The "CITY OF LONDON" or the City of London?

When I see a good article in mainstream media that portrays a truth well, I like to quote it. Without further ado then, let us see what the following article has to say about the "CITY OF LONDON". Ignore the other content. Learn what you can about the "CITY OF LONDON", and you will start to understand who exerts massive control over the UK.

By the way, the "CITY OF LONDON" should always be spelled in capitol letters, because it is a legal entity, a corporation. Their web site has this right in a few important instances, namely logotypes...

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Read on, learn, maybe even enjoy :)

Steve B
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The medieval, unaccountable Corporation of London is ripe for protest

Working beyond the authority of parliament, the Corporation of London undermines all attempts to curb the excesses of finance

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 31 October 2011 21.00 GMT

Illustration by Daniel Pudles

It's the dark heart of Britain, the place where democracy goes to die, immensely powerful, equally unaccountable. But I doubt that one in 10 British people has any idea of what the Corporation of the City of London is and how it works. This could be about to change. Alongside the Church of England, the Corporation is seeking to evict the protesters camped outside St Paul's cathedral. The protesters, in turn, have demanded that it submit to national oversight and control.

What is this thing? Ostensibly it's the equivalent of a local council, responsible for a small area of London known as the Square Mile. But, as its website boasts, "among local authorities the City of London is unique". You bet it is. There are 25 electoral wards in the Square Mile. In four of them, the 9,000 people who live within its boundaries are permitted to vote. In the remaining 21, the votes are controlled by corporations, mostly banks and other financial companies. The bigger the business, the bigger the vote: a company with 10 workers gets two votes, the biggest employers, 79. It's not the workers who decide how the votes are cast, but the bosses, who "appoint" the voters. Plutocracy, pure and simple.

There are four layers of elected representatives in the Corporation: common councilmen, aldermen, sheriffs and the Lord Mayor. To qualify for any of these offices, you must be a freeman of the City of London. Tobecome a freeman you must be approved by the aldermen. You're most likely to qualify if you belong to one of the City livery companies: medieval guilds such as the worshipful company of costermongers, cutpurses and safecrackers. To become a sheriff, you must be elected from among the aldermen by the Livery. How do you join a livery company? Don't even ask.

To become Lord Mayor you must first have served as an alderman and sheriff, and you "must command the support of, and have the endorsement of, the Court of Aldermen and the Livery". You should also be stinking rich, as the Lord Mayor is expected to make a "contribution from his/her private resources towards the costs of the mayoral year." This is, in other words, an official old boys' network. Think of all that Tory huffing and puffing about democratic failings within the trade unions. Then think of their resounding silence about democracy within the City of London.

The current Lord Mayor, Michael Bear, came to prominence within the City as chief executive of the Spitalfields development group, which oversaw a controversial business venture in which the Corporation had a major stake, even though the project lies outside the boundaries of its authority. This illustrates another of the Corporation's unique features. It possesses a vast pool of cash, which it can spend as it wishes, without democratic oversight. As well as expanding its enormous property portfolio, it uses this money to lobby on behalf of the banks.

The Lord Mayor's role, the Corporation's website tells us, is to "open doors at the highest levels" for business, in the course of which he "expounds the values of liberalisation". Liberalisation is what bankers call deregulation: the process that caused the financial crash. The Corporation boasts that it "handle[s] issues in Parliament of specific interest to the City", such as banking reform and financial services regulation. It also conducts "extensive partnership work with think tanks … vigorously promoting the views and needs of financial services." But this isn't the half of it.

As Nicholas Shaxson explains in his fascinating book Treasure Islands, the Corporation exists outside many of the laws and democratic controls which govern the rest of the United Kingdom. The City of London is the only part of Britain over which parliament has no authority. In one respect at least the Corporation acts as the superior body: it imposes on the House of Commons a figure called the remembrancer: an official lobbyist who sits behind the Speaker's chair and ensures that, whatever our elected representatives might think, the City's rights and privileges are protected. The mayor of London's mandate stops at the boundaries of the Square Mile. There are, as if in a novel by China Miéville, two cities, one of which must unsee the other.

Several governments have tried to democratise the City of London but all, threatened by its financial might, have failed. As Clement Attlee lamented, "over and over again we have seen that there is in this country another power than that which has its seat at Westminster." The City has exploited this remarkable position to establish itself as a kind of offshore state, a secrecy jurisdiction which controls the network of tax havens housed in the UK's crown dependencies and overseas territories. This autonomous state within our borders is in a position to launder the ill-gotten cash of oligarchs, kleptocrats, gangsters and drug barons. As the French investigating magistrate Eva Joly remarked, it "has never transmitted even the smallest piece of usable evidence to a foreign magistrate". It deprives the United Kingdom and other nations of their rightful tax receipts.

It has also made the effective regulation of global finance almost impossible. Shaxson shows how the absence of proper regulation in London allowed American banks to evade the rules set by their own government. AIG's wild trading might have taken place in the US, but the unit responsible was regulated in the City. Lehman Brothers couldn't get legal approval for its off-balance sheet transactions in Wall Street, so it used a London law firm instead. No wonder priests are resigning over the plans to evict the campers. The Church of England is not just working with Mammon; it's colluding with Babylon.

If you've ever dithered over the question of whether the UK needs a written constitution, dither no longer. Imagine the clauses required to preserve the status of the Corporation. "The City of London will remain outside the authority of parliament. Domestic and foreign banks will be permitted to vote as if they were human beings, and their votes will outnumber those cast by real people. Its elected officials will be chosen from people deemed acceptable by a group of medieval guilds …".

The Corporation's privileges could not withstand such public scrutiny. This, perhaps, is one of the reasons why a written constitution in the United Kingdom remains a distant dream. Its power also helps to explain why regulation of the banks is scarcely better than it was before the crash, why there are no effective curbs on executive pay and bonuses and why successive governments fail to act against the UK's dependent tax havens.

But now at last we begin to see it. It happens that the Lord Mayor's Show, in which the Corporation flaunts its ancient wealth and power, takes place on 12 November. If ever there were a pageant that cries out for peaceful protest and dissent, here it is. Expect fireworks – and not just those laid on by the Lord Mayor.

source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/31/corporation-london-city-medieval

Atlantic Council: Is Libya a "Global Con?"

Globalist organization ponders whether Al Qaeda has "snookered" NATO. 
by Tony Cartalucci 

First, a Conflict of Interest

The Atlantic Council claims to be a "preeminent, non partisan institution devoted to promoting transatlantic cooperation and international security." It is partnered with NATOand sponsored financially by some of Wall Street and London's largest, most powerful corporate-financier interests. These include many of the big oil interests poised to reap a whirlwind of profits over NATO-backed regime change in Libya, namely BP, Chevron, Exxon, and Shell. It also includes defense contractors already enriched by the protracted bloodshed in Northern Africa including Raytheon, BAE, SAAB Technologies,Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman. Additionally, the world's largest banks and equity firms sponsor Atlantic Council, including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, Barclays Capital, the Blackstone Group, Citigroup, and Credit Suisse Bank. There is also a tremendous amount of foundation support, each with a nefarious back-story worthy of their own thorough examination, including the Carnegie Corporation of New York , the Ford Foundation, and billionaire bankster George Soros' Open Society Institute.


Photos: (Top) Northrup Grumman's MQ-8 Fire Scout, which made headlines as it was shot down over Libya. (Below) a Raytheon Tomahawk cruise missile, employed during the opening phases of NATO's military intervention in Libya beginning in March of 2011. Both Northrup Grumman and Raytheon, amongst many other defense contractors are financial sponsors of the Atlantic Council, an epicenter providing political and rhetorical support for NATO's ongoing operations in Libya - exposing an astronomical conflict of interest.

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But perhaps most alarming is the Council's sponsorship by a large representation from "reputable" news and media agencies, including Thomson Reuters, News Desk Media, Bloomberg (which includes BusinessWeek), and Google.

Such an elaborate, full-spectrum conflict of interest should be alarming to even the most adamant supporters of the current NATO operation in Libya. We see all of the mechanics necessary to generate the justification for regime change through media, public, and political channels, the military might to carry out the war, and the corporate-financier organizations to fully manipulate and exploit the freshly installed regime, all integrated into a single organization. Without a doubt, the Atlantic Council has pledged unwavering support for the NATO operation, with the post, "Well Done, NATO!" perhaps the most obvious indication that not only is the Council amidst an immense conflict of interest but committing a full range of improprieties stemming from it.

Image: A screenshot showing the Atlantic Council's very premature victory congratulations extended to NATO even as their operations in Tripoli began to peter out and the full extent of the attempted psychological operation was made public.

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Before moving on, it is important to understand just how illegitimate NATO is by examining the Atlantic Council partnered with it, and how the Council is tying together corporate-financier interests and NATO's military power to sell, execute, and profit from regime change in Libya. As pointed out by Color Revolutions & Geopolitics in their recent article "The Devil Writes a Handbook: "The Responsibility to Protect" (2002)," the humanitarian aspects of the Libyan operation were merely a marketing ploy for yet another poisoned agenda stemming from Wall Street and London's financial institutions.

A Global Con? 

The above mentioned Atlantic Council recently penned an article titled "Global Con?" within which senior globalist scribe Arnaud de Borchgrave assaults our sensibility by proposing the following question, "Were the United States, France, Britain, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates -- the NATO-led coalition that set out to overthrow Col. Moammar Gadhafi's regime -- snookered by al-Qaida?" De Borchgrave concludes that it is a preposterous scenario and indeed he is correct, though not for the reasons he proposes.

De Borchgrave begins by mentioning notorious Neo-Conservative James Woolsey, who in the 1990's was the director of the CIA and was approached by Libya's Moammar Qaddafi for assistance against terrorists emanating from Libya's eastern city of Benghazi. Benghazi, of course, is now the current epicenter of the NATO-backed rebellion. Ironically, Woolsey, who de Borchgrave claims is one of the leaders of a campaign "to expose a clandestine Islamist plot to bring Shariah law to America," is also one of the chief proponents of NATO's handing of Libya over to these very "Islamist" terrorists today. Woolsey was one of the signatories of an "open letter to House Republicans" imploring Congress to ignore anti-war sentiments amongst their constituents and to do "more to help the Libyan opposition," which the letter insists "deserves our support." The letter also advised Congress not to be "held hostage" by the UNSC resolution authorizing the military intervention in the first place, undermining the "international rule of law" the US was supposedly enforcing.

The Atlantic Council piece then goes on to look at recent, damning evidence publicized by Asia Times reporter Pepe Escobar, proving that not only NATO's earlier claimed "flickers of Al Qaeda" in Libya are indeed raging fires, but that NATO was well aware of the terroristic nature of the rebels long before even the official start of the unrest in February, 2011. The article goes into this evidence in depth and concludes by saying it is "a harum-scarum scenario of NATO snookered by al-Qaida affiliates that can only please China."

Atlantic Council author de Borchgrave fails entirely to provide any additional insight into Escobar's report - however as we are about to see, if anything Escobar's statements are understated and NATO members have been intentionally nurturing Al Qaeda in Libya for nearly 30 years.

A Global Con Indeed

For nearly three decades, US and British intelligence agencies have supported terrorist organizations within Libya to wage war against Qaddafi's government. In an August 3, 1981 Newsweek article titled, "A Plan to Overthrow Kaddafi," it was stated that:

"The details of the plan were sketchy, but it seemed to be a classic CIA destabilization campaign. One element was a “disinformation” program designed to embarrass Kaddafi and his government. Another was the creation of a “counter government” to challenge his claim to national leadership. A third — potentially the most risky — was an escalating paramilitary campaign, probably by disaffected Libyan nationals, to blow up bridges, conduct small-scale guerrilla operations and demonstrate that Kaddafi was opposed by an indigenous political force." 

Further evidence from around this period of time comes to us from the US Library of Congress where the plan apparently went operational and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) trained and supported Libyan terrorists just before they attempted to assassinate Qaddafi in 1984. Then called the "Libyan National Salvation Front" (NFSL), a forerunner of the current "National Conference of Libyan Opposition (NCLO), it would grow over the years and make multiple armed attempts to seize Libya from Qaddafi with CIA and MI6 assistance.

Many of these militants would later form the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) in Afghanistan, also with CIA assistance under the auspices of Osama Bin Laden and what would eventually become Al Qaeda. LIFG fighters then returned to Libya and continued fighting against Qaddafi. At the outbreak of war between the US and Afghanistan, and then later with Iraq, many LIFG fighters would once again go abroad, this time to face US, not Soviet troops. Many of these fighters are now back in Libya, after killing US and British troops, under NATO air cover being handed piecemeal an entire nation. West Point's Combating Terrorism Center has published two reports now detailing just how entirely Libya's eastern region is saturated with Al Qaeda linked terrorists, concluding that it is one of the most highly concentrated recruiting grounds for the terror organization anywhere in the world, including Saudi Arabia. One of these reports was published in 2007 - long before the current NATO operation, giving policy makers plenty of warning of just who they would be eventually handing the nation over to in 2011.

For anyone, especially NATO or the US military to feign ignorance as to the constitution of Libya's rebel fighters is especially insulting since their entire existence is owed to 30 years of material support from Western intelligence agencies and now overt military support. Out of absolute folly, Qaddafi had invited the CIA and MI6 into Libya to help sweep up the remnants of LIFG after 2001. This was under the misguided impression that Al Qaeda constituted a common enemy between his regime and Western governments. It appears that instead of helping Qaddafi fight these terrorists, they instead rearmed them, reorganized them, provided them with freshly trained recruits and sent them back into battle against Qaddafi, culminating in what we are now being told is an "indigenous uprising" by the "people" of Libya.

As the depravity and duplicity of both NATO forces, overtly linked to Wall Street and London corporate-financier interests as illustrated via the Atlantic Council, and their terrorist proxies become more apparent throughout Libya, and now creeping over the Algerian border to breath new life into another notorious Al Qaeda-linked organization, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), NATO and the vast media empire supporting its agenda are seeking any and all diversions from their crumbling narrative. Lately accusations have been leveled against China for allegedly attempting to arm Qaddafi's forces after NATO operations began in March, 2011. While the West claims this is a "violation" of their self-contrived UN mandate prohibiting the arming of belligerents in the Libyan conflict, NATO members, most notably France and Qatar, have been openly supplying weapons to Libyan rebels in direct violation of this very mandate themselves.

US and UK press agencies are also attempting to muddle the debate by reintroducing the fact that the CIA and MI6 were working with Qaddafi against terrorists, now disingenuously labeled as "dissidents." We have even been treated to UK Prime MinisterDavid Cameron promising a full inquiry after arch-Al Qaeda LIFG commanderAbdulhakim al-Hasadi aka Balhaj demanded an apology from Western security forces for torturing him after being captured while fighting US troops in Central Asia. It should be noted that these "dissidents" are in fact LIFG fighters, listed by both the US State Department and the UK Home Office as a terrorist organization and it is therefore illegal to provide them any material support at all, let alone air cover, weapons, billions of dollars in aid, and diplomatic recognition.

Indeed, the Libyan conflict is a "global con." Contra to Atlantic Council member Arnaud de Borchgrave's suggestion that somehow the West was "snookered" by Al Qaeda, it is NATO and its Wall Street/London big oil, military industrial, and banking interests "snookering" the world into believing a noble military intervention is underway in Libya. Indeed, the global con is that under the thin and perpetually peeling veneer of humanitarian concern, lies a vicious looting spree by violent, internationally recognized terroristic mercenaries on the ground supported by the Fortune 500's military might via NATO.

In addition to the windfall of profits to be made in Libya, it is specifically noted by another global corporate-financier nexus, the Brookings Institution, that the battle for Libya is being waged in order to establish the primacy of "international law" over that of the nation-state. Clearly by "international law," Brookings means the dictates proposed by think-tanks like itself or the Atlantic Council, rubber stamped by the UN and pursued by an alliance driven by Wall Street and London interests. To portray a bid for global empire as a progressive humanitarian mission to alleviate unrest they themselves created over the course of decades, is indeed a "global con."