Attack on Sovereignty: The United States is the New World Order

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS | PCR.ORG | JANUARY 16, 2012

Those concerned about “The New World Order” speak as if the United States is coming under the control of an outside conspiratorial force. In fact, it is the US that is the New World Order. That is what the American unipolar world, about which China, Russia, and Iran complain, is all about.

Washington has demonstrated that it has no respect for its own laws and Constitution, much less any respect for international law and the law and sovereignty of other countries. All that counts is Washington’s will as the pursuit of hegemony moves Washington closer to becoming a world dictator.

The examples are so numerous someone should compile them into a book. During the Reagan administration the long established bank secrecy laws of Switzerland had to bend to Washington’s will. The Clinton administration attacked Serbia, murdered civilians and sent Serbia’s president to be tried as a war criminal for defending his country.

The US government engages in widespread spying on Europeans’ emails and telephone calls that is unrelated to terrorism. Julian Assange is confined to the Ecuadoran embassy in London, because Washington won’t permit the British government to honor his grant of political asylum. Washington refuses to comply with a writ of habeas corpus from a British count to turn over Yunus Rahmatullah whose detention a British Court of Appeals has ruled to be unlawful. Washington imposes sanctions on other countries and enforces them by cutting sovereign nations that do not comply out of the international payments system.

Last week the Obama regime warned the British government that it was a violation of US interests for the UK to pull out of the European Union or reduce its ties to the EU in any way.

In other words, the sovereignty of Great Britain is not a choice to be made by the British government or people. The decision is made by Washington in keeping with Washington’s interest.

The British are so accustomed to being Washington’s colony that deputy prime minister Nick Clegg and a group of UK business executives quickly lined up with Washington.

This leaves Great Britain in a quandary. The British economy, once a manufacturing powerhouse, has been reduced to the City of London, Britain’s equivalent to Wall Street. London, like New York, is a world financial center of which there are none in Europe. Without its financial status, there wouldn’t be much left of the UK.

It is because of the City’s financial importance that the UK, alone of the EU member states, kept the British pound as its currency and did not join the euro. Because the UK has its own currency and central bank, the UK was spared the sovereign debt crisis that has plagued other EU member states. The Bank of England, like the Federal Reserve in the US, was able to bail out its own banks, whereas other EU states sharing a common currency could not create money, and the European Central Bank is prohibited by its charter (at Germany’s insistence) from bailing out member states.

The quandary for the UK is that the solution to the sovereign debt crisis toward which the EU is moving is to strip the member governments of their fiscal sovereignty. For the individual countries, the spending, taxing and, thereby, deficit or surplus positions of the member countries’ budgets will be set by EU central authority. This would mean the end of national sovereignty for European countries.

For Britain to remain an EU member while retaining its own currency and central bank would mean special status for Great Britain. The UK would be the only member of the EU that remained a sovereign country. What are the chances that the UK will be permitted such exceptional status? Is this acceptable to Germany and France?

If the British are to fold themselves into Europe, they will have to give up their currency, central bank, their law, and their economic status as a world financial center and accept governance by the EU bureaucracy. The British will have to give up being somebody and become nobody.

It would, however, free the UK from being Washington’s puppet unless the EU itself is Washington’s puppet.

According to reports, sometime this year Scotland, a constituent part of the UK, is to vote on leaving the UK and becoming an independent country. How ironic that as the UK debates its dismemberment the country itself faces being merged into a multi-national state.

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David Cameron ready to bail-out BP

Financial Times

Shares in BP lost further ground on Thursday on growing concern about the impact of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill on the company’s

UK Prime Minister, David Cameron

financial health.

The potential cost of the crisis, and fresh fears over whether BP will pay its dividend, sent the shares tumbling 11 per cent at the open, The stock, which on Wednesday closed below 400p for the first time since October 2008, recovered some of those losses to stand 3.2 per cent lower at 380p by midday in London on Thursday.

But as US trading started, the stock was under more pressure, losing 7.3 per cent to 361.6p, even as its American Depositary Receipts, instruments that allow US investors exposure to its shares without a full listing on an exchange there, recovered from 14-year lows in a sell-off over the previous session. As New York markets opened, BP’s ADRs rose from their Wednesday close of $29.20 to $32.14.

The fall in the share price followed a near-16 per cent drop in New York overnight for the company’s American Depositary Receipts, which have now halved since the accident on April 20.

The cost of insuring BP debt against default also rose sharply, with five-year credit default swaps quoted at 510 basis points at one stage, having closed at 386 basis points on Wednesday. That means it would cost $510,000 a year over five years to protect $10m of BP bonds from default. At these levels, the market is indicating a “junk” rating on BP’s debt.

BP said in a statement on Thursday that it was “not aware of any reason” for the sharp fall in its ADRs. It said that its “strong and valuable” asset base , and its strong cash inflows and outflows, “gives us significant capacity and flexibility in dealing with the cost of responding to the incident, the environmental remediation and the payment of legitimate claims.which justifies this share price movement.“

The severe market reaction came as UK industry expressed alarm at the “inappropriate” and increasingly aggressive rhetoric being deployed against BP by Barack Obama, US president, and warned that the attacks on the oil company could damage transatlantic relations.

Adopting a more emollient tone, David Cameron, UK prime minister, said on Thursday that the British government stood ready to help BP with its clean-up efforts and that he completely understood US frustration. Speaking on a visit to Kabul, he said he would be discussing the “environmental catastrophe” with President Obama, with whom he is due to talk on the telephone over the weekend.

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