Documents Reveal Widespread Corruption and “Ghost Staffing” Within the UN’s Program in Afghanistan   ~ & gee these fucks wanna run the world ...hows that work~in fer us ,folks ,huh! ..hows that go~in ?

By Global Research News

Global Research, August 11, 2014

Inner City Press

Region: Asia

Theme: United Nations

In-depth Report: AFGHANISTAN

UNITED NATIONS — The United States is about to leave Afghanistan, transferring security to an Afghan force trained in part by the United Nations. But how prepared is that force? And how accountable is the UN?

A series of documents, exclusively obtained and published by Inner City Press, reveals widespread corruption within the UN’s program in Afghanistan. The UN Development Program (UNDP) routinely paid “ghost” soldiers and made double payments to existing soldiers.

See sample documents here, here, here and here, exclusively provided to Inner City Press by now-former UNDP staff.

When confronted by Inner City Press, the UN through UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s spokespeople has stonewalled, saying that it will not answer until an internal audit is completed – but they won’t say when that audit will be finished, or whether it will be made public. Meanwhile, an audit released earlier this year found that UNDP had overspent its budget and muddied its financial records.

This comes after UNDP’s Law and Order Trust Fund for Afghanistan scandal on which Inner City Press exclusively reported in 2012, here. Without answering these questions, UNDP Administrator Helen Clark is on the record campaigning to be the successor to Ban Ki-moon as Secretary General.

The Free United Nations Coalition for Access (FUNCA) is calling for open access to the UN and to UN documents. The UN secretariat and its agencies are not bound by any Freedom of Information laws, and have no fear of prosecution, due to legal immunity. This was seen most recently when the UN peacekeeping force introduced cholera to Haiti – and was never prosecuted and did not even apologize.

This has created a culture of unaccountability, which is on display every day at UN Headquarters. On the Afghanistan issue, the Secretary-General’s Office of the Spokesperson has been particularly arrogant, saying it would not accept “artificial deadlines” then reading a canned statement from UNDP that used an internal audit to justify not answering (see video here).

Journalists investigating the UN have little recourse. Nobody supervises the world body. There is no system of checks and balances to hold the UN to account, since powerful member states use the UN for their own purposes. And sadly, most of the in-house media covering the UN depends on friendly relationships with the Secretariat for their coverage.

That’s why FUNCA is asking for more independent journalists to take a look at UN Headquarters and dig into the problems plaguing the UN.

JAPAN PLANNING MILITARIZATION OF SPACE

Posted on August 8, 2014 by Joseph P. Farrell • Filed Under: Cosmic War •http://gizadeathstar.com/2014/08/japan-planning-militarization-space/

So many of you saw various versions of this story, and were kind enough to link various articles to me in your emails, that this absolutely had to be included in the “finals pile” for this week’s blogs, and when you read them(pick any one), you’ll see why:
Japan to launch military space force: report
Japan to launch “Space Army”
Japan’s ‘Space Force’ To Protect Satellites In Orbit
Japan Enhances Its Space Defenses

First, let’s put all this into context. You’ll recall a few months ago I blogged about a Japanese architectural firm that had put forward a study of turning the entire Moon into a gigantic solar energy power plant. The proposal called for ringing the entire equator of the Moon with panels, collecting enormous amounts of energy, which would be beamed back to the Earth in the forms of microwaves, converted to electricity, and voila, Japan’s energy problems would be solved. Except, there was a hitch. In my book Cover Wars and Breakaway Civilizations, I outlined a 1960s US Air Force study to orbit satellites which would do the same thing. The  trouble was the collecting antennae on the Earth would exist in dead zones created by the microwaves. Japan’s plan, in other words, was to make the Moon a kind of “Death Star”, and no sooner had the Japanese firm put forward its proposal than the Chinese, realizing what was up, put forward their own version, and even made reference to he fabled “Death Star” of the Star Wars movies. The Chinese, in other words, weren’t buying the idea that this was solely for “peaceful production of energy,” for one and the same technology could easily be weaponized.

As the first two articles make clear, the “cover story” for selling this program is to protect satellite assets from “space debris,” and it is also made clear that Japan is undertaking these moves in concert with American strategic planners. But as the second and third articles also make clear, this is being done partly as a response to the successful test of a Chinese anti-satellite missile system in 2007. 
But as regular readers here have probably already guessed, I think there is more going on here than even these explanations, and the “more going on” falls into two major but related categories: (1) the growing move to privatize and commercialize space and assets in space – think only of asteroid mining in this connection – will require minimizing risk, and part of that minimization will mean inevitably protecting assets from competitors, and this implies, ultimately, not just the militarization of space but the weaponization. In other words, what we are looking at is the first stage in a long-term plan to weaponize not just near-Earth space, but deep space. (2) The second factor is international financial clearing and other communications, for since much international clearing is handled by satellites, he who controls the satellites (and for that matter the trans-oceanic cables) controls international financial clearing. 
As the BRICSA nations appear to be set on the course to create rival development banks and international currency agreements, this implies inevitably the construction of their own independent international clearing, and this will require the expansion of their space-based assets, with the inevitable protection of those assets, from military intervention. In short, what is emerging is a new kind of space race, one in which space commercialization and geopolitical agendas on Earth are driving the weaponization of space. 
The merchantmen always drive the creation of the war galley, of the frigates and ships of the line, or in this case, the anti-satellite, and anti-anti-satellite capability, and as commercialization broadens and deepens, so too will the technologies of space weaponization. 
What this might portend in terms of geopolitical implications here on Earth is equally disturbing. One can expect the bi-lateral agreements among the BRICS bloc, which has already seen bi-lateral space agreements between Brazil and China, to continue. Most interesting to watch will be Europe, which has already seen a backlash against the USA in terms of the Snowden-NSA spying scandal, and European calls for its own independent internet. Similarly, Europe will move to protect its space assets. But this will place Europe vis-a-vis the UK into an interesting position, since the UK has participated in the European Space program, but is widely seen as being too integrated with the Washington-London financial oligarchy. One possibility to watch for is a more independent French and German national effort to create their own space-asset defense technologies and platforms. Germany and France both, with GDPs larger than Russia’s, are in a position to create such independent programs should those nations think they are necessary, and events may compel them to do so. In short, space may have an unusual effect on the geopolitics of the Earth, and in particular, on European Space affairs. This may be yet another one of those things to watch

Enron-ization of Water: Wall Street’s Pending Resource Grab   ~ hehe hows that "elites rul~in" things hows that fucking go~in ,folks huh???  we's go~in gooooooood weeeeee we weee wee's we's go~in

by Don Quijones • August 10, 2014 //http://wolfstreet.com/2014/08/10/enron-ization-of-water-wall-streets-pending-resource-grab/

By Don Quijones, freelance writer, translator in Barcelona, Spain. Raging Bull-Shit is his modest attempt to challenge the wishful thinking and scrub away the lathers of soft soap peddled by political and business leaders and their loyal mainstream media. This article is a Wolf Street exclusive.
As Leonardo Da Vinci once said, “water is the driving force of all nature.” It could also soon become the driving force of immense corporate profits and financial sector returns. For water is not just an essential public and natural good, it is a precious resource whose growing global scarcity has the potential to turn the content of rivers, lakes and reservoirs into transparent liquid gold.
The problem of water scarcity is growing at an alarming rate. By 2050, experts forecast a 55% increase in the amount of water required to meet demand from rising populations, food production and industry. Failure to meet that demand will have devastating consequences: water shortages will become chronic, leading to the proliferation of water riots and water wars. According to UN estimates, $1.8 trillion in new investments will be needed over the next 20 years to avoid such a calamity. The question is:
Whence Will That Money Come?
According to the wise masters of big capital and finance, there can only be one source: the ever-knowing, ever-perfect financial markets. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Andrew Critchlow argued the case for financializing water:

Markets can play an important role in providing future water security (DQ: Note the use of the term “water security,” not “water independence” or “water sustainability”). The City can help to fund vital water infrastructure and the creation of a futures market to trade water would help to create a baseline pricing mechanism against which regional water tariffs could be fairly set…

“Water will become something that is traded, there will be a market for it and this could happen in the next decade,” said Usha Rao-Monari, chief executive officer of Global Water Development Partners – an affiliate of New York-based investment giant Blackstone, the world’s largest private equity firm with a reported $280bn under management.

The reasoning is clear: in order to create more efficient distribution of the world’s most vital resource, we need to create myriad new layers of middlemen and financiers and have them trading billions (if not trillions) of dollars in derivatives of that scarce resource on global commodity exchanges. It will be the Enron-ization of water, as the exact same people who almost destroyed the global economy with mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps and who have corrupted the basic pricing mechanism of just about every commodity market on the planet will be entrusted to determine the price of the water we consume.
“It’s intuitively appealing to talk about water as a traded asset,” said Deane Dray, a Citigroup analyst who heads up global water-sector research. “If you look at projections over the next 25 years, you’ll see that global water supply and demand imbalances are on track to get worse.”
Turning Water Into Liquid Cash
Where there is scarcity, there’s the potential for serious profits – especially when the biggest profits do not come from buying or selling real things (such as houses or wheat or cars), but from the manipulation of ethereal concepts like risk and collateralized debt. As Frederick Kaufman writes in the journal Nature, these days most wealth flows from financial instruments that are at least one step away from reality.
That’s not to say, however, that global water derivatives trading is a fait accompli. Water supply remains a local issue all over the world. It’s prevalent in areas you don’t want it, often leading to flooding (think Bangladesh), and it’s scarce in areas you need it, such as densely populated and arid areas (think LA). As for pricing, every country values it differently, and there’s no uniformity at all.
For instance, water is free in Ireland. “They consider it a right,” says Dray. “That’s part of what you have to overcome” [DQ: ‘you’ basically meaning ‘we’ as in ‘we, at Citigroup’]. “Twenty-five years is a long time for some of these notions to change,” he said.
But as the old adage goes, where there’s a will, there’s a way. And when it comes to the financial services industry, the strength of its will is formidable and the reach of its influence unmatched. Indeed, big changes in water pricing and distribution are already afoot. The world’s driest inhabitable continent/country, Australia, has already launched a water futures exchange. Since it opened in March this year more than 1.6 million Australian dollars in forward contracts – representing about 16.5 billion liters of water – have changed hands. In Texas they’re thinking about doing the same for the Rio Grande.
“Water will be the commodity of the 21^st Century,” says Richard Sandor, the CEO of Environmental Financial Products and the man widely credited with the creation of interest-rate futures – now one of the world’s largest and most manipulated markets – and the Chicago Climate Exchange. As Sandor told CNBC, water trading would have to be based on the dynamics of regional markets – and as it just so happens, he’s been working on a plan. “I think we’re going to have to invent something that takes into account the varying geographical differences. We’ll have to figure that out,” he said.
A Disturbing Precedent
If Sandor and his cohorts do figure out a way to financialize water, the world’s most valuable natural compound will be exposed to the exact same speculative forces as have plagued the global food industry for the last two decades. In the 1990s, a host of new food derivatives were created and billions poured into the sector from hedge funds, private equity groups and investment banks – including the bank everyone loves to hate, Goldman Sachs, which according to Der Spiegel has its greedy tentacles in 25 to 30 commodities markets, including coffee, soybean, wheat and beef markets.
As a result of this huge influx of Wall Street money, the food commodity markets are now 80% speculation, with the volume of financial transactions between 20 and 30 times as large as the real transactions. As Kaufman told Wired magazine, the direct consequence has been volatility two standard deviations above the 1990’s norm:

We’ve seen the price of food become more expensive than ever three times in five years [DQ: sparking food riots and revolutions throughout the developing world]. Normally we’d see three price spikes in a century. And part of the reason is this new kind of commodity speculation in food markets.

And now they plan to unleash the exact same speculative forces on water. As I wrote in a 2013 article, in many ways the commodification and financialization of H20 represents the final frontier of crony capitalism. If granted complete control over the pricing mechanism of this vital natural resource, banks and hedge funds will have the means, the power and no doubt the financial incentive to decide who gets to drink another day, and who doesn’t. By Don Quijones. An exclusive for Wolf Street.
Through crude use of statistics, the Spanish government makes a mockery out of tragedy. Read…. How Government Masks the Plight of Spain’s Lost Generation