Friday, October 16, 2009

What's wrong with UNESCO

Nature 461, 447 (24 September 2009) | doi:10.1038/461447a; Published
online 23 September 2009

What's wrong with UNESCO

Abstract

The new director-general needs to buck all expectations and transform the agency.

As Nature went to press, Irina Gueorguieva Bokova, a Bulgarian diplomat, and Farouk Hosny, Egypt's minister of culture, faced off in a final electoral round to become director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The vote, by the agency's executive board, is subject to confirmation in October by its general conference.

BlackRock gets EU approval for buy of Barclays' BGI

BlackRock gets EU approval for buy of Barclays' BGI
REUTERS — September/23/2009

BRUSSELS, Sept 23 (Reuters) - U.S. fund manager BlackRock (Symbol : BLK) gained European Union regulatory approval on Wednesday for its acquisition of a Barclays (Symbol : BCS) investment unit for $13.5
billion in cash and shares.

The planned buy of Barclays Global Investors will elevate BlackRock (Symbol : BLK) to the world's largest money manager with $2.8 trillion of client funds. The new combined company will be called BlackRock
Global Investors.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Kinross gold mine at Paracatu, Brasil: stuck in stone age

Kinross gold mine at Paracatu, Brasil: stuck in stone age

Sergio Ulhoa Dani

When it comes to members of the same family, comparisons are inevitable. One of the mines of the Kinross' family is Kettle River-Buckhorn, in Washington state, USA. Kinross' CEO Tye Burt is a proud father when he talks about this mine: “When you look at the Buckhorn Mine, you're looking at the future of mining", he said. Kinross' Paracatu Mine, in Minas Gerais state, Brazil, is a quite different issue. When you look at the Paracatu Mine, you're looking through the window of pre-historical times. The Kinross' gold mine at Paracatu is stuck in stone age.

Dear David Kliegman,

Dear David Kliegman,

at the outset, let me forward to you and your Okanogan colleagues my sincere cumpliments on an excellent work done. We can appreciate your work very well since we are fighting the same fight, against the same culprits, down here in Brazil.

In Brazil, Kinross is slowly killing our creeks and the people of Paracatu, a 90,000 inhabitants town in northwestern Minas Gerais State. Kinross runs an open pit gold mine within the urban environment of Paracatu. Believe it or not, technically we are IN the open pit gold mine.

Environmental deal on Buckhorn gold mine brings jobs

Environmental deal on Buckhorn gold mine brings jobs

*Environmental deal on Buckhorn gold mine brings jobs*http://seattle.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/2008/12/29/focus3.html
by Greg Lamm, Staff Writer

After nearly 20 years of legal hurdles and hundreds of millions of dollars in investments, ore is finally flowing out of the Buckhorn Mountain gold mine in Okanogan County.

For the next seven or eight years, trucks will haul up to 1,000 tons of ore a day to a mineral processing center about 50 miles away in Ferry County. When the deposit is depleted from the underground mine atop a 5,600-foot mountain near the Canadian border, mine owner Kinross Gold Corp. expects to have produced 1 million ounces of gold. That’s worth about $850 million at today’s price.

How Buckhorn mine opponent adapted to activist’s life

How Buckhorn mine opponent adapted to activist’s life

*How Buckhorn mine opponent adapted to activist’s life*http://seattle.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/2008/12/29/focus4.html?q=BUCKHORN%20KINROSS
by Greg Lamm, Staff Writer

When Dave Kliegman launched his quest to block an open-pit gold mine on top of Buckhorn Mountain, his daughter was 10 years old.

Today, Sarah Kliegman is a year away from earning a Ph.D. in organic chemistry, and her father is still a passionate advocate for the Okanogan County wilderness area.

“I knew it was going to be a big battle,” said Dave Kliegman. “I really didn’t have any idea where it would end.”

Kliegman formed the Okanogan Highlands Alliance in 1992. He later quit his job as a physical and occupational therapist working with handicapped children to work full time on battling the open-pit mine. Along the way, he unraveled the hodgepodge of state regulations related to mining, became an expert on century-old federal mining law and also banded together with other grassroots organizations fighting mines in the West, including on Indian reservations.

Refusing gold

Refusing gold


May 8, 2009
Paracatu-MG, Brazil
“Not now, thanks” (said Wilson Brumer, former State Secretary, refusing Kinross’ gold)

The Canadian Kinross Gold Corporation press release was efficient on spreading the news about Wilson Nelio Brumer to join the company Board of Directors, April this year. It was in the internet all over the world that on May 6, at the Toronto headquarters annual meeting that Brumer was to be voted and appointed.

Just two days passed on and “O Tempo”, a local Brazilian newspaper, in a now timid note headlined “Refusing Gold” quoted Wilson Brumer, a former Minas Gerais State Secretary, as being more interested to run his own business.

Brumer´s to be appointment had been interpreted as Kinross desperate try to place its Brazilian operation in the hands of someone with “easy transit and flow” within Government offices, someone with a known track record to sell valuable Brazilian assets to foreign groups. Kinross makes it public in its “Code of Ethics“ that “facilition payments” are due to government authorities in order to facilitate businesses in foreign countries.

Bottlenecked twice by two legal suits which prevent Kinross to build up a gigantic toxic tailings dam in the outskirts of the historical city of Paracatu, the mining company threatened to close doors at the beginning of this month. Sergio Dani, an M.D., PhD who presides the Acangau Foundation, a Brazilian non governmental foundation fighting a two-year long struggle to make Kinross pay for its debts in Paracatu said “the company representatives are crying crocodile tears as no company gets out of business for technical problems but rather for sheer incompetence”.

Kinross mining rights in Paracatu were bought in 2006 from Rio Tinto, one of the biggest in the mining sector, for just US $280 million – “a bargain” in the words of geologist Eupidio Reis, surprised by such a low amount paid for the Brazilian biggest gold reserve, some 16 million ounces, standing for more than 60% of total Kinross’ proven gold reserves. Eupidio Reis did not understand why the Paracatu mine, estimated in over US $10 billion, could be sold so cheap.

Truth is, what seemed to be a bargain for the Toronto dandies soon proved to be a nightmare. Sergio Dani explains that since 1987 the Paracatu gold mining project has been poorly planned and equally poorly managed, “Kinross invested a half billion dollars to scale up this mine production but all it got back was to make more evident the error, makeshift and blunder surrounding this expansion project” said Dani. The socio-economical and environmental damages lay open wide for anyone to see (see pics and videos at http://alertaparacatu.blogspot.com/ ).

In order to explore the world’s lowest grade ore (0.4 g/ton) the mining company disputes with local population and farmers huge volumes of precious fresh water, giving back in turn millions of tons of toxic debris – deposited into gigantic tailings dams built on the freshwater springs which meant to supply the city 90.000 inhabitants.

The regular mine explosions have been causing cracks in this historical city buildings and houses. One suspects that the toxic dust released from the open pit mine operations is responsible for increasing cancer incidence and other diseases in Paracatu.

The Paracatu mine ore is arsenopyrite which equals to say it liberates arsenic and sulphuric acid into the environment when mined and ground to have gold extracted. Arsenic is a cancer causing substance and sulphuric acid permeates and contaminates streams and groundwater.
Kinross accounting liabilities in Paracatu compete with the value of its gold reserves - bad news for any stockholder. One wonders if any stockholder would knowingly embark into an adventure that poses risk to his/her invested capital? Question is: how much do the stockholders really know about it?

Kinross tries hard to conceal its mistakes and disqualify Paracatu scientific community when offered a sustainable withdraw plan, as of 2007. “We do not tolerate a foreign company to name us as silly and idiots” warned Serrano Neves, Justice Prosecutor and the Fundacao Acangau Council Curator when challenged by the Canadian transnational mining company.

“Paracatu Kinross mining is stuck in stone age. Liabilities are gigantic and the fly-by-night risk are substancial”, adds Dani. “It comes as a “no surprise” that Mr. Brumer has refused a return ticket to travel back to the past of mining”, he concluded.

Brumer’s refusal to the invitation to take a seat at the Kinross Board of Directors opens room for speculations. Brumer served in Billinton, the first owner of the Paracatu mining site. Brumer welcomed the Rio Tinto-Kinross expansion project as a Minas Gerais State Secretary. Brumer did not say “ no thanks “ then. Presently, when the opposition to the mine expansion is strong, he appears to say: “Not now, thanks”.

No new director of Kinross Gold Corporation gets less than a US$100,000 monthly salary, plus compensations. Kinross CEO, Tye Burt, for example, has got US$10 million as salary and compensations in 2008. It is hard to tell whether Mr. Brumer would get as much in his own businesses in Brazil.

What has Brumer really refused?

Cylene Gama

Sources:
http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS239069+23-Apr-2009+MW20090423
http://www.otempo.com.br/otempo/colunas/?IdEdicao=1288&IdColunaEdicao=8485
http://www.alertaparacatu.blogspot.com/
http://www.kinross.com/corporate/pdf/management-information-circular.pdf

The Trilateral Commission: Usurping Sovereignty

The Trilateral Commission: Usurping Sovereignty

The Trilateral Commission: Usurping Sovereignty

By Patrick Wood
http://www.augustreview.com/issues/globalization/the_trilateral_commission%3a_usurping_sovereignty_2007080373/
[Editor’s note: For ease of reading, all members of the Trilateral Commission appear in bold type]

“President Reagan ultimately came to understand Trilateral’s value and invited the entire membership to a reception at the White House in April 1984”
— David Rockefeller, Memoirs, 20021

According to each issue of the official Trilateral Commission quarterly magazine Trialogue:

The Trilateral Commission was formed in 1973 by private citizens of Western Europe, Japan and North America to foster closer cooperation among these three regions on common problems. It seeks to improve public understanding of such problems, to support proposals for handling them jointly, and to nurture habits and practices of working together among these regions.”2

Further, Trialogue and other official writings made clear their stated goal of creating a “New International Economic Order.” President George H.W. Bush later talked openly about creating a “New World Order”, which has since become a synonymous phrase.

This paper attempts to tell the rest of the story, according to official and unofficial Commission sources and other available documents.

The Trilateral Commission was founded by the persistent maneuvering of David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Rockefeller was chairman of the ultra-powerful Chase Manhattan Bank, a director of many major multinational corporations and "endowment funds" and had long been a central figure in the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Brzezinski, a brilliant prognosticator of one-world idealism, was a professor at Columbia University and the author of several books that have served as "policy guidelines" for the Trilateral Commission. Brzezinski served as the Commission's first executive director from its inception in 1973 until late 1976 when he was appointed by President Jimmy Carter as Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.

The initial Commission membership was approximately three hundred, with roughly one hundred each from Europe, Japan and North America. Membership was also roughly divided between academics, politicians and corporate magnates; these included international bankers, leaders of prominent labor unions and corporate directors of media giants.

The word commission was puzzling since it is usually associated with instrumentalities set up by governments. It seemed out of place with a so-called private group unless we could determine that it really was an arm of a government - an unseen government, different from the visible government in Washington. European and Japanese involvement indicated a world government rather than a national government. We hoped that the concept of a sub-rosa world government was just wishful thinking on the part of the Trilateral Commissioners. The facts, however, lined up quite pessimistically.

If the Council on Foreign Relations could be said to be a spawning ground for the concepts of one-world idealism, then the Trilateral Commission was the "task force" assembled to assault the beachheads. Already the Commission had placed its members in the top posts the U.S. had to offer.

President James Earl Carter, the country politician who promised, "I will never lie to you," was chosen to join the Commission by Brzezinski in 1973. It was Brzezinski, in fact, who first identified Carter as presidential timber, and subsequently educated him in economics, foreign policy, and the ins-and-outs of world politics. Upon Carter's election, Brzezinski was appointed assistant to the president for national security matters. Commonly, he was called the head of the National Security Council because he answered only to the president - some said Brzezinski held the second most powerful position in the U.S.

Carter's running mate, Walter Mondale, was also a member of the Commission. (If you are trying to calculate the odds of three virtually unknown men, out of over sixty Commissioners from the U.S., capturing the three most powerful positions in the land, don't bother. Your calculations will be meaningless.)

On January 7, 1977 Time Magazine, whose editor-in-chief, Hedley Donovan was a powerful Trilateral, named President Carter "Man of the Year." The sixteen-page article in that issue not only failed to mention Carter's connection with the Commission but also stated the following:
“As he searched for Cabinet appointees, Carter seemed at times hesitant and frustrated disconcertingly out of character. His lack of ties to Washington and the Party Establishment - qualities that helped raise him to the White House - carry potential dangers. He does not know the Federal Government or the pressures it creates. He does not really know the politicians whom he will need to help him run the country.”3

Is this portrait of Carter as a political innocent simply inaccurate or is it deliberately misleading? By December 25, 1976 - two weeks before the Time article appeared - Carter had already chosen his cabinet. Three of his cabinet members – Cyrus Vance, Michael Blumenthal, and Harold Brown - were Trilateral Commissioners; and the other non-Commission members were not unsympathetic to Commission objectives and operations. In addition, Carter had appointed another fourteen Trilateral Commissioners to top government posts, including:
C. Fred Bergsten (Under Secretary of Treasury)
James Schlesinger (Secretary of Energy)
Elliot Richardson (Delegate to Law of the Sea)
Leonard Woodcock (Chief envoy to China)
Andrew Young (Ambassador to the United Nations)

As of 25 December 1976, therefore, there were nineteen Trilaterals, including Carter and Mondale, holding tremendous political power. These presidential appointees represented almost one-third of the Trilateral Commission members from the United States. The odds of that happening “by chance” are beyond calculation!

Nevertheless, was there even the slightest evidence to indicate anything other than collusion? Hardly! Zbigniew Brzezinski spelled out the qualifications of a 1976 presidential winner in 1973:
“The Democratic candidate in 1976 will have to emphasize work, the family, religion and, increasingly, patriotism...The new conservatism will clearly not go back to laissez faire. It will be a philosophical conservatism. It will be a kind of conservative statism or managerism. There will be conservative values but a reliance on a great deal of co-determination between state and the corporations.”4

On 23 May 1976 journalist Leslie H. Gelb wrote in the not-so-conservative New York Times, "(Brzezinski) was the first guy in the Community to pay attention to Carter, to take him seriously. He spent time with Carter, talked to him, sent him books and articles, educated him."5

Richard Gardner (also of Columbia University) joined into the "educational" task, and as Gelb noted, between the two of them they had Carter virtually to themselves. Gelb continued: "While the Community as a whole was looking elsewhere, to Senators Kennedy and Mondale...it paid off. Brzezinski, with Gardner, is now the leading man on Carter's foreign policy task force."6
Although Richard Gardner was of considerable academic influence, it should be clear that Brzezinski was the "guiding light" of foreign policy in the Carter administration. Along with Commissioner Vance and a host of other Commissioners in the State Department, Brzezinski had more than continued the policies of befriending our enemies and alienating our friends. Since early 1977 we had witnessed a massive push to attain "normalized" relations with Communist China, Cuba, the USSR, Eastern European nations, Angola, etc. Conversely, we had withdrawn at least some support from Nationalist China, South Africa, Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia), etc. It was not just a trend - it was an epidemic. Thus, if it could be said that Brzezinski had, at least in part, contributed to current U.S. foreign and domestic policy, then we should briefly analyze exactly what he was espousing.

Needed: A More Just and Equitable World Order
The Trilateral Commission held their annual plenary meeting in Tokyo, Japan, in January 1977. Carter and Brzezinski obviously could not attend as they were still in the process of reorganizing the White House. They did, however, address personal letters to the meeting, which were reprinted in Trialogue, the official magazine of the Commission:
“It gives me special pleasure to send greetings to all of you gathering for the Trilateral Commission meeting in Tokyo. I have warm memories of our meeting in Tokyo some eighteen months ago, and am sorry I cannot be with you now.
“My active service on the Commission since its inception in 1973 has been a splendid experience for me, and it provided me with excellent opportunities to come to know leaders in our three regions.
“As I emphasized in my campaign, a strong partnership among us is of the greatest importance. We share economic, political and security concerns that make it logical we should seek ever-increasing cooperation and understanding. And this cooperation is essential not only for our three regions, but in the global search for a more just and equitable world order (emphasis added). I hope to see you on the occasion of your next meeting in Washington, and I look forward to receiving reports on your work in Tokyo.
“Jimmy Carter”7

Brzezinski's letter, in a similar vein, follows:
“The Trilateral Commission has meant a great deal to me over the last few years. It has been the stimulus for intellectual creativity and a source of personal satisfaction. I have formed close ties with new friends and colleagues in all three regions, ties which I value highly and which I am sure will continue.
“I remain convinced that, on the larger architectural issues of today, collaboration among our regions is of the utmost necessity. This collaboration must be dedicated to the fashioning of a more just and equitable world order (emphasis added). This will require a prolonged process, but I think we can look forward with confidence and take some pride in the contribution which the Commission is making.
“Zbigniew Brzezinski”8

The key phrase in both letters was "more just and equitable world order." Did this emphasis indicate that something was wrong with our present world order, that is, with national structures? Yes, according to Brzezinski, and since the present "framework" was inadequate to handle world problems, it must be done away with and supplanted with a world government.

In September 1974 Brzezinski was asked in an interview by the Brazilian newspaper Vega. "How would you define this new world order?" Brzezinski answered:
“When I speak of the present international system I am referring to relations in specific fields, most of all among the Atlantic countries; commercial, military, mutual security relations, involving the international monetary fund, NATO etc. We need to change the international system for a global system in which new, active and creative forces recently developed - should be integrated. This system needs to include Japan. Brazil, the oil producing countries, and even the USSR, to the extent which the Soviet Union is willing to participate in a global system.”9

When asked if Congress would have an expanded or diminished role in the new system, Brzezinski declared "...the reality of our times is that a modern society such as the U.S. needs a central coordinating and renovating organ which cannot be made up of six hundred people."10

Brzezinski developed background for the need for a new system in his book Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era (1969). He wrote that mankind has moved through three great stages of evolution, and was in the middle of the fourth and final stage. The first stage he described as "religious," combining a heavenly "universalism provided by the acceptance of the idea that man's destiny is essentially in God's hands" with an earthly "narrowness derived from massive ignorance, illiteracy, and a vision confined to the immediate environment."

The second stage was nationalism, stressing Christian equality before the law, which "marked another giant step in the progressive redefinition of man's nature and place in our world." The third stage was Marxism, which, said Brzezinski, "represents a further vital and creative stage in the maturing of man's universal vision." The fourth and final stage was Brzezinski's Technetronic Era, or the ideal of rational humanism on a global scale - the result of American-Communist evolutionary transformations.11

In considering our structure of governance, Brzezinski stated:
“Tension is unavoidable as man strives to assimilate the new into the framework of the old. For a time the established framework resiliently integrates the new by adapting it in a more familiar shape. But at some point the old framework becomes overloaded. The newer input can no longer be redefined into traditional forms, and eventually it asserts itself with compelling force. Today, though, the old framework of international politics - with their spheres of influence, military alliances between nation-states, the fiction of Sovereignty, doctrinal conflicts arising from nineteenth century crises - is clearly no longer compatible with reality.”12

One of the most important "frameworks" in the world, and especially to Americans, was the United States Constitution. It was this document that outlined the most prosperous nation in the history of the world. Was our sovereignty really "fiction"? Was the U.S. vision no longer compatible with reality? Brzezinski further stated:
“The approaching two-hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence could justify the call for a national constitutional convention to reexamine the nation's formal institutional framework. Either 1976 or 1989 - the two- hundredth an anniversary of the Constitution - could serve as a suitable target date culminating a national dialogue on the relevance of existing arrangements... Realism, however, forces us to recognize that the necessary political innovation will not come from direct constitutional reform, desirable as that would be. The needed change is more likely to develop incrementally and less overtly...in keeping with the American tradition of blurring distinctions between public and private institution.”13

In Brzezinski's Technetronic Era then, the "nation-state as a fundamental unit of man's organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state."14

Brzezinski’s philosophy clearly pointed forward to Richard Gardner’s Hard Road to World Order that appeared in Foreign Affairs in 1974, where Gardner stated, "In short, the 'house of world order' would have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It will look like a great 'booming, buzzing confusion,' to use William James' famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault.”15

That former approach which had produced few successes during the 1950’s and 1960’s was being traded for a velvet sledge-hammer: It would make little noise, but would still drive the spikes of globalization deep into the hearts of many different countries around the world, including the United States. Indeed, the Trilateral Commission was the chosen vehicle that finally got the necessary traction to actually create their New World Order.

Understanding the philosophy of the Trilateral Commission was and is the only way we can reconcile the myriad of apparent contradictions in the information filtered through to us in the national press. For instance, how was it that the Marxist regime in Angola derived the great bulk of its foreign exchange from the offshore oil operations of Gulf Oil Corporation? Why did Andrew Young insist that "Communism has never been a threat to Blacks in Africa"? Why did the U.S. funnel billions in technological aid to the Soviet Union and Communist China? Why did the U.S. apparently help its enemies while chastising its friends?

A similar and perplexing question is asked by millions of Americans today: Why do we spend trillions on the “War on Terror” around the world and yet ignore the Mexican/U.S. border and the tens of thousands of illegal aliens who freely enter the U.S. each and every month?

These questions, and hundreds of others like them, cannot be explained in any other way: the U.S. Executive Branch (and related agencies) was not anti-Marxist or anti-Communist - it was and is, in fact, pro- Marxist. Those ideals which led to the heinous abuses of Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and Mussolini were now being accepted as necessary inevitabilities by our elected and appointed leaders.

This hardly suggests the Great American Dream. It is very doubtful that Americans would agree with Brzezinski or the Trilateral Commission. It is the American public who is paying the price, suffering the consequences, but not understanding the true nature of the situation.
[Photo]
This nature however, was not unknown or unknowable. Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) issued a clear and precise warning in his 1979 book, With No Apologies:
“The Trilateral Commission is international and is intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States. The Trilateral Commission represents a skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power – political, monetary, intellectual and ecclesiastical.”16

Unfortunately, few heard and even fewer understood.

Follow the Money, Follow the Power
What was the economic nature of the driving force within the Trilateral Commission? It was the giant multinational corporations - those with Trilateral representation - which consistently benefited from Trilateral policy and actions. Polished academics such as Brzezinski, Gardner, Allison, McCracken, Henry Owen etc., served only to give "philosophical" justification to the exploitation of the world.

Don't underestimate their power or the distance they had already come by 1976. Their economic base was already established. Giants like Coca-Cola, IBM, CBS, Caterpillar Tractor, Bank of America, Chase Manhattan Bank, Deere & Company, Exxon, and others virtually dwarf whatever remains of American businesses. The market value of IBM's stock alone, for instance, was greater than the value of all the stocks on the American Stock Exchange. Chase Manhattan Bank had some fifty thousand branches or correspondent banks throughout the world. What reached our eyes and ears was highly regulated by CBS, the New York Times, Time magazine, etc.

The most important thing of all is to remember that the political coup de grace preceded the economic coup de grace. The domination of the Executive Branch of the U.S. government provided all the necessary political leverage needed to skew U.S. and global economic policies to their own benefit.

By 1977, the Trilateral Commission had notably become expert at using crises (and creating them in some instances) to manage countries toward the New World Order; yet, they found menacing backlashes from those very crises.
In the end, the biggest crisis of all was that of the American way of life. Americans never counted on such powerful and influential groups working against the Constitution and freedom, either inadvertently or purposefully, and even now, the principles that helped to build this great country are all but reduced to the sound of meaningless babblings.

Trilateral Entrenchment: 1980-2007
From left: Peter Sutherland, Sadako Ogata, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Paul Volcker, David Rockefeller. (25th Anniversary, New York, Dec. 1, 1998. Source: Trilateral Commission)

It would have been damaging enough if the Trilateral domination of the Carter administration was merely a one-time anomaly; but it was not!

Subsequent presidential elections brought George H.W. Bush (under Reagan), William Jefferson Clinton, Albert Gore and Richard Cheney (under G. W. Bush) to power.

Thus, every Administration since Carter has had top-level Trilateral Commission representation through the President or Vice-president, or both!

It is important to note that Trilateral domination has transcended political parties: they dominated both the Republican and Democrat parties with equal aplomb.

In addition, the Administration before Carter was very friendly and useful to Trilateral doctrine as well: President Gerald Ford took the reins after President Richard Nixon resigned, and then appointed Nelson Rockefeller as his Vice President. Neither Ford nor Rockefeller were members of the Trilateral Commission, but Nelson was David Rockefeller’s brother and that says enough. According to Nelson Rockefeller’s memoirs, he originally introduced then-governor Jimmy Carter to David and Brzezinski.

How has the Trilateral Commission effected their goal of creating a New World Order or a New International Economic Order? They seated their own members at the top of the institutions of global trade, global banking and foreign policy.

For instance, the World Bank is one of the most critical mechanisms in the engine of globalization.17 Since the founding of the Trilateral Commission in 1973, there have been only seven World Bank presidents, all of whom were appointed by the President. Of these seven, six were pulled from the ranks of the Trilateral Commission!

Robert McNamara (1968-1981)
A.W. Clausen (1981-1986)
Barber Conable (1986-1991)
Lewis Preston (1991-1995)
James Wolfenson (1995-2005)
Paul Wolfowitz (2005-2007)
Robert Zoellick (2007-present)

Another good evidence of domination is the position of U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), which is critically involved in negotiating the many international trade treaties and agreements that have been necessary to create the New International Economic Order. Since 1977, there have been ten USTR’s appointed by the President. Eight have been members of the Trilateral Commission!

Robert S. Strauss (1977-1979)
Reubin O'D. Askew (1979-1981)
William E. Brock III (1981-1985)
Clayton K. Yeutter (1985-1989)
Carla A. Hills (1989-1993)
Mickey Kantor (1993-1997)
Charlene Barshefsky (1997-2001)
Robert Zoellick (2001-2005)
Rob Portman (2005-2006)
Susan Schwab (2006-present)

This is not to say that Clayton Yeuter and Rob Portman were not friendly to Trilateral goals, because they clearly were.

The Secretary of State cabinet position has seen its share of Trilaterals as well: Henry Kissinger (Nixon, Ford), Cyrus Vance (Carter), Alexander Haig (Reagan), George Shultz (Reagan), Lawrence Eagleburger (G.H.W. Bush), Warren Christopher (Clinton) and Madeleine Albright (Clinton) There were some Acting Secretaries of State that are also noteworthy: Philip Habib (Carter), Michael Armacost (G.H.W. Bush), Arnold Kantor (Clinton), Richard Cooper (Clinton).

Lastly, it should be noted that the Federal Reserve has likewise been dominated by Trilaterals: Arthur Burns (1970-1978), Paul Volker (1979-1987), Alan Greenspan (1987-2006). While the Federal Reserve is a privately-owned corporation, the President “chooses” the Chairman to a perpetual appointment. The current Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke, is not a member of the Trilateral Commission, but he clearly is following the same globalist policies as his predecessors.

The point raised here is that Trilateral domination over the U.S. Executive Branch has not only continued and but has been strengthened from 1976 to the present. The pattern has been deliberate and persistent: Appoint members of the Trilateral Commission to critical positions of power so that they can carry out Trilateral policies.

The question is and has always been, do these policies originate in consensus meetings of the Trilateral Commission where two-thirds of the members are not U.S. citizens? The answer is all too obvious.
Trilateral-friendly defenders attempt to sweep criticism aside by suggesting that membership in the Trilateral Commission is incidental, and that it only demonstrates the otherwise high quality of appointees. Are we to believe that in a country of 300 million people only these 100 or so are qualified to hold such critical positions? Again, the answer is all too obvious.

Where Does the Council on Foreign Relations Fit?

While virtually all Trilateral Commission members from North America have also been members of the CFR, the reverse is certainly not true. It is easy to over-criticize the CFR because most of its members seem to fill the balance of government positions not already filled by Trilaterals.

The power structure of the Council is seen in the makeup of its board of directors: No less than 44 percent (12 out of 27) are members of the Commission! If director participation reflected only the general membership of the CFR, then only 3-4 percent of the board would be Trilaterals.18

Further, the president of the CFR is Richard N. Haass, a very prominent Trilateral member who also served as Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. Department of State from 2001-2003.

Trilateral influence can easily be seen in policy papers produced by the CFR in support of Trilateral goals.
For instance, the 2005 CFR task force report on the Future of North America was perhaps the major Trilateral policy statement on the intended creation of the North American Union. Vice-chair of the task force was Dr. Robert A. Pastor, who has emerged as the “Father of the North American Union” and has been directly involved in Trilateral operations since the 1970’s. While the CFR claimed that the task force was “independent,” careful inspection of those appointed reveal that three Trilaterals were carefully chosen to oversee the Trilateral position, one each from Mexico, Canada and the United States: Luis Rubio, Wendy K. Dobson and Carla A. Hills, respectively.19 Hills has been widely hailed as the principal architect of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that was negotiated under President George H.W. Bush in 1992.
The bottom line is that the Council on Foreign Relations, thoroughly dominated by Trilaterals, serves the interests of the Trilateral Commission, not the other way around!

Trilateral Globalization in Europe
The content of this paper thus far suggests ties between the Trilateral Commission and the United States. This is not intended to mean that Trilaterals are not active in other countries as well. Recalling the early years of the Commission, David Rockefeller wrote in 1998,

“Back in the early Seventies, the hope for a more united EUROPE was already full-blown – thanks in many ways to the individual energies previously spent by so many of the Trilateral Commission’s earliest members.” [Capitals in original]20

Thus, since 1973 and in parallel with their U.S. Hegemony, the European members of the Trilateral Commission were busy creating the European Union. In fact, the EU's Constitution was authored by Commission member Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in 2002-2003, when he was President of the Convention on the Future of Europe. [For more on the EU, see European Union: Dictatorship Rising? and The Globalization Strategy: America and Europe in the Crucible]

The steps that led to the creation of the European Union are unsurprisingly similar to the steps being taken to create the North American Union today. As with the EU, lies, deceit and confusion are the principal tools used to keep an unsuspecting citizenry in the dark while they forge ahead without mandate, accountability or oversight. [See The Globalization Strategy: America and Europe in the Crucible and Toward a North American Union]

Conclusion
It is clear that the Executive Branch of the U.S. was literally hijacked in 1976 by members of the Trilateral Commission, upon the election of President Jimmy Carter and Vice-President Walter Mondale. This near-absolute domination, especially in the areas of trade, banking, economics and foreign policy, has continued unchallenged and unabated to the present.

Windfall profits have accrued to interests associated with the Trilateral Commission, but the effect of their “New International Economic Order” on the U.S. has been nothing less than devastating. (See America Plundered by the Global Elite for a more detailed analysis)

The philosophical underpinnings of the Trilateral Commission are pro-Marxist and pro-socialist. They are solidly set against the concept of the nation-state and in particular, the Constitution of the United States. Thus, national sovereignty must be diminished and then abolished altogether in order to make way for the New World Order that will be governed by an unelected global elite with their self-created legal framework.
If you are having negative sentiment against Trilateral-style globalization, you are not alone. A 2007 Financial Times/Harris poll revealed that less than 20 percent of people in six industrialized countries (including the U.S.) believe that globalization is good for their country while over 50 percent are outright negative towards it.21 (See Global Backlash Against Globalization?) While citizens around the world are feeling the pain of globalization, few understand why it is happening and hence, they have no effective strategy to counter it.
The American public has never, ever conceived that such forces would align themselves so successfully against freedom and Liberty. Yet, the evidence is clear: Steerage of America has long since fallen into the hands of an actively hostile enemy that intends to remove all vestiges of the very things that made us the greatest nation in the history of mankind.

Endnotes
1.Rockefeller, David, Memoirs (Random House, 2002), p.418
2.Trialogue, Trilateral Commission (1973)
3.Time Magazine, Jimmy Carter: Man of the Year, January 7, 1977
4.Sutton & Wood, Trilaterals Over Washington (1979), p. 7
5.New York Times, Jimmy Carter, Leslie Gelb, May 23, 1976
6.ibid.
7.Trialogue, Looking Back…And Forward, Trilateral Commission, 1976
8.ibid.
9.Sutton & Wood, Trilaterals Over Washington (1979), p. 4
10.ibid. p. 5
11.Brzezinski, Zbigniew, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (New York: Viking Press, 1973), p. 246.
12.ibid.
13.ibid.
14.ibid.
15.Gardner, Richard, The Hard Road to World Order, (Foreign Affairs, 1974) p. 558
16.Goldwater, Barry, With No Apologies, (Morrow, 1979), p. 280
17.Global Banking: The World Bank, Patrick Wood, The August Review
18.Board of Directors, Council on Foreign Relations website
19.Building a North American Community, Council on Foreign Relations, 2005
20.Rockefeller, David, In the Beginning…” The Trilateral Commission at 25, 1998, p.11
FT/Harris poll on Globalization, FT.com website

Some thoughts about gold and the future of humankind

Some thoughts about gold and the future of humankind

By Sergio U. Dani (*)

What use is gold? Gold, as any rare substance, has a high trade value. Even though gold has no real intrinsic or absolute value, it can be traded for any thing, at elusive rates. Gold has no face value. Gold is no national currency; it is international currency. Gold is pirates’ preferred currency. Gold is war currency. No matter how dirty its origins it can always be melted and laundered into “pure gold”.

The increasing departure from the dollar standard in international transactions, the increasing adoption of other national currencies and the revival of the gold standard should not be seen as coincidental. Instead, the adoption of the gold standard should be viewed as a deliberate response of some astute world players against dollar devaluation and the rise of new, perhaps more competitive players.

International adoption of gold standard is likely to dwarf nations and their people, and to facilitate international crimes, wars, and the continuing domination of world wealth and peoples lives by just a handful of astute people.

This scheme constitutes no novelty in the context of wealth-building schemes of historical record. In the 16th century, Spanish conqueror Francisco Pizarro promised Atahualpa his freedom, in return to the Inca Empire gold and silver . It proved to be an empty promise; Atahualpa was killed just after 20 tonnes of gold and silver had been handed over to Pizarro and his men.

The human toll of gold looting or gold mining throughout history has been largely overlooked, even in our times (1). This has serious consequences, because we live in a global, highly finance-oriented society, in which human life is not as valuable as gold.

There is no such thing as “enough gold” for all. If world’s official gold holdings of some 36,000 tonnes were to be equally distributed to the total world population of some 6 billion people, each person would have a share of 6 grams of “pure gold”. What use is 6 grams of “pure gold”?

In spite of continuing mining, there will never be enough gold on Earth, so gold is for the rich, which most people aren’t. International gold prices are kept under control by a handful of rich or very rich people, the very same people who control or manipulate the fake investment markets. Therefore adopting the gold standard would be as worthless as investing in gold stock markets.

Yet some people, corporations and governments use gold to convey the illusion – or sentiment – they are stronger than they really are, better than their counterparts who do not have gold or the control thereof. Thus the ownership or control of gold stocks and their prices provide a psychological basis for the exertion of power; they convey the illusion or sentiment of strength, stability and power that can be used to shape social life and human history.

Perhaps these people are unaware that not much is left to be traded for gold in a world filled with poverty and collapsing life-bearing structures. In such a world, gold may have limited future as a commodity or a symbol of stability, power and strength. The ultimate or practical basis of strength, stability and power in hard times has always been – and will increasingly be – something that has life-bearing intrinsic value. I can’t think of anything other than climate, land, water and knowledge – I mean unpolluted air, farming land, drinking water and valuable scientific education, which are becoming increasingly rare, much rarer than gold, for that sake.

You cannot breath, eat or drink gold, yet the stupid, the corrupt and the weak – be that any person, family, community, nation, state, country, economic block whatsoever – will trade life-bearing, increasingly rare assets such as unpolluted air, fertile land, pure water, and even one’s own life for gold.

While stupidity is common because it is inborn with the human – hopefully even this inborn error can be treated by medicines such as good information, good education and good science – and weakness demands protection which is scarce, one might believe that gold is bound to be used by those handful of people who have it, or those handful of people who have control of it, to dominate the stupid, the corrupt and the weak.

It is thus irrefutable truth – realized by some astute investment bankers, corporate tycoons, politicians, military and by jurists hardly at all – that gold can be turned into a sophisticated instrument of domination. This situation is likely to persist, unless stupidity (not the stupid), corruption and weakness (not the weak) be eliminated from our planet, or until stupidity, corruption and weakness eliminate us from the planet (2).

Gold shines up as a sign of absolute value. But nothing else than human life should have absolute value in any human culture. Gold, the pirate’s preferred currency, the war currency, the currency of the rich, is bound to increase the gap between the rich and the poor. However in the long term, even the rich will be affected by the devastating effects of unequal distribution of wealth, because rich and poor share the same planet and the same future. Therefore more humane solutions have to be found. Maybe we could have a better lot if “life standards” were adopted instead of (or as) “gold standard”.

Notes:

(*) Writing from Goettingen, Germany, on June 11th, 2009, for the AlertaParacatu.

(1) Recent examples of looted gold or gold gained in exchange of human lives include the holocaust gold and the Marcos gold (see “The September 11 Commission Report”, published by J.P. Heidner in: http://www.scribd.com/doc/9423598/September-11-Commission-Report-Revised-December-0082), the Congo gold (should there be any doubt, ask AngloGold Ashanti) and the Kinross/Blood Stained Gold (Blood Stained Gold, the DVD documentary, can be downloaded from www.alertaparacatu.blogspot.com. The gold itself cannot be found in Paracatu; it is being sent regularly to Canada and other places in the world. Instead of gold, there is a huge tailings impoundment with thousands of tones of toxic arsenic left behind by Kinross Gold Corporation as a gift for the 90,000 people of Paracatu, to the plight of future generations.).

(2) For those who don’t believe in that stupidity and weakness can eliminate us, I recommend a look at the fossil records of our extinct ancestors in Africa and the conditions that made them disappear. I recommend the reading of one of Phillip Tobias’ articles: Tobias, PV. 1997. Evolution of brain size, morphological restructuring and longevity in early hominids. In “Principles of Neural Aging”, pp. 153-171, Elsevier Science, 1997, ISBN 0444823298.

ARSENIC IN THE FOOD CHAIN

 ARSENIC IN THE FOOD CHAIN

SOS-arsenic.net (click here) ARSENIC IN THE FOOD CHAINCONTENT

1. Introduction
2. Food production increasing, but self-sufficiency far behind
3. Arsenic in cooked rice in Bangladesh
4. Is your seafood tainted with arsenic?1. Introduction

A study on "Arsenic in groundwater of Bangladesh: Contamination in the Food Chain" jointly conducted by the Department of Soil, Water and Environment of Dhaka University and the Common-wealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) examined a thousand samples of crops, cereals and vegetables, a thousand samples of soil and 400 samples of water from 50 upazilas in 15 most affected regions. These samples were analysed in laboratories within the country and in Australia. The samples were collected from Rangpur, Dinajpur, Kushtia, Jessore, Faridpur, Laxmipur, Narayanganj, Rajshahi, Pabna, Munshiganj, Meherpur and Dhaka.

Trilateral Plan to Corner World Gold Market?

Trilateral Plan to Corner World Gold Market?

By Patrick Wood, Editor
December 9, 2008
http://www.augustreview.com/issues/globalization/trilateral_plan_to_corner_world_gold_market?_20081209107/

[Editor's note: members of the Trilateral Commission and companies with Commission representation appear in bold type.]

Since 1973, this writer has made inquiry as to the location and ownership of the vast stores of monetary gold (400 oz., .999 pure bars) in the world. There has not been a formal audit on Fort Knox, for instance, since the Eisenhower administration. Official statistics on gold holdings are often contradictory. Getting plain answers from any Central Bank in the world, including the Fed, is virtually impossible.

This paper points out a pattern of manipulation that has been clearly observed by many people. However, patterns do not exist in a vacuum, but rather they are evidence of the existence of a stable and consistent methodology. Clearly, more study needs to be done in identifying the finer parts of the methodology and its designers, but this is a good start!

When Richard Nixon canceled the Bretton Woods system in 1971, exchangeability of paper dollars for gold was terminated. In 1970 alone, available gold vs. dollars outstanding had shrunk from 55 to 22 percent, thus exerting pressure for investors to switch to gold to avoid further dilution of dollar assets.

Although the economic and financial experts swore that gold was an outmoded, ineffective and useless financial asset, cooler heads knew better. In recent years, these same experts have reversed field and are now proclaiming that gold is still, and always has been, a consistent monetary asset. Why the flip-flop?

The economic chaos in the world today is a direct result of policies set in motion to foster a New International Economic Order (NIEO). The NIEO was the explicit creation of the Trilateral Commission, founded by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1973, and their early papers and task force reports clearly asserted their NIEO plans.
Members of the Trilateral Commission were instrumental in creating the European Union as well. The EU is the prototype of global governance that will soon exert its influence to reshuffle world relationships.

Since 1973, Trilateralists have dominated the Executive Branch of the U.S. government with politicians like Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Dick Cheney. This has led to domination of the world trade mechanisms like the World Bank and negotiation of free trade agreements.

Six out of eight presidents of the World Bank have been members of the Commission. Eight out of ten of the U.S. Trade Representatives (USTR) have been Commissioners.

Indeed, the Trilateral Commission has had undue influence and control over the development of globalization, and it was self-interested at best.

With today's total meltdown in economic and global financial markets, one must ask, "Are these people just plain stupid?"

The answer has to be "No", considering their great success at consistently dominating political and economic processes over a span of thirty-five years.
So what else is going on?

There is mounting evidence that there has been a larger plan underway to corner the global supply of gold, thus laying the groundwork for a global currency exclusively controlled by Trilaterals and their friends. By extension, economic and political mechanisms would be controlled to the same extent.

From a Trilateral perspective, the Bretton Woods system had two flaws:

Gold was rapidly being decentralized into non-Trilateral hands

It limited the arbitrary creation of paper money to finance projects launched by Trilateral-related global companies. (Read Trilaterals Over Washington (Sutton & Wood) for detailed documentation on this process)

The breakup of Bretton Woods and the resulting opportunities may have been the principal rationale for the creation of the Trilateral Commission in the first place.
Since 1973, there has been an overarching plan to quietly centralize gold into private hands, using incrementally created wealth made possible by rapidly inflating paper currencies.

This theory must be explored and tested, because if true, it represents not just the hijacking of America (already thoroughly demonstrated elsewhere in this writer's papers), but the hijacking of an entire planet!

In 1976, Antony Sutton wrote,

"The assault on gold today is an integral part of a planned move into a new economic order under the dominance of a single country. It was Nazi Germany in the 1940's; it is the United States in the 1970's. In brief, the war on gold that we observe today, and discuss below, is dollar imperialism, designed to maintain the U.S. dollar as the only world currency without competitors. The purpose is the formation of a world totalitarian state under Wall Street dominance." (The War on Gold, Antony C. Sutton, 1976, p. 63)

Sutton's view was limited because he had not yet discovered the Trilateral framework just created three years earlier in 1973. We can see now that the totalitarian state is still clearly in view, but the self-proposed rulers of this new arrangement will be members of the Trilateral Commission, and their monetary "enforcer" will be gold.

2008 Gold Hegemony
Bill Murphy is the chairman of the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA), which has asserted for almost 10 years that a concentrated gold cartel has been manipulating the price of gold. Murphy and GATA are highly regarded around the world on their work to expose this cartel.

On September 10, 2008, Murphy made an opening statement at the 2008 Las Vegas Hard Assets Investment Conference, reprinted in full below. Murphy's perspective and argument does not include the Trilateral Commission, but the players in his narrative are largely members or former members of the Commission.

This leads this writer to connect some dots between 1973-1976 and 1998-2008.
In Murphy's comments, note that the famous bullion banks of 2008 include Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Deutsche Bank, all of which have at least one director or senior official sitting on the Trilateral Commission. In addition, the players Murphy names are members of the Commission.

As Sutton did in 1976, to imply a "war on gold" necessitates an eventual victory, a victor and a loser. It is already painfully obvious that the citizens of America are the losers: The middle class is being wiped out and we all hold a debased paper currency that is headed toward destruction.

The question is, who will the winner be? And what is the victor's intent over the conquered?

Bill Murphy's Opening Statements

The Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee’s basic assertion for the past 9 ½ years is that there is a Gold Cartel out there suppressing the price of gold. It consists of the US Government, including the Fed and Treasury, various other central banks, and bullion banks like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase.

The motives of “the cabal” are to give support to the dollar, keep US interest rates lower than they should be, and to tone down the widely watched US barometer of US financial market health, that being the gold price. After all, whenever the price of gold soars, it congers up talk of too much inflation, a sinking dollar, or a crisis of some sort … all negative for Wall Street and the incumbent administration.

Therefore, “Shoot the Messenger” is The Gold Cartel’s key mission.

The suppression of the price of gold was the essence of Robert Rubin’s Strong Dollar Policy. What else did the US do to effect that policy? Talk? Jawbone?

It seems to have all started with Robert Rubin…

Before he was CEO of Goldman Sachs and then US Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin worked in London for Goldman Sachs. One of his duties was to oversee their gold trading operations. We know this because the CEO of Kirkland Lake Gold, Brian Hinchcliffe, a staunch GATA supporter, worked in London back then for Goldman Sachs and reported directly to Robert Rubin.
This was many years ago and interest rates in the US were very high, say from 6 to 12%. Rubin had Goldman Sachs borrow gold from the central banks to fund their basic operations. They could do so at about a 1 % interest rate. This was like FREE money, as long as the price of gold did not rise to any sustained degree for any length of time.

Soon other major financial institutions realized what GS was doing and copied them. Rubin continued these operations as the Goldman Sachs CEO and then took it to a new level as US Secretary Treasurer. That is how the gold price suppression became the lynchpin of his widely acclaimed “Strong Dollar Policy.” GATA’s Reg Howe caught on to this notion in a paper titled, “Gibson’s Paradox and The Gold Standard,” co-authored by Lawrence Summers in 1988. Summers, a professor at Harvard at the time, succeeded Rubin as US Treasury Secretary. The bottom line of Summer’s analysis is that “gold prices in a free market should move inversely to real interest rates.” Control gold and it will help to control interest rates.

Bullion banks such as Goldman and Morgan became The Gold Cartel’s hit men, trading the gold market from the short side and bombing the market in coordinated anti-trust fashion at the beck and call of our government, making a great deal of money in the process … as you have all witnessed the past couple of months.

In a brilliant piece a few weeks ago Ted Butler reported 3 U.S. banks held a short position of 7,787 contracts (778,700 ounces) of gold in July, and, astonishingly the same 3 U.S. banks held a short position of 86,398 contracts (8,639,800 ounces) in August, an eleven-fold increase. Gold then declined more than $150 per ounce once Secretary Paulson (note: Paulson is ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs) gave the order, just as he did in May 2006 when a similar order was given, according to a US Senator from the state of Washington. Both times, various bullion banks made vast amounts of money quickly as the US government facilitated their short positions by feeding considerable clandestine central bank gold into the physical market.

It was the concerted, concentrated action of certain BULLION BANKS, which tipped off GATA what was going on nearly a decade ago now.

It was this clandestine feeding of central bank gold into the marketplace which clued GATA into the gold price suppression scheme. Three GATA consultants, Reg Howe, Frank Veneroso and James Turk, using independent, sophisticated methodologies, came to the same conclusion years ago … that the central banks have far less gold than the 30,000 tonnes of gold they say they have. The GATA camp research shows they have less than half that amount in their vaults, the difference being the amount that has been fed into the physical market to suppress the price. Since demand for physical gold exceeds mine and scrap supply by well over than 1,000 tonnes per year, this central bank gold is vital to prevent the price from exploding.

GATA is not alone in recognizing the central banks are not accounting for their gold properly. GATA revealed an IMF paper which corroborates GATA’s claims that much of the central bank gold has been double counted and that the central banks are not properly accounting for the gold no longer in their possession.

ISSUES PAPER (RESTEG) # 11
TREATMENT OF GOLD SWAPS AND GOLD DEPOSITS (LOANS)

“14. Regarding the statistical treatment of gold swaps, its treatment should be consistent with that of other reverse transactions, as presented in paragraph 7 above. Thus, swapped gold should be excluded from both reserve assets and IIP (demonetization). This is a logical consequence, and overstating of reserve assets can be avoided. On the other hand, this results in a decrease in the financial assets of the monetary authorities.”

Gold swaps and gold leasing are at the heart of the gold price suppression scheme. For example, the US cannot sell its 8,133.5 tonnes of gold without an Act of Congress, but they could lease or swap it. In 2006 the President of the Bundesbank made an astonishing statement for a central banker: “We have been asked to negotiate with other central banks’ about potential swap deals involving gold.”

Is this stuff hush hush? I guess so. in January 1995, the Federal Reserve’s general counsel, J. Virgil Mattingly, told the Federal Open Market Committee, according to the committee’s minutes, that the U.S. Treasury Department’s Exchange Stabilization Fund had undertaken “gold swaps.” When the GATA camp had Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning inquire Alan Greenspan what that was all about, Mattingly came back and said the Fed testimony was GARBLED … Right…

Recently GATA filed Freedom of Information Act requests to the Fed and Treasury about US gold swaps. The Fed redacted 300 pages of information and refused to send another 400 pages. Now, think about it … if the US gold is, and has been, just sitting in our vaults, without a true independent audit since the Eisenhower Administration, what is their to withhold?

As for GATA’s request to the Treasury about any Exchange Stabilization Fund activity into the gold market, they answered in the negative by referring to the Exchange STABILITY Fund. Can they be that lame?

Is the gold price manipulated? You don’t need to read through GATA’s countless evidence to appreciate what is going on. It is on the public record…
beginning with Alan Greenspan’s testimony before Congress in 1998:

“Central banks stand ready to lease gold in increasing quantities should the price rise” … which is just what they have done!

The Reserve Bank of Australia confessed to the gold price suppression scheme in its annual report for 2003. “Foreign currency reserve assets and gold,” the RBA’s report said, “are held primarily to support intervention in the foreign exchange market.

Maybe the most brazen admission of the Western central bank scheme to suppress the gold price was made by the head of the monetary and economic department of the Bank for International Settlements, William S. White, in a speech to a BIS conference in Basel, Switzerland, in June 2005. There are five main purposes of central bank cooperation, White announced, and one of them is “the provision of international credits and joint efforts to influence asset prices (especially gold and foreign exchange) in circumstances where this might be thought useful.”
Barrick Gold, then the largest gold-mining company in the world, confessed to the gold price suppression scheme in U.S. District Court in New Orleans on February 28, 2003. On that date Barrick filed a motion to dismiss Blanchard & Co.’s anti-trust lawsuit against Barrick and its bullion banker, JP Morgan Chase, for rigging the gold market.

Barrick’s motion said that in borrowing gold from central banks and selling it, the company had become the agent of the central banks in the gold market, and, as the agent of the central banks, Barrick should share their sovereign immunity and be exempt from suit.

Is the gold price manipulated today? Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker wrote the following in his memoirs:

“Joint intervention in gold sales to prevent a steep rise in the price of gold (in the 1970s), however, was not undertaken. That was a mistake.” …

Robert Rubin and gang took heed … as are more and more in the mainstream financial world. Just last week, the highly regarded Don Coxe of the Bank of Montreal stated the following in an audio presentation last about recent market action to the bank’s clients:
“The Most Massive Intervention Of Government Into The Capital Markets, Or The Financial Markets, Since President Roosevelt Closed The Banks Back In 1933,”

It’s wake up time, finally.

Recently, there has been talk about the Working Group on Financial Markets (more commonly known as The Plunge Protection Team), which consists of the President, Treasury Secretary, and heads of the CFTC and SEC. Think about it … why are bureaucrats included in meetings about the markets except to look the other way regarding government intervention?

To give you an idea just how pervasive and insidious our markets have become, I bring your attention to the Counterparty Risk Management Group. Ever hear of it?

It consists of major players in the investment banking/hedge fund community in New York, including Goldman Sachs. Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Deutsche Bank (all defendants in GATA’s Reg Howe’s suit against The Gold Cartel in 2001). There are a number of other participants such as the famed hedge fund of Paul Tudor Jones.

On July 27, 2005, E. Gerald Corrigan, former President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and now a Managing Director of Goldman Sachs, wrote:

The Report of the Counterparty Risk Management Policy Group II Addressing it to:

Mr. Henry M. Paulson, Jr.
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Goldman, Sachs & Co.
(all roads always lead back to Goldman Sachs)

He stated; “since we know that financial disturbances and even financial shocks will occur in the future, and we know that no approaches to risk management or official supervision are fail-safe, we also know that we must preserve and strengthen the institutional arrangements whereby, at the point of crisis, industry groups and industry leaders, as well as supervisors, are prepared to work together in order to serve the larger and shared goal of financial stability.”

This Orwellian shared goal of financial stability, which began with the serious rigging of the gold price under Robert Rubin, has led us to the financial market mess we have today. It is wrong and must be stopped!

Is the cat out of the bag?

In the 2007 May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, Benn Steil presented his paper, The End of National Currency. Steil is Director of International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. In his report, Steil stated,

"So what about gold? A revived gold standard is out of the question. In the nineteenth century, governments spent less than ten percent of national income in a given year. Today, they routinely spend half or more, and so they would never subordinate spending to the stringent requirements of sustaining a commodity-based monetary system. But private gold banks already exist, allowing account holders to make international payments in the form of shares in actual gold bars. Although clearly a niche business at present, gold banking has grown dramatically in recent years, in tandem with the dollar's decline. A new gold-based international monetary system surely sounds far-fetched. But so, in 1900, did a monetary system without gold. Modern technology makes a revival of gold money, through private gold banks, possible even without government support."

This is hardly far-fetched. Zbigniew Brzezinski noted in 1972 that "the nation-state as a fundamental unit of man's organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state."

Cracks in the dam

Noted Romanian economist, Professor Antal Fekete, released a critical report on December 5, 2008, entitled "Red Alert: Gold Backwardation."

For the first time in history, gold futures sold below spot price and creates a potential crisis in gold delivery at the end of December. Fekete states,

"According to the December 3rd Comex delivery report, there are 11,759 notices to take delivery. This represents 1.1759 million ounces of gold, while the Comex-approved warehouses hold 2.9 million ounces. Thus 40% of the total amount will have to be delivered by December 31st. Since not all the gold in the warehouses is available for delivery, Comex supply of gold falls far short of the demand at present rates. Futures markets in gold are breaking down. Paper gold is progressively being discredited..."
"Gold going to permanent backwardation means that gold is no longer for sale at any price, whether it is quoted in dollars, yens, euros, or Swiss francs. The situation is exactly the same as it has been for years: gold is not for sale at any price quoted in Zimbabwe currency, however high the quote is. To put it differently, all offers to sell gold are being withdrawn, whether it concerns newly mined gold, scrap gold, bullion gold or coined gold. I dubbed this event that has cast its long shadow forward for many a year, the last contango in Washington ― contango being the name for the condition opposite to backwardation (namely, that of a positive basis), and Washington being the city where the Paper-mill of the Potomac, the Federal Reserve Board, is located. This is a tongue-in-cheek way of saying that the jig in Washington is up. The music has stopped on the players of ‘musical chairs’. Those who have no gold in hand are out of luck. They won’t get it now through the regular channels. If they want it, they will have to go to the black market."

Conclusion

If Fekete is correct, and he has seldom been wrong, then the trap is snapping shut on who will own the gold in 2009. Free-market supplies of gold are drying up, but the price is being kept low as global institutions sop up whatever crumbs are left.

Several very serious implications can be drawn:

The massive amounts of gold leased to bullion banks will ultimately be seized by these same banks as collateral against worthless paper loans made to the Central Banks.

Central Banks (including the Federal Reserve) could well be left to disintegrate in order to give way to a single global central bank controlled and fueled by the bullion banks who have Monopoly control over the world's gold.

These superbanks are all closely tied to the goals and membership of the Trilateral Commission, whose members have methodically carried out a monetary policy designed to bring about this eventuality.

For all practical intent, individuals will be frozen out of the gold market at any price.

Indeed, a global totalitarian state may be closer than we think; as the globalist's golden rule states, "He who has the gold, makes the rules."

Letter to Mr. von dem Bussche

Letter to Mr. von dem Bussche

Göttingen, 19th June 2009

Dear Mr. von dem Bussche,

We kindly request a copy of your speech delivered yesterday, at the Altes Rathaus in Göttingen, for publication at the Acangau Foundation's websites:
www.alertaparacatu.blogspot.com and www.acangau.net.

Acangau Foundation is a non-profit NGO established 1991 in Brazil to contribute a technological and cultural platform for sustainable development. The foundation headqurters are located at the Acangau Valley and Acangau Natural Reserve, in Paracatu, state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, 200 km S. of Brasilia-DF. The foundation's assets include 83 hectares divided into four areas which are closely located to each other in the Acangau Valley; a share in the 3,000 hectare Acangau Reserve, and facilities such as the NAP building (for the support of researchers in field work), the Pohl Lab (a molecular biology lab), a plant nursery and the Enterprise Incubation Area.

While Acangau Foundation is strongly committed to the sustainable use of natural resources, it is a fierce opponent to the expansion of the Kinross Gold Corporation mining project in Paracatu as it is being done. The Acangau Foundation is fostering new business models as counterparts for their predatory mining model.

One of the programs set out by Acangau Foundation is the Acangau Valley Science Park and its Innovative Enterprise Incubator. There are presently two start-up companies being incubated in the Acangau Valley: Excegen Genetica SA and Glia Ambiental ltda.

Excegen is Brazil's pioneer in the field of Marker-Assisted Selection (MAS) of bovine cattle. It has 2 patents on the use of DNA polymorphisms to select more productive, tropical cattle. The company was recipient of three tranches of non-refundable seed-money from private investors in the period from 2003 to 2006. In 2007, Excegen went into a quiescent phase, due to the unwillingness of its capitalist investors to scale-up the company's business plan. This led the enterpreneur associates to acquire the capitalist's shares of Excegen. Meanwhile some powerful players such as Merial and Pfizer made their entrance in the catttle MAS business in Brazil, making it worth investing in Excegen's patents and know how. Excegen is thus seeking for an investor.

Glia Ambiental ltda. is a small company founded and incubated at the Acangau Valley to explore tropical soil management technologies, soil conditioning, and development of more adapted indigenous crops, such as indigenous maize varieties. Glia is also interested in developing the sustainable management of other natural resources and the technology thereof. It has been shaped as a "model company" to fit the aims of a showcase in Paracatu region. Indeed, Paracatu has become a seed-production centre in Brazil, with 4 seed companies installed there, including COODETEC, Monsanto and Dow AgroScience.

Another important project relates to water production. Acangau Foundation's efforts towards the conservation of soils, water bodies and forests at the Acangau Reserve account for the largest man-made contribution for public water supply for the 90,000 inhabitants of the town of Paracatu. To disseminate these efforts, Acangau Foundation has created APACAN - Acangau's water producers association, early in 2004. In the same year, this project was awarded the "Blue Gold Trophy" by the Ministry of Mines and Energy of Brazil, Eletrobras, Furnas and Diários Associados joint commission.

It has become increasingly important to deliver good quality information about these projects and their meaning to the public. We believe in education for human and environmental rights and values as the major force for human and environmental sustainability and further cultural evolution. To strengthen public awareness of what is going on, Acangau Foundation has incorporated the Serrano Neves Institute for socio-environmental education, which is held and maintained by Public Prosecutor Paulo Mauricio Serrano Neves. In Germany, Acangau Foundation has just started a collaboration with the Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker (Göttingen), which is considering ways by which it could help us in our fight for the rights of the Quilombola people who live in the very site where Kinross plans to build a new tailings dam in Paracatu.

As you can see from this brief description of Acangau Foundation's projects and aims, we share common interests and values. Your speech at the Rathaus yesterday sets the example of how an international company can expand its business worldwide based on sustainability criteria and the cultivation of human values.

We share with you the concept that tendering real human values are the only way out of the present world crisis. Unless there is a profound change in human behavior and human values worldwide, human civilizations as we know are bound to be irreversibly downgraded.

We thus welcome the publication of your speech and any other form of collaboration you may label relevant.

Looking forward to hearing from you at your best convenience,

Dr.med., D.Sc. Sergio U. Dani
President of the Acangau Foundation

*United Nations Synthesis Report on Arsenic in Drinking-Water*

*United Nations Synthesis Report on Arsenic in Drinking-Water*

*By various authors*

*WHO, 2001*
* *
*Accessible from:
http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/dwq/arsenic3/en/*
* *
*- HIGHLIGHTS (bearing on the Paracatu issue, MG, Brazil) -*
* *
*"In areas where some geological units are arseniferous and others are not, it is important to avoid cross-contamination, which can occur in several ways. In some cases, the arsenic-rich zones may be naturally in hydraulic connection with arsenic -free zones. By pumping water from arsenic -free zones, arsenic -rich water may be induced to flow into previously uncontaminated strata, and eventually may reach the well." *
* *
*"(...) in many soils and aquifers, much of the arsenic appears to be associated with secondary minerals such as iron, aluminium and manganese oxides, probably in large part as adsorbed arsenic species. This form is particularly sensitive to changes in the environment and it only takes a small change in the amount of arsenic adsorbed to change the concentration of arsenic in the groundwater significantly. For example, if it assumed that say 1 mg kg-1 of the sediment arsenic is present in a labile form, in the event of complete dissolution or desorption, this would produce up to 3000-6000 ì**g As l-1 in the groundwater, many times the WHO guideline value."*
* *
*"An important consequence of the highly non-linear adsorption for arsenate is that even at the ì**g l-1 level of arsenic in solution, the arsenic loading on the oxide can be appreciable corresponding to thousands of mg As/kg in the case of hydrous ferric oxide (Hfo)."*
* *
*"Significant increases in arsenic concentrations of river waters may also occur as a result of pollution from industrial or sewage effluents." *
* *
* "Arsenic concentrations much higher than baseline values have been found in sediments and soils contaminated by the products of mining activity, including mine tailings and effluent. Concentrations in tailings piles and tailings-contaminated soils can reach up to several thousand mg kg-1. The high concentrations reflect not only increased abundance of primary arsenic -rich sulphide minerals, but also secondary iron arsenates and iron oxides formed as reaction products of the original ore minerals. The primary sulphide minerals are susceptible to oxidation in the tailings pile and the secondary minerals have varying solubility in oxidising conditions in groundwaters and surface waters. Scorodite (FeAsO4.2H2O) is a common sulphide oxidation product and its solubility is considered to control arsenic concentrations in such oxidising sulphide environments. Scorodite is metastable under most groundwater conditions and tends to dissolve incongruently, forming iron oxides and releasing arsenic into solution (Robins, 1987; Kraus and Ettel, 1989)."*
* *
*"Azcue and Nriagu (1995) found baseline concentrations in the Moira River, Ontario of 0.7 ì**g l-1 upstream of the influence of tailings from gold-mine workings. Downstream, concentrations increased to 23 ì**g l-1. Azcue et al. (1994) found concentrations up to 556 ì**g l-1 (average 17.5 ì**g l-1) in streams adjacent to tailings deposits in British Columbia. Williams et al. (1996) and Smedley et al. (1996) noted high arsenic concentrations (typically around 200-300 ì**g l-1) in surface waters affected respectively by tin- and gold- mining activities." *
* *
*"As with Ron Phibun District in Thailand, the gold is associated with sulphide mineralisation, particularly arsenopyrite. Arsenic mobilises in the local environment as a result of arsenopyrite oxidation, induced (or exacerbated) by the mining activity. Around the town of Obuasi, high As concentrations have been noted in soils close to the mines and treatment works (Amasa, 1975; Bowell, 1992; 1993). Some high concentrations have also been reported in river waters close to the mining activity (Smedley et al., 1996)."*
* *
*"In the cases where affected groundwaters are found close to obvious geological or industrial sources rich in arsenic (geothermal springs, drainage from mineralised and mining areas, specific contaminant sources), it is clear that the anomalously high arsenic concentrations in the source region are responsible."*
* *
*"The greater the quantity of arsenic involved, the more strongly it is adsorbed and the slower the rate of groundwater movement, the longer that high-arsenic groundwaters will persist".*
* *
*"Significant changes in arsenic transport in groundwater may occur locally due to the influence of mining, groundwater pumping and irrigation. Mining in hardrock areas may in effect create a new aquifer with extensive fracturing, adits and other drainage channels. The water table is also often lowered by drainage or pumping and this can induce air entry and enhanced oxidation."*
* *
*"The mobilisation of As is believed to be caused by oxidation of arsenopyrite, exacerbated by the former tin- mining activities. The recent appearance in groundwater has occurred during post- mining groundwater rebound (Williams, 1997)."*
* *
*"Arsenic is unusual in that sufficient human epidemiological data of acceptable scientific quality are available for the assessment of health risks associated with the long-term exposure to arsenic. Long-term exposure to arsenic in drinking water is causally related to increased risks of cancer in the skin, lungs, bladder and kidney, as well as other skin changes such as hyperkeratosis and pigmentation changes. These effects have been clearly demonstrated in a number of epidemiological studies of differing design. High risks and exposure-dose relationships have been observed for each of these end-points."*
* *
*"A few epidemiological studies have highlighted that none of the exposed population to environmental As show any clinical manifestation of chronic As toxicity. (Goldsmith 1980. Harrington et al 1978. Valentine et al 1985). Further, there is a wide variation in the incidence of chronic arsenicosis in an affected population. Even not all members of an affected family show clinical effect. The reasons for such variation of disease expression  is an enigma. However, as the As exposed people are at risk for developing As related cancer, they should be subjected to prolonged surveillance."*
* *
*"Raie (1996) compared tissue arsenic levels in infants (aged 1 day to 5 months) and adults from Glasgow, Scotland using NAA. Mean levels of arsenic (ppm or ug/g dry weight) in liver, lung and spleen in infants versus adults were 0.0099 vs. 0.048, 0.007 vs. 0.044, and 0.0049 vs. 0.015, respectively. These data suggest that arsenic accumulates in tissues with age, a finding that is wholly consistent with observations in laboratory animals (Marafante et al., 1982)."*
* *
*"In spite of the higher risk of contamination, in many cases surface water is the only feasible water source, and various low-cost , low-tech options for water treatment are available." *
* *
*"The mitigation strategy for arsenic contamination can entail arsenic removal, but because of the costs and operational complexity of the technologies involved, it is often preferable to seek an alternative water source of good quality."*
* *
*"Given that arsenic removal is prohibitively expensive in many circumstances, much will depend on the availability of feasible alternative water sources."*
* *
*"The best treatment strategy when symptoms start emerging is the provision of arsenic -free water." *
* *
*"It is now clear that the chronic effects of low concentrations of arsenic in drinking water have been underestimated. Large populations in various parts of the world are exposed to levels of arsenic above safe limits. The full epidemiological implications of arsenic contamination are only now emerging, and it is likely that over the coming decade more arsenicosis cases will be identified. This adds substantially to the complexity of water service provision. Arsenic removal is - in general - expensive and technically difficult, and alternative water sources may either be unavailable or can pose their own serious health risks (such as increased diarrhoeal disease incidence)." *
* *
*"Many of the worst problems occur in poor countries without the necessary infrastructure to be able to respond rapidly."*
* *
*"What is clear is that the poor, and especially the rural poor, are the most vulnerable."*
* *
*"If the water supply is of good quality and replaces old contaminated wells or supplies, it also contributes towards improvements in public health. Finally, water is increasingly seen by many to be a basic human right and thus the provision of water to all, at a reasonable cost, is an imperative that must be fulfilled by governments and other duty-bearers (see, for example, Article 24 of the Convention of the Rights of the Child  -United Nations 1989)."*

Letter to the World Health Organization, June 2009

Letter to the World Health Organization, June 2009

To Dr Margaret Chan

Director-General of WHO

World Health Organization
Avenue Appia 20
1211 Geneva 27
Switzerland

Telephone: + 41 22 791 21 11
Facsimile (fax): + 41 22 791 31 11

Göttingen, June 24th, 2009

Madam,

I am writing to You in your capacity as Director-General of the World Health Organization to ask for your immediate action to prevent an imminent arsenic catastrophe in Brazil.

Canadian Kinross Gold Corporation plans to build a gigantic tailings impoundment on top of three important springs of an aquifer which constitutes the ultimate affordable resource of public water supply to Paracatu, a 90,000 inhabitants, historical town in northwestern Minas Gerais state, 200 km S. of Brasilia-DF.

The 1.2 million tons of arsenic to be released by the expansion of the Morro do Ouro mine by Kinross will sum up with some 0.3 million tons of arsenic that have been already disposed in the first tailings impoundment. This unbelievable amount of 1.5 million tons of arsenic is a dreadful hazard that must be avoided.

As already shown by several reports, including the 2001 United Nations synthesis report on arsenic in drinking water (quoted in the attached fact sheet, along with other evidence), a substancial part of that arsenic shall slowly and persistently spread over a large area in the São Francisco river basin, causing arsenicosis and cancer to millions of people during the coming years, decades and centuries.

The São Francisco river and its basin play a key role to the development of Brazil. The São Francisco is the only river that crosses the semi-arid Northeast part of the country without drying up. Its waters shall convey life and wealth, not death and plight. Lots of national and international money and time, and entire lives of dedicated people have been invested in the development of the region. Now all these efforts are being jeopardized by a single mining project that threatens the region with mass poisoning.

Madam, we appeal to your relevant and decided acting in this issue. It is necessary to take urgent steps. Owing to suspensions of the preliminary verdicts in two public lawsuits, we expect that Kinross will be given an installation permit for the new tailings impoundment at any time. Failure or delay to action will cause irreversible damage and will set the stage for a catastrophe.

Yours Sincerely,

Sergio Ulhoa Dani, Dr.med., D.Sc.

President of the Acangau Foundation

c.c.:

Mrs. Mirta Roses Periago

Regional Office of the World Health Organization
525 Twenty-third Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20037, United States of America
Tel: (202) 974-3000 Fax: (202) 974-3663

Eng. Diego Victoria Mejía

PAHO/WHO representative in Brazil

OPAS - Setor de Embaixadas Norte, Lote 19 , Brasília-DF Brasil 70800-400
Tel: +55 61 3251 9595 Fax: +55 61 3251 9591

Attachments:

. Fact Sheet

. Suggestion of a letter to be sent by WHO to Minas Gerais State Secretary for Environment and Sustainable Development, Mr. Jose Carlos Carvalho. This letter could be forwarded to other Brazilian Government authorities as well, further actions by WHO notwithstanding.

Letter to World Bank's President, Mr. Robert B. Zoellick

Letter to World Bank's President, Mr. Robert B. Zoellick

To Mr. Robert B. Zoellick

President

The World Bank
1818 H Street, NW
Washington, DC 20433 USA

tel: (202) 473-1000
fax: (202) 477-6391

c.c.: World Bank Country Director for Brazil, Raid (UK), Mines and Communities, Mining Watch Canada, Friends of the Earth, International Society for Endangered People (GfbV, Germany), Okanogan Highlands Alliance, Movimento pelas Serras e Águas de Minas, Projeto Manuelzão, World Health Organization, Brazilian authorities, national and international media

Göttingen, June 30, 2009

Sir,

I am writing to You in your capacity as Chief Executive of World Bank *to ask for your immediate action to prevent an imminent catastrophe in Brazil*, which is to be brought about by the unwarranted expansion of a large-scale mining project, backed by the Minas Gerais State Government and a World Bank loan.

In 2008, World Bank signed a contract with the Minas Gerais state government by which this government will be loaned some US$ 1 billion until 2010. This was the first time World Bank conceded a loan directly to a Brazilian state without asking for any warrants but the achievement of certain agreed results.

In an interview, former World Bank director in Brazil John Briscoe appreciated this fact as “the first time in the bank’s 60 year history in which such a big loan is given to a sub-national entity”. Minas Gerais state governor Aécio Neves compared the loan to “a sign” of World Bank’s trust in Minas Gerais State, whose government will use the money to achieve, in several sectors, some “previously established goals”.

Now it becomes increasingly clear that one of these “previously established goals” is to set the stage for a real catastrophe.

Canadian Kinross Gold Corporation has been dealing with Minas Gerais State government authorities as early as 2004, when it bought 100% interests in the Paracatu Morro do Ouro Mine from the mining giant Rio Tinto.

In 2006, as Minas Gerais state governor Aécio Neves announced Kinross’ expansion project in Paracatu, he also made clear one of the goals of his government was “to attract some R$100 billion in investments until 2010, most of this amount being in the mining industry.”

Minas Gerais State secretary Wilson Brumer added to Mr. Neves statement: “Northwest Minas Gerais is a much important region. The Minas Gerais state government is going to invest very much in this region in terms of increase in energy offer, to match the region’s abilities in the mining and agriculture industries.”

In a second official announcement later in 2007, made in the presence of Kinross director Tim Baker, the same state secretary Wilson Brumer welcomed Kinross’ decision to invest in Paracatu as “a demonstration of trust in the Minas Gerais state.”

Having built an impressive track record in the mining industry and state agencies alike, Mr. Brumer was finally appointed to Kinross Gold Corporation direction board, as of May 2009.

As early as 2007 we have called the attention of the Minas Gerais state government agencies and people, *including governor Aécio Neves himself*, during one of his visits to Paracatu, to a large spectrum of evidence and facts that allow for the conclusion that *Kinross’ expansion project in Paracatu is worse than a crime, it is a blunder*.

Kinross plans to build a gigantic tailings impoundment on top of three important springs of an aquifer which constitutes the ultimate affordable resource of public water supply to Paracatu, a 90,000 inhabitants,
historical town in northwestern Minas Gerais state, 200 km S. of Brasilia-DF.

The 1.2 million tons of arsenic to be released by the expansion of the Morro do Ouro mine by Kinross will sum up with some 0.3 million tons of arsenic that have been already disposed in the first tailings impoundment. This unbelievable amount of 1.5 million tons of arsenic is a dreadful hazard that must be avoided.

As already shown by several reports, including the 2001 *United Nations Synthesis Report on Arsenic in Drinking Water* (quoted in the attached fact sheet, along with other serious evidence), a substantial part of that arsenic shall slowly and persistently spread over a large area in the São Francisco river basin, causing arsenicosis and cancer to millions of people during the coming years, decades and centuries.

The São Francisco river and its basin play a key role to the development of Brazil. The São Francisco is the only river that crosses the semi-arid Northeast part of the country without drying up. Its waters shall convey
life and wealth, not death and plight. Lots of national and international money and time, and entire lives of dedicated people have been invested in the development of the region. Now all these efforts are being jeopardized by a single mining project that threatens the region with mass poisoning.

*We take into account that World Bank considers it as inconvenient to have its name involved as a contributor to the environmental degradation of a city’s water resources and the plight of a whole region, even though World Bank would not admit direct responsibility for the potential chronic
poisoning by arsenic of thousands of people**. *

* *

In 2003, an independent review commissioned by the World Bank (the
Extractive Industries Report, EIR, released November 25), recommends steps
forward in regulating the mining industry, recognizing local people's rights
and implementing “best practice.” **

However many organizations such as Friends of the Earth International believe that the World Bank should withdraw from large-scale mining altogether: “Development finance should instead be used to support job transition, mine closure, reparations payment and alternative solutions such as re-use, recycling and reducing consumption.”

In view of the situation you may think it desirable to have more permanent contact maintained between World Bank, the Minas Gerais state government and the organized Paracatu community *in order to provide financial support to encourage the immediate closure of the Paracatu mine and the obligatory socio-economical and environmental restoration of Paracatu.*

This could be achieved through World Bank’s support in a number of community-based actions:

1. One restoration action should be to set up and fund a comprehensive water production programme for the whole Serra da Anta System, including the Machadinho Valley. This might be accomplished through a concerted action starting with the recognition of the 50,000 hectare Serra da Anta System as an area of public interest for water supply and the conservation of natural resources and endangered people and cultures. This is precisely the aim of the so called “Paracatu Waters Law”, under scrutiny by the Paracatu City Hall.

2. Another restoration action should be to fund long needed infrastructural, scientific, technological and educational projects in Paracatu including: (i) the sanitation and ecological restoration of the Rico Creek and all its tributaries within the urban settlement area, as a counterpart to the unwarranted, incomplete and damaging Kinross’ actions on this creek; (ii) the set up of institutional programmes on environment monitoring, comprehensive health surveys, and scientific and technological education and training for sustainable development.

3. Further development financing should be provided to support job transition during mine closure, reparations payment and alternative solutions such as re-use, recycling and reducing consumption.

All these actions should be aimed at resetting Paracatu town as a green town.

Sir, we appeal to your relevant and decided acting in this issue. It is necessary to take urgent steps. Owing to suspensions of the preliminary verdicts in two public lawsuits, we expect that Kinross will be given an installation permit by the Minas Gerais state government for the new tailings impoundment at any time. Failure or delay to action will cause irreversible damage and will set the stage for a catastrophe.

Yours Sincerely,

Sergio Ulhoa Dani, Dr.med., D.Sc.
President of the Acangau Foundation (Paracatu-MG, Brazil)

srgdani@gmail.com

www.alertaparacatu.blogspot.com

www.acangau.net