Who REALLY makes the laws, no matter who you vote for?

Who does not report to anyone?

Who can not be elected or step down after 4 years?

Who owns land and people and decides what will be done with them?

Who is incredibly powerful, rich and well off?

Who controls governments?

In Russia it is very „honestly“ obvious, that no matter who you vote for, Putin will stay king.

But in the USA? In Germany? In France?

Who is the INVISBLE king or queen in Corporatocracy there?

If money rules your world…. remember that ultimately all modern money comes from a bank. And it is not for free.

Baron Rothschild, an 18th century British nobleman and member of the Rothschild banking family, is credited with saying that  „The time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets.“

„The best time to buy is when there is blood running on the streets“

said by Mark Mobius (President of Templeton Emerging Markets – Singapur) in the movie „lets make money 2008“.

Meaning: The best time to buy is when a crysis is worst.

Meaning: Economical crashes enable a shifts of property in the money-poker-game.

Meaning: Who is a crash-insider, makes cash. Who is not. Looses it.

http://www.footprint.at/index.php?id=6243

“Tunisia’s New Path Towards Democracy and Prosperity”… will that be so? And what role plays the world bank in it?

… islam is a bigger threat to capitalism than communism was because communism is not a strong principle… and even capitalism is not as strong as a principle than believers of a religion.

Caïd Essebsi was speaking at the World Bank yesterday in a seminar entitled “Tunisia’s New Path Towards Democracy and Prosperity”

About the world bank

Together, we provide low-interest loans, interest-free credits and grants to developing countries for a wide array of purposes that include investments in education, health, public administration, infrastructure, financial and private sector development, agriculture and environmental and natural resource management.

The World Bank, established in 1944, is headquartered in Washington, D.C. We have more than 10,000 employees in more than 100 offices worldwide.

The World Bank is a vital source of financial and technical assistance to developing countries around the world. Our mission is to fight poverty with passion and professionalism for lasting results and to help people help themselves and their environment by providing resources, sharing knowledge, building capacity and forging partnerships in the public and private sectors.

We are not a bank in the common sense; we are made up of two unique development institutions owned by 187 member countries: the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the International Development Association (IDA).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Bank

Clean Technology Fund management

The World Bank has been assigned temporary management responsibility of the Clean Technology Fund (CTF), focused on making renewable energy cost-competitive with coal-fired power as quickly as possible, but this may not continue after UN’s Copenhagen climate change conference in December, 2009, because of the Bank’s continued investment in coal-fired power plants.[23]

List of Presidents

Not all World Bank Presidents have banking experience with some as political appointments.

Name Dates Nationality Field
Eugene Meyer 1946–1946  United States Newspaper publisher
John J. McCloy 1947–1949  United States Lawyer and US Assistant Secretary of War
Eugene R. Black, Sr. 1949–1963  United States Bank executive with Chase and executive director with the World Bank
George Woods 1963–1968  United States Bank executive with First Boston Corporation
Robert McNamara 1968–1981  United States US Defense Secretary, business executive with Ford Motor Company
Alden W. Clausen 1981–1986  United States Lawyer, bank executive with Bank of America
Barber Conable 1986–1991  United States New York State Senator and US Congressman
Lewis T. Preston 1991–1995  United States Bank executive with J.P. Morgan
Sir James Wolfensohn 1995–2005  United States
 Australia[note 1]		 Corporate lawyer and banker
Paul Wolfowitz 2005–2007  United States Various cabinet and government positions; US Ambassador to Indonesia, US Deputy Secretary of Defense
Robert B. Zoellick 2007–present  United States Bank executive with Goldman Sachs, Deputy Secretary of State and US Trade Representative

List of chief economists

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatocracy

Exxon Mobil Chairman and CEO Lee Raymond will retire at the end of the year. Exxon Mobil Chairman and CEO Lee Raymond will retire at the end of the year.

http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/04/news/newsmakers/exxon_ceo/index.htm

Is it him?

David J. Lesar, is Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer of Halliburton Energy Services.

Halliburton’s major business segment is the Energy Services Group (ESG)

WANTED: Exxon for crimes against the planet

Feature story – August 21, 2002

Lee Raymond and Exxon are the Godfathers of corporate environmental crime. They have built up an unfathomable empire at the cost of our environment. They influence governments to get their own way, leaving the charred remains of international treaties in their wake. Their head honcho Raymond knows no bounds that money can’t remove.
Exxon’s Lee Raymond is WANTED for crimes against the climate. You can download your own wanted poster below.

The environmental criminal:Lee Raymond, Chairman and Chief Executive of ExxonMobil (Esso), the world’s richest company, is wanted for questioning over his part in an audacious plot to bake the planet.

He is armed with the absurd belief that global warming is not caused by burning oil, coal or gas. His views are believed by the scientific community to be dangerous.

The accomplice: Raymond often rides out with his partner George W Bush. Together the two of them are known to be responsible for a number of hold ups, most notably the United States ditching of the Kyoto protocol on climate change.

The environmental crime: Lee Raymond and Exxon are responsible for sabotaging efforts by the international community to tackle global warming. Through a ten-year campaign of dirty tricks, Raymond’s Exxon has done more than any other company on the planet to sabotage international action to tackle global warming. Exxon gave US$1.376 million to the Republicans in the 2000 election cycle – more than any other oil company. As soon as George Bush became president, he pulled the United States out of the Kyoto Protocol, the only international agreement to address global warming – exactly the policy that Exxon was promoting.

The victims:The huge amounts of oil Exxon sells every day help make the world a little warmer every day. Eventually we will all feel the impacts of climate change if you haven’t already. As the climate changes, so will our environment. One result of global warming already being seen is the retreat of glaciers across the globe. View our investigation into the melting glacier on Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania in Quicktime format – part one and part two.

The verdict: Guilty. Exxon is misleading the public, buying off governments and selling the planet short. It is time for them to clean up their act and stop meddling in international agreements to prevent climate change. The US government is duplicitous in this crime. President Bush has allowed big business to dictate global policy and has yet to hold Exxon accountable for environmental damage done by Exxon.

You can help make Exxon accountable for their environmental crimes by joining the Stop Exxon/Esso campaign.

Reward:

A cleaner, greener, cooler planet.

Byron York

July 9, 2003 9:30 A.M.

The Bush/Iraq Scandal That Wasn’t

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatocracy

Corporatocracy, in social theories that focus on conflicts and opposing interests within society, denotes a system of government that serves the interest of, and may be run by, corporations and involves ties between government and business. Where corporations, conglomerates, and/or government entities with private components, control the direction and governance of a country, including carrying out economic planning (notwithstanding the „free market“ label).[1]

Contents

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[edit] Concept

See also: Corporatism

The concept of corporatocracy is that corporations, to a significant extent, have massive power over governments, including those governments nominally elected by the people. They exercise their power via corporate monopolies and mergers, and through their subsequent capacity to leverage broad economic interests, which allows them the luxury of being declared „too big to fail“; this is accomplished by legal mechanisms (i.e., lobbyists, campaign contributions to office holders and candidates, threats to leave the state or country for another with less oversight and/or more personally beneficial subsidies, etc.), which renders them immune to vague accusations and prosecution. It may also refer to an unrealized form of government or theoretical corporate governance in national or international affairs.

[edit] Usage

 This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (April 2011)

„The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.“ – Dwight D. Eisenhower Farewell Address to the Nation January 17, 1961[2]

  • In his 2004 book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins writes; „corporations, banks, and governments (collectively the corporatocracy)“.
  • The concept of a government run by corporations or instances where governments are actually weaker (politically, financially, and militarily) than corporations is a theme often used in both political fiction and science fiction. In these instances the dominant corporate entity is usually dubbed a „megacorporation„.

ATTENTION … very long article… you probably will loose interest… yeah why not 😀 maybe you should ! 😀

The president’s critics come up empty.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/207451/bush-iraq-scandal-wasnt/byron-york

EDITOR’S NOTE: This appeared in the July 14, 2003, issue of National Review.

On March 24, Halliburton, the giant energy-services company once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, announced that a subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, had signed a contract with the Army Corps of Engineers to put out oil fires in Iraq, as well as to evaluate and repair the Iraqi oil infrastructure. The announcement set off an angry reaction in some circles on Capitol Hill. On March 26, California Democratic representative Henry Waxman wrote a letter to the Corps demanding to know why the contract was signed “without any competition or even notice to Congress.” On April 8, Waxman, joined by Democratic representative John Dingell, requested a General Accounting Office investigation, writing that “ties” between Cheney and Halliburton “have raised concerns about whether the company has received favorable treatment from the administration.” On April 10, Waxman wrote the Corps again, demanding more information. More Waxman letters followed on April 16, May 6, and June 6.

Liberal voices in the press followed Waxman’s lead. Writing in the Washington Post, columnist Michael Kinsley called the Halliburton contract “nation-building, Republican-style, with huge contracts awarded in secret to politically connected companies.” The New York Timeseditorialized that the contract “looks like naked favoritism” and “undermines the Bush administration’s portrayal of the war as a campaign for disarmament and democracy, not lucre.”

One element missing from all the criticism was a serious examination of what the Halliburton contract actually involved and how it came to be signed. For example, was it really reached without competition, as Waxman charged? As it turns out, the evidence that is publicly available (some of it remains classified) suggests that Waxman’s accusations are misleading at best and flat wrong at worst. It appears not only that there was not “naked favoritism” at work in the Halliburton contract, but that the Corps of Engineers, and the Bush administration, acted reasonably and properly in awarding the contract — no matter what Waxman says.

THE FIRES THIS TIME?
Waxman has made three basic accusations about the Halliburton deal. The first is that it was signed without appropriate competition. The second is that it called for Halliburton to be paid under an arrangement that — Waxman says — often results in overcharges to the government. The third objection is that it is a questionable use of federal money because of what Waxman calls Halliburton’s “troubling” performance record.

First the competition issue. Last year, as administration officials made plans for war in Iraq, they were greatly concerned that Saddam Hussein would set fire to his country’s oil fields, just as retreating Iraqi troops had done in Kuwait at the end of the first Gulf War. That, military planners knew, would result in a huge economic and environmental disaster. “The model we were looking at was what the Iraqis had done in Kuwait at the end of the Gulf War,” says Lt. Col. Eugene Pawlik, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers. “We had to consider the possibility that the Iraqis would set that many or more wells on fire in Iraq and what it would take for us to throw a maximum response at a maximum destruction scenario.”

Last November, the Corps assigned Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), which has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Halliburton since the 1960s, to do a classified study of potential damage and repairs in the Iraqi oil fields. Contrary to Waxman’s assertion, the work was done under a competitively awarded contract system known as the U.S. Army Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, or LOGCAP. The LOGCAP system came about because of the military’s need to perform complex jobs — peacekeeping in Bosnia, intervention in Haiti — on sometimes very short notice. In such situations, American troops require lots of logistical support; camps have to be built, utilities have to be supplied, food has to be cooked. By the early 1990s, as the size of the active-duty force shrank, the Pentagon began to “outsource” much of that work, that is, pay civilian contractors to do it rather than tie up soldiers with non-essential tasks. Instead of going through a months-long competitive-bidding process for each job, the military came up with LOGCAP.

LOGCAP is, in effect, a multi-year supercontract. In it, the Army makes a deal with a single contractor, in this case Halliburton, to perform a wide range of unspecified services during emergency situations in the future. The last competition for LOGCAP came in 2001, when Halliburton won the contract over several other bidders. Thus, when the oil-field study was needed, Corps officials say, Halliburton was the natural place to turn. “To invite other contractors to compete to perform a highly classified requirement that Kellogg Brown & Root was already under a competitively awarded contract to perform would have been a wasteful duplication of effort,” Corps commander Lt. Gen. Robert Flowers wrote to Waxman in April.

In February 2003, with the study done, the Corps of Engineers decided to issue a contract to actually execute the plan that KBR had drawn up for dealing with problems in the Iraqi oil fields. At the end of that month, Army headquarters authorized the Corps to issue a sole-source contract to KBR. (The assignment seemed logical for another reason: Halliburton/KBR put out 350 oil-well fires in Kuwait after the first Gulf War.) “Only KBR, the contractor that developed the complex, classified contingency plans, could commence implementing them on extremely short notice,” Flowers wrote Waxman. “The timing was driven by Central Command’s operational requirement to have support available in advance of possibly imminent hostilities.” Flowers added that the contract was always intended as a temporary “bridge” to a more permanent contract that would be offered for competitive bidding.

The next question was how large the contract should be. That was a difficult problem, because no one knew how big the problem would be. Would all the fields burn? Would none of them? Just a few? The Army assumed a worst-case scenario and decided the contract would be worth any amount between $0 and $7 billion (a common contracting practice known as ID/IQ, which stands for indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity). The $7 billion cap was thought to be sufficient to handle any emergency.

When the Army told Waxman that, he immediately began calling the KBR deal a $7 billion contract. “We are told it was a short-term contract for very little money, then it turned out it was a $7 billion contract,” he said on National Public Radio in early May. What Waxman did not say was that he had been told a month earlier that the contract would not be worth anywhere near the cap amount. Because most of the anticipated disasters did not take place, the Army has asked KBR to do much less work than the original worst-case scenario envisioned, and the contract has therefore been worth far less than it might have been. “We will come nowhere close to the $7 billion figure,” says Lt. Col. Pawlik. As of mid June, Pawlik says, the task orders issued to Kellogg Brown & Root totaled about $214 million. It’s estimated that, in the end, costs will probably amount to around $600 million. While that is not pocket change, it’s also not $7 billion — contrary, again, to Waxman’s assertion.

Army officials also suggest that critics consider what might have happened had the Iraqi situation worked out differently. Suppose the wells had been torched and the Army, following Waxman’s advice, had begun a long, complicated competitive-bidding process to find a company to put out the fires. “I don’t think people would have been satisfied for the wells to have been burning while we were going through standard contract practices,” says Pawlik. “I think we would have been getting a lot of questions about why did we pursue that course of action.”

HALLIBURTON — THE CLINTON CONTRACTOR
Waxman’s second objection concerns the way the company will be paid for its services. The LOGCAP payment method, known as a cost-plus-award, calls for KBR to be paid its costs plus a profit of 1 percent. According to the General Accounting Office, KBR could also earn “an incentive fee of up to nine percent of the cost estimate, based on the contractor’s performance in a number of areas, including cost control.” In one of his letters to the Corps of Engineers, Waxman says that the cost-plus-award system is “generally discouraged in the executive branch because it provides the contractor with an incentive to increase its profits by increasing the costs to the taxpayer.” But in fact, the cost-plus-award method is an extremely common arrangement throughout the defense-contracting industry; one can leaf through the pages of Defense Daily and see many hundreds of contracts handled on the same basis. Given such widespread use, it is hard to conclude that the cost-plus-award method somehow makes the Halliburton contract a sweetheart deal for a politically favored company. (Nor is the contract unusually generous; the LOGCAP’s range of a 1 percent to 9 percent fee is in line with standard government/industry practice.)

[Editor’s note — Since this article was published in National Review magazine, Halliburton has said that while the LOGCAP that was in effect from 1992 until 1997 called for a one-to-nine percent profit range, the LOGCAP in effect now calls for significantly less, a one-to-three percent profit margin.]

Finally, Waxman objects to what he calls Halliburton’s “troubling” performance record, suggesting that Halliburton would not have gotten the contract had Vice President Cheney not once headed the company. But Waxman’s charges — and their echoes in outraged editorials — overlook Halliburton’s extensive history of defense work for earlier administrations. Indeed, far from having a “troubling” past, one could argue that Halliburton was a favorite contractor of the Clinton Pentagon.

The first LOGCAP was awarded in 1992, as the first Bush administration (including then-Secretary of Defense Cheney) was leaving office. Four companies competed, and the winner was Brown & Root, as it was known at the time (Halliburton changed the name to Kellogg Brown & Root after an acquisition in 1998). The multi-year contract was in effect during much of the Clinton administration. During those years, Brown & Root did extensive work for the Army under the LOGCAP contract in Haiti, Somalia, and Bosnia; contract workers built base camps and provided troops with electrical power, food, and other necessities.

In 1997, when LOGCAP was again put up for bid, Halliburton/Brown & Root lost the competition to another contractor, Dyncorp. But the Clinton Defense Department, rather than switch from Halliburton to Dyncorp, elected to award a separate, sole-source contract to Halliburton/Brown & Root to continue its work in the Balkans. According to a later GAO study, the Army made the choice because 1) Brown & Root had already acquired extensive knowledge of how to work in the area; 2) the company “had demonstrated the ability to support the operation”; and 3) changing contractors would have been costly. The Army’s sole-source Bosnia contract with Brown & Root lasted until 1999. At that time, the Clinton Defense Department conducted full-scale competitive bidding for a new contract. The winner was . . . Halliburton/Brown & Root. The company continued its work in Bosnia uninterrupted.