As information progresses, my OTHER blog is way behind in keeping up with developments, but if you go there, www.lowlevelradiation.blogspot.com you will at least see a clear pattern of the plutocracy at work to keep the nukes "on the table".
The profitability for uranium speculation is ENORMOUS and it is done under the cover of "looking for copper" ..
I wish I had six pairs of hands so I could blog ALL the information that is coming to light as we go through the SECRETS COMING TO LIGHT meme - as let's face it! There is PLENTY coming out. We continue detoxifying every dirty little secret this year. Everything must come into the light.
And something else comes to mind to tell you as you read this - Barrick Gold's supposed lies about the gold in Indonesia? Well, truth do tell it was and IS there, but "they" decided on a better, more covert way of getting it out.
Virginia
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/
duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2798911
dited on Thu Jan-31-08 02:51 PM by leveymg
The NYT reports today that Former President Bill Clinton operates a foundation with Canadian mining magnate, Frank Giustra. The two are reported to have worked together to seal a uranium mining deal with the President of Kazakhstan, who is accused of human rights violations. Clinton, who runs a non-profit foundation with Giustra, is not said to have personally gained from this transaction.
Meanwhile, the Times has failed to provide some important context. Former President G.H.W. Bush, Sr. has made a personal fortune doing business with Barrick Gold, a huge Canadian mining company affiliated with the Carlyle Group. Both former Presidents have, in their different ways, tapped into the $USD trillion global mining industry, based largely in Canada, which operates in the most unstable and underdeveloped regions of the world.
Giustra is a relative newcomer to the global mining business, while Barrick Gold is one of the very largest and oldest global extraction companies, and has long-established ties with conservative politicians in Canada and the United States. Both outfits do business with private military contractors and corrupt Third World dictatorships. These companies are major contributors to "charitable" and "development" agencies that operate in mineral-rich areas of Africa, South America, and Central Asia.
Giustra has partnered with Clinton as a major contributor to a charity that operates in the Third World. This is not really a new story. See, http://www.stockhouse.ca/bullboards/viewmessage.asp?no=...
According to this 2006 article by Keith Harmon Snow and David Barouski, Barrick Gold is connected to both Bush and, less directly, with close Clinton associates in mineral extraction operations in some of the bloodiest areas in Africa. See, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9832
SNIP
Some people have lauded great progress in the exposure of illegal mining in DRC, particularly by the group Human Rights Watch (HRW), whose 2005 report “The Curse of Gold” exposed Ugandan officials and multi-national corporations smuggling gold through local rebel militias. The cited rebel groups were the Nationalist and Integrationist Front (FNI) and the People’s Armed Forces of Congo (FAPC). The western companies targeted by HRW were Anglo-Ashanti Gold, a company headquartered in South Africa, and Metalor, a Swedish firm. The HRW report failed to mention that Anglo-Ashanti is partnered with Anglo-American, owned by the Oppenheimer family and partnered with Canada-based Barrick Gold described below (3). London-based Anglo-American Plc. owns a 45% share in DeBeers, another Oppenheimer company that is infamous for its near monopoly of the international diamond industry (4). Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, a director of Anglo-American, is a director of Royal Dutch/Shell and a member of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan’s Advisory Board (5). The report also suppressed the most damning evidence discovered by HRW researchers—that Anglo-Ashanti sent its top lawyers into eastern DRC to aid rebel militia leaders arrested there.
Several multi-national mining companies have rarely if ever been mentioned in any human rights report. One is Barrick Gold, who operates in the town of Watsa, northwest of the town of Bunia, located in the most violent corner of the Congo. The Ugandan People’s Defense Force (UPDF) controlled the mines intermittently during the war. Officials in Bunia claim that Barrick executives flew into the region, with UPDF and RPF (Rwanda Patriotic Front) escorts, to survey and inspect their mining interests (6).
George H.W. Bush served as a paid advisor for Barrick Gold. Barrick directors include: Brian Mulroney, former PM of Canada; Edward Neys, former U.S. ambassador to Canada and chairman of the private PR firm Burston-Marsteller; former U.S. Senator Howard Baker; J. Trevor Eyton, a member of the Canadian Senate; and Vernon Jordan, one of Bill Clinton’s lawyers (7).
Barrick Gold is one of the client companies of Andrew Young’s Goodworks International lobbying firm. Andrew Young is the former Mayor of Atlanta, and a key organizer of the U.S.-Uganda Friendship Council. Young was chosen by President Clinton to chair the Southern Africa Enterprise Development Fund in October 1994. Goodworks’ clients—or business partners in some cases—include Coke, Chevron-Texaco, Monsanto, and the governments of Angola and Nigeria (note weapons transfers from Nigeria cited below). Young is a director of Cox Communications and Archers Daniels Midland—the “supermarket to the world” and National Public Radio sponsor whose directors include Brian Mulroney (Barrick) and G. Allen Andreas, a member of the European Advisory Board of The Carlyle Group.
Barrick Gold’s mining partners have included Adastra Mining—formerly named America Mineral Fields (AMFI, AMX, other names), formerly based in Hope, Arkansas, Bill Clinton’s hometown. Adastra had close ties with Lazare Kaplan International Inc., the largest diamond brokerage firm in the U.S., whose president, Maurice Tempelsman, has been an advisor on African Affairs to the U.S. Government and has been the U.S. Honorary Consul General of the Congo since 1977 (8).
Maurice Tempelsman accompanied Bill Clinton during his African tour in 1998, and he sails with the Clintons off Martha’s Vineyard. He serves on the International Advisory Council of the American Stock Exchange, and is a director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, a
”scientific” front for his offshore diamond mining—raking the seabed into oblivion.
Adastra also purchased a diamond concession on the Congolese-Angolan border from the Belgian mercenary firm International Defense and Security (1998), and currently has cobalt and copper concessions in Congo’s Katanga (Shaba) province (9). Adastra is a member of the Corporate Council on Africa, along with Goodworks, Halliburton, Chevron-Texaco, Northrop Grumman, GE, Boeing, Raytheon, Bechtel and SAIC—the latter two being secretive intelligence and defense entities involved in classified and supra-governmental “black” projects.
In April 1997, Jean-Ramon Boulle, a co-founder of Adastra (then AMFI), received a $1 billion dollar deal for mines in the Congo at Kolwezi (cobalt) and Kipushi (zinc) from Laurent Kabila’s Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Zaire (ADFL) before they were even officially in power. The ADFL were even allowed to use Boulle’s private jet (10). Meanwhile, directors of Adastra are also former directors of Anglo-American (11). Other Clinton-connected founders of Adastra include Michael McMurrough and Robert Friedland—both involved in shady, criminal, offshore businesses in Indonesia, Africa, Burma and the Americas (12).
Barrick sub-contracts to Caleb International, who has also partnered with Adastra in the past. Caleb is run by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s half-brother Salim Saleh, the former acting General of the UPDF. When Uganda withdrew from the Congo in 2002 following a so-called “peace” agreement, Saleh began training paramilitary groups to act as Ugandan proxies to sustain the flow of minerals into Uganda (13).
SNIP
Katanga’s militias and racketeering are connected to criminal networks of businessmen, including Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, Billy Rautenbach, John Bredenkamp, and Marc Rich. U.S. diamond magnate Maurice Tempelsman has profited from Katanga concessions since the Kennedy era. Lawrence Devlin, the old CIA station chief of Lubumbashi under Eisenhower, maintained Tempelsman’s criminal rackets with direct ties to Zaire’s former President Mobutu, and was subsequently employed by Tempelsman (16).
SNIP
Coltan ore is widely used in the aerospace and electronics industries for capacitors, superconductors and transistors after it is refined to tantalum. The U.S. is entirely dependant on foreign sources for tantalum, an enabling technology for capacitors essential to aerospace weaponry and every pager, cell phone, computer, VCR, CD player, P.D.A. and TV. U.S. import records show a dramatic jump of purchases from Rwanda and Uganda during the time they were smuggling tantalum and cobalt out of the Congo.
SNIP
Bechtel, a U.S. aerospace & construction company, provided satellite maps of reconnaissance photos of Mobutu’s troops for the ADFL invasion of Congo in 1996; they also created infrared maps of the Congo’s mineral deposits (22). The Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), led by Paul Kagame, the current Rwandan President graduate of the U.S. Army officers school at Fort Leavenworth, used Bechtel’s NASA maps to locate Rwandan Hutu civilians that fled the cataclysm in Rwanda in 1994. An estimated 800,000 refugees were hunted down and killed in the Congo’s forests (23). Bechtel’s friends in high places include former Secretary of State George Shultz (Board of Directors), former Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger (Bechtel Counsel) and retired U.S.M.C. general Jack Sheehan (Senior Vice President), who is also a member of the Defense Policy Board at the Pentagon (24). Riley P. Bechtel is on the Board of J.P. Morgan (25). Bechtel’s Nexant Company is the prime contractor on the Uganda-Kenya pipeline project, believed to ultimately facilitate petroleum transport out of the Semliki Basin of Lake Albert.
The U.N. Panel of Experts named New England-based Cabot Co. for conducting unethical business practices (26). Cabot is one of the largest tantalum processors in the world. The current Deputy Director of the U.S. Treasury, Samuel Bodman, was CEO and chairman of the board for Cabot from 1997-2001 (27). Current Director John H. McArthur is a Senior Advisor to Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank (28).
SNIP
Perhaps reflecting a larger reality about global business, these interlocking mining and charitable operations make Bill Clinton and G.H.W. Bush both competitors and business partners.
Meanwhile, the Times has failed to provide some important context. Former President G.H.W. Bush, Sr. has made a personal fortune doing business with Barrick Gold, a huge Canadian mining company affiliated with the Carlyle Group. Both former Presidents have, in their different ways, tapped into the $USD trillion global mining industry, based largely in Canada, which operates in the most unstable and underdeveloped regions of the world.
Giustra is a relative newcomer to the global mining business, while Barrick Gold is one of the very largest and oldest global extraction companies, and has long-established ties with conservative politicians in Canada and the United States. Both outfits do business with private military contractors and corrupt Third World dictatorships. These companies are major contributors to "charitable" and "development" agencies that operate in mineral-rich areas of Africa, South America, and Central Asia.
Giustra has partnered with Clinton as a major contributor to a charity that operates in the Third World. This is not really a new story. See, http://www.stockhouse.ca/bullboards/viewmessage.asp?no=...
Andy Hoffman
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Former U.S. president Bill Clinton has teamed with a reclusive Vancouver mining financier and a Mexican billionaire to create a massive charitable effort that will see the mining industry channel funds to fight poverty in areas affected by the resource sector.
Frank Giustra, who has made millions for himself and investors financing mining deals, has pledged $100-million (U.S) and half of all his future earnings from the mining business towards the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative (CGSGI). Carlos Slim Helu, a Mexican billionaire who made his fortune in the telecom industry has also committed $100-million towards the effort, which will initially focus on alleviating poverty and fostering growth in Latin America.
“I firmly believe that this innovative partnership between the Clinton Foundation and the business community – and the mining industry in particular – will have a profound and positive effect on the lives of countless people in the developing world during the months and years ahead,” Mr. Giustra, the 49-year-old son of a Sudbury miner and former head of Yorkton Securities, said in a statement.
Several large mining companies including zinc and copper producer Teck Cominco Ltd. and gold miner Newmont Mining Corp. have signed on as partners to the charity group which plans to expand its efforts beyond Latin America to other parts of the developing world.
As well, mining focused Canadian brokerage firms including Canaccord Capital Inc. and GMP Securities LP have committed to the fund and will direct a percentage of their resource-related commission fees to the CGSCI.
Toronto law firm Cassels Brock has promised a financial contribution as well as a pledge to provide legal services at no charge. The Toronto Stock Exchange and London Stock Exchange are also supporting the initiative.
SNIP
Although many mining companies have spent millions on funding sustainable development, education, health and infrastructure in countries and areas in which they operate, the industry still gets a bum rap, according to Newmont Mining board member and former company president Pierre Lassonde.
“What I find absolutely genius in the move here is that what has done is he has got Bill Clinton to more or less, be the spokesman for resource development. That is momentous,” Mr. Lassonde said in an interview.
In the past, some mining companies have faced severe criticism for exploiting resources in developing nations and giving little back to the community. In some cases, mining has caused environmental damage that has made some areas uninhabitable or been linked to illnesses in local people.
The CGSGI said it intends to work with local leaders to address, social, economic and environmental issues in a cost-effective and sustainable manner. The Clinton Foundation will act as the “implementing partner” linking the resource industry with local communities in the developing world.
SNIP
While the CGSGI may be the single largest charity initiative by the mining sector, Mr. Giustra's contribution follows previous large-scale donations by other industry heavyweights from Canada.
Mr. Lassonde has donated millions through his own active philanthropic efforts as has his Franco-Nevada co-founder and long-time business partner Seymour Schulich. Mr. Schulich recently gave $22.5-million (Canadian) to the Technion-Israel Institute, which is naming its chemistry department after him. His past gifts have included $27-million to York University's school of business and $20-million to McGill University's faculty of music. Barrick Gold co-founder Peter Munk gave almost $61-million to charity last year alone including $37-million to the Toronto General Hospital, $18.5-million to the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and $5-million to the University of Toronto.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Former U.S. president Bill Clinton has teamed with a reclusive Vancouver mining financier and a Mexican billionaire to create a massive charitable effort that will see the mining industry channel funds to fight poverty in areas affected by the resource sector.
Frank Giustra, who has made millions for himself and investors financing mining deals, has pledged $100-million (U.S) and half of all his future earnings from the mining business towards the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative (CGSGI). Carlos Slim Helu, a Mexican billionaire who made his fortune in the telecom industry has also committed $100-million towards the effort, which will initially focus on alleviating poverty and fostering growth in Latin America.
“I firmly believe that this innovative partnership between the Clinton Foundation and the business community – and the mining industry in particular – will have a profound and positive effect on the lives of countless people in the developing world during the months and years ahead,” Mr. Giustra, the 49-year-old son of a Sudbury miner and former head of Yorkton Securities, said in a statement.
Several large mining companies including zinc and copper producer Teck Cominco Ltd. and gold miner Newmont Mining Corp. have signed on as partners to the charity group which plans to expand its efforts beyond Latin America to other parts of the developing world.
As well, mining focused Canadian brokerage firms including Canaccord Capital Inc. and GMP Securities LP have committed to the fund and will direct a percentage of their resource-related commission fees to the CGSCI.
Toronto law firm Cassels Brock has promised a financial contribution as well as a pledge to provide legal services at no charge. The Toronto Stock Exchange and London Stock Exchange are also supporting the initiative.
SNIP
Although many mining companies have spent millions on funding sustainable development, education, health and infrastructure in countries and areas in which they operate, the industry still gets a bum rap, according to Newmont Mining board member and former company president Pierre Lassonde.
“What I find absolutely genius in the move here is that what
In the past, some mining companies have faced severe criticism for exploiting resources in developing nations and giving little back to the community. In some cases, mining has caused environmental damage that has made some areas uninhabitable or been linked to illnesses in local people.
The CGSGI said it intends to work with local leaders to address, social, economic and environmental issues in a cost-effective and sustainable manner. The Clinton Foundation will act as the “implementing partner” linking the resource industry with local communities in the developing world.
SNIP
While the CGSGI may be the single largest charity initiative by the mining sector, Mr. Giustra's contribution follows previous large-scale donations by other industry heavyweights from Canada.
Mr. Lassonde has donated millions through his own active philanthropic efforts as has his Franco-Nevada co-founder and long-time business partner Seymour Schulich. Mr. Schulich recently gave $22.5-million (Canadian) to the Technion-Israel Institute, which is naming its chemistry department after him. His past gifts have included $27-million to York University's school of business and $20-million to McGill University's faculty of music. Barrick Gold co-founder Peter Munk gave almost $61-million to charity last year alone including $37-million to the Toronto General Hospital, $18.5-million to the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and $5-million to the University of Toronto.
According to this 2006 article by Keith Harmon Snow and David Barouski, Barrick Gold is connected to both Bush and, less directly, with close Clinton associates in mineral extraction operations in some of the bloodiest areas in Africa. See, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9832
SNIP
Some people have lauded great progress in the exposure of illegal mining in DRC, particularly by the group Human Rights Watch (HRW), whose 2005 report “The Curse of Gold” exposed Ugandan officials and multi-national corporations smuggling gold through local rebel militias. The cited rebel groups were the Nationalist and Integrationist Front (FNI) and the People’s Armed Forces of Congo (FAPC). The western companies targeted by HRW were Anglo-Ashanti Gold, a company headquartered in South Africa, and Metalor, a Swedish firm. The HRW report failed to mention that Anglo-Ashanti is partnered with Anglo-American, owned by the Oppenheimer family and partnered with Canada-based Barrick Gold described below (3). London-based Anglo-American Plc. owns a 45% share in DeBeers, another Oppenheimer company that is infamous for its near monopoly of the international diamond industry (4). Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, a director of Anglo-American, is a director of Royal Dutch/Shell and a member of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan’s Advisory Board (5). The report also suppressed the most damning evidence discovered by HRW researchers—that Anglo-Ashanti sent its top lawyers into eastern DRC to aid rebel militia leaders arrested there.
Several multi-national mining companies have rarely if ever been mentioned in any human rights report. One is Barrick Gold, who operates in the town of Watsa, northwest of the town of Bunia, located in the most violent corner of the Congo. The Ugandan People’s Defense Force (UPDF) controlled the mines intermittently during the war. Officials in Bunia claim that Barrick executives flew into the region, with UPDF and RPF (Rwanda Patriotic Front) escorts, to survey and inspect their mining interests (6).
George H.W. Bush served as a paid advisor for Barrick Gold. Barrick directors include: Brian Mulroney, former PM of Canada; Edward Neys, former U.S. ambassador to Canada and chairman of the private PR firm Burston-Marsteller; former U.S. Senator Howard Baker; J. Trevor Eyton, a member of the Canadian Senate; and Vernon Jordan, one of Bill Clinton’s lawyers (7).
Barrick Gold is one of the client companies of Andrew Young’s Goodworks International lobbying firm. Andrew Young is the former Mayor of Atlanta, and a key organizer of the U.S.-Uganda Friendship Council. Young was chosen by President Clinton to chair the Southern Africa Enterprise Development Fund in October 1994. Goodworks’ clients—or business partners in some cases—include Coke, Chevron-Texaco, Monsanto, and the governments of Angola and Nigeria (note weapons transfers from Nigeria cited below). Young is a director of Cox Communications and Archers Daniels Midland—the “supermarket to the world” and National Public Radio sponsor whose directors include Brian Mulroney (Barrick) and G. Allen Andreas, a member of the European Advisory Board of The Carlyle Group.
Barrick Gold’s mining partners have included Adastra Mining—formerly named America Mineral Fields (AMFI, AMX, other names), formerly based in Hope, Arkansas, Bill Clinton’s hometown. Adastra had close ties with Lazare Kaplan International Inc., the largest diamond brokerage firm in the U.S., whose president, Maurice Tempelsman, has been an advisor on African Affairs to the U.S. Government and has been the U.S. Honorary Consul General of the Congo since 1977 (8).
Maurice Tempelsman accompanied Bill Clinton during his African tour in 1998, and he sails with the Clintons off Martha’s Vineyard. He serves on the International Advisory Council of the American Stock Exchange, and is a director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, a
”scientific” front for his offshore diamond mining—raking the seabed into oblivion.
Adastra also purchased a diamond concession on the Congolese-Angolan border from the Belgian mercenary firm International Defense and Security (1998), and currently has cobalt and copper concessions in Congo’s Katanga (Shaba) province (9). Adastra is a member of the Corporate Council on Africa, along with Goodworks, Halliburton, Chevron-Texaco, Northrop Grumman, GE, Boeing, Raytheon, Bechtel and SAIC—the latter two being secretive intelligence and defense entities involved in classified and supra-governmental “black” projects.
In April 1997, Jean-Ramon Boulle, a co-founder of Adastra (then AMFI), received a $1 billion dollar deal for mines in the Congo at Kolwezi (cobalt) and Kipushi (zinc) from Laurent Kabila’s Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Zaire (ADFL) before they were even officially in power. The ADFL were even allowed to use Boulle’s private jet (10). Meanwhile, directors of Adastra are also former directors of Anglo-American (11). Other Clinton-connected founders of Adastra include Michael McMurrough and Robert Friedland—both involved in shady, criminal, offshore businesses in Indonesia, Africa, Burma and the Americas (12).
Barrick sub-contracts to Caleb International, who has also partnered with Adastra in the past. Caleb is run by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s half-brother Salim Saleh, the former acting General of the UPDF. When Uganda withdrew from the Congo in 2002 following a so-called “peace” agreement, Saleh began training paramilitary groups to act as Ugandan proxies to sustain the flow of minerals into Uganda (13).
SNIP
Katanga’s militias and racketeering are connected to criminal networks of businessmen, including Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, Billy Rautenbach, John Bredenkamp, and Marc Rich. U.S. diamond magnate Maurice Tempelsman has profited from Katanga concessions since the Kennedy era. Lawrence Devlin, the old CIA station chief of Lubumbashi under Eisenhower, maintained Tempelsman’s criminal rackets with direct ties to Zaire’s former President Mobutu, and was subsequently employed by Tempelsman (16).
SNIP
Coltan ore is widely used in the aerospace and electronics industries for capacitors, superconductors and transistors after it is refined to tantalum. The U.S. is entirely dependant on foreign sources for tantalum, an enabling technology for capacitors essential to aerospace weaponry and every pager, cell phone, computer, VCR, CD player, P.D.A. and TV. U.S. import records show a dramatic jump of purchases from Rwanda and Uganda during the time they were smuggling tantalum and cobalt out of the Congo.
SNIP
Bechtel, a U.S. aerospace & construction company, provided satellite maps of reconnaissance photos of Mobutu’s troops for the ADFL invasion of Congo in 1996; they also created infrared maps of the Congo’s mineral deposits (22). The Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), led by Paul Kagame, the current Rwandan President graduate of the U.S. Army officers school at Fort Leavenworth, used Bechtel’s NASA maps to locate Rwandan Hutu civilians that fled the cataclysm in Rwanda in 1994. An estimated 800,000 refugees were hunted down and killed in the Congo’s forests (23). Bechtel’s friends in high places include former Secretary of State George Shultz (Board of Directors), former Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger (Bechtel Counsel) and retired U.S.M.C. general Jack Sheehan (Senior Vice President), who is also a member of the Defense Policy Board at the Pentagon (24). Riley P. Bechtel is on the Board of J.P. Morgan (25). Bechtel’s Nexant Company is the prime contractor on the Uganda-Kenya pipeline project, believed to ultimately facilitate petroleum transport out of the Semliki Basin of Lake Albert.
The U.N. Panel of Experts named New England-based Cabot Co. for conducting unethical business practices (26). Cabot is one of the largest tantalum processors in the world. The current Deputy Director of the U.S. Treasury, Samuel Bodman, was CEO and chairman of the board for Cabot from 1997-2001 (27). Current Director John H. McArthur is a Senior Advisor to Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank (28).
SNIP
Perhaps reflecting a larger reality about global business, these interlocking mining and charitable operations make Bill Clinton and G.H.W. Bush both competitors and business partners.
Refining it must be more so.
From the NYT article:
After Mining Deal, Financier Donated to Clinton
By JO BECKER and DON VAN NATTA Jr.
Published: January 31, 2008
Late on Sept. 6, 2005, a private plane carrying the Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra touched down in Almaty, a ruggedly picturesque city in southeast Kazakhstan. Several hundred miles to the west a fortune awaited: highly coveted deposits of uranium that could fuel nuclear reactors around the world. And Mr. Giustra was in hot pursuit of an exclusive deal to tap them.
Unlike more established competitors, Mr. Giustra was a newcomer to uranium mining in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic. But what his fledgling company lacked in experience, it made up for in connections. Accompanying Mr. Giustra on his luxuriously appointed MD-87 jet that day was a former president of the United States, Bill Clinton.
Upon landing on the first stop of a three-country philanthropic tour, the two men were whisked off to share a sumptuous midnight banquet with Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, whose 19-year stranglehold on the country has all but quashed political dissent.
Mr. Nazarbayev walked away from the table with a propaganda coup, after Mr. Clinton expressed enthusiastic support for the Kazakh leader’s bid to head an international organization that monitors elections and supports democracy. Mr. Clinton’s public declaration undercut both American foreign policy and sharp criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record by, among others, Mr. Clinton’s wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.
Within two days, corporate records show that Mr. Giustra also came up a winner when his company signed preliminary agreements giving it the right to buy into three uranium projects controlled by Kazakhstan’s state-owned uranium agency, Kazatomprom.
The monster deal stunned the mining industry, turning an unknown shell company into one of the world’s largest uranium producers in a transaction ultimately worth tens of millions of dollars to Mr. Giustra, analysts said.
CONTINUED...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.h...
Very profitable stuff, for those selling it to Uncle Sam.
US nuclear tab at $5.8 trillion
South News July 1
Washington: In an enormous drain on resources the United States has spent $5.8 trillion on nuclear weapons according to a new study
A four-year study of newly declassified Pentagon documents, released yesterday by the Brookings Institute, looked at the expenditures of producing and deploying nuclear explosives over the past 5 1/2 decades with current spending on the arsenal at about $35 billion annually, or roughly 15 percent of the total defense budget.
Since the birth of the atomic weapons program in 1940, a total of $5.5 trillion was spent through 1996, the Washington think tank reports. That is 29 percent of all U.S. military spending and almost 11 percent of all government spending through the 52 years.
In the first comprehensive audit of the US nuclear arsenal,it calculated costs for research, development, deployment, command and control, defenses and dismantlement. The U.S. government has never attempted to track these costs, and whether the weapons helped to bring down the Soviet Union, against whom most of the arms were aimed after World War II, remains an open question, Stephen I. Schwartz, chairman of the four-year study, said in the report.
"Given the significant sums expended on nuclear weapons and their central role in the cold war, it is striking that so few have expressed an interest in either the cumulative or the annual costs,'' Schwartz wrote.
SNIP...
Highlights of the report:
CONTINUED...
http://southmovement.alphalink.com.au/southnews/980701-...
Uranium must get real profitable selling to Israel and Pakistan, say.
BTW: For a while, I thought you were Don Van Natta or one of Jack Anderson's former assistants, leveymg.
From the NYT article:
After Mining Deal, Financier Donated to Clinton
By JO BECKER and DON VAN NATTA Jr.
Published: January 31, 2008
Late on Sept. 6, 2005, a private plane carrying the Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra touched down in Almaty, a ruggedly picturesque city in southeast Kazakhstan. Several hundred miles to the west a fortune awaited: highly coveted deposits of uranium that could fuel nuclear reactors around the world. And Mr. Giustra was in hot pursuit of an exclusive deal to tap them.
Unlike more established competitors, Mr. Giustra was a newcomer to uranium mining in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic. But what his fledgling company lacked in experience, it made up for in connections. Accompanying Mr. Giustra on his luxuriously appointed MD-87 jet that day was a former president of the United States, Bill Clinton.
Upon landing on the first stop of a three-country philanthropic tour, the two men were whisked off to share a sumptuous midnight banquet with Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, whose 19-year stranglehold on the country has all but quashed political dissent.
Mr. Nazarbayev walked away from the table with a propaganda coup, after Mr. Clinton expressed enthusiastic support for the Kazakh leader’s bid to head an international organization that monitors elections and supports democracy. Mr. Clinton’s public declaration undercut both American foreign policy and sharp criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record by, among others, Mr. Clinton’s wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.
Within two days, corporate records show that Mr. Giustra also came up a winner when his company signed preliminary agreements giving it the right to buy into three uranium projects controlled by Kazakhstan’s state-owned uranium agency, Kazatomprom.
The monster deal stunned the mining industry, turning an unknown shell company into one of the world’s largest uranium producers in a transaction ultimately worth tens of millions of dollars to Mr. Giustra, analysts said.
CONTINUED...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.h...
Very profitable stuff, for those selling it to Uncle Sam.
US nuclear tab at $5.8 trillion
South News July 1
Washington: In an enormous drain on resources the United States has spent $5.8 trillion on nuclear weapons according to a new study
A four-year study of newly declassified Pentagon documents, released yesterday by the Brookings Institute, looked at the expenditures of producing and deploying nuclear explosives over the past 5 1/2 decades with current spending on the arsenal at about $35 billion annually, or roughly 15 percent of the total defense budget.
Since the birth of the atomic weapons program in 1940, a total of $5.5 trillion was spent through 1996, the Washington think tank reports. That is 29 percent of all U.S. military spending and almost 11 percent of all government spending through the 52 years.
In the first comprehensive audit of the US nuclear arsenal,it calculated costs for research, development, deployment, command and control, defenses and dismantlement. The U.S. government has never attempted to track these costs, and whether the weapons helped to bring down the Soviet Union, against whom most of the arms were aimed after World War II, remains an open question, Stephen I. Schwartz, chairman of the four-year study, said in the report.
"Given the significant sums expended on nuclear weapons and their central role in the cold war, it is striking that so few have expressed an interest in either the cumulative or the annual costs,'' Schwartz wrote.
SNIP...
Highlights of the report:
- • The United States produced 70,000 nuclear warheads between 1945 and 1990, with an arsenal that peaked in the 1960s at 32,000 warheads
• Making the warheads was relatively inexpensive. Firing, storing and handling them was extremely costly. The 70,000 warheads cost $409.4 billion, only about 7 percent of the total. But thousands of aircraft, submarines, ships, missiles, and a large network of factories, bases and personnel cost $3.241 trillion.
• In 1996 dollars, the World War II Manhattan Project cost more than $26 billion.
• The United States has produced 65 warhead types for 116 different weapons systems.
• Thirteen major U.S. facilities - including Washington state's Bangor submarine base - handle and maintain nuclear weapons, and cover an area larger than Delaware, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia combined.
• Some 6,135 strategic ballistic missiles were purchased at a cost of $266 billion, as well as 4,680 strategic bombers since World War II at a cost of $227 billion.
• The 2,975 submarine-launched ballistic missiles alone cost $97 billion, said the report. Since their inception, the United States has designed and deployed 14 kinds of strategic bombers. Some 210 nuclear-powered military vessels have been built or are being built.
• The figures include the estimated $7 billion costs of attempting to develop a nuclear-powered airplane, which never got off the ground.
• At the moment, the U.S. nuclear arsenal - long-range strategic and short-range tactical - is estimated at 10,635 warheads.
• The current stockpile has the equivalent explosive force of about 120,000 Hiroshima bombs.
• The United States is spending an estimated $35 billion a year on nuclear weapons and related programs, the Brookings Institution says in a massive study.
CONTINUED...
http://southmovement.alphalink.com.au/southnews/980701-...
Uranium must get real profitable selling to Israel and Pakistan, say.
BTW: For a while, I thought you were Don Van Natta or one of Jack Anderson's former assistants, leveymg.
http://newsmine.org/archive/cabal-elite/international-b...
Bush cashes his gold chips -
In 1986-87, at the height of the Iran-Contra controversy, the Barrick Gold Corp. acquired the Goldstrike property in Nevada for $63 million. The land, proving to hold $10 billion in gold, was the property of the U.S. government. Bush was elected President in 1988, and his administration put through a special dispensation--applied only to the Barrick Gold Corp.--to speed up the normal procedures for a mining company to take official title (``patent'') to the land.
With the Bush Goldstrike intervention, Barrick Gold shot up from insignificance, to world power status, and Bush himself climbed onboard.
President Bush's ambassador to Canada (1989-92), Edward N. Ney, had been for many years a Bush political operative and an international coordinator of Bush's ``privatized'' intelligence activities. In 1992, Ney quit as ambassador and became a director of the Barrick Gold Corp.
The following year, Brian Mulroney resigned as Canadian prime minister. Mulroney was the most unpopular Canadian politician; but, in power, he had directly aided Barrick's international ventures, and had worked closely with Bush to force through free trade agreements. Munk immediately hired the former prime minister as a Barrick step-'n'-fetchit. The approved biography explains Munk's point of view:
``Mulroney the unhappy lightning rod for the angst of a whole nation, in office and out. Munk was well aware of these feelings toward his new recruit.... After nine years trotting around the world to meet world leaders, he had incomparable access to Presidents and prime ministers in all the key spots.... Mulroney arranged the necessary access to the key decision makers. Munk was starting to salivate at the prospect of an inside track into the huge Chinese territory.''
Mulroney has been paid over $300,000 per year by Barrick.
Barrick announced in May 1995, that a new international advisory board was being assembled, under the leadership of ``honorary senior adviser'' George Bush, the former U.S. President, who, like Mulroney, had recently lost his job at the hands of the voters.
On Nov. 27, 1996, the French newspaper {Le Monde} leaked the news that Barrick had been granted a concession to prospect for gold in Zaire--a lead which prompted the present {EIR} Barrick investigation. Canadian newspapers that same day reported that Barrick Gold had convinced the government of Indonesia to award to Barrick control over the world's largest gold find, and that {George Bush and Brian Mulroney had personally done the heavy lobbying} to accomplish this.
The Indonesia deal is indeed startling. The small Canadian mining company Bre-X Minerals Ltd. had intended to develop the Busang gold mine, on East Kalimantan. Suddenly, the government announced that it demanded that Barrick Gold Corp. be cut in to a 75% ownership stake in the mine, which is estimated to hold 57 million ounces of gold, with a current estimated value over $20 billion.
{EIR} contacted Placer Dome Inc., a rival company which has been bidding for the right to develop a share of the Busang mine. A Placer Dome spokesman would make no comment on Barrick Gold, saying only, of his own firm, ``We are a gold mining company, not a political organization.''
The U.S. Republican Party, of course, has been attempting to use President Clinton's fund-raising relationship with Indonesian supporters as a scandal to break the President. Former President Bush, meanwhile, has been reportedly telling world leaders, privately, that the Clinton Presidency is destroyed; that his son, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, will be the next President, reviving the Bush dynasty; and that, therefore, leaders would be smart to work with him now.
Bush cashes his gold chips -
In 1986-87, at the height of the Iran-Contra controversy, the Barrick Gold Corp. acquired the Goldstrike property in Nevada for $63 million. The land, proving to hold $10 billion in gold, was the property of the U.S. government. Bush was elected President in 1988, and his administration put through a special dispensation--applied only to the Barrick Gold Corp.--to speed up the normal procedures for a mining company to take official title (``patent'') to the land.
With the Bush Goldstrike intervention, Barrick Gold shot up from insignificance, to world power status, and Bush himself climbed onboard.
President Bush's ambassador to Canada (1989-92), Edward N. Ney, had been for many years a Bush political operative and an international coordinator of Bush's ``privatized'' intelligence activities. In 1992, Ney quit as ambassador and became a director of the Barrick Gold Corp.
The following year, Brian Mulroney resigned as Canadian prime minister. Mulroney was the most unpopular Canadian politician; but, in power, he had directly aided Barrick's international ventures, and had worked closely with Bush to force through free trade agreements. Munk immediately hired the former prime minister as a Barrick step-'n'-fetchit. The approved biography explains Munk's point of view:
``Mulroney
Mulroney has been paid over $300,000 per year by Barrick.
Barrick announced in May 1995, that a new international advisory board was being assembled, under the leadership of ``honorary senior adviser'' George Bush, the former U.S. President, who, like Mulroney, had recently lost his job at the hands of the voters.
On Nov. 27, 1996, the French newspaper {Le Monde} leaked the news that Barrick had been granted a concession to prospect for gold in Zaire--a lead which prompted the present {EIR} Barrick investigation. Canadian newspapers that same day reported that Barrick Gold had convinced the government of Indonesia to award to Barrick control over the world's largest gold find, and that {George Bush and Brian Mulroney had personally done the heavy lobbying} to accomplish this.
The Indonesia deal is indeed startling. The small Canadian mining company Bre-X Minerals Ltd. had intended to develop the Busang gold mine, on East Kalimantan. Suddenly, the government announced that it demanded that Barrick Gold Corp. be cut in to a 75% ownership stake in the mine, which is estimated to hold 57 million ounces of gold, with a current estimated value over $20 billion.
{EIR} contacted Placer Dome Inc., a rival company which has been bidding for the right to develop a share of the Busang mine. A Placer Dome spokesman would make no comment on Barrick Gold, saying only, of his own firm, ``We are a gold mining company, not a political organization.''
The U.S. Republican Party, of course, has been attempting to use President Clinton's fund-raising relationship with Indonesian supporters as a scandal to break the President. Former President Bush, meanwhile, has been reportedly telling world leaders, privately, that the Clinton Presidency is destroyed; that his son, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, will be the next President, reviving the Bush dynasty; and that, therefore, leaders would be smart to work with him now.
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