NATO Countries Set to Steal $30,000 from Each Libyan Citizen

Scott Creighton
Poor Richard’s Blog
October 25, 2011

The pro-Western corporatist media outlets are hurriedly trying to help spin every aspect of the murder of Moammar Gadhafi and the ongoing rape and pillage of the Libyan people’s assets.

Yesterday Paul Richter of the LA Times wrote an article claiming that Moammar Gadhafi was the richest man in the world, holding some $200 billion dollars in assets hidden all over the globe. Buried deep within the body of his article, the truth finally comes out…

“But subsequent investigations by American, European and Libyan authorities determined that Kadafi secretly sent tens of billions more abroad over the years and made sometimes lucrative investments in nearly every major country, including much of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, officials said Friday.

Most of the money was under the name of government institutions such as the Central Bank of Libya, the Libyan Investment Authority, the Libyan Foreign Bank, the Libyan National Oil Corp. and the Libya African Investment Portfolio. But investigators said Kadafi and his family members could access any of the money if they chose to.

The new $200 billion figure is about double the prewar annual economic output of Libya, which has the largest proven oil reserves in Africa.” – Paul Richter

All of the money was invested in Libyan enterprises presumably for the Libyan people but because “investigators” claim Gadhafi could have accessed it, the globalist spin on this wealth owned by the Libyan people, is that it was Gadhafi’s and not theirs. The difference is that if this money belongs to the people of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, then it must be returned to them and cannot be touched. If it were to belong to Gadhafi then it simply becomes spoils of war and can be seized by whomever claims it.

The $200 billion dollar figure represents (as Richter points out) “about $30,000 for every Libyan citizen”. This is the amount that is about to be stolen from the people of Libya.

The US has still got somewhere around 29.3 billion dollars of Libyan money it took at the beginning of this conflict. Other NATO partners also turned a profit thus far in this conflict.

U.S. and European authorities said Friday that they intended to quickly hand over frozen assets to the transitional Libyan government. But so far, the U.N. has authorized release of only $1.5 billion from accounts in the U.S., and the Obama administration has turned over $700 million of that amount, said Marti Adams, a Treasury Department spokeswoman. Paul Richter

Though 200 billion would seem to be a lot of money (and God only knows whose pockets it will eventually fall into – is anyone really paying attention to all that Haitian Relief money that Hillary Clinton put her husband in charge of?) the fact is, more will be made when the garage sale of Libyan assets is held sometime in the very near future. Public assets will be sold for pennies on the dollar at best to corporate cronies, friends of the various administrations who pushed for this illegal invasion of Libya. It’s been done so many times in the past it’s ridiculous to believe anything different will take place. Especially if you remember that heads of certain corporations met with NATO leaders at the beginning of this staged conflict, surely to hash out who gets which slices of the Jamahiriya Pie. The Chicago Boys are probably already in Libya working their special neoliberal magic on the unsuspecting “rebels”