about his contact. He was recalled to Washington soon afterwards.

Intelligence sources say that another CIA agent was also present; and that Bin Laden was also visited by Prince Turki al Faisal, then head of Saudi intelligence, who had long had links with the Taliban, and Bin Laden. Soon afterwards Turki resigned.

http://perso.cs3i.fr/do/ag/331.htm#fr
According to Le Figaro: "Un homme, partenaire professionnel de la direction administrative de l'hôpital américain de Dubaï, affirme que l'ennemi public numéro un a séjourné dans cet établissement hospitalier du 4 au 14 juillet." A partner in the hospital confirmed that bin Laden stayed at the hospital.