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OpEdNews Op Eds    H4'ed 4/14/11

Libya: All About Oil, or All About Central Banking?

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Ellen Brown
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Another provocative bit of data circulating on the Net is a 2007 "Democracy Now" interview of U.S. General Wesley Clark (Ret.).   In it he says that about 10 days after September 11, 2001, he was told by a general that the decision had been made to go to war with Iraq.   Clark was surprised and asked why.   "I don't know!" was the response.   "I guess they don't know what else to do!"   Later, the same general said they planned to take out seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. 

 

What do these seven countries have in common?   In the context of banking, one that sticks out is that none of them is listed among the 56 member banks of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).   That evidently puts them outside the long regulatory arm of the central bankers' central bank in Switzerland.  

The most renegade of the lot could be Libya and Iraq, the two that have actually been attacked.   Kenneth Schortgen Jr., writing on Examiner.com, noted that "[s] ix months before the US moved into Iraq to take down Saddam Hussein, the oil nation had made the move to   accept Euros instead of dollars for oil , and this became a threat to the global dominance of the dollar as the reserve currency, and its dominion as the petrodollar."   According to a Russian article titled "Bombing of Lybia -- Punishment for Ghaddafi for His Attempt to Refuse US Dollar," Gadaffi made a similarly bold move: he initiated a movement to refuse the dollar and the euro, and called on Arab and African nations to use a new currency instead, the gold dinar.   Gadaffi suggested establishing a united African continent, with its 200 million people using this single currency.   During the past year, the idea was approved by many Arab countries and most African countries.   The only opponents were the Republic of South Africa and the head of the League of Arab States.   The initiative was viewed negatively by the USA and the European Union, with French president Nicolas Sarkozy calling Libya a threat to the financial security of mankind; but Gaddafi was not swayed and continued his push for the creation of a united Africa.   And that brings us back to the puzzle of the Libyan central bank.   In an article posted on the Market Oracle, Eric Encina observed:  

One seldom mentioned fact by western politicians and media pundits: the Central Bank of Libya is 100% State Owned . . . . Currently, the Libyan government creates its own money, the Libyan Dinar, through the facilities of its own central bank. Few can argue that Libya is a sovereign nation with its own great resources, able to sustain its own economic destiny. One major problem for globalist banking cartels is that in order to do business with Libya, they must go through the Libyan Central Bank and its national currency, a place where they have absolutely zero dominion or power-broking ability.   Hence, taking down the Central Bank of Libya (CBL) may not appear in the speeches of Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy but this is certainly at the top of the globalist agenda for absorbing Libya into its hive of compliant nations.

 

Libya not only has oil.   According to the IMF, its central bank has nearly 144 tons of gold in its vaults.   With that sort of asset base, who needs the BIS, the IMF and their rules?  

 

All of which prompts a closer look at the BIS rules and their effect on local economies.   An article on the BIS website states that central banks in the Central Bank Governance Network are supposed to have as their single or primary objective "to preserve price stability."   They are to be kept independent from government to make sure that political considerations don't interfere with this mandate.   "Price stability" means maintaining a stable money supply, even if that means burdening the people with heavy foreign debts.   Central banks are discouraged from increasing the money supply by printing money and using it for the benefit of the state, either directly or as loans.  

 

In a 2002 article in Asia Times titled "The BIS vs National Banks," Henry Liu maintained:   

 

BIS regulations serve only the single purpose of strengthening the international private banking system, even at the peril of national economies. The BIS does to national banking systems what the IMF has done to national monetary regimes. National economies under financial globalization no longer serve national interests.  

 

. . . FDI [foreign direct investment] denominated in foreign currencies, mostly dollars, has condemned many national economies into unbalanced development toward export, merely to make dollar-denominated interest payments to FDI, with little net benefit to the domestic economies.  


He added, "Applying the State Theory of Money, any government can fund with its own currency all its domestic developmental needs to maintain full employment without inflation."   The "state theory of money" refers to money created by governments rather than private banks.

 

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Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books including the best-selling WEB OF DEBT. In THE PUBLIC BANK SOLUTION, her latest book, she explores successful public banking models historically and (more...)
 

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