Earliest evidence of fungus that takes over ants' behaviour for its own ends found by scientists
The oldest evidence of a fungus that turns ants into zombies and makes them stagger to their death has been uncovered by scientists.
The gruesome hallmark of the fungus's handiwork was found on the leaves of plants that grew in Messel, near Darmstadt in Germany, 48m years ago.
The finding shows that parasitic fungi evolved the ability to control the creatures they infect in the distant past, even before the rise of the Himalayas.
The fungus, which is alive and well in forests today, latches on to carpenter ants as they cross the forest floor before returning to their nests high in the canopy.
The fungus grows inside the ants and releases chemicals that affect their behaviour. Some ants leave the colony and wander off to find fresh leaves on their own, while others fall from their tree-top havens on to leaves nearer the ground.
The final stage of the parasitic death sentence is the most macabre. In their last hours, infected ants move towards the underside of the leaf they are on and lock their mandibles in a "death grip" around the central vein, immobilising themselves and locking the fungus in position.
"This can happen on mass. You can find whole graveyards with 20 or 30 ants in a square metre. Each time, they are on leaves that are a particular height off the ground and they have bitten into the main vein before dying," said David Hughes at Harvard University.
The fungus cannot grow high up in the canopy or on the forest floor, but infected ants often die on leaves midway between the two, where the humidity and temperature suit the fungus. Once an ant has died, the fungus sprouts from its head and produces a pod of spores, which are fired at night on to the forest floor, where they can infect other ants.
Scientists led by Hughes noticed that ants infected with the fungus, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, bit into leaves with so much force they left a lasting mark. The holes created by their mandibles either side of the leaf vein are bordered by scar tissue, producing an unmistakable dumb-bell shape.
Writing in the journal, Biology Letters, the team describes how they trawled a database of images that document leaf damage by insects, fungi and other organisms. They found one image of a 48m-year-old leaf from the Messel pit that showed the distinctive "death grip" markings of an infected ant. At the time, the Messel area was thick with subtropical forests.
"We now present it as the first example of behavioural manipulation and probably the only one which can be found. In most cases, this kind of control is spectacular but ephemeral and doesn't leave any permanent trace," Hughes said.
"The question now is, what are the triggers that push a parasite not just to kill its host, but to take over its brain and muscles and then kill it."
He added: "Of all the parasitic organisms, only a few have evolved this trick of manipulating their host's behaviour.
Why go to the bother? Why are there not more of them?"
Scientists are not clear how the fungus controls the ants it infects, but know that the parasite releases alkaloid chemicals into the insect as it consumes it from the inside.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Why college costs so much
Tired of doing your job but still want to collect your full paycheck? Imagine you could require your employer to hire someone else to do nearly all of your work so you only had to show up three to six hours a week and then only do the parts of your job you most felt like doing while your fill-in, earning barely more than minimum wage with no benefits, did all the grunt work.
Imagine further that you had lifetime job security, summers off and six months of additional guaranteed vacation every three years; that everyone in your job category, amounting to most of your employer's work force, had that sort of deal; and that your employer, instead of worrying about the expense, was able to pass the entire cost onto the customers while according you and your colleagues annual pay raises several times the rate of inflation.
As Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus point out in their new book "Higher Education?" that's the deal every tenured faculty member gets at America's public universities and at most larger private schools. Their hired grunts are the "adjuncts." As reported by The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Hacker and Ms. Dreifus point out "it is immoral and unseemly to have a person teaching exactly the same class as an ensconced faculty member but for one-sixth the pay."
If nothing else, the need to maintain duplicate staffs — one grotesquely underpaid, the other lavishly overpaid and underemployed — has helped push college costs to the point where students and their parents end up tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Debts of comparable magnitude accrue to the increasing number of public-university students who never attain degrees, though the schools' ostensible primary mission is to make widespread higher education affordable. Indisputable is a college is unaffordable when four years of attendance leave students and their parents with debts exceeding $30,000.
Mr. Hacker and Ms. Dreifus document how America's universities have evolved into asylums run by the lunatics. In Connecticut, for example, the legislature and governor retain the right to intervene decisively, but they have insulated themselves from higher-education governance through layers of independent boards, and those boards are run by administrators and faculties for the benefit of administrators and faculties.
That's been the national trend. As The Wall Street Journal noted: "For all the high-minded talk, Mr. Hacker and Ms. Dreifus conclude, colleges and universities serve the people who work there more than the parents and taxpayers who pay for 'higher education' or the students who so desperately need it.'" Within such a framework, it was no surprise the Connecticut State University system's governors voted the other day to give the system's presidents a 5 percent "cost-of-living" raise to cover a year in which the Bureau of Labor Statistics said the cost of living went down.
This year, Connecticut will elect a new governor and legislature. It's time for those seeking to represent taxpayers to tell them clearly what they will do to restore affordability to Connecticut's state colleges and universities, even if that means taking back much of the delegated authority that has been grossly abused by its college and university governing boards.
A good starting point would be for the governor and legislature to insist upon the end of the absurd and exorbitant duplicate staffing, and that those on the faculty be required to do an honest amount of in-class work for their paychecks.
Imagine further that you had lifetime job security, summers off and six months of additional guaranteed vacation every three years; that everyone in your job category, amounting to most of your employer's work force, had that sort of deal; and that your employer, instead of worrying about the expense, was able to pass the entire cost onto the customers while according you and your colleagues annual pay raises several times the rate of inflation.
As Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus point out in their new book "Higher Education?" that's the deal every tenured faculty member gets at America's public universities and at most larger private schools. Their hired grunts are the "adjuncts." As reported by The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Hacker and Ms. Dreifus point out "it is immoral and unseemly to have a person teaching exactly the same class as an ensconced faculty member but for one-sixth the pay."
If nothing else, the need to maintain duplicate staffs — one grotesquely underpaid, the other lavishly overpaid and underemployed — has helped push college costs to the point where students and their parents end up tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Debts of comparable magnitude accrue to the increasing number of public-university students who never attain degrees, though the schools' ostensible primary mission is to make widespread higher education affordable. Indisputable is a college is unaffordable when four years of attendance leave students and their parents with debts exceeding $30,000.
Mr. Hacker and Ms. Dreifus document how America's universities have evolved into asylums run by the lunatics. In Connecticut, for example, the legislature and governor retain the right to intervene decisively, but they have insulated themselves from higher-education governance through layers of independent boards, and those boards are run by administrators and faculties for the benefit of administrators and faculties.
That's been the national trend. As The Wall Street Journal noted: "For all the high-minded talk, Mr. Hacker and Ms. Dreifus conclude, colleges and universities serve the people who work there more than the parents and taxpayers who pay for 'higher education' or the students who so desperately need it.'" Within such a framework, it was no surprise the Connecticut State University system's governors voted the other day to give the system's presidents a 5 percent "cost-of-living" raise to cover a year in which the Bureau of Labor Statistics said the cost of living went down.
This year, Connecticut will elect a new governor and legislature. It's time for those seeking to represent taxpayers to tell them clearly what they will do to restore affordability to Connecticut's state colleges and universities, even if that means taking back much of the delegated authority that has been grossly abused by its college and university governing boards.
A good starting point would be for the governor and legislature to insist upon the end of the absurd and exorbitant duplicate staffing, and that those on the faculty be required to do an honest amount of in-class work for their paychecks.
Sex and ignorance a deadly mix
I read with interest your on-line report “Porn a major reason behind baby dumping, say cops” and would like to share my observations as a former tertiary educator.
Blaming porn for the increasing rate of baby dumping and other sex-related ills such as teenage pregnancy is just a short-term solution which at best screams of ignorance. There are a lot of people out there who have access to porn and yet do not go through teenage pregnancies or baby dumping.
The key is not in micromanaging our children’s lives but educating them to the best of our abilities.
Many young people want and choose to have sex out of love or curiosity. Please do not blame the so-called corrupt West as love and sexuality exist in all cultures and communities.
However, when teens have sex and are ignorant of the consequences, it is a deadly mix. Excuses like “that one time won’t get me pregnant” or “a condom makes things feel different” is common among teens and these reasons should be looked into closely by both the Government and parents.
We need to stop heaping the majority of our parental responsibility onto the education system and start taking the initiative to teach our children not just about the birds and the bees but also the emotional aspects of a sexually active lifestyle.
We should allow our children to choose the path they take in life and ensure that at the same time they do so responsibly.
Our roles as parents encompasses more than just providing a roof over our children’s heads, food on the table and a degree in their achiever’s belt. It means spending time knowing our children and moulding them to be God-fearing, law-abiding, wise and street-smart people who will go on to pass these values to their own children.
This can only be achieved by spending more quality time with them and not handing their care (spiritually, mentally and emotionally) off to someone else like a maid.
Our Education Ministry should look into sex education in a more complete manner. Sex is more than just biology; it is an act that encompasses all facets of a human being – mentally, socially, emotionally and even religiously. Instead of adopting one firm stand – that abstinence is the law – the ministry should address other issues such as what happens if someone chooses to have sex, how to teach girls to stand up and say, “Wear a condom if you love me” instead of giving in to their partners and so forth.
I have seen many cases in colleges and universities whereby girls have sex because they think it’s the only way to garner love and they have unprotected sex at the insistence of their male partners. They don’t know how to insist on their rights or do not feel that it’s important to take care of their own bodies first.
Also, studies into the abstinence programme in the US have discovered loopholes in the system, mainly that when these teens do eventually have sex, they do not practise safe sex.
This is something we need to change and change fast. Teachers who teach sex education should not only talk about the biological aspect but also discuss prevailing issues related to sexuality and love.
Gone are the days when it’s just a simple matter of the birds and the bees. We are not talking about toddlers but teenagers with raging hormones and a smart mind.
MABEL TEOH,
Singapore.
Blaming porn for the increasing rate of baby dumping and other sex-related ills such as teenage pregnancy is just a short-term solution which at best screams of ignorance. There are a lot of people out there who have access to porn and yet do not go through teenage pregnancies or baby dumping.
The key is not in micromanaging our children’s lives but educating them to the best of our abilities.
Many young people want and choose to have sex out of love or curiosity. Please do not blame the so-called corrupt West as love and sexuality exist in all cultures and communities.
However, when teens have sex and are ignorant of the consequences, it is a deadly mix. Excuses like “that one time won’t get me pregnant” or “a condom makes things feel different” is common among teens and these reasons should be looked into closely by both the Government and parents.
We need to stop heaping the majority of our parental responsibility onto the education system and start taking the initiative to teach our children not just about the birds and the bees but also the emotional aspects of a sexually active lifestyle.
We should allow our children to choose the path they take in life and ensure that at the same time they do so responsibly.
Our roles as parents encompasses more than just providing a roof over our children’s heads, food on the table and a degree in their achiever’s belt. It means spending time knowing our children and moulding them to be God-fearing, law-abiding, wise and street-smart people who will go on to pass these values to their own children.
This can only be achieved by spending more quality time with them and not handing their care (spiritually, mentally and emotionally) off to someone else like a maid.
Our Education Ministry should look into sex education in a more complete manner. Sex is more than just biology; it is an act that encompasses all facets of a human being – mentally, socially, emotionally and even religiously. Instead of adopting one firm stand – that abstinence is the law – the ministry should address other issues such as what happens if someone chooses to have sex, how to teach girls to stand up and say, “Wear a condom if you love me” instead of giving in to their partners and so forth.
I have seen many cases in colleges and universities whereby girls have sex because they think it’s the only way to garner love and they have unprotected sex at the insistence of their male partners. They don’t know how to insist on their rights or do not feel that it’s important to take care of their own bodies first.
Also, studies into the abstinence programme in the US have discovered loopholes in the system, mainly that when these teens do eventually have sex, they do not practise safe sex.
This is something we need to change and change fast. Teachers who teach sex education should not only talk about the biological aspect but also discuss prevailing issues related to sexuality and love.
Gone are the days when it’s just a simple matter of the birds and the bees. We are not talking about toddlers but teenagers with raging hormones and a smart mind.
MABEL TEOH,
Singapore.
Monday, August 16, 2010
DIPLOMATIC BUBBLES: Disaster tourism amidst concern for Muslim Ummah —By Saeed Minhas
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2010\08\16\story_16-8-2010_pg7_22
ISLAMABAD: The worst floods in the living memory of Pakistan remained an obvious topic of concern for the diplomatic corps in Islamabad throughout the week as Europeans and especially UN officials questioned the response of the Muslim world to a mammoth disaster wreaking havoc in the second-most populated Muslim country of the world.
Few gatherings of foreign emissaries rallied around the unending phases of floods happening in across the country, devastating over 15 million people and destroying over two million acres of standing crops while washing away millions of homes and state structures in over 70 – 37 directly and the rest due to the influx of displaced people – flood-affected districts.
“Its really surprising to see that the Muslim world is not showing any enthusiasm for a country where we see people sacrificing their lives in the name of the Muslim Ummah from any corner of the world,” opined a surprised western diplomat, just to trigger a comparison of the aid pouring in from across the world for Pakistani flood victims. Quoting charts from this newspaper, one of them said that out of $460 million needed for flood victims, as assessed by UN agencies for relief efforts, just over $100 million had reached the various UN organs while the government of Pakistan had collected only $25 million (mostly in-kind) from various countries.
One can easily find an amazing contrast in these charts that the majority of the aid, regardless of being in the form of pledges or actually being disbursed, is coming from the western world. Only a handful of Muslim countries, with the exception of the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) that is yet to utter a single word of sympathy, have contributed directly (mostly in-kind) to any of the government of Pakistan’s relief appeals.
Countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Egypt and their oil-controlling giant Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has contributed only a couple of hundred million dollars altogether, and that too through the Red Crescent or other International organisations for in-kind donations. Despite knowing that over 65 helicopters, 19 of which come from the US alone, are working around the clock, none of these oil-rich countries have even asked to foot the oil bill or donate oil for these humanitarian sorties. An hour of a helicopter flight costs an estimated Rs 100,000 in fuel expenses alone, and so far as per the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) figures, over 200 hours of flight operations have been carried out throughout Pakistan.
Another diplomat chipped in by saying that all these ‘brothers’ seem to be good enough for political and strategic guarantees but nothing more for Pakistan. Despite there being a double-digit unemployment rate and zero or negative growth in many of the Western countries including the US and UK, most of the aid, both in cash and in-kind was flowing in from Western countries, he said. The response to the unprecedented floods has been lacklustre so far, not only from locals but also from the international community. Figures collected from various organisations show that though the impact of these floods is larger than the 2004 Tsunami, the 2005 Pakistani and 2010 Haiti earthquakes combined, yet the donations or pledges from all sides is less than 25 percent of what each of the above-mentioned disasters received during their respective relief efforts.
A friend from the Mediterranean belt said, “perhaps the international and even Pakistani media has given more attention to the Cameron remarks, President Zardari’s ill-timed visits and corruption prevailing in Pakistan, then to the human catastrophe.” The diplomat from UK, however, said that it hardly matters what is happening in political circles; it is irrelevant that Prime Minister Cameron agreed to meet President Zardari only after getting the assurance that his Indian statement would not be mentioned in the meeting or how Saeeda Warsi managed the meeting at the last minute. What matters now is to find out ways to help these poor people lying out there at the mercy of raging waters, the diplomat added.
A former Pakistani diplomat said that although it remains a fact that the Muslim block is failing in response and the US is leading all relief efforts, yet there is a major cause of concern creeping in with regard to these developments. He appreciated that after the initial days, relief efforts by the US and other UN agencies were diversified and instead of focusing only on Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the northern areas, they began operations in Punjab, Sindh and partially in Balochistan, and yet the presence of more than 300 US marines is being talked about in certain circles. At no point in time, he said, the strategic games are put to rest by the right-winged politicians and therefore, once the water recedes, both the Pakistani government and US authorities might find themselves entangled in a clarification phase.
The diplomats were of the unanimous opinion that though the donors’ fatigue factor was a valid one, it also remains a fact that the donors are not finding any credible data from any single official source.
The concern was well taken by all around the table, and most of the diplomats were of the view that despite the ongoing disaster-tourism and disaster politicking, what needed to be focused on in the aftermath of these floods is management and governance.
ISLAMABAD: The worst floods in the living memory of Pakistan remained an obvious topic of concern for the diplomatic corps in Islamabad throughout the week as Europeans and especially UN officials questioned the response of the Muslim world to a mammoth disaster wreaking havoc in the second-most populated Muslim country of the world.
Few gatherings of foreign emissaries rallied around the unending phases of floods happening in across the country, devastating over 15 million people and destroying over two million acres of standing crops while washing away millions of homes and state structures in over 70 – 37 directly and the rest due to the influx of displaced people – flood-affected districts.
“Its really surprising to see that the Muslim world is not showing any enthusiasm for a country where we see people sacrificing their lives in the name of the Muslim Ummah from any corner of the world,” opined a surprised western diplomat, just to trigger a comparison of the aid pouring in from across the world for Pakistani flood victims. Quoting charts from this newspaper, one of them said that out of $460 million needed for flood victims, as assessed by UN agencies for relief efforts, just over $100 million had reached the various UN organs while the government of Pakistan had collected only $25 million (mostly in-kind) from various countries.
One can easily find an amazing contrast in these charts that the majority of the aid, regardless of being in the form of pledges or actually being disbursed, is coming from the western world. Only a handful of Muslim countries, with the exception of the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) that is yet to utter a single word of sympathy, have contributed directly (mostly in-kind) to any of the government of Pakistan’s relief appeals.
Countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Egypt and their oil-controlling giant Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has contributed only a couple of hundred million dollars altogether, and that too through the Red Crescent or other International organisations for in-kind donations. Despite knowing that over 65 helicopters, 19 of which come from the US alone, are working around the clock, none of these oil-rich countries have even asked to foot the oil bill or donate oil for these humanitarian sorties. An hour of a helicopter flight costs an estimated Rs 100,000 in fuel expenses alone, and so far as per the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) figures, over 200 hours of flight operations have been carried out throughout Pakistan.
Another diplomat chipped in by saying that all these ‘brothers’ seem to be good enough for political and strategic guarantees but nothing more for Pakistan. Despite there being a double-digit unemployment rate and zero or negative growth in many of the Western countries including the US and UK, most of the aid, both in cash and in-kind was flowing in from Western countries, he said. The response to the unprecedented floods has been lacklustre so far, not only from locals but also from the international community. Figures collected from various organisations show that though the impact of these floods is larger than the 2004 Tsunami, the 2005 Pakistani and 2010 Haiti earthquakes combined, yet the donations or pledges from all sides is less than 25 percent of what each of the above-mentioned disasters received during their respective relief efforts.
A friend from the Mediterranean belt said, “perhaps the international and even Pakistani media has given more attention to the Cameron remarks, President Zardari’s ill-timed visits and corruption prevailing in Pakistan, then to the human catastrophe.” The diplomat from UK, however, said that it hardly matters what is happening in political circles; it is irrelevant that Prime Minister Cameron agreed to meet President Zardari only after getting the assurance that his Indian statement would not be mentioned in the meeting or how Saeeda Warsi managed the meeting at the last minute. What matters now is to find out ways to help these poor people lying out there at the mercy of raging waters, the diplomat added.
A former Pakistani diplomat said that although it remains a fact that the Muslim block is failing in response and the US is leading all relief efforts, yet there is a major cause of concern creeping in with regard to these developments. He appreciated that after the initial days, relief efforts by the US and other UN agencies were diversified and instead of focusing only on Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the northern areas, they began operations in Punjab, Sindh and partially in Balochistan, and yet the presence of more than 300 US marines is being talked about in certain circles. At no point in time, he said, the strategic games are put to rest by the right-winged politicians and therefore, once the water recedes, both the Pakistani government and US authorities might find themselves entangled in a clarification phase.
The diplomats were of the unanimous opinion that though the donors’ fatigue factor was a valid one, it also remains a fact that the donors are not finding any credible data from any single official source.
The concern was well taken by all around the table, and most of the diplomats were of the view that despite the ongoing disaster-tourism and disaster politicking, what needed to be focused on in the aftermath of these floods is management and governance.
Michelle's Presidential Credit Card Declined
White House darlings, Barack and Michelle Obama, are having problems after the First Lady's presidential credit card was declined in Spain. Michelle and daughter Sasha were on official business having lunch with King Juan Carlos and Queen Sophia at their modest summer palace on the island of Majorca. There they discussed the best priced local resorts and how to provide much needed stimulus to Spain's economy.
The mother daughter pair then flew to the coastal city of Marbella checking in at the Budget Villa Padierna. There they enjoyed some quality mother-daughter time lounging about and stimulating Spain's economy in these dire times. To offset the carbon footprint of the trip, the two took long walks on the beach charging their bodies with solar energy and holding their breath as often as possible.
The trip was going splendidly until Michelle's presidential credit card was declined while attempting to pay for an estimated $95,000 in hotel costs for her near seventy members of security personnel, their $273 a day government per diem, $146,000 of US Air Force 757 airfare, and the cost of about a dozen vehicles in her motorcade. The First Lady left shocked and embarrassed after being forced to write a check from the Social Security coffers to settle the bill.
Things didn't get any easier when the First Lady returned to the White House. After examining the transaction history it was discovered that the president had spent billions of dollars trying to stimulate anything and everything including pet projects, pork, and an unidentified woman using the name Lilly Ledbetter. As things began to spin out of control for the president, White House Press Secretary Robert Fibs released a statement saying, “I have spoken with the President and First Lady and I can assure you that the President has never stimulated anything.”
We here at Rancor News disagree. The president has spent much of his first term in office stimulating things like racial tension. Robert Gates and the "beer summit," Black Panther case dropped, latinos deported taking their kids out for ice cream, the list goes on and on.
Tyson Bam
August 7th, 2010
If you enjoyed this article you may also enjoy our in depth compilation of A Complete List of Good Liberal Ideas
The mother daughter pair then flew to the coastal city of Marbella checking in at the Budget Villa Padierna. There they enjoyed some quality mother-daughter time lounging about and stimulating Spain's economy in these dire times. To offset the carbon footprint of the trip, the two took long walks on the beach charging their bodies with solar energy and holding their breath as often as possible.
The trip was going splendidly until Michelle's presidential credit card was declined while attempting to pay for an estimated $95,000 in hotel costs for her near seventy members of security personnel, their $273 a day government per diem, $146,000 of US Air Force 757 airfare, and the cost of about a dozen vehicles in her motorcade. The First Lady left shocked and embarrassed after being forced to write a check from the Social Security coffers to settle the bill.
Things didn't get any easier when the First Lady returned to the White House. After examining the transaction history it was discovered that the president had spent billions of dollars trying to stimulate anything and everything including pet projects, pork, and an unidentified woman using the name Lilly Ledbetter. As things began to spin out of control for the president, White House Press Secretary Robert Fibs released a statement saying, “I have spoken with the President and First Lady and I can assure you that the President has never stimulated anything.”
We here at Rancor News disagree. The president has spent much of his first term in office stimulating things like racial tension. Robert Gates and the "beer summit," Black Panther case dropped, latinos deported taking their kids out for ice cream, the list goes on and on.
Tyson Bam
August 7th, 2010
If you enjoyed this article you may also enjoy our in depth compilation of A Complete List of Good Liberal Ideas
Friday, August 13, 2010
US Schools to Stop Teaching History; Instead Teachers Will Bash “Anglos” and Praise Islam & Castro
Gateway Pundit ^ | 8/12/10 | Lady Liberty
Posted on Thursday, August 12, 2010 12:59:15 PM by American Dream 246
This is insane. Our nation’s schools are going to stop teaching American history. Instead teachers are going to attack “Anglos” (whitey) and praise Castro and Che. IBD reported:
Schools Erase America From U.S. History
Arizona’s new law that requires the police to ask people to show ID, which was just knocked out by a supremacist judge, may not be the most controversial Arizona law about illegal aliens. Gov. Jan Brewer signed another law this year that bans schools from teaching classes designed to promote solidarity among students of a particular ethnic group.
This law bans classes that “promote the overthrow of the United States government” or “promote resentment toward a race or class of people” because schools should treat all pupils as individual Americans. The issue arose because the Tucson School District offers courses in Mexican-American studies (known locally as Raza Studies) that focus on that particular group and its influence.
The law doesn’t prohibit these classes so long as they are open to all students and don’t promote ethnic resentment or solidarity. However, Arizona’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tom Horne, says the basic theme of the Mexican-American studies program is that Latino students “were and continue to be victims of a racist American society driven by the interests of middle- and upper-class whites.”
Among the goals listed for the Mexican-American Studies are “social justice” and “Latino Critical Race Pedagogy.” Pictures of the classroom showed the walls decorated with “heroes,” such as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
Americans Now ‘Anglos’
Tucson also offers courses especially for African-American and Native American students. These classes obviously divide the student population by race, a practice we thought was not supposed to be tolerated anymore.
Greta Van Susteren interviewed former Tucson high school teacher, John A. Ward, who was removed from teaching the class for Mexican Americans and reassigned because he questioned the curriculum. For raising concerns, Ward was called a racist. And since he is of Mexican heritage, Ward was also called a vendido (Spanish for sellout).
The state of Arizona requires students to take a course in American history in order to graduate, but Ward said the course was actually not about U.S. history at all. He said it focused solely on the history of the Aztec people, which is the group to which Mexican-American activists ascribe their lineage.
Others who have looked at the books used in these courses say they refer to Americans as “Anglos” or “Euroamericans” rather than as “Americans.” The books do not recognize the U.S. as a country, but claim Arizona is part of “Aztlan, Mexico” (even though the Aztecs never lived in what is now the U.S.).
The Mexican version of history is not the only foreign propaganda masquerading as American history in public school courses and textbooks. Five chapters promoting Islam were inserted in a world history textbook that is authorized and recommended for seventh-grade students by the state of California.
Muhammad Praised
This world history textbook, called “History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond,” gives the history and beliefs of Islam lengthy and favorable treatment far above and beyond what is given to every other religion, according to Stephen Schwartz in the Weekly Standard (Aug. 9, 2010).
The textbook uses what he calls a “sanitized vocabulary” to conceal Muslim practices that are criminal in the U.S. These include forced marriage, forced divorce, marriage to children, polygamy and punishments imposed by Shariah law, such as public beheadings, amputations, floggings and stonings.
Muhammad is the only person in this world history textbook who rates an entire chapter. Jesus gets only one sentence, and the contrast between the treatment of Islam and Christianity is shocking.
The book gives an entirely positive account of Muhammad’s teachings, saying, for example, “He preached tolerance for Christians and Jews as fellow worshippers of the one true God.” It says nothing about Jesus’ teachings, but it does describe examples of Christian persecution of non-Christians.
This textbook tells students that the first year in the Muslim calendar is “the year of Muhammad’s hijrah” (his escape from Mecca to Medina in the year 622). The book doesn’t say from what event our Christian calendar dates, instead replacing A.D. with the trendy term “C.E.” (Common Era).
William J. Bennetta, editor of the Textbook Letter, published a detailed analysis of this book’s distortions, which he calls “pseudohistory.” Bennetta documents how it was influenced by a Muslim pressure group, the Council on Islamic Education (CIE), which boasts of successfully “collaborating” with “K-12 publishers” to present a benign view of Islam to impressionable American schoolchildren.
Parents should check out how American history is taught, and NOT taught, in their children’s schools. Is Islamic or Mexican propaganda masquerading as “American history”?
It’s time to wake up, America!
To: American Dream 246
FYI, the public institute of education has been doing this for decades, which is the reason why we don’t have free and logical thinking citizens in our midst.
Remove your children from the public schools. Home educate them or enroll your children in schools which incorporate conservative ideas and values.
Here is a primer on the Lefts agenda:
Communist Goals (1963)
Documention below
Congressional Record—Appendix, pp. A34-A35
January 10, 1963
Current Communist Goals
EXTENSION OF REMARKS OF HON. A. S. HERLONG, JR. OF FLORIDA
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Thursday, January 10, 1963
Mr. HERLONG. Mr. Speaker, Mrs. Patricia Nordman of De Land, Fla., is an ardent and articulate opponent of communism, and until recently published the De Land Courier, which she dedicated to the purpose of alerting the public to the dangers of communism in America.
At Mrs. Nordman’s request, I include in the RECORD, under unanimous consent, the following “Current Communist Goals,” which she identifies as an excerpt from “The Naked Communist,” by Cleon Skousen:
[From “The Naked Communist,” by Cleon Skousen]
CURRENT COMMUNIST GOALS
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament [by] the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev’s promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.”
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. “Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art.”
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them “censorship” and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a “religious crutch.”
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the “common man.”
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the “big picture.” Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture—education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand [or treat].
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use [”]united force[”] to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction [over domestic problems. Give the World Court jurisdiction] over nations and individuals alike.
Posted on Thursday, August 12, 2010 12:59:15 PM by American Dream 246
This is insane. Our nation’s schools are going to stop teaching American history. Instead teachers are going to attack “Anglos” (whitey) and praise Castro and Che. IBD reported:
Schools Erase America From U.S. History
Arizona’s new law that requires the police to ask people to show ID, which was just knocked out by a supremacist judge, may not be the most controversial Arizona law about illegal aliens. Gov. Jan Brewer signed another law this year that bans schools from teaching classes designed to promote solidarity among students of a particular ethnic group.
This law bans classes that “promote the overthrow of the United States government” or “promote resentment toward a race or class of people” because schools should treat all pupils as individual Americans. The issue arose because the Tucson School District offers courses in Mexican-American studies (known locally as Raza Studies) that focus on that particular group and its influence.
The law doesn’t prohibit these classes so long as they are open to all students and don’t promote ethnic resentment or solidarity. However, Arizona’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tom Horne, says the basic theme of the Mexican-American studies program is that Latino students “were and continue to be victims of a racist American society driven by the interests of middle- and upper-class whites.”
Among the goals listed for the Mexican-American Studies are “social justice” and “Latino Critical Race Pedagogy.” Pictures of the classroom showed the walls decorated with “heroes,” such as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
Americans Now ‘Anglos’
Tucson also offers courses especially for African-American and Native American students. These classes obviously divide the student population by race, a practice we thought was not supposed to be tolerated anymore.
Greta Van Susteren interviewed former Tucson high school teacher, John A. Ward, who was removed from teaching the class for Mexican Americans and reassigned because he questioned the curriculum. For raising concerns, Ward was called a racist. And since he is of Mexican heritage, Ward was also called a vendido (Spanish for sellout).
The state of Arizona requires students to take a course in American history in order to graduate, but Ward said the course was actually not about U.S. history at all. He said it focused solely on the history of the Aztec people, which is the group to which Mexican-American activists ascribe their lineage.
Others who have looked at the books used in these courses say they refer to Americans as “Anglos” or “Euroamericans” rather than as “Americans.” The books do not recognize the U.S. as a country, but claim Arizona is part of “Aztlan, Mexico” (even though the Aztecs never lived in what is now the U.S.).
The Mexican version of history is not the only foreign propaganda masquerading as American history in public school courses and textbooks. Five chapters promoting Islam were inserted in a world history textbook that is authorized and recommended for seventh-grade students by the state of California.
Muhammad Praised
This world history textbook, called “History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond,” gives the history and beliefs of Islam lengthy and favorable treatment far above and beyond what is given to every other religion, according to Stephen Schwartz in the Weekly Standard (Aug. 9, 2010).
The textbook uses what he calls a “sanitized vocabulary” to conceal Muslim practices that are criminal in the U.S. These include forced marriage, forced divorce, marriage to children, polygamy and punishments imposed by Shariah law, such as public beheadings, amputations, floggings and stonings.
Muhammad is the only person in this world history textbook who rates an entire chapter. Jesus gets only one sentence, and the contrast between the treatment of Islam and Christianity is shocking.
The book gives an entirely positive account of Muhammad’s teachings, saying, for example, “He preached tolerance for Christians and Jews as fellow worshippers of the one true God.” It says nothing about Jesus’ teachings, but it does describe examples of Christian persecution of non-Christians.
This textbook tells students that the first year in the Muslim calendar is “the year of Muhammad’s hijrah” (his escape from Mecca to Medina in the year 622). The book doesn’t say from what event our Christian calendar dates, instead replacing A.D. with the trendy term “C.E.” (Common Era).
William J. Bennetta, editor of the Textbook Letter, published a detailed analysis of this book’s distortions, which he calls “pseudohistory.” Bennetta documents how it was influenced by a Muslim pressure group, the Council on Islamic Education (CIE), which boasts of successfully “collaborating” with “K-12 publishers” to present a benign view of Islam to impressionable American schoolchildren.
Parents should check out how American history is taught, and NOT taught, in their children’s schools. Is Islamic or Mexican propaganda masquerading as “American history”?
It’s time to wake up, America!
To: American Dream 246
FYI, the public institute of education has been doing this for decades, which is the reason why we don’t have free and logical thinking citizens in our midst.
Remove your children from the public schools. Home educate them or enroll your children in schools which incorporate conservative ideas and values.
Here is a primer on the Lefts agenda:
Communist Goals (1963)
Documention below
Congressional Record—Appendix, pp. A34-A35
January 10, 1963
Current Communist Goals
EXTENSION OF REMARKS OF HON. A. S. HERLONG, JR. OF FLORIDA
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Thursday, January 10, 1963
Mr. HERLONG. Mr. Speaker, Mrs. Patricia Nordman of De Land, Fla., is an ardent and articulate opponent of communism, and until recently published the De Land Courier, which she dedicated to the purpose of alerting the public to the dangers of communism in America.
At Mrs. Nordman’s request, I include in the RECORD, under unanimous consent, the following “Current Communist Goals,” which she identifies as an excerpt from “The Naked Communist,” by Cleon Skousen:
[From “The Naked Communist,” by Cleon Skousen]
CURRENT COMMUNIST GOALS
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament [by] the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev’s promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.”
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. “Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art.”
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them “censorship” and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a “religious crutch.”
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the “common man.”
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the “big picture.” Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture—education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand [or treat].
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use [”]united force[”] to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction [over domestic problems. Give the World Court jurisdiction] over nations and individuals alike.
Sylvester Stallone back to big action in 'The Expendables'
SAN DIEGO, California: With his business shirt, black tie and blue tinted shades, Sylvester Stallone looks more like a hipster movie executive than a battle-worn bruiser on a deadly mission in South America.
But beneath that shirt are the muscles he first revealed in "Rocky," and behind those eyes is the grit that got his breakthrough movie made back in 1976. At 64, Stallone is still a tough guy, and he aims to prove it alongside a cast of killer comrades in "The Expendables," which opens Friday.
In the film — another hat trick for the writer, director and star — Stallone leads a gang of impossibly muscular mercenaries who get caught up in a plot to overthrow the murderous dictator of a fictitious nation, though all is not as it seems.
The story serves as a backdrop for countless explosions and fight scenes between Sly's cast of tough guys, which includes Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Mickey Rourke, Terry Crews, former pro wrestler Steve Austin and Ultimate Fighting champ Randy Couture, plus cameos by Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The muscles, the fights, even the tattoos they sport in the film are real.
"They are all bad-ass, for real. Like they know how to hurt you," Stallone said of his cast at a hotel suite just outside the recent Comic-Con fan fest, where he presented clips of the film. "And the audience hasn't seen guys who can run through a wall and snap you like a pretzel, for real."
Stallone himself got pretzeled: He broke his neck and tore his shoulder while filming a fight scene with Austin.
"I still have two more operations to go on my shoulder," he said.
How is that for tough?
"The Expendables" started out as a more intellectual story, but then Stallone ditched half the script and focused on an action-filled tale of men on a mission to save the girl, their gang and, he says, their very souls. He wanted to bring back the classic tough-guy characters and real big-screen fights that were popular before the advent of computer-generated effects and Velcro muscles.
He urged his cast not to hold back.
"I said, 'You guys, we have to do something very physical without CGI that's interesting to watch. I mean, we have to throw down,'" he recalled. "They were all for it."
Even the stunt doubles brought their A-game to scenes with the famous fighters, said Austin, who with Lundgren, appeared with Stallone in the suite.
"You didn't see a lot of guys wearing wires and flying around all over the set. When you got hit, you got hurt, and that was nice," Austin said. "It was good, old-school physical stuff. It looked real and a lot of it was real."
Plus everyone tried to outdo each other on set, Stallone said, adding that all were afraid to fight Couture.
"Randy Couture is ferocious," Stallone said.
"Randy went through a couple of individuals," Austin added. "There were a few people who got carted off."
Austin and Lundgren said they kicked their training regimens up a notch so they could be bigger and badder for the movie. Couture is still in fighting shape, having recently competed with UFC.
"These are not just kid actors who pretend to be tough, no offense to anyone" Lundgren said. "These are real tough guys."
And though the cast is all over 40 (Crews is the youngest at 42), their age isn't acknowledged in the film.
"I wasn't trying to flaunt it, but it just seems that the tough guys, the ones I know, are mature," Stallone explained. "I haven't seen the young tough guys yet. ... Hopefully, if this works, you'll be able to find the young Rambos and the young this and the young Charles Bronsons, who want to show their machismo."
And as for Stallone himself?
"I look at myself as like an 18-year-old with arthritis," he said. "I know we were called geezers and we're this and we're past our prime, but I said, 'Good. wait until you see this." - AP
But beneath that shirt are the muscles he first revealed in "Rocky," and behind those eyes is the grit that got his breakthrough movie made back in 1976. At 64, Stallone is still a tough guy, and he aims to prove it alongside a cast of killer comrades in "The Expendables," which opens Friday.
In the film — another hat trick for the writer, director and star — Stallone leads a gang of impossibly muscular mercenaries who get caught up in a plot to overthrow the murderous dictator of a fictitious nation, though all is not as it seems.
The story serves as a backdrop for countless explosions and fight scenes between Sly's cast of tough guys, which includes Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Mickey Rourke, Terry Crews, former pro wrestler Steve Austin and Ultimate Fighting champ Randy Couture, plus cameos by Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The muscles, the fights, even the tattoos they sport in the film are real.
"They are all bad-ass, for real. Like they know how to hurt you," Stallone said of his cast at a hotel suite just outside the recent Comic-Con fan fest, where he presented clips of the film. "And the audience hasn't seen guys who can run through a wall and snap you like a pretzel, for real."
Stallone himself got pretzeled: He broke his neck and tore his shoulder while filming a fight scene with Austin.
"I still have two more operations to go on my shoulder," he said.
How is that for tough?
"The Expendables" started out as a more intellectual story, but then Stallone ditched half the script and focused on an action-filled tale of men on a mission to save the girl, their gang and, he says, their very souls. He wanted to bring back the classic tough-guy characters and real big-screen fights that were popular before the advent of computer-generated effects and Velcro muscles.
He urged his cast not to hold back.
"I said, 'You guys, we have to do something very physical without CGI that's interesting to watch. I mean, we have to throw down,'" he recalled. "They were all for it."
Even the stunt doubles brought their A-game to scenes with the famous fighters, said Austin, who with Lundgren, appeared with Stallone in the suite.
"You didn't see a lot of guys wearing wires and flying around all over the set. When you got hit, you got hurt, and that was nice," Austin said. "It was good, old-school physical stuff. It looked real and a lot of it was real."
Plus everyone tried to outdo each other on set, Stallone said, adding that all were afraid to fight Couture.
"Randy Couture is ferocious," Stallone said.
"Randy went through a couple of individuals," Austin added. "There were a few people who got carted off."
Austin and Lundgren said they kicked their training regimens up a notch so they could be bigger and badder for the movie. Couture is still in fighting shape, having recently competed with UFC.
"These are not just kid actors who pretend to be tough, no offense to anyone" Lundgren said. "These are real tough guys."
And though the cast is all over 40 (Crews is the youngest at 42), their age isn't acknowledged in the film.
"I wasn't trying to flaunt it, but it just seems that the tough guys, the ones I know, are mature," Stallone explained. "I haven't seen the young tough guys yet. ... Hopefully, if this works, you'll be able to find the young Rambos and the young this and the young Charles Bronsons, who want to show their machismo."
And as for Stallone himself?
"I look at myself as like an 18-year-old with arthritis," he said. "I know we were called geezers and we're this and we're past our prime, but I said, 'Good. wait until you see this." - AP
History of Turkish Money
Turkish money has seen many fascinating but difficult changes in its history.
Originally, the lira was a gold coin that was first introduced in 1844, before which the Ottoman Empire used the `akce` that was replaced by the `kurus` (piaster) and the para as its part. The `kurus` was originally a large silver coin that was reduced in size later on and was one hundredth of a gold lira. Each `kurus` was equal to 40 para.
Soon paper money was introduced by the Imperial Ottoman Bank that was valued by the help of `kurus` with denominations ranging from 5 to 5000 `kurus`. The lira soon took over the `kurus` in mid 1870s and had denominations of 5 to 1000 liras. Further, there was the 50,000-lira banknote that helped to solve the problem of small money like 1 and 2.5 `kurus`.
Turkey soon abandoned the gold standard by the First World War, and by the early 1920s the gold lira could be equated to about nine liras in paper money. Soon the older Imperial Ottoman paper liras were again replaced with the Turkish lira in the form of medium sized silver coins. Notes were also introduced in the denominations of 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500 and 1000 lira. The notes then carried the picture of the Turkish National hero, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, but following his death in 1938 new notes carried the picture of President Ismet Inonu. However, in the 1950s the picture of Ataturk reappeared on the notes.
The sun set on the Turkish currency from the late 1970s, when chronic inflation, coupled with recessions in 1994 and 1999, as well as a banking crisis in 2001, saw the old Turkish lira depreciate heavily against other currencies. In 1966 the old Turkish lira was worth nine liras for every one US dollar, for instance. By 2004, you had to pay 1,350,000 lira for the same American dollar!
Inflation was so bad (up to 70% at times) and the exchange rate so dire that new notes with bigger denominations had to be introduced almost every two years from 1981 to match prices. The Guinness Book of Records ranked the lira as the world’s least valuable currency in 1995, 1996 AND 1999 through to 2004.
Finally, the Turkish government had to act. As well as putting in place a plan to tackle inflation (now standing at 10.1% at the end of 2008, predicted by the Central Bank of Turkey to be between 5.4 and 8.2% in 2009) and putting more controls into the banking sector, they also decided to reissue their currency.
And on January 1 2005, the New Turkish Lira - to become simply Turkish Lira four years later - was born.
Originally, the lira was a gold coin that was first introduced in 1844, before which the Ottoman Empire used the `akce` that was replaced by the `kurus` (piaster) and the para as its part. The `kurus` was originally a large silver coin that was reduced in size later on and was one hundredth of a gold lira. Each `kurus` was equal to 40 para.
Soon paper money was introduced by the Imperial Ottoman Bank that was valued by the help of `kurus` with denominations ranging from 5 to 5000 `kurus`. The lira soon took over the `kurus` in mid 1870s and had denominations of 5 to 1000 liras. Further, there was the 50,000-lira banknote that helped to solve the problem of small money like 1 and 2.5 `kurus`.
Turkey soon abandoned the gold standard by the First World War, and by the early 1920s the gold lira could be equated to about nine liras in paper money. Soon the older Imperial Ottoman paper liras were again replaced with the Turkish lira in the form of medium sized silver coins. Notes were also introduced in the denominations of 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500 and 1000 lira. The notes then carried the picture of the Turkish National hero, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, but following his death in 1938 new notes carried the picture of President Ismet Inonu. However, in the 1950s the picture of Ataturk reappeared on the notes.
The sun set on the Turkish currency from the late 1970s, when chronic inflation, coupled with recessions in 1994 and 1999, as well as a banking crisis in 2001, saw the old Turkish lira depreciate heavily against other currencies. In 1966 the old Turkish lira was worth nine liras for every one US dollar, for instance. By 2004, you had to pay 1,350,000 lira for the same American dollar!
Inflation was so bad (up to 70% at times) and the exchange rate so dire that new notes with bigger denominations had to be introduced almost every two years from 1981 to match prices. The Guinness Book of Records ranked the lira as the world’s least valuable currency in 1995, 1996 AND 1999 through to 2004.
Finally, the Turkish government had to act. As well as putting in place a plan to tackle inflation (now standing at 10.1% at the end of 2008, predicted by the Central Bank of Turkey to be between 5.4 and 8.2% in 2009) and putting more controls into the banking sector, they also decided to reissue their currency.
And on January 1 2005, the New Turkish Lira - to become simply Turkish Lira four years later - was born.
Can Malaysia's Islamic gold dinar thwart capitalism?
Muslim advocates of the dinar believe it will stop the excesses of capitalism, but it is just another avenue for exploitation
Imagine a world trading solely in gold and silver coins. Imagine the size of your wallet.
Yet this is the ideal world envisaged by some of Malaysia's activists championing the Islamic gold dinar and silver dirham as a new form of legal tender to replace paper money – a utopia that could see the light of day as early as the middle of next month.
This is when one such group, Muamalah Council, plans to implement the dinar system in Malaysia's northern state of Kelantan. If information on its website is to be believed, the council has the blessing of the state's Islamist government, Parti Islam SeMalaysia (Pas), to kickstart the dinar in three moves.
First, the state will pay a quarter of its public servants' salaries using the dinar. Second, all state companies will accept dinar payments. Lastly, some 600 commercial enterprises will also embrace this currency.
Inspired by selective religious sources and backed by historical precedents within the annals of Islamic history, the gold dinar system is touted by certain fiercely proud Muslims as the Islamic answer to thwart capitalism's woes.
The idea was first mooted by Malaysia's former prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. He argued that the coins would never hang their possessor out to dry in the same way that paper money had. As precious metals with intrinsic value, gold and silver are more resistant to market fluctuations and devaluation compared to the US dollar – an argument he took to the Organisation of the Islamic Conference as a tool to battle western hegemony.
Today, Islamic gold dinar advocates would cite the recent credit crunch as proof. Indeed, the rocketing price of gold – possibly transcending a record high of $2,000 an ounce – can only strengthen their pitch.
While Mahathir's grand plan for Malaysia to implement the dinar system by 2003 may have been unceremoniously scrapped by his successor, Abdullah Badawi, the idea has since gained currency beyond Malaysia's shores.
In neighbouring Indonesia, for instance, an outfit known as Wakala Induk Nusantara (WIN) had begun minting Islamic gold coins for use in Australia, Malaysia and Singapore. Its spokesman, Riki Rokhman Azis, claims that the number of dinars used in the world's most populous Muslim nation has more than doubled in 2009 to 25,000 pieces.
What is perhaps more striking is the UK connection to the increasingly globalised Islamic gold dinar movement. The Indonesian grouping is adhering to a fatwa issued by the South African-based cleric Sheikh Abdalqadir as-Sufi, a Muslim convert in Cape Town formerly known as Ian Dallas of Scotland.
Then there is Dinar Exchange, the British equivalent of Indonesia's WIN. As the "official certified supplier of Islamic gold dinar and silver dirham in the United Kingdom", the company had just concluded a month-long series of roadshows in May that saw it promoting the gold dinar to Muslims in key UK cities such as London, Birmingham and Edinburgh. The group is inviting more to spread this Islamic vision as dinar agents. For a fee, of course.
As the dinar movement gathers momentum, its propagators – which include some of the Muslim world's most polemical figures such as the Trinidad-born cleric Imran Hosein – would doubtless dismiss Antony Lerman's recent suggestion in the Guardian that no credible anti-capitalist doctrine exists today. To them, the Islamic gold dinar is perhaps mankind's best-formulated answer to beat capitalism's excesses.
Yet, as an anti-capitalist weapon, the Islamic gold dinar is far from mint.
It is motivated by politics more than benign religious values. The Kelantan example is instructive. Implementing the Islamic dinar serves as a political statement to Muslim voters that Malaysia's Islamist opposition party, Pas, is more Islamic (and hence more legitimate) compared with its competitor, the United Malays National Organisation. Even in its pristine form, the idea as it is originally propagated by Mahathir could be read as a radical attempt at power politics.
But a more serious flaw lies in its contradiction. At the heart of the dinar system can still be found the same capitalistic spirit of commodification.
It lacks the egalitarian spirit embodied in socialism's virtue of the common good. Its advocates say that the poor could never be taken advantage of because the coins they own have intrinsic value. But Britain's recent gold-rush dilemma suggests that the poor do not always get their money's worth – even when trading gold.
Like paper money, gold is also vulnerable to the manipulations of valuers, our gatekeepers of wealth. And let's be honest, how many of the poor have stacks of gold already in their possession? Gold is a precious metal precisely because it is so rare.
On a wider scale, who is to prevent gold-rich nations from banding together as a cartel to fix prices at exorbitant amounts in the same way that the oil-producing nations of OPEC did?
Or multimillion corporations from exploiting poor but gold-rich nations? This is best exemplified in the case of Pacific Rim, a Vancouver-based firm that has filed an appeal via the Central American Free Trade Agreement (Cafta) to bypass local legislation so they can mine for gold in El Salvador despite local objections. In a world mired by climate change troubles, one also needs to mind the environmental cost of gold mining – an operation that involves huge amounts of water and toxic chemicals.
The Islamic gold dinar could not thwart capitalism's excesses. It is only providing one more avenue for exploitation. For this reason alone, it will not have my buy-in.
Comments in chronological order (Total 143 comments)
Lote
17 Jul 2010, 11:15AM
Muslim advocates of the dinar believe it will stop the excesses of capitalism, but it is just another avenue for exploitation
-----
Why not go all the way to the Barter System?
Malaysian state employees then can be paid in sheeps or chickens...or bowls of rice...and everyone then will live happily ever after in an Islamic Utopia.
And rest of the world can get on with the challenges of modernity.
epidavros
17 Jul 2010, 11:16AM
Gold has little intrinsic value. It's not especially rare (heck, you can even find it in Wales), and it's not especially useful (we use it mainly in electronics, but in the tiniest quantities - 1 ounce gives 50 miles or so of gold wire).
It's value is entirely due to perception - an entirely artificial market in perceptual value beyond usefulness. If anything, gold is more liable to manipulation than any of the alternatives we currently have.
But I say let these Islamic nations get on with it. Adopting this standard will no doubt sink their economies beyond any realistic chance of recovery.
DrJohnZoidberg
17 Jul 2010, 11:45AM
i thought that the reason that gold coins were ditched was because of the rapidity with which the currency became debased?
surely with modern tech it wold be easy to shave coins and replace the gold with another alloy of the same weight to avoid detection and, once detected the value of that currency would plummet on the international markets and also lose its credibility with those people who had to use it for transactions.
nice idea...can i have my £ as the original pound of gold it was intended to replace please?
zazar
17 Jul 2010, 11:52AM
As precious metals with intrinsic value, gold and silver are more resistant to market fluctuations and devaluation compared to the US dollar – an argument he took to the Organisation of the Islamic Conference as a tool to battle western hegemony.
The case is even weaker than the author suggests.
It's a commonly held myth that gold and silver have intrinsic value: they don't have any more intrinsic value as currency than paper notes or my monthly bank statement telling me that I have £xxx in my current account. Their value as currency is based on mutual acceptance of their value between vendors and consumers in relation to tangible goods. Didn't anyone read Gulliver's Travels?
Anyway, the whole idea is based on ignorance of the nature of exploitation as Nazry points out.
JimPress
17 Jul 2010, 11:55AM
It's worth bearing in mind that in Kuala Lumpur the ever stranger affairs of Kelantan are generally viewed with nothing more than amused contempt.
Kelantan is the home of the mighty cleavage and short skirt police who barge into workplaces with their devout tape measures in an effort to preserve stone age levels of decency. There was also a heated debate not so long ago regarding whether in the case of sharia amputation the amputee or the state owned the severed limb: the worry was that the victim would pack his limb in ice and head for KL in an effort to get a hospital to re-attach it. The northern states of Malaysia are a constant source of bleak knockabout Islamic comedy for their more cosmopolitan urban cousins.
zazar
17 Jul 2010, 11:56AM
DrJohnZoidberg
i thought that the reason that gold coins were ditched was because of the rapidity with which the currency became debased?
Absolutely. The Spanish mined so much silver in South America in the sixteenth century that they flooded the European market and the price dropped.
The value of gold and silver is mostly dependent on:
1. The perception that they are rare materials
2. Mutual belief among buyers and sellers in a marketplace that they are valuable
Imagine a world trading solely in gold and silver coins. Imagine the size of your wallet.
Yet this is the ideal world envisaged by some of Malaysia's activists championing the Islamic gold dinar and silver dirham as a new form of legal tender to replace paper money – a utopia that could see the light of day as early as the middle of next month.
This is when one such group, Muamalah Council, plans to implement the dinar system in Malaysia's northern state of Kelantan. If information on its website is to be believed, the council has the blessing of the state's Islamist government, Parti Islam SeMalaysia (Pas), to kickstart the dinar in three moves.
First, the state will pay a quarter of its public servants' salaries using the dinar. Second, all state companies will accept dinar payments. Lastly, some 600 commercial enterprises will also embrace this currency.
Inspired by selective religious sources and backed by historical precedents within the annals of Islamic history, the gold dinar system is touted by certain fiercely proud Muslims as the Islamic answer to thwart capitalism's woes.
The idea was first mooted by Malaysia's former prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. He argued that the coins would never hang their possessor out to dry in the same way that paper money had. As precious metals with intrinsic value, gold and silver are more resistant to market fluctuations and devaluation compared to the US dollar – an argument he took to the Organisation of the Islamic Conference as a tool to battle western hegemony.
Today, Islamic gold dinar advocates would cite the recent credit crunch as proof. Indeed, the rocketing price of gold – possibly transcending a record high of $2,000 an ounce – can only strengthen their pitch.
While Mahathir's grand plan for Malaysia to implement the dinar system by 2003 may have been unceremoniously scrapped by his successor, Abdullah Badawi, the idea has since gained currency beyond Malaysia's shores.
In neighbouring Indonesia, for instance, an outfit known as Wakala Induk Nusantara (WIN) had begun minting Islamic gold coins for use in Australia, Malaysia and Singapore. Its spokesman, Riki Rokhman Azis, claims that the number of dinars used in the world's most populous Muslim nation has more than doubled in 2009 to 25,000 pieces.
What is perhaps more striking is the UK connection to the increasingly globalised Islamic gold dinar movement. The Indonesian grouping is adhering to a fatwa issued by the South African-based cleric Sheikh Abdalqadir as-Sufi, a Muslim convert in Cape Town formerly known as Ian Dallas of Scotland.
Then there is Dinar Exchange, the British equivalent of Indonesia's WIN. As the "official certified supplier of Islamic gold dinar and silver dirham in the United Kingdom", the company had just concluded a month-long series of roadshows in May that saw it promoting the gold dinar to Muslims in key UK cities such as London, Birmingham and Edinburgh. The group is inviting more to spread this Islamic vision as dinar agents. For a fee, of course.
As the dinar movement gathers momentum, its propagators – which include some of the Muslim world's most polemical figures such as the Trinidad-born cleric Imran Hosein – would doubtless dismiss Antony Lerman's recent suggestion in the Guardian that no credible anti-capitalist doctrine exists today. To them, the Islamic gold dinar is perhaps mankind's best-formulated answer to beat capitalism's excesses.
Yet, as an anti-capitalist weapon, the Islamic gold dinar is far from mint.
It is motivated by politics more than benign religious values. The Kelantan example is instructive. Implementing the Islamic dinar serves as a political statement to Muslim voters that Malaysia's Islamist opposition party, Pas, is more Islamic (and hence more legitimate) compared with its competitor, the United Malays National Organisation. Even in its pristine form, the idea as it is originally propagated by Mahathir could be read as a radical attempt at power politics.
But a more serious flaw lies in its contradiction. At the heart of the dinar system can still be found the same capitalistic spirit of commodification.
It lacks the egalitarian spirit embodied in socialism's virtue of the common good. Its advocates say that the poor could never be taken advantage of because the coins they own have intrinsic value. But Britain's recent gold-rush dilemma suggests that the poor do not always get their money's worth – even when trading gold.
Like paper money, gold is also vulnerable to the manipulations of valuers, our gatekeepers of wealth. And let's be honest, how many of the poor have stacks of gold already in their possession? Gold is a precious metal precisely because it is so rare.
On a wider scale, who is to prevent gold-rich nations from banding together as a cartel to fix prices at exorbitant amounts in the same way that the oil-producing nations of OPEC did?
Or multimillion corporations from exploiting poor but gold-rich nations? This is best exemplified in the case of Pacific Rim, a Vancouver-based firm that has filed an appeal via the Central American Free Trade Agreement (Cafta) to bypass local legislation so they can mine for gold in El Salvador despite local objections. In a world mired by climate change troubles, one also needs to mind the environmental cost of gold mining – an operation that involves huge amounts of water and toxic chemicals.
The Islamic gold dinar could not thwart capitalism's excesses. It is only providing one more avenue for exploitation. For this reason alone, it will not have my buy-in.
Comments in chronological order (Total 143 comments)
Lote
17 Jul 2010, 11:15AM
Muslim advocates of the dinar believe it will stop the excesses of capitalism, but it is just another avenue for exploitation
-----
Why not go all the way to the Barter System?
Malaysian state employees then can be paid in sheeps or chickens...or bowls of rice...and everyone then will live happily ever after in an Islamic Utopia.
And rest of the world can get on with the challenges of modernity.
epidavros
17 Jul 2010, 11:16AM
Gold has little intrinsic value. It's not especially rare (heck, you can even find it in Wales), and it's not especially useful (we use it mainly in electronics, but in the tiniest quantities - 1 ounce gives 50 miles or so of gold wire).
It's value is entirely due to perception - an entirely artificial market in perceptual value beyond usefulness. If anything, gold is more liable to manipulation than any of the alternatives we currently have.
But I say let these Islamic nations get on with it. Adopting this standard will no doubt sink their economies beyond any realistic chance of recovery.
DrJohnZoidberg
17 Jul 2010, 11:45AM
i thought that the reason that gold coins were ditched was because of the rapidity with which the currency became debased?
surely with modern tech it wold be easy to shave coins and replace the gold with another alloy of the same weight to avoid detection and, once detected the value of that currency would plummet on the international markets and also lose its credibility with those people who had to use it for transactions.
nice idea...can i have my £ as the original pound of gold it was intended to replace please?
zazar
17 Jul 2010, 11:52AM
As precious metals with intrinsic value, gold and silver are more resistant to market fluctuations and devaluation compared to the US dollar – an argument he took to the Organisation of the Islamic Conference as a tool to battle western hegemony.
The case is even weaker than the author suggests.
It's a commonly held myth that gold and silver have intrinsic value: they don't have any more intrinsic value as currency than paper notes or my monthly bank statement telling me that I have £xxx in my current account. Their value as currency is based on mutual acceptance of their value between vendors and consumers in relation to tangible goods. Didn't anyone read Gulliver's Travels?
Anyway, the whole idea is based on ignorance of the nature of exploitation as Nazry points out.
JimPress
17 Jul 2010, 11:55AM
It's worth bearing in mind that in Kuala Lumpur the ever stranger affairs of Kelantan are generally viewed with nothing more than amused contempt.
Kelantan is the home of the mighty cleavage and short skirt police who barge into workplaces with their devout tape measures in an effort to preserve stone age levels of decency. There was also a heated debate not so long ago regarding whether in the case of sharia amputation the amputee or the state owned the severed limb: the worry was that the victim would pack his limb in ice and head for KL in an effort to get a hospital to re-attach it. The northern states of Malaysia are a constant source of bleak knockabout Islamic comedy for their more cosmopolitan urban cousins.
zazar
17 Jul 2010, 11:56AM
DrJohnZoidberg
i thought that the reason that gold coins were ditched was because of the rapidity with which the currency became debased?
Absolutely. The Spanish mined so much silver in South America in the sixteenth century that they flooded the European market and the price dropped.
The value of gold and silver is mostly dependent on:
1. The perception that they are rare materials
2. Mutual belief among buyers and sellers in a marketplace that they are valuable
Indonesia group prefers gold as dollar loses shine
JAKARTA — Guided by a Scottish-born convert to Islam, a group of devout Indonesian Muslims is shunning "worthless" paper money in favour of gold and silver coins for their daily transactions.
The followers of Sheikh Abdalqadir as-Sufi -- born Ian Dallas -- trade goods like food, medicine, clothes and phone cards with gold dinars and silver dirhams in line with a strict interpretation of Islamic law.
Their anti-modern views sit uneasily with the naked capitalism of Indonesia's teeming capital, the financial and political centre of one of the fastest growing economies in the world.
"History has proven that, since the prophet Mohammed, the value of one gold dinar for thousands of years has always been equal to the value of one goat," said 33-year-old Kurniawati, who runs a shop in southern Jakarta.
Hoping to follow the example of Mohammad and the first generations of Muslims, the sheikh's followers do their shopping with dirhams worth around 30,000 rupiah (3.20 dollars) and dinars worth 1.43 million (153 dollars).
And they want the government -- or preferably a worldwide Islamic caliphate -- to replace paper currencies with the dinar that was used, in the words of the sheikh, "until the incursions of the kafir financiers in the Muslim lands".
Wakala Induk Nusantara (WIN) is the body responsible for regulating the issuance and distribution of the dinar in the world's most populous Muslim-majority country.
Coins minted in Indonesia are also in circulation in Australia, Malaysia and Singapore, WIN official Riki Rokhman Azis said.
The number of dinars on the local market more than doubled in 2009 to 25,000 pieces, reflecting the movement's growing popularity, he said.
"We decided to mint silver and gold coins in Indonesia following a fatwa issued by Sheikh Abdalqadir as-Sufi in Cape Town of South Africa, banning Muslims from using paper money," Azis told AFP.
Abdalqadir, a former playwright and actor who converted to Islam in the late 1960s, bitterly opposes modern capitalism and advocates a return to forms of Islamic law practised by the first generations after Mohammed.
These include seventh-century systems of trade and, in particular, the requirement of "zakat", or obligatory sharing of wealth, which he says must be done with gold or silver if it is paid in money.
Recent global economic upheavals, with their origins in the US mortgage and derivatives markets, have confirmed in the eyes of the sheikh that the final victory of Islamic finance is at hand.
In a blog on his website dated February 7, the sheikh pronounces the "historical, demonstrated end" of capitalism, and claims Western governments are using the threat of terrorism to distract people from this failure.
"It is time for the enslaved billions of our world today to fear no more the exploding shoes and underpants of the idiot agents of capitalism and to learn what Islam really is," he writes.
One of the key elements to being Muslim, he continues, is "following the messenger in all trade and contracts with honour (and) ... with real-value instruments of exchange like gold and silver".
Some Muslims have countered that a world economy based on gold coins would lead to a powerful cartel of gold-producing countries, while others have noted the potential for market chaos if gold replaced the greenback.
But for the sheikh's followers, such issues seem remote compared to the straightforward injunction to obey the Koran and emulate Mohammed.
"At least four people on average shop here every week with dinars, mostly buying things like rice, cooking oil, soap and clothes," said Kurniawati, a mother-of-three who also runs a dinar exchange service.
She became convinced of the wisdom of using dinars after her husband gave her a wedding dowry in gold coins eight years ago.
"A gold coin was worth 400,000 rupiah in 2002 but now it's at 1.45 million," she said proudly.
Several dinar users expressed a belief that gold never lost value, even though the currency has dropped 14 percent over the past year, according to rates tracked on local website Gerai Dinar.
The rupiah, meanwhile, has gained 29.17 percent against the US dollar since February 2009, while inflation last year was a record low of 2.78 percent. Consumer prices rose 11.07 percent in 2008.
Despite its recent gains, dinar users expressed a deep distrust of the rupiah, which tanked during the 1998-1999 Asian economic crisis.
"The value of the dinar and the dirham always goes up because the price of gold never falls," said food vendor Faturrahman.
"The price of food in rupiah, in contrast, is always rising. It gives me a headache as my income is becoming smaller and smaller."
The followers of Sheikh Abdalqadir as-Sufi -- born Ian Dallas -- trade goods like food, medicine, clothes and phone cards with gold dinars and silver dirhams in line with a strict interpretation of Islamic law.
Their anti-modern views sit uneasily with the naked capitalism of Indonesia's teeming capital, the financial and political centre of one of the fastest growing economies in the world.
"History has proven that, since the prophet Mohammed, the value of one gold dinar for thousands of years has always been equal to the value of one goat," said 33-year-old Kurniawati, who runs a shop in southern Jakarta.
Hoping to follow the example of Mohammad and the first generations of Muslims, the sheikh's followers do their shopping with dirhams worth around 30,000 rupiah (3.20 dollars) and dinars worth 1.43 million (153 dollars).
And they want the government -- or preferably a worldwide Islamic caliphate -- to replace paper currencies with the dinar that was used, in the words of the sheikh, "until the incursions of the kafir financiers in the Muslim lands".
Wakala Induk Nusantara (WIN) is the body responsible for regulating the issuance and distribution of the dinar in the world's most populous Muslim-majority country.
Coins minted in Indonesia are also in circulation in Australia, Malaysia and Singapore, WIN official Riki Rokhman Azis said.
The number of dinars on the local market more than doubled in 2009 to 25,000 pieces, reflecting the movement's growing popularity, he said.
"We decided to mint silver and gold coins in Indonesia following a fatwa issued by Sheikh Abdalqadir as-Sufi in Cape Town of South Africa, banning Muslims from using paper money," Azis told AFP.
Abdalqadir, a former playwright and actor who converted to Islam in the late 1960s, bitterly opposes modern capitalism and advocates a return to forms of Islamic law practised by the first generations after Mohammed.
These include seventh-century systems of trade and, in particular, the requirement of "zakat", or obligatory sharing of wealth, which he says must be done with gold or silver if it is paid in money.
Recent global economic upheavals, with their origins in the US mortgage and derivatives markets, have confirmed in the eyes of the sheikh that the final victory of Islamic finance is at hand.
In a blog on his website dated February 7, the sheikh pronounces the "historical, demonstrated end" of capitalism, and claims Western governments are using the threat of terrorism to distract people from this failure.
"It is time for the enslaved billions of our world today to fear no more the exploding shoes and underpants of the idiot agents of capitalism and to learn what Islam really is," he writes.
One of the key elements to being Muslim, he continues, is "following the messenger in all trade and contracts with honour (and) ... with real-value instruments of exchange like gold and silver".
Some Muslims have countered that a world economy based on gold coins would lead to a powerful cartel of gold-producing countries, while others have noted the potential for market chaos if gold replaced the greenback.
But for the sheikh's followers, such issues seem remote compared to the straightforward injunction to obey the Koran and emulate Mohammed.
"At least four people on average shop here every week with dinars, mostly buying things like rice, cooking oil, soap and clothes," said Kurniawati, a mother-of-three who also runs a dinar exchange service.
She became convinced of the wisdom of using dinars after her husband gave her a wedding dowry in gold coins eight years ago.
"A gold coin was worth 400,000 rupiah in 2002 but now it's at 1.45 million," she said proudly.
Several dinar users expressed a belief that gold never lost value, even though the currency has dropped 14 percent over the past year, according to rates tracked on local website Gerai Dinar.
The rupiah, meanwhile, has gained 29.17 percent against the US dollar since February 2009, while inflation last year was a record low of 2.78 percent. Consumer prices rose 11.07 percent in 2008.
Despite its recent gains, dinar users expressed a deep distrust of the rupiah, which tanked during the 1998-1999 Asian economic crisis.
"The value of the dinar and the dirham always goes up because the price of gold never falls," said food vendor Faturrahman.
"The price of food in rupiah, in contrast, is always rising. It gives me a headache as my income is becoming smaller and smaller."
The Gold Standard Explained!
The Gold Standard...
In laymans terms:
Gold standard made it "harder" to distribute credit without devaluing the worth of an ounce of Gold. However, this also put heavy strains on economic expansion .. that is to say, under the Gold Standard many of today's corporations, and thus our way of life, would not and could not exist.
There are some good and bad things about Gold.. the worst aspect is that Gold is limited, and so like all things in low quantity Gold dispersed over the population's value would be so high that economic stagnation or even collapse would be the only course. This also creates the by-product of a select few individuals hoarding the Gold. Not to mention the Government, who would have to enact steep taxes on it's people to make up the budget, as credit expansion under the Gold Standard is far lower then Wealth As Determined By Productivity. Another horrible aspect of Gold? Countries once waged massive campaigns to secure Gold supplies, killing millions in their wake, royalty would crush anything and any one to secure Gold.
Good thing? Tighter control of inflation, however, inflation is still there ... the Government can still issue 80 billion dollars of printed paper to save a bank under the Gold Standard, and when THIS happens, it creates HYPER inflation .. which destroys economies. However it controls the "natural growth" of inflation over the years so long as the money supply is constrained to a preset and designated amount, including a ceiling to be applied on how many new bills to be added to the money supply in any given year.
Under the Gold Standard America has nothing to sell to make a profit of Gold, our people are dirt poor.. if Government had to buy back Gold in order to back currencies .. the United States would collapse, as would most countries in the World.
No more McMillionairs driving escalades and living in nice houses, if you don't have a durable good to sell to generate a tangible profit, you are poor and we go back a few hundred years. If we enacted the Gold Standard, you would need hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a single ounce of Gold, and the price would fluctuate drastically.. extreme volatility.. Just because $1 is backed by Gold, does not mean you can always trade in one dollar for an ounce of Gold..
Also, in a way, money supply is always tied up in Gold.. as the Dollar falls, Gold rises, as the Dollar strengthens, Gold falls.. This is the natural order of "how much can I get for this".. as the currency is based on productivity and estimated wealth, so is it's apparent value in comparison to supply and demand with precious medals.
I might not be able to buy something with a bar of Gold, that bar of Gold will depreciate and appreciate determined to how much $1 can buy..
Essentially, the de-peg of the Gold is the allowing of massive credit expansion ..
Good or bad, that is perception, just know that without credit expansion America is worth a fraction of what our current life style is perceived...
Just remember, your dollar may not be "backed by something" .. but you can still trade them in for cars, tvs, vacations, FOOD, and other goods and services.. if you don't believe me still and believe your money worthless, I highly encourage you to send me your unwanted Dollars, U2U me for a shipping address!!
In laymans terms:
Gold standard made it "harder" to distribute credit without devaluing the worth of an ounce of Gold. However, this also put heavy strains on economic expansion .. that is to say, under the Gold Standard many of today's corporations, and thus our way of life, would not and could not exist.
There are some good and bad things about Gold.. the worst aspect is that Gold is limited, and so like all things in low quantity Gold dispersed over the population's value would be so high that economic stagnation or even collapse would be the only course. This also creates the by-product of a select few individuals hoarding the Gold. Not to mention the Government, who would have to enact steep taxes on it's people to make up the budget, as credit expansion under the Gold Standard is far lower then Wealth As Determined By Productivity. Another horrible aspect of Gold? Countries once waged massive campaigns to secure Gold supplies, killing millions in their wake, royalty would crush anything and any one to secure Gold.
Good thing? Tighter control of inflation, however, inflation is still there ... the Government can still issue 80 billion dollars of printed paper to save a bank under the Gold Standard, and when THIS happens, it creates HYPER inflation .. which destroys economies. However it controls the "natural growth" of inflation over the years so long as the money supply is constrained to a preset and designated amount, including a ceiling to be applied on how many new bills to be added to the money supply in any given year.
Under the Gold Standard America has nothing to sell to make a profit of Gold, our people are dirt poor.. if Government had to buy back Gold in order to back currencies .. the United States would collapse, as would most countries in the World.
No more McMillionairs driving escalades and living in nice houses, if you don't have a durable good to sell to generate a tangible profit, you are poor and we go back a few hundred years. If we enacted the Gold Standard, you would need hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a single ounce of Gold, and the price would fluctuate drastically.. extreme volatility.. Just because $1 is backed by Gold, does not mean you can always trade in one dollar for an ounce of Gold..
Also, in a way, money supply is always tied up in Gold.. as the Dollar falls, Gold rises, as the Dollar strengthens, Gold falls.. This is the natural order of "how much can I get for this".. as the currency is based on productivity and estimated wealth, so is it's apparent value in comparison to supply and demand with precious medals.
I might not be able to buy something with a bar of Gold, that bar of Gold will depreciate and appreciate determined to how much $1 can buy..
Essentially, the de-peg of the Gold is the allowing of massive credit expansion ..
Good or bad, that is perception, just know that without credit expansion America is worth a fraction of what our current life style is perceived...
Just remember, your dollar may not be "backed by something" .. but you can still trade them in for cars, tvs, vacations, FOOD, and other goods and services.. if you don't believe me still and believe your money worthless, I highly encourage you to send me your unwanted Dollars, U2U me for a shipping address!!
The Gold Diner: A Nuclear Wild Card
http://dominicfrisby.net/writing/why-gold-is-the-currency-of-the-idle-and-free
Why Gold Is The Currency Of The Idle and Free
The modern system of money, banking and credit is a loathsome beast that impoverishes and enslaves. If ever there was a system that needed smashing it is this one. It has made wars that should never have happened possible, and it has brought about this relentless commercial expansion that has so raped our beautiful earth. As Gandalf surveys the carnage Saruman has wrought building his armies, he proclaims, ‘The old world will burn in the fires of industry’. It has now burnt. In this essay, I shall argue that the simple act of doing away with the modern system of fractional reserve banking (don’t worry, I’ll explain what that means) and using gold as money once again could return us to the beauty and stability of the old world.
Ezra Pound, not a poet I’m wild about, once said ‘In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.’ We need to understand what money was and now is, and how we got where we are today, if we are to appreciate how the current system persecutes the free and idle – and how it can be changed. But let us first consider, do we need money at all?
Many an anarchist, myself included, has dreamt of a society without money. Barter is a wonderful system, and among its many beauties is the fact that it is hard to tax, so government can’t get its grubby claws in on any deal. But because barter relies on what is called ‘The Double Coincidence Of Wants’ – you have to want what I am offering at roughly the moment I want what you are offering - it is, sadly, impractical on a day-to-day basis.
Let’s say you are an erotic masseuse and I am a plumber. In a society without money, for any transaction to take place between us I am going to have to want an erotic massage within roughly the timeframe that you need some plumbing done. There will be the occasions when this coincidence occurs, but they will be infrequent. What is needed is some means of storing the value of the work one of us has done for the other. This can then be used at a later stage to buy other goods or services. There are numerous barter websites that are currently thriving and giving some kind of resurgence to the barter system, but they all rely on some system of storing the value of the work you have done or goods you have sold that can later be exchanged for other goods or services. In many cases they use a points system. All these boil down to is a modern money equivalent, a different form of money. Like it or loathe it, a society can’t function without money. Even the most primitive developed some kind of payments system.
Shells, cocoa beans, various metals, even feathers have been used over the years as money. At one stage Roman soldiers were paid in salt, from where we derive the word, ‘salary’. These early forms of money were ‘Commodity Money’. The most widely and successfully used forms of commodity money were gold and silver. Indeed the words ‘silver’ and ‘money’ are interchangeable in some 90 or more different languages: ‘Argent’ in French, ‘Plata’ in Spanish, for example. A Pound Sterling once meant a pound of sterling silver. Trade was facilitated by the casting of gold and silver coins which certified the weight and purity of the metal content.
As people needed somewhere to store their gold and silver they turned to their local goldsmith. He would issue a certificate as receipt for the gold deposited in his vaults, and over time people began to use these certificates in the marketplace as if they were the gold itself. Governments issued such notes, which in the case of the pound were considered, ‘as good as gold’. World trade had slowly moved from a ‘Commodity Money’ to a ‘Representative Money’.
It is at this stage in money’s history that the fraud of modern banking crept in. Seeing that very few depositors ever removed their actual gold, instead using their certificates for trade, goldsmiths realised they could make money by lending out certificates against depositors’ gold. Despite the inherent duplicity in the scheme – lending what is not yours to lend – it worked. The depositors did not lose anything. As long as there was no bank run, their gold was all still safe in the goldsmith’s vault. Depositors, however, soon wanted their share. Rather than taking back their gold, the depositors simply demanded that the goldsmith, now in effect their banker, pay them a share of the interest. The goldsmith paid one rate on deposits and then lent at a higher rate. Bankers then began lending out many times the amount of gold they had on deposit.
In times of panic some borrowers might demand their real gold back, instead of the paper certificates, and you had the dreaded run on the bank, with the banker not having enough gold and silver to redeem all the paper he had put out. It would have been straightforward to outlaw this new lending practice, but the large volumes of credit the bankers had issued made huge European commercial expansion and, indeed, the Industrial Revolution, possible, so, instead, the practice was legalised and regulated. The monetary system had moved on from representative to ‘Debt’. But, as one Pullilius Syrus said, ‘Debt is the slavery of the free’
It is no coincidence that both Christianity and Islam regarded lending, or usury as it was called, as a sin. Before mass media, religion was the primary means to govern, educate and control people. Many of the practices that are promoted or chastised, from not eating pork to not killing to not doing any work on the seventh day, were done so for a specific and sensible practical purpose.
Bankers agreed limits on the amount of money that could be lent out, limits still much larger than the amount of gold and silver on deposit. Usually the ratio was nine loaned units to one actual unit in gold. This is the fractional reserve banking system I referred to earlier. It was also arranged that, in the event of a run, central banks would support local banks with emergency gold. Only if there were runs on a lot of banks simultaneously would the bankers’ credit bubble burst and the system come crashing down.
By the twentieth century, this fractional reserve system, where you need only hold a fraction of the money you lend out, became the dominant money system of the world. But simultaneously, another, more ominous problem was developing: the amount of gold backing the paper money steadily shrank. The British came off the Gold Standard in 1914 because they needed to print money to pay for World War One. So did the Germans. By 1944, the USA and Switzerland were the only major nations left with a currency backed by gold. With the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944 which established monetary order between the major industrial countries at the end of World War Two, the dollar became the global reserve currency. It was pegged to gold at $35 an ounce.
Throughout the 60s, however, President Johnson and then Nixon allowed many more dollars to be issued or printed than they had gold to back them. They needed to pay for their new, expensive welfare systems and for the war in Vietnam. The French, under Charles De Gaulle, recognized this and began demanding gold in exchange for their dollars at the agreed fixed rate $35 per ounce. Initially, the US coughed up, but eventually, in 1971, as the run on the dollar sped up and faced with the rising cost of the Vietnam War, President Nixon removed the dollar from the gold standard altogether.
This move was a direct breech of the US Constitution which clearly states that nothing but gold and silver should be money. Article I, Section 10, Clause 1 reads: ‘No State shall…coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debt.’ America’s Founding Fathers, having had their own currencies collapse, wrote this clause with good reason.
Nevertheless, after 1971, for the first time in history, with the exception of the Swiss Franc, no currency on the planet, nor any small fraction of any currency, was backed by anything tangible. The basic nature of money had changed again. We were now in an era where money is money by fiat, that is by government edict – by the law. That is all. In the past, people had the choice to refuse privately created bank credit notes, but now legal tender laws declare that citizens must accept this government-edict money – or fiat currency – as payment. Their value is determined by how they trade against other fiat currencies on international currency markets. The status of the money is protected by the fact that the governments demand that tax be paid in that currency. The status of the dollar was also protected indirectly by the US military and by the fact that oil was bought and sold in dollars. (Did you know that shortly before the US invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein had pledged to sell oil in Euros? Some say the US invasion had more to do with protecting the hegemony of the dollar than anything else).
Did you know the US founding fathers never intended Americans to be taxed on their income? What they worked for should be theirs and no one else’s. This was changed in 1913 – coincidently the same time that the US Federal Reserve Bank, the single most villainous institution in whole of the global monetary system, was formed – with the The Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which read, ‘The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration’. What right does a state have to take from you under threat of prison what you have fairly worked for? All that state offers in exchange are dubious services of a dubious quality which you never given any choice over. You have to pay protection money to the mafia or you will be kidnapped or beaten up; you have to pay taxes to the government or you will be arrested and locked up.
(I’m in favour of a consumption tax, by the way, if there must be taxes at all. Instead of being taxed on what you produce (your work), you are taxed on what you consume. Surely it’s more sensible to reward and incentivize production rather than consumption. Production breeds real wealth. Consumption leads to debt. It is also infinitely better for the soul to produce rather than consume, just as giving is more satisfying than receiving. Other beneficiaries of a consumption tax would be the environment (less consumption means less rape of the earth) and freedom (less debt means less control) .
Since that fateful day in 1971 when Nixon unpegged the US Dollar from gold, debt has grown exponentially and there has been nothing to stop it. We have seen the formation of the greatest credit bubble in history. It has brought with it greatest rape of the earth, the longest-working hours, the greatest slavery, the worst working conditions, the highest divorce rates, the highest crime rates, the most wars, the greatest frauds, the most malevolent greed and dozens of other beastly anti-idler practices. We have just lived through the greatest credit bubble in history – greater than the South Sea Bubble, than the Dutch tulip bubble, than John Law’s Mississippi Bubble which brought about total economic collapse in France – and are about to face the consequences. There is a finite amount of gold in the world. With gold as money such expansion would never have been possible because there would not have been the gold to pay for it. But with modern money that can be endlessly issued, there was no such restriction.
The modern monetary system relies on ever expanding debt to function. Some new money is physically printed, but most money – over 90%, according to the Money Reform Party – is created digitally through the issuance of debt. I want to buy a house, I go to the bank with this proposal, they create the money and lend it to me, receiving the deeds to the house as collateral. I then pay them interest on this newly created money that didn’t previously exist. That newly-created money then goes into the economy and gets spent. That is how the system works.
There is an idea that successful business ventures create money. No economic activity has created any money. It has generated revenue yes, but actually created money, no. New debt creates new money. Thus the only way to service the entire debt of the system is for that system to take out more debt. But as debt expands, so the cost of servicing debt increases and you have this never ending bubble of expansion that requires people to work harder and harder and business to expand and expand (and thus pillage to earth) until eventually the cost of servicing the debt becomes too great and the whole system comes crashing down. That is where we are now. Governments worldwide are trying desperately to keep the system going by encouraging more and more lending (Brown : ‘We will do whatever it takes’) but they are doomed. It is a great big mess that could never have happened if gold was money and there was no or only limited fractional reserve banking. As Winston Churchill put it: “All previous attempts to base money solely on intangibles such as credit or government edict or fiat have ended in inflationary panic and disaster.”
George Bernard Shaw once said, “You have to choose, as a voter, between trusting to the national stability of gold and the natural stability and intelligence of governments. I advise you, as long as the capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold.” Let’s look now at why we should vote for gold.
Money has two uses: one, to be a medium of exchange and, two, to be a store of wealth. A successful form of money must have two main qualities. It must, firstly, be portable and, secondly, have a purchasing power that lasts, so it can be used at a later stage to buy goods or services. Enough people have to believe in its value for a money to function properly. As long as it has these qualities, money can, in theory, be virtually anything.
Gold’s rarity gives it value. A great deal of worth can be stored in a single gold coin. Silver, being less rare and thus less valuable, (it is fifteen times more common in the earth’s crust) was more useful for day-to-day transactions. However, over time, we have seen that people preferred the ease of paper money and now digital money. So gold, though portable and infinitely more beautiful than paper or digital money, was eventually bettered in the first necessity of money, which is to be portable. But this drawback is no longer the case. Now we have digital gold (and silver): gold is stored in vaults and ownership of that gold can be transferred digitally as transactions take place just as debit cards work today.
Money’s other function is to be a store of wealth. Spandau Ballet sing, ‘Gold you’re indestructable’ and indeed gold is immutable. It doesn’t tarnish. As the recent discoverers of Iceni gold buried in Norfolk found to their delight, you can dig up a gold coin buried in the ground a thousand years ago and it would be more or less intact, unoxidized and unblemished. Just as gold lasts over time, so does its purchasing power. There is the wonderful observation that an ounce of gold would have bought a Roman Senator a jolly decent toga and perhaps a pair of sandals; today the sterling equivalent (600 pounds) would buy your local MP a very respectable suit and shoes.
There is another story from the Old Testament where it is referenced that King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon was able to buy three hundred and fifty loaves of bread with an ounce of gold. If a loaf now costs one pound fifty, three hundred and fifty loaves would cost about £525. An ounce of gold costs about £650. So gold buys you as much bread now as it did in the Old Testament. In fact, it buys more as, with modern farming and production, bread has got cheaper.
Similarly, according to the Koran, a gold dinar would buy you a lamb. The modern equivalent still does today. So gold buys you as much bread, meat and clothing as it ever has. It’s purchasing power is unchanged over millennia.
Compare that with the modern pound or the dollar. A five pound note would not last ten years buried underground and think how much less it buys you now than it did ten years ago. What is the point of saving money if it will buy you less in the future? The chart below shows the declining purchasing power of the pound.
That period of stability in the pound throughout the Nineteenth Century came when the pound was on the Gold Standard and considered ‘as good as gold’. The decline only came after we left it.
Except for water, oil is the most important commodity in the world. Below is a chart which shows the cost of oil measured in US Dollars versus the cost of oil measured in grams of gold. You can see the purchasing power of gold has been fairly constant over the last hundred years, while the purchasing power of other currencies has been wild and unstable.
(How much better for global trade would a stable global currency, beyond the interfering control of governments, be? Businesses would no longer go bust because of currency fluctuations. You would not see these huge divergences between what an Asian or African earns and what a Westerner does).
We come now to gold’s importance to The Idler. Gold’s lasting purchasing power makes it the currency of the idle. You have your money. You leave it safely stored, perhaps in the form of jewellery about your wife’s person, confident your wealth is preserved for you or your descendants. The falling purchasing power of modern money breeds this idle-unfriendly culture of spending and speculation. The ever-expanding debt breeds this obsession with work at the expense of other, more important, areas of our lives.
As anyone who has ever handled gold bullion will vouch, gold is not only beautiful, it has an indefinable, magical, captivating power. It is real money, tangible wealth. Just as the handwritten letter is preferable to the email, so is a beautifully engraved gold or silver coin infinitely more desirable to the idle and free as payment for their endeavours to some intangible digital currency paid via bank transfer. It is pleasant to handle gold and it is said that gold jewellery about your person is actaully good for your health. The image of the old miser counting his gold was a PR stunt wrought by the same people who today tell you to go shopping, to buy things you don’t need with money you don’t have and persuade you that somehow this will make you happy and save the economy. More nonsense. Nobody gets rich by spending money. The way to get out of this recession is to go back to a culture of making stuff, rather than consuming it, while true satisfaction comes through production not consumption.
Apart from in a few rare electronic applications, gold has absolutely no industrial use whatsoever. In fact almost all the gold that has ever been mined still remains in the world today, unconsumed. Gold’s only use is as money, as a means to store wealth. Newly mined gold increases world inventory by about 3% per year – the same rate as world population growth – so the idea that there is not enough gold to go round is a nonsense. A lot of environmentalists despise gold miners because of the damage they do to surroundings and workers. This may be so in some cases, although practices have vastly improved. But the damage done by gold miners is nothing compared to the rape of the earth caused by the endless expansion of debt.
Governments are at best incompetent and at worst corrupt. Their role should be to organize essential services such as rubbish collection, and no more. (If indeed they should even be doing that). They should not be in charge of money and its creation. It gives them too much power. In 1790, the banker Mayer Amschel Rothschild said, “Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes the laws.” Government has too much power already. Look what they’ve done with that power. The best way to stop the misuse of power is to spread it and widely and equally as possible. We must take away from government the power to print money.
Politicians make silly promises in order to get elected. Then they somehow have to meet these promises. To do so, they will often print the money. There is nothing to stop them. That is, effectively, what Gordon Brown is doing now. Government’s response to this current crisis has been to bail out the banking system, the car industry, anything they can. They have already spent , even in inflation adjusted terms, many times more than was spent on the whole of World War Two. ‘Where has the money come from?’, many are asking. They have printed it, or rather they have entered digits into a computer somewhere. The money has been created out of thin air. The only reason this has not resulted in global Zimbabwe-style hyperinflation is that governments have not been able to print as fast as credit has contracted. But that hyperinflation will come.
Ben Bernanke, who is chairman of the US Federal Reserve Bank – effectively the most powerful banker in the world – wrote in 2002, “The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.’ The printing press is what he and his UK counterparts are resorting to. It is immoral. Companies that have acted irresponsibly should be allowed to go bust. It may be painful, but the hole they leave will be filled by another company that has behaved responsibly and prudently.
What gives the government and bankers the right to print and create money? The more money in circulation the less its value. If you have a hundred pounds which you have earned fairly and government just creates another hundred pounds, the value of your hundred pounds has just been interfered with and diminished, because there will be another hundred pounds chasing the same goods and services. By printing money governments are effectively destroying it. What right does a government have to destroy what you have earned? The amount of gold in circulation is limited by the amounts newly mined. There is no such limit on unbacked modern money, be it pounds, dollars or Euros. It’s modern alchemy.
Now imagine a world where at both national and personal level you could only spend what you had and you didn’t have the power to print money. You could only spend as much gold as you had. And once you’d spent it. That’s it. It’s gone.
All those ridiculous government spending programmes would disappear instantly. Neither the UK nor the US would be able to pay for its illegal war in Iraq. (And if you think work is anti-idle, try war). Nor would our own government be able to bail out the banking system or waste money in any of the other innumerable ways it has found to blow it. Efficiency and competence would suddenly become essential, waste would become less possible. Looking back, World War One could never happened. Neither the British nor the Germans had the gold to pay for it. We both came off the gold standard to print the money. The subsequent German reparations, which gave rise to Weimar hyperinflation and then to Hitler would never have happened. The endless expansion of debt and its enslavement of millions to mortgages would never have happened. I can go on ad infinitum. All those horrendous crimes that are committed in the name of law and order – from war to fascism-through-political-correctness – would not be possible.
But the current system of money imposes no such discipline. People are blaming the ‘free market’ for the current economic woes. But it is not a free market while issuance of money remains in the hands of governments and banks. It is only a free market when you have a free money, beyond the control of any body of people. There are calls for more regulation. We have enough regulation already. We do not need any more. It’s just a further attack on freedom and it taking us on the road to serfdom and totalitarianism. Regulation absolves people of moral and individual responsibility. With regulation you can say, ‘We were only obeying orders’. At present deficits don’t matter. Governments can print what they like, spend what they like, and that means they have almost unlimited power. Professor Walter E. Spahr, Chairman of the Department of Economics at NYU from 1927 to 1956, sums up: What is the meaning of a gold standard and a redeemable currency? It represents integrity. It insures the people’s control over the government’s use of the public purse. It is the best guarantee against the socialization of a nation. It enables a people to keep the government and banks in check. It prevents currency expansion from getting ever farther out of bounds until it becomes worthless. It tends to force standards of honesty on government and bank officials. It is the symbol of a free society and an honorable government. It is a necessary prerequisite to economic health. It is the first economic bulwark of free men.
Anyone can mint gold. Anyone can issue gold receipts. With gold, control of the money is taken away from government. Gold is true. It is incorruptible. You can’t print it. It is a rare, useless, inanimate object, but it is constant, immutable and nobody else’s liability. Gold imposes a discipline on people and governments which means they can’t spend it recklessly. Spending , now matter how well-intentioned, creates problems. Gold is a restrictive monetary system, but it is a fair, free and honest system. It all starts with money. Values, morals, behaviour, ambitions, manners, everything. Money must be sound and true. At the moment it is neither. Society is corrupt as a consequence. As Dorothy is repeatedly advised in The Wizard of Oz (an allegory about the monetary system and the fraud that is the dollar, ‘The Emerald City’) the time has come once again to ‘follow the yellow brick road’.
The Islamic Gold Dinar
The Islamic “Gold Dinar” is a form of currency that was used throughout the Islamic world from A.D. 700-1924. It came back into existence right after September 11, 2001, re-introduced by the Islamic Mint in Malaysia. This currency poses a threat to the West for many reasons detailed in this article, not the least of which is that it may become the official currency of over 1.5 billion Muslims. The Gold Dinar is becoming a settlement currency for oil, a planned offensive against the use of the dollar, partially fueled by the Asian Currency Crisis of 1997.
Mohammedfikri's Blog
March 21, 2010
By Craig R. Smith
A.D.700 – A.D. 1924: From the very beginning, Muslims used a gold coin called a Gold Dinar as their form of money. The Gold Dinar remained the official Islamic currency until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1924… when it disappeared for 77 years.
But on Nov. 7, 2001 — less than two months after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 — the Islamic Dinar was officially re-launched by the Islamic Mint in West Malaysia and is now available to the public.
Although a beautiful coin, the Gold Dinar could pose a serious threat to the U.S. economy! In fact, its supporters believe the Gold Dinar will become the official currency of more than 1.5 BILLION Muslims worldwide. Now radical Islam is urging Muslims worldwide to drop the U.S. Dollar and adopt the Gold Dinar as their primary currency!
WHY IS THE DINAR A THREAT TO THE U.S. DOLLAR?
Since the reissue of the Gold Dinar in November 2001, the U.S. Dollar has dropped to a RECORD LOW against the euro… while the price of gold has SOARED from about $260 per ounce to an 8-year RECORD HIGH of over $410 per ounce. And this is just the beginning!
As the dollar continues to drop, the priced-for-perfection stock market could be impacted dramatically. Unprepared investors could lose BILLIONS! It’s no coincidence that Osama bin Laden chose to strike the World Trade Center on Sept. 11… Why?
Because, the World Trade Center represented the heart and soul of the U.S. economy. And destroying the U.S. economy is the main pillar of bin Laden’s strategy to bring down the United States.
Back in 1997, there was a huge and devastating currency raid by the famous trader, George Soros, who leveled Asian monetary units and caused the major Asian economies to falter. It is true that some of those economies have not fully recovered. However, it is also true that history may point to this currency raid and raider as the germination of the seed for the uniting factor of Islamic economic power that changed the economic and monetary world.
FROM OIL FOR DOLLARS … TO … OIL FOR GOLD!
On Jan 18 Forbes reported that Sell oil for gold, Mahathir tells Saudi Arabia … “Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said on Sunday that Saudi Arabia should sell oil for gold, not dollars, to avoid being “short-changed” by a decline in the U.S. currency … He suggested countries tally their total annual imports and exports and settle the difference at the end of the year in “gold dinars.”
Recent news supports the idea that the Gold Dinar, with support from 53 other Islamic nations, is a planned offensive against the use of the dollar as a settlement currency for oil. It is perceived, and correctly so, that the Islamic world is controlled via the use of the US dollar as the main settlement currency.
When I say “controlled” I mean whatever happens economically in the USA is exported there via the dollar. Dollars exchanged for the Gold Dinar currency as a measure for gold settlements quarterly or gold convertible to pay for certain oil imports would end all the debate of whether or not gold has a place in the monetary system.
CAN RADICAL ISLAM CONVINCE MUSLIMS TO USE THE GOLD DINAR INSTEAD OF THE DOLLAR?
IF it was just the radical fundamentalists that were pushing the gold Dinar, you could presume that this movement would never get off the ground, BUT it is not.
On Jan. 8, 2004 the Malaysian Star reports, “Malaysian gold mine bought to promote gold dinar — MALAYSIA-BASED IGD Practice (Labuan) Ltd is buying into a gold mine in Kazakhstan in a bid to promote the use of gold dinar globally.”
According to John Myers, Outstanding Investments A 1,300-year-old gold dagger; “Many Muslims believe that the United States is responsible for the enormous devastation suffered by hundreds of millions of Muslims during the Asian Currency Crisis of 1997. This ANGER will provide a powerful incentive for Muslims to get even with the United States by selling dollars and buying Islamic Gold Dinars.
Just take a look at this quote from the Islamic Mint Web site: “… he heard the Messenger of Allah say: “‘A time is certainly coming over mankind in which there will be nothing [left] which will be of use save a dinar…’” – Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal
I think it’s obvious. These folks don’t just want the dollar to drop, they want the U.S. dollar to disappear. Permanently!
Last year SwissAmerica.com posted a ground-breaking story by Jim Sinclair, “The Gold Dinar: A Nuclear Wild Card,” which quoted the Islamic “AL-FATH AL-’ALI AL-MALIKI” (PP. 164-165)
“This Fatwa considers paper-money to be fulus, because it only represents money and does not have value as merchandise. It follows that since Zakat cannot be paid in fulus, which has no value as merchandise, it cannot be paid in paper-money, which value as weight of paper is null. On this basis, it becomes clear the urgent need to restore the use of the Dinar and the Dirham as payment of Zakat. If the millions of Muslims who now make their payment of Zakat in paper money would do it in newly minted Dinars and Dirham’s, they will put in circulation millions of gold and silver coins into the mainstream of daily commercial activities of our communities. That single act will became the most important political act of the century, opening the path towards the establishment our own halal free currency breaking away from the usurious financial system. The return to the payment of zakat in gold and silver is an essential part of the reestablishment of Islam.”
Those are serious words and should not be taken lightly. You see, the establishment of a gold-based currency is rebellion against the IMF as it is distinctly forbidden under IMF rules.
RESTORING THE FOURTH PILLAR OF ISLAM: ZAKAT IN GOLD & SILVER
Here is where the Gold Dinar story gets interesting — and even somewhat ironic to those who understand the Judeo-Christian principle of both tithing and the biblical requirement of just weights and measures in an honest money system.
According to Islam, Muhammad was reported to have said, “Islam is based upon five pillars:
* to make Shahadataan (declaration of faith)
* to establish Salaah (formal prayer)
* to make Sawm (fasting in the month of Ramadaan)
* to give Zakat (or Zakaah) (charity)
* to perform Hajj (pilgrimage to the Ka’bah).”
It is this fourth “pillar” that I want to focus on for a moment. The fundamentalist branch of Islam (about 10% of 1.3 billion followers – that’s 130 million! – about 1/3 of U.S. population) holds to the belief system stated above … “The return to the payment of Zakat in gold and silver is an essential part of the reestablishment of Islam.”
The literal meaning of the word Zakat is: grow (in goodness) or ‘increase’, ‘purifying’ or ‘making pure’. The vital importance of Zakat is reflected in Islamic law: “My mercy encompasses all things, but I will specify it for the righteous who give Zakat” (7:156). “Zakat must be given away “on the day of harvest” (6:141). Whenever we receive “net income,” the “known amount” of Zakat should be paid or set aside. This known amount is 2.5%.” SOURCE: Submission.org
According to Viewislam.com…”Zakat (or Zakaah) is an obligatory form of charity on savings. It is not an income tax, but a savings tax. Its major recipients are the working poor, who cannot meet all of their needs without some additional help, and the destitute, who cannot even meet their basic needs. It is also used to pay off the debts of those who are unable to pay off their own debts, to free slaves and ransom prisoners of war and to reconcile the hearts of new Muslims who may not yet have a firm foundation of faith. Other lawful recipients are stranded travelers, those engaged in jihad and employees of the state working to collect and distribute zakaah. Their wages come from it.
“Zakaah is due on the following forms of wealth: Gold and silver, Business inventory, Livestock, Agricultural produce and even buried treasure. The amount due is 2.5% of savings when it reaches the equivalent value of 85 grams (approximately three ounces) of gold. This minimum amount on which zakaah is due is called the nisaab. Although some scholars say that money should be pegged to the nisaab of silver, i.e., 595 grams, the majority considers gold to be a more reasonable peg for developed economies.” [The Practice of Zakat by country]
So, under Islamic law Zakat is a form of Muslin tithing to God for the support of the less fortunate or jihad — and it is to be paid in gold or silver, not paper currencies without any intrinsic value.
It is clear that the restoration of a gold and silver dinar is part of the mission of Islamic fundamentalist and, if successful, it could send the value of the U.S dollar spiraling downward if the Arab world decides to start valuing the price of oil in gold dinars instead of U.S. dollars.
Why Gold Is The Currency Of The Idle and Free
The modern system of money, banking and credit is a loathsome beast that impoverishes and enslaves. If ever there was a system that needed smashing it is this one. It has made wars that should never have happened possible, and it has brought about this relentless commercial expansion that has so raped our beautiful earth. As Gandalf surveys the carnage Saruman has wrought building his armies, he proclaims, ‘The old world will burn in the fires of industry’. It has now burnt. In this essay, I shall argue that the simple act of doing away with the modern system of fractional reserve banking (don’t worry, I’ll explain what that means) and using gold as money once again could return us to the beauty and stability of the old world.
Ezra Pound, not a poet I’m wild about, once said ‘In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.’ We need to understand what money was and now is, and how we got where we are today, if we are to appreciate how the current system persecutes the free and idle – and how it can be changed. But let us first consider, do we need money at all?
Many an anarchist, myself included, has dreamt of a society without money. Barter is a wonderful system, and among its many beauties is the fact that it is hard to tax, so government can’t get its grubby claws in on any deal. But because barter relies on what is called ‘The Double Coincidence Of Wants’ – you have to want what I am offering at roughly the moment I want what you are offering - it is, sadly, impractical on a day-to-day basis.
Let’s say you are an erotic masseuse and I am a plumber. In a society without money, for any transaction to take place between us I am going to have to want an erotic massage within roughly the timeframe that you need some plumbing done. There will be the occasions when this coincidence occurs, but they will be infrequent. What is needed is some means of storing the value of the work one of us has done for the other. This can then be used at a later stage to buy other goods or services. There are numerous barter websites that are currently thriving and giving some kind of resurgence to the barter system, but they all rely on some system of storing the value of the work you have done or goods you have sold that can later be exchanged for other goods or services. In many cases they use a points system. All these boil down to is a modern money equivalent, a different form of money. Like it or loathe it, a society can’t function without money. Even the most primitive developed some kind of payments system.
Shells, cocoa beans, various metals, even feathers have been used over the years as money. At one stage Roman soldiers were paid in salt, from where we derive the word, ‘salary’. These early forms of money were ‘Commodity Money’. The most widely and successfully used forms of commodity money were gold and silver. Indeed the words ‘silver’ and ‘money’ are interchangeable in some 90 or more different languages: ‘Argent’ in French, ‘Plata’ in Spanish, for example. A Pound Sterling once meant a pound of sterling silver. Trade was facilitated by the casting of gold and silver coins which certified the weight and purity of the metal content.
As people needed somewhere to store their gold and silver they turned to their local goldsmith. He would issue a certificate as receipt for the gold deposited in his vaults, and over time people began to use these certificates in the marketplace as if they were the gold itself. Governments issued such notes, which in the case of the pound were considered, ‘as good as gold’. World trade had slowly moved from a ‘Commodity Money’ to a ‘Representative Money’.
It is at this stage in money’s history that the fraud of modern banking crept in. Seeing that very few depositors ever removed their actual gold, instead using their certificates for trade, goldsmiths realised they could make money by lending out certificates against depositors’ gold. Despite the inherent duplicity in the scheme – lending what is not yours to lend – it worked. The depositors did not lose anything. As long as there was no bank run, their gold was all still safe in the goldsmith’s vault. Depositors, however, soon wanted their share. Rather than taking back their gold, the depositors simply demanded that the goldsmith, now in effect their banker, pay them a share of the interest. The goldsmith paid one rate on deposits and then lent at a higher rate. Bankers then began lending out many times the amount of gold they had on deposit.
In times of panic some borrowers might demand their real gold back, instead of the paper certificates, and you had the dreaded run on the bank, with the banker not having enough gold and silver to redeem all the paper he had put out. It would have been straightforward to outlaw this new lending practice, but the large volumes of credit the bankers had issued made huge European commercial expansion and, indeed, the Industrial Revolution, possible, so, instead, the practice was legalised and regulated. The monetary system had moved on from representative to ‘Debt’. But, as one Pullilius Syrus said, ‘Debt is the slavery of the free’
It is no coincidence that both Christianity and Islam regarded lending, or usury as it was called, as a sin. Before mass media, religion was the primary means to govern, educate and control people. Many of the practices that are promoted or chastised, from not eating pork to not killing to not doing any work on the seventh day, were done so for a specific and sensible practical purpose.
Bankers agreed limits on the amount of money that could be lent out, limits still much larger than the amount of gold and silver on deposit. Usually the ratio was nine loaned units to one actual unit in gold. This is the fractional reserve banking system I referred to earlier. It was also arranged that, in the event of a run, central banks would support local banks with emergency gold. Only if there were runs on a lot of banks simultaneously would the bankers’ credit bubble burst and the system come crashing down.
By the twentieth century, this fractional reserve system, where you need only hold a fraction of the money you lend out, became the dominant money system of the world. But simultaneously, another, more ominous problem was developing: the amount of gold backing the paper money steadily shrank. The British came off the Gold Standard in 1914 because they needed to print money to pay for World War One. So did the Germans. By 1944, the USA and Switzerland were the only major nations left with a currency backed by gold. With the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944 which established monetary order between the major industrial countries at the end of World War Two, the dollar became the global reserve currency. It was pegged to gold at $35 an ounce.
Throughout the 60s, however, President Johnson and then Nixon allowed many more dollars to be issued or printed than they had gold to back them. They needed to pay for their new, expensive welfare systems and for the war in Vietnam. The French, under Charles De Gaulle, recognized this and began demanding gold in exchange for their dollars at the agreed fixed rate $35 per ounce. Initially, the US coughed up, but eventually, in 1971, as the run on the dollar sped up and faced with the rising cost of the Vietnam War, President Nixon removed the dollar from the gold standard altogether.
This move was a direct breech of the US Constitution which clearly states that nothing but gold and silver should be money. Article I, Section 10, Clause 1 reads: ‘No State shall…coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debt.’ America’s Founding Fathers, having had their own currencies collapse, wrote this clause with good reason.
Nevertheless, after 1971, for the first time in history, with the exception of the Swiss Franc, no currency on the planet, nor any small fraction of any currency, was backed by anything tangible. The basic nature of money had changed again. We were now in an era where money is money by fiat, that is by government edict – by the law. That is all. In the past, people had the choice to refuse privately created bank credit notes, but now legal tender laws declare that citizens must accept this government-edict money – or fiat currency – as payment. Their value is determined by how they trade against other fiat currencies on international currency markets. The status of the money is protected by the fact that the governments demand that tax be paid in that currency. The status of the dollar was also protected indirectly by the US military and by the fact that oil was bought and sold in dollars. (Did you know that shortly before the US invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein had pledged to sell oil in Euros? Some say the US invasion had more to do with protecting the hegemony of the dollar than anything else).
Did you know the US founding fathers never intended Americans to be taxed on their income? What they worked for should be theirs and no one else’s. This was changed in 1913 – coincidently the same time that the US Federal Reserve Bank, the single most villainous institution in whole of the global monetary system, was formed – with the The Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which read, ‘The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration’. What right does a state have to take from you under threat of prison what you have fairly worked for? All that state offers in exchange are dubious services of a dubious quality which you never given any choice over. You have to pay protection money to the mafia or you will be kidnapped or beaten up; you have to pay taxes to the government or you will be arrested and locked up.
(I’m in favour of a consumption tax, by the way, if there must be taxes at all. Instead of being taxed on what you produce (your work), you are taxed on what you consume. Surely it’s more sensible to reward and incentivize production rather than consumption. Production breeds real wealth. Consumption leads to debt. It is also infinitely better for the soul to produce rather than consume, just as giving is more satisfying than receiving. Other beneficiaries of a consumption tax would be the environment (less consumption means less rape of the earth) and freedom (less debt means less control) .
Since that fateful day in 1971 when Nixon unpegged the US Dollar from gold, debt has grown exponentially and there has been nothing to stop it. We have seen the formation of the greatest credit bubble in history. It has brought with it greatest rape of the earth, the longest-working hours, the greatest slavery, the worst working conditions, the highest divorce rates, the highest crime rates, the most wars, the greatest frauds, the most malevolent greed and dozens of other beastly anti-idler practices. We have just lived through the greatest credit bubble in history – greater than the South Sea Bubble, than the Dutch tulip bubble, than John Law’s Mississippi Bubble which brought about total economic collapse in France – and are about to face the consequences. There is a finite amount of gold in the world. With gold as money such expansion would never have been possible because there would not have been the gold to pay for it. But with modern money that can be endlessly issued, there was no such restriction.
The modern monetary system relies on ever expanding debt to function. Some new money is physically printed, but most money – over 90%, according to the Money Reform Party – is created digitally through the issuance of debt. I want to buy a house, I go to the bank with this proposal, they create the money and lend it to me, receiving the deeds to the house as collateral. I then pay them interest on this newly created money that didn’t previously exist. That newly-created money then goes into the economy and gets spent. That is how the system works.
There is an idea that successful business ventures create money. No economic activity has created any money. It has generated revenue yes, but actually created money, no. New debt creates new money. Thus the only way to service the entire debt of the system is for that system to take out more debt. But as debt expands, so the cost of servicing debt increases and you have this never ending bubble of expansion that requires people to work harder and harder and business to expand and expand (and thus pillage to earth) until eventually the cost of servicing the debt becomes too great and the whole system comes crashing down. That is where we are now. Governments worldwide are trying desperately to keep the system going by encouraging more and more lending (Brown : ‘We will do whatever it takes’) but they are doomed. It is a great big mess that could never have happened if gold was money and there was no or only limited fractional reserve banking. As Winston Churchill put it: “All previous attempts to base money solely on intangibles such as credit or government edict or fiat have ended in inflationary panic and disaster.”
George Bernard Shaw once said, “You have to choose, as a voter, between trusting to the national stability of gold and the natural stability and intelligence of governments. I advise you, as long as the capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold.” Let’s look now at why we should vote for gold.
Money has two uses: one, to be a medium of exchange and, two, to be a store of wealth. A successful form of money must have two main qualities. It must, firstly, be portable and, secondly, have a purchasing power that lasts, so it can be used at a later stage to buy goods or services. Enough people have to believe in its value for a money to function properly. As long as it has these qualities, money can, in theory, be virtually anything.
Gold’s rarity gives it value. A great deal of worth can be stored in a single gold coin. Silver, being less rare and thus less valuable, (it is fifteen times more common in the earth’s crust) was more useful for day-to-day transactions. However, over time, we have seen that people preferred the ease of paper money and now digital money. So gold, though portable and infinitely more beautiful than paper or digital money, was eventually bettered in the first necessity of money, which is to be portable. But this drawback is no longer the case. Now we have digital gold (and silver): gold is stored in vaults and ownership of that gold can be transferred digitally as transactions take place just as debit cards work today.
Money’s other function is to be a store of wealth. Spandau Ballet sing, ‘Gold you’re indestructable’ and indeed gold is immutable. It doesn’t tarnish. As the recent discoverers of Iceni gold buried in Norfolk found to their delight, you can dig up a gold coin buried in the ground a thousand years ago and it would be more or less intact, unoxidized and unblemished. Just as gold lasts over time, so does its purchasing power. There is the wonderful observation that an ounce of gold would have bought a Roman Senator a jolly decent toga and perhaps a pair of sandals; today the sterling equivalent (600 pounds) would buy your local MP a very respectable suit and shoes.
There is another story from the Old Testament where it is referenced that King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon was able to buy three hundred and fifty loaves of bread with an ounce of gold. If a loaf now costs one pound fifty, three hundred and fifty loaves would cost about £525. An ounce of gold costs about £650. So gold buys you as much bread now as it did in the Old Testament. In fact, it buys more as, with modern farming and production, bread has got cheaper.
Similarly, according to the Koran, a gold dinar would buy you a lamb. The modern equivalent still does today. So gold buys you as much bread, meat and clothing as it ever has. It’s purchasing power is unchanged over millennia.
Compare that with the modern pound or the dollar. A five pound note would not last ten years buried underground and think how much less it buys you now than it did ten years ago. What is the point of saving money if it will buy you less in the future? The chart below shows the declining purchasing power of the pound.
That period of stability in the pound throughout the Nineteenth Century came when the pound was on the Gold Standard and considered ‘as good as gold’. The decline only came after we left it.
Except for water, oil is the most important commodity in the world. Below is a chart which shows the cost of oil measured in US Dollars versus the cost of oil measured in grams of gold. You can see the purchasing power of gold has been fairly constant over the last hundred years, while the purchasing power of other currencies has been wild and unstable.
(How much better for global trade would a stable global currency, beyond the interfering control of governments, be? Businesses would no longer go bust because of currency fluctuations. You would not see these huge divergences between what an Asian or African earns and what a Westerner does).
We come now to gold’s importance to The Idler. Gold’s lasting purchasing power makes it the currency of the idle. You have your money. You leave it safely stored, perhaps in the form of jewellery about your wife’s person, confident your wealth is preserved for you or your descendants. The falling purchasing power of modern money breeds this idle-unfriendly culture of spending and speculation. The ever-expanding debt breeds this obsession with work at the expense of other, more important, areas of our lives.
As anyone who has ever handled gold bullion will vouch, gold is not only beautiful, it has an indefinable, magical, captivating power. It is real money, tangible wealth. Just as the handwritten letter is preferable to the email, so is a beautifully engraved gold or silver coin infinitely more desirable to the idle and free as payment for their endeavours to some intangible digital currency paid via bank transfer. It is pleasant to handle gold and it is said that gold jewellery about your person is actaully good for your health. The image of the old miser counting his gold was a PR stunt wrought by the same people who today tell you to go shopping, to buy things you don’t need with money you don’t have and persuade you that somehow this will make you happy and save the economy. More nonsense. Nobody gets rich by spending money. The way to get out of this recession is to go back to a culture of making stuff, rather than consuming it, while true satisfaction comes through production not consumption.
Apart from in a few rare electronic applications, gold has absolutely no industrial use whatsoever. In fact almost all the gold that has ever been mined still remains in the world today, unconsumed. Gold’s only use is as money, as a means to store wealth. Newly mined gold increases world inventory by about 3% per year – the same rate as world population growth – so the idea that there is not enough gold to go round is a nonsense. A lot of environmentalists despise gold miners because of the damage they do to surroundings and workers. This may be so in some cases, although practices have vastly improved. But the damage done by gold miners is nothing compared to the rape of the earth caused by the endless expansion of debt.
Governments are at best incompetent and at worst corrupt. Their role should be to organize essential services such as rubbish collection, and no more. (If indeed they should even be doing that). They should not be in charge of money and its creation. It gives them too much power. In 1790, the banker Mayer Amschel Rothschild said, “Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes the laws.” Government has too much power already. Look what they’ve done with that power. The best way to stop the misuse of power is to spread it and widely and equally as possible. We must take away from government the power to print money.
Politicians make silly promises in order to get elected. Then they somehow have to meet these promises. To do so, they will often print the money. There is nothing to stop them. That is, effectively, what Gordon Brown is doing now. Government’s response to this current crisis has been to bail out the banking system, the car industry, anything they can. They have already spent , even in inflation adjusted terms, many times more than was spent on the whole of World War Two. ‘Where has the money come from?’, many are asking. They have printed it, or rather they have entered digits into a computer somewhere. The money has been created out of thin air. The only reason this has not resulted in global Zimbabwe-style hyperinflation is that governments have not been able to print as fast as credit has contracted. But that hyperinflation will come.
Ben Bernanke, who is chairman of the US Federal Reserve Bank – effectively the most powerful banker in the world – wrote in 2002, “The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.’ The printing press is what he and his UK counterparts are resorting to. It is immoral. Companies that have acted irresponsibly should be allowed to go bust. It may be painful, but the hole they leave will be filled by another company that has behaved responsibly and prudently.
What gives the government and bankers the right to print and create money? The more money in circulation the less its value. If you have a hundred pounds which you have earned fairly and government just creates another hundred pounds, the value of your hundred pounds has just been interfered with and diminished, because there will be another hundred pounds chasing the same goods and services. By printing money governments are effectively destroying it. What right does a government have to destroy what you have earned? The amount of gold in circulation is limited by the amounts newly mined. There is no such limit on unbacked modern money, be it pounds, dollars or Euros. It’s modern alchemy.
Now imagine a world where at both national and personal level you could only spend what you had and you didn’t have the power to print money. You could only spend as much gold as you had. And once you’d spent it. That’s it. It’s gone.
All those ridiculous government spending programmes would disappear instantly. Neither the UK nor the US would be able to pay for its illegal war in Iraq. (And if you think work is anti-idle, try war). Nor would our own government be able to bail out the banking system or waste money in any of the other innumerable ways it has found to blow it. Efficiency and competence would suddenly become essential, waste would become less possible. Looking back, World War One could never happened. Neither the British nor the Germans had the gold to pay for it. We both came off the gold standard to print the money. The subsequent German reparations, which gave rise to Weimar hyperinflation and then to Hitler would never have happened. The endless expansion of debt and its enslavement of millions to mortgages would never have happened. I can go on ad infinitum. All those horrendous crimes that are committed in the name of law and order – from war to fascism-through-political-correctness – would not be possible.
But the current system of money imposes no such discipline. People are blaming the ‘free market’ for the current economic woes. But it is not a free market while issuance of money remains in the hands of governments and banks. It is only a free market when you have a free money, beyond the control of any body of people. There are calls for more regulation. We have enough regulation already. We do not need any more. It’s just a further attack on freedom and it taking us on the road to serfdom and totalitarianism. Regulation absolves people of moral and individual responsibility. With regulation you can say, ‘We were only obeying orders’. At present deficits don’t matter. Governments can print what they like, spend what they like, and that means they have almost unlimited power. Professor Walter E. Spahr, Chairman of the Department of Economics at NYU from 1927 to 1956, sums up: What is the meaning of a gold standard and a redeemable currency? It represents integrity. It insures the people’s control over the government’s use of the public purse. It is the best guarantee against the socialization of a nation. It enables a people to keep the government and banks in check. It prevents currency expansion from getting ever farther out of bounds until it becomes worthless. It tends to force standards of honesty on government and bank officials. It is the symbol of a free society and an honorable government. It is a necessary prerequisite to economic health. It is the first economic bulwark of free men.
Anyone can mint gold. Anyone can issue gold receipts. With gold, control of the money is taken away from government. Gold is true. It is incorruptible. You can’t print it. It is a rare, useless, inanimate object, but it is constant, immutable and nobody else’s liability. Gold imposes a discipline on people and governments which means they can’t spend it recklessly. Spending , now matter how well-intentioned, creates problems. Gold is a restrictive monetary system, but it is a fair, free and honest system. It all starts with money. Values, morals, behaviour, ambitions, manners, everything. Money must be sound and true. At the moment it is neither. Society is corrupt as a consequence. As Dorothy is repeatedly advised in The Wizard of Oz (an allegory about the monetary system and the fraud that is the dollar, ‘The Emerald City’) the time has come once again to ‘follow the yellow brick road’.
The Islamic Gold Dinar
The Islamic “Gold Dinar” is a form of currency that was used throughout the Islamic world from A.D. 700-1924. It came back into existence right after September 11, 2001, re-introduced by the Islamic Mint in Malaysia. This currency poses a threat to the West for many reasons detailed in this article, not the least of which is that it may become the official currency of over 1.5 billion Muslims. The Gold Dinar is becoming a settlement currency for oil, a planned offensive against the use of the dollar, partially fueled by the Asian Currency Crisis of 1997.
Mohammedfikri's Blog
March 21, 2010
By Craig R. Smith
A.D.700 – A.D. 1924: From the very beginning, Muslims used a gold coin called a Gold Dinar as their form of money. The Gold Dinar remained the official Islamic currency until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1924… when it disappeared for 77 years.
But on Nov. 7, 2001 — less than two months after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 — the Islamic Dinar was officially re-launched by the Islamic Mint in West Malaysia and is now available to the public.
Although a beautiful coin, the Gold Dinar could pose a serious threat to the U.S. economy! In fact, its supporters believe the Gold Dinar will become the official currency of more than 1.5 BILLION Muslims worldwide. Now radical Islam is urging Muslims worldwide to drop the U.S. Dollar and adopt the Gold Dinar as their primary currency!
WHY IS THE DINAR A THREAT TO THE U.S. DOLLAR?
Since the reissue of the Gold Dinar in November 2001, the U.S. Dollar has dropped to a RECORD LOW against the euro… while the price of gold has SOARED from about $260 per ounce to an 8-year RECORD HIGH of over $410 per ounce. And this is just the beginning!
As the dollar continues to drop, the priced-for-perfection stock market could be impacted dramatically. Unprepared investors could lose BILLIONS! It’s no coincidence that Osama bin Laden chose to strike the World Trade Center on Sept. 11… Why?
Because, the World Trade Center represented the heart and soul of the U.S. economy. And destroying the U.S. economy is the main pillar of bin Laden’s strategy to bring down the United States.
Back in 1997, there was a huge and devastating currency raid by the famous trader, George Soros, who leveled Asian monetary units and caused the major Asian economies to falter. It is true that some of those economies have not fully recovered. However, it is also true that history may point to this currency raid and raider as the germination of the seed for the uniting factor of Islamic economic power that changed the economic and monetary world.
FROM OIL FOR DOLLARS … TO … OIL FOR GOLD!
On Jan 18 Forbes reported that Sell oil for gold, Mahathir tells Saudi Arabia … “Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said on Sunday that Saudi Arabia should sell oil for gold, not dollars, to avoid being “short-changed” by a decline in the U.S. currency … He suggested countries tally their total annual imports and exports and settle the difference at the end of the year in “gold dinars.”
Recent news supports the idea that the Gold Dinar, with support from 53 other Islamic nations, is a planned offensive against the use of the dollar as a settlement currency for oil. It is perceived, and correctly so, that the Islamic world is controlled via the use of the US dollar as the main settlement currency.
When I say “controlled” I mean whatever happens economically in the USA is exported there via the dollar. Dollars exchanged for the Gold Dinar currency as a measure for gold settlements quarterly or gold convertible to pay for certain oil imports would end all the debate of whether or not gold has a place in the monetary system.
CAN RADICAL ISLAM CONVINCE MUSLIMS TO USE THE GOLD DINAR INSTEAD OF THE DOLLAR?
IF it was just the radical fundamentalists that were pushing the gold Dinar, you could presume that this movement would never get off the ground, BUT it is not.
On Jan. 8, 2004 the Malaysian Star reports, “Malaysian gold mine bought to promote gold dinar — MALAYSIA-BASED IGD Practice (Labuan) Ltd is buying into a gold mine in Kazakhstan in a bid to promote the use of gold dinar globally.”
According to John Myers, Outstanding Investments A 1,300-year-old gold dagger; “Many Muslims believe that the United States is responsible for the enormous devastation suffered by hundreds of millions of Muslims during the Asian Currency Crisis of 1997. This ANGER will provide a powerful incentive for Muslims to get even with the United States by selling dollars and buying Islamic Gold Dinars.
Just take a look at this quote from the Islamic Mint Web site: “… he heard the Messenger of Allah say: “‘A time is certainly coming over mankind in which there will be nothing [left] which will be of use save a dinar…’” – Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal
I think it’s obvious. These folks don’t just want the dollar to drop, they want the U.S. dollar to disappear. Permanently!
Last year SwissAmerica.com posted a ground-breaking story by Jim Sinclair, “The Gold Dinar: A Nuclear Wild Card,” which quoted the Islamic “AL-FATH AL-’ALI AL-MALIKI” (PP. 164-165)
“This Fatwa considers paper-money to be fulus, because it only represents money and does not have value as merchandise. It follows that since Zakat cannot be paid in fulus, which has no value as merchandise, it cannot be paid in paper-money, which value as weight of paper is null. On this basis, it becomes clear the urgent need to restore the use of the Dinar and the Dirham as payment of Zakat. If the millions of Muslims who now make their payment of Zakat in paper money would do it in newly minted Dinars and Dirham’s, they will put in circulation millions of gold and silver coins into the mainstream of daily commercial activities of our communities. That single act will became the most important political act of the century, opening the path towards the establishment our own halal free currency breaking away from the usurious financial system. The return to the payment of zakat in gold and silver is an essential part of the reestablishment of Islam.”
Those are serious words and should not be taken lightly. You see, the establishment of a gold-based currency is rebellion against the IMF as it is distinctly forbidden under IMF rules.
RESTORING THE FOURTH PILLAR OF ISLAM: ZAKAT IN GOLD & SILVER
Here is where the Gold Dinar story gets interesting — and even somewhat ironic to those who understand the Judeo-Christian principle of both tithing and the biblical requirement of just weights and measures in an honest money system.
According to Islam, Muhammad was reported to have said, “Islam is based upon five pillars:
* to make Shahadataan (declaration of faith)
* to establish Salaah (formal prayer)
* to make Sawm (fasting in the month of Ramadaan)
* to give Zakat (or Zakaah) (charity)
* to perform Hajj (pilgrimage to the Ka’bah).”
It is this fourth “pillar” that I want to focus on for a moment. The fundamentalist branch of Islam (about 10% of 1.3 billion followers – that’s 130 million! – about 1/3 of U.S. population) holds to the belief system stated above … “The return to the payment of Zakat in gold and silver is an essential part of the reestablishment of Islam.”
The literal meaning of the word Zakat is: grow (in goodness) or ‘increase’, ‘purifying’ or ‘making pure’. The vital importance of Zakat is reflected in Islamic law: “My mercy encompasses all things, but I will specify it for the righteous who give Zakat” (7:156). “Zakat must be given away “on the day of harvest” (6:141). Whenever we receive “net income,” the “known amount” of Zakat should be paid or set aside. This known amount is 2.5%.” SOURCE: Submission.org
According to Viewislam.com…”Zakat (or Zakaah) is an obligatory form of charity on savings. It is not an income tax, but a savings tax. Its major recipients are the working poor, who cannot meet all of their needs without some additional help, and the destitute, who cannot even meet their basic needs. It is also used to pay off the debts of those who are unable to pay off their own debts, to free slaves and ransom prisoners of war and to reconcile the hearts of new Muslims who may not yet have a firm foundation of faith. Other lawful recipients are stranded travelers, those engaged in jihad and employees of the state working to collect and distribute zakaah. Their wages come from it.
“Zakaah is due on the following forms of wealth: Gold and silver, Business inventory, Livestock, Agricultural produce and even buried treasure. The amount due is 2.5% of savings when it reaches the equivalent value of 85 grams (approximately three ounces) of gold. This minimum amount on which zakaah is due is called the nisaab. Although some scholars say that money should be pegged to the nisaab of silver, i.e., 595 grams, the majority considers gold to be a more reasonable peg for developed economies.” [The Practice of Zakat by country]
So, under Islamic law Zakat is a form of Muslin tithing to God for the support of the less fortunate or jihad — and it is to be paid in gold or silver, not paper currencies without any intrinsic value.
It is clear that the restoration of a gold and silver dinar is part of the mission of Islamic fundamentalist and, if successful, it could send the value of the U.S dollar spiraling downward if the Arab world decides to start valuing the price of oil in gold dinars instead of U.S. dollars.
I don’t want mummy, says girl in custody fight
PUTRAJAYA: It was a heart-wrenching scene at the Court of Appeal here when three appellate judges tried to persuade an 11-year-old girl to give her mother a second chance.
Low Bi-Anne had initially refused to meet her mother Tan Siew Siew, 37, when the custody battle case was called up. The mother has been given custody of the child.
However, Bi-Anne, who was in tears, sat close to her father, real-estate negotiator Low Swee Siong, 40.
Upon hearing submissions by the parties, Court of Appeal judge Justice Sulong Matjeraie, who chaired a three-man panel, asked the girl to give her mother a chance to show her love.
“Your mother came all the way from England to see you,” he said.
Justice Mohamed Apandi Ali told her: “Your mother took care of you for nine months. Give it a try.”
Upon hearing this, Bi-Anne said: “She took care of me for nine months but my father took care of me for 10 years.”
Justice Jefrey Tan Kok Wha told the girl: “I am sure (both your parents) love you equally.”
The girl then wept and said: “I don’t love her.”
Lawyer T. Susamma, who acted for the girl’s mother, said her client was heartbroken at not having access to her daughter.
Susamma applied to the Bench for the girl’s father, Low, to surrender her birth certificate and all school records.
Counsel Chan Kah Ling, who represented Low, requested that the court give them 14 days or a month to comply with the order.
Justice Sulong ordered that the birth certificate be given to Tan within seven days.
The couple married on Aug 2, 1999. When they divorced on June 19, 2006, the custody of the girl was given to the father.
After two years, the mother applied for custody.
On Aug 6, 2008, High Court judge Justice Hinshawati Sharif ordered that custody of the girl be given to the mother and the father be given reasonable access. However, the order could not be executed because Bi-Anne did not want to go to her mother.
On July 27, the father appealed to the Court of Appeal against the lower court ruling but later withdrew it. Yesterday was the execution of the High Court order for the custody of the child to the mother.
Low Bi-Anne had initially refused to meet her mother Tan Siew Siew, 37, when the custody battle case was called up. The mother has been given custody of the child.
However, Bi-Anne, who was in tears, sat close to her father, real-estate negotiator Low Swee Siong, 40.
Upon hearing submissions by the parties, Court of Appeal judge Justice Sulong Matjeraie, who chaired a three-man panel, asked the girl to give her mother a chance to show her love.
“Your mother came all the way from England to see you,” he said.
Justice Mohamed Apandi Ali told her: “Your mother took care of you for nine months. Give it a try.”
Upon hearing this, Bi-Anne said: “She took care of me for nine months but my father took care of me for 10 years.”
Justice Jefrey Tan Kok Wha told the girl: “I am sure (both your parents) love you equally.”
The girl then wept and said: “I don’t love her.”
Lawyer T. Susamma, who acted for the girl’s mother, said her client was heartbroken at not having access to her daughter.
Susamma applied to the Bench for the girl’s father, Low, to surrender her birth certificate and all school records.
Counsel Chan Kah Ling, who represented Low, requested that the court give them 14 days or a month to comply with the order.
Justice Sulong ordered that the birth certificate be given to Tan within seven days.
The couple married on Aug 2, 1999. When they divorced on June 19, 2006, the custody of the girl was given to the father.
After two years, the mother applied for custody.
On Aug 6, 2008, High Court judge Justice Hinshawati Sharif ordered that custody of the girl be given to the mother and the father be given reasonable access. However, the order could not be executed because Bi-Anne did not want to go to her mother.
On July 27, the father appealed to the Court of Appeal against the lower court ruling but later withdrew it. Yesterday was the execution of the High Court order for the custody of the child to the mother.
Kelantan launches syariah currency
KOTA BARU: Kelantan has become the first state to introduce the gold dinar and silver dirham as official currency.
Mentri Besar Datuk Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat said the state would strive to expand the use of gold dinar and silver dirham in its transactions, including the payment of civil servants’ remuneration.
“However, there are many technicalities that have to be addressed by the state government,” he said after launching the Islamic currency yesterday.
The gold dinar and silver dirham is managed by Kelantan Gold Trade (KGT), a subsidiary of Kelantan Mentri Besar Incorporated (PMBK). In a symbolic gesture, Nik Abdul Aziz handed over a dinar gold to PMBK chief executive officer Mustapha Salleh as payment of salaries to PMBK employees for the month.
Nik Abdul Aziz said 1,000 traders so far had agreed to use the currency in their transactions besides Tabung Haji and Bank Islam Malaysia.
“Syariah currency was widely used thousands of years before the fall of the Ottoman Empire,” he said. — Bernama
Mentri Besar Datuk Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat said the state would strive to expand the use of gold dinar and silver dirham in its transactions, including the payment of civil servants’ remuneration.
“However, there are many technicalities that have to be addressed by the state government,” he said after launching the Islamic currency yesterday.
The gold dinar and silver dirham is managed by Kelantan Gold Trade (KGT), a subsidiary of Kelantan Mentri Besar Incorporated (PMBK). In a symbolic gesture, Nik Abdul Aziz handed over a dinar gold to PMBK chief executive officer Mustapha Salleh as payment of salaries to PMBK employees for the month.
Nik Abdul Aziz said 1,000 traders so far had agreed to use the currency in their transactions besides Tabung Haji and Bank Islam Malaysia.
“Syariah currency was widely used thousands of years before the fall of the Ottoman Empire,” he said. — Bernama
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Will writers taking thousands from customers, Panorama claims
Popular will-writing services are unfairly taking thousands of pounds from customers and their loved ones, a BBC investigation has claimed.
By Martin Beckford
Published: 6:00AM BST 10 Aug 2010
The firms claim they are cheaper and more straightforward than solicitors at creating a last will and testament, and are said to account for 10 per cent of the market.
But a Panorama documentary says in some cases their fees quickly escalate from hundreds to thousands of pounds in hidden fees and charges, while the supposed beneficiaries of wills can be left with nothing.
The problem is made worse by the fact that will-writers are not regulated as strictly as traditional law firms or financial services companies, which used to help people write wills.
Fergus Ewing, a Member of the Scottish Parliament who is bringing in protection north of the border, told the programme: “The public have a right to be protected, in Scotland they will be.
“Anyone who is charging a fee for writing a will must be regulated. They must have appropriate qualifications, they must have proper indemnity in place. At present none of this protection exists.
"I hope that justice will be done for people – throughout Britain, ideally – in protection against crooks, cowboys and con men."
The programme, broadcast on Monday night on BBC One, interviewed one woman who was left a large sum by a friend but who never received a penny because of fraud by the will-writing firm involved.
Mary Neenan, a single mother from Birmingham, said: "To have something like that £35,000-£40,000 would have been a life-changing amount of money for the three of us."
She went to police and last month David Nash and Nicholas Butcher, two men behind the firm, Lincoln-based Willmakers of Distinction, were each jailed for three-and-a-half years for stealing more than £400,000 from estates they were administering.
Neil Hollingsworth, of the Economic Crimes Unit of Lincolnshire Police, said: “A lot of the times, probably 90 per cent of those cases, the beneficiaries didn't know they were beneficiaries and so they weren't asking questions. I guess they probably thought they'd got the perfect crime."
However financial experts also warn that some banks are wrongly claiming that they must be added as joint or sole executors when writing customers’ wills, which can reduce the value of their legacies substantially.
James Daley, of Which? Money, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “What that means is when you die they’re then able to take as much as 4 per cent of your estate in fees, which ends up adding up to tens of thousands of pounds.
“It’s quite a complex area. It’s the kind of thing most people have to do once in their lives. You’re really in the hands of the advisers, it’s really important that they give you the right advice.
“If somebody tells you that you need to have that firm written in to your will you take their word for it and you might not realise you’re then going to pay for that. This is a widespread issue, it’s a real problem out there.”
Pauline Platt, a Probate Lawyer at SAS Daniels LLP, said: "I've seen an increase in the companies who offer will writing 'services' and the shocking financial pitfalls that have faced some unwary consumers. It can be immensely costly to undo, and can leave a family in disarray after the loved one has died – which is usually only when issues come to light.
“If clients use a solicitor in the first instance, not only can they offer the correct legal advice taking into account the client's domestic and financial situation, but they can also advise on other services such as the creation of trusts, transfer of assets and powers of attorney.”
By Martin Beckford
Published: 6:00AM BST 10 Aug 2010
The firms claim they are cheaper and more straightforward than solicitors at creating a last will and testament, and are said to account for 10 per cent of the market.
But a Panorama documentary says in some cases their fees quickly escalate from hundreds to thousands of pounds in hidden fees and charges, while the supposed beneficiaries of wills can be left with nothing.
The problem is made worse by the fact that will-writers are not regulated as strictly as traditional law firms or financial services companies, which used to help people write wills.
Fergus Ewing, a Member of the Scottish Parliament who is bringing in protection north of the border, told the programme: “The public have a right to be protected, in Scotland they will be.
“Anyone who is charging a fee for writing a will must be regulated. They must have appropriate qualifications, they must have proper indemnity in place. At present none of this protection exists.
"I hope that justice will be done for people – throughout Britain, ideally – in protection against crooks, cowboys and con men."
The programme, broadcast on Monday night on BBC One, interviewed one woman who was left a large sum by a friend but who never received a penny because of fraud by the will-writing firm involved.
Mary Neenan, a single mother from Birmingham, said: "To have something like that £35,000-£40,000 would have been a life-changing amount of money for the three of us."
She went to police and last month David Nash and Nicholas Butcher, two men behind the firm, Lincoln-based Willmakers of Distinction, were each jailed for three-and-a-half years for stealing more than £400,000 from estates they were administering.
Neil Hollingsworth, of the Economic Crimes Unit of Lincolnshire Police, said: “A lot of the times, probably 90 per cent of those cases, the beneficiaries didn't know they were beneficiaries and so they weren't asking questions. I guess they probably thought they'd got the perfect crime."
However financial experts also warn that some banks are wrongly claiming that they must be added as joint or sole executors when writing customers’ wills, which can reduce the value of their legacies substantially.
James Daley, of Which? Money, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “What that means is when you die they’re then able to take as much as 4 per cent of your estate in fees, which ends up adding up to tens of thousands of pounds.
“It’s quite a complex area. It’s the kind of thing most people have to do once in their lives. You’re really in the hands of the advisers, it’s really important that they give you the right advice.
“If somebody tells you that you need to have that firm written in to your will you take their word for it and you might not realise you’re then going to pay for that. This is a widespread issue, it’s a real problem out there.”
Pauline Platt, a Probate Lawyer at SAS Daniels LLP, said: "I've seen an increase in the companies who offer will writing 'services' and the shocking financial pitfalls that have faced some unwary consumers. It can be immensely costly to undo, and can leave a family in disarray after the loved one has died – which is usually only when issues come to light.
“If clients use a solicitor in the first instance, not only can they offer the correct legal advice taking into account the client's domestic and financial situation, but they can also advise on other services such as the creation of trusts, transfer of assets and powers of attorney.”
Eastern European cyber criminals 'draining British bank accounts'
Eastern European cyber criminals are using sophisticated computer viruses to drain the accounts of thousands of British banking customers, internet security experts have said.
By Heidi Blake
Published: 7:19AM BST 11 Aug 2010
A new version the notorious “Zeus” virus, which cannot be detected by traditional firewalls, has stolen £675,000 from about 3,000 online customers of a British bank, the experts claimed.
The funds have been transferred out of the online accounts, which are held by businesses and individuals, since early July.
Experts at M86 Security, which specialises in online fraud, said the virus checks to see how much money the accounts contain, steals it, and covers its tracks by showing the customer fake bank balances.
The online security firm, based in California and Britain, uncovered the fraud when it penetrated the criminals’ command server, which is based in Eastern Europe, and found a list of all the cash transfers.
Experts produced a dossier explaining how the attacks had occurred and informed the police and the bank concerned two weeks ago – but experts said the attacks appear to be continuing.
The Zeus virus, which targets online bank accounts, first emerged three years ago. The new version, “Zeus v3”, not only collects users’ logins, passwords and bank details – it is also capable of transferring money out of the compromised accounts.
Bradley Anstis, vice president of technical strategy at M86, told The Times: “This is an extremely sophisticated version of the virus and it cannot be detected by traditional security software”.
The experts also warned that such viruses are no longer confined to “red light district” sections of the web, such as gambling and pornography sites, but can be found on popular search engines, blogs and news websites.
Last year, attackers placed a virus in an advertisement on the New York Times website.
M86 Security said that online banking customers had transferred the virus from legitimate websites onto their computers through “security holes” in either Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser or Adobe Reader software.
Once a computer is infected, the “Trojan” spyware lies dormant within the user’s browser until they connect to their online banking account.
The virus then hijacks the customer’s online banking session and checks their bank balance. If their account contains more than £800, it begins invisibly transferring the funds into “mule accounts” – other accounts held by legitimate online banking customers which the criminals have already penetrated.
Britain’s major high street banks refused to comment on whether their customers had been affected by the scam when contacted by The Times.
But a spokesman for HSBC said: “There are millions of viruses, and other malicious software. We urge people to take basic measures to protect themselves from virus attacks. Any customer who is the victim of fraud will be reimbursed by HSBC.”
Online banking fraud increased 18 per cent last year to £59.7 million according to UK Payments Administration, the trade organisation.
By Heidi Blake
Published: 7:19AM BST 11 Aug 2010
A new version the notorious “Zeus” virus, which cannot be detected by traditional firewalls, has stolen £675,000 from about 3,000 online customers of a British bank, the experts claimed.
The funds have been transferred out of the online accounts, which are held by businesses and individuals, since early July.
Experts at M86 Security, which specialises in online fraud, said the virus checks to see how much money the accounts contain, steals it, and covers its tracks by showing the customer fake bank balances.
The online security firm, based in California and Britain, uncovered the fraud when it penetrated the criminals’ command server, which is based in Eastern Europe, and found a list of all the cash transfers.
Experts produced a dossier explaining how the attacks had occurred and informed the police and the bank concerned two weeks ago – but experts said the attacks appear to be continuing.
The Zeus virus, which targets online bank accounts, first emerged three years ago. The new version, “Zeus v3”, not only collects users’ logins, passwords and bank details – it is also capable of transferring money out of the compromised accounts.
Bradley Anstis, vice president of technical strategy at M86, told The Times: “This is an extremely sophisticated version of the virus and it cannot be detected by traditional security software”.
The experts also warned that such viruses are no longer confined to “red light district” sections of the web, such as gambling and pornography sites, but can be found on popular search engines, blogs and news websites.
Last year, attackers placed a virus in an advertisement on the New York Times website.
M86 Security said that online banking customers had transferred the virus from legitimate websites onto their computers through “security holes” in either Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser or Adobe Reader software.
Once a computer is infected, the “Trojan” spyware lies dormant within the user’s browser until they connect to their online banking account.
The virus then hijacks the customer’s online banking session and checks their bank balance. If their account contains more than £800, it begins invisibly transferring the funds into “mule accounts” – other accounts held by legitimate online banking customers which the criminals have already penetrated.
Britain’s major high street banks refused to comment on whether their customers had been affected by the scam when contacted by The Times.
But a spokesman for HSBC said: “There are millions of viruses, and other malicious software. We urge people to take basic measures to protect themselves from virus attacks. Any customer who is the victim of fraud will be reimbursed by HSBC.”
Online banking fraud increased 18 per cent last year to £59.7 million according to UK Payments Administration, the trade organisation.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
