November 9th, 2010

National Debt: £7.9 trillion, Paki Gold, Toll troll, Banksters and fiat

The article excerpted below about corruption in the Pakistani government and in various mining interests including China revealed some interesting information. I've seen the question asked why the government (US, UK etc.) doesn't declare Pakistan a terrorist state. Perhaps this is the answer.

$260 billion gold mines going for a song, behind closed doors
[...] "The Reko Diq scandal is equal to 260 steel mills valued at one billion dollar each or 570 steel mills at $350 million each, the price at which PSM was being sold by PM Shaukat Aziz before it was stopped by the Supreme Court," shows a calculation. And according to one Washington mining industry expert, if Pakistan gets its fair share from the gold and copper mines, Balochistan and Pakistan would become richer than any of the present oil producing Gulf countries, many times over. "They have the goods, they need the will," he said.

The massive mine deposits at Reko Diq in Chagai Balochistan are part of the same geological belt discovered in Afghanistan, which the Pentagon recently claimed was worth one trillion dollars, though President Hamid Karzai claimed it was worth more than 3 trillion dollars.

According to a report in the New York Times on June 13, 2010 by James Risen: "The previously unknown deposits - including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium - are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe. An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the Saudi Arabia of lithium, a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and Black Berrys."

Pakistan, it is estimated in mining circles, has more deposits than Afghanistan, so the enormity of the riches and the cost of the backdoor deals can easily be guessed. "It would be the mother of all the deals and grandfather of all the corruption cases in Pakistan, put together," according to one expert.

Reading the piles of documents, statements, interviews and legal papers available with The News, the picture that emerges is one of a grand deception, loot and plunder that never happened before on such a scale and the facts, untruths, half-truths, attempts to sabotage, frauds and backdoor bribes, are all documented.

It all started in the Musharraf era but once the massive scale of the stakes involved became apparent to the PPP government, the Raisani/Zardari camp quickly jumped into the fray to renegotiate the deal, behind closed doors. /more

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Subcontracting tax collection Here

[...] Turning over a toll road, for example, means that a state or municipality gets money upfront which in theory it could invest but in practice will simply be used to subsidise current expenditure. The return on this money will be the state's cost of borrowing plus the running costs of operating the road.  The private sector body will face the same running costs, plus a higher cost of finance. But it will expect to make a profit on top.  It can do this by cutting costs or raising the toll. But both options would be open to the local authority. In effect, it has farmed out the right to collect the toll in return for ready cash.
 
Stephen Morris gave the following links to further reading in the comments:
PFI tax farming:
- here on Buttonwood in March 2009;
- here; and
- here.
Defects of the PFI:
- here;
- here; and
- here.

The peculiar lunacy of private toll toads (which transfer to the private sector the very risk the private sector is unable to manage) is discussed in greater detail here.
Paradoxically, the privatisation of monopolies - far from being an anti-statist policy – actually reflects an enormous belief in the state: a blind faith that the government will not be captured by the private monopolist and work with the monopolist to extract rents from the long-suffering citizens.
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New TPA Research:
The Real National Debt: A Decade of Reckless Growth
Excerpt from the article:

£890 billion (£0.89 trillion) Official public sector debt quoted in the Budget by the Government

£7,900 billion (£7.9 trillion) Real national debt, according to TaxPayers' Alliance calculations
Click here to read the full report

Key Findings
At the end of 2009-10 the real national debt stood at £7.9 trillion, over £300,000 for every single household in Britain
During the last decade debt has more than tripled, soaring from 230 per cent of GDP (£2.3 trillion) up to 560 per cent of GDP (£7.9 trillion)
Official national debt (quoted by the Chancellor in his budget) hugely underestimates taxpayer liabilities
Relative to GDP this is by far the biggest national debt we have ever had since records began

Our measure of the real national debt is gross debt (total debt) valued at market prices (the market value of the debt). It includes the following items (2009-10):
  • The official public sector debt quoted in the budget – £890 billion (£0.89 trillion)
  • Unfunded public sector pensions – estimated at £1,283 billion (£1.28 trillion)
  • Unfunded state pensions – estimated at £2,717 billion (£2.7 trillion)
  • RBS/Lloyds debt – £2,585 billion (£2.6 trillion)
  • Other – including the Local Government Pension deficit, PFI, and nuclear decommissioning – £398 billion (£0.4 trillion)
At March 2010, we calculate the total debt stood at £7,873 billion (£7.9 trillion)

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7.9 trillion. It beggars belief what the banksters and their minions have done to the country. It continues apace. CO2 is harmless to the climate as the last 10-15 years of no global warming despite escalating CO2 emissions has demonstrated yet the boondoggle rush continues apace.
Lord Oxburgh's favourite scam, carbon capture and storage got a boost from Huhne:
The Government's decision to extend its "clean coal" research programme to include gas plants and raise the outlay to £9 billion will add to bills and increase the cost of building new plant, companies warned on Monday. Here
Lord Oxburgh who works for the Deutsche Banksters is hon. pres. of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association and chairman of the wind energy company Falck Renewables as well as having interests in carbon credits. 
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Banksters and fiat
The banksters with their one hand on the tiller and the other stashing public money, worried for their skins* as the pound and the euro head for oblivion, are looking for a way they can maintain their presence and authority in Europe and the UK. I believe there is room at Pentonville.
The pound and the euro will crash because they are fiat currencies and they can only hit the bottom in the long run. The end of the long run looks to fast approaching. Fiat currencies were given to us by central banksters. Thick (or more likely thick as thieves with the banksters) governments have accepted the wisdom of fiat currency that increasingly transfers wealth to the banks such that the bulk of any nation's wealth ends up in the control of a few and the people of the nation end up receiving not what they earn but what the banksters allow them to have.
The debt being such that it can never be repaid, it is tantamount to enslavement. A globalist bankster's ideal. Cameron appears to be a globalist as does Osborne. The EC is certainly under the globalist thumb as are the various regulatory banks, BoE, CEB, WB, IMF, and world gov't piggy banks such as GEF etc.
An anonymous donor (Foundation X) came forward and offered the government billions, here
(Update: My colleague Martin Beckford informs me that the leading suspects are the Office of International Treasury Control. And as Auntycensorship points out, the original speech was picked up by Charlie Stross as well as by Hopi)

and here -
For the past 20 weeks I have been engaged in a very strange dialogue with the two noble Lords, in the course of which I have been trying to bring to their attention the willing availability of a strange organisation which wishes to make a great deal of money available to assist the recovery of the economy in this country. For want of a better name, I shall call it Foundation X. That is not its real name, but it will do for the moment. Foundation X was introduced to me 20 weeks ago last week by an eminent City firm, which is FSA controlled. Its chairman came to me and said, "We have this extraordinary request to assist in a major financial reconstruction. It is megabucks, but we need your help to assist us in understanding whether this business is legitimate". I had the biggest put down of my life from my noble friend Lord Strathclyde when I told him this story. He said, "Why you? You're not important enough to have the answer to a question like that". He is quite right, I am not important enough, but the answer to the next question was, "You haven't got the experience for it". Yes I do. I have had one of the biggest experiences in the laundering of terrorist money and funny money that anyone has had in the City. I have handled billions of pounds of terrorist money.

Robert Zoellick, president of the Rothschild cartel's World Bank wants to discuss a return to the gold standard that could rescue the currencies from certain doom. Here and here

*  People Power! Ireland Protests Banking Cartel
http://www.youtube.com/v/aPnoAY1wXfI?fs=1
 
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Doncha just love biofuel a major source of real pollution that causes strife and misery everywhere and does SFA for the climate.
UK Wholesale Food Prices Soar As Commodity Costs Rise
Soaring wheat and other commodity costs on world markets have pushed up UK wholesale food prices at the fastest rate in two years, official figures showed this morning.
Prices of food produced in the UK were 9.8% higher last month than a year ago, the biggest annual increase since October 2008, the Office for National Statistics reported. Imported food prices climbed 4.5% on the year, the fastest rate since October 2009.
Food prices are likely to be pushed even higher in coming months, with refined sugar surging to a record peak of $783.90 a tonne today.
Consumers are now starting to pay more for bread and meat as a result of sharp increases in the price of wheat and corn following poor harvests, the British Retail Consortium reported this week. Vegetable oil and margarine showed double-digit price hikes, while fruit showed its biggest price increases since April 2009. This helped push up food prices overall at 4.4%, the BRC said, the fastest rate in more than a year. /more