Not So Free Dubai

Like Halliburton, everyone is moving to Dubai the free enterprise zone of the Middle East. Unfortunately when it comes to a free press Dubai has allowed its commercial and trade interests with Pakistan to dictate policy. After all free speech and free enterprise do not necessarily go together. Capitalism can function without democracy. And visa versa.

Two of Pakistan's leading private television networks, ordered off air during emergency rule, said on Saturday they had been forced to close down altogether after being ordered to halt transmissions via the United Arab Emirates.

Geo, Pakistan's biggest television network, and ARY One World, both have offices and studios in Dubai Media City, from where they broadcast news.

"We have been told by the (Dubai) Media City that our transmission will be shut down," Imran Aslam, president of Geo News, told Reuters. "This is all I can say at the moment." The channel’s web site said it was shut down “

SEE

Musharraf's Coup

Capitalism and Islam

Freedom and Democracy Where?


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Capitalism and Islam

Dubai World Begins MGM Mirage Tender

Ah good old capitalism it will make a believer out of Muslim businessmen yet.

Dubai's proposed purchase of a 9.5 per cent stake, as well as a 50 per cent share in MGM's $7bn CityCenter project, for a total outlay of $5bn, stunned the gaming industry when it was announced last week.

They invest in gambling while prohibiting it to believers. Making money off the vices of the infidel.

While it won't be just another day at the office, Nevada gambling regulators say they're ready to dig into a mass of paperwork to be filed in the $5.1 billion investment that the Persian Gulf state of Dubai is making in MGM Mirage.

The deal marks the first time a state has applied for a Nevada gambling license. And the applicant is part of a Middle Eastern emirate that strictly forbids gambling for its citizens.

Notice there has been no hew and cry about Dubai World buying MGM. Nope not a peep. Of course Congress is off on holidays. But what about Lou Dobbs? Nope not a peep.

MGM needs the investment money with credit drying up because of the sub-prime melt down.

Las Vegas Not Exempt From Money Woes

A silver lining to this means the hotel workers can be assured that management will meet their contract demands. MGM Mirage workers: Unions approve contract


While on the global level it means the Gulf States, UAE, are using Dubai to create Arab capital to compete against other national capital. Since they have little in the way of military power in the region, they are amassing capital to compete with the other imperial powers.

Qatar Offers $2 Billion to Buy Nasdaq’s Share in London Stock Exchange

SABIC Concludes Purchase of GE Plastic Business

They are using their capital to further their own political agenda in the region;Gulf’s Federation of Chambers of Commerce Welcome Free Trade with Iran

And typical of capitalism they have created a metropolis a capitol of capital in the region; Dubai.

Sovereign Wealth Funds: The Growth and Challenges of State-Sponsored Investments

A combination of an unprecedented volume of oil revenues in the last three years and a staggering American trade deficit have been the main causes of foreign exchange reserve buildup in countries around the world—specifically in the Gulf region (oil revenues) and East Asia (current account surplus). As economist Michael Pettis explains, “…it seems reasonably certain that what has powered the [globalization] boom in the last decade is the recycling of the massive U.S. trade deficit. As central banks and sovereign funds accumulate reserves as the flip side of the U.S. trade deficit, excess U.S. consumption is being converted into global excess savings.”

China and the Gulf countries, excluding Kuwait, actively ensure the growth of their respective sovereign wealth funds by holding down their exchange rates in order to retain the dollar amount of their funds, which draw on dollar-denominated oil revenues. Kuwait is the only Gulf country to have un-pegged its currency from the dollar as a measure to combat inflation. Saudi Arabia does not consider it in its interest to follow suit.

In addition to rapidly accelerating oil revenues, capital appreciation and dividends on initial country investments caused incomes to snowball long before the SWF became an investment vehicle. For instance, the father of Dubai’s current ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, defied skeptics by investing a large part of the emirate’s oil revenue into developing the Jebel Ali Port in the 1970’s. The port is now one of if not the world’s busiest ports, and has firmly established Dubai as the region’s trading and transit hub.

Dubai World Ports Might Offer IPO of $4.2 Billion

On the other hand, the QE2's future is settled. Sold for $100 million, it will become a hotel permanently docked in Dubai, and many past passengers view that as a good thing.

Halliburton Spin-Off Positive

The KBR spin-off and an increased push in the Eastern Hemisphere through a headquarters in Dubai are both positive developments for Halliburton (NYSE: HAL). The spin-off of the high volume, low margin KBR business removes distractions, improves operational focus, and makes Halliburton a pure-play on the oilfield service market.

Ahmed Lotfy relocates to Dubai, strengthens Halliburton’s regional presence

Halliburton Company (NYSE:HAL) announced today that Ahmed Lotfy, Senior Vice President – Eastern Hemisphere, is relocating to Dubai following the opening of a second corporate headquarters office for Halliburton in the centrally located Gulf city.

Gone are the days when the oil sheikdoms simply amassed personal wealth and engaged in conspicuous consumption. Now that capital is being used to take on the imperial powers at home as the case of MGM and OMX show and by attracting their TNC's, like Halliburton, to Dubai.

Changing Patterns of Investment in the Gulf Region: The Case of Dubai

The massive increase in oil revenues in most of the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)—Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and Kuwait—has created unprecedented opportunities for the building of infrastructure, the provision of social services and, at the same time, for investments overseas.

These investments have been channeled through two principal pipelines—acquisition of assets and the purchase of shares in high quality financial and industrial firms. According to the London daily al-Sharq al-Awsat of August 13, the Gulf countries have channeled $140 billion into overseas investments in the last three years. In a relatively short time, some of the Gulf countries have become respectable actors on the international financial scene.

At the same time, a hospitable investment environment, the privatization of state-owned entities and the prospects of mutually profitable deals have attracted a massive influx of Western financial services and industry to the Gulf region. The opening of the real estate market for foreign investors, particularly in Dubai, has created a massive construction boom which is fueling economic growth at a rapid rate.

The purpose of this article is to shed light on the investment activities of Dubai, and how an enlightened and entrepreneurial leadership has turned what was a small desert outpost just a few decades ago into a bustling metropolis with a vigorous economy that is subject to both envy and emulation.

In contrast to the earlier oil booms of the 1970’s and 1980’s, however, these countries are not squandering their oil revenues on spending sprees, but rather are focusing on diversifying their assets and buttressing their fiscal solvency through massive investment schemes.

Dubai, one of the seven emirates that make up the UAE, in particular, exemplifies the investment trends of the Middle East, mostly on account of the fact that it is an investment powerhouse out of necessity. The emirate seeks to open itself to and extend its reach within international markets in order to hedge any risk it faces due to the steady decline of its oil and gas reserves, which are expected to reach depletion within twenty years. Dubai currently has a strong penchant for the real-estate sector, but is learning to thoroughly diversify its assets in its search for some high-yielding financial instruments.

The current generation of economic and industry ministers in the Gulf region is largely composed of men who began their careers in the private sector. This correlates with efforts in almost all MENA countries to increase the privatization of state-owned entities in an attempt to create an “open market” atmosphere. As the Middle East daily al-Sharq al-Awsat reported on August 8, 2007, an international investment firm in Kuwait noted that privatization trends in Gulf countries—which are competing amongst themselves to become the next global “financial capitol”—are reflected in the flow of private capital into publicly traded stocks and other financial instruments. In 2006 this amount totaled $7.07 billion, which was a 61.6% increase over the previous year.

The Carlyle Group LP says that the Middle East is now the “hot spot” for private equity deals, and HSBC reports that as much as one third of all project finance involves Middle Eastern projects. Dubai is a particular hub of this activity. The chief executive of oil services company Halliburton has recently opted to relocate at least part of the company’s corporate and executive headquarters from Houston to Dubai. Other prospective buyers of property in the emirate include Oracle, Cisco and Microsoft.

Expanding Horizons

While Western banking, financial and information technology industries are rapidly being drawn to the Gulf countries, Gulf investment is not necessarily giving preferential treatment to the Western hemisphere that has largely responsible for its explosion of financial power.

While it is true that various emirate companies invested $3.5 billion in the US last year, many of those same companies are also shifting their interest to Asian markets on account of the falling dollar and for the sake of diversification:

- Dubai International Capital and DIFC Investments are working to extend their reach into Pakistan, India and South Korea.

- Istithmar’s real estate arm, which is part of the Dubai World group of companies, plans to increase the 5% of its assets it has invested in Asia to 30% within five years.

- The Dubai government firm Emaar is responsible for the housing boom taking place across Asia, most recently securing a deal to construct a 1,200-hectare project, set on the pristine Mandalika Beach, estimated at $600 million in worth.

- Remaining oil exports in the Dubai are being used to help launch the Dubai Mercantile Exchange, a joint venture with Nymex that is to create a futures market for Mideast crude oil exported to Asia.

- Dubai Ports World, in its attempt to double its capacity in 10 years, is developing terminals in China, India, Vietnam and Pakistan.

These investment patterns place the Gulf region, and especially Dubai, in a unique position. As relationships increase in number and depth within certain markets, namely Iran and China, diplomatic ties with Washington and Europe will probably occasionally feel a squeeze.

SEE:

At Least It's Not Dubai Ports

Calgary Fraud Funds Dubai Boom

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Bin Laden Transcript

Bin Laden Inc. takes on the American Empire.(transcript)

This is why I tell you: as you liberated yourselves before from the slavery of monks, kings, and feudalism, you should liberate yourselves from the deception, shackles and attrition of the capitalist system.

If you were to ponder it well, you would find that in the end, it is a system harsher and fiercer than your systems in the Middle Ages. The capitalist system seeks to turn the entire world into a fiefdom of the major corporations under the label of “globalization” in order to protect democracy.

And Iraq and Afghanistan and their tragedies; and the reeling of many of you under the burden of interest-related debts, insane taxes and real estate mortgages; global warming and its woes; and the abject poverty and tragic hunger in Africa: all of this is but one side of the grim face of this global system.

So it is imperative that you free yourselves from all of that and search for an alternative, upright methodology in which it is not the business of any class of humanity to lay down its own laws to its own advantage at the expense of the other classes as is the case with you, since the essence of man-made positive laws is that they serve the interests of those with the capital and thus make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

The infallible methodology is the methodology of Allah, the Most High, who created the heavens and earth and created the Creation and is the Most Kind and All-Informed and the Knower of the souls ofHis slaves and the methodology that best suits them.

It is asymmetrical Imperialism versus the new Imperium. The modern manichiest duality. Bin Laden Inc. is a Muslim engineering, security and banking corporation in competition for regional hegemony with USA Inc. and it's partner's Halliburton and Bechtel. Not to be confused with the family business back in Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi Binladin Group is not liable for the Sept. 11 attacks, attorneys for the multinational engineering firm maintain, because it made Osama bin Laden surrender his stake in the company 14 years ago. Responding in federal court to lawsuits over the attacks, the lawyers wrote that in 1993, the terrorist mastermind was forced out as a shareholder in two companies his family owns.

A judge had ordered Saudi Binladin Group in July to provide additional information about where the money for Osama bin Laden's 2 percent stake in the company went.

Osama bin Laden in lecturing America sounds like Ben Bernake, lecturing on the financial impacts of the housing crisis, and the coming recession. And well he should he is the scion of the largest telecommunications and engineering family in Saudi Arabia. He is a self made man. Not unlike Donald Trump.

His anti-capitalism in the transcript is a medievalist reaction, he is one of many new prophets claiming to be the Mahdi, and he is using the Wahhabist base that is the Saudi state religion.

The Sept. 11 Commission concluded that the Sudanese government took Osama bin Laden's assets when he left Sudan in 1996.

"He left Sudan with practically nothing," the commission concluded.

"When bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan, he relied on the Taliban until he was able to reinvigorate his fundraising efforts by drawing on ties to wealthy Saudi individuals that he had established during the Afghan war in the 1980s."

Before Osama bin Laden, it might be argued, there was the Mahdi. Over 120 years ago, a messianic leader united the tribes of the Sudan in a bloody revolt against their Turkish-Egyptian masters. Proclaiming that Islam had been corrupted and defiled by "foreigners," this Islamic warrior declared a jihad against the "outsiders."

Although not alike in all significant respects--the Mahdi, for example, came from humble origins, whereas bin Laden is the scion of a Saudi billionaire--the desert warrior and the peripatetic leader of al Qaeda show some striking similarities. There is a shared connection with Sudan, from which bin Laden was expelled in 1996. Both men tangled militarily with the major power of their eras. Both believed themselves to be directed by Allah to lead a holy war, to eradicate the corrupting influence of the West from Muslim lands and, in the process, spread Islam.

The Islamic Traditions of Wahhabism and Salafiyya

And he knows how to use the media to get out his message, hence he has gained weight, changed his beard, is dressed well.

He is a businessman lecturing to his peers. He is not yet dead, nor captured the war on terror so far has been a failure, just like Iraq. This is what his spectacular appearance says.

In any case, it may be that the point of terror is not merely to disrupt spectacle by producing indigestible images, but to exceed it. Retort highlight the paradox of the vanguard Islamic revolutionaries, who deny themselves all that capitalist spectacle has to offer, and harden themselves against mundane sentiment and appetite, yet who still hold to the effectiveness of the image, and propagate images of their acts through websites.

His is not class war but global inter-Imperialist rivalry. America is in the way of his war against the current ruling classes in the Middle East. Always was.

Retort argue that the result of the spectacular defeat of 9-11 has been to push the state into actions that are as much governed by spectacle as by material considerations. Warfare has been elevated from an intermittent action to permanent imperial conflict. They claim that one frequently repeated charge of the anti-war movement "that the war was fought for oil" when taken too simply, ignores the "partially non-factual imperatives of capital accumulation." These include the effort to repair spectacle, and the drive to normalize war in the minds of citizens.

SEE:

Osama bin Laden Republican


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Soccer Not War

Once more the common people in Iraq make a poignant political point about the national solidarity created by sports. In this case the victory of the Iraqi Soccer Team winning the Asian Cup this weekend unites the Iraqi people as I pointed out the other day. Proving once again that sports are an alternative to war and a great national unifier.

"Those heroes have shown the real Iraq. They have done something useful for the people as opposed to the politicians and lawmakers," said Sabah Shaiyal, a 43-year-old policeman in Baghdad's main Shiite district of Sadr City. "The players have made us proud. Once again our national team has shown that there is only one, united Iraq."

Spontaneous celebrations broke out in religiously mixed Baghdad as well as in Basra and the holy Shiite city of Najaf in the south and northern Kurdish towns like Arbil and Kirkuk.

Fans cried and danced in the streets, waving their shirts in the air and hugging.

Soldiers with their rifles slung over their shoulders danced with ordinary Iraqis in Baghdad while children, their faces painted in the Iraqi colours, held up pictures of their heroes.

While mainly comprised of Shiites, the team was captained by a Sunni Turkman from Kirkuk — goal-scoring hero Younis Mahmoud — and also contained Sunni Arab and Kurdish players in a broad representation of Iraqi society.

In Baghdad's Sadr City, a sprawling Shiite slum, women threw sweets to gathering fans and poured water over crowds in sweltering summer heat.

"A thousand congratulations for all Iraqis," another fan said.

Television presenters, draped in the red, white and black Iraqi flag, dissolved into tears. One Iraqiya television reporter was engulfed by a crowd in Baghdad and re-emerged on the shoulders of chanting fans.

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Soccer Surge A Success In Iraq

It is not the U.S. Military surge, nor the Iraqi government, nor the Shia, Sunnis or Kurd politicians and imams, its not Al Qaida in Iraq, it is soccer that is a success and unifier in Iraq. And the irony is they beat the terror state Saudi Arabia, which funds the Sunni insurgents, in the Asia Cup.

So perhaps the U.S. congress should fund the Iraq Soccer Team instead of more money for Iraqi politicians and George Bush's surges. Certainly it is the only successful thing to come out of the Iraq war.

Iraq's triumph in the Asia Cup signals a soccer program rising from the ashes, even as the country descends deeper into civil conflict. The resurgence of Iraqi soccer is one of the few untainted pieces of good news to emerge from post-invasion Iraq. A powerhouse in the 60s and 70s, the national team faded in the 1980s as Iraq's young men were killed and maimed by the hundreds of thousands in Saddam Hussein's war with Iran. Saddam's son Uday vented his sadism on soccer players and other athletes, forcing them to kick immovable stones and imprisoning them in medieval torture devices. Says Abu Ahmad: "I can't express my feelings. We are so happy, those 25 men brought happiness and hope to 25 million Iraqis, the thing our politicians couldn't do."

Iraq knocks off favored Saudi Arabia to win Asian Cup

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Prince Bandit

The Saudi's are experts at playing both sides against the middle and taking baksheesh for it.

The UK's biggest arms dealer, BAE Systems, paid hundreds of millions of pounds to the ex-Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar bin Sultan.

The investigation found that up to £120m a year was sent by BAE Systems from the UK into two Saudi embassy accounts in Washington.

There wasn't a distinction between the accounts of the embassy or official government accounts... and the accounts of the royal family David Caruso American bank investigator Timeline: BAE Systems probe

The BBC's Panorama programme has established that these accounts were actually a conduit to Prince Bandar for his role in the 1985 deal to sell more than 100 warplanes to Saudi Arabia.

The purpose of one of the accounts was to pay the expenses of the prince's private Airbus.

If there are Terrorist States promoting insurgency in the region then one of them is Saudi Arabia, more so than even Iran. However unlike Iran they are an American client state, just like Israel.

And like Israel they can count on America to support their primitive accumulation of capital or criminal capitalism by any other name.

The Saudi family compact controls OPEC, and the U.S. is it's petrol-junkie.

And as a result of all those US Dollars the British Government is its weapons junkie.

At the same time it was claimed that Mr Blair was 'anxious' to complete another bumper arms deal with Saudi Arabia before he leaves office. In a further twist, BAE insisted that British governments from Mrs Thatcher's to Mr Blair's had known about and approved all the payments involved in the 22-year-old, £43bn Al Yamamah deal.

Mr Blair, whose government made bribery of foreign officials illegal in 2001, now faces more questions over why the Serious Fraud Office was ordered to ditch a probe into the 1985 Al Yamamah contract between BAE and Saudi Arabia.

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