Showing posts with label World Bank. Show all posts
Showing posts with label World Bank. Show all posts

Friday, August 21, 2009

The History Of The Money Changers - DBS

The History Of The Money Changers - Andrew Carrington Hitchcock

I just read this entire document - it is AWESOME.

I heard this morning that former DHS Director Tom Ridge has put out a book detailing how he "almost had a crisis of conscience" in regards to the scamming of the American Public with the color-coded alert system.

Gee, thanks, Tom - you really did WE THE PEOPLE a huge favor...you told us about scumbaggery long after anything could be done about it.

Go fuck yourself.

Remember Smedley Darlington Butler? Back in 1936, he was included in a plot to overthrow the government of these United States. Do you know what happened?

He STOPPED the coup.

Is it really beyond the realm of possibility that there is NO ONE possessed of the moral fiber of a Smedley Butler?

Dammit all...but then again, this is why I am engaged in the verbiage on this blog, rather than Googling pictures of Brittany Murphy or the like...but I digress.

At any rate, considering the size of this document, I won't be posting the entire document; rather, I do wish to post a couple of excerpts that I believe are pertinent to our current situation. Please take your time, read the entire posting and get MAD, and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

Otherwise, read (or watch the video embedded below) about what happened to Argentina - this will be our fate, if you choose to stick your head in the sand. When the blade comes, the pain will be sharp, but quick. Learn to enjoy it.


On the other hand - why don't you join me on my mission to UTTERLY DESTROY THESE PIECES OF SUB-HUMAN GARBAGE, and take away their ability to despoil our green Earth? This could be really fun.

2001 - Professor Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist of the World Bank, and former Chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, goes public over the World Bank's, "Four Step Strategy," which is designed to enslave nations to the bankers. I summarize this below,

Step One: Privatization.
This is actually where national leaders are offered 10% commissions to their secret Swiss bank accounts in exchange for them trimming a few billion dollars off the sale price of national assets. Bribery and corruption, pure and simple.

Step Two: Capital Market Liberalization.
This is the repealing any laws that taxes money going over its borders. Stiglitz calls this the, "hot money," cycle. Initially cash comes in from abroad to speculate in real estate and currency, then when the economy in that country starts to look promising, this outside wealth is pulled straight out again, causing the economy to collapse.

The nation then requires IMF help and the IMF provides it under the pretext that they raise interest rates anywhere from 30% to 80%. This happened in Indonesia and Brazil, also in other Asian and Latin American nations. These higher interest rates consequently impoverish a country, demolishing property values, savaging industrial production and draining national treasuries.

Step Three: Market Based Pricing.
This is where the prices of food, water and domestic gas are raised which predictably leads to social unrest in the respective nation, now more commonly referred to as, "IMF Riots." These riots cause the flight of capital and government bankruptcies. This benefits the foreign corporations as the nations remaining assets can be purchased at rock bottom prices.

Step Four: Free Trade.
This is where international corporations burst into Asia, Latin America and Africa, whilst at the same time Europe and America barricade their own markets against third world agriculture. They also impose extortionate tariffs which these countries have to pay for branded pharmaceuticals, causing soaring rates in death and disease

My favorite story is the attempted coup of Venezuela...it lasted less than a couple of days.
2002 - On April 12th every major paper in the USA runs a story that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez had resigned as he was, "unpopular and dictatorial." In fact he had been kidnapped under a coup, where he was imprisoned on an army base. Following sympathy from the guards, the coup falls apart and President Chavez is back in his office one day later. Interestingly he has video evidence that whilst he was imprisoned on that base a United States military attaché entered the base.

President Chavez, demonized by the controlled western media, gives milk and housing to the poor, and gives land not used for production by big plantation owners for more than two years, to those without land. His big crime however, was in passing a petroleum law that doubled the royalty taxes from 16% to 30% on new oil discoveries, which affected Exxon Mobil and other international oil operators.

He also took full control of the state oil company, PDVSA, which before was nominally owned by the government, but in actual fact was in thrall to these international oil operators. Not only that but President Chavez is also the President of OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries). The main reason is, however, that President Chavez fully rejects the World Bank's, "Four Step Strategy," and plan to reduce wages of the people for the benefit of the bankers.

Indeed President Chavez has increased the minimum wage by 20%, which has increased the purchasing power of the lower paid workers and strengthened the economy. His minister, Miguel Bustamante Madriz, fully aware of the danger Venezuela poses to the bankers when people contrast the fact it wouldn't let them in, for example, with Argentina who did, stated,

"America can't let us stay in power. We are an exception to the new globalization order. If we succeed, we are an example to all the Americas."

I included that as an example of a nation making a determination NOT to go along with the "status quo" and simply engage in the scumbaggery-of-the-day.
Conclusions

In my research, I have discovered those critics who currently condemn the monetary system almost universally suggest that the only solution is to restore a gold backed currency. I don't think any readers of this timeline can be in any doubt, that such a system will be open to abuse by those very people who abuse it today. Indeed if we introduced a currency backed by chairs, I believe we would find ourselves with nothing to sit on!

The only monetary system that seems to have worked in history is one which is backed by the goodwill of a government and is debt free, such as President Lincoln's, "Greenbacks." Fortunately, the Nobel Peace Prize winning economist, Milton Friedman came up with an ingenious solution of wresting back control of the money supply from the bankers, paying off all outstanding debt, and preventing inflation or deflation whilst this process is completed. I summarize this below.

Using America as the example here, Friedman suggests that debt free United States notes be issued to pay off the United States Bonds (debts) on the open market. In conjunction with this, the reserve requirements of the day to day bank the regular person banks with, be proportionally raised so the mount of money in circulation remains constant.

As those people holding bonds are paid off in United States notes, they will deposit the money in the bank they bank with, thus making available the currency then needed by these banks to increase their reserves. Once all these United States bonds are paid off with United States notes, the banks will be at 100% reserve banking instead of the fractional reserve system and then fractional reserve banking can be outlawed.

If necessary, the remaining liabilities of financial institutions could be assumed or acquired by the United States government in a one-off operation. Therefore these institutions would eventually be paid off with United States notes for the purpose of keeping the total money supply stable.

The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and the National Banking Act of 1864 must also be repealed and all monetary power transferred back to the Treasury Department. The effects of this will be seen very soon by the average person as their taxes would start to go down as they would no longer be paying interest on debt based money to a handful of central bankers.

A law must be passed to ensure that no banker or any person in any way affiliated with financial institutions, be allowed to regulate banking. Also the United States must withdraw from all international debt based central banking operations ie. the IMF; the BIS; and the World Bank.

If all the countries of the world adopted the conclusions above, then humanity will at last be free of these central bankers and their debt based currency. It's a lovely idea, but first we have to get it past our corrupt politicians many of whom are quite aware of the scam that plays us on a daily basis, however rather than do the job we have elected them to do, they keep their mouths shut and instead look after themselves and their families, whilst the rest of us continue to be exploited.

"For what will it profit men that a more prudent distribution and use of riches make it possible for them to gain even the whole world, if thereby they suffer the loss of their own souls? What will it profit to teach them sound principles in economics, if they permit themselves to be so swept away by selfishness, by unbridled and sordid greed, that, 'hearing the Commandments of the Lord, they do all things contrary."

Pope Pius XI

Small wonder he was excommunicated, eh?

Let me end today's rant with this posting regarding the institutionalization of Clare Swinney, because she brought a complaint to the Broadcasting Standards Authority pointing out that TVNZ’s claim that Osama bin Laden carried out the attacks of 9/11 was an outright lie. Shortly afterwards, she was threatened and then incarcerated in a psychiatric ward. Following a week of compulsory treatment, the head psychiatrist told a judge that she should remain in hospital, as her belief that 9/11 was an inside job was evidence she was “delusional.” The judge agreed. This is her extraordinary story.

Is this bloody amazing or what?

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

FOX News: World Bank Under Cyber Siege in 'Unprecedented Crisis' by Richard Behar

World Bank Under Cyber Siege in 'Unprecedented Crisis'

Friday , October 10, 2008
By Richard Behar

The World Bank Group's computer network — one of the largest repositories of sensitive data about the economies of every nation — has been raided repeatedly by outsiders for more than a year, FOX News has learned.

It is still not known how much information was stolen. But sources inside the bank confirm that servers in the institution's highly-restricted treasury unit were deeply penetrated with spy software last April. Invaders also had full access to the rest of the bank's network for nearly a month in June and July.

In total, at least six major intrusions — two of them using the same group of IP addresses originating from China — have been detected at the World Bank since the summer of 2007, with the most recent breach occurring just last month.

In a frantic midnight e-mail to colleagues, the bank's senior technology manager referred to the situation as an "unprecedented crisis." In fact, it may be the worst security breach ever at a global financial institution. And it has left bank officials scrambling to try to understand the nature of the year-long cyber-assault, while also trying to keep the news from leaking to the public.

Click here to see the e-mail.

Click here to visit FOXNews.com's Cybersecurity Center.

The crisis comes at an awkward moment for World Bank president Robert Zoellick, who runs the world's largest and most influential anti-poverty agency, which doles out $25 billion a year, and whose board represents 185 member nations. This weekend, the bank holds its annual series of meetings in Washington — and just in advance of those sessions, Zoellick called for a radical revamping of multilateral organizations in light of the global economic meltdown.

Zoellick is positioning himself and the bank as an institution that can help chart a new path toward global financial stability. But that reputation, more than ever, depends on the bank's stable information infrastructure.

The fact that the information vaults of the World Bank have been repeatedly pried open won't help Zoellick's case.

While it remains unclear how much data has been pilfered from the bank, it's a lot. According to internal memos, "a minimum of 18 servers have been compromised," including some of the bank's most sensitive systems — ranging from the bank's security and password server to a Human Resources server "that contains scanned images of staff documents."

Click here to see bank memos about the intrusions.

One World Bank director tells FOX News that as many as 40 servers have been penetrated, including one that held contract-procurement data.

Despite the gravity of the break-ins, the bank is trying hard to pretend to outsiders it didn't happen. "There were attempts to hack the bank's computer systems last summer," says a World Bank spokesman. "However, there was no compromise of confidential information." Requests for on-the-record interviews with Zoellick and other top officials were declined.

Meanwhile, the bank's treasurer, Kenneth G. Lay, has been briefing Zoellick's senior management team regularly on the situation since April.

Other bank officials are also sleuthing. The bank's chief information officer, Guy De Poerck, has engaged Price Waterhouse Coopers to do a confidential million-dollar assessment that is expected to tell him what's going on in his own department. And a 22-page internal report by a computer security company named MANDIANT, dated August 18, fleshes out many details of the June-July breaches. But very few people have ever seen the report, and nobody has been permitted to retain a paper copy.

At the same time, De Poerck has been downplaying the problem to the bank's 10,000 rank-and-file staffers as mere intrusion "attempts" in his e-mails. Yet most of those staffers have been asked to change their password three times in the past three months.

"As previously reported in mid-July," CIO De Poerck and a senior bank treasury official wrote in an August announcement to employees, "we would like to reassure you that there is no evidence that Bank staff personal information is at risk from the recent external attempts."

It's unclear how that statement squares with an internal memo to De Poerck a month earlier revealing that a sensitive Human Resources server "that contains scanned images of staff documents" had been successfully breached. De Poerk declined to comment to FOX News about any of these details.

Click here to see De Poerck's memo.

In reality, the situation is serious enough that federal investigators have been called in. "We're not talking about hackers playing games or messing up our website," insists a senior member of the bank's IT department at its Washington headquarters. "It's about the FBI coming last summer and saying, 'You should take a look at your systems because we think something weird is going on.' It's about the intruders knowing what information they wanted — and getting to it whenever they wanted to. They took our existing data stores and organized them in a way that they could be easily accessed at will."

In plainspeak: "They had access to everything," says the source. "They had the keys to every room at the bank. And we can't say whether they still do or don't until we fully and openly address what's happening here."

The data raids are not a matter of stealing inconsequential bits and bytes. The World Bank's data center is literally a treasure trove of vital financial information from around the globe. As a clearinghouse for financial data from both governments and companies, the bank's computers could provide intruders with both a financial and intelligence gold mine — from inside information on bids and contracts to the minutes of confidential board meetings.

If the bank takes a position in a currency, for example, that currency usually moves in response to the bank's actions. Stocks and bonds can also swing up and down based on World Bank announcements. "If you know beforehand that the bank is going to put an order in for oil pipelines in Chad or healthcare systems in India, you can actually make a good amount of money," says one insider.

Although the bank typically provides only a fraction of the financing for a project, its influence on those projects is immense. Private corporations see the bank's stamp of approval as a guarantee that their own larger investments will be safe — and profitable. Knowing in advance what projects the bank's board will reject could be just as profitable.

Some insiders fear that contractors — perhaps even governments — might be seeking advance knowledge on the status of the bank's anti-corruption probes. "The bank knows the books of countries almost as well as the countries do — including the corruption at times," says one insider.

The first breach of the bank's secrets was discovered in September, 2007, after the FBI —while at work on a different cybercrime case — notified the bank that something was wrong. The feds pointed to a part of the bank's network that led out of the Johannesburg hub of the International Finance Corp. (IFC), a bank arm that lends to the private sector.

Within a week of the tip, teams of bank investigators sent to Johannesburg discovered that intruders had gained full and total access to all of IFC's worldwide information — including all incoming and outgoing e-mail — for at least six months. "They were downloading everything and anything," says one insider, who says that IFC's monitoring systems were extremely weak. "They [intruders] had full access."

Investigators discovered that the intruders were using a so-called "cluster" of IP addresses from Macao, China. But since those addresses can be spoofed (i.e., disguised) the discovery doesn't prove that the breaches actually originated in China. Nonetheless, bank officials and its executive director for China clashed behind closed doors over whether or not China's government is involved in the break-ins.

Bank sources tell FOX News that Johannesburg is one of several secret "hubs" containing a "common data store" (or CDS) that the World Bank Group has established around the globe. In layman's terms, a CDS is the cyber-world's version of a bomb shelter where every piece of an organization's data is replicated and backed up in case of a data-wipeout at headquarters in Washington. While it's known that IFC data was accessible at the hub, it remains unclear if all World Bank Group data was compromised there.

The second major breach — of the bank's treasury network in Washington — was discovered in April 2008. The World Bank's Treasury manages $70 billion in assets for 25 clients — including the central banks of some countries. It carries out substantial collaborations with the world's finance ministers on public wealth and debt management, runs an active bond-trading desk in Washington, and does everything from currency trading to capital markets financings.

After a forensic analysis of the treasury breach, bank investigators discovered that spy software was covertly installed on workstations inside the bank's Washington headquarters — allegedly by one or more contractors from Satyam Computer Services, one of India's largest IT companies.

The software — which operates through a method known as keystroke logging — enabled every character typed on a keyboard to be transmitted to a still-unknown location via the Internet.

Upon its discovery, insiders report, bank officials shut off the data link between Washington and Chennai, India, where Satyam has long operated the bank's sole offshore computer center responsible for all of the bank's financial and human resources information.

Satyam was also banned from any future work with the bank. "I want them off the premises now," Zoellick reportedly told his deputies. But at the urging of CIO De Poerck, Satyam employees remained at the bank as recently as Oct. 1 while it engaged in "knowledge transfer" with two new India-based contractors.

Satyam — one of the largest and most prestigious IT companies in India — is publicly listed on the NYSE and boasts having $2 billion in sales and more than 150 Fortune 500 companies as clients. In 2003, Satyam — it means "truth" in Sanskrit — won a much-heralded and lucrative five-year "sole source" contract to design, write and maintain all of the World Bank's information systems.

The contract — which began at $10 million and grew to more than $100 million by 2007 — was suddenly not renewed this year. Satyam so far declines to comment.

Then came the June-July breaches in Washington. They were similar to the Johannesburg attack, as the same group of IP addresses from Macao were used.

This time, however, the cyber-burglars used a different spyware. They broke into an external server run by the bank's private sector development unit. They were able to acquire passwords — including the password for the systems administrator.

That enabled them to jump into the servers at MIGA, the bank's giant insurance arm. It was there that they captured the security administrator's password as he was logging on to his computer.

It took ten days for bank officials to detect that they'd been invaded. Once they did, they shut down all external servers, except for e-mail — which it turns out the invaders were already using as their entrance point. By the end of July the invaders "had completely mapped out the topography of the bank's information systems," says one expert — "where everything was, the types of servers, and the types of files on the servers."

What the intruders did with all that information is the World Bank's most sensitive and painful mystery. It has clearly left the institution in a highly vulnerable position.

And the same may go for bank president Zoellick. Bank insiders say that he needs desperately to get the security of his own house in order. Despite the vast sums that the Bank spends on data and data storage, its information systems are deeply in disarray.

Today the total cost to maintain the bank's information infrastructure is at least $280 million per year. But according to one disgruntled bank staffer, "We don't even have an internal search engine that works."

The truly alarming fact, however, is that someone — or many people — seem to know their way around the bank's most valuable resource very well, even though they aren't supposed to be there at all.

UPDATE: After FOX News published its story, a World Bank spokesman issued the following statement:

"The Fox News story is wrong and is riddled with falsehoods and errors. The story cites misinformation from unattributed sources and leaked emails that are taken out of context.

"Like other public and private institutions, the World Bank has repeatedly experienced hacking attacks on its computer systems and is constantly updating its security to defeat these. But at no point has a hacking attack accessed sensitive information in the World Bank's Treasury, procurement, anti-corruption or human resources departments."

FOX News stands by its story.