The meanings of victory emerged from my word to sacrifice myself for the sake of the prophet I protect the prophet with whatever I own using words, I write poetry on the papers The full moon rises in the sky proudly and the sun shines without any source The dog barks but does not harm our sky and harm will hit you firmly Your talk about the prophet will not harm him but rather it will increase his ranks All of humanity will sacrifice itself for the prophet hes the messenger God sent with the verses Na7ree be-na7ri (I think he means that the prophet is worth the sacrifice) I look forward to meeting you after I die Your honour is my honour O prophet of God it is time to stand up for your honour without hestitation The universe was very happy when the loved and the blessed one came The spears of Kofr shattered when he came and optimistic that he will be glorious were the poems The branches of Erk (the tree where they get the branches for their bows) with its flexibility will bend the fencers and drop the banners And perhaps the death of the generous one made the people fear because he died with many good traits Your insults to the prophet will make us love him more and his religion as well in this life This is your harvest and produce a thorn that made my heart pray for the prophet more You should realize that were an Umma, prayed for the best of humanity
Muslim children sit on the roof of a house next to a mosque after morning prayers in the old quarters of Delhi, May 14, 2010.
REUTERS/Adnan Abidi
NEW DELHI: The alacrity with which fatwas issued by Indian Muslim clerics gain media coverage, particularly when they are regarding Muslim women, demands an analysis of the issue from several angles. One is whether the media gives coverage to complete “news†regarding fatwas, secondly whether they really have been issued or not, significance of these fatwas for Indian Muslims and socio-political value of the same. The latest fatwa to hit headlines is one opposing working of Muslim women and their contributing to household income. Even before details about this fatwa were clarified, “news†and “views†of reaction against it dominated the media. So much so, that noted lyricist Javed Akhtar, who has been recently nominated to Rajya Sabha (Upper House of Indian Parliament) received “death threats†for apparently calling the cleric who issued the fatwa “insane†during a television debate. Akhtar has been provided security by Mumbai-police. “We have provided security to Javed Akhtar by posting armed guards at his house. The guards would follow him wherever he goes,†a police official said.
Alarmed by the storm raised over the so-called fatwa opposing working of Muslim women, leading clerics and Muslim leaders wasted little time in clarifying their stand on the controversial issue. Asserting that Darul Uloom, Deoband (Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh) had not issued such a fatwa, the Islamic seminary’s spokesperson Maulana Adnan Munshi said: “We had only given an opinion based on Sharia that women need to be properly covered in government and private offices.†“No new fatwa was issued,†he said. He also denied reports on the Deoband institution being opposed to men and women working together. Elaborating on this stand, Mufti Mohammad Shakeel said: “We have not issued any such fatwa declaring a woman’s financial support to the family as illegal. I fail to understand how such a news was flashed across the media.â€
Suggesting that cleric’s stand on the issue had been misinterpreted, another Muslim cleric said: “There has been no fatwa against working of Muslim women. There has been probably some confusion over saying that it would be preferable for her to work with permission of others in the family.â€
Some credit must be given to Indian media for paying substantial attention to Muslim leaders who have opposed and also questioned the so-called fatwa. “There is no question of principles of Islam dismissing a woman’s earnings through legitimate means as illegal,†according to Maulana Khalide Rasheed, who heads Lucknow’s Islamic seminary, Firangi Mahal. Specifying that “Islam does not discriminate between men and women,†he said: “A woman has as much right to contribute financially towards running a family household as her husband.â€
Paradoxically, the so-called fatwa against Muslim women working raised a storm without substantial importance being given to whether such a fatwa was actually issued or not. The fatwa would have continued raising controversies, opposing and supporting it, had the concerned clerics not quickly clarified their stand on the issue. Besides, socially, politically and economically, prospects of such a fatwa being supported by Muslim women themselves seem to be practically non-existent. It cannot be missed that the sub-continent is witness to significant number of Muslim women having succeeded in holding top-level political positions in their respective countries. At the grassroots, Muslim women are employed in various jobs not simply to add to the family income. Their main aim is to feed and educate the family and if possible save a little for their hours of crisis and/or other needs. They are employed as part-time or full-time domestic maids, engaged in cleaning utensils, washing clothes, cooking, sweeping the floors and similar household chores. At a higher level, they are employed as assistants in beauty parlors, stitching clothes, knitting woolens, embroidery work and so forth. The list is endless. Muslim women are visible in India as engaged in work in practically all walks of life, including academics, politics, law, media, business, management, medicine, administration, bureaucracy, sports and so forth.
Not surprisingly, when questioned on the so-called fatwa, former legislator Syed Shahabuddin said: “It is not possible to follow such a fatwa.†There is yet another angle to easily-generated controversies regarding actual or assumed fatwas. A Muslim cleric, with specialization in Islam, has the right to express views on matters, particularly if they are related to Islam. He may do so when questions on specific issues are posed to him and/or whenever he feels it is appropriate to do so. Howsoever, his views and/or fatwas are constitutionally not binding on the entire Indian Muslim community. Besides, it cannot also be ignored that Indian Muslim community is divided within itself into numerous groups- with each holding a different stand on certain issues. These groups include Shias and Sunnis, Deobandis and Barelvis among numerous others. So even if a fatwa is issued by a prominent cleric of one of these groups, it may not be expected to have similar significance for Muslims of other groups or even of the same group. The significance of the fatwa may hold greater importance for Muslim leaders, the media than for the common Muslims, who may not be even aware of any fatwa having been issued. The last point certainly holds true for the so-called fatwa against working of Muslim women. The controversial fatwa did raise a storm in media and among Muslim clerics. It did not take long for it to settle down with the clarification that no such fatwa had been issued. The storm rose and passed by with absolutely no impact on Muslim women remaining engaged in their respective jobs!
Former Pakistan National Assembly Member Jamshed Ahmad Dasti resigned in March 2010, because he was accused of presenting a fake Bachelors degree. His resignation came to avoid disqualification because of the forged degree.
He nominated himself when nomination to fill up the same seat that he resigned from.
Mr. Jamshed Dasti is also a candidate for NA-178 by-elections. On May 3rd, 2010 a registered voter of Muzaffargarh’s NA-178 constituency had challenged the approval of nomination papers of Dasti.
The petitioner’s council Mr. Malik Muhammad Rafique Rajwana had asked the judge to resolve the case before the election begins.
On the May 13th 2010 acting Chief Election Commissioner Justice Javed Iqbal ordered on Thursday prosecution of lawmakers whose educational degrees had been declared to be fake and bogus by courts. The order said that such people must not be allowed to contest any election in future.
Speaking in the National Assembly on the same date as the order, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Mr.Yousuf Raza Gilani said that degrees should not be a hurdle in eligibility for election. Graduate degrees had never been a condition for standing in election in a democratic setup, he claimed.
Along side the claim that degrees should not be a condition or a hurdle The Prime Minister also said that in future the political parties should not give ticket to fake degree holders because this causes embarrassment.
Mr. Gilani added that this has never been a problem before; it only surfaces in Mr. Musharraf’s time the reasons being that he wanted to keep his opponents away from the general elections of 2002.
The Prime Minister of Pakistan also went to an election rally for Mr. Jamshed Dasti and announced development funds in the constituency of Jamshed Dasti. He defended his act by saying that his brother was also applied for the same seat and if he did not support it would seem like he is holding a grudge against Mr. Dasti for his nomination rather than his brother.
The Prime Minister went on to claim that he did not do anything unethical by announcing development projects in Mr. Jamshed Dasti’s area, he said these were already included in the Public Sector Development Programme (PDSP). The prime minister said parliament should legislate on the issue of fake educational degrees of public representatives.
Justice Javed Iqbal headed the three-member bench of the Supreme Court, which decided honesty and fair play as the criterion for holders of public offices. The Supreme Court also observed that a person deceiving people with a counterfeit degree did not qualify to be a part of any elections.
Informed sources said that 142 election petitions were pending before election tribunals and many of them challenged the qualification of successful candidates on the plea that they were holding fake degrees. The sources said the Election Commission had asked the provincial election commissioners to provide details of the petitions.
The elections took place on May 15, 2010 and still the names of those who allegedly have fake degrees and are running in the elections are not decided.
This situation brings us to an even larger question in the context of our nation. If these people who are supposed to represent the Pakistani public and serve them are lying about something as basic as their education, what else are they lying to us about?
A person who cannot be trusted in one area most likely cannot be trusted in other areas as well. Point that needs to be noted here is that even though the public knows that most of these people are not being completely honest with them they still vote for them and put them in power, or do they?
The amount of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico may be at least 10 times the size of official estimates, according to an exclusive analysis conducted for NPR.
May 14, 2010
Greenpeace Senior Campaigner Lindsey Allen walks through a patch of oil from the Deepwater Horizon on the breakwater in the mouth of the Mississippi River where it meets the Gulf of Mexico in Louisiana, May 18, 2010. Fears that oil from a massive Gulf of Mexico spill was drifting to U.S. shorelines rose on Tuesday after tar balls were found in Florida, while BP faced mounting pressure to stem its leaking well.
REUTERS/Sean Gardner/Greenpeace/Handout
At NPR’s request, experts examined video that BP released Wednesday. Their findings suggest the BP spill is already far larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska, which spilled at least 250,000 barrels of oil.
BP has said repeatedly that there is no reliable way to measure the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico by looking at the oil gushing out of the pipe. But scientists say there are actually many proven techniques for doing just that.
Steven Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, analyzed videotape of the seafloor gusher using a technique called particle image velocimetry.
A computer program simply tracks particles and calculates how fast they are moving. Wereley put the BP video of the gusher into his computer. He made a few simple calculations and came up with an astonishing value for the rate of the oil spill: 70,000 barrels a day — much higher than the official estimate of 5,000 barrels a day.
The method is accurate to a degree of plus or minus 20 percent.
Given that uncertainty, the amount of material spewing from the pipe could range from 56,000 barrels to 84,000 barrels a day. It is important to note that it’s not all oil. The short video BP released starts out with a shot of methane, but at the end it seems to be mostly oil.
“There’s potentially some fluctuation back and forth between methane and oil,†Wereley said.
But assuming that the lion’s share of the material coming out of the pipe is oil, Wereley’s calculations show that the official estimates are too low.
“We’re talking more than a factor-of-10 difference between what I calculate and the number that’s being thrown around,†he said.
At least two other calculations support him.
Timothy Crone, an associate research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, used another well-accepted method to calculate fluid flows. Crone arrived at a similar figure, but he said he’d like better video from BP before drawing a firm conclusion.
Eugene Chiang, a professor of astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, also got a similar answer, using just pencil and paper.
Without even having a sense of scale from the BP video, he correctly deduced that the diameter of the pipe was about 20 inches. And though his calculation is less precise than Wereley’s, it is in the same ballpark.
“I would peg it at around 20,000 to 100,000 barrels per day,†he said.
Chiang called the current estimate of 5,000 barrels a day “almost certainly incorrect.â€
Given this flow rate, it seems this is a spill of unprecedented proportions in U.S. waters.
“It would just take a few days, at most a week, for it to exceed the Exxon Valdez’s record,†Chiang said.
BP disputed these figures.
“We’ve said all along that there’s no way to estimate the flow coming out of the pipe accurately,†said Bill Salvin, a BP spokesman.
Instead, BP prefers to rely on measurements of oil on the sea surface made by the Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Those are also contentious. Salvin also says these analyses should not assume that the oil is spewing from the 21-inch pipe, called a riser, shown in the video.
“The drill pipe, from which the oil is rising, is actually a 9-inch pipe that rests within the riser,†Slavin said.
But Wereley says that fact doesn’t skew his calculation. And though scientists say they hope BP will eventually release more video and information so they can refine their estimates, what they have now is good enough.
“It’s possible to get a pretty decent number by looking at the video,†Wereley said.
This new, much larger number suggests that capturing — and cleaning up — this oil may be a much bigger challenge than anyone has let on.
Renowned Scholar Abdulaziz Sachedina to Join Emmanuel College as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Islamic Studies. His Three-Year Appointment is to Begin in July 2011.
Emmanuel College continues to develop its emerging Muslim Studies program with the addition of renowned religious scholar Abdulaziz Sachedina to its faculty.
Currently the Frances Myers Ball Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, Sachedina will join Emmanuel College on July 1, 2011, as a distinguished visiting professor of Islamic studies.
His appointment at Emmanuel College has been made possible by members of Toronto’s Muslim communities, particularly the generosity of Moez Kassam, a financial advisor and business consultant, and the board of directors of the Canadian Dawn Foundation.
Sachedina will be working closely with the College prior to the commencement of his professorship. In the coming academic year, Sachedina will be teaching a course in interfaith relations from a Muslim perspective at Emmanuel College and will be participating in Victoria University’s 175th anniversary celebrations with the delivery of a public lecture on bioethics and religion in October 2010.
The university community has met the news of Sachedina’s appointment with great enthusiasm. “Dr. Sachedina is an outstanding public intellectual, teacher and scholar, who will provide important leadership as Emmanuel seeks to address the most significant issues facing Muslim communities in Canada,†says Emmanuel College principal Mark G. Toulouse.
Victoria University president Paul W. Gooch believes Sachedina’s presence will help Emmanuel College realize its vision of Muslim studies: “Dr. Sachedina is someone who builds bridges among diverse Muslim communities, among diverse religious faiths and among a variety of academic disciplines.
Sachedina received his MA and PhD in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies from the University of Toronto, and has been conducting research and writing in the fields of Islamic law, ethics, and theology (Sunni and Shiite) for more than two decades.
In the last 10 years, he has concentrated on social and political ethics, including interfaith and intrafaith relations, Islamic biomedical ethics, and Islam and human rights. Sachedina’s publications include: Islamic Messianism (SUNY Press, 1981); Human Rights and the Conflicts of Culture (University of South Carolina, 1988); The Prolegomena to the Qur’an (Oxford University Press, 1998); The Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism (Oxford University Press, 2001); Islamic Biomedical Ethic: Theory and Application (Oxford University Press, 2009); and Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights (Oxford University Press, 2009).
Sachedina is currently conducting research in Iraq and Iran on the role of reason in classical formulations of Islamic ethics. He has lectured widely in East Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan, India, Iran, Europe and Canada. Since 2007, he has been the distinguished honorary professor of Islamic biomedical ethics for Shahid Behishti University of Medical Sciences in Tehran, Iran.
Sachedina has also served on the advisory board of the Center for Bioethics of the University of Virginia and on an advisory council for the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding in New York City. He participates on editorial boards for 10 scholarly journals, including the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and The Journal of Religious Ethics.
Throughout the 1990s, he worked closely with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington on the Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism Project, an effort to link religion to universal human needs and values in the service of peace building.
Among his numerous awards are the Z Society Award for Outstanding Professor, the Government of Iran Cultural Scholarship, and the Sesquicentennial Fellowship for research in the United Kingdom.
Berkeley–In his introduction to the presentation of Professor Heba Reof, a political scientist at Cairo University, Dr. Nezar AlSayyed, the Chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at U.C. Berkeley, stated, when he was in Cairo, he always conferred with Ms. Reouf for she is one of the experts on Islamism in Egypt.
Dr. Reof was dressed as a proper Islamic traditional woman with a prominent Hajjib. Her studies recently entailed the linkage between the Egyptian public sphere and the context of contemporary latter Capitalism.
She believes that there is a tension between space reflection and theory amongst the trading and related classes. The informality of Cairo’s economic structure helps to comprehend the financial construction of the nation. Monetary viable fiscal transactions are constantly taking place, but simultaneously societal development is lagging, and that has led to a relaxed urban familiarity. Each municipal inhabitant mirrors the countenance of their other fellow citizens.
Curiously, Heba was adamant that the casualness of contemporary “Alexandrian†society can actually emulate the spiritual. Therefore, religion can, also, be reflected in this societal laissez-faire attitude – especially as in modern late Capitalism found in Northern Africa.
The Egyptian populace is negotiating its boundaries. This informality is not a protected way of life. It is affected by the economy and society. In a Third World situation, reliance(s) reside on small scale indigenous networks within local communities themselves. There are no particular patterns of interactions. Informal styles of pecuniary survival give dignity to the Subaltern (the shoddy to lower middle classes). The unperturbed attitude in the developing world offers an individual protection from the State, also. It possesses innovation that can lead to Modernity, but, almost counter to her previous statement, she states that there is no space for the casual within religion (because religious conviction is dominated by the ritualistically ceremonial – even within Islam itself although not as stalwartly as the spiritual traditions bordering upon it). She prefers that her “spiritual†archetype (i.e., the Islamic) to move even further away from Christian conceptualizations found (almost universally in the contemporary world,) though.
Strangely, although Western scholars contend that Islam is fully melded with the State, in actuality, there is some tension between the secular and the divine even within the Muslim State. Thus, religion is not as homogenous, as it is in most Islamic culture in the Egyptian example, according to Ms. Reof.
With the raise of Cosmopolitanism within the sphere of the Nile, faith has become manifested inside an urban space. Dr. Reouf declared that surrounded by this sacred tradition in the metropolitan space, it can become ill intentioned — degenerating from the unceremonious into militancy quickly. Socially, “If you can’t predict the informality within the spiritual, you might end up with a civil war!†There has been a rise of political agency as her ancient civilization has grown into the present. Further, “the rising competition amongst the different religiosities can, also, turn into violence.†Peculiarly, “Informality can create its own [type] of formality.â€
“The theory of the State can control the public sphere, but†in an odd twist to her argument, she states that “the informal is [always] questionable.â€
At first, the Egyptian State used criminal (“Mafiaâ€-like) techniques to repress those they considered to be “Fundamentalists†(e.g. Islamists). There, further, was inter-communal violence between the Copts (Egyptian Christians who make up 20%of the population of Egypt still) and the Islamists which was acerbated even more by the media, but in time the Islamists were able to secure their position within the Egyptian political landscape.
Besides, Professor Heba Reouf’s brilliant analysis, she is a testimony to the accomplishments of Muslim women in Egypt and the rest of the Islamic world.
Mention the name of the corporation BP to Scott West and two words immediately come to mind: Beyond Prosecution.
Oil sits on the bank of the the breakwater in the mouth of the Mississippi River where it meets the Gulf of Mexico in Louisiana, May, 18, 2010. Fears that oil from a massive Gulf of Mexico spill was drifting to U.S. shorelines rose on Tuesday after tar balls were found in Florida, while BP faced mounting pressure to stem its leaking well.
REUTERS/Sean Gardner/Greenpeace/Handout
West was the special agent in charge with the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) criminal division who had been probing alleged crimes committed by BP and the company’s senior officials in connection with a March 2006 pipeline rupture at the company’s Prudhoe Bay operations in Alaska’s North Slope that spilled 267,000 gallons of crude oil across two acres of frozen tundra – the second largest spill in Alaska’s history – which went undetected for nearly a week.
West was confident that the thousands of hours he invested into the criminal probe would result in felony charges against the company and the senior executives who received advanced warnings from dozens of employees at the Prudhoe Bay facility that unless immediate steps were taken to repair the severely corroded pipeline, a disaster on par with that of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill was only a matter of time.
In fact, West, who spent more than two decades at the EPA’s criminal division, was also told the pipeline was going to rupture – about six months before it happened.
In a wide-ranging interview with Truthout, West described how the Justice Department (DOJ) abruptly shut down his investigation into BP in August 2007 and gave the company a “slap on the wrist†for what he says were serious environmental crimes that should have sent some BP executives to jail.
He first aired his frustrations after he retired from the agency in 2008. But he said his story is ripe for retelling because the same questions about BP’s record are now being raised again after a catastrophic explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig killed 11 workers and ruptured an oil well 5,000 feet below the surface that has been spewing upwards of 200,000 barrels of oil per day into the Gulf waters for a month.
The Watchdog
In the summer of 2005, West was transferred from San Francisco to the EPA’s Seattle office and was introduced to Chuck Hamel, an oil industry watchdog, who is credited with exposing weak pollution laws at the Valdez tanker port in the 1980s prior to the Exxon Valdez spill and the electrical and maintenance problems associated with the trans-Alaska oil pipeline operated by BP.
Hamel had become the defacto spokesperson and protector of dozens of BP Exploration Alaska (BPXA) whistleblowers, who would routinely leak to him documents, pictures and inside information about the company’s poor safety and maintenance record at its Prudhoe Bay operations. Hamel also operated a now defunct web site, Anwrnews.com (the acronym for Arctic National Wildlife Refuge), which became a clearing house for the whistleblowers’ complaints and an archive showcasing, among other things, the letters Hamel had written to Congress, the White House and BP’s top executives exposing the company’s shoddy operations in the North Slope and demanding immediate action. The tagline on the archived version of Anwrnews.com says it was “established by and for the many concerned Prudhoe Bay BP operators who fear for their lives and the environment due to violations of Government regulations and requirements by BP.â€
One of the letters still posted on the web site is dated January 10, 2001. It was sent to him by unnamed BP employees, who asked him to assist them in getting BP management to address their concerns about safety and maintenance issues that their repeated attempts had failed to do. They said they even reached out to then-BP President Lord John Browne about “inadequate staffing levels†two years earlier, but never received a response.
“We were concerned about our recommendations being ignored and disregarded…We were concerned about BP’s cost cutting efforts undermining our ability to respond to emergencies and reducing the reliability of critical safety systems. We were concerned about the lack of preventative maintenance on our equipment,†the BP employees’ letter said. “We had suffered a major fire, which burned a well pad module to the ground and nearly cost one of our operators his life.
“We had suffered two job fatalities and a third serious injury to personnel in the months before the letter was sent. In response to our concerns, Sir John’s Management Team further reduced our staffing levels from six to four in the GC Plants and from seven to six on the Well Pads. Our four Plant Operators do the work that seven did in 1990.
“It is clear that BP Management has one priority and that is cost reduction … Perhaps you may know some way of getting our concerns heard and addressed. If these concerns are not addressed, we feel that a major catastrophe is imminent. We have only our lives and our futures at risk here.â€
Hamel followed up the employees’ letter with one he sent on April 11, 2001, to Browne at the company’s London headquarters alerting him to the substandard safety and maintenance policies in place at Prudhoe Bay that threatened the welfare of BP employees, an issue that persists at the facility nearly a decade later. “Courageous ‘Concerned Individuals’ contacted me for assistance in reaching you,†Hamel’s letter to Browne said. “They have not succeeded in being heard in the past two years in London, Juneau or Washington. I am again a reluctant conduit. They hope that you will take whatever action appropriate to effect corrective action which would protect the environment, the facilities and their safety.â€
Hamel also sent a copy of the letter to President Bush. It is unclear if either Browne or the Bush White House ever responded. BP would not comment for this story. But a majority of these allegations were repeated to West when he met with Hamel years later, and one explosive tidbit of information would form the basis of his criminal investigation into the company.
West said when he met Hamel he was told in no uncertain terms by Hamel that a section of pipeline at a caribou crossing – a “perfect habitat for corrosion†– was going to rupture and when it did it would be catastrophic.
“He said ‘eventually, the pipeline will fail,’†West said.
Hamel explained that the pipeline was so fragile that new employees were warned not to lean against it or allow their keys to bang against the structure because of the damage it could cause.
Hamel also told West that BP failed to take steps to conduct an internal inspection of the pipeline through a lengthy process known as “smart pigging,†which calls for sending electronic monitors, referred to as “smart pigs,†through the pipeline to determine whether any defects exist, such as sediment buildup, on the pipeline walls. The monitors squeal as they travel through the pipeline and that’s how the device got its name. It would later be revealed that BP had not conducted such an inspection for eight years and ignored and or retaliated against employees who suggested the company do so.
West said the first question he posed to Hamel was “how do you know this?â€
“This is what the employees are telling me,†West said, recalling his conversation with Hamel. Hamel was unavailable to comment for this story. “I told Chuck that if you don’t have first hand information there’s not much that I can do. I asked if I can speak to the employees. But he’s extremely protective of them and wanted assurances that I would keep their identities confidential and I wouldn’t bring any harm to them. I gave him my word and he arranged for me to speak to these guys.â€
“Nightmaresâ€
During the time that West met with Hamel, Congress was debating opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to exploration and BP, which operated the Prudhoe Bay oil field, the largest in North America and jointly owned by ExxonMobil, BP and ConocoPhillips, would have led the drilling efforts.
One of the concerns that employees expressed back then was that the frequent oil spills at Prudhoe Bay would also become a routine occurrence in ANWR because of BP’s ongoing cost-cutting measures that left its operations vulnerable. And for that reason, some employees opposed calls to pass legislation to drill in ANWR.
In an interview with Truthout in 2005, Hamel said whistleblowers informed him and then-Interior Secretary Gale Norton, who at the time was touring the Prudhoe Bay oil fields, that the safety valves at Prudhoe Bay, which kick in in the event of a pipeline rupture, failed to close. Secondary valves that connect the oil platforms with processing plants also failed to close. And because the technology at Prudhoe Bay would be duplicated at ANWR, that meant there was a strong chance for an explosion and massive oil spills.
West said after he spoke with a handful of the BP whistleblowers he “started having nightmares.â€
“They told me there was going to be a massive spill on the North Slope and I need to be ready,†West said. “I had these guys telling me about conversations they had with midlevel managers and documents they turned in exposing the pipeline corrosion and leak detection equipment on pipes that failed and ignored because it went off all the time. The employees were slapped down. They were given a lot of grief for having raised these issues. The BP culture is keep your mouth shut and your head down because nobody at BP wants to hear about it.
“That’s why I knew this was a criminal case,†West said. “BP turned a blind eye and deaf ear to their experts who predicted a major spill. It wasn’t intentional act to put oil on the ground, but it was intentional act to ignore their employees. That’s negligence and its criminal. “
West said he contacted colleagues in one of EPA’s regional offices in around December 2005 that he had information an oil spill was likely to happen in the North Slope.
Prediction Becomes Reality
On March 2, 2006, West was at his desk when he received a phone call.
“It was one of the employees I spoke to months earlier,†West said. “He said ‘just as we predicted, there’s a leak at the caribou crossing we told you about and it’s pretty bad.’â€
Even worse, the leak had gone undetected for nearly a week. The leak detection equipment employees had warned BP managers about malfunctioned and for about five days oil spilled out of a hole in the pipeline the size of a pencil eraser. The leak was discovered when an oilfield worker surveying the area smelled petroleum in the air and stepped out of his car to investigate.
“He ended up with a black foot,†West said. “That’s how bad the spill was.â€
The oil leak was determined to be caused by “severe corrosion.†It forced BP to shut down five oil processing centers in the region for about two weeks, which led to a spike in gas prices during a time of tight crude supplies.
Longtime BP employee Marc Kovac said a couple of weeks after the oil spill that he and his co-workers warned the company numerous times that their aggressive cost-cutting measures would increase the likelihood of accidents, pipeline ruptures and spills.
“For years we’ve been warning the company about cutting back on maintenance,†Kovac told The New York Times. “We know that this [March 2006 oil spill] could have been prevented.â€
West said he immediately dispatched one of his investigators to the North Slope and he admits that he became “excited about the prospect of putting people in jail for environmental crimes†and that was his goal as he and his team, working with the FBI, the DOJ and Alaska state environmental and regulatory officials, launched their probe into the circumstances behind the spill.
As West’s investigation into the company began to take shape, he obtained information that “very senior people in [BP’s] London [headquarters] were aware of what was going on [with regard to the corrosion in the pipeline] and did nothing.â€
“That’s where my investigation was going,†he said. “This was one of the top two cases being investigated by the EPA’s criminal division in 2007. This was a big deal. This case had all the markings of letting us getting high and deep into the corporate veil. “
West would not identify the executives, but two DOJ officials, who work in the agency’s environmental and natural resources division and are familiar with the case, said it was Browne, BP’s then-president and chief executive, and Tony Hayward, who was head of the company’s production and exploration division. The DOJ officials would only speak on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive issues surrounding BP in the aftermath of the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that led to the massive oil spill in the Gulf.
Hayward took over for Browne in May 2007, a move that BP accelerated by 18 months in the wake of the Alaska oil spill and widespread safety issues there at a March 2005 refinery explosion in Texas that killed 15 employees.
Grand Jury Convened
One of the setbacks West faced early on, however, was that he could not use the information he and his investigators obtained from the employees who claimed BP officials knew about the pipeline corrosion prior to the spill.
“One of the things that made this case slow was the vindictive nature of BP,†West said. “Sources we spoke with would not allow their name to be used because they feared they would be fired or retaliated against. What that meant was that I couldn’t send investigators out to knock on their doors at night and take their statements. [The employees] said ‘what you have to do is get me in front of a grand jury and subpoena me to testify.’â€
So, the US attorney’s office in Anchorage, under the guidance of Assistant US Attorney Aunnie Steward, the lead prosecutor on the case, convened a grand jury to hear witness testimony and subpoena witnesses as well as documents from BP. Because grand jury testimonies are secret, West could not say who or how many people testified before the panel. Nor could he divulge the details about what they revealed.
West said his team prepared a “surgical subpoena,†requesting specific documents from the company that would shed light on who knew what and when regarding the Alaska pipeline rupture.
“BP overwhelmed us,†West recalled. “When I say overwhelmed I’m talkin’ 62 million pages of documents they turned over. That told me there was a smoking gun in there but it was going to take time to find it.â€
“Like Trying to Turn the Titanicâ€
The investigation progressed into 2007, and by June of that year, prosecutors were discussing the evidence of BP’s alleged crimes.
Indeed, in a confidential email dated June 12, 2007, Steward sent to other federal and state prosecutors and EPA officials working on the case. Steward said what made the Alaska pipeline spill an issue of criminal negligence was that “BP knew or should have known that failure to maintenance pig the line that leaked would cause the line to fail.â€
“Standard in the industry is anywhere from quarterly to once every five years,†said Steward’s email, under the subject line “BP Theory of the Case.†The email was prepared in preparation for an August 2007 meeting with BP’s defense attorneys. Steward noted that the goal for the prosecution for the next two months is to “get something in writing on the charges and the evidence. It won’t be trial ready in August.†But she said her hope “for the August 28 [2007] meeting is to listen to BP and find out what they think their defenses or mitigating circumstances are so that we can focus on those.â€
As for the evidence, Steward said the prosecution had plenty and she expressed an interest in pursuing felony charges.
“It had been eight years since the line had been pigged. We have a nice photo of the cross-section of pipe where the leak occurred with 6 inches of sediment accumulated in the line. BP’s own corrosion engineers say that if they had known there was that much sediment in the line they would have pigged immediately. The important point here is that other parts of BP’s organization besides the corrosion team knew that there was sediment in the line – so perhaps a corporate collective knowledge would get us to knowing, ie, BP knew that failure to pig was going to cause the pipe to fail because of sediment build up.â€
By this point, BP had mounted a vigorous defense and suggested that even if they had performed maintenance on the line it still could have failed. But the company’s own corrosion engineers disagreed with that assertion. The company also said that it intended to pig the line by the summer of 2006, but the oil spill happened first.
Moreover, according to Steward’s email, “BP has also made a point of saying that everyone thought these lines were not likely to leak and so even if they had more money to throw at it, nothing would have been done differently regarding the lines that leaked. We have a ton of evidence to the contrary on this point.â€
Steward’s email then indicates that employee concerns about aggressive cost-cutting measures were substantiated during the course of the investigation. She indicated that BP has stated publicly that the company “changed their attitude†about cost-cutting in 2005, after the Texas refinery explosion and was “trying to do the right thing but they just didn’t do it quickly enough (and I think the implication is that they should thus not be penalized).â€
“It was all, however, too little too late,†Steward wrote. “Like trying to turn the titanic. Managers at BP have said that things were so tight at BP from the 90s through 2004 that even after things began to change in 2005 the mentality of employees was still so entrenched in cost cutting that the first response to any proposal is ‘we’ll never get the money for that’. The only reason things started to change were because the corrosion manager was such a tyrant and cost cutting was so rampant that whistleblowers complained to the probation office while [BP Exploration Alaska] was on probation for [a prior] felony conviction. This led to an audit in ‘04 which recommended serious changes in organization and budgeting to address the problems that started to be rolled out in ‘05.â€
The audit was prepared by the law firm Vinson & Elkins. It said BP created a climate of fear for employees who wanted to report concerns about the company’s operations. Congressional investigators probing the March 2006 oil spill obtained internal BP emails that showed executives issued “budget challenges†and ordered “top down cost cutting†with no regard for the safety of its pipelines.
Steward said in her email, however, that the “explosion in Texas got BP’s attention†and company executives maintained that BP had “changed.â€
“Tony Hayward traveled to [Alaska] after the [Texas refinery] explosion to see if there were similar problems in [Alaska] as in [Texas] such as overly aggressive cost cutting and a lack of communication between [management] and employees and found that there were,†she wrote.
Hayward told BP employees who attended a town hall type meeting in December 2006 that BP has “a leadership style that is too directive and doesn’t listen sufficiently well. The top of the organisation doesn’t listen sufficiently to what the bottom is saying.â€
Those comments led Steward to conclude that the changes at BP “did not come about because they were being good corporate citizens, it was because they were already felons and had recently killed a bunch of people.â€
Steward also attached a 12-page memo to her from Dean Ingemansen, the EPA’s criminal enforcement attorney, of the proposed fines that could be levied against BP Exploration Alaska for the week-long oil spill as well as another spill that occurred five months later, which also resulted from a corroded pipeline.
Ingemansen concluded, based on his review of case law, sentencing decisions and “guidance documents†from the EPA and the DOJ’s Environmental Crimes Manual, that BP could be penalized as much as $672 million for the March and August 2006 oil spills or as little as $58 million, “incredibly low settlements†as far as West was concerned.
Blunted
West said he knew he still had quite a bit of work to do. Although his probe had crossed the one year mark, he didn’t have enough evidence to recommend felony charges against BP or senior executives.
“These are complex investigations,†West said. “It usually takes a minimum of three to five years.â€
He said as much during a meeting of investigators and prosecutors in Anchorage on August 28, 2007, to discuss the case. And, West said, he was told that if he did not have enough evidence to allow prosecutors to file immediate felony charges against BP or executives at the company than the government was no longer interested in pursuing the case.
Federal prosecutors “asked me what I thought we could charge BP at that very moment and I said a criminal misdemeanor for Clean Water Act violations,†West said. “And they said ‘OK, then a misdemeanor it is.’ I’m screaming bloody murder! I told them I’m hot on the trail. Don’t kill this investigation now! It would be different if I were working this case for six years and spent a lot of time and resources on it. But it was only 17 months.â€
DOJ attorneys in Alaska decided the best course of action was to settle the case then and there. West said he continued to argue against the “rush to settle†and explained that he still had a large volume of evidence he hadn’t yet reviewed. He said he needed at least another year.
“They said flatly ‘no,’†West said. He then asked for six months and again was rebuffed.
“How about three more months?â€
“No,†he was told. “It’s over.â€
West said he was pulled aside at the end of the meeting by Karen Loeffler, the chief of the criminal division of the US attorney’s office in Alaska.
“She told me that she was just following orders and that the decision to close the case and settle was made by Ron Tenpas,†the assistant attorney general for Environment and Natural Resources at Main Justice, who was appointed to that position earlier in the year.
Tenpas, now in private practice at the law firm Morgan Lewis in Washington, DC, did not return calls or emails seeking comment. Loeffler also did not respond to requests for comment. Loeffler had previously denied that she told West that Tenpas shut down the probe. Tenpas had said in November 2008 that, while he agreed with the decision to settle, the decision to do so was not his.
West said he would be willing “to testify under oath and take a lie detector test†to prove that Loeffler told him Tenpas killed the investigation.
“What really irritated me though is that my own management didn’t even back me on this one,†West said. “Something happened between June of 2007 when Aunnie Steward sent the email talking about serious criminal charges and the meeting I attended in August when the case was killed.â€
He suspects that federal prosecutors in Alaska had already been negotiating with BP about a plea agreement prior to the August 28, 2007, meeting. DOJ officials familiar with the case said they were unaware whether there was any interference from the Bush White House or senior agency officials that would have led to the decision to shutter the probe.
In a statement issued in November 2008 when he first went public, the DOJ said West’s claims that something “sinister took place between June 12 and August 28, 2007†are “not based in fact and simply not true.â€
Money is anything that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment ofdebts. The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a store of value, and occasionally, a standard of deferred payment.
Money originated as commodity money, but nearly all contemporary money systems are based onfiat money. Fiat money is without intrinsic use value as a physical commodity, and derives its value by being declared by a government to be legal tender; that is, it must be accepted as a form of payment within the boundaries of the country, for “all debts, public and private.â€
The money supply of a country consists of currency (banknotes and coins) and demand deposits or ‘bank money’ (the balance held in checking accounts and savings accounts). These demand deposits usually account for a much larger part of the money supply than currency. Bank money is intangible and exists only in the form of various bank records. Despite being intangible, bank money still performs the basic functions of money, being generally accepted as a form of payment.
The use of barter-like methods may date back to at least 100,000 years ago, though there is no evidence of a society or economy that relied primarily on barter. Instead, non-monetary societies operated largely along the principles of gift economics. When barter did occur, it was usually between either complete strangers or potential enemies.
Many cultures eventually developed the use of commodity money. The shekel was originally both a unit of currency and a unit of weight. The first usage of the term came from Mesopotamia circa 3000 BC. Societies in the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australia used shell money– usually, the shell of the money cowry were used. According to Herodotus, and most modern scholars, the Lydians were the first people to introduce the use of gold and silver coin. It is thought that these first stamped coins were minted around 650–600 BC. Commodity money eventually evolved into a system of representative money. This occurred because gold and silver merchants or banks would issue receipts to their depositors – redeemable for the commodity money deposited. Eventually, these receipts became generally accepted as a means of payment and were used as money. Paper money or banknotes were first used in Chinaduring the Song Dynasty.
These banknotes, known as “jiaozi†evolved from promissory notes that had been used since the 7th century. However, they did not displace commodity money, and were used alongside coins. Banknotes were first issued in Europe by Stockholms Banco in 1661, and were again also used alongside coins. The gold standard, a monetary system where the medium of exchange are paper notes that are convertible into pre-set, fixed quantities of gold, replaced the use of gold coins as currency in the 17th-19th centuries in Europe. These gold standard notes were made legal tender, and redemption into gold coins was discouraged.
By the beginning of the 20th century almost all countries had adopted the gold standard, backing their legal tender notes with fixed amounts of gold.
After World War II, at the Bretton Woods Conference, most countries adopted fiat currencies that were fixed to the US dollar. The US dollar was in turn fixed to gold. In 1971 the US government suspended the convertibility of the US dollar to gold. After this many countries de-pegged their currencies from the US dollar, and most of the world’s currencies became unbacked by anything except the governments’ fiat of legal tender.
In the past, money was generally considered to have the following four main functions, which are summed up in a rhyme found in older economics textbooks: “Money is a matter of functions four, a medium, ameasure, a standard, a store.†That is, money functions as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a standard of deferred payment, and a store of value.[4] However, most modern textbooks now list only three functions, that of medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value, not considering a standard of deferred payment as a distinguished function, but rather subsuming it in the others.
There have been many historical disputes regarding the combination of money’s functions, some arguing that they need more separation and that a single unit is insufficient to deal with them all. One of these arguments is that the role of money as a medium of exchange is in conflict with its role as a store of value: its role as a store of value requires holding it without spending, whereas its role as a medium of exchange requires it to circulate.[4] Others argue that storing of value is just deferral of the exchange, but does not diminish the fact that money is a medium of exchange that can be transported both across space and time. The term ‘financial capital’ is a more general and inclusive term for all liquid instruments, whether or not they are a uniformly recognized tender.
Apparently, when you publish your Social Security number prominently on your website and billboards, people take it as an invitation to steal your identity.
LifeLock CEO Todd Davis, whose number is displayed in the company’s ubiquitous advertisements, has by now learned that lesson. He’s been a victim of identity theft at least 13 times, according to the Phoenix New Times.
That’s 12 more times than has previously been known.
In June 2007, Threat Level reported that Davis had been the victim of identity theft after someone used his identity to obtain a $500 loan from a check-cashing company. Davis discovered the crime only after the company called his wife’s cellphone to recover the unpaid debt.
About four months after that story published, Davis’ identity was stolen again by someone in Albany, Georgia, who opened an AT&T/Cingular wireless account using his Social Security number (.pdf), according to a police report obtained by the New Times. The perpetrator racked up $2,390 in charges on the account, which remained unpaid. Davis, whose real name according to police reports is Richard Todd Davis, only learned a year later that his identity had been stolen again after AT&T handed off the debt to a collection agency and a note appeared on his credit report.
Then last year, Davis discovered seven more fraudulent accounts on his credit report that were opened with his personal information and have outstanding debt, according to the police report.
Someone opened a Verizon account in New York, leaving an unpaid bill of at least $186. An account at Centerpoint Energy, a Texas utility, was delinquent $122. Credit One Bank was owed $573, and Swiss Colony, a gift-basket company, was seeking $312.
In addition to these amounts, Davis’s credit report showed five collection agencies were seeking other sums from accounts opened in his name: Bay Area Credit was pursuing $265; Associated Credit Services was seeking two debts in the amount of $207 and $213; Enhanced Recovery Corporation was chasing $250 and $381.
A spokeswoman for the Albany police, who investigated the AT&T/Cingular account but never made any arrest, told the New Times that Davis’ publication of his Social Security number created more victims than just himself.
“It’s unfortunate he chose to conduct business in that way,†spokeswoman Phyllis Banks said. “It’s not fair to [AT&T] because they’re losing a pretty substantial amount of money.â€
LifeLock refused to discuss the issue with the New Times. The company did not respond to a request for comment from Threat Level.
Lifelock promised in ads that its $10 monthly service would protect consumers from identity theft. The company also offered a $1 million guarantee to compensate customers for losses incurred if they became a victim after signing up for the service. The FTC called the claims bogus and accused LifeLock of operating a scam.
“In truth, the protection they provided left such a large hole … that you could drive that truck through it,†said FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, referring to a LifeLock TV ad showing a truck painted with Davis’s Social Security number driving around city streets.
Davis’ history as an identity-theft victim would seem to call into question the company’s ability to protect consumers from a similar fate.
VANCOUVER–Shahier Razik of Toronto won the BC Honda 2010 Canadian squash championships, retaining his national title when Jonathon Power suffered a leg injury and withdrew midway through the final match Saturday.
The Cairo born Razik is currently ranked 26th worldwide.
It is meant to be a beautiful, melodic and spiritual start to the day.
But the morning calls to prayer by some of Istanbul’s muezzins and imams have had locals plugging their ears rather than reaching for their prayer books.
The problem is such that following a flood of complaints by locals, special classes for the tuneless culprits have been set up.
Imam Mehmet Tas, one of the school’s first pupils, said he was already feeling the benefits.
“I have so much more self-confidence now in my abilities to do all five calls to prayer in their correct tempos,†he said.
The improvement scheme was put together by Mustafa Cagrici, the city’s head of religious affairs, who is determined to make sure all of the city’s 3,000 mosques produce a beautiful call-to-prayer each morning.
“For some reason, these imams were hired even though their voices are not good, they just can’t sing!
“We’re doing our best to help our imams and muezzins to improve their singing.â€
He says that since lessons started, complaints have dropped from hundreds a month to just dozens, an improvement that can be credited to the singing teacher, Seyfettin Tomakin.
“I personally find a badly sung azan [call to prayer] very disturbing,†he said.
“The azan is music, beautiful music that brings people to God, that’s why it’s so important to sing it well.
“Sure, there are some people who find it harder than others, that’s why some come here for a year. But my job is to find their voice to enable them to sing.â€
Sadly, for some, no amount of teaching will ever be enough.
“There are some people who can’t improve – no matter how much training you give them,†said Mr Cagrici.
“So we connect their mosque, by radio, to a central mosque where there’s an imam who can sing.â€
Interviews with surviving Deepwater Horizon rig workers show how explosions led to what may be the world’s worst oil spill
By David Randall
Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) holds a can of oil collected from the Gulf of Mexico during the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce committee hearing on the Deepwater Horizon Rig Oil Spill on Capitol Hill in Washington May 12, 2010.
REUTERS/Yuri Gripas
An extraordinary account of how the Deepwater Horizon disaster occurred emerged yesterday in leaked interviews with surviving workers from the rig. They said that a methane gas bubble had formed, rocketed to the surface and caused a series of fires and explosions which destroyed the rig and began the gushing of millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, threatening wildlife and coastal livelihoods. Oil-covered birds caught by the outer edges of the 135-mile slick are now being found.
Word also came yesterday that the oil spill may be five times worse than previously thought. Ian MacDonald, a biological oceanographer at Florida State University, said he believed, after studying Nasa data, that about one million gallons a day were leeching into the sea, and that the volume discharged may have already exceeded the 11 million gallons of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, widely regarded as the world’s worst marine pollution incident. Mr MacDonald said there was, as of Friday, possibly as much as 6,178 square miles of oil-covered water in the Gulf.
Meanwhile, at the site of the ill-fated well, a mile beneath the surface, a massive metal chamber had been positioned over the rupture so it could contain and then capture the bulk of the leaking oil. The operation, which uses undersea robots, and has never before been attempted at this depth and pressure. But last night, the formation of ice crystals meant the dome had to be moved away from the leak.
The interviews with rig workers, described to the Associated Press by Robert Bea, a University of California Berkeley engineering professor, recall the chain reaction of events that led to the disaster. They said that on 20 April a group of BP executives were on board the Deepwater Horizon rig celebrating the project’s safety record. Far below, the rig was being converted from an exploration well to a production well.
The workers set and then tested a cement seal at the bottom of the well, reduced the pressure in the drill column and attempted to set a second seal below the sea floor. But a chemical reaction caused by the setting cement created heat and a gas bubble which destroyed the seal.
As the bubble rose up the drill column from the high-pressure environs of the deep to the less pressurised shallows, it intensified and grew, breaking through various safety barriers. “A small bubble becomes a really big bubble,†Professor Bea said. “So the expanding bubble becomes like a cannon shooting the gas into your face.â€
Up on the rig, the first thing workers noticed was the sea water in the drill column suddenly shooting back at them, rocketing 240ft in the air. Then, gas surfaced, followed by oil. “What we had learned when I worked as a drill rig labourer was swoosh, boom, run,†he said. “The swoosh is the gas, boom is the explosion and run is what you better be doing.†The gas flooded into an adjoining room with exposed ignition sources, he said. “That’s where the first explosion happened,†said Professor Bea, who worked for Shell Oil in the 1960s during the last big northern Gulf of Mexico oil well blow-out. “The mud room was next to the quarters where the party was. Then there was a series of explosions that subsequently ignited the oil that was coming from below.â€
According to one interview transcript, a gas cloud covered the rig, causing giant engines on the drill floor to run too fast and explode. The engines blew off the rig and set “everything on fireâ€. Another explosion below blew more equipment overboard. The BP executives were injured but nine crew on the rig floor and two engineers died. “The furniture and walls trapped some and broke some bones, but they managed to get in the lifeboats with assistance from others,†said the transcript. The workers’ accounts are likely to be presented in some form to the hearings held by the US Coastguard and Minerals Management Service, which begin next week.
By then, the success of the dome-lowering, if it is resumed, will be known. On Friday, a BP-chartered vessel lowered a 100-ton concrete and steel vault on to the ruptured well in an attempt to stop most of the gushing crude from fouling the sea. “We are essentially taking a four-storey building and lowering it 5,000ft and setting it on the head of a pin,†said BP spokesman Bill Salvin. With the contraption on the seafloor, workers needed at least 12 hours to let it settle and stabilise before the robots could hook up a pipe and hose that will funnel the oil up to a tanker. By today, the box the size of a house could be capturing up to 85 per cent of the oil.
The task became urgent as toxic oil crept deeper into the bays and marshes of the Mississippi Delta. A sheen of oil began arriving on land last week, and crews have been laying booms, spraying chemical dispersants and setting fire to the slick to try to keep it from coming ashore. But now the thicker, stickier goo is drawing closer to Louisiana’s coastal communities.
There are still untold risks and unknowns with the containment box. The approach has never been tried at such depths, where the water pressure is enough to crush a submarine, and any wrong move could damage the leaking pipe and make the problem worse. The seafloor is pitch black and the water murky, though lights on the robots illuminate the area where they are working. If the box works, another one will be dropped on to a second, smaller leak at the bottom of the Gulf. At the same time, crews are drilling sideways into the well in the hope of plugging it up with mud and concrete, and they are working on other ways to cap it.
“The Fed can no longer operate in virtual secrecy,†declared Vermont independent Bernie Sanders Tuesday after the Senate voted 96-0 to add his “Audit the Fed†amendment to the financial regulatory reform bill.
The Senate amendment is not as muscular as the bipartisan legislation backed by the House, which was sponsored by Florida Congressman Alan Grayson, an aggressive progressive, and Texas Congressman Ron Paul, an equally aggressive conservative with libertarian leanings. The Grayson-Paul bill authorizes audits by the Government Accountability Office of every item on the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, including all credit facilities and all securities purchase programs; there would be exemption only for unreleased transcripts, minutes of closed-door meetings and the most recent decisions of the central bank. The Senate measure is narrower in its focus, but it would require the GAO to scrutinize some several trillion dollars in emergency lending that the Fed provided to big banks after the September 2008 economic meltdown.
The actual amount of public money that has been set aside for private banks is not known. That’s one reason why this audit is so important. But there can be no doubt that the figure is astronomical. The Center for Media and Democracy’s Wall Street Bailout Tally shows that since 2008, the U.S. government has flooded Wall Street banks and financial institutions with $4.7 trillion dollars in taxpayer money, mostly in the form of loans from the Fed reserve. The Fed has never told us which firms got these loans and what type of collateral American taxpayers got in return. This will now be revealed. We will also get an accounting of the Fed’s “stealth†bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac.
Sanders tried to pass a broader amendment, but when he faced roadblocks — and the prospect that audit language might be excluded entirely from the final bill — he agreed to propose an amendment outlining the one-time audit of post-meltdown Fed activity. That did not sit well with all senators. Even as Republicans such as New Hampshire’s Judd Gregg tried to prevent any demand for transparency, Louisiana Republican David Vitter proposed tougher language along the lines what Grayson and Paul pushed through the House. While most Democrats and a number of Republicans opposed the tougher language, Sanders joined the most serious reformers in the Democratic caucus — Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold, Washington’s Maria Cantwell, North Dakota’s Byron Dorgan, Arkansas’s Blanche Lincoln, Virginia’s Jim Webb and Oregon’s Ron Wyden — in voting “yes.â€
The Vitter amendment failed on a 62-37 vote and Feingold was especially disappointed. “Unfortunately,†the Wisconsin progressive declared, “the defeat of the Vitter amendment means American taxpayers will still not have a complete picture of how one of the most powerful government agencies makes policy and spends their tax dollars.â€
Still, Feingold acknowledged that, “Senator Sanders’ amendment will mean more transparency for the Federal Reserve, so the public will have a better idea of how it is spending taxpayer dollars.â€
That transparency is consequential, noted Sanders. “Let’s be clear,†he explained, “when trillions of dollars of taxpayer money are being lent out to the largest financial institutions in this country, the American people have a right to know who received that money and what they did with it. We also need to know what possible conflicts of interest exist involving the heads of large financial institutions who sat in the room helping to make those decisions.â€
The “Audit the Fed†language that is included in the final legislation remains to be seen, as the differences between the House and Senate proposals will have to be reconciled by a conference committee. That will provide an opening for Grayson, Paul, Sanders and their allies to push for the broadest possible transparency. But, make no mistake, there will be pushback.
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has repeatedly refused to respond to demands from Sanders and others for information about the banks that have been bailed out by the taxpayers — and that continue to pad their accounts with public dollars. President Obama, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and their aides are critics of the “Audit the Fed†push, as well.
So why, with so much official opposition, did the “Audit the Fed†movement win a 96-0 vote in the Senate? Campaigners on the left and right made the issue a high priority. A good deal of credit must go to Sanders and Paul — long-time critics of the Fed who opposed the 2008 Wall Street bailouts and then steered anger at those bailouts toward the “Audit the Fed†movement — which was boosted on the left by websites such as Jane Hamsher’s Firedoglake and on the right by the Paul-linked Campaign for Liberty, as well as by outspoken economists such a Dean Baker and watchdog operations such as CMD’s BanksterUSA project.
Ultimately, however, much of the credit must go to Grayson, who embraced Paul’s proposal — which had languished in the House — and led the campaign to get Democrats to sign on to the bill. As Hamsher says, “Tremendous credit goes to Alan Grayson. It was Grayson who decided to take up Ron Paul’s bill and bring Democratic support for it.
Sanders, who took some hits for compromising, also deserves credit at this point for making sure, even when he was forced to trim back on his amendment, that critical elements of the initial proposal by Paul — especially the defined role for the GAO — were retained. That will make it harder for the Obama White House and their allies in the congressional leadership to gut the audit language in the conference committee.
There will, as well, be additional fights:
“While passage of Senator Sanders’ amendment will provide some long overdue accountability and transparency for the Federal Reserve, the overall bill still needs a lot of work,†said Feingold. In particular, Feingold and other real reformers have focused on the need for the bill to restore the firewall between Main Street banks and Wall Street securities firms and insurance companies, which contributed to financial institutions growing “too big to fail.â€
While the bipartisan support for auditing the Fed represents a step in the right direction, Feingold is right when he says it is only one step on a long road toward addressing the way in which bad decisions by Congress “led to deregulation and the increased concentration of economic power and economic decision-making.â€
John Nichols is Washington DC correspondent for The Nation magazine.
By Sumayyah Meehan, MMNS Middle East Correspondent
The case of Lebanese citizen Ali Hussain Sibat, who has been incarcerated for the past two years in a Saudi Arabian prison on charges of being a sorcerer, has brought the dark world of ‘black magic’ and witchcraft that exists in many countries of the Middle East into the limelight. Sibat has been sentenced to death by beheading for hosting a television show called, “The Hidden†in Lebanon in which he engaged in acts of sorcery on camera. Saudi officials also claim that he confessed while in custody to selling potions to his clients that supposedly fulfill their greatest desire.
Sorcery, voodoo, soothsaying and all sorts of witchcraft are strictly forbidden in the Islamic faith and laws against the evil practices are firmly upheld by most Islamic countries. Despite the severe penalties, which are sometimes lethal, many people claiming to have special powers continue to prey on the public. And in many cases, the soothsayers are sought out by people suffering from hardships ranging from issues of the heart to more worldly issues like financial struggles. There is a tangible market in the Middle East for sorcery as there is a plethora of people seeking to get a hold of, what they perceive to be, the unattainable.
However, personal gain is not the only reason why witchcraft has found a comfortable niche in the Gulf region. Jealousy, hatred and just plain loathing are often the driving forces behind the use of witchcraft or sorcery. In a recent cover story in the newspaper Saudi Gazette, a pair of Indonesian housemaids was arrested for committing acts of sorcery against their sponsor families. Both were duped into confessing to their crimes in exchange for a large amount of money, which was bogus and meant only to extract their confessions. The housemaids admitted to placing at least 55 ‘charms’ in various parts of each of the family homes. Just prior to their confessions, family members had become suspicious after several other members of the family fell ill mysteriously. According to the article the charms, some consisting of broken glass and nails, were found and ‘undone’ by religious authorities.
The problem of sorcery has become so widespread in the Gulf that many countries are taking preemptive actions to dissuade the practice. Bahrain is just one government that is trying to root out witchcraft from within its borders. The Bahraini government is set to pass a new appendix to the law that already exists on the books which forbids anyone in the country from performing sorcery on the behalf of others or even privately in the home. However, unlike in Saudi Arabia, anyone convicted of sorcery in Bahrain does not stand to lose his or her head. The penalty for sorcery in Bahrain is a stiff fine and possibly a prison stint followed by deportation.
Human rights groups are swift to criticize Middle East governments for taking a hard line when it comes to witchcraft and sorcery. Most recently Human Rights Watch (HRW) criticized the Saudi government for turning Sibat’s case into a capital crime when in other countries it would be most likely be classified as a mere case of fraud.
Residents carry a coffin of a victim who was killed in Monday’s bomb attack during a funeral in Basra, 420 km (260 miles) southeast of Baghdad, May 11, 2010. Bombers and gunmen officials linked to a battered but still lethal al Qaeda killed more than 100 people on Monday during a day-long wave of attacks on markets, a textile factory, checkpoints and other sites across Iraq.
REUTERS/Atef Hassan
BAGHDAD – With deadly attacks still claiming more lives in the war-torn country, the funeral market in Iraq has turned from a simple work into a booming business. “Before US-led invasion, I had one ceremony to take care,†mourner Ali Abdel-Kareem al-Shuwafi, 48, told IslamOnline.net on Friday, October 30.
“But in the last four years, I had to hire 12 employees and other 15 who are used when we have many ceremonies to hold in the same day.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed in violence plaguing Iraq since the US invaded the country in 2003 to topple the Saddam Hussein regime.
“Violence in Iraq changed my life. I know that it isn’t a nice sentence to say but it is the true,†said Shuwafi.
“The continuing killings in my country helped me become a wealthy man and able to give a very good life to my family who years ago were suffering with the need of everything.â€
Before the US invasion, Shuwafi was hardly able to provide basics to his family.
But his life has totally changed after the US troops invaded the oil-rich country.
“I decided to open a shop in Baghdad two years ago which takes care of everything, the three days mourning process, the burying and other ceremonies asked by our clients,†he said.
Shuwafi had borrowed money from a friend of his to open his shop.
“After few months, I had enough to pay him back and open more two shops, one in Baghdad and one in Basra where my brother takes care,†he said.
“I know I’m successful today because of people suffering, however, I didn’t kill them and just made a way for families to be well supported in a so hard moment of their lives.
“The war changed my life for better but I sometimes I wish that things were like before and I would had been able to improve my living conditions under other ways offered by the government.â€
Lucrative
Like Shuwafi, many mourning professionals have made a fortune from the deadly violence.
“There was periods where I had to refuse ceremonies because I didn’t have enough materials to organize it,†Kamal al-Jumeiri, a funeral business owner in Baghdad, told IOL.
“During 2006 and 2007 I was able to make enough money to send my family away to Jordan to protect them and I use to visit my kids and wife every three months.
“My family accuse me of taking advantage and making money from people who were victims but someone had to make it and I had enough conditions to offer my skills.â€
Jumeiri recalls that he only owned two coffins to run his business before the US invasion.
“After violence in 2006, I had enough money to open two shops,†he said.
“By two trucks, I import supplies from outside with better quality, offer a proper burial with all stuff needed like chairs for the mourners, recorders, speakers, people to read Qur’anic verses, kitchen apparatus to cook food during the three days ceremony, generators, tents and other specific things that sometimes is asked by grieving families.â€
According to Iraqi traditions, families rent tents for the three days of mourning and professional mourners to add emotions by crying while speaking verses of the Qur’an.
In addition, coffee, tea and cigarettes should be offered to visitors during the three days of mourning.
In the last day, food is cooked and offered to all people present, including poor people who usually get close to get free food.
“I moved from a simple mourning workers into a first-class business and most of my clients have wealthy living conditions and hire my work due to my excellent materials used,†said Jumeiri.
The booming funeral market is also sparking rivalry among mourning professionals.
“I suffered threats from other mourning professionals,†said Jumeiri.
“Many of them, not all, have organised gangs to prevent us from keeping work and leave all ceremonies to them but I insisted and have to pay a security guard to follow me.â€
Prices for the funeral services have skyrocketed over the violence.
“I lost my father before invasion from heart disease and didn’t spend more than US $50 for all ceremony and coffin,†Haydar Muhammad Khalif, a government employee, told IOL.
“But two months ago, my uncle was killed and we had to pay US $300 for the same ceremony, without any changes.â€
Coffins now cost about $80, from only $10 before the US invasion.
A complete ceremony would cost from $150 to $400, from only $60 before the invasion.
“Even to die in Iraq you have to have enough money or you will have to be buried without proper Iraqi Muslim traditions,†said Khalif.
Editor’s note: The TMO Foundation conducted a scholarship essay contest and TMO is now printing the essays of some of the entrants to the contest.
This is the essay of a $500 scholarship winner, by Nidah Chatriwala, on the subject “Why I Want to Be a Journalist.†She received a $500 scholarship.
By Nidah Chatriwala
I want to be a journalist for many reasons, but before we jump into the reasons why, let me share with you the first moment I was given the hint of having a career in this field. I remember clearly even today, I used to read the Fun Times, a children’s newspaper in Saudi Arabia. In one of their issues they had given examples of few careers for children to ponder about and one of them was journalist. Without a second thought I laid my finger on it and screamed confidently, “that’s what I want to be!†Then in high school my influential teachers gave birth to my hidden talent, which has today become my companion in life, writing. Then came time for graduating high school and I had couple of ideas for my career since freshmen year which changed from being an actor to an interior designer then a psychologist and finally, a journalist.
I wanted to be a journalist and I didn’t have a solid reason to support my decision. This led to my research in the career and I discovered how a specialization in journalism gelled with my skills and personality. I believe journalism is the perfect career for me because of the certain mindset, personality, and skills it requires; basically it requires me. There are four sections that complete the soul of a journalist, which are communication, discipline, problem-solving skills, and working with people.
To be interested into the journalism path, one must have considered achievement and independence important. They must possess artistic abilities such as working with artistic forms because it gives them freedom to be expressive. Having an investigative personality is an important trait of a true journalist as they to search for facts and figure out solutions to problems with their minds. Journalists have strong enterprising skills because they carry the trait of strong leadership into creating and carrying out projects. Of course having the sense of recognition and support from co-workers and employers is intensely important to me and to a journalist; this description of a journalist equals me.
Skills which I am graciously gifted to be a journalist are: to be comfortable with the inspiring language of English, competent with the use of the latest computer and other technologies, being aware of the shared link between communications and media, and administrative and management abilities.
These are the qualities that are combined to build a sensational journalist today. Though I am capable of all specializations of journalism, I have chosen public relations.
I chose public relations because I believe that I contain the necessary skills this department requires. I encompass enthusiastic presentation skills with an obsession for planning, which is beneficial in managing events for my clients. My communication skills can assist me in retrieving clear expectations from my clients to creating and maintaining cooperative relationships. My artistic flare can visually show my clients their idea in action. My partnership with goodwill will magically transform my clients’ image positively. My editorial skills can mechanically flow the information to other media outlets or to create speeches. My business side can market an idea or a product with fresh techniques to profit the client.
I strongly believe that, especially in today’s time, we need more Muslims in this field because due to the damage media has already done on the peaceful image of Islam, it needs to be cleared. Successful and positive examples need to be illuminated by the media to show what Islam really is, and who Muslims really are. Muslim journalists need to work as public relations examples of Islam, to promote its true message with facts and successful examples.
A few serious issues our Muslim American community faces today are the fear of hiring a Muslim for a job and being stereotyped. To address these conflicts we need to unite as a Muslim community and work together living proudly under the freedom this nation has provided us with. We must raise our voices together to get action on our views, but most of all, we need to become good Muslims. That is because we need to win Allah on our side first and we can do that by practicing our religion and sharing knowledge with each other.
If Allah is on our side then nothing is impossible. To solve the Islamphobia, we as Muslims should unite, become good Muslims, and promote Islam in our communities. We should participate in our local events, spread knowledge to our non-Muslim brothers and sisters, and invite them to learn about our religion, but most importantly we as Muslim journalist should promote Islam.
One issue close to my heart is the treatment us Muslim women get, who wear the hijab, at the workplace. In my experience, I have received the skeptical stares, unfair questions, and difficulty in being hired for a job position. I have heard from my Muslim sisters that at times their employers asked them to take off their hijabs and these situations have been mishandled to even leading to a lawsuit against the employer, but in majority of the cases the employer agreed to have the Muslim sister to continue to wear her hijab after a religious explanation. Once again it narrows down to spreading knowledge of Islam for a clear and better understanding of who we are.
One of the aspects of today’s media that irritates me is the choice of words they invent while referring to the terrorists; for example, the Islamic fundamentalists, the extremists, the Islamic world or the Muslim world. These terms are used to describe terrorists and their destructive activities or train of thought the Muslim dictator of a country’s viewpoint. This is unfair and unethical. These terms should be taken out immediately because Islam has no relation to terrorists and their tactics or to the political ideas the Middle Eastern countries’ president has.
Muslims need to participate in debates and policy-making events because it’s important–not because it’s a right which we have earned as citizens of this nation, but because we need to make our government to remember that it in itself is nothing without the people. We the people run these nations and the government should abide by justice, organize itself with a president, who declares the majority ruling. The government has its own ways of checking itself and the president, but we the people have the power over all. So we Muslims should show our community power by participating in our governmental hearings, most importantly make our votes count, and take part in politics.
We Muslim Americans can relate to other Muslims in other parts of the world by the beautiful faith we share between us.
We all have our own share of difficulties we have to pass through in our lives every day. We all surrender to one and only god, Allah. We all bow our heads down towards the Ka’aba five times a day. We fast during the month of Ramadan together. We all make a goal of performing hajj at least once in our lifetime. We both give charity and offer help to the poor. These five pillars of Islam, belief in Allah, and our daily hurdles, bring us on the common ground of hope and friendship between each other. Not only that, we are all brothers and sisters in Islam, who were created out of Adam–we worship Allah, and follow our beloved Prophet Muhammad’s (s) teachings.
We Muslim Americans are already a part of the American pluralism. We have the most diversity of people in our religion, we follow the religion which is the solution for humanity, we have been taught to tolerate and bear with patience when treated unfairly and we learned to accept and offer help to each other. We strive to reach a common ground of agreement between each other. Our social societies promote positive energy with rules and guidance provided by the best sources such as the Qur`an, hadiths, and Allah’s blessings. We blend and accept each other’s culture. We can create an example of a perfect society.
In conclusion, I believe that more than ever before we are in strong need of Muslim journalists and opportunities to fund our education should be highly created especially for this area of study.
It is not the quantity, but the quality of time spent attempting to follow the guidance of ALLAH that ensures success. ALLAH says in Qur’an that “everything is a sign – for those who reflect.†Each day, if we just take 10 minutes of quiet, quality time in carefully selected thought procedures, we can improve our life by achieving a greater measure of happiness, increased efficiency, and a feeling of spiritual, mental, and physical well-being.
So many things whiz by us each day that it is virtually impossible to reflect while you are on the go. You will possibly see these “signs of ALLAHâ€, but not will reflect on them to get the full benefit. So many miraculous things occur during the course of our going about our daily activities. They are happening whether you realize it or not. The key is to first know that ALLAH is in the blessing business and then key in on your blessings by being one of those who “reflect†on the signs of ALLAH.
This 10 minute formula I am sharing with you has been proven scientifically over time and it is right in sync with the ALLAH’S word to “reflect.†The plan is to spend the 10 minutes every day in quiet submission. It must be regular. To do it for a day or two and then skip a day or two will lessen the impact on the results.
ALLAH is real, and He will guide you as you submit your mind to His. Don’t go into this process with the idea “I want to do this—or do that. Instead, wait on an answer to enter your mind. You have now made your mind susceptible to Divine wisdom.
This is in the same vein as the Istikara prayer Muslims say in the early reaches of the night. The difference is, in the istakara prayer, we ask ALLAH to examine our particular situation. It may be a particular relationship or maybe a career move or something similar. We make two rakah and ask ALLAH to make it easy and possible to attain— if it is right for us. If it is not right for us, we ask Him to remove it from us. Istakara is a powerful tool of connection and help from ALLAH.
This time of reflection is also special because we stop what we are doing, go to a quiet place with no distractions and wait for thoughts to enter your mind. They might not be what you expect or even what you want. They may be far from what we are accustomed to thinking. But if you are a believer and have submitted yourself to be an instrument of ALLAH, you will be on a higher wavelength of righteousness in which there is no error. The time can vary. It may be before salat or after salat—or an hour or so after salat. It doesn’t matter. The main thing is quietness, relaxation, and submission of your mind to ALLAH.
There are many tools and avenues to connect spiritually to our Creator. This is only one. Sometimes while offering salat, solutions and answers come to our minds. I take it as ALLAH choosing a time to communicate with me. Some people think they are sinning if your mind wanders during salat. But it is not necessarily so. It depends on what your mind is wandering to.
This human mind we have is special and it has a special way of communicating with its Maker. Reflect on the “Signs†of ALLAH. You will be richer for it.
The full version of our analysis (with comments particularly valuable for Precious Metals Traders) is available to our Subscribers.
Over the last few days, there has been a steady complementing studied between the gradual decline of Dollar and the correction of Gold rates. There has always been a debate regarding the inherent value of the two. The dollar has always been traded, compared and exchanged for and against Gold. Gold is the evergreen king of the precious metal commodity and its trading has revered over changing streams of different eras. Since the abolishment of Bretton Woods System of IMF in 1971, Gold has been replaced with Dollar; due to this replacement many further effects has been triggered, adjustments and movements have been drawn, that reciprocate between the two.
The fundamental reason given for abolishment of Gold standard was based on exchange deficits that were causing challenges to Dollar in the wake of imports and exchange rates in comparison to locally produced consumption.
Over the decades the movement of Dollar has corresponded in variant terms with reference to economic and trade policies in differing speculative environments. The fundamental reason behind substituting the Gold standard was also to slash the impacts of speculative currency trading in the international forex markets reacting on the valuation of Dollar.
Impacts of Monetary Inflation:
Another valid reason may also be the drifts in the economic environments; IMF and World Bank regulations and their responsive effects on the US economy. The Capital based Trade Market Economies have also exhibited fluctuations in the wake of diverse political events such as the formation of independent Russia, Fall of the Berlin Wall, formation of European Union, oil discovery in Middle East, the rising tension in Far East because of North Korea, Euro launch, and the steady emergence of markets such as India and China.
US home based policies also displayed a progressive change in the economic scenarios with respect to wars, governmental stance and most importantly the recent economic meltdown. The extensive printing of the currency in from of Euro and Dollar also had depleted effects on the consumer power of purchase and radically visible inflation all over the world and particularly in G7 countries.
Dollar being the standard is highly dependent on the prevailing national debt, imports, inflation and the rising cost of living. Unemployment, bail-outs, tax and health care reforms also had exorbitant influence on the face value of dollar in general.
But the question remains; where does it all lead to? Is it all based on speculative investments or all these factors are predominantly acting for the virtue of Gold. The relationship between the two has always been preempted under immense implicative measures. The impact of one currency (Dollar) over the other commodity (Gold) has always been a reason of criticism against each other from siding speculators of both fronts.
Gold was made standard in 1945 to stabilize the global international monetary system so that there is fair assimilation of national economies based on indicators such as GDP, GNP, Per Capita Income, Reserves and BOP (Balance of Payment). Gold being the common global standard had less effects on its value due to the inherent perception and that of various economies competing to match on its standardized worth.
Dollar Value:
The national economic policies since 1971 did not only have weakening outcome on dollar value but it also advanced the process of devaluation further when economies such a EU and USA started printing more currency to stabilize the wear and tear for the adjustment on domestic level.
Gold on the other hand was accumulated and stored in its actual worth and the steady weakening of currency value led to its appreciation. Since gold was always considered on its inherent worth, the dollar on the other hand was adjusted based on non-regulated and un-supervised measures such a Lehman crunch and the bail-outs implicating tax-reforms, inadvertently tarnishing the possibility of domestic growth and further posing the challenges such as unemployment, national debt and severely suffered consumer power of purchase.
All these side effects that contributed towards the loss of dollar had contributed towards the gain of gold value. Just like the political and economic policies had impacted Dollar value, similarly weakened dollar value added on the worth of stable and independent gold rates.
Both depression followed Gold as the emerging market standard. In 1945 it was mutually decided between 44 signing nations that Gold will be kept as a standard of international monetary exchange based on the fact that it had always been one since the recorded history, to stabilize equitable and even distribution of wealth in world order. Being replaced by paper money and many stimulus packages, has only appreciated Gold’s worth rather than sustaining any inadvertent effect of the currency based decline.
Power of Purchase:
This recession too has forecasted the emergence of Gold once again as the prominent market dominant force, a commodity, a precious metal, a globally fixed and accepted standard. A tool to regularize the unevenness of wealth distribution, gold has further captured the limelight due to its movement along the path of Dollar and its resilient stability overcoming all the posed risks and challenges in the frequently shifting economic scenarios.
Economic analysts all over the world have been forecasting a trickle up effect of Gold against the paper money, they believe in storing and retaining the Gold in various forms such a biscuits, bullion and numismatic coins to cover up against the non-recovering irresponsible scenario of dollar.
Another vital interest is also based on the security expenses, war deficit and the foreign investments in US, that are based and biased on off shore interests and agenda. Due to high cost of resources, all the major producers are now creating goods of mass consumption in China. Garments, automobile, electronics and even Gold and Silver mining, China is storing resources (including copper) while at the same time generating supplement resources from their foreign direct investments and offshore exports. The dominant factors encapsulating the US economic scenario is leading to further devaluing the dollar as it is not purchasing anything but accumulating debt and thereby further worsening the trade objective that was meant to achieve through the substituting of dollar from gold in 1971 by President Nixon.
These policies have thereby further strengthened precious metals as the counter-effect of sliding dollar movement and non-recovering effects of leading economic indicators. Dollar being the representative currency of US markets also stand as the major determinant of the bi-lateral effects it narrows within the US and world economies. This correlation creates Gold as the buffer medium that gets profited due to the short comings of its competition against the dollar.
Real Money Dollar or Gold?
Some economic authorities considers Gold as the real money, the reason being it does not devalue and has little reflection of the policy scenario on its power of purchase and hence depicts the real value worth of economic prosperity and national hard work. The growth and decline corresponds well because it only changes it impact on the currency valuation when there is an actual change in figures of Gross Domestic Product.
The policy of providing stimulus through printing paper money is another crucial factor that strengthens the worth of Gold in international markets, European and United States do so to provide leverage to the deteriorating conditions of unemployment and improving the standard of living but the reverse occurs when in the long term scenario the trade deficits start effecting the currency and the average price of goods increase in form of inflation and rising cost of living.
Current trends future events:
During the last few weeks and since past few months; the correction in Dollar rates has led to steady shift in the investors’ confidence in the currency. Though the unchanged interest rates announced by FED (until the economic health is retained) is good for short term as there has been a betterment of at least 10% in unemployment ratios. This marked improvement has also helped in regaining the speculators confidence a bit, who had witnessed the steady improvement in Dollar value during the 2009 risky era.
The current move in Dollar has since given speculative markets an incentive of making profits from Dollar through trading in other currencies, though the speculated change in interest rates halted by FED will become another reason for the next speculation related to the improvement in Euro against Dollar for the target 1.5 figures. Due to the approach of Euro to 1.5 figures also reflects an upswing in the position of global economy and thereby an eventual escalation in interest rates. Norway is one of those early birds who showed a recent marked increase in interest rates from 1.5 to 1.75%.
BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China) play a major role in global economic scenario because they contribute 27% of the world GDP. Due to this mammoth power they have a tendency to grow more annually (more than 7% GDP) than any other westerner economy, an average of 2% GDP growth is recorded in G7 countries.
Therefore their effects are very dominant on Gold valuation, their respective currencies have depicted various cycles over the last decade until their current emergence.
Various strong global currencies have also reflected changes because of the weakening dollar stance, the three major ones are Chinese Yuan, Russian Ruble and Indian Rupee.
Brazil has been steady and thereby no marked upward or downward change is speculated.
Despite being proclaimed to show an appreciation against the dollar, these sudden changes can also have downturns because the currency trading in these economies is very thin and may have such very short term impressions.
The BRIC economies play a major role of change agent in context of stabilizing the worth of Gold. Due to the stable nature of Gold the reserves figures also increase, following chart will further establish this perspective.
Many economists are claiming that BIRC is just an artificial association of four very different economies and it is very hard for them to survive sitting in a common vessel. Economies such as Brazil has also been blamed for artificial capital but the truth remains that steady political climate and terrorism free economy has led it to become one of the major hubs of global business.
“Our main goal today was bolstering our co-operation, tackling the aftermath of the economic crisis, supporting the international financial institutions and creating a more democratic and fair international system in generalâ€, Dmitry Medvedev, Russian President stated during the BIRC Quartet for the Multi-Polar Financial Structure.
“I think Russia is playing a very important role in this grouping, and in many respects it is the leader amongst the BRIC countries-currently it is the only BRIC country without capital accounts restrictions, all other countries of this group have such restrictionsâ€, says Yaroslav Lissovolik, Chief Economist, Deutsche Bank.
“What they are doing is let’s start from inside, this means reforming the Bretton Woods institution. The IMF and World Bankâ€, said Pepe Escobar, Analyst Asia Times. BRIC economies have laid a solid foundation on breaking the monopolistic environment of dollar under the trickling effects of recovering US economy making the entire world getting influenced by its recent jolts. Stock exchanges, commodity and capital markets have been suffering for long and facing the turmoil due to the unsupervised measures in the capital markets of US. As an opportunity cost gold has evolved again with poor countries working up to compete for multi-polar world order. BIRC has an accumulated reserve of 3 trillion dollars which is the fruition of generating cross exchange profits of the devaluing dollar.
What this means is that soon world order is going to revive Gold as a standard as it was before 1971. A correcting US economy will have little growth in from of GDP to influence the solution that is reverting back to Bretton Woods system revolving around Gold.
Gold and Dollar are going to further influence each other till the old Bretton Woods system is re-established, it is in the pipeline and part of Multi-Polar Financial World Agenda. How the dollar is still going to catalyze the process for faster or slower; will only be unleashed with the passage of time. Till then the speculative market are going to reap these benefits along the movements of Dollar and its corresponding effects on the appreciating worth of Gold.
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