Archives: Articles

 

Though, for most, the London Inter-Bank Offer Rate (Libor) interest rate fixing scandal appears to be distant and far too complex to understand, its potential consequences may be as economically devastating as a world war.

The Libor is used to set payments on $800 trillion worth of financial instruments. It sets the prices that people and corporations pay for loans and receive for savings. Given that the fraud impacted $10 trillion in consumer loans, the Libor scandal will likely leave a long list of previous financial scandals that contributed to the Great Recession look like child’s play.

It also pulls back the curtain on the mechanisms behind the world economy, its anti-social priorities, its willingness to gamble away the future of billions of people, and the government’s collusion in these operations. The Libor scandal reveals that the “invisible hand” Adam Smith spoke of in explaining how a capitalist economy regulates itself has been transformed into the trained hand of a swindler.

The Libor and Its Problems

The Libor sets interest rates that banks charge one another to borrow on a daily basis. Sixteen (now eighteen) large banks submit their assessment of what they anticipate credit would cost them. The four lowest and four highest calculations are thrown out, and the interest rate is determined as the middle figure among the remaining assessments.

While the method that the banks use to determine the figure they report to Libor is largely arbitrary, it is, nevertheless, assumed that they won’t take advantage of the process to game the system. This is a rather remarkable leap of faith since there are billions of dollars of profit if the banks can find a clever way to sidestep the rules. In contrast to popular knowledge, the Libor expects honor among thieves.

Clearly, this is naive in the extreme. It has recently been revealed that for years the banks worked with one another to submit interest rates to the Libor lower than their actual borrowing costs, thereby covering up the shaky condition they were in. Of even greater consequence, it is now acknowledged that the banks were rigging the Libor since 2005 to make the most profit from their bets on derivatives, and regulators knew it was happening.

So far, London-based Barclays Bank has been fined $455 million by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the U.S. Department of Justice and the UK Financial Services Authority. This is likely a fraction of the money they made from their fraud. Its chief executive, Bob Diamond, was forced to resign, no doubt, with a handsome severance package even if he does have to give up some on the advice of the bank’s board.

Barclays Bank is just the tip of the iceberg. In several countries, 20 big banks are under investigation, including such behemoths as Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, RBS and UBS.

Current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Chairman Ben Bernanke have had to defend the Fed’s response when it first became aware of the fraud in 2008. While Geithner said he was “aggressive” in expressing his concerns, this on-going scandal did not come to light until four years later.

Why the Regulators Failed to Regulate

The explanation for this contradiction is that the fraud the banks were committing was producing outcomes in line with the Federal Reserves own policies, though they were concerned about how flagrantly it was being done. In “The Meaning of Libor-gate” Paul Craig Roberts explains:

It is the prospect of ever-lower interest rates that causes investors to purchase bonds that do not pay a real rate of interest. Bond purchasers make up for the negative interest rate by the rise in price in the bonds caused by the next round of low interest rates. As the Federal Reserve and the banks drive down the interest rate, the issued bonds rise in value, and their purchasers enjoy capital gains.

As the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England are themselves fixing interest rates at historic lows in order to mask the insolvency of their respective banking systems, they naturally do not object that the banks themselves contribute to the success of this policy by fixing the Libor rate and by selling massive amounts of interest rate swaps, a way of shorting interest rates and driving them down or preventing them from rising.

The lower Libor is, the higher is the price or evaluations of floating-rate debt instruments, such as CDOs [Collateralized Debt Obligation], and thus the stronger the banks’ balance sheets appear.

Does this mean that the U.S. and UK financial systems can only be kept afloat by fraud that harms purchasers of interest rate swaps, which include municipalities advised by sellers of interest rate swaps, and those with savings accounts?

The answer is yes, but the Libor scandal is only a small part of the interest rate rigging scandal. The Federal Reserve itself has been rigging interest rates. How else could debt issued in profusion be bearing negative interest rates?

Later in the article Roberts succinctly points out:

Imagine the Federal reserve called before Congress or the Department of Justice to answer why it did not report on the fraud perpetrated by private banks, fraud that was supporting the Federal Reserve’s own rigging of interest rates (and the same in the UK.)

The Federal Reserve will reply: “So, you want us to let interest rates go up? Are you prepared to come up with the money to bail out the FDIC-insured depositors of JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, etc.? Are you prepared for U.S. Treasury prices to collapse, wiping out bond funds and the remaining wealth in the U.S. and driving up interest rates, making the interest rate on new federal debt necessary to finance the huge budget deficits impossible to pay, and finishing off what is left of the real estate market? Are you prepared to take responsibility, you who deregulated the financial system, for this economic Armageddon?

Obviously, the politicians will say NO and continue with the fraud. The harm to people from a collapse far exceeds the harm in lost interest from fixing the low interest rates in order to forestall collapse. The Federal Reserve will say that we are doing our best to create profits for the banks that will permit us eventually to unwind the fraud and return to normal. Congress will see no better alternative to this.

In short, the Federal Reserve and other political structures have been left to act as subordinate partners in the big banks’ schemes — the tail is wagging the dog.

The Magnitude of the Problem

The level of gambling that is being tolerated without a care by the wheeler and dealers of Wall Street is almost beyond comprehension. For instance, it has been estimated that the world’s annual gross domestic product is valued between $50 trillion and $60 trillion. This is peanuts compared to the exposure of the worlds financial markets to such speculation tools as derivatives. Paul Wilmott has estimated the total amount of derivatives being played in the markets is $1.2 quad-trillion. That is 20 times the amount of money currently in the global economy. As noted earlier, the amount of financial instruments pegged to the Libor alone is $800 trillion.

Despite the obscuring complexity and mathematical models used to justify such inflated figures, the fact of the matter is that they are still inevitably tied to the real economy of production and consumption. The farther they stretch into the stratosphere from this ground level, the more violently they snap back to earth with catastrophic consequences for working people. The Libor scandal combined with the government sanctioned gambling help to create greater economic crises around the bend.

There is no accountability for this mad lust for short-term, even if illusionary, profit at the expense of the economy’s long-term health. Those responsible are sheltered from the devastation they wreak with the hand out line of “too big to fail” and workers’ tax dollars.

This should be no surprise because these crooks own both the Republican and Democratic parties. What better evidence for this than, after being bailed out, the banksters are again continuing their speculative orgy and scandals while workers continue to suffer from the effects of the Great Depression. If the U.S.’s political parties had the least amount of independence from the financial elite, they would have jailed those responsible for the economic crisis, confiscated their funds, sharply raised taxes on the rich, and used this increased revenue for job creation, fully funded education, Medicare for all, and rebuilding our decaying infrastructure.

In addition to denying workers of revenue for these fundamental needs, those behind the Libor scandal have also used their interest rigging to rob already cash strapped municipalities and other local governments. While there are many examples of this that are dealt with in Pam Marten’s “Wall Street’s

Biggest Heist Yet? How the High Wizards of Finance Gutted Our Schools and Cities,” one is enough to get the picture of how it worked:

According to the June 30, 2011 auditor’s report for the City of Oakland, California, the city entered into a swap with Goldman Sachs Mitsui Marine Derivatives Products in connection with $187.5 million of muni bonds for Oakland Joint Powers Financing Authority. Under the swap terms, the city would pay Goldman a fixed rate of 5.6775 percent through 2021 and receive a variable rate based on the Bond Market Association index (that was the predecessor name to the SIFMA index). In 2003, the variable rate was changed from being indexed to the Bond Market Association index to being indexed at 65 percent of the one-month Libor rate.

The city is still paying the high fixed rate but it’s receiving a miniscule rate of less than one percent. According to local officials, the city has paid Goldman roughly $32 million more than it has received and could be out another $20 million if it has to hold the swap until 2021. A group called the Oakland Coalition to Stop Goldman Sachs succeeded in getting the City Council to vote on July 3 of this year to stop doing business with Goldman Sachs if it doesn’t allow Oakland to terminate the swap without penalty. It called the vote “a huge victory for both the city of Oakland and for the people throughout the world living under the boot of interest rate swaps.”

Thanks to grass roots pressure, Oakland was fortunate enough to get out of paying the termination fees on the abusive interest rates swaps. This is not normally how it works. According to a March 2010 Service Employees International Union (SEIU) report, from 2006 -2008 the banks have been paid $28 billion in termination fees so state and local governments could get out of similar arrangements. Clearly the requirement to pay such termination fees to get out of abusive interest rate swaps should be voided on a federal level.

The Way Forward

In addition, many, in response to the Libor scandal have called for the re-instatement of the Glass-Steagall Act, which was repealed under President Clinton. This Act did help to prevent some of the worst current excesses. However, the situation with fraud has reached such monstrous proportions today that such a measure seems to be entirely inadequate. The shattered system.

 

By Mark Vorpahl

07 August, 2012

Countercurrents.org

 

 

Beirut: According to the Obama Presidential campaign issues staff, temporarily operating out of the Democratic National Committee HQ at 430 South Capitol Street, SE in Washington DC, Team Obama scored an electoral coup again rival Mitt Romney this week by moving fast to pull the rug from Romney’s hoped for advantage from his obsequious Israel trip. That visit, which ranks among the all-time most groveling led to even Zionist media outlets including the New York Times and Washington Post dissing Mitt’s trip as “un-presidential.”

Obama operative James Carville boasted this week that “Romney & Co. ain’t ready for no major league Presidential campaigning and we’re gonna keep whupping em real bad til November 6th.”

“Slick Jimmy” as Mr. Carville is fondly known back home in Big Easy bars along Bourbon Street as well as some of his associates are explaining why:

The Republican National Committee, now essentially part of the Romney campaign even though it is supposed to stay neutral until the party chooses its nominees at the August 27-30 Tampa, Florida Republican Convention had worked for over a month with AIPAC and Florida Republican Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen to help deliver pro-Israel votes and cash to Romney.

The plan was to cap off Romney’s Israel trip with another round of sanctions against Iran which he would promote at a major photo op while bashing Syria in the process. This was to be achieved via yet another law, this time H. R. 1905 named by AIPAC as The Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act of 2012.

It was last December the Iran Threat Reduction Act draft law on the House side heaped more sanctions on Iran. The problem was that the White House was then tepid and US Senate Foreign Relation Committee Chair, John Kerry (D-Mass) did not cooperate as he continues to work to launch a diplomatic initiative with Tehran on behalf of Obama.

The current AIPAC version has emerged from Israel lobby dominated House-Senate negotiations and it includes the most flagrant layers of sanctions ever enacted to undermine the economy of any country. Congressman Ron Paul rose to speak in strong opposition to H.R. 1905 on 8/1/12 labeling it a “declaration of war against Iran even though Iran has no nuclear weapons program”. And so it is.

H.R. 1905 sponsor and House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) was almost giddy as she promised to deliver Florida to Romney and gushed: “This bipartisan, bicameral Iran sanctions legislation strengthens current U.S. law by leaps and bounds and it updates and expands U.S. sanctions, and counters Iran’s efforts to evade them. The bill sends a clear message to the Iranian

mullahs that the U.S. is committed, through the use of sanctions, to preventing Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold.” She reminded the media that Romney told Israeli officials in Jerusalem that the Obama administration was not doing enough to stop Iran’s nuclear program and that: “Essentially president Obama is doing nothing!”

H.R. 1905 is a catch all frenzied election year gimmick that lumps together legislative initiatives of all sorts in order to corral votes for Romney immediately after his Israel trip which left little doubt that Israeli leaders believe that Israel will have less leverage to squeeze the US to take on yet another big military action if Obama is re-elected than if Romney wins.

H.R. 1905:

• Puts virtually all of Iran’s energy, financial, and transportation sectors under U.S. sanction. Companies conducting business with Iran in these sectors face losing access to U.S. markets;

• Applies harsh sanctions designed to prevent Iran from repatriating any proceeds from its oil sales, thus depriving Iran of 80 percent of its hard currency earnings and half of the funds to support its national budget for education, health, food subsidies and other needed public purposes;

• Places more tough sanctions on the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), the National Iranian Tanker Company (NITC) and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC);

• Targets Iran’s use of barter transactions to bypass sanctions, the provision of insurance to Iran’s energy sector, and the provision of specialized financial messaging services to the Central Bank of Iran;

In its letter to Congressmen, designed to aid Mitt Romney, AIPAC writes: “America and our allies must unite in a tough response to Iran’s belligerent approach. We must continue to send a strong message to Tehran that it will face unremitting pressure until it complies with its international obligations and end its nuclear weapons quest. We strongly support The Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act (H.R. 1905) and urge you to vote YES.”

The letter is signed by the following AIPAC supporters of Romney: Howard Kohr, Executive Director, Marvin Feuer, Director, Policy & Government Affairs, and Brad Gordon, Director of Special Campaigns.

Learning what the Israeli lobby was attempting from its contacts at AIPAC, Obama campaign strategists moved fast and decided to have their candidate use his constitutional powers and undercut the Romney strategists toute de suite. Obama did and angered AIPAC and Republican leaders in Congress before the lopsided House vote on 7/12/12 when the White House quickly invited supporters of Israel to a media event at which the President issued an Executive Order which he explained included “ Two major actions to further isolate and penalize Iran for its refusal to live up to its international obligations regarding its nuclear program and to hold accountable financial institutions that knowingly provide financial services to Iranian banks.”

As a result of pre-empting AIPAC’s H.R. 1905, and despite ‘feel good’ further action by Congress on H.R. 1905, the Obama campaign says they gutted the AIPAC/Republican/Romney scheme while once more assuring Israel and its lobby of Obama’s willingness to use all his Constitutional powers on Israel’s behalf and to target its “existential threat” Iran.

According to two congressional insiders, the quick witted maneuver by the Obama campaign is a key reason their candidate currently leads in the swing states of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania while reminding the media that no presidential candidate since 1960 has won the White House without carrying two of these three states.

Meanwhile, Romney operatives are seeking alternative ways to convince Israel to maintain its support and cash for his campaign during the next nine weeks of what “Slick Jimmy” is calling, “American Democracy at work.”

By Franklin Lamb

07 August, 2012

Countercurrents.org

Franklin P. Lamb is Director, Americans Concerned for Middle East Peace, Wash.DC-Beirut and Board Member, The Sabra Shatila Foundation and the Palestine Civil Rights Campaign, Beirut-Washington DC Email: fplamb@gmail.com

 

In continuation of the US-led illegal sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran, Congress passed on Wednesday night a bill, which imposes more embargoes on the country including those on the parent companies of foreign subsidiaries violating sanctions as well adding penalties for those that help Iran’s petroleum, petrochemical, insurance, shipping and financial sectors.

Immediately, US Congressman Ron Paul expressed his vociferous opposition to the new sanctions and vilified them as “an act of war”, saying that the US is marching into war with Iran.

Paul said, “There is no evidence that Iran has ever enriched uranium above 20 percent.” He also said the IAEA and CIA have determined that the Iran is not on the verge of building a nuclear weapon. “What we continue to be doing is obsess with Iran and the idea that Iran is a threat to our national security.”

The idea was somehow shared by senior Iranian cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati who on Friday called on people and authorities to stand united against the “economic war” waged on the Islamic Republic by foreign forces.

Sharing this line of thinking, Governor of the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) Mahmoud Bahmani has said that CBI considers the sanctions as a declaration of war and that a special team has been set up to deal with them dynamically. He said the economic sanctions are meant to sabotage national economy and that the CBI will thwart them rapidly and effectively.

It is transpiring gradually that a country does not need to wage a military war against another nation in an effort to paralyze it and that imposing brutal sanctions or tightening them can be well tantamount to an act of war.

The US war against Iran has already started. In fact, the US started its war long ago by imposing sanctions on the country when it was slowly recovering from the human and financial losses (roughly USD 600 billion) the Iraqi war had inflicted on the country, a war so shamelessly, vehemently and financially supported by Washington.

Later, reports revealed that the US government funneled through an Atlanta branch of Italy’s largest bank, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro over USD 4 billion to Iraq from 1985 to 1989. The money, which was supplied to the regime of the despotic Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein, was used to buy military technology and arms. The CIA was reportedly privy to this gargantuan sum of money which was paid in the name of loan but concealed it from Congress. Part of the report carried by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) reads: “The House Banking Committee is conducting an investigation into over $4 billion in unreported loans the former employees of the Atlanta branch of Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL)

provided to the government of Iraq between 1985 and 1990. The Committee’s investigation has uncovered the fact that Henry Kissinger was on the International Advisory Board of BNL during that same time period and that BNL was a client of Kissinger Associates.”

The sanctions against Iran practically started under the Reagan administration in 1983 when the US government accused Iran of sponsoring terrorism and opposed international loans to the country. The US imposed embargos against Iranian imports and also the sale of ‘dual use’ items.

The US narrative continued in 1995 when Washington absurdly accused Iran of pursuing weapons of mass destruction, a fairy tale which was later exploited by the Bush administration to attack Iraq in 2003 and that which was used by Washington to lend a cloak of legitimacy to its military adventurism. At any rate, US President Bill Clinton intensified sanctions against the country, banning any American involvement with the Iranian petroleum industry. In 1997, he placed a ban on US investment in Iran. To make matters worse, Clinton even goaded other countries into following suit. In view of the fact that the Iraq-imposed war on Iran (1980-1988) had inflicted inconceivable human and material losses on Iran and that the country had just started to convalesce from the lashes of the Iraqi invasion, it was more like a miracle that Iran had managed to weather this entire US-manufactured calamity for the Iranian nation.

Washington has long been making unflagging efforts to push Iran to the farthest margins of political and economic isolation even when Iran was not working on its nuclear energy program. The West has failed to understand that Iran is not a country solely dependent on oil resources. Rather, it has at its disposal myriad natural resources to rely on. Ergo, blocking Iran’s oil flow to other countries will not be so damaging to the country as the West imagines. On the contrary, such an act will surely prove irreversibly damaging to world economy; the oil prices will rocket up beyond control; the global economic security will be caught up in an unmanageable whirlpool and the rest of the world including the US and Europe will have to suffer immensely for this strategic folly.

The sanctions are nothing new and the western media flowery phrases like ‘Iran feels the pain of sanctions’, ‘The sting of sanctions begins’, ‘Iran feels the pinch of US-led sanctions’ are only meant to cater for the public taste of western audience who are now prone to see Iran through the purblind eyes of the corrupt western powers-that-be which have long entertained sinister plots for the Iranian nation.

To a critical mind, the sanctions are to be seen as a metaphorical declaration of war on Iran albeit the US and its allies will be the ones who will suffer most.

 

By Dr. Ismail Salami

07 August, 2012

Countercurrents.org

 

Dr. Ismail Salami is an Iranian writer, Middle East expert, Iranologist and lexicographer. He writes extensively on the US and Middle East issues and his articles have been translated into a number of languages.

 

The Great Drought of 2012 has yet to come to an end, but we already know that its consequences will be severe. With more than one-half of America’s counties designated as drought disaster areas, the 2012 harvest of corn, soybeans, and other food staples is guaranteed to fall far short of predictions. This, in turn, will boost food prices domestically and abroad, causing increased misery for farmers and low-income Americans and far greater hardship for poor people in countries that rely on imported U.S. grains.

This, however, is just the beginning of the likely consequences: if history is any guide, rising food prices of this sort will also lead to widespread social unrest and violent conflict.

Food — affordable food — is essential to human survival and well-being. Take that away, and people become anxious, desperate, and angry. In the United States, food represents only about 13% of the average household budget, a relatively small share, so a boost in food prices in 2013 will probably not prove overly taxing for most middle- and upper-income families. It could, however, produce considerable hardship for poor and unemployed Americans with limited resources. “You are talking about a real bite out of family budgets,” commented Ernie Gross, an agricultural economist at Omaha’s Creighton University. This could add to the discontent already evident in depressed and high-unemployment areas, perhaps prompting an intensified backlash against incumbent politicians and other forms of dissent and unrest.

It is in the international arena, however, that the Great Drought is likely to have its most devastating effects. Because so many nations depend on grain imports from the U.S. to supplement their own harvests, and because intense drought and floods are damaging crops elsewhere as well, food supplies are expected to shrink and prices to rise across the planet. “What happens to the U.S. supply has immense impact around the world,” says Robert Thompson, a food expert at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. As the crops most affected by the drought, corn and soybeans, disappear from world markets, he noted, the price of all grains, including wheat, is likely to soar, causing immense hardship to those who already have trouble affording enough food to feed their families.

The Hunger Games, 2007-2011

What happens next is, of course, impossible to predict, but if the recent past is any guide, it could turn ugly. In 2007-2008, when rice, corn, and wheat experienced prices hikes of 100% or more, sharply higher prices — especially for bread — sparked “food riots” in more than two dozen countries, including Bangladesh, Cameroon, Egypt, Haiti, Indonesia, Senegal, and Yemen. In Haiti, the rioting became so

violent and public confidence in the government’s ability to address the problem dropped so precipitously that the Haitian Senate voted to oust the country’s prime minister, Jacques-Édouard Alexis. In other countries, angry protestors clashed with army and police forces, leaving scores dead.

Those price increases of 2007-2008 were largely attributed to the soaring cost of oil, which made food production more expensive. (Oil’s use is widespread in farming operations, irrigation, food delivery, and pesticide manufacture.) At the same time, increasing amounts of cropland worldwide were being diverted from food crops to the cultivation of plants used in making biofuels.

The next price spike in 2010-11 was, however, closely associated with climate change. An intense drought gripped much of eastern Russia during the summer of 2010, reducing the wheat harvest in that breadbasket region by one-fifth and prompting Moscow to ban all wheat exports. Drought also hurt China’s grain harvest, while intense flooding destroyed much of Australia’s wheat crop. Together with other extreme-weather-related effects, these disasters sent wheat prices soaring by more than 50% and the price of most food staples by 32%.

Once again, a surge in food prices resulted in widespread social unrest, this time concentrated in North Africa and the Middle East. The earliest protests arose over the cost of staples in Algeria and then Tunisia, where — no coincidence — the precipitating event was a young food vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, setting himself on fire to protest government harassment. Anger over rising food and fuel prices combined with long-simmering resentments about government repression and corruption sparked what became known as the Arab Spring. The rising cost of basic staples, especially a loaf of bread, was also a cause of unrest in Egypt, Jordan, and Sudan. Other factors, notably anger at entrenched autocratic regimes, may have proved more powerful in those places, but as the author of Tropic of Chaos, Christian Parenti, wrote, “The initial trouble was traceable, at least in part, to the price of that loaf of bread.”

As for the current drought, analysts are already warning of instability in Africa, where corn is a major staple, and of increased popular unrest in China, where food prices are expected to rise at a time of growing hardship for that country’s vast pool of low-income, migratory workers and poor peasants. Higher food prices in the U.S. and China could also lead to reduced consumer spending on other goods, further contributing to the slowdown in the global economy and producing yet more worldwide misery, with unpredictable social consequences.

The Hunger Games, 2012-??

If this was just one bad harvest, occurring in only one country, the world would undoubtedly absorb the ensuing hardship and expect to bounce back in the years to come. Unfortunately, it’s becoming evident that the Great Drought of 2012 is not a one-off event in a single heartland nation, but rather an inevitable consequence of global warming which is only going to intensify. As a result, we can expect not just more bad years of extreme heat, but worse years, hotter and more often, and not just in the United States, but globally for the indefinite future.

Until recently, most scientists were reluctant to blame particular storms or droughts on global warming. Now, however, a growing number of scientists believe that such links can be demonstrated in certain cases. In one recent study focused on extreme weather events in 2011, for instance, climate specialists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Great Britain’s National Weather Service concluded that human-induced climate change has made intense heat waves of the kind experienced in Texas in 2011 more likely than ever before. Published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, it reported that global warming had ensured that the incidence of that Texas heat wave was 20 times more likely than it would have been in 1960; similarly, abnormally warm temperatures like those experienced in Britain last November were said to be 62 times as likely because of global warming.

It is still too early to apply the methodology used by these scientists to calculating the effect of global warming on the heat waves of 2012, which are proving to be far more severe, but we can assume the level of correlation will be high. And what can we expect in the future, as the warming gains momentum?

When we think about climate change (if we think about it at all), we envision rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, freakish storms, hellish wildfires, and rising sea levels. Among other things, this will result in damaged infrastructure and diminished food supplies. These are, of course, manifestations of warming in the physical world, not the social world we all inhabit and rely on for so many aspects of our daily well-being and survival. The purely physical effects of climate change will, no doubt, prove catastrophic. But the social effects including, somewhere down the line, food riots, mass starvation, state collapse, mass migrations, and conflicts of every sort, up to and including full-scale war, could prove even more disruptive and deadly.

In her immensely successful young-adult novel The Hunger Games (and the movie that followed), Suzanne Collins riveted millions with a portrait of a dystopian, resource-scarce, post-apocalyptic future where once-rebellious “districts” in an impoverished North America must supply two teenagers each year for a series of televised gladiatorial games that end in death for all but one of the youthful contestants. These “hunger games” are intended as recompense for the damage inflicted on the victorious capitol of Panem by the rebellious districts during an insurrection. Without specifically mentioning global warming, Collins makes it clear that climate change was significantly responsible for the hunger that shadows the North American continent in this future era. Hence, as the gladiatorial contestants are about to be selected, the mayor of District 12’s principal city describes “the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land [and] the brutal war for what little sustenance remained.”

In this, Collins was prescient, even if her specific vision of the violence on which such a world might be organized is fantasy. While we may never see her version of those hunger games, do not doubt that some version of them will come into existence — that, in fact, hunger wars of many sorts will fill our future. These could include any combination or permutation of the deadly riots that led to the 2008 collapse of Haiti’s government, the pitched battles between massed protesters and security forces that engulfed parts of Cairo as the Arab Spring developed, the ethnic struggles over disputed croplands and water sources that have made Darfur a recurring headline of horror in our world, or the inequitable

distribution of agricultural land that continues to fuel the insurgency of the Maoist-inspired Naxalites of India.

Combine such conflicts with another likelihood: that persistent drought and hunger will force millions of people to abandon their traditional lands and flee to the squalor of shantytowns and expanding slums surrounding large cities, sparking hostility from those already living there. One such eruption, with grisly results, occurred in Johannesburg’s shantytowns in 2008 when desperately poor and hungry migrants from Malawi and Zimbabwe were set upon, beaten, and in some cases burned to death by poor South Africans. One terrified Zimbabwean, cowering in a police station from the raging mobs, said she fled her country because “there is no work and no food.” And count on something else: millions more in the coming decades, pressed by disasters ranging from drought and flood to rising sea levels, will try to migrate to other countries, provoking even greater hostility. And that hardly begins to exhaust the possibilities that lie in our hunger-games future.

At this point, the focus is understandably on the immediate consequences of the still ongoing Great Drought: dying crops, shrunken harvests, and rising food prices. But keep an eye out for the social and political effects that undoubtedly won’t begin to show up here or globally until later this year or 2013. Better than any academic study, these will offer us a hint of what we can expect in the coming decades from a hunger-games world of rising temperatures, persistent droughts, recurring food shortages, and billions of famished, desperate people.

By Michael T. Klare

07 August, 2012

@ TomDispatch.com

Michael Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of The Race for What’s Left (Metropolitan Books). A documentary movie based on his book Blood and Oil can be previewed and ordered at www.bloodandoilmovie.com. You can follow Klare on Facebook by clicking here.

Copyright 2012 Michael T. Klare

We grieve and condemn in the strongest terms the killing of Dutch missionary Willem Geertman, 67, who has lived a good 46 years among the people of Quezon province in Luzon until his death on July 3 last week.

President Benigno Aquino III’s conscience should be haunted by this latest killing. But no, he forms another futile Task Force which, like all the others, indicates that the government is turning another blind eye on this yet another murder of a foreign missionary in the country.

Already, the signs that authorities are in denial mode over the political nature of the killing can be seen in the preposterous claim that robbery was the motive here.  Who is the government fooling? This government has produced the most ridiculous of cover-ups for state-sponsored abductions, murders, enforced evacuations, and other human rights violations against grassroots leaders, activists, and community folk.

Like the killing of Italian Missionary Fr. FaustoTentorio, PIME in October last year, and of Protestant Bishop Alberto Ramento in 2006, Geertman’s murder is not caused by petty thieves. It is traced to the state’s Internal Peace and Security Plan (IPSP) which targets ‘enemies of the state’. The Dutch missionary was forced to kneel before his assassins then he was gunned down.

Another life has been sacrificed at the altar of the Armed Forces of the Philippines’ Oplan Bayanihan. What hypocrisy for the AFP to mouth ‘Peace! Peace!’ when behind the rhetoric of the IPSP is the intent to silence those who truly work for justice and peace!

Geertman’s killing bespeaks of an escalating attack on Christian missions.

Many foreign and Filipino religious missionaries in the country are experiencing surveillance, harassment, and political killings by state security forces ranging from paramilitaries, AFP-backed fanatical cults, militaries, police, and assassin-at-large General Palparan and his ilk. Often, missionaries live among the poorest of the poor in the remotest of areas initiating programs to provide what the government has neglected to give — education, health, livelihood, and even their sense of dignity as communities.

Missionary works have been empowering communities through years of raising awareness on their human dignity and rights. Oplan Bayanihan reverses this impact by intimidating missionaries and silencing them forever.

Their work stands in stark contrast against the superficial social welfare dole-outs like the Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT) and the counter-insurgency ‘peace and development’ projects of Oplan Bayanihan. Missionary works, including those by women religious in Mindanao, have led to the strengthening of community positions against largescale mining and other projects that destroy livelihoods and the environment. Government social welfare programs particularly those taken over and carried out by the AFP seek to force communities to accede to ‘development’ aggression.

We direct our indignation to President Aquino who boasts of billion-dollar foreign investments that plunder our people’s labor and the environment but fails to see that enlightened foreign missionaries are God’s grace to the poor and the oppressed.

We thank Willem for being God’s missionary who fulfilled and lived the belief that “As far as the Church is concerned, the social message of the Gospel must not be considered as theory but, above all else, a basis and a motivation for action.” (No. 57, Centesimus Annus)

Justice for Willem Geertman!

Stop killing our Missionaries and Prophets!

STATEMENT

July 6, 2012

@ Sister’s Association in Mindanao

For reference:

Sr. Noemi P. Degala, SMSM

Executive Secretary

Mobile 0929-446-3684

In 1992, world leaders signed up to something called “sustainability”. Few of them were clear about what it meant; I suspect that many of them had no idea. Perhaps as a result, it did not take long for this concept to mutate into something subtly different: “sustainable development”. Then it made a short jump to another term: “sustainable growth”. And now, in the 2012 Rio+20 text that world leaders are about to adopt, it has subtly mutated once more: into “sustained growth”.

This term crops up 16 times in the document, where it is used interchangeably with sustainability and sustainable development. But if sustainability means anything, it is surely the opposite of sustained growth. Sustained growth on a finite planet is the essence of unsustainability.

As political economist Robert Skidelsky, who comes at this issue from a different angle, observes in the Guardian today:

“Aristotle knew of insatiability only as a personal vice; he had no inkling of the collective, politically orchestrated insatiability that we call economic growth. The civilization of “always more” would have struck him as moral and political madness. And, beyond a certain point, it is also economic madness. This is not just or mainly because we will soon enough run up against the natural limits to growth. It is because we cannot go on for much longer economising on labour faster than we can find new uses for it.”

Several of the more outrageous deletions proposed by the United States – such as any mention of rights or equity or of common but differentiated responsibilities – have been rebuffed. In other respects the Obama government’s purge has succeeded, striking out such concepts as “unsustainable consumption and production patterns” and the proposed decoupling of economic growth from the use of natural resources.

At least the states due to sign this document haven’t ripped up the declarations from the last Earth summit, 20 years ago. But in terms of progress since then, that’s as far as it goes. Reaffirming the Rio 1992 commitments is perhaps the most radical principle in the entire declaration.

As a result, the draft document, which seems set to become the final document, takes us precisely nowhere: 190 governments have spent 20 years bracing themselves to “acknowledge”, “recognise” and express “deep concern” about the world’s environmental crises, but not to do anything about them.

This paragraph from the declaration sums up the problem for me:

“We recognise that the planet Earth and its ecosystems are our home and that Mother Earth is a common expression in a number of countries and regions and we note that some countries recognise the rights of nature in the context of the promotion of sustainable development. We are convinced that in order to achieve a just balance among the economic, social and environment needs of present and future generations, it is necessary to promote harmony with nature.”

It sounds lovely, doesn’t it? It could be illustrated with rainbows and psychedelic unicorns and stuck on the door of your toilet. But without any proposed means of implementation, it might just as well be deployed for a different function in the same room.

The declaration is remarkable for its absence of figures, dates and targets. It is as stuffed with meaningless platitudes as an advertisement for payday loans, but without the necessary menace. There is nothing to work with here, no programme, no sense of urgency or call for concrete action beyond the inadequate measures already agreed in previous flaccid declarations. Its tone and contents would be better suited to a retirement homily than a response to a complex of escalating global crises.

The draft and probably final declaration is 283 paragraphs of fluff. It suggests that the 190 governments due to approve it have, in effect, given up on multilateralism, given up on the world and given up on us. So what do we do now? That is the topic I intend to address in my column next week.

By George Monbiot

24 June, 2012
Monbiot.com

George Monbiot is an English writer, known for his environmental and political activism. He writes a weekly column for The Guardian, and is the author of a number of books, including Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain, and Bring on the Apocalypse: Six Arguments for Global Justice. His website ishttp://www.monbiot.com

It was, in the words of U.N. special envoy Kofi Annan, the “tipping point” in the Syria conflict: a savage massacre of over 90 people, predominantly women and children, for which the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad was immediately blamed by virtually the entirety of the Western media. Within days of the first reports of the Houla massacre, the U.S., France, Great Britain, Germany, and several other Western countries announced that they were expelling Syria’s ambassadors in protest.

But according to a new report in Germany’s leading daily, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), the Houla massacre was in fact committed by anti-Assad Sunni militants, and the bulk of the victims were member of the Alawi and Shia minorities, which have been largely supportive of Assad. For its account of the massacre, the report cites opponents of Assad, who, however, declined to have their names appear in print out of fear of reprisals from armed opposition groups.

According to the article’s sources, the massacre occurred after rebel forces attacked three army-controlled roadblocks outside of Houla. The roadblocks had been set up to protect nearby Alawi majority villages from attacks by Sunni militias. The rebel attacks provoked a call for reinforcements by the besieged army units. Syrian army and rebel forces are reported to have engaged in battle for some 90 minutes, during which time “dozens of soldiers and rebels” were killed.

“According to eyewitness accounts,” the FAZ report continues,

the massacre occurred during this time. Those killed were almost exclusively from families belonging to Houla’s Alawi and Shia minorities. Over 90% of Houla’s population are Sunnis. Several dozen members of a family were slaughtered, which had converted from Sunni to Shia Islam. Members of the Shomaliya, an Alawi family, were also killed, as was the family of a Sunni member of the Syrian parliament who is regarded as a collaborator. Immediately following the massacre, the perpetrators are supposed to have filmed their victims and then presented them as Sunni victims in videos posted on the internet.

The FAZ report echoes eyewitness accounts collected from refugees from the Houla region by members of the Monastery of St. James in Qara, Syria. According to monastery sources cited by the Dutch Middle East expert Martin Janssen, armed rebels murdered “entire Alawi families” in the village of Taldo in the Houla region.

Already at the beginning of April, Mother Agnès-Mariam de la Croix of the St. James Monastery warned of rebel atrocities’ being repackaged in both Arab and Western media accounts as regime atrocities. She cited the case of a massacre in the Khalidiya neighborhood in Homs. According to an account published in French on the monastery’s website, rebels gathered Christian and Alawi hostages in a building in Khalidiya and blew up the building with dynamite. They then attributed the crime to the regular Syrian army. “Even though this act has been attributed to regular army forces . . . , the evidence and testimony are irrefutable: It was an operation undertaken by armed groups affiliated with the opposition,” Mother Agnès-Mariam wrote.

By John Rosenthal

9 June 2012

@ National Review Online

John Rosenthal writes on European politics and transatlantic security issues. You can follow his work at www.trans-int.com or on Facebook.

Gaza City: “I can never forget his image with blood all over his little body and both his legs badly injured,” Umm Mamoun Hassouna told The Electronic Intifada as she sat at a relative’s house in Gaza City. “I am a preacher [for women] at a local mosque and used to preach against harming innocent Israeli children, women or the elderly, and even cutting down a tree,” she said.

“After I have seen my son killed by an Israeli warplane in front of my eyes, I wonder what my only son did against Israel [for them to] kill him,” Umm Mamoun added.

Thirteen-year-old Mamoun Zuhdi al-Dam was killed on Wednesday, 20 June, during an Israeli attack on Gaza amid exchange of fire between the Israeli army and Palestinian resistance factions that left eight Palestinians dead.

At approximately 3pm, an Israeli warplane fired a missile at members of a Palestinian family who were having a picnic behind the campus of the University College of Applied Sciences in the southern Gaza City neighborhood of Tal al-Hawa. As a result, Mamoun al-Dam was killed.

His blind father, Muhammad Zuhdi al-Dam, 67, was wounded by shrapnel to the head and the neck. Three other children who were in a nearby field were also wounded, according to theweekly report from the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.

He made tea for his parents

“One month ago, I inherited a small piece of land — about 220 square meters — from my family, and we were all so happy to own that land as my husband is an elderly retired man,” Umm Mamoun said. “Since we inherited that land, Mamoun used to go to it often to enjoy some time outdoors.”

On the day he was killed, his mother said, Mamoun went to the piece of land in the Zaytoun neighborhood, just near the Ali Bin Abi Talib mosque, at about 9am. “I received a phone call from him later on to inform me that the situation was tense and that Israeli warplanes were buzzing overhead,” she said. “His father and I were scared for him and we went to join him.”

Mamoun, his mother said, used to read the Quran, and he led noon prayers that day on the family’s plot of land. The boy also prepared some tea for his parents, and then laid down to listen to news on his mobile phone.

“As he was listening to the newscast that moment, he told us that an Israeli warplane had fired a missile somewhere else,” she added.

Killed as he played football

“Then, Mamoun went to play with a football just close to us on the same land,” his mother recalled, surrounded by mourners. “Suddenly, we heard a loud explosion and pillars of smoke covered the place. I heard Mamoun screaming and saw him stained with blood, and his legs were badly injured. By then my relatives, who are our neighbors, came over to help us as his father was slightly injured too.”

“Mamoun was everything for me — a son, a brother, a sister and everything in my life,” his grief-stricken mother said, “I am the second wife of his father, and God had given me Mamoun to fill in my life.”

In tears, Umm Mamoun spoke of how her son would tell her, “I love you so much, mom. You are my dearest, I love you, I love you.”

“He used to fill my moments with joy”

Muhammad, Mamoun’s father and a retired trader, sat at a condolence ceremony in the Asqoula neighborhood of Gaza City, with his left hand bandaged due to his injuries from the same missile strike that killed his son.

As relatives and friends came to offer condolences, al-Dam lamented, “I do not know what to say, except may God take revenge on those who killed my son Mamoun.”

Al-Dam explained that his son used to look after him due to his lack of sight. “Mamoun, may he rest in peace, used to be very reliable, though he was only a child. He used to take me to the mosque for prayer, he used to bring whatever I need from nearby grocery stores, he used to fill my moments with joy.”

No resistance, no shooting

Al-Dam told The Electronic Intifada that the moment his son Mamoun was hit by the Israeli missile, there was no sign of Palestinian shooting or rocket fire in the area.

“The area where our new piece of land is located is far away from the Israeli border line and it is populated as well,” he said.

Mamoun’s maternal aunts on his mother’s side, Umm Mahmoud and Umm Ahmad Hassouna, recalled how cheerful, humorous and polite Mamoun was.

“One day I was very sad and visited my sister Umm Mamoun to feel better. Mamoun came over to me and said, aunty, I will tell you 15 jokes so that you will smile,” Umm Ahmad said as a little smile broke the grief on her face.

Mamoun’s niece, seven-year-old Abeer Zuhdi al-Dam, wanted to share her feelings too.

“We used to play together often. Sometimes he used to show me some pictures on his own computer, and we used to play many games including hide and seek. We hate Israel for killing him, we hate Israel for killing him,” she said.

“Like my son”

Mamoun’s elder brother, Zuhdi al-Dam, 42, received condolences alongside his father. “This is something that our faith obliges us to tolerate and take for granted, but the question is, why does Israel target such little children? Why?” Zuhdi al-Dam said. “Mamoun was like my son as the age difference between us is thirty years.”

“Why do those alleged world leaders assemble at the so-called United Nations Security Council? Rather, it is the No-Security Council,” Mamoun’s father remarked.

“When an Israeli is hurt, those alleged leaders rush to condemn or call for action, while our own children are being killed and no one even moves.”

By Rami Almeghari

24 June, 2012
The Electronic Intifada

Rami Almeghari is a journalist and university lecturer based in the Gaza Strip.

Outside London’s five-star Dorchester Hotel sits a Bugatti Veyron. These 253 mph supercars are rare enough at the best of times, but this one is unique: known as L’Or Blanc, or White Gold, its exterior is inlaid with porcelain, giving it the appearance of a highly polished humbug.

In terms of conspicuous consumption that takes some beating — £1.6 million for a car that is as delicate as a tea-set.

But for the Saudi owner who has had it flown over to London for the duration of his visit, that is what life is all about. Like the first swallows of summer, the arrival of the world’s rarest supercars in the capital heralds the start of another, lesser known, season — the Ramadan Rush.

This year the weeks leading up to the Muslim month of fasting, which begins on July 20, have seen millionaires and billionaires flock to London from across the Middle East.

They come to escape the oppressive heat back home, to relax, to party and, above all, to show off their wealth.

For upmarket shops, restaurants, nightclubs and hotels, it is bonanza time. Forget the summer sales, these visitors want the best and are prepared to pay for it.

And so it is that Bond Street jewellers, West End designer outlets, casinos such as Les Ambassedeurs, restaurants such as Le Caprice, and hotels such as The Sheraton Park Tower have been instructing their (Arabic-speaking) staff to roll out the red carpet.

The figures speak for themselves: some five-star hotels are reporting 80 per cent Middle Eastern occupancy.

As for the stores, the average British shopper will spend £120 during a trip to the West End and an American £550. Compare that with the average Saudi spend of £1,900. What’s more, in the month before Ramadan, the amount spent by Middle Eastern visitors will be double that in other months.

Of course, it is not the first time the high-rollers have abandoned the fierce heat of a Middle Eastern summer for London. But this year the numbers are well up on before.

Saudi visitors are up 22 per cent year-on-year, while visitors from the UAE have risen to almost 120,000 — up nearly ten per cent.

With the burka banned in France, many who traditionally holidayed in Paris can do so no more. Furthermore, the shockwaves from the Arab Spring have encouraged many of the ruling elites to look beyond their own shores for a potential long-term safe haven.

As a result, while house prices in other parts of Britain stagnate in the recession, Middle Eastern buyers have piled in to London properties, particularly those worth upwards of £5million, driving prices up.

‘The Ramadan Rush is a total phenomenon,’ says Jace Tyrrell of the New West End Company, the management company for retailers in Oxford Street, Bond Street and Regent Street.

‘It is worth millions to us — last year there was about £120 million spent in the pre-Ramadan rush by Middle Eastern visitors, but it grows every single year. We expect it to be up ten per cent this year.’

In central London the signs of this flood of Arab money, and of businesses’ efforts to catch it, are everywhere to see.

‘This stunning international fashion label is looking for an experienced Arabic-speaking sales advisor to join their upmarket concession within Harrods,’ reads one vacancy advert.

‘Arabic-speaking, experienced, talented makeup artists and skincare specialists needed for exciting positions in West End premier department store,’ reads another, one of dozens posted online. And it’s not just the staff who are hand-picked.

The visitors from the Middle East are not interested in buying run-of-the-mill designer goods and have no interest in discounted items. Consider the fact that the value of a single Saudi shopping transaction in London averages out at £600.

As a result the traditional summer sales in many upmarket London stores were brought forward to May and have ended early. They have now been replaced with tailored and often specially designed collections that will chime with the tastes of their incoming customers.

‘They absolutely don’t want summer sales bargains, they want new season stock,’ explains a Selfridge’s spokesperson. ‘They’re very keen on fine jewellery and shoes, and on recognised brands like Chanel. They’re very savvy shoppers and they want the latest, most fashionable, limited-edition products.’

One example of targeting by the brands is to be found in the use of Oud, a distinctive fragrance, in scents and beauty products.

‘Oud is a particularly popular scent for Middle Eastern shoppers, so a limited edition of, say, an Oud-scented fragrance, whether it’s by Armani, Jo Malone or Tom Ford, is very popular,’ says the spokesperson.

Unsurprisingly, one of the biggest draws for the visitors is Harrods. Indeed, so popular is the department store with Middle Eastern travellers that the Ramadan Rush has also been nicknamed the Harrods Hajj — a light-hearted reference to the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca.

Again, limited-edition items are popular: Louis Vuitton handbags; diamond jewellery; watches from Cartier; leather goods; silk scarves, and perfumes from Hermès.

Many of the purchases will be paid for in cash. Atif Nawaz works a stone’s throw from Harrods, at the Knightsbridge Foreign Currency Exchange.

He says it is not uncommon for Middle Eastern families to exchange £3,000 a day during a three-day shopping trip.

‘The family will go to Harrods or Harvey Nichols, spend the money they have and then send their chauffeur back to me the next day to exchange more money,’ said Mr Nawaz.

‘It is spare change for these people. But even though they are rich, they always haggle. They’ll spend thousands in the casino or at Harrods but come back and argue about the exchange rate.’

It’s not just shops that benefit from this deluge of dollars and dirhams, the currency of the UAE.

Companies providing chauffeurs, private chefs and close-protection bodyguards are all reporting a surge in business, as are concierge companies who cater for the rich and famous.

One such outfit, Quintessentially, is currently looking after a Saudi woman who is visiting London. She has requested that every week she is here she be hand-delivered a new handbag. So far she has had ones by Celine and Isabel Marant.

For another client they arranged for a guitar signed by Damien Hirst to be delivered to a member’s son because he loved the artist’s exhibition at the Tate so much. The cost? £10,000.

Quintessentially also laid on a very special tour of London for a group of male clients from the Middle East. The brief was that it was to involve cars and that money was to be no object. And so they arranged for a fleet of ten deluxe supercars to pick them up from their Mayfair apartment.

They included a Bugatti Veyron, a Ferrari Enzo, a Lamborghini Gallardo and an Aston Martin DB9.

The men then drove around the capital, stopping at ten of London’s most iconic locations and swapping cars at each. The drivers were equipped with wireless headsets through which a live commentary was given by a historian following in a car of his own. Better than an open-top bus tour.

Karen Jones, editor of Citywealth, a publication aimed at ‘individuals of ultra-high net worth’ (the sort of people with £100 million-plus to invest), says that for her clients London is all about having a good time before returning home to observe Ramadan.

‘Arabs love London because of the shopping and the fun,’ she says. ‘They don’t come to do business, they come and use London as a playground as we would Cannes or Monaco.’ One of her clients from Saudi Arabia told her that during a month in London he would expect to spend £100,000.

His daytimes will be spent shopping at Hermès and dining at Scott’s, La Petite Maison, Le Caprice and Nobu, and in the evenings he will frequent the capital’s casinos.

‘He told me that one of his Saudi friends bought a £9 million flat opposite Harrods and then spent £1 million furnishing it,’ said Ms Jones. ‘The trouble was that he couldn’t get any staff to work in it or anyone to come and make him a cup of coffee, so he ended up going to stay in a hotel. He tried bringing maids to London but the minute they get here they disappear.’ Presumably into the black market.

Even the weather isn’t off-putting. Ms Jones says: ‘They don’t get rain in places like Saudi, so running for a taxi in a shower is seen as a fun and exciting thing to do.’

Of course, the real high-flyers would not be seen dead in a taxi.
Instead they have their cars freighted over to London, generally by aeroplane, so that they can use them during their stay.

Take a trip around central London at the moment and supercars with Arabic-script plates can be seen — and heard — touring the streets.

Their drivers want to be noticed, and where better to be seen than outside Harrods? So it was that in the space of ten minutes on Wednesday afternoon I spotted a Saudi-registered Ferrari 438 worth £170,000 performing three laps of Harrods, its driver revving the engine each time he passed the famous green doors. He was followed shortly afterwards by a Dubai-registered, £270,000 Lamborghini SV.

Given the wealth of the owners, it is perhaps unsurprising that little notice is paid to the British rules of the road. Each summer Westminster Council is left with tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of unpaid fines as these visitors abandon their cars on yellow lines.

A list of last year’s most prolific offenders included the Arab owner of a £300,000 Rolls Royce who owed £2,000 for 18 tickets, and a Dubai-registered, £200,000 Lamborghini Murcielago which had racked up 24.

Meanwhile, the owner of a Bugatti Veyron L’Edition Centenaire — registration 444 — failed to pay £120 after he parked on a yellow line outside Selfridges (despite having managed to find £1.2 million to buy the car).

A mile or two from Harrods, legally parked on the forecourt of the Sheraton Park Hotel are two Maybachs with foreign plates and a Qatar-registered McLaren MP4.

‘The MP4 is worth about £200,000,’ one hotel worker explained. ‘It’s been brought in on a private jet and then driven straight off the plane to here. The amount of money these people can spend is ferocious.

‘We had one chap here, the son of a Saudi prince, and he and his brother each had a Bugatti Veyron, which they had had shipped over while they stayed here. He told me he had just bought a fully crewed yacht and anchored it in Monaco. The thing cost him about £30 million and he had never even seen it.’

Back at The Dorchester in Mayfair, the Veyron L’Or Blanc is attracting a crowd, even with its high-powered engine switched off.

The onlookers are discussing its vital statistics — kiln-fired porcelain inlay, eight-litre engine and acceleration of zero to 60mph in a touch over two-and-a-half seconds. As for fuel economy? That’s seven miles per gallon in town. With petrol prices what they are, that’s enough to send a shudder through the wallet of even a very well-off Briton.

But for the car’s owner, an unknown Saudi said to be in his 30s, the cost of a tank of petrol wouldn’t even count as small change.

By Tom Rawstorne

29 June 2012

@ www.dailymail.co.uk

Fasting is a universal custom and is advocated by all religions of the world, with more restrictions in some than in others. The “Siy?m” should not be interpreted as “fasting” lest it may be misunderstood as mere starvation or as an act of self-denial and asceticism, and therefore, a renunciation of the world. For the purpose of this article, let us call it the “Islamic Fast”.

Readers are kindly requested to refer to Q. 2:183-185, where the main fruit of fasting is to achieve Taqw? that essentially means self-restraint.

“O ye faithful! fasting is prescribed for you as it was prescribed for those before you so that you may guard against evil”. This is also translated by some as “…you may learn self-restraint”, or “…you may develop Taqw?? (God-consciousness)” (Q.2:183).

Thus, the Islamic fast is for those Muslims, who are preparing to become Mu?min?n (true and firm believers in faith). Faith carries much more weight than belief or doctrine. In this verse, Allah gives an open invitation to us as: “Oh ye faithful!” Although multiple benefits accrue, Muslims in general fast because it is Allah’s command and not merely for the physical benefits.

Fasting is the most rigorous of all spiritual disciplines imposed on every adult Muslim man and woman. Fasting frees oneself from egoism, replacing it with an indescribable peace within, which makes the person accept differences in humans. The aim of this spiritual exercise is to enable man to achieve proximity to Allah and obtain His pleasure.

In Islam, fasting is obligatory in the lunar month of Ramad??n, a lunar month of 29 or 30 days. During this period there is complete abstinence from food, drink, smoke, marital relationship, and any evil thought, word or deed. The advantage of the lunar month, compared to solar, is that fasting takes place by cyclic rotation under different climatic conditions, during the life span of the individual while residing in the same geographical location.

Fasting gives us an opportunity to fine tune the body, to develop qualities of endurance, and to control anger, sensual desires and a malicious tongue. The fasting person should avoid such actions as might arouse passion in him as well as in others, such as casting lustful eyes at a woman. He should also abstain from thinking carnal thoughts and fantasizing pleasures incompatible with the spiritual regimen.

It is a well-known fact that beasts can be brought under control by keeping them occasionally hungry and then feeding them at planned intervals. Similarly, man can tame the animal within himself and become its master by fasting for one whole month. One of the objectives is to bring unruly passions under control. The man who can rule his desires and makes them work as he likes, has attained true moral excellence.

Allah puts our faith to a severe test for one month, with strict non-indulgence in physical gratifications, during long hours of a day. If we emerge triumphant in this test, more strength develops in us to refrain from other sins. Our brain then also responds by sending recurrent and frequent signals to us to protect ourselves by rejecting evil immediately. In fact, this exercise trains us to receive warning signals at all times, whether Ramad??n or not, so that we should not see evil, hear evil, utter evil or act evil. Besides abstention from food and drink, the fasting of the pious man is to curb unchaste desires, to fast from looking at the provocative, from hearing the mischievous, and from uttering the obscene. A fasting man is also required to avoid slander and from thinking about inflicting injury to others. He should never find himself in a situation which may expose whatever animal qualities in whatever form he possesses.

The effect of fasting on the human personality is dominant and decisive. It enables man to subdue the strongest worldly urges raging within him and brings a harmonious equilibrium between the temporal (the body) and the spiritual (the soul), both coming together for peaceful co-existence.

Fasting is an institution for the improvement of the moral and spiritual character of man. The purpose of the fast is to help develop self-restraint, self-purification, God-consciousness, compassion, spirit of caring and sharing, and the love of Allah and humanity. The objective of fasting is to develop our personality to a high standard of God-consciousness and maintain that standard throughout life, so that on the Day of Judgment before God, we would already be well-off to a good start, to begin our life in Hereafter.

However, for some Muslims, Ramad??n is a burst of Islamic activity in a year-long ocean of un-Islamic behavior. As soon as the fasting program is over, some Muslims throw to the wind whatever good and hard-earned qualities they might have gained as a result of that exercise, and sooner or later return to their vicious habits and practices of their pre-Ramad??n days, be they of thoughts, words or deeds. We ought to remind ourselves that we must not allow the weeds in our garden to stifle the flowers and the fruits. Islam is neither a Sunday religion nor a Ramad??n only religion. Ramad??n is not meant to be a 30-day fast ending on ‘Id with a feast to beat all feasts. Some of the greatest achievements in Islam were made during Ramad??n, e.g. the Battle of Badr. If the newly converted Muslims had gorged themselves after Ift??r parties at nights and had slept in the day, they could not have become victorious at the Battle of Badr, and we, even now, might still have been pagans.

From a moral point of view, during fasting, one becomes more sympathetic and tolerant towards those in needy circumstances. It brings about a better realization of human understanding. In this world of today, with a population explosion, where two-thirds of the world goes to sleep on an empty stomach, the quicker this realization takes place, the sooner the problems would be appreciated and solved. It is only during such time as Ramad??n that one can reflect and make an inventory of the importance of the basic moral values affecting oneself and the community.

We should remember that Allah says that fasting has been prescribed for you. It is a divine prescription from Allah Who is the Greatest Physician. It is different from a medical doctor’s prescription and hence this prescription should be duly respected and carried out in full. It is also a pre-scription i.e. it was also prescribed for religious communities before the advent of Islam. If a person fasts for temporal motives only e.g. slimming according to a doctor’s prescription, he will be far from performing his religious duty or achieving nearness to Allah or obtaining His pleasure. In order to subjugate the body with the sole purpose of developing will power and a dominant personality, it is essential to bring certain forces within the body under control and thus develop will power. Besides hunger, thirst and carnal desires, we must gain full control of the tongue, mind and the rest of the body. Hence, Muslims call Ramad??n a blessed month of compassion and mercy, a month of self-purification and re-dedication, a month of commiseration with the poor and the hungry, who are in the majority among mankind. It is a unique month of self-analysis, of taking stock of one’s moral and spiritual assets and liabilities and of examining critically one’s spiritual portrait.

Why is it that we fast in the daytime and not, for our own convenience, at nights? This is because the human personality only develops when a person is exposed to maximum social conditions. Hence, Islam puts great stress on family and community life. Islam does not advocate running away from society or becoming a monk or leaving the family to retire in a desert, with all the solitude and the solitary confinement. Personality only develops during encounters with others in a society or community. To alienate from society is not Da’wah (invitation to Islam). Religion does not become perfect without the world. We must work for the community and also with the community for the common welfare and the good of the Ummah. Islam regards the interest of the society above the interest of the individual. Service to Allah is rendered through a clean life in the turmoil of this world in the multitudes of society.

Perhaps it would be interesting to consider why fasting was not made compulsory every single day of one’s life. Allah gives us a month of compulsory fast and then gives us eleven lunar months to asses the result of this month-long effort. This 11-month grace period is the reason as to why we should not fast every single day of our lives. If we had done so, we would have remained under continuous compulsory restrictions of the Islamic fast throughout the year, and without the complete and unrestricted freedom to do as we like. Our will power would not have been given a chance to develop a strong personality. Personality grows much more when we are free to do any wrong we would like, but choose not to do it under unrestricted conditions, such as during the eleven months following the Ramad??n fast. Both during Ramad??n and after, Allah gives us the opportunity to examine our spiritual profile and see where the defect lies. Has some jealousy, hatred, malice, miserliness, tendency to give short measure, cheating and intrigue and unforgiving thoughts and actions been removed in our acquired attributes?

Fasting is an institution by which an individual and by extension a community, may benefit physically and morally. The Islamic fast strengthens the disposition of the individual to obedience of laws and respect for social order. Islam lays stress on submission to Allah and consequently, lays stress on submission to just authority, beginning with example in the home.

What are the three components of personality that we put to the acid test in the month-long exercise of fasting? They are (a) our physical cravings, (b) sensory desires, and (c) material longings. If we are successful in overcoming these, we shall pass the first part of our examination, emerging a far better Muslim within ourselves, fully laden with Taqw? (God-consciousness). We see a much better individual unfolding itself from within us, a person that was lying dormant for long. Now the same person in the month of Ramad??n, has become the captain, the master of the control room of the self, controlling and at times eliminating certain types of worldly desires. It is easy now for such a person to be “on guard” and reject evil temptations as fast as they come, even challenging and encountering more temptations without any fear of giving in to them.

The purpose of the Islamic Fast is to obey Allah’s Command with a view to becoming His vicegerent (Khal?fah). It trains all those who volunteer for service to Allah before allowing them to take on the job of His vicegerency and establish Allah’s rule on Earth.

There is no guarantee that the fasting person has definitely acquired the laudable achievement of Taqw? or God-consciousness. Some of us, who fast, often wait anxiously for Ramad??n to end so that we could resume our nefarious activities. Sometimes, during the fasting month Satan becomes more active than usual. Allah may use such situations to test a fasting person’s Taqw? if and when he makes his evil passion his god.

The English translation of Q.2:183 is usually expressed as “…you may develop taqw?”. Note the word “may”. There is no guaranty that a fasting person would definitely develop God-consciousness and piety or enough will power that he could guard against evil. In fact, the fasting person cannot develop Taqw? if he continues to backbite, slander, tell lies, harm others, deceive people and show malice, anger and hatred towards fellow beings. It is easy for any belittler, slanderer, tyrant or businessman who gives short measure or a miser who does not disburse Zak?t money, to starve himself during Ramadan days. But, how can such a person develop God-consciousness and divine qualities? Such a person, besides committing sins of commission and omission, may simply be wasting his time by fasting. Shall we spend a month every year, in which we starve and become thirsty, fast and eat, while our condition does not change – our rich remain rich and our poor remain as poor? Prophet Muhammad (S.A.W.) had warned that poverty may lead to unbelief. This is why a person who steals food while facing starvation is not to be punished according to the Shariah.

@ Imam Reza Network