Big bucks

Isn't it a wonderful world?

Isn't it a wonderful world? Well it is if you are part of the arms trade. Governments will pay whatever its costs and wait as long as it takes, so being over budget or out of time doesn't matter. At least that's until the auditors come along and spoil the fun. That's in the U.S. but in the UK we have our very own arms scandal and it looks as if BAE are untouchable. They provided a sophisticated defense system to Tanzania even though it cost the country what it could ill afford, and questionable that it was necessary in the first place. The bribery that went into the sale of aircraft to Saudi Arabia is now folklore, but no one has been answerable. The government has bent double to protect the criminals involved. A second article in the same edition of the Washington Post takes a look at weapons from another perspective.

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Posted by John Tyrrell at 3:01 PM April 1, 2008

What sauce!

Sauce is not the word for Heinz behaviour following their theft of the company from Aston putting many loyal staff out of work. Now they have moved on as if Birmingham never existed. I am afraid, however, that this is the logic of the so-called global village made to sound so appealing in the pretext of progress.
What it means is that the multinationals have the power to pick and choose where they locate and who they employ cutting costs to their benefit. Where do people come into this. Sure there will be those suffering poverty who will be pleased to get a job. Poverty, then, is a tool to ensure companies like Heinz are able to maximise profits. Their shareholders and directors should be shamed.

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Posted by John Tyrrell at 9:44 AM March 26, 2008

Why don't you do something and become a volunteer?

Our former great leader goes from strength to strength. The man who told people that volunteering would be good for their souls gathers lucrative offers from all quarters. Many of those he would like to do this work in deprived areas and happen to be on very low incomes. Blair's "expertise" appears to have no bounds as does his religiosity. Now he has been offered a lectureship at Yale University on religion and politics. When most of us would rather forget him he keeps popping up in the most unlikely places.

While in the U.S. he took the opportunity to call in on his mate George who shares a religious conviction. I suppose if the two of them together instruct us "how not to do it" it all might have some credibility. In UK Blair presided over the use of the Sabbath for trade, casinos and non-stop drinking. If God is Mammon we'd all understand. Quite frankly I don't.

The problem we still have of course is that New Labour is like the water snake, the hydra, you cut off one of its heads and it grows dozens more, equally hypocritical, if not downright dangerous, in their self-righteousness.

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Posted by John Tyrrell at 11:39 AM March 8, 2008

"Tax me more" says billionaire Buffett

The boring world's rich list has surfaced again. Comments that caught my attention from the Guardian article today (6/3/2008) were first from Warren Buffett, now passing Bill Gates (now third) to become no 1, who said Bush should get more tax from him. So too in UK where Lakshmi Mittal (very appropriate name!) heads the list. Comment is made that the super rich love the UK's attitude to them.

While this attitude is to be expected from an administration like Bush's, it's yet another illustration of the way New Labour has gone. Way out of sight of the Labour Party set up to represent the not so super-rich. Thatcherism has grown and bloomed under New Labour who dare not say "boo" to their wealthy friends.

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Posted by John Tyrrell at 8:57 AM March 6, 2008

Re. Kosovo's Independence from Serbia

A note from Bharat Bhushan with an article by George Monbiot written in 2001. Wondered why the Foreign Secretary was looking so smug today when he welcomed Kosovan independence, as did surprise surprise George W. Russia and China are about to reject it (along with Spain) so watch out!

Re: Kosovo's independence from Serbia

just a brief article written in 2001 by George Monbiot exposing the link between Trans Balkan pipeline from Caspian Sea via central asian countries to Bulgarian Black Sea port of Burgas and then passing through Bulgaria and Macedonia to Albanian port of Vlore and the Albanian interest in the separation of ethnic Albanian dominated Kosovo from Serbia.
very timely.
Bhushan
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Published on Thursday, February 15, 2001 in the Guardian of London

A Discreet Deal in the Pipeline

Nato Mocked Those Who Claimed There was a Plan for Caspian Oil
by George Monbiot

Gordon Brown knows precisely what he should do about BP. The company's £10bn profits are crying out for a windfall tax. Royalties and petroleum revenue tax, both lifted when the oil price was low, are in urgent need of reinstatement. These measures would be popular and fair. But, as all political leaders are aware, you don't mess with Big Oil.
During the 1999 Balkans war, some of the critics of Nato's intervention alleged that the western powers were seeking to secure a passage for oil from the Caspian sea. This claim was widely mocked. The foreign secretary Robin Cook observed that "there is no oil in Kosovo". This was, of course, true but irrelevant. An eminent commentator for this paper clinched his argument by recording that the Caspian sea is "half a continent away, lodged between Iran and Turkmenistan".
For the past few weeks, a freelance researcher called Keith Fisher has been doggedly documenting a project which has, as far as I can discover, has been little-reported in any British, European or American newspaper. It is called the Trans-Balkan pipeline, and it's due for approval at the end of next month. Its purpose is to secure a passage for oil from the Caspian sea.
The line will run from the Black sea port of Burgas to the Adriatic at Vlore, passing through Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania. It is likely to become the main route to the west for the oil and gas now being extracted in central Asia. It will carry 750,000 barrels a day: a throughput, at current prices, of some $600m a month.
The project is necessary, according to a paper published by the US Trade and Development Agency last May, because the oil coming from the Caspian sea "will quickly surpass the safe capacity of the Bosphorus as a shipping lane". The scheme, the agency notes, will "provide a consistent source of crude oil to American refineries", "provide American companies with a key role in developing the vital east-west corridor", "advance the privatisation aspirations of the US government in the region" and "facilitate rapid integration" of the Balkans "with western Europe".
In November 1998, Bill Richardson, then US energy secretary, spelt out his policy on the extraction and transport of Caspian oil. "This is about America's energy security," he explained. "It's also about preventing strategic inroads by those who don't share our values. We're trying to move these newly independent countries toward the west.
"We would like to see them reliant on western commercial and political interests rather than going another way. We've made a substantial political investment in the Caspian, and it's very important to us that both the pipeline map and the politics come out right."
The project has been discussed for years. The US trade agency notes that the Trans-Balkan pipeline "will become a part of the region's critical east-west Corridor 8 infrastructure ... This transportation corridor was approved by the transport ministers of the European Union in April 1994". The pipeline itself, the agency says, has also been formally supported "since 1994". The first feasibility study, backed by the US, was conducted in 1996.
The pipeline does not pass through the former Yugoslavia, but there's no question that it featured prominently in Balkan war politics. On December 9 1998, the Albanian president attended a meeting about the scheme in Sofia, and linked it inextricably to Kosovo. "It is my personal opinion," he noted, "that no solution confined within Serbian borders will bring lasting peace." The message could scarcely have been blunter: if you want Albanian consent for the Trans-Balkan pipeline, you had better wrest Kosovo out of the hands of the Serbs.
In July 1993, a few months before the corridor project was first formally approved, the US sent peacekeeping troops to the Balkans. They were stationed not in the conflict zones in which civilians were being rounded up and killed, but on the northern borders of Macedonia. There were several good reasons for seeking to contain Serb expansionism, but we would be foolish to imagine that a putative $600m-a-month commercial operation did not number among them. The pipeline would have been impossible to finance while the Balkans were in turmoil.
I can't tell you that the war in the former Yugoslavia was fought solely in order to secure access to oil from new and biddable states in central Asia. But in the light of these findings, can anyone now claim that it was not?
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001
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Posted by John Tyrrell at 11:05 PM February 18, 2008