Libyan war: Just another bailout for the banking class

Four days before President Obama made the unilateral decision for war with Libya, under the innocuous banner of a humanitarian NATO action to prevent civilian deaths, the African Union met in Ethiopia to discuss Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi’s proposal to unite the African continent with Arab states in a confederation called the United States of Africa. [1] Both our president and the lapdog U.S. press failed to inform the American people why this just might be of interest to them.

Gaddafi’s plan calls for a common African currency. The Libyan dinar would become the African dinar with more than one billion people and many of the top oil producing countries using it. Libya, with 143.8 tons of gold worth $6.5 billion [2] and the world’s ninth ranked oil reserves, just may have the resources to pull this off.

This from U.S. Department of Treasury concerning the seizing of Libyan financial assets upon our commencement of bombing: “The Libyan National Oil Corporation has been a primary funding source for the Qadhafi regime,” said OFAC Director Adam J. Szubin. “Consistent with UN Security Council Resolution 1973, all governments should block the National Oil Corporation’s assets and ensure that Qadhafi cannot use this network of companies to support his activities.”

“Treasury will continue monitoring the National Oil Corporation’s operations in Libya. Should National Oil Corporation subsidiaries or facilities come under different ownership and control, Treasury may consider authorizing dealings with such entities.” [3]

Robert Wentzel reported on EconomicPolicyJournal.com: “Here’s one for the Guinness Book of Records. The Libyan rebels in Benghazi said they have created a new national oil company to replace the corporation controlled by leader Muammar Qaddafi whose assets were frozen by the United Nations Security Council and have formed a central bank!

“The Transitional National Council (Libyan rebel government) released a statement announcing the decision made at a March 19 meeting to establish the ‘Libyan Oil Company as supervisory authority on oil production and policies in the country, based temporarily in Benghazi, and the appointment of an interim director general” of the company.

“The Council also said it “designated the Central Bank of Benghazi as a monetary authority competent in monetary policies in Libya and the appointment of a governor to the Central Bank of Libya, with a temporary headquarters in Benghazi.” [4]

On the same day that our president took us to war, the Libyan rebels set up their own oil company to do business with the Western capitalist countries in place of the now outlawed by NATO Libya National Oil Corporation. Also, on the same day Libyan rebels set up a new central bank that one can only assume is privately owned, since the EU and other Western capitalist banks would not be interested in dealing with a publicly held bank like the current Central Bank of Libya.

Eric V. Encina in the Market Oracle: “One seldom mentioned fact by western politicians and media pundits: the Central Bank of Libya (the present one under Gaddifi) is 100% State Owned. The world’s globalist financiers and market manipulators do not like it and would continue their on-going effort to dethrone Muammar Muhammad al-Gaddafi, bringing an end to Libya as independent nation.

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

“When the smoke eventually clears from all the cruise missiles and cluster bombs, you will see the Allied reformers move in to reform Libya’s monetary system, pumping it full of worthless dollars, priming it for a series of chaotic inflationary cycles.” [5]

The Bank for International Settlements, Basel, Switzerland (BIS) is the central bankers’ central bank. It has 56 member central banks, all privately owned including our own private Federal Reserve. Not listed as members are the central banks in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran. General Wesley Clark stated in a Democracy Now interview that he was told ten days after Sept 11, 2001 that we would be going to war with Iraq and within five years with all the other countries just listed. [6] Why does the West desire war with countries that have public banking systems that benefit their people, unlike Western ‘democracies’ that have private banking systems benefiting their wealthy owners?

“BIS regulations serve only the single purpose of strengthening the international private banking system, even at the peril of national economies. The BIS does to national banking systems what the IMF (International Monetary Fund) has done to national monetary regimes. National economies under financial globalization no longer serve national interests. They operate to strengthen what US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan calls US financial hegemony in the name of private profit. The IMF and the international banks regulated by the BIS are a team: the international banks lend recklessly to borrowers in emerging economies to create a foreign currency debt crisis, the IMF arrives as a carrier of monetary virus in the name of sound monetary policy, then the international banks come as vulture investors in the name of financial rescue to acquire national banks deemed capital inadequate and insolvent by the BIS.” [7] Economic critic Henry Liu wrote this is 2002. Certainly the Greeks, Spaniards, Portuguese and Irish would attest to the sagacity of his insight after the devastation wrote on their economies by global speculation in their currencies and IMF structural reform.

Ellen Brown wrote Web of Debt a critical analysis of the debt based enslavement produced by the private banking system in the U.S. and other Western capitalist countries. This is from her article in Intrepid Report: “Libya: All About Oil or All About Banking?”

“The presumption of the rule against borrowing from the government’s own central bank is that this will be inflationary, while borrowing existing money from foreign banks or the IMF will not. But all banks actually create the money they lend on their books, whether publicly-owned or privately-owned. Most new money today comes from bank loans. Borrowing it from the government’s own central bank has the advantage that the loan is effectively interest-free. Eliminating interest has been shown to reduce the cost of public projects by an average of 50%.

“And that appears to be how the Libyan system works. According to Wikipedia, the functions of the Central Bank of Libya include ‘issuing and regulating banknotes and coins in Libya’ and ‘managing and issuing all state loans.’ Libya’s wholly state-owned bank can and does issue the national currency and lend it for state purposes.

“That would explain where Libya gets the money to provide free education and medical care, and to issue each young couple $50,000 in interest-free state loans. It would also explain where the country found the $33 billion to build the Great Man-Made River project (the greatest system of underground pipes and aqueducts in the world which supplies 6.5 million cubic meters of fresh water per day to Tripoli, Benghazi and other Libyan cities, described by Gaddafi as the Eighth Wonder of the World, Wikipedia). Libyans are worried that NATO-led air strikes are coming perilously close to this pipeline, threatening another humanitarian disaster.

“So is this new war all about oil or all about banking? Maybe both—and water as well. With energy, water, and ample credit to develop the infrastructure to access them, a nation can be free of the grip of foreign creditors. And that may be the real threat of Libya: it could show the world what is possible. Most countries don’t have oil, but new technologies are being developed that could make non-oil-producing nations energy-independent, particularly if infrastructure costs are halved by borrowing from the nation’s own publicly-owned bank. Energy independence would free governments from the web of the international bankers, and of the need to shift production from domestic to foreign markets to service the loans.

“If the Gaddafi government goes down, it will be interesting to watch whether the new central bank joins the BIS, whether the nationalized oil industry gets sold off to investors, and whether education and health care continue to be free.” [8]

It should come as no great shock to any student of American foreign policy that we would react militarily to any threat to capitalism and empire. Our CIA has supported military coups against democratically elected governments in at least 15 countries:

• Cuba (1952)
• Iran (1953)
• Guatemala (1954)
• Zaire (1961, 1965)
• Dominican Republic (1963)
• Brazil (1964)Indonesia (1965)
• Greece (1967)
• Laos (1967–1973)
• Ecuador (1961, 1963 and unsuccessful 2010)
• Chile (1973)
• Nicaragua (1979–1990)
• Haiti (1991, 2004)
• Venezuela (unsuccessful 2002)
• Honduras (2009)

The common link they all had was a leftist/socialist government that was a threat to the capitalist/globalist exploitation of the developing world. The CIA continues to do the same thing in many other countries, this is just a list of democratically elected governments militarily overthrown with help from the CIA.

But what can’t be done covertly must be done overtly. When the revolution needed help we were quick to enlist the U.N. to giving an OK and our Western capitalist partners in NATO to go along with war in the guise of humanitarian intervention. There is little doubt that our CIA was involved in fomenting the Libyan revolution in Benghazi. The chief rebel commander is none other than Colonel Khalifa Haftar (Heftar), a former compatriot of Gaddafi who supported Gaddafi’s coup in 1969 and was a member of Gaddafi’s Revolutionary Command Council before breaking away from him in 1987. [9] Haftar was the head of a resistance to Gaddafi under the title of the Libyan National Army since the 1987 split in Chad. In 1991 he moved his headquarters to Falls Church, Virginia, 7 miles from the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. It has been an open secret that he has been on the CIA payroll. [10]

Many of those revolting, I am sure, have legitimate issues with Gaddafi’s rule. It seems there is a natural East/West tribal split in Libya. As in all wars, there are atrocities reported by both sides. But Western bankers and capitalists could not allow Libya to unite Africa and the Arab world under a common currency the African Dinar. In the 1970s we agreed to allow Saudi Arabia and OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) to jack up the price of oil as long as the U.S. dollar (petrodollar) would be the one and only international currency used for oil. The Libyan war is just another bailout scheme for our ruling banking class.

On June 8, the lead prosecutor of the International Criminal Court had a major press conference and charged the Libyan government with conspiracy to commit rape without a shred of evidence presented. Sara Flounders addresses these charges and the lack of charges for documented torture and other crimes by the U.S., including the study by the Journal of Military Medicine that stated 71% of female U.S. soldiers have been the victims of sexual assault while serving in the U.S. military. [11]

Reference Notes

1. CBS News, “The United States of Africa may become reality“

2. Wall Street Journal, “Gaddafi’s gold reserves among the top 25 in the world“

3. U.S. Department of Treasury, “Treasury identifies fourteen companies owned by Libya’s National Oil Corporation as subject to sanctions“

4. EconomicPolicyJournal.com, “Libyan rebels form central bank“

5. Eric Encina, The Market Oracle, “Globalists Target 100% State Owned Central Bank of Libya“

6. Democracy Now interview General Wesley Clark

7. Henry C.K. Liu, Independent Critical Analysis and Commentary, May 14, 2002, “The BIS vs. National Banks“

8. Ellen Brown, Intrepid Report, “Libya: All About Oil or All About Banking?“

9. Reuters News, “Rebel army chief is veteran Gaddafi foe—think tank“

10. Patrick Martin, uruknet.info, “Mounting evidence of CIA ties to rebels“

11. Sara Flounders, GlobalResearch.ca, “Libya—Behind the Phony ICC ‘Rape’ Charges: Are NATO Forces Preparing a Ground Attack?“

Nick Egnatz is a Vietnam veteran. He has been actively protesting our government’s crimes of empire in both person and print for some years now and was named “Citizen of the Year” for Northwest Indiana in 2006 for his peace activism by the National Association of Social Workers. Contact Nick at nickatlakehills@sbcglobal.net.