Against whom is the European Union’s so-called “oil embargo on Iran” really aimed at?
This is an important geo-strategic question. Aside from rejecting the new E.U. measures against Iran as counter-productive, Tehran has warned the member states of the European Union that the E.U. oil embargo against Iran will hurt them and their economies far more than Iran.
Tehran has thus warned the leaders of the E.U. countries that the new sanctions are foolish and against their national and bloc interests. But is this correct? At the end of the day, who will benefit from the chain of events that are being set into motion?
Are Oil Embargos against Iran New?
Oil embargos against Iran are not new. In 1951, the Iranian government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh with the support of the Iranian Parliament nationalized the Iranian oil industry. As a result of Dr. Mossadegh’s nationalization program, the British militarily blockaded the territorial waters and national ports of Iran with the British Royal Navy and prevented Iran from exporting its oil. They also militarily prevented Iranian trade. London also froze Iranian assets and started a campaign to isolate Iran with sanctions. The government of Dr. Mossadegh was democratic and could not be vilified easily domestically by the British, so they began to portray Mossadegh as a pawn of the Soviet Union who would turn Iran into a communist country together with his Marxist political allies.
The illegal British naval embargo was followed by regime change in Tehran via a 1953 Anglo-American engineered coup d’état. The 1953 coup transformed the Shah of Iran from a constitutional figure head to an absolute monarch and dictator, like the monarchs of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar. Iran was transformed overnight from a democratic constitutional monarchy into a dictatorship.
Today, a militarily imposed oil embargo against Iran is not possible like it was in the early 1950s. Instead London and Washington use the language of righteousness and hide behind false pretexts about Iranian nuclear weapons. Like in the 1950s, the oil embargo against Iran is tied to regime change. Yet, there are also broader objectives that go beyond the boundaries of Iran tied to the Washington’s project to impose an oil embargo against the Iranians.
The European Union and Iranian Oil Sales
Iran’s largest customer for oil is the People’s Republic of China. According to the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA), which was created after the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo as the strategic wing of the Western Bloc’s Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Iran exports 543,000 oil barrels per day to China. Iran’s other large customers are India, Turkey, Japan, and South Korea. India imports 341,000 barrels per day from Iran, Turkey imports 370,000 barrels per day from Iran, Japan imports 251,000 barrels per day from Iran, and South Korea imports 239,000 barrels per day from Iran.
According to the Iranian Ministry of Petroleum the European Union only accounts for 18% of Iranian oil exports, which means less than one-fifth of Iranian oil sales. Only “collectively” is the European Union the second largest customer of Iran. All the E.U. countries together import 510,000 barrels per day from Iran. This collective rank that all Iranian oil importing E.U. countries have together is being highlighted by those that want to emphasize the effectiveness of the E.U. oil embargo against Iran.
Iran can replace oil sales to the European Union via new buyers or by increasing sales to existing customers like China and India. An Iranian agreement to work with China for stockpiling Chinese strategic reserves would fill a large portion of the vacuum left by the European Union. Thus, the oil embargo against Iran will have minimal direct effects on Iran. Rather, it is most likely that any of the effects that the Iranian economy feels will be tied to the global ramifications of the oil embargo against Iran.
Iran and Global Currency Warfare
According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), both the U.S. dollar and the euro together constitute 84.4% of the world’s currency exchange reserves (end of 2011 date). The U.S. dollar alone, was the largest share of the world’s currency exchange reserves in 2011, namely 61.7%.
Energy sales are an important part of this equation, because the American dollar is tied to the oil trade.
Thus, oil trade, through what is called the petro-dollar, is helping sustain the American dollar’s international standing. Countries around the world have been virtually forced to use the U.S. dollar to maintain their energy and trade needs and transactions.
To highlight the importance of the international oil trade to the U.S., all the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members – Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates – have their national currencies pegged to the U.S. dollar and thereby sustain the petro-dollar by trading oil in American dollars. Moreover, the currencies of Lebanon, Jordan, Eritrea, Djibouti, Belize, and several tropical islands in the Caribbean Sea are also all pegged to the U.S. dollar. Aside from the overseas territories of the United States, El Salvador, Ecuador, and Panama also all officially use the U.S. dollar as their national currencies.
The euro on the other hand is both a rival of the U.S. dollar as well as an allied currency. Both currencies work in tandem against other currencies in many cases and seem to be controlled by increasingly merging centres of financial power.
Aside from the seventeen European Union members using the euro as their currency, the Principality of Monaco, San Marino, and Vatican City have issuing rights and both Montenegro and the Albanian-majority Serbian province of Kosovo also use the euro as their national currencies. Outside of the euro area (Eurozone), the currencies of Bosnia, Bulgaria, Denmark, Latvia, and Lithuania in Europe; the currencies of Cape Verde, Comoros, Morocco, the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe, and the two CFA zones in Africa; and the currencies of several Western European overseas dependencies, such as Greenland, are all pegged to the euro.
Several monetary zones are directly tied to the euro. In Oceania, the Comptoirs Français du Pacifique (CFP) franc, simply called the Pacific franc (franc pacifique), used in a monetary union of the French dependencies of French Polynesia, New Caledonia, and the Territory of the Wallis and Futuna Islands is pegged to the euro. As mentioned earlier, both the CFA zones in Africa are also pegged to the euro. Thus, both the Financial Community of Africa (Communauté financière d’Afrique, CFA) franc or West African CFA franc in West Africa – used by Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo – and the Financial Cooperation in Central Africa (Coopération financière en Afrique central, CFA) franc or Central African CFA franc – used by Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville), Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon – have their fates tied to the monetary value of the euro.
Early in 1998, Jack Abramoff was in Imelda Marcos’s condominium in Manila, advising the former first lady of the Philippines on how to overturn a Supreme Court order that she go to prison for graft. His proposal: She should promise the country’s leaders that she would not run for election, loan half of an alleged slush fund to the ruling party and threaten a public relations campaign in which Abramoff, as her lobbyist, would “destroy” the government’s reputation.
The plot was classic Abramoff, involving the trademark elements of his Washington lobbying: a transfer of money, a promise of political support and a threat of harm to those who stood in his clients’ way. It worked in Manila, he writes in his new memoir, “Capitol Punishment.” (He notes in the book that Marcos called the plan “brilliant.”)
It’s not every day that a veteran Washington insider — one who, at the zenith of his career, was the city’s highest-paid lobbyist — writes a 300-page account of his political triumphs, serial lawbreaking and unethical conduct, all of which ended in his imprisonment for fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy. Abramoff’s status as perhaps the premier modern symbol of Washington’s corruption by monied interests makes his reflections on the events surrounding his disgrace especially tantalizing.
The book’s aim, according to its dust jacket, is to pull “back the curtain on K Street,” show “the dirty underbelly of America’s government” and prescribe reforms meant to undercut the political influence of private, monied interests. It achieves these goals in part, confirming in a highly personal narrative what some reporters on his trail (myself included) unearthed in the mid-2000s, while adding some fresh accounts of how he manipulated the legislative process.
There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest.
Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it.
Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded “anti-American,” “anti-semite” or “conspiracy theorist.”
Truth is an inconvenience for government and for the interest groups whose campaign contributions control government.
Truth is an inconvenience for prosecutors who want convictions, not the discovery of innocence or guilt.
Truth is inconvenient for ideologues.
Today many whose goal once was the discovery of truth are now paid handsomely to hide it. “Free market economists” are paid to sell offshoring to the American people. High-productivity, high value-added American jobs are denigrated as dirty, old industrial jobs. Relicts from long ago, we are best shed of them. Their place has been taken by “the New Economy,” a mythical economy that allegedly consists of high-tech white collar jobs in which Americans innovate and finance activities that occur offshore. All Americans need in order to participate in this “new economy” are finance degrees from Ivy League universities, and then they will work on Wall Street at million dollar jobs.
Economists who were once respectable took money to contribute to this myth of “the New Economy.”
And not only economists sell their souls for filthy lucre. Recently we have had reports of medical doctors who, for money, have published in peer-reviewed journals concocted “studies” that hype this or that new medicine produced by pharmaceutical companies that paid for the “studies.”
US ally Bahrain continued its crackdown against popular calls for democratic rights with the illegal arrest and detention this week of prominent journalist and commentator Jaffar Al Alawy.
To date, nearly 100 journalists, poets, bloggers and media figures have been targeted for detention by the Persian Gulf oil kingdom since pro-democracy protests erupted there last February, according to the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights. The detainees have claimed gross ill-treatment and torture while in custody – independently verified by several international human rights groups. Two respected media figures, Zakariya Al Aushayri and Karim Fakhrawi, have died during detention, their bodies showing undeniable signs of brutality.
In the latest arrest, Al Alawy was hauled into prison after security forces smashed their way into his home without a warrant. Well-known for his radio and television appearances, he is also a published poet, who has been mildly critical of the US-backed Al Khalifa regime.
Ironically, the arrest of Al Alawy followed only hours after US secretary of state Hillary Clinton claimed in a major speech in Washington that the Bahraini government “has recognized the need for dialogue, reconciliation, and concrete reforms. And they have committed to provide access to human rights groups, to allow peaceful protest”.
I will begin with the scandal of Operation Gladio that climaxed in the murder of former Italian Prime Minister, Aldo Moro, who on the day of his kidnapping, was to announce an Italian coalition government that would include the Italian Communist Party.
Leader of the Christian Democratic Party at that time, Francesco Cossiga, admits in the 1992 BBC Timewatch documentary about Operation Gladio, that he chose to “sacrifice” Moro “for the good of the Republic.” Not unlike the targeted assassinations that the U.S. government engages in around the world, where someone extrajudicially makes decisions on who lives and who dies. In the three-part documentary, Cossiga states that the decision caused his hair to turn white.
Operation Gladio is the ugly real-life tale of the U.S. government’s decision to hire members of the state security apparatus of various European countries, and in collaboration with recruited community allies, wreak terror on innocent citizens by blowing up train stations, shooting customers in grocery stores, and even killing police officers in order to convince populations in Europe to give up their rights in exchange for certain security measures and enhanced state power.
Whether or not you believe that Wikileaks and Julian Assange are functionaries of Washington’s sophisticated intelligence web, what is clearly undeniable is that the existence of the document dumping site is being used by the State to end internet privacy, and place restrictions on free speech, the availability of public domain information, and to legally prosecute users of certain websites.
Presently, the United States is conducting its own secret Grand Jury investigation into Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. At the centre of Washington’s effort is the targeting of WikiLeaks’ DNS host, Dynadot, based in California. With this case, the US Government is hoping to rewrite the current rulebook regarding freedom on internet.
The government’s ability to shut down any website’s DNS means that it will be able to effectively lock the users’ gateway into any website deemed to be in violation of the US’s dubious, and wholly unconstitutional USA Patriot Acts I & II.
With the majority of the world’s DNS houses residing within the US, a precedent like this could give the US Federal Government carte blanch to seize and liquidate any number of websites that might fall into the state’s new and elastic definition of ‘espionage’, or are deemed to be a ‘threat to national security’.
With the backing of a Federal Court order, Washington soon hopes to gain the right to ‘legally’ sequester confidential user information including subscriber names, user names, screen names, mailing addresses, residential addresses, business addresses, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, temporary IP addresses and credit card payment and billing details.
Few will doubt that this act of Constitutional aggression on the part of the State could have far reaching consequences for any online publisher.
WIKILEAKS: A useful tool of the establishment to move a police state further forward.
If you don’t want to read this, let me sum it up in a sentence. Radioactive Iodine-131 from Japan’s nuclear reactor meltdown has now reached the US rainwater in concentrations 3300%greater than allowed in drinking water but the government says its OK because no one drinks rainwater (except maybe your pets and plants, huh?).
By the way, radiation is accumulative. Radioactive iodine has a short half life (8 days), but there are other components arriving from this disaster that will stick around a lot longer.
So, in 16 days, the iodine-131 radiation in the rainwater will ONLY be 1650% about federal drinking water standards…unless of course it rains again.
Pennsylvania Office of the Governor
HARRISBURG, Pa., March 28, 2011/PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Governor Tom Corbett today said weekend testing of public drinking water found no elevated levels of radioactivity.
On Friday, concentrations of Iodine-131, likely originating from the events at Japan’s damaged nuclear plants, were found in rainwater samples collected from Pennsylvania’s nuclear power plant facilities.
The numbers reported in the rainwater samples in Pennsylvania range from 40-100 picocuries per liter (pCi/L). Although these are levels above the background levels historically reported in these areas, they are still about 25 times below the level that would be of concern. The federal drinking water standard for Iodine-131 is three pCi/L.
“Rainwater is not typically directly consumed,” Corbett said. “However, people might get alarmed by making what would be an inappropriate connection from rainwater to drinking water. By testing the drinking water, we can assure people that the water is safe.”
While the radioactive element is believed to have originated from Japan’s damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, it is not considered to be a health risk in Pennsylvania or anywhere else in the country. Similar testing in other states, including California, Massachusetts and Washington, has shown comparable levels of Iodine-131 in rainwater samples.
Read full article with all the political doubletalk bullshit here (I just gave you just the cold hard facts):
If you are building a fence and you try using a hammer rather than a shovel to dig the postholes, progress will be slow if not nonexistent. The Federal Reserve is supposed to maintain the value of the currency and keep the banking system sound and stable – which it has not done (more on that below). Yet, in 1978, Congress passed the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act, which, in part, also gave the Fed some explicit responsibility for maintaining full employment but did not provide the tools to do so.
TheFed does have the tools to increase or decrease the money supply, which means it can control the rate of inflation or deflation. However, the Fed has done a poor job of maintaining the value of the currency, as the dollar is now worth only about one-twenty-second of its 1913 value. The Fed also was supposed to maintain a sound and stable banking system; however, since theFed was created in 1913, bank failures have been at a higher rate than during the pre-Fed period.
Great Exchange! Senator Bernie Sanders can’t contain himself during today’s (03/03/09) Senate Budget Commitee hearing in Washington. Bad Boy Bernie demands to know who got the 2.2 trillion of dollars in loans from the Fed. Bernanke won’t tell him. He’s also angry that banks that get tax payer funds for nothing, are charging credit card customers 25% interest. Also discusses A.I.G. and who got those credit Defautl swaps. He also demands to know why Bernanke didn’t raise the alarm when the Bush Administration was claiming the economy was sound when it obviously wasn’t.
Video – Sen. Bernie Sanders scolds Helicopter Ben
At the Bail, we hang Federal Reserve criminals with their words.
By Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
