Libya: All About Oil, Or All About The Banks?

Ellen Brown - Several writers have noted the odd fact that the Libyan rebels took time out from their rebellion in March to create their own central bank – this before they even had a government. Robert Wenzel wrote in the Economic Policy Journal:

I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising. This suggests we have a bit more than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty sophisticated influences.

Alex Newman wrote in the New American:

In a statement released last week, the rebels reported on the results of a meeting held on March 19. Among other things, the supposed rag-tag revolutionaries announced the “[d]esignation of the Central Bank of Benghazi as a monetary authority competent in monetary policies in Libya and appointment of a Governor to the Central Bank of Libya, with a temporary headquarters in Benghazi.”

Newman quoted CNBC senior editor John Carney, who asked, “Is this the first time a revolutionary group has created a central bank while it is still in the midst of fighting the entrenched political power? It certainly seems to indicate how extraordinarily powerful central bankers have become in our era.”

Another anomaly involves the official justification for taking up arms against Libya. Supposedly it’s about human rights violations, but the evidence is contradictory. According to an article on the Fox News website on February 28:


As the United Nations works feverishly to condemn Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi for cracking down on protesters, the body’s Human Rights Council is poised to adopt a report chock-full of praise for Libya’s human rights record.

The review commends Libya for improving educational opportunities, for making human rights a “priority” and for bettering its “constitutional” framework. Several countries, including Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia but also Canada, give Libya positive marks for the legal protections afforded to its citizens — who are now revolting against the regime and facing bloody reprisal.

Whatever might be said of Gaddafi, the Libyan people seem to be thriving. A delegation of medical professionals from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus wrote in an appeal to Russian President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin that after becoming acquainted with Libyan life, it was their view that in few nations did people live in such comfort:


[Libyans] are entitled to free treatment, and their hospitals provide the best in the world of medical equipment. Education in Libya is free, capable young people have the opportunity to study abroad at government expense. When marrying, young couples receive 60,000 Libyan dinars (about 50,000 U.S. dollars) of financial assistance. Non-interest state loans, and as practice shows, undated. Due to government subsidies the price of cars is much lower than in Europe, and they are affordable for every family. Gasoline and bread cost a penny, no taxes for those who are engaged in agriculture. The Libyan people are quiet and peaceful, are not inclined to drink, and are very religious.

They maintained that the international community had been misinformed about the struggle against the regime. “Tell us,” they said, “who would not like such a regime?”

Even if that is just propaganda, there is no denying at least one very popular achievement of the Libyan government: it brought water to the desert by building the largest and most expensive irrigation project in history, the $33 billion GMMR (Great Man-Made River) project. Even more than oil, water is crucial to life in Libya. The GMMR provides 70 percent of the population with water for drinking and irrigation, pumping it from Libya’s vast underground Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System in the south to populated coastal areas 4,000 kilometers to the north. The Libyan government has done at least some things right.

Another explanation for the assault on Libya is that it is “all about oil,” but that theory too is problematic. As noted in the National Journal, the country produces only about 2 percent of the world’s oil. Saudi Arabia alone has enough spare capacity to make up for any lost production if Libyan oil were to disappear from the market. And if it’s all about oil, why the rush to set up a new central bank?

Another provocative bit of data circulating on the Net is a 2007 “Democracy Now” interview of U.S. General Wesley Clark (Ret.). In it he says that about 10 days after September 11, 2001, he was told by a general that the decision had been made to go to war with Iraq. Clark was surprised and asked why. “I don’t know!” was the response. “I guess they don’t know what else to do!” Later, the same general said they planned to take out seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.

What do these seven countries have in common? In the context of banking, one that sticks out is that none of them is listed among the 56 member banks of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). That evidently puts them outside the long regulatory arm of the central bankers’ central bank in Switzerland.

The most renegade of the lot could be Libya and Iraq, the two that have actually been attacked. Kenneth Schortgen Jr., writing on Examiner.com, noted that “[s]ix months before the US moved into Iraq to take down Saddam Hussein, the oil nation had made the move to accept Euros instead of dollars for oil, and this became a threat to the global dominance of the dollar as the reserve currency, and its dominion as the petrodollar.”

According to a Russian article titled “Bombing of Lybia – Punishment for Ghaddafi for His Attempt to Refuse US Dollar,” Gadaffi made a similarly bold move: he initiated a movement to refuse the dollar and the euro, and called on Arab and African nations to use a new currency instead, the gold dinar. Gadaffi suggested establishing a united African continent, with its 200 million people using this single currency. During the past year, the idea was approved by many Arab countries and most African countries. The only opponents were the Republic of South Africa and the head of the League of Arab States. The initiative was viewed negatively by the USA and the European Union, with French president Nicolas Sarkozy calling Libya a threat to the financial security of mankind; but Gaddafi was not swayed and continued his push for the creation of a united Africa.

And that brings us back to the puzzle of the Libyan central bank. In an article posted on the Market Oracle, Eric Encina observed:


One seldom mentioned fact by western politicians and media pundits: the Central Bank of Libya is 100% State Owned. . . . Currently, the Libyan government creates its own money, the Libyan Dinar, through the facilities of its own central bank. Few can argue that Libya is a sovereign nation with its own great resources, able to sustain its own economic destiny. One major problem for globalist banking cartels is that in order to do business with Libya, they must go through the Libyan Central Bank and its national currency, a place where they have absolutely zero dominion or power-broking ability. Hence, taking down the Central Bank of Libya (CBL) may not appear in the speeches of Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy but this is certainly at the top of the globalist agenda for absorbing Libya into its hive of compliant nations.

Libya not only has oil. According to the IMF, its central bank has nearly 144 tons of gold in its vaults. With that sort of asset base, who needs the BIS, the IMF and their rules?

All of which prompts a closer look at the BIS rules and their effect on local economies. An article on the BIS website states that central banks in the Central Bank Governance Network are supposed to have as their single or primary objective “to preserve price stability.” They are to be kept independent from government to make sure that political considerations don’t interfere with this mandate. “Price stability” means maintaining a stable money supply, even if that means burdening the people with heavy foreign debts. Central banks are discouraged from increasing the money supply by printing money and using it for the benefit of the state, either directly or as loans.

In a 2002 article in Asia Times titled “The BIS vs National Banks,” Henry Liu maintained:


BIS regulations serve only the single purpose of strengthening the international private banking system, even at the peril of national economies. The BIS does to national banking systems what the IMF has done to national monetary regimes. National economies under financial globalization no longer serve national interests.

. . . FDI [foreign direct investment] denominated in foreign currencies, mostly dollars, has condemned many national economies into unbalanced development toward export, merely to make dollar-denominated interest payments to FDI, with little net benefit to the domestic economies.

He added, “Applying the State Theory of Money, any government can fund with its own currency all its domestic developmental needs to maintain full employment without inflation.” The “state theory of money” refers to money created by governments rather than private banks.

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

Stock up with F

And that appears to be how the Libyan system works. According to Wikipedia, the functions of the

Central Bank of Libya include “issuing and regulating banknotes and coins in Libya” and “managing and issuing all state loans.” Libya’s wholly state-owned bank can and does issue the national currency and lend it for state purposes.

That would explain where Libya gets the money to provide free education and medical care, and to issue each young couple $50,000 in interest-free state loans. It would also explain where the country found the $33 billion to build the Great Man-Made River project. Libyans are worried that NATO-led air strikes are coming perilously close to this pipeline, threatening another humanitarian disaster.

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

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

Saving The World Empire: Ground Troops In Libya

Michael S. Rozeff - In an article on the Libyan War on March 22, I predicted the war would grow in scope, air power wouldn’t win it, divisions in the Western alliance would worsen, that Gaddafi would change his tactics, and that this meant that the West would introduce ground troops. This has almost all happened. In Senate testimony, an American general says the war is stalemated (I doubt that but air power hasn’t won it), Gaddafi has indeed altered tactics, and the coalition could erode if ground troops are introduced. The article mentions American CIA teams in operation on the ground, and we had a report on Feb. 28 of forces from the U.S., Great Britain, and France already being in Libya.


Gen. Ham tells Senator Lindsey Graham the current strategy is not working.

General Ham says the U.S. may consider ground troops and/or an international ground force even though it has drawbacks. Western aims are (1) get Gaddafi out, (2) set up a new and friendly government, (3) protect Western oil investments, (4) control the revolts and revolutions in nearby oil-producing lands, (5) maintain the dollar as the pricing vehicle for oil, and (6) secure Western influence in North Africa and Africa more generally as opposed to Russian and Chinese interests. If troops are necessary to do this, they’ll use troops no matter what Gates or Obama have said. This entire regional turmoil, especially when it comes to Saudi Arabia, is not over. Its importance is as great or greater than the American loss of control over Iran in 1979, and that is the factor suggesting that the American leadership will exert whatever power it takes. This of course depends heavily on the decisions of one man: Emperor Obama. He tends toward international coalitions as a cover. He tends to compromise between the harder line Clinton and softer line Gates. He will be looking seriously at all his military and political options, just as General Ham says, due to the high stakes for the aims of American Empire.

Obama Sucessfully Shutdown Anti-War Movement

Kurt Nimmo - It is more evidence the antiwar movement is largely a left-vs-right distraction. A new study by U-M’s Michael Heaney and colleague Fabio Rojas of Indiana University shows that the antiwar movement in the United States demobilized as Democrats took over Congress and the White House.

A small, dedicated core of people protest against Obama’s third war.

“As president, Obama has maintained the occupation of Iraq and escalated the war in Afghanistan,” said Heaney. “The antiwar movement should have been furious at Obama’s ‘betrayal’ and reinvigorated its protest activity.”

“Instead, attendance at antiwar rallies declined precipitously and financial resources available to the movement have dissipated. The election of Obama appeared to be a demobilizing force on the antiwar movement, even in the face of his pro-war decisions.”

“Since Democrats are more numerous in the population at large than are members of third parties, the withdrawal of Democrats from the movement in 2009 appears to be a significant explanation for the falling size of antiwar protests,” Heaney said. “Thus, we have identified the kernel of the linkage between Democratic partisanship and the demobilization of the antiwar movement.”

“Overall, our results convincingly demonstrate a strong relationship between partisanship and the dynamics of the antiwar movement. While Obama’s election was heralded as a victory for the antiwar movement, Obama’s election, in fact, thwarted the ability of the movement to achieve critical mass.”

Democrats and other liberal supporters of the establishment are not opposed to mass murder and wanton slaughter by the state – they merely oppose it when Republicans do it. Opposition is a partisan formality.

A corporate media poll conducted in late March on Obama’s handling of the unconstitutional attack on Libya shows that two-thirds of Democrat respondents support violating international law and pummeling the oil-rich north African country with Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Congress Democrats often howled about “Bush’s Wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, but supported them – including the mass murder of 1.5 million Iraqis, a war criminal of immense proportion – by continuing to fund them. The number of anti-war Democrats in Congress who worked to defund the illegal occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq was miniscule.

Obama duped the so-called anti-war faction of his party during the election. He said he’d bring home the troops and close down Gitmo. During the primaries, he tried to make Hillary Clinton look like the war candidate.

Once elected as savior, Obama not only continued Bush’s war policies – in fact the war policies of the global elite – but expanded them. Troops remain in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Pentagon and the CIA stepped up the terror campaign in Pakistan. Gitmo remains open.

History repeats itself. In 1999, then president Clinton attacked Yugoslavia. Democrats and liberals cheered him on. Congress was silent. Only four Democrats objected. In the House, there was only one, Barbara Lee of California. In the Senate, just three – Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, and Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico.

Both Republicans and Democrats love mass murder and military conquest. War is the health of the state, declared Randolph Bourne as the First World War unfolded. The Great War extracted a great toll – 37 million casualties. London and Wall Street bankers cooked up that devastating war and every one since, including the one now expanding in Libya as a U.S. general hints the government will soon send in ground troops and thus initiate a third war in the Arab and Muslim Middle East.

Democrats are so enthusiastic about the murder campaign in Libya, they didn’t even bother to vote on it, not that Obama gave them a chance – like Bush before him, he used the unchecked power of a unitary presidency to attack the African country. “He has proceeded in a way that is cautions and thoughtful,” said a proud Carl Levin, Michigan Democrat. “He has put the ducks in a row before he decided the United States should take the lead for a short period of time to do what only we could do.”

Ohio Democrat Dennis Kucinich stands alone in the wilderness with Rep. Ron Paul. He said Obama’s unconstitutional attack “is an act of war” and an impeachable offense. “The president made statements which attempt to minimize U.S. action, but U.S. planes may drop U.S. bombs and U.S. missiles may be involved in striking another sovereign nation. War from the air is still war,” he said in a lengthy speech on the House floor, a speech mostly ignored by fellow Democrats.

“It is hard to imagine that Congress, during the current contentious debate over deficits and budget cutting, would agree to plunge America into still another war, especially since America will spend trillions in total for the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and incursions into Pakistan,” he said.

Really, it is not hard to imagine at all. Democrats and Republicans do the bidding of the global elite and the global bankster elite not only want war in the Middle East, they want the enslaving debt that invariably comes with it.

In 2003, as he prepared to attack Iraq, Bush dismissed the antiwar movement as a focus group. Democrats are not so crude. Instead, they deem their war “humanitarian,” as a previous war criminal, Bill Clinton, did as he bombed the former Yugoslavia with depleted uranium, in effect launching a nuclear war against that small country.

Gitmo Graduates, Two Other Islamist Thugs At The Head Of The Libya's Rebellion

Ed Morrissey - When the Telegraph first reported on the presence of Abdel Hakim al-Hasadi, the story started off with an explanation that, contrary to rumor, Hasadi had never been held at Guantanamo Bay. American forces had captured him fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan, but the US transferred him to Libya after holding him in Afghanistan for a period of at least several months. However, Sufyan Ben Qumu did graduate from Club Gitmo in 2007 after six years in detention, and now he, Hasadi, and known Islamist exremist Salah al-Bahrani lead a substantial portion of the Libyan rebellion (via Liberty Pundits):

Two former Afghan Mujahedeen and a six-year detainee at Guantanamo Bay have stepped to the fore of this city’s military campaign, training new recruits for the front and to protect the city from infiltrators loyal to Col. Moammar Gadhafi.

The presence of Islamists like these amid the opposition has raised concerns, among some fellow rebels as well as their Western allies, that the goal of some Libyan fighters in battling Col. Gadhafi is to propagate Islamist extremism. …

Mr. Hasady’s field commander on the front lines is Salah al-Barrani, a former fighter from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, or LIFG, which was formed in the 1990s by Libyan mujahedeen returning home after helping to drive the Soviets from Afghanistan and dedicated to ousting Mr. Gadhafi from power.

Sufyan Ben Qumu, a Libyan army veteran who worked for Osama bin Laden’s holding company in Sudan and later for an al Qaeda-linked charity in Afghanistan, is training many of the city’s rebel recruits.

Both Messrs. Hasady and Ben Qumu were picked up by Pakistani authorities after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and were turned over to the U.S. Mr. Hasady was released to Libyan custody two months later. Mr. Ben Qumu spent six years at Guantanamo Bay before he was turned over to Libyan custody in 2007.

Earlier this week, Admiral James Stavridis told Congress that intelligence had picked up “flickers” of radical Islamists in the rebellion. If these are “flickers,” then the Taliban must have be only a 40-watt light bulb in Afghanistan. We have a former Gitmo detainee training new insurgency fighters in a near-failed state, a situation that sounds a lot like Yemen rather than Libya, plus two mujahedin veterans running a major portion of the rebellion.

Thomas Joscelyn gives us more background on Qumu:

Declassified memos produced at Guantanamo paint a troubling picture of the man who is training Derna’s rebels. …

In Sudan, Qumu was a truck driver for a company owned by Osama bin Laden, but his standing soon progressed. He was named to the military committee of the LIFG. In 1998, Qumu joined the Taliban’s forces in Afghanistan, where he fought against the Northern Alliance.

Qumu continued to work with al Qaeda in Afghanistan as well. In memos prepared at Guantanamo, US officials alleged that he “received military training at Osama bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan” and his “name and family information” were “listed on a document which contained details of al Qaeda operatives’ families.” The Gitmo files note that the document “is associated with a senior al Qaeda operative.”

US officials at Gitmo also alleged that Qumu “met a senior al Qaeda facilitator between ten and twenty occasions.” One of the al Qaeda-affiliated camps Qumu attended was the Khalden camp, which was run by Ibn Sheikh al Libi, a senior al Qaeda leader who died while in Libyan custody in 2009, and Abu Zubaydah, a senior al Qaeda facilitator who is currently detained at Gitmo. The Gitmo files do not specifically say if either of these two al Qaeda leaders met with Qumu, or if he repeatedly met some other “senior al Qaeda facilitator.”

While in Kabul from August to November of 2001, Qumu worked for al Wafa, a charity that has been designated as an al Qaeda front by the US Treasury Department and United Nations. Sometime after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Qumu allegedly “met with al Qaeda operatives at a guest house in Kabul…to discuss the evacuation of women and children.” He also allegedly delivered equipment to al Qaeda and Taliban forces fighting the Northern Alliance in Mazar e Sharif, Afghanistan in late 2001.

So why did we release Qumu in the first place? Supposedly, it acted to strengthen our position on the global stage. Instead, we’ve let a very dangerous Islamist build an army of insurgents in North Africa. That’s not the Obama administration’s fault, of course, as Qumu was released during the Bush administration. But it is a good reason to stop releasing others from Gitmo.

Meanwhile, the US continues to publicly mull sending weapons to the rebellion. That’s a flicker of smart power.

In 2009 Col. Muammar Gaddafi Proposed Nationalizing Libya's Oill

Kurt Nimmo - The Coalition of Globalists are not interested in sheltering the Libyan people from Muammar al- Gaddafi. The no-fly zone and attacks on the Libyan military by NATO and U.S. have nothing to do with democracy and free elections.

It’s about oil – and who owns it.

In 2009, Gaddafi uttered the “N” word – nationalization. Not only for Libya’s oil, but all oil in the region. For the globalists, this made Gaddafi a dangerous mad dog renegade who needed to be replaced.

“The oil-exporting countries should opt for nationalization because of the rapid fall in oil prices. We must put the issue on the table and discuss it seriously,” he declared. “Oil should be owned by the State at this time, so we could better control prices by the increase or decrease in production.”

Predictably, Gaddafi’s pronouncement set off alarm bells at Anglo-Dutch Shell, British Petroleum, ExxonMobil, Hess Corp., Marathon Oil, Occidental Petroleum and ConocoPhillips, the Spanish Repsol, Germany’s Wintershall, Austria’s OMV, Norway’s Statoil, Eni and Canada’s Petro Canada.

The year before, the Libyan state oil company, National Oil, prepared a report on the subject in which officials suggested modifying the production-sharing agreements with foreign companies in order to increase state revenues, according to a report posted on the Pravda website.

After implementing contract changes, Libya gained 5.4 billion dollars in oil revenues.

Gaddafi’s plan was reported on by Reuters and the corporate media.

In addition to calling for nationalization, the Libyan leader called for support of his proposal to dismantle the government and to distribute the oil wealth directly to Libya’s 5 million citizens.

State bureaucrats, however, rejected the idea because they feared for the loss of their cushy jobs and also feared the wrath of transnational oil corporations and the banks that own them.

Prime Minister al-Baghdadi, Ali al-Mahmoudi and Farhat Omar Bin Guida, of Libya’s Central Bank, told Gaddafi the measure would wreck the country’s economy in lead to “capital flight,” in other words the globalists pulling their money out of the country.

“The Administration has failed and the state’s economy has failed. Enough is enough. The solution is for the Libyan people to directly receive oil revenues and decide what to do with them,” Gaddafi said in a speech broadcast on state television. To this end, the Libyan leader urged a radical reform of government bureaucracy.

The government, however, voted to reject Gaddafi’s plan to turn ownership of the country’s oil over to the people. 64 ministers from a total of 468 Popular Committee members voted for the measure.

“My dream during all these years was to give the power and wealth directly to the people,” said Gaddafi in response to the rejection.

In 1953, the United States and Britain plotted to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had promised to nationalize the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and give the profits to the Iranian people. Mosaddegh attempted to negotiate with the AIOC, but the company rejected his proposed compromise.

In order to sell a coup, Britain persuaded Secretary of State John Foster Dulles that Iran was going over to the Soviets. Then president Truman was cool to the idea, but in 1953, when Dwight D. Eisenhower became president, the UK convinced him to a joint coup d’état. The CIA was dispatched to destabilize the country, get rid of Mosaddegh, and install the brutal dictator Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi and his secret police, the SAVAK.

For the mistake of suggesting oil profits be returned to the Libyan people, Muammar al-Gaddafi is now suffering a likewise fate.