The real world of real crooks - Pepe Escobar

An enlightening long article, full of information that the author laid bare for all to see. Many knew but pretended not to know or have good reasons not to talk about it. It is mafiadom at the highest level practised by the most unscrupulous crooks of all time. Spend the time to read it slowly and get informed of the real world of big time crooks and wicked men. Here's the article.

As competition for oil, water and other resources intensify, global power relationships are shifting, providing backdrops for a string of conflicts from Iraq to Libya. Brazilian-born journalist Pepe Escobar, one of the most perceptive analysts of these trends, was interviewed by German Lars Schall.

Mr. Escobar, given your experience in that field, what would you highlight as the most crucial misunderstanding held by the general public related to the so called “War on Terror”?

Pepe Escobar: This is the cover story for a “Clash of Civilizations“ and an undercover cold war that maybe becomes a hot war between the U.S. and the two strategic competitors, China and Russia. They couldn’t go directly against any of these two BRICS members. [BRICS is an organization of emerging economies consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa].

Remember that before the “War on Terror“ and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Americans were trying to find out who was going to be our next enemy? So you needed a pre-fabricated external enemy – before that there was the Soviet Union, the Iron Curtain and the evil of communism. After the evil was defeated by realpolitik – okay, who’s next?

First they thought about China, but they said, no, we can’t take China, it’s a big power, it’s nuclear armed. The same thing with Russia – and they were doing nice, they had a puppet in the Kremlin, Boris Yeltsin, who was privatizing everything like crazy and was plundering Russia’s resources to the benefit, hypothetically, of Western corporations. Then Putin took the whole thing upside-down.

So the “War on Terror“ was perfect because Islam was branded as the enemy, and 9/11, it couldn’t have been more convenient because then, what was conceptionalized before, you had the Pearl Harbor element – you could sell it not only to the American public but to world public opinion. But undercover the real agenda of the global “War on Terror,“ which the Pentagon calls “The Long War“ – meaning infinite war – is in fact that there are two emerging powers that pose a real serious threat to the United States.

Russia basically because it is nuclear armed. At that time they were not thinking about Russia as a major oil and gas exporter – this was before [Vladimir] Putin re-organized Gazprom, so that Gazprom would become the top international major in oil and gas. And China, which at that time, ten years ago, the Americans were looking at it as still struggling, maybe there would be a peasant revolt, whatever, they didn’t think that China was the big competitor. And now, of course, they have 3.2 trillion U.S. dollars in foreign reserves and U.S. treasury bonds etc. (laughs.)

The perfect pretext was 9/11, but undercover the war for energy resources in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia intensified, and they had the neo-con masterplan, which incredibly is being implemented now, which is to destabilize this “Arc of Instability,“ this is Pentagon-coined, of course, from the Maghreb through Northern Africa across the Middle East and all the way to Central Asia via Afghanistan/Pakistan – which is the intersection between Central Asia and South Asia – up to the Chinese border in Xinjiang.

So they needed to implement their strategy, which was conceptionalized finally after 9/11 – this is the Pentagon’s “Full Spectrum Dominance“ doctrine, which is something you will never ever read about in the U.S. mainstream press or in the European mainstream press for that matter. Since 2002 the “Full Spectrum Dominance“ doctrine is the official Pentagon doctrine. It is intrinsically linked to America’s National Security – we have to be the predominant power not only on land, on sea and in the air but also in cyberspace and outerspace. That is the essence of the “Full Spectrum Dominance“ doctrine.

[Compare for example Jim Garamone (American Forces Press Service): “Joint Vision 2020 Emphazises Full Spectrum Dominance“, published June 2, 2000 at the website of the U.S. Department of Defense under: http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=45289 ]

This is being applied now after the “Arab Spring,“ and that’s incredible because nobody is talking about it also. Everybody was saying at the beginning: Wow, finally the Arabs are “awakening,“ but that is too hard a term, as it means that the Arabs were sleeping for the past 100 years – that is not true.

“Spring“ is also not really the right word, I would say that it is a process of enhanced conciousness of the working classes and the middle classes in Tunisia, in Egypt, in Bahrain and other parts of the Middle East as well. And then came the counter-revolution, and this process of counter-revolution is leading directly to the implementation of further steps of the “Full Spectrum Dominance“ doctrine.

We can go back to this later on, but basically what I’m trying to say is that the counter-revolution, orchestrated by the U.S. and especially by the House of Saud, re-instrumentalized what has happened in Tunisia and Egypt, they unleashed the counter-revolution in the Persian Gulf, they try to bribe the military dictatorship in Egypt to keep it that way as a military dictatorship (they gave already 4 billion U.S. dollars to the Tantawi junta, and more is coming from Saudi Arabia), and meanwhile in Central Asia the United States is trying to re-organize itself because suddenly they have noticed that they are losing terrain to who else? China and Russia.

This in terms of oil and gas deals between China and Russia themselves, between Turkmenistan and China, between all these players and Iran as well – Russia and China have very close cooperation with Iran in their oil and gas fields.

So the Americans are saying: Okay, how do we re-organize the whole thing? The “War on Terror“ for all practical purposes is more or less over in the Pentagon way of seeing the world. Now it’s back to “Full Spectrum Dominance“ – we have to control the whole thing. So this means control of the Mediterranean Sea as a NATO lake, which was what they have implementated in Libya and now will try to implement in Syria; control the rest of Africa, sending troops to Uganda like Obama did a few weeks ago, which is not only Uganda but the heart of Central Africa, it’s Uganda, South Sudan, Central African Republic and Congo – lots of oil, lots of minerals, lots of rare earths as well, all extremely precious.

So the West has to be there and the U.S. has to be in control, forget about China. This means raving up AFRICOM, the African Command sitting in Stuttgart, Germany, and soon probably sitting in Benghazi, Libya.

I was talking to people from the European Union in Brussels a few days ago, some smart dissidents who don’t agree with what they are doing, and they told me off the record: Look, there is going to be a military base in Libya, this was the project right from the beginning.

There will not be a lot of European boots on the ground, it’s going to be Turkish, Qatari, UAE, those mercenaries that get trained by Blackwater – now Xe – in the United Arab Emirates, these people will be part of this base and it’s going to be the base that NATO and AFRICOM wanted in North African territory.

For me the number one answer to your question is this: the “War on Terror“ was a diversion that lasted more or less ten years. Now even the Pentagon, the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Obama administration, everybody is saying out loud: “al-Qaeda is operationally ineffective” – these are their own words.

Virtually everybody is dead, apart from al-Zawahiri and the new guy that they have named to be their military commander, but I can’t even remember his name, they have a new one every week or so. Everybody is dead, they are not in Afghanistan anymore, they have a few trainers in the tribal areas in the Waziristans, they are ineffective in the rest of the world, though, of course, they are in power now in Tripoli because the West has used them. Those guys were trained in a military camp north of Kabul.

I was there in this place in early 2001, and I was told that they had a lot of Libyans there. And yes, these Libyans were the guys from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, LIFG, and they were trained in this camp north of Kabul, it was very easy to go there. So now they are in Libya, the military commander of Tripoli, Abdelhakim Belhadj, with his cohorts, they are very well armed, very well trained, they will not go away, and these al-Qaeda-linked jihadis were used by the West with no second thoughts.

Would you say that al-Qaeda, now as a phantom and in the “good old days“ as a real force, was an useful tool for the foreign policy of the U.S.A.?

Pepe Escobar: Yes, of course it was! It was the perfect excuse because they kept them to try to implement “Full Spectrum Dominance“ anywhere that they could. In Central Asia they were very active – until maybe two years ago – during the Bush administration.

Remember that Cheney used to go to Central Asia every two or three months at that time. The U.S. tried to strike deals directly with the Kazakhs, with the Turkmen, and especially with the Azerbaijanis – the Azerbaijani elite is very close with the Republicans in the U.S. So Dick Cheney was there all the time.

And their special embassador, who is still working for the Obama administration, Richard Morningstar, is the oil envoy of Washington to Central Asia, he knows the area well, he knows all the players. The Americans tried to pressure them: don’t do deals with Russia, don’t do deals with China, bypass Iran and do deals with us. What is happening now? They did deals with Russia, they did deals with China, they did not bypass Iran and they didn’t do any deals with the Americans. (laughs.)

Usually, people expect when you do a war that you want to win it. But isn’t it the case in Central Asia that a perpetual war theater has some advantages for the “military petroleum complex” (as economist James K. Galbraith called it) vis-à-vis China and Russia? [For the term "military-petroleum complex" compare James K. Galbraith: "Unbearable Costs of Empire", originally published by The American Prospect magazine, November 2002, republished at Third World Travelor.]

Pepe Escobar: Yes, but the problem is that they don’t know who they are dealing with. They forget cultural factors, they forget that Turkmen, for instance, are very independent and prefer to do deals with people who speak the same language, which is Russian. If the middleman Medvedev goes to Ashgabat to talk to President Berdimuhamedov in Russian it is much easier to clinch a deal.

Or if the Chinese go to Ashgabat, they say: Look, we build anything you want and we even build a pipeline ourselves. So give us a good rate for your gas and we build this pipeline tomorrow from eastern Turkmenistan to western China. This is exactly what they did, two years ago the pipeline was inaugurated. And this applies to the Africans as well: there are no conditionalities, there is no interference in internal politics.

The Americans tried this for a while, like with Uzbekistan and this guy who boils his own people, Islam Karimov. They had a very close understanding with the Bush administration, and the U.S. had a military base in Karimabad near the Afghan border during the Bush years, which was very helpful to the Americans, but afterwards they started to criticize human rights in Uzbekistan – so what did the Uzbeks say? No more base, bye bye! And they are part of this pipeline that goes from Turkmenistan to China via Uzbekistan. They changed tactics a bit, but at the end the Americans lost the plot.

Now the Americans are realizing that they were losing terrain to both Russia and China in Central Asia, so they redeployed in the Persian Gulf, in northern Africa and inside Africa as well. Libya will be very helpful for new oil and gas explorations. The Libyans say that they will keep the contracts that they have with the Italians – there is this gas pipeline from northern Libya to Sicily and the shipments to Italy. But the new contracts will go to Total, BP and the Americans, not to the Russians and the Chinese.

Libya was, is and will be profitable for Western energy majors. In Central Asia their only hope is Azerbaijan, because they more or less control the energy business in Azerbaijan, and like I have said, the elites work as a satrapy of Washington, basically. But the problem is that they cannot control Turkmenistan. They’ve been pressuring Turkmenistan to build Nabucco, the pipeline. Nabucco will cost a fortune, it will cost around 20 billion euros, nobody knows where this money is coming from, especially in a European crisis.

The Turkmen say that they can provide enough gas, but nobody knows if they actually have that kind of gas, because they are swapping gas with Iran, they are selling a lot of gas to China, and they are still selling gas via the old Soviet pipeline. Nabucco is going to need a lot of gas and nobody knows if Turkmenistan has it. And the Turkmen still say: you need to prove us that you have the investment for the pipeline, which can be built within the next three to four years, so that we can commit our gas reserves to this pipeline.

But this means, if Turkmenistan does not have enough gas, the Europeans have to find it somewhere else, and it shouldn’t be in Azerbaijan, unless they spend over 22 billion U.S. dollars in new investment.

So while everybody is stuck, the Russians built two pipelines: North Stream and South Stream. Putin is winning the war against Nabucco because he started first and he made deals with governments, with Gerhard Schröder of Germany for North Stream and with Silvio Berlsconi of Italy for South Stream. So North and South Stream is winning against Nabucco, because they still don’t know where the money is coming from, they don’t know if they will have enough gas, and they don’t know where they are finding the gas if it is not in Turkmenistan or in Azerbaijan.

Turkey wants to have a lot of the gas for itself as well, plus the transit fees, it is an absolute mess. I keep reading these official pronouncements from Nabucco, which is based in Vienna, and every month or so there is an official communication: it is going to work, we have the 20 billion euros, it will be ready in 2017, we will start next year – but we are hearing this for the past five years, if I’m not mistaken.

Another central problem is the opium / heroin trade in Afghanistan. What are your observation with regards to this problem? Who are the major players in that business? And would you say that this whole affair is a shame for the West?

Pepe Escobar: Oh, yes. One of the major players has always been Ahmed Ali Karzai, Hamid Karzai’s brother. I met him after 9/11 in Quetta, he was always living in Quetta because this was his perfect base. Quetta is a fascinating place. I would say it is the smuggling capital of the East – and that’s no mean feat because you are competing with Hong Kong, you are competing actually with everybody, with the Russians, with the Ukrainian mafia.

In Quetta you have a transportation mafia, you have a heroin mafia, and from Quetta all these networks start to diversify. There is one network that goes through northern Pakistan and goes to Tajikistan, they is another one that bifurcates in Tajikistan and goes towards Central Asia and from Central Asia to Turkey.

So there are these Pakistani/Afghan opium networks, there is another Tajik network which is basically refining. Everybody knows there is a CIA network, what we don’t know is exactly what trajectory they follow. Probably it’s a trajectory from Afghanistan via Uzbekistan to get to Turkey, probably flying from Uzbekistan. Everybody has a network.

As far as I know the Chinese mafias don’t have a network in Afghanistan, but maybe soon they will. And this is the major problem for Russia. Whenever you talk to Russian officials about what is the big deal in Afghanistan, they immediately say: There is a drug war against us, and the source is Afghan opium.

They have now more victims related to heroin than they had during the 1980′s with the war in Afghanistan.

Pepe Escobar: You are absolutely right, exactly. This is one of the key focusses for the Russians within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. It’s not only to keep American bases outside of the region, just like the Chinese want as well. It’s to try to find a way to fight these drug, opium mafias. It’s a big problem for Russia, and it’s also a big problem for Iran as well.

For Iran because of the Afghan refugees. The Afghan refugees basically moved to eastern Iran, so if you go to Mashhad in eastern Iran, if you go to the suburbs of Mashhad that’s the opium center, that’s the smuggling center. They cross Afghanistan, they cross via Herat, from Herat to Mashhad with very good roads now it’s like seven hours maximum, and from Mashhad they distribute this opium all across Iran, there is a huge drug problem for Iran as well, and Iran is an observer member of Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and one of the main reasons for them to join the SCO is to try to organize a regional mechanism to fight a real drug war, because these countries are badly suffering from it.

If true, then they are processing heroin in Afghanistan, they are not only growing the opium. And one question that I always ask myself is, who provides the chemicals involved in the manufacturing process? I guess the Afghans don’t have factories to produce acetic acid chloride, do they?

Pepe Escobar: Honestly, I cannot answer this question, but I would say there is outside help involved, it’s true. In Afghanistan they simply cannot process. In fact, the refineries used to be in Tajikistan or in Pakistan, in Quetta, for instance, or in Dushanbe in Tajikistan. The people from the Panjshir valley who deal with the trafficking, everything is concentrated in Dushanbe, 40 minutes to northern Afghanistan by helicopter – and they have their own private helicopters. So I would say yes, there is outside help, and then, of course, it’s specualtion: is it Western outside help? (laughs.)

Is it just by chance that one can have the impression: where energy resources and / or illicit drugs are placed (for example South America, Central Asia, South East Asia), the U.S. military and intelligence is never really far away?

Pepe Escobar: They are, they are everywhere. Though they can’t be in South America at the moment because of what is going on in South America since, I would say, 2002. It’s a geopolitical earthquake, in fact, because the South Americans for the first time in their history with the elections of first Chavez, and then Lula in Brazil in 2002, and then in Ecuador, even in Uruguay, even when Kirschner won in Argentina – they decided: Okay, let’s get our act together now that most of our governments are center-left or at least nominally progressive.

Let’s get our backyard in order, organize ourselves via the Unasur, for instance, the Union of South American countries, and also the Mercosur, which is a commercial/trade union. And let’s try to fight American interference directly. And this is what’s been happening. Remember the failed coup against Chavez in 2002, which was directly organized by Washington, there is extensive proof, you can find it on the net, Eva Golinger, a Venezuelan-American lawyer, she wrote excellent books about it. Okay, and they tried in 2007 to destabilize Bolivia as well, the failed coup in Ecuador over a year ago. So why is it not happening anymore in South America? Because of political, economic and geopolitical unity.

But don’t doubt it, if the Pentagon found an opening to interfere directly in Venezuela again, they will do it. The problem is, now there are Russian advisors over there, there are Chinese traders in Venezuela, Iranian commercial interests as well. Venezuela is not only trading with South America and they are now a member of Mercosur as well, so they are trading a lot with Brazil and Argentina etc., but they are trading with the other side of the world as well – and with two of America’s strategic competitors, plus their nemesis, Iran. So that explains a lot.

Since 2002, South America for the Pentagon is a big, big problem, and no wonder these Republican whacko candidates in their last foreign policy debate, they were saying that Hamas and Hezbollah are all over South America, that they have to pay attention to Latin America because we forget that there are a lot of communists and terrorists over there. It’s no wonder.

But would you say it’s a coincidence, this historical connection between energy resources and illicit drugs? For example, in the Vietnam war.

Pepe Escobar: True, with Air America. Remember, Air America was not only defending civilians in Laos and Vietnam, basically this was a CIA heroin smuggling operation, of course. – But the thing is, it’s not necessarily so. I would mention Colombia. Colombia was a completely different case, Colombia was a case of indigenous cartels, they were fighting among themselves to see who would have the monopoly of exporting cocaine to the U.S., I would say there were few American interests here – selling equipment and weapons, yes, but the Americans were not at the forefront of the battle against the cartels.

So when they fragmented, the cartels went all over the place. So now for the past three or four years, it’s the Peruvians who control the distribution of cocaine in South America, it’s not the Colombians anymore.

They delocalized, for instance, to Brazil as a refinery center and an export center as well. I would say every week there’s a major apprehension of coke at Sao Paulo’s International Airport, for instance. So if you multiply this by what really goes through, it’s amazing. Now the airport in Sao Paulo is one of the major shipping routes of cocaine to North America, or to Europe as well. Once there used to be heroin coming from Central Asia via Europe that was landing in Brazil as well. It was funny, there was a time during the 80s, I remember, there was an Italian connection: people would bring heroin from Milan to Sao Paulo, and would take cocaine from Sao Paulo to Milan. (laughs.) That was almost thirty years ago.

In the Colombian case it’s very different. There is not a direct relation between drugs and energy. In Venezuela as well: the only game in town over there is energy, it’s a battle for energy. Hugo Chavez, whatever you think about him, was very clever, because: Okay, my way out is to do deals with other players. So they made a gigantic deal with China, and now they are one of the top suppliers of oil to China.

Soon they will be selling China one million barrels of oil per day, and they could expand to two million easily, if the Chinese invest in the Orinoco region, exploiting the new fields, which they will do, it’s not a priority at the moment, because for the moment the Chinese are concentrated in Siberia, Central Asia, and Africa, But they still have this Plan C or Plan D for them, which is Venezuela.

Do they also count on Brazil as an oil exporter?

Pepe Escobar: Definitely, because of the pre-salt deposits in Brazil, which is a kind of mixed blessing, in fact. Petrobras is regarded all over the world as one of the most competent national oil companies. The problem is they have to develop this specific technology to perforate this salt layer to extract the oil. It’s an extremely complex and extremely expensive operation. They say they will start in 2017, I doubt it.

The last figure that I saw in terms of investment that they needed, this was a few months ago, they were talking about 220 to 240 billion U.S. dollars of investment over the next few years to start extracting oil from the pre-salt layer. Everybody wants to be part of it. Chevron is already here, Exxon Mobil, Gazprom wants to be here, and of course the Chinese. And I’m sure when the Brazilians start issuing tenders, the Chinese are going to be at the forefront, all of their companies, CNPC, CNOOC, all of them.

But this is a long term project for the Chinese, of course, because in a realistic assessment there’s not going to be oil from the pre-salt layer before 2019/2020, so the Chinese are thinking ahead.

We hear quite a lot about the BRICS. Would you say this is just a nice name once given by Goldman Sachs or is there more behind it, a comprehensive strategy, something like this?

Pepe Escobar: They still don’t have a comprehensive strategy. It used to be a nice name in 2001/2002; not anymore, because now they are meeting regularly, not only an official annual meeting, but their foreign ministers are meeting, their deputy foreign ministers are meeting just like they did in St. Petersburg recently for that matter. Their interests are more or less the same in terms of: for Russia and China to keep the U.S. out of their backyard, which is basically Central Asia and the former Soviet Republics.

For Brazil it’s to keep the Americans out of South America as much as humanly possible, considering that the relations between Brazil and the U.S. are very, very close, and the United States still regards Brazil as a key ally in Latin America. It’s a very complicated foreign policy game between Brazil and the U.S.

For India, they want to be in the same group of all emerging countries as well, but without antogonizing the U.S. too much, so they have a difficult game to play as well. South Africa was included basically so that they would have a continental span, so that three continents were represented.

I would say from the point of view of the BRICS, and in fact they discussed this in Brasilia over a year ago – the fifth BRIC would be Turkey, it would be BRICT actually, but at the last minute they decided to include South Africa, because they said: we need the largest economy from Africa as well, and because Brazil and South Africa and India started to trade among themselves much more over the past 4 years than over the past 400. Brazil and South Africa are integrating very closely, and South Africa is the bridge between Brazil and India.

So it would suit all of these three players. But soon the BRICS might include – I say “might“ because they started discussing but still don’t know how to do it as a formal mechanism: Turkey, Indonesia and South Korea, which are natural candidates, there is no question about it. Two in Asia and one in the Middle East, the intersection between Europe and Asia.

So they started to talk about more integration in terms of our economies, cultural exchanges, all those bla-bla-bla’s…now they are thinking: Okay, we need geopolitically to pound our fist on the table, even if very softly in the beginning. So it started in Libya, they abstained from voting UN 1973, which was already a big step. They were mildly condemned by the Europeans and the Americans for that. But they said, this is still not a red line, this is a very, very yellow line, we cannot afford to antagonize the Americans at this point.

And then came the latest proposal for a UN Security Council vote on Syria, and the BRICS immediately said: No way, this is the red line. For many reasons, because Russia and China have very good deals with Syria. Brazil and Syria are very close. There are millions of Syrians living in Brazil and Syrian-Libanese living in Brazil, so in Brazil people call them Syrian-Libanese, it’s indinstinctive for most people here because they started coming in the 1920′s, 1930′s, and after the Second World War as well, they are very well integrated in Brazilian society, and there is lots of commercial deals between Brazil and Syria. These are some of the reasons why they have a common position for this as well.

As for South Africa, it is evident. The first time they voted for the UN resolution, they were pressured by Obama, Obama called president Zuma, they were on the phone for two hours or so, and Obama said: Look, you got to vote for us, otherwise you are going to be in trouble. So Zuma voted against his will. And later he was part of the African Union delegation to organize a peace deal between the rebels and Gaddafi. And the Gaddafi regime said yes, the rebels said no. Why? Because NATO told them to say no.

So South Africa had their reasons, too. Syria is the red line. So now they are starting to organize their geopolitical approach vis-à-vis the Atlanticist West in a much more coordinated way. And in terms of economics, they are putting pressure on the IMF to give more voting power rights to Brazil and China.

There are three guys as regional chair directors at the IMF, and the Chinese and the Brazilians are saying for years: we need more directors and we need more voting rights. That was part of the discussion, remember when the Brazilian minister of finance said: Look, maybe we can devise a mechanism to help the struggling European economies. That was their message to say: The thing goes to the IMF, and we want to be there, we want more voting rights, and then we decide if we can help or not, but this has to be within the IMF mechanism.

Yes, they are definitely coordinating much more than they were, I would say, two years ago. Soon BRICS is going to be BRICTS, BRICTIISS, an expanded BRIC. But now it is configured as a counterpower in geopolitical terms, in terms of appeal to the developing world, because the appeal by the BRICS to the Non-Aligned Movement, NAM, for instance, to other countries in South America, to a lot of countries in the Middle East, to many countries in South-East Asia is huge against what is an Atlanticist U.S.-NATO, which is basically the same thing because the U.S. controls NATO.

NATO aligned with the most ultra-reactionary and repressive Persian Gulf monarchies. The realignment of the chessboard is something very tricky now because now these countries, especially Qatar and the Emirates, they are sub-sects of NATO. In one of my pieces recently I was venturing the possibility of soon talking about a NATOGCC, or GCCNATO, Gulf Cooperation Council – I usually call them Gulf Counterrevolutionary Club, because this is what they are.

So the merging between NATO and the GCC now is total. And if we include the merger between the Western military-industrial complex in the U.S. and the Saudi defense system which is total as well, we can say that Pentagon and the GCC is all the same thing.

And the BRICS look at this and for some of them this is extremely complicated, for China, for instance, because still their number one oil supplier is Saudi Arabia. For the moment Saudi Arabia is outrunning Angola. Venezuela is already among the top five. Libya was not among the top five, that’s why they said: Okay, not now, maybe later. But how do they organize the relationship between Beijing and Riyadh, because they see that Riyadh is totally aligned with the Pentagon agenda, and at the same time they depend on their oil, and this explains among other things why the Chinese are so eager to be less and less dependent on Middle Eastern oil.

So this means more deals with Iran. My guess, my more or less informed guess is soon the Chinese will go to Iran and say: How much money do you need to totally upgrade your oil and gas installations? Here it is, but deal with us.

This explains the pipeline from Turkmenistan to China, this explains the two pipelines from Siberia to China, and this explain China in Angola and in Central Africa as well, and this will explain China coming to Brazil as soon as possible, saying: How much money do you want? The Saudi-China relation for Beijing is very complicated, and that means, for now, they they cannot antogonize Saudi Arabia on anything.

Related to the BRICS, do you pay attention to the fact that the central banks of Russia, China and India and also South American central banks are buying gold big time?

Pepe Escobar: Oh, yes! In the moment they are buying gold, and they still have in the backburner the Plan B, which is a basket of currencies in terms of an international currency system. The Russians and the Chinese want it, the Brazilians also want it, it would include probably the U.S. dollar, the euro, yuan, maybe ruble, maybe real as well, maybe yen, but the Japanese are not part of this conversation, and for the moment, of course, it’s to buy gold, including those who are not in this loop but are connected to the loop, Venezuela. Remember Venezuela was repatriating all their gold that they had in European banks, the first shipment already arrived in Caracas.

Do you think there could be some sort a connection in the pricing of oil with gold in the future going ahead?

Pepe Escobar: I don’t know, Lars, honest answer. I don’t know. You know why? I would say it depends on a move connected to bypassing the petrodollar. And this move already started a few years ago. Iran wants to do it badly like yesterday. Russia already said: Yes, we want it. Venezuela already said in South America: Yes, we want it as well. But I think this is the nuclear option. Can you imagine the day when you have major oil producers inside OPEC saying: It’s not going to be the petrodollar anymore, it’s going to be our own currencies or it’s going to be a basket of currencies. That’s basically the end of the American hegemony for good.

The whole country will burn, basically.

Pepe Escobar: Exactly. The whole globe will burn. I see this as the nuclear option. A few years ago when Iran was establishing an energy bourse, in fact, they did, it’s already there.

Since 2008. [Oil Bourse Opens in Kish, published at Fars News Agency on Feb. 18, 2008]

Pepe Escobar: I remember in 2005, I interviewed the guy in charge of establishing this bourse in Tehran. We had a fantastic conversation, and then I got into a big fight with the editor at that time of Asia Times, because he said: If we publish this, the Americans will bomb our site tomorrow.

The Iranians said: This is our first step to entice people to start buying oil contracts with us at our bourse and not in New York or in London. And then I told this guy: You know what you’re doing when this thing goes ahead. You are going to be bombed by the U.S. tomorrow. They said: Yes, we know the risks. But the guy who was implementing this mechanism for us was a former trader in London actually. It was a very complicated messy affair.

After my interview, it took them three years, as you have said, they only established it in 2008. It’s a very small bourse, but as far as the Iranians see it, it’s just the beginning. They like this bourse. They started with petrochemicals first. They start to deal with petrochemicals, oil and gas for the future and they were especially interested in attracting buyers from the developing world plus Russia and China, so that they could buy Iranian energy products in Iran directly. I’m sure, Russia and China loved the idea as well, but for the moment it’s an embryo of something much bigger coming later.

You call the “Great Game 2.0″ in Central Asia / the Greater Middle East “Pipelineistan.” Is it of advantage to be familiar with good ol’ Halford Mackinder (a British geographer credited with being the father of geopolitics) in “Pipelineistan”?

Pepe Escobar: No, the thing is, the people who are familiar with Mackinder are the Brzeziński crowd and people at national security agencies in Washington. They think they can apply Mackinder and win. (laughs.) The Russians and the Chinese would say: Not in our region, guys, here is different. We have the resources. Russia is a continental power. China, it’s a kingdom and a civilization in itself, we don’t admit foreign interference, you are never going to control our part of Eurasia, you can control the euro part of Eurasia, but that stops at the Bosphorus.

To the right of the Bosphorus, Turkey has regional ambitions, Iran has regional ambitions, we have our former Soviet Republics, which we still see as our satellites, South East Asia now is linked to China in terms of trade, commerce, and I would say parts of South East Asia are becoming a sub-sect of China, in fact.

Remember, during the Asian Miracle, when the World Bank launched that famous book in 1993, “The Asian Miracle,“ it was Japan as the lead goose, then the other four tigers right behind it, then the mini-tigers, and China was way behind, and now in 2011 the whole thing is upside down, because it’s China as the larger-than-life goose, and then we have all these mini-gooses behind China trying to keep up and clinch deals as well, because the Chinese diaspora in all these countries is essential.

They control most of the economy in Indonesia, they control most of the economy in Thailand, mixed marriages Thai-Chinese, they control most of the economy in the Philippines, they control a lot of the economy in Malaysia, they control the whole economy in Singapore. Tigers? Not really. Mini-gooses. The whole thing is upside down.

So I don’t see Mackinder being applied. They thought during the Bush administration because of hubris, and because they said, remember, they were saying it on a daily basis practically: We create our own reality, and then you people in the rest of the world have to keep up. They thought that they could implement their new great game strategy in Central Asia by building this pipeline in Afghanistan, finally, the TAPI – Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, bypassing Iran and bypassing Russia and China.

They thought that they could force the Turkmen to sell gas to Western companies and not to China or to be linked to the Russian pipeline network. They were still drunk with their success of the BTC, the Baku- Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, saying this was the beginning of many other pipelines bypassing Iran.

But that was in the beginning of the Bush administration until 2003/2004 after the “success“ of the Iraq war. Now, only a few years later, as we were talking before, they didn’t win anything. In fact, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization which is a mechanism that is counter this proliferation of American initiatives in Central Asia is getting stronger and stronger.

In terms of energy deals, Russia, Iran, China, Turkmenistan, they all are dealing among themselves. Obviously there is space with Europe, but they cannot deal with Europe in the case of Iran because of the sanctions, and in the case of Turkmenistan because to build a pipeline like Nabucco, over 20 billion euros, it’s unfeasible. To give you an idea: BTC cost 4.5 billion U.S. dollars at that time, and at that time everybody was saying: it’s ridiculous to build a pipeline like this when we could have had a shorter route from Iran that probably costs ten times less than this pipeline. They built it anyway. So now it’s 500 percent more than BTC was.

So the Americans are not winning anything, in fact, in Afghanistan they are shooting themselves in the foot, because now they antagonized not only Pakistan, which they did when they began to bomb the country over the last few years with the drone war, they antagonized the Afghans themselves, which were really willing to cut a deal with the Americans. The tribal leaders were even saying let’s talk to the Americans what kind of a base complex they want after they retire in 2014. They were willing to discuss it.

Nowadays, forget it, because Pakistan don’t want to discuss this anymore, they are fed up, and Pakistan and China are getting closer and closer, the Chinese are going to exploit this rift between Washington and Islamabad. In Afghanistan, there will be a total mess, they don’t want American bases, I’m sure, after 2014, so the Pentagon has to force these bases over to Afghan controls, we still don’t know the road map for this as well. So if you analyze in terms of successes of the new great game American-style in Eurasia over the past four or five years, there is not much to show. (laughs.)

If one would address the question: “Why do wars happen at all?”, would you say that the fact that bankers are at the top of the list of beneficiaries of wars is an important part of the answer, insofar for example:

[Editor: For background, see J.S. Kim: “Inside The Illusory Empire Of The Banking Commodity Con Game“, published at The Underground Investor on Oct. 19, 2010: "The U.S. Federal Reserve creates money to fund the war and lends it to the American government. The American government in turn must pay interest on the money they borrow from the Central Bank to fund the war. The greater the war appropriations, the greater the profits are for bankers."]

Pepe Escobar: I agree if there were a lot of war appropriations, if the looting is conducive. In Iraq it didn’t happen. The looting in Iraq would supposedly be the oil that would not only pay for the war, but for America’s supply of oil for the next 1,000 years or so, the new American Reich based on Iraqi oil. Didn’t work.

We had a fascinating historical lesson of what happened in Iraq. The neocons thought in the beginning, obviously, because they knew absolutely [nothing] about the Middle East, they don’t even travel, they don’t even go there, they thought: Okay, this will cost us virtually nothing, we will make the Iraqis pay for the whole thing later on, and then when the oil comes, that’s it. Remember what they used to say: We’re the new OPEC, this was in late 2002/03.

Didn’t work. And now we have a different, let’s say, variant of the model, that you’ve just explained: wars paid by foreign powers. China is financing the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, part of the war in Libya, it didn’t cost much, but anyway, still the war in Libya, the war in Somalia, the war in Yemen, the next war in Uganda or Sudan that the U.S. decides to start. This is being financed basically by Chinese buying U.S. treasury bonds. It’s a variant of the model.

In an article for al-Jazeera you’ve once quoted a study related to the cost of the War on Terror, published by the Eisenhower project at Brown University. [Pepe Escobar: “Why the US won't leave Afghanistan“, published at Al Jazeera on July 12, 2011] Do you remember?

Pepe Escobar: Yes, I do.

And the costs were four billion?

Pepe Escobar: Yes, depending on the variables, depending on the medical costs for the injured veterans in the U.S., which escalate and go on forever, because they still have to pay pensions for these people, it could be between four and six trillion U.S. dollars. So what did the U.S. get for these four to six trillion dollars so far? We can say, so far they only got Libya, which is not exactly a priority for them.

It was part of the original neocon plan – it starts with Iraq, then Lebanon, Syria, especially Iran. For the moment the only thing they get is Libya. That’s why Syria is so important because Syria is the way to Iran, and it is still the same what the neocons said in 2002, and it is still part of the Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine. We always come back to the same themes, because these themes are the basis of what we are watching nowadays.

Do you think that the war in Libya qualifies as a Resource War, not only related to oil and maybe the gold currency that Gaddafi wanted to issue, but also related to the Great Man Made River project?

Pepe Escobar: Yes, I was going to say that, Lars, absolutely, it’s a water war already. I was writing a few months ago a long story about coming water wars – no, it’s not coming, they are already here. This was the first big water war, if you think about it. There is going to be a lot of water wars in the Middle East, Southern Turkey, Israel-Palestine, but this one is big because of the Great Man Made River project – over 20 billion U.S. dollars financed by the Libyan government, by Gaddafi, with a lot of Canadian expertise involved.

And no money from the International Monetary Fund.

Pepe Escobar: Especially that! No money from the IMF and from those schemes at the World Bank when you have to keep paying interest until you die three times over. They built this by themselves and they imported the technology that they needed, and they built an indigenous pipeline system undercover in the southern desert to bring water to the coast line in Libya. It’s absolutely fantastic because they have a reservoir of fresh water in the southern desert that lasts according to the best estimates for a thousand years. A thousand years of fresh water.

Can you imagine, the project isn’t even totally completed, I think 80 percent are completed. Obviously, the three major water companies in the world are French, and in my opinion this explains 99 percent of the French rationale for the war. They want to privatize these one thousand years of fresh water and sell it to the whole planet. And then we have Sarkozy and the interests of the industrial-military complex in France, we need more gas and oil for Total, which they were always complaining that they always wanted the lion’s share of Libya’s energy exports.

There is an alliance of the Qataris, the industrial-military complex in France and Sarkozy, who is basically a lackey of these people, and the Qataris wanted to be involved in trade and commerce in Northern Africa. NATO and AFRICOM interests in establishing a beach head. There were so many interests. Gaddafi couldn’t win from the beginning because all these interests in the axis Pentagon, NATO, key European countries like France and England, and the monarchies of Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and House of Saud as well, because they wanted to bring Gaddafi down because there was a bad beef between King Abdullah and Gaddafi since 2002, before the invasion of Iraq.

Gaddafi couldn’t possibly face this, too many powerful interests were behind it, they wanted to renegotiate the contracts, they wanted the new oil and gas contracts to go only to European and American companies, maybe Turkish companies, but not to BRICS countries, and Gaddafi, he was interviewed by German journalists two or three days before the resolution was passed, and he said explicitly: If you attack us, the next contracts are going to BRIC countries – so he was attacked three days later. (laughs.) Absolutely obvious.

And what you’ve mentioned, very importent as well: the gold dinar, because the gold dinar could have been an African currency, he could have financed development projects in Sub-Saharan Africa, he was already doing this, financing a lot of projects in Sub-Saharan African countries, and he was bypassing completely the Bretton Woods system and this from the point of view of Washington, the Bank of International Settlements, all this gang – it’s a no-no, it’s an absolute no-no. And remember, when Saddam started selling oil in euro in Iraq in late 2002. Major reason for the invasion as well.

Do you think it was good for the Benghazi “rebels“ to establish a central bank that is in bed with Western central banks?

Pepe Escobar: This is what they wanted. In fact, these people of the Transition National Council, which is bag of dodgy cats – opportunists, former Gaddafi officials, Islamists linked to al-Qaeda from Cyrenaica, exiles living in Virginia, come on! This is a bloody tragic joke, in fact. And of course, from the beginning, they had a Qatari connection: one of the advisors of Sheika Moza, the wife of the Emir of Qatar, was the link between Qatar and the Transition National Council.

So why Qatar got this independent central bank based in Benghazi, obviously, Qatari influence, because they wanted to get into the financial and the trade system in Northern Africa, they are expanding. Qatar is a fast-expanding mini empire. It’s very, very impressive. I remember Doha ten years ago, it was a backwater. I remember very well. I used to go Iraq via Qatar. I saw it growing year by year, and nowadays when you arrive in Doha, you think you are in a mini-Hong Kong already.

And their tentacles are everywhere: in Europe, in the U.S., in the Middle East, of course, and northern Africa as well, they trade heavily with Asia, they are setting their sights in Brazil nowadays. So it’s very impressive. And their move in Northern Africa was very clever, because they are now localized in Northern Africa, and, as they hope, the rest of Africa: We want to trade with everybody, we have a very good banking system, we sell gas to anyone who wants to buy. Mini-empire in the make.

What do we have to expect in the next year related to Syria and Iran. These are allies, right?

Pepe Escobar: Yes. Well, this is the multi-trillion-dollar question. I would go to Iran as soon as I can, the problem for us to get a press visa to Iran, after the Green Movement in 2009, it’s very difficult. You need a press visa to go to Iran, because if you want to talk to the IRGC, for instance, officials, people from the govenment, you need that kind of visa. I am going to try again, exactly to get from those people their point of view, and I am talking especially about the IRGC commanders, the people in the oil industry, and of course, in order to talk to average Tehranians, which is something that I have always enjoyed doing.

In the North of Tehran, you think you are in California. In South Tehran, you know you are in the hardcore heart of the Middle East. There are two universes in one city, and the spectrum of opinions that you get just by a fourty minute taxi ride, is absolutely outstanding. You see people who want to kill Rafsanjani the day they’d meet him, you see people defending the ayatollahs strictly, you see people saying, without the Green Movement we’re lost. It’ a universe in itself.

And the echoes that I get from my friends who live there or from Iranians who send me a lot of stuff is: people are consuming, they are living their lives, there is lots of inflation, prices have been rising substantially, but they want to go out, try to buy an iPad that was smuggled from China, they want to have a new European car that they can afford, they want to keep eating meat, which is very funny, because the Brazilian meat that they import is cheaper than the Iranian-produced meat. Go figure! You have that kind of stuff.

And at the same time, they know that something is brewing. It could be an Israeli strike, it could be a U.S.-Israeli strike, it could be a strike only on the nuclear facilities, but a lot of people fear a strike on the civilian infrastructure. They always say: Look, what happened to Iraq. They attacked civilian buildings – yes, it’s true, I saw it for myself.

People are expecting the worst. They are trying to keep a brave face, but they immediately recognize there is a power struggle inside the regime between the Ahmadinejad faction and the revolutionary guards ultra-hardline faction, which is against Ahmadinejad because he wants some sort of a compromise with the West. These IRGC guys, they want confrontation.

This is very dangerous. Why? Because the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khameinei, is supporting this faction against Ahmadinejad. He wants Iran to be respected for what it is, and we can assume that he is welcoming this confrontation. This is extremely dangerous, because we could have an incident that would be the casus belli for an attack, an Israeli-Anglo-American attack, let’s put it this way.

People are very much aware of this, and they are very much afraid of this power struggle at the top of the regime. At the same time, next year they will have parliamentary elections, and they are going to have Presidential elections in 2013, where the favorite, at least for the moment, is Larijani, he is a former nuclear negotiator and a close friend and protege of Khamenei’s. This means the hardliners are very much in power and control, and incredibly as it might seem, Ahmadinejad at the moment he is more or less sidelined, and he is considered by these hardliners as an appeaser vis-à-vis the West.

So the internal situation inside Iran is extremely worrying. And they know what might happen in Syria, and they know that Syria is the short cut to get to them. But at the same time the hardliners they are not only expecting an attack on Syria, in fact, they say: maybe they won’t even use the short cut, maybe they will attack us directly. So they are preparing for this as well. Everything very worrying.

Do you perceive a similar mood in Israel?

Pepe Escobar: I don’t know. I have a lot of Jewish friends in South America, in the U.S. and in Europe, they come and go to Israel, and when they come back, they say: Look, people are lost in Israel, they don’t know how to deal with the Arab Spring, the regime doesn’t know how to deal with the Arab Spring, they don’t even know how to deal with the the non-Spring in Syria, because they expect what might come next as even worst, like a Muslim Brotherhood antagonistic government in Damascus. Which is a no-no for Israel.

They prefer to deal with the devil they know, which is an ineffectual devil, the Assad regime. There is a civil society movement, very strong in Israel, against corruption, inflation and rising costs of living, they are anti-war and anti-government as well.

And then we have a government that is a hostage of this absolutely disgusting settler lobby. Extreme right-wing, Lieberman-Ukrainian immigrants, it’s horrible, because the progressive left in Israel, you read them in the Israeli press once in a while, but they have been marginalized. Even inside the U.S.: the progressive Jews in the U.S., they are more or less marginalized, because AIPAC is controlling the discourse.

If you listen to radio, read the mainstream press, watch the networks, it’s like an AIPAC press release after another. You don’t see Jewish progressives saying: It’s crazy, what we are doing, we have to sit down and talk about Palestine, sit down and talk about the Golan Heights, about Iran. This is a minority position.

Whereas the majority is supported by the Evangelics and new-born Christians in the U.S., who believe in Armaggedon.

Pepe Escobar. Exactly. You have the majority of the establishment who wants to have an Eretz Israel, a greater Israel, and the religious nuts, who say: Okay, the best way to (expedite) Armaggedon is a war against our neighbours.

The maniacs are running the asylum.

Pepe Escobar: Yes, it’s crazy. I would say, since the beginning of the Arab Spring, 2011 was the year that the maniacs took over the asylum completely. And that’s why 2012 could be such a really terrible year, I think, for all this arc: Northern Africa, Middle East and Central Asia. In Central Asia basically Af/Pak, because the situation in Af/Pak tends to be going down the drain very fast.

What’s your take of the recent assault by NATO troops on Pakistan? [See “'Mistakes made': Pentagon 'regrets' slaughter of 24 Pakistani troops“, published at Russia Today on Dec. 22, 2011]

Pepe Escobar: This is a very complex thing, because maybe there’s a hidden motive behind it, and we still don’t know what it could be. Could be that some Pakistani provoked it, could be that NATO itself provoked it to have a better excuse to ramp up the demonization of Pakistan campaign, try to provoke a military coup, so that the factions within the Pakistani military who are more pro-American are running the show. It’s still very murky.

But there is something behind this attack that makes no sense: NATO knows where all the Pakistani checkpoints are in the tribal areas, they have the maps and the coordinates, they simply cannot bomb a Pakistani military checkpoint, because they know that it is a friendly place, it’s not that they were bombing a Pashtun wedding in Waziristan in a mud house, where the satellite said: This house is full of al-Qaeda, bomb them – boom! It’s different. Our writers in India and Pakistan are not convinced by the official story. Short of calling it a lie, it’s still a story to tell.

But it is a problem, because Pakistan and China have the closest relations to each other possible.

Pepe Escobar: Yes, and anything that happens in Pakistan from now on, drives Islamabad closer and closer to Bejing, it’s absolutely inevitable. Pakistani public opinion is fed up with American interference, with the relentless drone war and the loss of their sovereignty if they had ever had any, by the way.

And of course, the Chinese are reacting typically, they are very quiet, they are not making any move, they are just waiting for the leadership in Islamabad to come running to Bejing and say: Take care of us, please. And it is not very hard with the way the Americans are acting. The only two things that matters to Washington; they don’t give a flying fuck – excuse me for the expression – about the Pakistani people. What they cared about was the “War on Terror“ to exterminate al-Qaeda.

So now they are saying openly and on the record, that al-Qaeda is ineffective, since the death of bin Laden – was it bin Laden or not is still open for speculation, but they killed al-Qaeda. So what are they doing in Af/Pak? Oh, now we have a problem, because Pakistan is a very unstable country, they are now the heartbeat of the terrorist movement in the world, it’s not Aghanistan anymore, and can you imagine if these nuclear weapons fall into the hand of the terrorists.

This is the only thing that matters. They want to find a pretext to interfere in Pakistan to get a hold of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. It’s an extremely long shot, of course, but this is what the Pentagon would like to do. This is their agenda.

The political elite in Pakistan apart from Imran Khan, I would say, is corrupt. Imran Khan by himself is not a corrupt man, he is getting a hundred thousand people everytime he speaks in public in Pakistan, because they start to see him as an alternative. He says: Let’s get rid of the Americans, let’s get rid of the corrupt political elite, let’s get the military to stay in their barracks, let’s have a true civilian government, let’s try to develop the country and try to bridge the inequality gap. That’s why he is so popular now, he could win the next elections.

But basically, Pakistani civil society is fed up with the state of things. And for the Americans this is really bad news, because they want since Zia to have the military in control basically, doing what the Pentagon tells them to do, and for the past few years conduct their “War on Terror“ the way they want it from their bases inside Pakistan, like this one in Balochistan,
Samsi, and the drone war in the Waziristans, but this is not going to happen anymore, I don’t see it happening. The Chinese are just waiting. I think they will admit Pakistan to the SCO, this is something that could happen next year, so Pakistan would be inside a meachanism that implies military cooperation with the Chinese.

The problem is that the Pakistani military is not a monolithic organization, there are layers, there are people who were appointed by Musharraf, there are people, like some Pashtun middle-ranking officers, who are sympathetic to the Taliban in Pakistan or even al-Qaeda, and there are cracks inside this arrangement. And I am sure the army leaders, their relationship with the Pentagon is more than difficult at the moment, especially after the last raid, which was an attack against their own, this was an attack against an army post. This is for them a bit too much.

Anti-Americanism is on the raise everywhere in the world.

Pepe Escobar: Except in the Persian Gulf. (laughs.)

Would you say it’s a bit tragic given the friendliness of the ordinary American people?

Pepe Escobar: It’s true. I have been going to the U.S. since I was a kid, I traveled to at least 40 states, I lived there on both coasts, I have friends in the U.S., a lot of people who read my stuff know where I am coming from, but I also have a lot of readers who are saying: you are a Taliban-Communist-Apocalyptic-Anti-American bla-bla-bla – the whole thing. They still don’t get it.

One thing is to be very fond of the country and American pop culture, American entertainment, American icons in music, in literature, in cinema, in architecture, in art etc., and another thing is to criticize their foreign policy. If you grew up like myself, I grew up in Brazil and Europe during the 1960/70′s – the military dictatorship installed in Brazil in 1964, when I was ten years old, was an American coup.

Yes.

Pepe Escobar: We learned here in South America by ourselves what it means to live under a military dictatorship sponsored by the U.S. So we know what we are talking about. Obviously, the people in the Middle East also know what they are talking about. Some people in Asia also know what they are talking about, like the South Koreans, for instance, they lived under a military regime sanctioned by the U.S. before they became a democracy.

So it’s very tragic that after the beginning of the Arab Spring, a lot of people in the Persian Gulf haven’t seen already that they live in extremely autocratic regimes, they are vassals and satrapies of the U.S. empire, and they simply cannot count on their own governments to get the minimum of sovereignty.

So when you see indigenous pro-democracy movements in Bahrain or in Eastern Saudi Arabia, you see how the response is. Even in Egypt, where they said: Let’s get finally rid of the system once and for all – they didn’t get rid of the system, the snake is still there, and the snake is being financed by Saudi Arabia.

There was no revolution in Egypt, the revolution maybe will start if they get rid of the Tantawi junta, which is what the masses in Tahrir Square, the Google generation and the working class in Egypt want. But the problem is the army in Egypt controls – there are different estimates about it – from 25 to 40 percent of the Egyptian economy, they are not going to give that up. It’s got to be a real bloody revolution for these people to go, and obviously the U.S. don’t want this.

As a geopolitical analyst would you say that the future of Germany is much more in the East of Eurasia (Russia, China) than in New York and London?

Pepe Escobar: I would love to pose this question to you. My maybe wild guess is that Germany wants to integrate more with Russia.

Yes. Well, the economic and political elites here in this country [Germany] are still aligned to the U.S.

Pepe Escobar: Exactly.

As you could see when Angela Merkel as the chancellor of Germany received the highest civilian medal this year in Washington DC, the “Medal of Freedom.“ She has now something in common with Duke Ellington, because he received it once, too (in 1969). But the thing is that I think this is telling.

Pepe Escobar: It is. That’s the problem with Germany, because it’s an Atlanticist thing, but they know that their future in terms of all the raw materials and the commodities that they need they can have from Russia. They can have the rest of the world as their market, which they already have. It’s a fabulous exporting power. They don’t have to be subjugated to this Atlanticist link, definitely not. But as you have said correctly: the elites in Berlin and Frankfurt are still very Americanized.

For me both as a journalist and from my perspective as a German, it is interesting that you are familiar with my favorite German of all-time, Heinrich Heine…

Pepe Escobar: Heine!

…who was also a journalist.

Pepe Escobar: Unfortunately, I only read him in translation. Wonderful translations in English and in Spanish. I never read him in German, but German friends tell me that his German is absolutely outstanding.

Yes, together with people like Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Goethe he is at the very top.

Pepe Escobar: I was a major Nietzsche fan for some years. One of my best philosophy professors, he was a Nietzsche specialist, a French guy, Gerard Lebrun, he was one of the best Nietzsche scholars in France. I learned a lot from him. And Nietzsche is still one of my go-to guys.

And he was a fan of Heine’s poetry, too.

Pepe Escobar: Yes, he was a fan of Heine’s poetry, exactly.

From a journalistic point of view, do you think that journalism in the West is in a profound crisis?

Pepe Escobar: Oh yes. I give you two personal examples. One of the reasons why I wanted to become a journalist was Watergate. I was in college at that time, I was 19, and I hadn’t decided at that time what to do, I thought maybe visual arts, and I was always a big fan of literature, but I thought with literature I cannot made a living.

Then I wanted to become a journalist, and that, Watergate, was my role model in the profession. Later on, before digital journalism, I worked for big national papers, I got the insight of how the industry works. A big national paper is basically a corporate institution, they operate more or less the same all over the world.

Then I became seriously disenchanted about it, I wouldn’t say disgusted, not yet. I became disgusted, finally, with mainstram media after the beginning of the “War on Terror“ and before the war in Iraq, because then most of the credibility of the mainstream press in the world disappeared.

When you see the New York Times printing lies in their front page everyday for months, that was for me the end of respectable mainstream journalism. And papers like Le Monde, that I used to read since I was in high-school for that matter, they became an Americanized rag like a bad copy of the New York Times, and sometimes even more reactionary. It’s a bit sad that I don’t read German papers, because at least their cultural sections are still the best in the world.

And the modern German “Feuilleton“ is more or less an invention by Heinrich Heine…

Pepe Escobar: I used to read a lot of the English papers, but you can’t sometimes even trust the gold standard of English media, like the Guardian or the Independent, who were historically very strong center, left, progressive papers. So this disenchantment became total this past decade, I may say. You have to go to the net, if you want to find information that connects the dots, it’s in the net, it’s not in mainstream media anymore. And my friends who still work at big papers, they tell me: Look, it’s impossible to discuss with our editors what should and what should not be printed. It’s over.

Would you say that the whole handling of affairs related to 9/11 was a big push for alternative media?

Pepe Escobar: It was, because if you wanted to know after 9/11 what was really going on – forget about mainstream media anywhere in the world. The only place where you could find it was in the net – independent observers and analysts, who took the trouble of going through documents, in mainstream media it was impossible.

Nowadays, sometimes they filter these guys, you see them once in a while, but these are just glimpses. The mainstream discourse itself is monolithic. There is no alternative. And there is really no alternative, because you only listen to these guys all saying the same thing for decades.

Yes, and most of those experts and big news media outlets are linked to the Round Tables like the Royal Institute of International Affaires, Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Club…

Pepe Escobar: Exactly, they all work for the same think tanks. And other media outlets have credibility problems as well. The international Chinese tv-channel in English, CCTV9, because you would need at least a minimum of debates, but there are no debates going on. I like what RT, Russia Today, is doing, I am a contributor, but they don’t criticize Russia. Big problem.

I also work for al-Jazeera, which is great, because I can reach people and get responses that I otherwise would not have, for example from people in Africa. But they have an enormous problem of credibility, because of their coverage of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya compared to their coverage of what happens in the Persian Gulf, they simply cannot criticize themselves and they cannot criticize – forget about it – the House of Saud, because of the close relations between the House of Saud and the Emir of Qatar. It’s very complicated when you are navigating this universe.

We are very happy, all of us, who work and write for Asia Times because it is truly independent and we are respected for that. We have Zionists’ opinions in it, we have extreme-right opinions, extreme-left opinions, we have the middle, we have the Iranians, the Pakistanis, the Russians, the Chinese, we even have a North Korean writing for us, so it’s all there.

We don’t have any specific editorial line, no, it’s open for everybody. That is what people respect us for. But that’s something hard to find. We have for example tremendous problems with financing. I have been involved with this for the past few months, and it’s a headache: we want to expand, but we don’t want to lose our editorial control. Very tricky equation.

I wish you many success with that!

Pepe Escobar: Thank you!

Pepe Escobar was born in 1954 in Brazil and has been a foreign correspondent since 1985, based in London, Milan, Los Angeles, Paris, Singapore, and Bangkok. Since the late 1990s, he has specialized in covering geopolitical stories from the Middle East to Central Asia and has reported during this decade from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, the Central Asian Republics, U.S.A. and China. He now works for Hong Kong/Thailand-based Asia Times as “The Roving Eye“ and is an analyst for The Real News in Washington DC, as well as a contributor to Russia Today and Al Jazeera. He is author of three books:Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War, Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge, and Obama does Globalistan.
Pepe Escobar is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Pepe Escobar

Voices outside the cauldron of fire

The PM has acknowledged the bigger role played by the bloggers in giving feedback to the govt, or the govt listening to their grouses and acting on them. Outside of the establishment set ups, outside of the political system and intrique, there are a few more prominent voices in cyberspace that are gaining a bigger follower for their unrestraint and non party views, views that are personal, objective, neutral and perhaps strongly critical of the wrongs of our socio political system.

Among the more established bloggers are Lucky Tan of Diary of a Singaporean Mind, FeedMeToTheFish of the blog with the same name. Lucky has been providing very good economic analysis of what affects the current situation and thinking. Fish is more critical and cynical about the social and political mess we are in. There are also Molly of MollyMeek and the hilarious Mr Brown to add a little light hearted perspective to an otherwise hardcore political reporting. I could add a few more. Cyberspace is growing and can easily outgrow the main media in terms of numbers of bloggers and articles put out.

I would like to add two former newspaper men who have left the corridors of power and more or less on their own and free to offer critical and objective views of their own. Seah Chiang Nee may be free lancing for the Star in Malaysia, but he is still writing profusely on developments in the city state. And occasionally there is PN Balji who would chip in with his two cents worth. Their contributions have given cyberspace more authority as they were not minnows without any credentials.

2012 is likely to see more voices being heard in cyberspace and may these pioneers and stalwarts continue to write and contribute to the buzz and oomphs of cyberspace.

Medicare for Senior Citizens

Malaysia - Senior citizens can look forward to a healthy start to the new year - they can seek outpatient treatment at government hospitals and clinics without having to fork out a single sen.

Effective yesterday, the Government abolished the token RM1 (S$40 cents) payment senior citizens needed to pay each time they sought such treatment.
The Health Ministry announced in its latest circular that patients aged 60 and above would be exempted from making any payment for outpatient treatment at government hospitals and clinics.

This means that these patients will enjoy medical consultation, check-ups and medication at no charge at all.

The circular, issued by ministry's finance division secretary Wong Foong Lai, stated that the exemption was in appreciation of the contributions made by senior citizens.

Senior citizens would only have to pay a nominal fee if they required specialist care, treatment or hospitalisation…

Lim Wey Wen

If the above were to be in the ST all Singaporeans will know that it must be a joke. But that is real in Malaysia. If only our govt were to treat our seniors better and provide them free medical consultation in poly clinics for common illnesses and cough and colds where no hospitalisation and expensive medical treatment are needed. Our govt is so much richer than Malaysia. If they can afford it, why can’t we? Ok, asking for anything free is like asking to eat in hawker centre, foodcourt or restaurant. How about charging a flat fee of $3 or $5 for the seniors, and NO MEAN TESTING needed?

Many oldies are finding basic healthcare cost quite unbearable. It would be a dream start for 2012. But as they said, tan ku ku. There is no free lunch in paradise. If any oldie is thinking of getting free medical care, try to get admitted into a charity home and go perform in one of the charity shows on TV, and show the world how pathetic and pitiful he is. Then only will he get some charity for free.

A medal for Mah Bow Tan

Many Singaporeans may be unhappy with him and his arrogant housing policies and how it affected their lives and their income. Because of that, many have forgotten to look at the good side and achievements of this man. He was handed a $2b problem, more than 10,000 units of unsold HDB flats. There was initial panic when so much money was tied up in unsold properties.

Then he did a miraculous feat. Within a few years he not only sold all this flats, and the sale was so good that he turned a surplus into a shortage. As a result, HDB was able to sell its flats at higher and higher prices, bringing in great profits, though it surprisingly registered an unfortunate big loss in one year. The gist was that he was the best seller of properties. The best property salesman in the number of properties sold.

He also taught the complacent young people in family planning. Many have taken for granted that marriage is a thing that just happened and buying a flat is so easy. He is not going to make it easy for them in their careless approach to setting up a family. He made them plan ahead. He made them plan at least 3 to 5 years ahead, and the penalty was to get married without a flat in waiting. He would only build public flats when his order book was full. Period. And this demanded the buyers to plan carefully. It also cut down on spurious applications and long queues for flats. Only genuine buyers needed register.

He also encouraged the higher income young couple to buy private properties instead of HDB. He maintained the eligibility ceiling at a level that many had no choice but to go private or ended up no housing at all. There were many advantages which many young people did not see, like low interest rates and high demand for flats with influx of foreigners. Those who took his cue are now smiling as their properties would have appreciated many times despite the high mortgages they took. It indirectly also helped to boost the economy and GDP with higher consumption and borrowing. Those who did not listen to his advice only got themselves to blame. And many are still flatless and not eligible for public housing any more while private housing went beyond their reach.

Mah Bow Tan’s other achievement is conservation. By not building too many flats, the land was kept in reserve instead of wanton building for the sake of building. He knew how precious and limited is our land bank. And because of this, he went one step further by building flats of smaller sizes, saving on land, material and cost. The cost savings went into the furnishing as well, smaller space needed smaller furniture and lesser furniture. Great savings for the owners. Micky mouse flats become a fad and a new way of life and with assurance by HDB that the quality of life would not be affected.

While the people took for granted the ownership of public housing, the tight policies made the people more aware of how important owning a flat was, and how valuable a flat as well. Many are so happy that the same flat, after using and staying in it for so many years, can still fetch higher and higher prices. They are feeling so much richer.

This man deserves a medal for his foresight and nature conservation policies. If he did not hold down on the building programme, all the land would have been built up and no space left for anything. Don’t just look at the negative side. There are goodness in badness and badness in goodness.

With 2011 in the past, let’s give this man a medal for his achievements in public housing and conservation.

2012 a year of give and take

Many ordinary people will understand this give and take phrase to mean you take some, you give some, or you give some and you take some. It is so simple as that, or is it?

Different people have different takes when comes to give and take. Some say those who have been taking should stop taking and those who have been giving should stop giving, and the role be reversed. The takers should start to give and the giver should start to take.

Another view is that the taker should continue to take since he is the taker and the giver should continue to give since he is used to be the giver. And there are variations to how much to take and how much go give. The familiar formula is to take $1,000 and give $1. Oops, sorry, this is not about money. Money is not in the picture. In that case the position of giver and taker means different things. When money is concerned, the taker is always at the advantage. If not money, then the taker is at the losing end, taking shit and whatever.


Yes whatever, in the end it is likely that the taker will continue to take as it has become habitual. On the giver side, he too will be giving all the time. And it will still be a give and take situation, some will take and some will give. Some will take more and some will give less.

The inevitable change

2011 set the stage for change in a new world with new players. The Americans tried very hard to retain its number One super power status and to contain the challenge coming from an emerging China. Much as it tried, American power is dwindling in the midst of economic failures and a mountain of debt. America continues in its pursuit of military power and control, getting itself embroiled in wars, in sanctions, in interfering with the domestic politics of every country on its good book or in its bad books. It poked its finger into Myanmar and North Korea, two countries that have nothing to do with the lives of Americans. While the North Koreans are mourning the death of its leaders, the Americans are furiously engaging the South Koreans on how to deal with the North Koreans when it is totally none of its business. It still thinks it has the privilege and resources to mess around the world.

Domestically we are seeing a party on the defensive. The ruling party has expended all its political capital and with every minister a liability rather than an asset to the party. Without political capital, something that it callously chose not to build over the last decades, it is looking at social capital to fall back on. How much social capital is there when it neglected building on it like political capital?

Singaporeans went through a very painful phase of ‘nothing can be done’, it is all due to market forces, wide income gap is good and natural, that is growth. High housing prices are beyond the govt’s control, so is high cost of living, market forces at work. The high intake of foreigners labelled as foreign talents is for the good of the people, like it or not. It can’t be helped. It is not the norm or responsibility to build housing for the people when they needed it. The govt will dictate when they want to build and how many to build, and 3 to 4 years wait is a take it or leave it position. So what can the people do about it other than to accept it as the norm.

Many people benefited from the govt’s policies of market forces, including very high pay, very high property prices. Those who have plenty kept piling their plates higher and higher when they could live for generations without having to work. The average Singaporeans continue to make ends meet and whine quietly. And the people were told to accept it as normal in a meritocracy. The rich will get richer and the poor poorer. Can’t be helped.

Many things were taken for granted. Retaining more and more of the people’s money in the CPF/Medisave is done against their wishes as if the money belongs to the govt becomes a norm. No need to consult the people. Just legislate to make it legal.

Is there really much social capital that the govt can tap on or call upon when the social economic system benefits only a small group of elites at the expense of the majority? The elites and talented are very happy, very, very happy, as they get richer and richer with favourable govt policies. So are the foreigners and the foreign talents. No where can they find a system that is so friendly to them than Singapore. And they would threaten to move some where if govt policies were not favourable to them. We owe them a living. On the other hand the average Singaporeans are finding life getting tougher for themselves and were told that they have themselves to blame.

Does the ruling party really believe that things are getting better for them and not getting worst for the years to come? The Americans are going to face tougher time ahead, like it or not. The only thing they have left is power, power to destroy, to impose sanctions, to coerce, to start wars. As the born again convert of Americanism, everything the Americans do, we follow. Would the blind believer follow the leader to the same end?

Fallen myths and discredited policies

When the concept of super talents in politics was first proclaimed in an edict, the people quietly accepted it as there was nothing to dispute the fact that the country has been very well managed, from the Third World to the First World. Albeit a little flaws here and there, overall the country was in the pink of health and the people were rich and happy.

With this edict out of the way, it was easy to put meat onto this claim. The country needed the best talents to keep it going from prosperity to prosperity. And the best talents needed to be paid the best. The best talents would not want to sacrifice their careers and money making opportunities to serve the country and people if they were to be under paid. It made sense. So they went piling on the plate.

Till sometime last year, this year is not over yet, there were strong indications of more pay hikes for the political leaders. Something like how much you want, $3m, $5m or $10m? No one knows exactly how much the politicians were taking home except the basic pay.

The year 2011 proved to be a turning point of sort, a watershed in many ways. Hot on the heels of the Mas Selamat Escape in 2008, a series of bloops continued to fall on the faces of ministers in charge. Transportation, floods, Youth Olympics, Housing, cost of living, foreign talents and unemployments of local PMETs, all added to become a big pool of grievances.

The ground shift was felt in the May General Election. George Yeo was shaken even before the voters went to cast their votes. Hsien Loong made a quick public apology in his election speech. And the ruling party lost a GRC, an unsinkable contraptions that was not meant to sink, but sank it did, taking with it two ministers and a couple of top talents in the govt. It was only one GRC, but the psychological and emotional impact of this event was like saying more to come.

The appearance of Chen Show Mao, a truly super talent with international standing and a super income to boot, stood for the opposition and willing to accept a paltry $13,000 as an MP allowance. Small relative to what he could get but huge in many ways to what many MPs could get relative to their incomes. He could earn many times more. This act alone shattered the myth that super talents would only be enticed by money to serve the country and people.

Against this backdrop, the ruling party added to their wound with more questionable and doubtful super talents in their teams and hilarious accounts flooded the media. It was like the strike of a thunderbolt. The super talent myth was gone. There was disbelief as well as affirmation that it was all a myth.

With the fallen myth and the discredited policies that affected the lives of citizens adversely, the super salaries of politicians became a big issue. Suddenly it was seen as unjustifiable, grossly overpaid, leading to Hsien Loong calling for a Salary Review Committee to relook into the whole formula of out of this world salary for the ministers. And the first comment from Gerard Ee, who was tasked to do the review, was that the ‘final answer must include a substantial discount on comparable salaries in the private sector.’ A discount or a substantial salary cut is what the people are expecting. No body in his right mind would think that paying the ministers so much is right. And no ministers were in the right mind to stand up to defend their salaries as deserving and appropriate.

The report by the Committee has been submitted to Hsien Loong and all eyes and ears are waiting eagerly to see what the Committee has recommended. The year 2011 marks the end of the super talent concept and salaries in politics.

Temasek cutting losses

KARACHI:
Fed up with mounting losses at its only major investment in Pakistan, the Singapore-based Temasek Holdings is selling off its stake in NIB Bank and is reportedly in talks with the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, sources told The Express Tribune.

Senior management officials at NIB Bank were so tight-lipped about the transaction that, not only did they refuse to discuss the matter, but they even refused to go on the record as having said that they have no comment. Neither the ICBC not Temasek Holdings were available for comment, despite repeated attempts to contact them by The Express Tribune….

Temasek certainly has reason to be unhappy. The Singaporean state-owned institutional investor has ploughed about $540 million into NIB Bank and has thus far seen the bank make close to $400 million in losses. At the close of trading on Wednesday, NIB Bank had a total market capitalisation of approximately $154 million, which values Temasek’s 74% holding (through its subsidiary Bugis Investments) at $114 million….

The above are the starting paragraph of an article titled, ‘Cut your losses: Temasek may be selling off NIB to China Bank’ by Farooq Tirmizi in The Express Tribune.

I could sense a little sarcasm and sneering by the author that Temasek is making such a huge loss. But smug not, for Farooq did not know how big is Temasek’s portfolio and this loss is just a pittance compared to all the big gains it is making elsewhere. I bet in the next annual report Temasek will announced another scintillating result with profits in hundreds of millions, after minus this small loss. For every loss of a few hundred millions, it will be covered by gains of many hundred millions. That is how good the track record of Temasek.

Our reserves are in good hands with the best money can buy managing them.

Hormuz the next flash point

This will be the big one. No peace in the Middle East with the Empire threatening to impose sanctions on Iran to cripple its economy. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour when the West and the US tried to strangle its economic development and curtailing its access to oil and natural resources. Iran is not going to stand still and allow the Americans to hurt its economy. It is threatening to close the Straits of Hormuz if the US applied sanctions against her.

The US has sent its aircraft carrier John C Stennis to the Hormuz. US Chief of Staff, Gen Martin Dempsey has revealed that they are planning to attack Iran once the White House gives the clearance. Israel is opening talking about a preventive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

It is Iran’s fault to force the peace loving Empire and Israel to want to attack it. Blame it on the Iranians. A new coalition of peace loving countries will be gathered to attack the hostile and unfriendly Iran. God bless the peace loving countries. Iran must be destroyed and there will be peace on earth. Iran is only the third country to be attacked by the peaceful countries and the peace loving Empire. One by one they will be attacked by the hordes of hyenas dressed like angels.

Next to be attacked by the peace loving countries and Empire will likely be Pakistan, North Korea and China. All these are aggressive warlike countries planning to attack countries of peace loving people. So the peace loving countries and Empires must strike at all these war mongering countries to maintain peace.

The logic of peace loving countries that daft peace loving people of the world are expected to believe and swear by it. Only peace loving countries will provoke and attack other countries in the name of peace and start wars. With America around, the world can be guaranteed to have wars every day, in the name of peace.

Tough to get retail investors into stock market

Where have all the retail investors gone? Why is it that so few are interested in the stock markets? Despite all the efforts to woo them, systems and designs tweaked for their benefits, the best stock market in the world, the fastest high speed computers to hand millions of trades in a few seconds, where are the traders? Is it that Singaporeans are allergic to trading stocks?

No body knows why, or no one wants to see what is really wrong with the market? Everyone playing the 4 proverbial monkeys, see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing and do nothing. It is sad that there are so many super talents, including foreign talents, but no one knows or wants to know the truth. And yet, everyone in the industry knows what went wrong. What a farce!

And they all appear to be in a state of shock! Why ah? Why Singaporeans did not want to dabble in stocks? Stock market got no pulling power? We do not have this, we do not have that, we need more marketing to lure the suckers to buy snake oils!

Just flash back the memory to 1993, everyone, housewives, students, hawkers in the market, were all in the market, dabbling in stocks. Everyone was talking nothing but stocks. PhDs and highly qualified professionals were giving up their jobs to be in the market. And we have stocks, plenty of stocks from two markets to trade with. No need big foreign funds, no need high speed computers, no algos, and the stock markets were roaring.

The stockbrokers were smiling, the remisiers were hard pressed for time to breathe, the employees were in glee with 12 months bonuses. Property booms because there was so much liquidity and many people became rich. There was buzz, big buzz instead of big bust.

Today, with high speed computers, big foreign funds, plenty of them, algos, big trading volumes, but you could hear a pin drop inside a broking house. The industry is dying. The broking houses will go into the red if things did not turn around. The remisiers will become taxi drivers or housing agents if these are still available. Anything will be better than to become a remisier. The staff in the brokerages will see retrenchment coming.

A lucratic industry turning to a ghost town. 10,000 people will soon lose their jobs. What is happening? No one knows. All the people supposed to know did not know. Can you believe it? Then who should know? God knows.

The proper perspective of history

Many people tend to write about social political developments in Southeast Asia as if these countries were there from time immemorial. The truth is that many of these countries we see today and took for granted were never countries in the normal sense. Many were colonies or disorganized states of a different nature, and some have not even reached statehood in whatever counts.

Singaporeans used to use the familiar dates of 1819 as the founding of Singapore and 1959 when we were given self rule, but still a colony of the British Empire, not an independent country. Then came 1963 and 1965, when we became part of Malaysia and then truly independent as a nation. And there was the blip in 1941 to 1945 when we were conquered and became part of the Japanese Empire.

What was the state of Singapore in 1819? Was it a state, a country, with local govt, with a head of state, or was it a natural territory that was still evolving? There was the Johore Sultanate, with a Temengong and village chiefs. It was then probably called Temasek, or was it called something else? It did or did not have a name until Raffles landed and claimed this land as part of the British Empire and ceded it from the Johore Sultanate? It was so easy then. And he named the island Singapore or Singapura. The people, not citizens, became British subjects, owned by England. I don’t think they called themselves Singaporeans or British or Malayans. There was no Malaya as a single entity or country then.

Sounds quite funny really. There were the sultans who owned parts of the peninsula separately but no country that we know of today. They were regrouped by the British as Federated and non Federated states. There was no Malaya to talk about till 1946. A Federation of Malaya came about only in 1948 as a British colony. It only became an independent state in 1957. As a country, Malaya was even younger than me.

Singapore only gained self ruled in 1959, but still a British colony, not a country. Only in 1963 were we given the honour of calling ourselves Malaysians, citizens of a country. This short lived affair lasted for two years before we gained our independence as Singapore. Then could we call ourselves Singaporeans. Were there Singaporeans before 1965, Singaporeans of an independent country?

Until 1963, the people were a mixed of migrants with different nationalities and at best could called themselves British subjects. They didn’t have a country to pledge loyalty to but to raise the Union Jack and sing ‘God save the King/Queen’. Oh, in the period under Japanese Occupation, they were actually Japanese subjects, Japanese conquered people. And every racial group was on their own to look after themselves. You want schools for your children, go and build yourself. Raise your own fund, the govt of the day did not care who you were or your needs as a people.

No one bothered about integration or welcoming them. No one bothered what was happening to another racial group. Neither would the British be bothered. To them, all the residents were their subjects and each might hold different loyalties to wherever they came from.

And all the changes happened about 50 years ago. Could Singapore go and join the rest of the newly minted countries to claim the islands in South China Sea? We were just migrants, then British, then Japanese, British again, then Malaysian and now Singaporeans.

Now we talk about rights as citizens, equal under the law. We demand to be treated equally. We can get angry if feel discriminated. Before all these today, what rights could we talk about then? Everyone was on their own, to make the best of the day.

What’s next? American or International citizens?

Can Singaporeans be so cruel?

Members of a family who repeatedly tortured a 10-year-old relative over two years and left him permanently disfigured were yesterday sentenced to jail.

The boy - who started living with his grandaunt and her family when he was four, after his mother went to prison - was beaten repeatedly, burned and had his fingers cut. …
The court heard the boy was hit last year on his mouth with a hammer, causing a tooth to fall off and his mouth to bleed.
This was after his grandaunt found out he had finished some fried rice meant for the family.

A few months after the incident, the boy was again abused for allegedly stealing food and playing with the knobs of the gas stove.
His grandaunt asked her three daughters to restrain the boy while she splashed hot cooking oil on his face and body. She also cut his fingers with a pair of scissors, and pressed a hot iron and ladle on him….

The boy now suffers from facial deformities, including a distorted lip margin and a flattened nasal bridge.
The above extracts were taken from the ST.

Singapore a safe haven for money

The developers are worried that the recent property curbs may dampen the property market and lead to a recession. I think they are unduly worried and the fear is misplaced. Singapore is the choice estate for the rich to park their money, good or bad money, as long as they can get them in. The attractiveness of Singapore is a stable and good govt and a system of rule of law. Once the money is in and legally accepted, the money is safe.

With so much money floating around the world and seeking a safe place to hide or park, where else but Singapore. For this reason, more money will keep flowing in as other places are turning bad. Switzerland has lost its attractiveness when its privacy status is being challenged, and with foreign govts being able to pry open private accounts. The Arabs are also starting to realize their stupidity for putting money in Europe and the US when the Americans could seize them at will. And the US dollar is no longer a safe hedge for the future.

The developers should have no fear as foreign money are aplenty and will keep coming in as long as the door is open. In fact they should prepare for a flood of foreign funds into the island. The price of private high end properties should never be an issue as the reason for the money to be here is safety. And there are plenty of these monies wanting to come in.

Stop crying wolf. They could hold their prices or even expect the demand to increase. How much more land can this piece of rock sell to foreigners? And the prices are guaranteed to go up and up. The best hedge against inflation, and very safe.

Super high speed train for paradise

The ageing SMRT train system is looking like a goner. Instead of high speed it has to operate on slower speed. And instead of a smooth free ride, getting train disruptions and delays are going to be a daily affair. So what else needs to be done to improve the system of mass rapid transportation? I am including the words ‘mass’ and ‘rapid’ in case people think it is meant to be otherwise.

First step, send the international head hunter agencies to go on a world wide hunt for a true blue foreign talent to helm the organization. Local talents definitely won’t do, good at scoring As only in examinations. Regional talents, well, proven still not good enough.

Once such a true blue foreign talent comes on board, even 30 years is ok, tell him we want the best MRT and let him go to work. Soon we will have the world’s best super high speed train running from Tuas to Changi, only these two stops. At 500kph, it would take only 5 min for the journey. There is no possibility of more stops if the train is to hit the top speed. It would be a super fast journey, no jams, like taking a river bus from Clark Quay to Marina Barrage.

When the system is in place, commuters can take the snail train to Tuas or Changi to get to their destinations super fast. This will definitely help alleviate the jams in the city as commuters will all be travelling outwards to Tuas and Changi.

Why would they want to go to Tuas and Changi is not the problem as long as the train is super fast. And we have another claim to make, the fastest public transport system in the world. Never mind if it is empty. The train computer can generate images on the windows to give the impression that the trains are full, full of activities.

Never mind if it costs billions of dollars. It is other people’s money. And can get reporters to write about how good the super high speed train is, all the good stuff. It is all about the future, proactive, planning ahead for higher demands, looks very good too.

If, after blowing the trumpet for a while and the truth is that the super high speed train is not doing what it should be, well, it was a good wet dream. The foreign talent can say good bye and collect his fat severance pay to live forever, happily ever after. As for the white elephant, still can show the world we have the fastest super high speed train running, all paid for by the people.

Pakistan another powder keg

Pakistan is poised for a big explosion, a military coup. The Army Chief came out to deny that a coup was in the making. What is worrisome is the discovery of a note from a Pakistani leader asking the US to intervene to prevent a coup from happening. What a recipe for disaster! Now, who sent that note out for help? Or was there really a Pakistani leader that sent out such a note inviting a foreign power to move in to his country? Is that a sign that a certain foreign power are planning to meddle with Pakistan’s internal affair?

There were also talks of coup in China and in North Korea. Where would the support for such coups to come from? There have been frequent rumours in the media that these leaders are weak and the dissident groups are waiting to oust them out, and a coup is the perfect weapon.

No coup has happened in China or in North Korea since the end of WW2. Coups happened quite frequently in Arab land, in the Philippines, in South Korea, in South Vietnam, in Thailand, in Indonesia, but not even in North Vietnam. They are considered unstable govts but never had coups. Only stable countries have had coups.

Pakistan got to be very careful as the coup makers are working overtime for a coup, maybe with outside help.

The illegal casinos

Casinos started in a small way, and all illegal. They gambled with match sticks, cards, dice, beans, and some even have their manual roulette tables. Things changed when the sophisticated mafias started to engage engineers and technology experts to create new and more interesting games. For their huge investments to be profitable, they must find willing casino operators to use their machines.

They went to entice the casino operators with high turnovers, high gambling activities and with a sure win formula. They will pay the casino operators a fee and the casino operators will have to accommodate them with how the rules of the games should be played. Some casino operators even bent the rules for the big mafia boys.

And the mafias brought in their expensive and highly computerized machines into the casinos. They explained that the machines would do all the works, and all kinds of gamblers can play the machines. The operators only need to provide coins, $1, 50c, 20c, 10c, 5c and even 1c. The smaller bets were good, would attract many more small gamblers. And the operators obliged without question asked. The operators could just go to sleep and collect their dues.

As long as the mafias kept paying the operators their dues, the operators did not care and did not want to know what the mafias were doing. The machines were rigged to maximize profits. The odds in favour of the mafia machines could be as high as 90% or 99%. And they kept cleaning up the gamblers, big or small. They happily scooped up everything quietly. The operators also happily collected their fees and shared their big dividends among themselves.

The casinos were still illegal, of course. No responsible govt was going to let such casinos to operate freely to rip off the innocent and ignorant gamblers. But the mafias had big plans. It all started in America. They wanted to operate casinos legally and started to buy up the law makers. The law makers might be greedy, the govt could made do with more revenue. But there must be laws, responsibilities, to manage the mafias and prevent them from sending every gambler to the cleaners.

Other than a hefty gambling tax, the responsible govt imposed many conditions and rules for the casinos to operate legally and within limits. The odds must be controlled, no more 90% or 99% wins. The gamblers must have a fair chance of making some wins as well. Basically the mafias were not allowed to cheat the small gamblers in an unfair game. They might be allowed to bring in their sophisticated machines, but the responsible govt would want to know how the machines work and how to monitor them to prevent excesses and rampant cheating.

The govt was also smart enough to set up a regulatory body to monitor, supervise and regulate the casinos and the mafias and their machines. Of course the casino operators would want to regulate themselves. But no stupid govt would allow that to happen. They could not let the operators regulate themselves and work hand in glove with the mafias and their machines to cheat the gamblers. To allow the casino operators to regulate themselves was like asking the fox to guard the hen house. To close an eye and not wanting to know how the machines work and how much advantage they had to manipulate their winnings was criminal. It was a dereliction of responsibility to the innocent and ignorant gamblers who were citizens to be protected by the govt.

The responsible govt won. They allowed the casinos to operate under strict regulations, controlled and supervision. The odds in their machines were controlled and dictated by the govt. And everything was in order, with checks and balance and a fair and equitable system for both the casino operators, the mafias and the gamblers. Only such a system is sustainable.

Only an irresponsible govt would allow casinos to operate freely and in cahoot with the mafias, and to allow the mafias a free hand to do whatever they want, even rigging their high speed computerized machines to cheat the gamblers. No where in the world would this be allowed to happen. No where. Unless the govt is also in cahoot with the casino operators and the mafias.

Seng Han Thong’s affair continues

This episode does not seem to want to fade away. And the developments make the issue more confusing with some red faces in some quarters. Luckily SMRT was safe as there were records to prove what the PR executive said.

Seng Han Thong had apologized and nobody is demanding an explanation, which means apologies accepted but no need to explain further. This should have been the closure. Then Shanmugam came out to explain why Seng Han Thong is not a racist. This was followed by Hri Kumar saying more or less the same and that some blog sites have misquoted him or did not report the case fairly.

What then is the position of Halimah Yacob who was obviously not happy with the statement in the beginning? So, after all the explanations, hopefully she is now happy that it was all a wild goose chase and there was nothing to it. And there is a happy closure. All is a big misunderstanding due to poor command of English and misquoting.

Let’s move on.

Ah Long rules the land

Reading from the media and the unceasing pressure put on residents by Ah Longs and his guerilla painters and fire starters, it is obvious that Ah Longs have won the war. They are getting more outrageous and destructive in their attacks on innocent flat dwellers. Their coercive methods include taunting and terrorizing the whole neighbourhood and residents are living in fear.

Shall I congratulate the Ah Longs for their nasty and lawless acts? Why are the Ah Longs so indefeatable, so creative and deceptive in their harassment of residents? They seem to be more superior in their tactics and no one is able to terminate them.

One possible option is for residents to pay for hire guns to go after them and take them down like the wild wild west when the law was incapable of dealing with the hoodlums. It would provide jobs for the jobless as bounty hunters.

Is it really so difficult to remove these terrorists?

An act of war

Many people still believe that the sinking of the Choenan was committed by the North Koreans, except the South Koreans. I am not preview to the full facts, and so are many people. But from afar, one can still make some logical assessments based on the facts available and the actions of the parties concerned. It may not be right but at least it must be logical and not just some blind belief based on the most corrupted source of information, the media that have a private agenda for printing the story. Then there are media that were told to print, some paid to print and some simply print, believing that it was innocent facts.

The South Koreans are begging for war with the North Koreans, conducting regular and provocative war games with North Korea’s arch enemy the US. The US are most eager to precipitate a war in the Korean Peninsula with everything to gain, gaining a bigger foothold at China’s doorstep with permission to station more troops and bases, more control over the South Koreans who would be fully be dependent and beholden to them, the opportunity to sell more weapons to South Korea and Japan, and other countries and making more money and influence. And the opportunity to start a war outside of the US with the Asians killing themselves, and next to China, would be a great bonus.

The South Koreans have a reason to want to go to war. The US have all the reasons to want a war with the North. All they need is a good reason for them to attack the North. The Choenan was the best reason ever presented to them. It was an act of war. No buts, a serious enough incident, the sinking of a naval ship with many seamen dead.

Then one may ask, what was holding back the two protagonists who are bent on a war with the North and given this great opportunity, refrained from doing so? I am not going to discuss why the North Koreans were so stupid, knowing that this was what the South and the Americans were waiting for. The only reason was that they were mad. And many believe this too.

Why would the South Koreans hold back? And why weren’t they be pushed by the US who were so trigger happy to do so? I bet the US was pushing them real hard to start that war. The South Koreans chickened out at the face of war? Obviously not. The last thing they wanted to do was to plunge into a war for the wrong and stupid reason, a false flag incident.

Some may think the two Koreans are mad, but they are definitely not stupid. They might be led by the nose by the Americans, but they would not be fixed by some party or parties to go to war. They would have thoroughly examined the wreckage for the conclusive evidence that it was a hostile act by the North. And if it was, they have no reason not to go to war. It was South Korean lives killed, property destroyed and national pride at stake, the credibility of the govt.

Why didn’t they go to war if they have the proof? Why were they able to ward off the pressure from the Americans who wanted them to attack the North? The North Koreans committed the first act of war! The world opinion and the UN would be on their side. The South Koreans would die to defend their country when attacked and their own people killed.

What is happening? No guts to go to war? Or they did found some conclusive evidence, ….that it was not the North Koreans who sank their ship and killed their sailors?

You may have your own reasons to still want to believe the North sank the Choenan. Good for you.

PS. Please excuse me for belabouring this issue. Forget about the Koreans. The moral of my posting is to remind people not to take the information from the media, particularly politically sensitive information for granted. Think a little and try to see through the issue. You may see something, you may not. If thinks are too hazy, don't jump to conclusion and allowed the scheming parties to fix your thinking. The joke is on you.

US dollar going to the sewage

Saddam had to go when he schemed to replace the US dollar for trading oil. This was a dangerous move that would jeopardize the already weak dollar. When countries have no need to use the dollar to buy/sell oil, the demand for US dollar is going to go down the sewage.

This was the logical reason put forth by many economists that explained why the hoax of WMD was shafted down the dead brains of the heads of Allied governments who then parroted the whole hoax to their people as truth, and joined the gang of the ‘Willing Coalition to kill Saddam and Iraqis’.

The Chinese and the Japanese have just signed an agreement to facilitate trade between the world’s number 2 and number 3 economies using Yuan and Yen, by passing the need to buy US dollars. The implications of this development on the US dollar are severe.

China is also working with the Asean states to promote the use of Yuan. And why not when the US dollar is slipping into the drain? Commercial transactions using US dollars are so treacherous that seemingly profitable deals may end up a big loss with the currency depreciating daily. It is a matter of time before the US dollars be dumped and turned into banana currency.

And hither will the TPP go when the Yuan starts to replace the US dollar as a reliable currency for trade? There is no need for war for the US economy to collapse. When the dollar becomes a useless piece of paper that no one wants, that will be the end of the Empire. It may come much sooner than expected.

Ominous signs

The MRT trains have been running fairly smoothly for more than 20 years. Recently so many incidents and faults occurred in a span of a few weeks. And despite doing a complete check, faults are popping up frequently like the popping of champagne bottles. The regular disruption is now becoming the new normal and commuters better live with it, just like ponding in Orchard Road.

Should the whole train system be removed as it seems that it has reached the end of its usable life? Or it is just an ominous sign of bigger things to come, when seemingly things in good order just keep breaking down?

The shame of 2011

The death of Kim Jong Il has brought out some of the ugliest traits in some human beans across the world. In Taiwan, a news reader had the rude audacity to imitate the sorrows and grief in the way the North Korean news reader broadcast his death. And the Taiwanese thought it was fun. And some thought it was justifiable to win viewerships by such a poor taste act of disgraceful conduct.

The biggest disgraceful act happened at the UN when a 1 minute silence was proposed for the death of Kim, a national leader. The shameful boycott of this 1 minute observance was led by the US and its shameful allies, the European countries, Japan and South Korea. It was only a gesture of respect and condolence to Kim Jong Il, the leader of a nation. They really stooped really low in human decency to do such a darn thing.

Kim Jong Il was not Hitler nor was he a George Bush or Tony Blair whose hands were dripping with the bloods of Iraqis. How would the US and the European nations, supposedly civilised nations, behave in such a creepy and disgraceful way?

It was definitely uncalled for, and a very mean thing to do so.