Financial structures in free fall. The real crisis
Hello there World. You now have a new president whom his acolytes like to claim is the most powerful man on the planet. I will deliver my State of The World address to let you know what it is really like. I admit my view is a little biased, sitting in this cave listening to the enemy shells landing a hundred miles away, but I am more in touch with my endeavours than are most military leaders during battle or most of you during this battle.
A few years ago some of my bravest followers devised their own plan to bring terror to you infidels and they crashed your stolen planes into your iconic buildings. They thought this was an attack on the hated Capitalist West and there is no doubt it had some effect. Its main effect was to awaken some in the infidel countries to the simple and rather obvious fact that they do not own the vast majority of that second most vital of all fluids, oil. Your attempts to rule Iraqi oil by military force have cost you dear and your attempt to surround another major oilfield by occupying Afghanistan will never be successful. You know that.
Your double standards are quite clear. Your own Mr. Mugabe is the most foul of men as an Infidel hes just about average but he owns no oil so you do nothing to stop him murdering his own people. Let someone find a major oil reserve under Zimbabwe and Uncle Sam would not be able to resist his moral obligation to save the people from their president unless the Chinese beat him to it.
Despite having to live much of my life on the run, I am still one of the richest men on earth measured by your standards. I have to thank you infidels for that because your insatiable appetite for squandering your most precious resource - oil - has made my cousins and I filthy rich. I am not an ungrateful man and I thank you for giving me the ability to fight my battle to destroy you. I was not happy to see my brave freedom fighters die in their efforts so other followers have devised much better means of destroying your civilisation.
There are currently many of my brave men writing computer viruses to attack your World Wide Web. And a fine achievement it is too. In little more than twenty years it has grown from nothing to be the biggest centralised management tool the world has known and it will no doubt continue to grow. Already most vital functions of your civilisation would not operate without it. But you all know how vulnerable it is. My strategy is quite simple I pay your geeks to write viruses that spy on your private files and infiltrate your company management accounts and the operations of various government departments. Some of the viruses are simply annoyances similar to a common cold. Some terminate and stay resident so that they can sit hidden until I instruct them to wreak their havoc. Some mine data and send it back to criminals who then prey on your bank accounts. Some let me know what they, and you, are doing. Some will destroy your computers but they are just smoke screens to hide the real Trojan Horses. Most are there just to annoy you. But your www really is so vulnerable. Thank you.
My current master stroke was to mess with your financial markets. Burning down your towers was not really effective for long you quickly recovered. But now you are learning just how powerful I really am. My tactic was simple. I set up an ordinary company. You can do that on-line in an hour. Then I hired some greedy infidels to operate it as a company selling mortgages. The nice bit was that I sold it as almost charitable selling mortgages to people who could not get them elsewhere unemployed people homeless feckless useless people. I gave them all their own houses and that had several effects. It made the housing market look good and boosted prices of all property. It made people feel good and they liked the government for that. It produced a general feel-good factor. It hid the truth for a long time few of these people could afford the mortgages. I built a house of cards.
Then I set off these debts by repackaging them as prime debt to be sold on to other banks - and foolish and greedy investors. I have to admit I was concerned that the Rating Agencies might smell a rat but they were controlled by Uncle Sam and the feel-good factor was far too important a political advantage for him to allow the Ratings Agencies to undermine it. The idea spread rapidly and others were only too keen to get a slice of the action. I was soon able to withdraw the odd few billions I had invested to prime the company together with a few billions in profit - and was able to sit on the sidelines and watch my scheme unfold.
You all now know what happened in the end. They had to invent a new term to describe it sub-prime mortgage and it has shaken the foundations of your evil capitalist empires. I did nothing but use your systems, your stupidity, and your greed. You have let the lunatics take over the asylum. Im sitting in my cave laughing all the way to the bank. Thank you all so much. Infidel, you asked for it.
Another interesting one was quite unintended but has still added a few billions to my coffers. You will have all heard of the ex-president of a New Your Stock Exchange that bazaar for exchanging infidel non-wealth. He is now under investigation for making about $80 billion disappear. It was quite by chance that some of my sleepers within the system discovered his activities and helped him not without a quid pro quo. A scam on such a scale cannot be undertaken by just one man. You must be asking yourself where such a large amount of your money could have gone. I dont know the complete answer but I do know that some of my followers were involved and a substantial chunk is now sitting in the back of my cave ready to finance my next infidel-bashing scheme.
I am a very happy man today. My enemies have created a civilisation whose vital mechanisms are clearly vulnerable. All I have to do is keep picking away and turn the energy and efforts of its own citizens against themselves. You have let the enemies within the gates and you will pay whatever price demanded by your enemies, greed and stupidity.
By just a very few such means I have brought the West close to bankruptcy. The USA just might survive this - if I leave it alone to recover - but its acolyte state Britain is already well out of its depth. It has promised its bankers so many billions in subsidies that the nation will very soon be bankrupt. The most likely solution is raging inflation and massive devaluation. This will, of course, hit the poor people hardest and those who have not joined in the pig feast but have saved their money and been provident. I have to say, I applaud your bankers, most of whom are managing to hold onto their jobs, and very large salaries, despite their abject failure to manage their affairs properly. Nearly all their banks are bankrupt and in every other walk of life they would be cast out on their necks for the failures they are but the government regulates your banks and your politicians are not going to admit their compliance in this debacle. It is all of great help to me.
The source of your current misery is your failure to observe reality. Your civilisation grew for a long time by observing time-honoured codes of conduct and sensible financial policies. You built factories to convert the materials of the earth into useful products and thereby created true wealth. You developed farms to feed the people. Both of these processes have reached the point that much of their production is now simply not needed. You invented the Joint Stock Company to magnify massively the efforts of individual men. Many of these companies have now much outgrown the ability of your governments to control them. You have built commodity markets to trade goods in time-honoured fashion. You invented the Stock Exchange to regulate the financial performance of your companies and enable private individuals to make investments based on published information. You developed banks to keep your savings safe and enable the transfer of money to guard you from robbers. You actually flourished despite being infidels.
Then you decided that the system was working so well that it did not need regulation any longer. You de-regulated your banks so that they could take the sort of risks previously reserved for the stock market. Your banks can only operate by government charter. It is illegal to operate a bank unless you have a government license. The government - quite correctly - regulated banks to protect the conserved wealth of the citizens. Then you removed most of the constraints of those licenses. The result should have been obvious. The bank managers now had total authority over massive assets but no responsibilities at all. The salaries of the rapacious bank managers soon zoomed massively out of proportion to the job they were doing. But we need them whined the trapped politicians. It wasnt hard for me to help this process on its way by judicious investments and appointments. Now your government has sold you down the river by guaranteeing the salaries of the fat cat bank managers and their habit of speculating with your money. They get the fat profits and the ordinary infidels take both the risk and the losses. More fool you.
Then they started selling the family silver. The Building Society movement in Britain and Savings and Loan in the USA represented a massive deposit of accumulated wealth generated by the sterling efforts of several prior generations of hard working citizens. Even though most of these people were infidels they had led their lives in a worthy manner. De-regulation dissipated this massive wealth. Your people sanctioned this because each and every one thought they would benefit. Pure greed sanctioned your action. Some did benefit a little for a while - but most have been ripped off by a very small number of grossly overpaid bank managers and their retinue. My colleagues and I helped to ensure that.
The major banks have hidden their shenanigans behind mergers and share issues and a host of dubious financial practices that virtually no-one understands. They have got their just deserts by investing in that most evil of all financial products the hedge fund. This is just an excuse to rip people off and I am probably one of the few people on earth who understands how it works after all we invented it. I will just say thank you again. Your banks were led by greed and a lack of responsibility and accountability - to invest in products they knew nothing about. They built their own house of cards and as anyone could have foreseen it is now falling down. I really must stop writing soon - my sides are aching with laughter.
The victims in this are you ordinary infidels but you deserve it. You have allowed your politicians to line their own pockets both financial and political by undermining the previously good and successful rules of your capitalism. You all knew what was happening but each and every one expected to gain something from the scams. The property boom in Britain was just one example of greedy stupidity. The bubble was obviously going to burst but you all flocked to buy off-plan properties whose construction was financed by my money. You are making my job of destroying you so very easy. All I have to do now is to sit back and watch and count the profits I made from your property boom.
I could not easily beat in battle a genuine capitalist society because its banks would be properly regulated and otherwise free to allow honest men to produce wealth without allowing the neo-criminals to usurp the high ground. It would have few chinks in its armour and it would easily deal with those who attempted to rob it. Once your economic and industrial systems were nearly impregnable. Your industry earned you fabulous wealth more than my oil earns me and it brought you technological supremacy. Your spare money financed your world domination. Some of the less advantaged parts of your system tried Communism and even Fascism but these systems were not viable because they did not allow the natural innovative energies of your people to thrive. Capitalism was triumphant; you abandoned your Judeo-Christian ethic to embrace capitalism and made yourselves very rich. Now you have abandoned Capitalism in favour of Bottom Line Pragmatism. Anything goes so long as the bottom line looks good each year. Nothing else matters a damn.
You have exported your manufacturing jobs on the basis that others can undercut your prices and you have exported with those jobs the ability to develop the next generation of technology. Meanwhile a large part of your own population that never was highly educated and never will be is on the dole and lives in festering slums where manual work and its con-comittants, pride and respect for the law are now unknown. You wonder why I find it so easy to recruit adherents to my philosophy yours has betrayed them.
You have abandoned your own masses and elevated a few tricksters to the level of deity - and paid tribute to them fit for a king. Now you have discovered that they are not omnipotent but many are grossly incompetent and a few are plainly criminal. All of them are excessively greedy and greedy men are easily turned. You let them redesign your once excellent and inviolable economic system to suit their avarice and now you are paying the price. I use my wealth to enable me to pursue my objective to destroy you. You have squandered your wealth in the pursuit of hedonism. You have no other objectives. Your attempts to find me are a sad reflection of your once great power and now your impotence brought about by your refusal to examine your own lack of purpose. You have abandoned your own greatest philosophy - capitalism.
I maintain my life by refusing to separate authority from responsibility just as you used to do. It seems to be a creed you have forgotten. I maintain my life by being true to a rational code. You might not like my code but it serves me much better than your absence of code has served you. Your arbitrary pragmatism has been your worst enemy. I maintain my life by trusting only my rationality. I trust no-one and co-operate only with those with whom I have something to trade. I judge everything by rational examination. I survive. Will you?
I dont have to beg you to continue using your cars you are going to do that whatever happens and you will continue to make me very rich. I can think of a hundred ways your reliance on the car is undermining your society. Living in a cave is not the best existence but men have been doing it for fifty thousand years and may be doing it for another fifty thousand. My lifestyle is sustainable - is yours?
Finally it would be discourteous of me to end without thanking you again for making me a very rich man. Please continue your profligate waste of your most precious asset every barrel you burn increases my fortune. Please continue to trust your governments who are making you so vulnerable and leading you to disaster. And please keep stuffing your money into your banks. It wont be long before I devise a plan to completely destroy them if they dont do the job for me. Please keep destroying your prime wealth creators factories - they are the only means you have of opposing me. Please continue your profligate ways it makes my job so easy. Keep abusing your credit cards they keep you poverty stricken and vulnerable.
Please continue your efforts to reduce your carbon output as it absorbs huge slices of your productive capacity. My advisers tell me that the step change in carbon has already been made and whatever is going to happen will happen in response to the step input of several million years worth of stored carbon released in less than one hundred years. You are too late - but as you caused the problem it is fitting that you should be the first to pay the price. I can only benefit. I get you with a double whammy. I benefit from every ounce of carbon you pump into the atmosphere and atmospheric degeneration is bound to affect your advanced civilisations much more than us troglodytes.
Please continue to nurture my best allies - greed and stupidity - and please continue your military operations in Afghanistan. You appear to have completely missed the trap I am tempting you into. So be it. Keep watching me and take your eyes off China, India and Pakistan. China has already destroyed your productive industry and is your biggest creditor. My friends in Russia have already turned off your gas supply while you were not watching. You have not the faintest idea what is happening in Pakistan.
Good luck, Infidel. You will need it. Do not say you did not know. You do know - but will not face up to it. We faithful own over half the worlds oil reserves. Even if your overstretched forces manage to kill me I shall die laughing. Your number is up.
Osama Bin Wreckin 22 January 2009
28th March 2011
Colin Walker