Britain’s Royal Wedding: A Big Day For The Global Oligarchy

[conspiracy analyst]

Britain’s Royal Wedding: A Big Day For The Global Oligarchy
A Celebration of the Dictatorship of Global Capital over Democracy


by Finian Cunningham


Global Research, April 28, 2011




The British royal wedding can be seen as a modern-day repeat of the “bread and circuses” policy of ancient Rome. In the waning days of that empire, the rulers sought to distract the masses from their grinding misery and the unwieldy wealth and corruption of the elite by sporadically throwing scraps of bread to the hungry public while saturating them with spectacles of gore and bloodlust at the Colosseum.

Today, the British public – grinding under massive austerity budget cuts, unemployment, poverty wages, social deprivations and crumbling services – are thrown scraps of feelgood comfort from the much-hyped wedding between Prince William and his girlfriend Kate Middleton. William is the grandson of Queen Elizabeth II and son of the heir apparent to the British throne, Prince Charles. Fawning media coverage will present it as a day of romance, nationhood, nostalgia and pride.

Meanwhile, the spectacles of gore and bloodlust – admittedly despite much public opposition – are located thousands of kilometers away in the Middle East, Iraq, Central Asia, Afghanistan, where over a million civilians have been killed in British-backed “wars against terror” that have yet to be sated even after eight and 10 years of butchery, respectively; and now the latest spectacle opens in North Africa, Libya, where over the past six weeks Royal Air Force warplanes have been bombing and killing civilians in the name of “peace” and “humanitarian concern”. The day before the wedding, the British government announced that troops are to be dispatched to the borders of Libya to provide “humanitarian corridors” for displaced civilians – many of whom will have been displaced by RAF ground attack aircraft.

Of course, the British Empire has long ago waned as a singular entity and its elite is not alone in lording over their masses. The same bread and circuses charade is being played out in varied ways by the other Western powers, the US, France, Germany, Italy, that comprise today’s global Empire of Capital.

But what should be appreciated from the display in Britain is the revelation – albeit unintended – of raw state power. Behind the translucent wedding veil, what can be seen is raw state power that blows away any vestige of illusions of parliamentary democracy, illusions that are not just peculiar to Britain, but to all the Western powers. In short, the empire of corporate and financial aristocracy that has emerged in late capitalism is now asserting itself increasingly and more blatantly as a dictatorship of Capital.

All political parties, whether Conservative, Liberal or Labour in Britain, or Republican, Democrat in the US etc., are seen to be willing servants of this dictatorship.

Bear in mind that London’s royal pageant is being imposed, without any public question, at an estimated cost of some $70 million, most of that for state security against any sign of popular protest. When the wider cost to the economy of the British government’s declared “public holiday” is factored in, the total cost may be $10 billion – this as the British exchequer is embarking on implementing austerity budget cuts of $130 billion. The bill for the royal wedding will be footed by the British public through future deeper cuts in jobs, education and health services, and social welfare programmes. This as the British government unilaterally adds to the public debt the cost of RAF bombing sorties in Libya, estimated at over $1 billion a month, and its other even more costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So where is the democracy in that? Austerity budgets imposed against public will, a deficit substantially increased from a royal pageant imposed without democratic consultation, and war expenses loaded on to the suffering public – even though these wars are opposed by the majority of voters.

That is dictatorship by elite government for an unelected elite. The same dictatorship manifests in the US and other Western powers. Ordinary Americans in particular may look at the British royal wedding pageant with mild fascination as some kind of “old Europe curiosity”. But in spite of its supposed revolution against European monarchs, the US has today reinvented its own corporate and financial aristocracy that rules and plunders without democratic accountability in alliance with the oligarchies of Europe.

The real world nexus for our global oligarchy is seen graphically in the power of oil companies and the transnational banking system. Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, one of the world’s top 10 richest individuals, has a personal fortune that is reckoned to far exceed her country’s $130 billion deficit cuts. She is a major shareholder in Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum – these companies along with Exxon and Chevron make up the “four horsemen” of global Big Oil.

As Dean Henderson, author of Big Oil and Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf, points out:

“The Four Horsemen have interlocking directorates with the international mega-banks. Exxon Mobil shares board members with JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Canada and Prudential. Chevron Texaco has interlocks with Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase. BP Amoco shares directors with JP Morgan Chase. RD/Shell has ties with Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, N. M. Rothschild & Sons and Bank of England.”

Henderson continues: “Information on RD/Shell is harder to obtain since they are registered in the UK and Holland and are not required to file 10K reports. It is 60% owned by Royal Dutch Petroleum of Holland and 40% owned by Shell Trading & Transport of the UK. The company has only 14,000 stockholders and few directors. The consensus from researchers is that Royal Dutch/Shell is still controlled by the Rothschild, Oppenheimer, Nobel and Samuel families along with the British House of Windsor and the Dutch House of Orange.” [1]

Such global connections bestow on the British monarch the epithet of “the world’s ultimate insider trader”.

Scott Thompson writes: “[T]he Queen is the world's ultimate ‘insider trader’. She not only gets tips from British financiers, but also has access to all the state secrets, through the [Privy Council] ‘boxes’. Thus, if the Queen learns from among all public and private British Empire intelligence and economic warfare entities reporting to her, for example, that Nigeria is about to be destabilized, she can immediately call her broker. Under the secrecy laws of the British Empire, it would be unthinkable for anyone to consider pressing charges of insider trading and conflict of interest against the sovereign: In fact, only a handful of trusted advisers would ever know.” [2]

To put these connections of the House of Windsor to the global Empire of Capital in a real world context, we should factor in the following:

1. The war in Iraq, according to recent revelations from Wikileaks, and others, was most certainly about gaining access for Big Oil and British Big Oil in particular, despite the arrogant assertions by former British prime minister Tony Blair that such claims made at the time of the US/British invasion of Iraq in 2003 were “absurd”. [3]

2. The present NATO war in Libya has an uncanny resemblance to British and French war planning for that country several months before any sign of alleged popular uprising. [4]

3. NATO’s military intervention in Libya was precipitated by Muammar Gaddafi’s move to put a financial squeeze on Big Oil to compensate for more than $2 billion in reparations extracted from that country over a frame-up for the Lockerbie bombing in 1988, according to former US intelligence asset Susan Lindauer.

4. The subjugation and integration of Libya’s independent financial system within the global banking system, the same system in which the British monarch is a major shareholder. [5]
5. Libya’s vast untapped oil wealth – the largest in Africa – was impeded by a leader considered unreliable to the long-term interests of Big Oil.

6. The reconquest of Libya by Western militarism provides a strategic bridgehead for global Capital to thwart pro-democracy uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa – uprising that represent threats to the profit interests of Big Oil and its shareholders, including the House of Windsor.

On the last point, it should be noted that Western governments have been aided and abetted by dictatorial monarchs from the Persian Gulf, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait. The Persian Gulf monarchs are among the guest list attending the Big Day for the British royals. The delegation from the House of Saud is particularly noteworthy, given in its ongoing involvement in the vicious repression of the pro-democracy movement in Britain’s former colony of Bahrain.

But the royal wedding is not just a peculiar Big Day for the seemingly quaint House of Windsor. It is in many ways a celebration of the dictatorship of global Capital over democracy in Britain and elsewhere around the world, including the ‘Republic of the USA”. As the assorted global dictators assembled in London’s Westminster Abbey might say in harmony with the happy couple: “Till death do us part”.

www.myspace.com/finiancunninghammusic

finianpcunningham@yahoo.ie


NOTES:

[1] http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24507

[2]
http://american_almanac.tripod.com/crown.htm

[3]
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24491

[4]
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24351

[5]
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24306



Finian Cunningham is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Finian Cunningham

[conspiracy analyst]

May 20, 2007

MI5 ‘raided bank for sex pictures of Margaret’
Richard Brooks Arts Editor Her acknowledged love affairs were some of the great sex scandals of their day and the rumours were even more lurid.

But few of the stories about Princess Margaret are as murky as claims to be made in a new film – that MI5 staged a London bank robbery as a ruse to eliminate sexually compromising photographs of her on the Caribbean island of Mustique.

The Bank Job, clips of which were shown last week at the Cannes film festival, tells the story of the notorious Baker Street robbery in 1971. It will be released next year and stars Jason Statham, who played the lead role in the gangster film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

In the film, which purports to be based on fact, the photographs are placed in the bank for safe-keeping by Michael X, a well-known criminal originally from the Caribbean.

“What happens in the film is that the raid on Lloyds is set up by MI5,” said Steven Chasman, the producer. “They knew that a box owned by Michael X with those pictures was inside the bank vaults.”

MI5 then got some of its minor gangland contacts to initiate the raid. The contacts in turn tipped off criminals they knew that the Lloyds Bank in Baker Street would be easy to break into and had a lot of money to steal.

The writers of the film – the veteran team of Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais – spoke to at least six people directly involved in some way with the robbery. The writers declined to name their sources, but said that several of them separately claimed the raid was aimed at getting hold of the photographs.

At the time of the robbery, Margaret’s marriage to the Earl of Snowdon was in its final stages. As a single woman in the 1950s, she had already created a scandal when she began an affair with Peter Townsend while he was still married. During her marriage she became close to Robin Douglas-Home, nephew of the former prime minister Lord Home. He shot himself in 1968.

The palace establishment was frequently worried that Margaret was moving in excessively racy circles and opening herself up to scandal. There was tittle-tattle about rumoured lovers – ranging from the actor Peter Sellers to the singer Dusty Springfield.

The gangster John Bindon also claimed to have been her lover.

The robbers got away with £500,000 (equivalent to £5m today), although it is not yet clear whether the film portrays the attempt to recover the photographs as successful. Four men were jailed in 1973 for the raid. Michael X was hanged for murder in Trinidad in 1975.

The film does not detail what exactly is in the photographs and Margaret is not referred to directly although Chasman said “we are pretty clear who we are talking about”.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1813496.ece

[conspiracy analyst]

Buried alive: The model, socialite and daughter of a Tory MP who fell for a charismatic black civil rights leaderBy VICTORIA MOORE
Last updated at 15:22 16 February 2008

Comments (0) Add to My Stories One morning, before the Caribbean sun had got the chance to get too hot, 27-year-old Tory MP's daughter Gale Benson was walking among a clump of bamboos on the banks of a small ravine.

She was accompanied by friends who, a little earlier, had dropped in to collect her from the commune where she lived at the time, in 1972, with her boyfriend. After making their way across an empty building site, they stopped by the bamboos.
There, some of the group, mostly locals from Trinidad including the self-styled Black Power leader Michael X - who had modelled himself on the militant black Civil Rights activist, Malcolm X - investigated a small hole in the ground before making it bigger with some tools.
Scroll down for more...
Gale Benson: Naive victim or executed spy?
They had enlarged it to the depth of about four feet when one of the diggers turned to Gale and asked: "What do you think this is for?"
She shrugged. "This is a fresh hole for decomposed bodies," said the man before suddenly pushing her into it.
Two other companions began to lash at her with a cutlass. The swinging blade caught her hands and arms as she fought back, wounding her badly in the chest and throat.
Gale realised that they were trying to bury her alive. She was still breathing as mounds of dry earth was piled on to her body and the men she thought were her friends were frantically stamping their feet on it to keep her down.
The terrified Englishwoman couldn't put up a fight for long and soon she passed out and died.

Militant black Civil Rights activist, Michael X
It wasn't until seven weeks later that her badly decomposed corpse was discovered. Eventually the police brought those responsible to trial and the grisly details of her murder became public.
Gale's murder came out in a Trinidadian court and two followers of Michael X were found guilty of her murder.
The tragedy was seen at the time as an extraordinary end for a mixed-up girl who had come under the thrall of a Trinidadian revolutionary, pimp, druggie and property racketeer.
But a new film raises disturbing new questions about why Gale was killed.
Was she simply a wide-eyed innocent, mesmerised by the energy and passion of her boyfriend and his black militant friends?
Or were more complex forces at play and was she actually killed, as the movie alleges, because she was a secret service agent on an undercover mission for MI6 whose cover was blown?
Gale was born with her twin brother, Greville, in London near the end of World War II in November 1944.
Her father was Captain Leonard Plugge, a radio enthusiast, inventor and Tory MP who had defeated future Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell in 1935 to win the constituency of Chatham in Kent, which he held for a decade.
He and his wife, Ann, already had one son, Frank, who was eight when the twins were born.
Today, Frank, 71, is the sole surviving member of that small family unit. He lives in Calais and remembers his childhood with great clarity.
Gale was, he says, "a happy child. She was lively and pretty, the opposite of her blond, quiet twin. Our father passionately believed that his children should learn languages and, because of that, he often insisted on a foreign language being spoken at the home dinner table and Gale was sent to the French Lycee in London."
The privileged young girl's early life was typical of someone of her breeding and generation; she began modelling, worked as a DJ for a French radio show and married young, at 20, to film director Jonathan Benson.
Their wedding was reported in the papers under the frivolous headline, "Silk, satin and lace," in reference to her glamorous bridal attire. The actor Corin Redgrave, a friend of Jonathan, was the best man and the newly-weds moved into a big house in Chelsea.

Gale's father, Captain Leonard Plugge
However, it was not long before the marriage began to founder and Gale went away to Argentina. Her brother recalls: "I remember seeing her off. It was 1967, she was 22 and she just wanted to get away from it all, I think."
After a short time, Gale came back. But the course of her life was changed completely by an encounter at a dinner party at the house of the actress Vanessa Redgrave (Corin's sister).
There, Gale met an American who called himself "Hakim Jamal", although his real name was Alan Donaldson.
He was from a broken home in a black district of Boston, had started using heroin at 14, been committed to an asylum for two attempted murders, and then underwent a spiritual conversion.
Hakim Jamal was clever, fiery, passionate about his political ideals and kept impressive company.
He talked of attending functions alongside Princess Margaret and her husband Lord Snowdon and the broadcaster David Frost.
Soon, Gale was mesmerised. "I didn't like him at first," she said later.
"He was very rude to everyone and kept calling us 'white devils'."
But she soon changed her mind. "He was the first black man I had ever really talked to. I was fascinated by what he had to say about black people's suffering in the world."
Her brother, Frank, saw a different side to the man with whom his young sister had become infatuated. "He was ghastly!" he recalls.
"Really cocksure. I mean, he used to call himself God."
Hakim wrote a book about Malcolm X. Frank says: "I remember going to the launch party for the book, which wasn't even at a publisher's but in someone's flat - full of all sorts of weirdos.
"But what I found really odd was the strange act Hakim did with Gale. He laid her across two chairs, head on one, legs on another, and as I watched, she seemed to go into a sort of coma. She was quivering - and she wasn't acting. Hakim said that being able to do this was proof that he was God."
Having fallen in with this dangerous set, Gale was swept into the radical politics of the day, attending protest marches and attending a series of political rallies.
She was often short of money and her brother helped her out when he could. Once, she asked him to sell a writing box which their mother had given her.
Instead, he simply gave her the money for it and kept the box, in case she ever wanted it back.
Despite these problems, Frank didn't see the trouble that was coming, and he never sat down with his younger sister and talked about the dangerous situation she might be getting into.
As part of the Black Power movement in London, Hakim was friends with Michael X, who had been described as "the authentic voice of black bitterness" and, in 1967, had become the first non-white person to be charged and imprisoned under the Race Relations Act for calling publicly for any black woman seen with a white man to be shot.
He had also set up a commune called "Black House" on the Holloway Road in North London which was financed by a young millionaire drop-out.
Michael X had many aliases - another name he used was Michael Abdul Malik - but was half-Portuguese, half-Trinidadian and his real name was Michael de Freitas.
He had arrived in Britain aged 24 on a cargo boat that docked at Cardiff and rapidly worked his way into the veins of criminal society.
He was a thug who managed prostitutes, ran gambling houses, sold drugs and became a rent collector for the notorious property racketeer Peter Rachman.
He once said: "They've made me the archbishop of violence in this country."
John Lennon and Yoko Ono gave a bag of their hair to be auctioned to raise money for the Black House, in return for which they were given a pair of Muhammad Ali's boxing shorts.
This was the sort of company Gale Benson was keeping. Soon, she changed her name to "Hale Kimga", which had no cultural meaning but was simply an anagram of her own first name and Hakim.
Her friends simply assumed that Gale had become swept along by the excitement of the time.
But in the film, The Bank Job, out later this month, it is claimed that she was working deep undercover for the secret services as part of their campaign to infiltrate the Black Power movement.
To her brother, even with the benefit of hindsight, this seems a "ludicrous" suggestion.
"The details just don't fit," he tells me. He believes his sister had simply fallen in love, nothing more, nothing less.
In 1971, Gale and Hakim moved to Guyana. They had not been there long when they decided to move again: this time to Trinidad where, by this time, their friend, Michael X, was waiting for them, having fled England while on bail after being charged with extortion and robbery.
According to the film, Gale had an ulterior motive for being in Trinidad.
It claims that Michael X was using a set of sexually incriminating photographs of Princess Margaret, taken in Mustique, to try to blackmail the British Establishment.
Most of the pictures were allegedly stored in a bank vault in London, from where (according to the film) they were recovered in a sophisticated undercover raid by the intelligence services - the notorious unsolved Baker Street robbery.
Gale's role, supposedly, was to see whether any other photos or negatives might be at Michael X's home.
Whatever the truth, in late 1971, Gale and her lover moved into a house close to Michael X's and began life on his commune.
It was a tight-knit community: Gale and Hakim ate in the commune with Michael every night.
But there were also some sinister incidents. For example, over the Christmas period, a group went to a nearby farm, slaughtered a cow and some drank its blood.
"They handed me the cup," Hakim later attested, "but I ain't no blood drinker."
A few days later, on the fateful morning of January 2, 1972, when Gale was killed, Michael X had been inciting his followers to slaughter and saying that he "wanted blood".
By the time Gale's body was discovered in the shallow grave, it was so decomposed that her twin brother could not make a positive identification and her dentist had to be flown in to confirm it was her.
A lengthy trial in Trinidad followed her cremation, and of the men present at Gale's death, one turned witness for the prosecution, which is why so many details are known about how she died.
One of the group had drowned mysteriously at sea. A third, Joseph Skerritt, a local barber, had been murdered.
Two more, Stanley Abbott and Edward Chadee, were eventually found guilty of her murder and given the death penalty.
One was hanged; the other had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Michael X, we shall come to in a moment.
But why did Gale die? When I ask her brother, Frank, he repeats again his absolute conviction that she was never a spy.
Instead, clues come from the strange behaviour of Hakim. A month after her "disappearance," he was given money by Michael X to leave Trinidad, an odd thing for someone truly in love with a woman missing there.
After the discovery of her body, Hakim gave interviews to newspapers depicting Gale as a fragile, clingy soul, who had got on his nerves.
"She wanted to marry me and I knew then she was dependent on me for life," he said in one particularly insensitive comment.
The writer VS Naipaul, who returned to his native Trinidad to research the incident, added weight to the picture of a woman who had simply begun to annoy those around her.
His article described Gale as "a fake among fakes," documented her "slave-like" devotion to Hakim, commented acerbically on her unusual habit (as a white woman) of wearing African clothes and noted "she had a way of putting people off."
So the theory that Gale simply fell out of favour with the black power commune and its influential, somewhat volatile, self-appointed leader, Michael X, seems most plausible.
There are no winners in this story - Hakim Jamal was shot in 1973 in Boston; and in a cruel twist Gale's twin, Greville was killed in a car crash in Morocco that same year.
But Gale's older brother Frank blamed Michael X for her death. And while the black revolutionary never faced trial for Gale's murder, he was found guilty of that of the barber Joseph Skerritt, and was hanged in Trinidad in May 1975.
"I remember," her brother Frank told me this week, "the day he was executed. I was in East Anglia, driving the car, listening to a programme on the death penalty, based around Michael's execution which was due to happen at midday.
"I called in to the programme to talk about my own experience. And then, at noon exactly, I stopped the car, and heard it reported that he had died and I felt a great and overwhelming sense of relief."
Finally, for Gale's family, there was a sense that justice had been served.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-514916/Buried-alive-The-mode l-socialite-daughter-Tory-MP-fell-charismatic-black-civil-rights-leade r.html#ixzz1L8ktGgo3