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Norway Foreign Minister Blasts G-20, Calls It "Greatest Setback For International Community Since World War II"
Der Spiegel conducts a stunning interview with Norway's foreign minister Jonas Gahr Støre, in which the Scandinavian official rips the G-20 (which is meeting this weekend in Toronto), in a manner far more vicious than any of the tens of thousands of protesters could hope to ever do. Støre essentially compares the Group of Twenty to the most cataclysmic event in the history of mankind: calling it "the "greatest setback" for the international community since World War II." Any other day, this would result in a diplomatic gaffe, and the expulsions of various ambassadors. Today, with the entire world agreeing with the Norwegian, except those, of course, in attendance in Toronto, nobody bats an eyelid. One of the smartest countries in Europe (having refused to join the utter disaster that is the European Union... twice) once again proves its wit, when its minister "questions the legitimacy" of the G-20, stating "We no longer live in the 19th century, a time when the major powers met and redrew the map of the world. No one needs a new Congress of Vienna." Ah, but we do, as otherwise the spoils from the greatest generational wealth transfer would go equally and ratably to all, instead of being concentrated in the greedy hands of those who have already stolen so much, they have no place to put the loot. Which is why the G7, G8, G20, etc. will continue to exist as the world's most potent parasite until there is nothing left to steal anymore.
From Spiegel
'One of the Greatest Setbacks Since World War II'
Norway's foreign minister has described the group of the 20 most important industrialized and developing nations, which will meet this weekend in Toronto, as the "greatest setback" for the international community since World War II. In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, Jonas Gahr Støre explains why the organization won't function in the long run.
SPIEGEL: Mr. Foreign Minister, this week the most important industrial and developing nations will meet at the G-20 summit in Toronto. You oppose the organization. Is that because Norway, which is one of Europe's richest countries, is not a part of it?
Jonas Gahr Støre: No. The G-20 had a meaning when the financial crisis broke out, the situation was serious and joint decisions had to be swiftly made in order to calm the markets. This importance remains. But the G-20 is a grouping without international legitimacy -- it has no mandate and it is unclear which functions it actually has.
SPIEGEL: The president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, views the G-20 as being the main forum for steering the global economy.
Støre: It is for precisely that reason that one must be allowed to question its legitimacy. After World War II, we set up international organizations like the United Nations, the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund with clear responsibilities and clear mandates. We need to make them fit for the new realities in the world and for the new balance of power.
SPIEGEL: Isn't the G-20 an attempt to do precisely that?
Støre: The G-20 is a self-appointed group. Its composition is determined by the major countries and powers. It may be more representative than the G-7 or the G-8, in which only the richest countries are represented, but it is still arbitrary. We no longer live in the 19th century, a time when the major powers met and redrew the map of the world. No one needs a new Congress of Vienna.
SPIEGEL: Who do you feel is missing from the current grouping of major powers?
Støre: South Africa is part of it, but not as a representative of Africa. Saudi Arabia is part of it, but not as a representative of the Arab world. So why is the European Union represented in addition to having four individual EU member states and two others as observers? That is not acceptable. You don't have to change everything, but with a few small adjustments you could achieve a regional representation like that which we have achieved with the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank, among other organizations. We need the kind of strong, smaller alliances, or "voting groups," of the type that we see, for example, with the Nordic or the Baltic states, so that we can react quickly.
SPIEGEL: What can the Nordic countries do better than the G-20?
Støre: Taken together, the Nordic countries are the world's eighth- or ninth-largest economy. We are small in terms of our populations, but we are big in terms of our economic power. Norwegians are the biggest contributors to the international development programs of the United Nations and the World Bank. Norway's trade surplus is one-third of China's, and its current account surplus is one-third of that of Germany. Our pension and future fund (editor's note: the sovereign wealth fund that reinvests Norway's gas and oil riches for future generations) is the second largest in the world. So our experiences could be valuable in discussions about a reform of the global financial world.
SPIEGEL: Other countries could also use the same justification to demand admission to the Group of 20.
Støre: The 20 or effectively 22 are big, but there are also the countries that play a decisive role in a few areas. If the G-20 or another international body were to discuss, for example, energy security without Norway, which already provides one-third of Germany's natural gas, then that would be a real surprise for everyone. When climate change is discussed, one has to keep in mind the fact that Norway makes one of the largest contributions to saving rainforests and pays out billions of dollars, we should also have a voice, because we have something to say. Decisions on fighting poverty in the world without the participation of Norway, Denmark and Sweden, who make the greatest financial contributions, make no sense.
SPIEGEL: If Norway wants to strengthen its international influence, then why don't you just join the EU?
Støre: Because our people have rejected (membership) twice in referenda, the last time 16 years ago. In contrast to my own wishes, there is no majority support for membership today either. That is how democracy works.
SPIEGEL: Proponents of the G-20 want to reform the body and also to provide it with additional competencies -- in combating climate change, international development and in health care.
Støre: It would be a great paradox if the G-20 contributed to undermining the legitimacy of the UN and its institutions. It would mean a further creeping devaluation of the responsible world organizations, if decisions like those of the World Health Organization or the World Trade Organization were in the future effectively made in advance by the G-20.
SPIEGEL: The UN and its institutions haven't exactly proven themselves to be powerful instruments in the fight against global crises.
Støre: But that cannot lead us to give up reform of, for example, the UN Security Council and instead, out of convenience, create a new body with a new voice. That would be a kind of "key mandate" for a small, self-appointed group against the rest of the world -- the remaining 170 or 171 nations. From that perspective, the Group of 20, in terms of international cooperation, is one of the greatest setbacks since World War II.
SPIEGEL: Will the summit in Toronto this week make progress on introducing a global bank levy and bank participation in providing financial help to bankrupt countries like Greece?
Støre: That is a difficult task. The ability to find a compromise between the divergent national interests will show just how serious the desire for better international regulation of the financial markets really is. But it still doesn't answer the question of whether the world will accept the decisions made by the G-20.
Interview conducted by Manfred Ertel
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They can't steal my gold because it is my pocket!
that's not your pocket!
"Jonas Gahr Støre: No. The G-20 had a meaning when the financial crisis broke out, the situation was serious and joint decisions had to be swiftly made in order to calm the markets. This importance remains. But the G-20 is a grouping without international legitimacy -- it has no mandate and it is unclear which functions it actually has."
These are the words of someone who is either completely uniformed or hopelessly naive. This is why this interview is a non-deal.
He knows exactly what the G-20's function is. Power. He is not stating it, because to state it is not his purpose. His purpose is to say: "I am warning you all that the existence of this (not stated but obvious)-(Power Wielding) Group in the presence of formally defined Power Wielding Groups (UN, IMF, WB, etc), is an issue. It is an issue because the G-20 has voted itself Power over others that it does not represent."
He says that just fine. He is also a puppet, an elite, but he has a role to play, so he is not a Norwegian.
Exactly, who cares about Norway anyway? Go back to being a ridiculously expensive place to live, full of offshore oil and keep buying US equities.
"These are the words of someone who is either completely uniformed (sic) or hopelessly naive." Your admission, I'm just quoting you.
...worst tap dancing accident since 1952
You sure about that?
http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/154507
Ha ha! I forgot about that episode. That was classic.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW85KbKYwYs
Modded from this^
Her parents died in a tragic irish stomp dancing accident which is why she needed to go into "business".
Støre sure got some ballz
T....
You are on today, however it is all wasted effort as usual. You preach to the choir. The market is on and loves the smell of fresh dung. We are going much higher. At least to 1300 before a dip back to 1150.
I have more coversations with people these days about severance and unemployment benefits then I have EVER had in my life time. Very fashionable to know the ins and outs. All the while, the market presents itself as the never ending BUYING OP.
I bet ESU0 plunges through the 200-day MA today by 14:30 EDT
What do you know, it looks like I was wrong by about 10 minutes....
Turd, I think it should say: "completely uniformed AND hopelessly naive".
i am uninformed as to why you all leaving the 'f' out.
Oh , .UCK! Cheers to you all.
Disclosure. no way
If Norway wants to be part of G20 let them be part of G2. It will help their ego tremendously.
If Norway wants to be part of G20 let them be part of G2. It will help their ego tremendously.
WhAT is the frickin deal with that awful Waldorf roll down ad above the ZH banner. IT IS SO ANNOYING!
Click the ad once, your heels three times and you get a free all expense paid afternoon alone with Paris Hilton in Norway.
Pack condoms.
I tell you what, I'll let you have the prize if it works because I'd rather stick needles in my eye than spend an afternoon with Paris Hilton
G-20 is just symptomatic of what world leadership has come to this last couple of centuries - our very own societal GoM toxic spill - with political scum that now slops from one side of the planet to the other.
Hey I beg to differ about the EU. Unlike a lot of the pundits on here who post from X,000 miles away I live in Europe and in my opinion the EU tenets of free movement of people, goods and capital are great.
Norway could afford not to join the EU due to its enormous wealth deriving from a relatively small population in a large country benefiting from valuable oil reserves. The downside of living in Norway is that you pay through the nose for all kinds of goods and services (just look at the price of booze). At least as a member of the EEA, its inhabitants enjoy more or less the same freedom of movement as most EU citizens, so they can escape Norge and move to warmer climates for work or play if they so choose.
Gotta love the class warfare slogans. For a second I thought I was reading an attac.org article. Stealing, manipulation, conspiracies... yes, "they" do everything just so the poor man stays poor! Oh what an unfair world!
Støre and the rest of the Norwegian self-indulgent fascist political pigs are well advised to take a look at their own crap before shooting their mouths off. This group belongs to the very pinnacle of arrogant elitists ever to have set foot on this earth.
Norway and its' Pension fund is mainly run by a fascist regime consisting of clueless politicians who pay shitloads for advice to the same people who are ripping them off.
Fortunately they have stumbled over a bag of gold (oil) and as long as the sheeple aren't aware of the hand behind the curtain drawing them deeper into the fascist cesspool and the monopolistic schemes they deploy it's business as usual.
We can easily draw parallels to todays' Wall Street cronyism and the robbing of the taxpayer in broad daylight. It's blatant and no attempts are made to hide it from the public. There seems to be so much complacency that nobody seems to give a flying fcuk.......Until it's too late that is.
My best guess is that 99.9 % of the Norwegians are happily ignorant about what is going on. "Giske" openly rallying the fascist troops by creating special interest groups of "The filthy rich" to loot the taxpayer. Having people like Berg-Hansen in a gov. position where she can decide on the rule of law for her own company is quite mind-boggling.
Examples are plentiful. Norway, as being the last Soviet State in the world (Björn Rosengren, may be right afterall), is rapidly embracing fascism. It's written all over the place but nobody is reading.
OMFG, what have these Elitist Political Norwegian asshats ever done other than displaying a sickening level of arrogance.....Ooooh I almost forgot....they awarded Obama the Nobel Peace Prize!
LMAO
This post is a bit silly. At no time in history would ambassadors been expelled over an interview like this.
The G-20, for whatever faults, represents the biggest powers on the planet sitting down together to talk things over. This is infinitely better than a scenario where these groups didn't meet with each other and just let events play out as a series of surprises and misunderstandings on the global stage.
The rich, the few, the insane all in one room. May the breathe their own farts and slip on the oils that bind them.
Disclosure. Full of ill will towards our masters
Not really. The neutral powers are sick of having policy dictated to them by the tinpot hollow power of the US.
Having the world economy centrally planned and "coordinated" at the G-20 is just as fucked up if not more so than the Congress of Vienna.
Interesting that he used as an example the Congress of Vienna, which was the origin of Rothschild world political control.
Then, as now, the goal was to formalize a status quo that greatly (and unfairly) benefitted a small number of people within the ruling families of Europe. It's generally accepted now that von Metternich (Austria's Foreign Minister) was an agent for the Rothschilds. After more than a decade of war, most of the European powers were heavily indebted to the Rothschild bankers, who therefore had a big say in how things would be arranged, post-Napoleon.
Private bankers having undue influence over sovereign states because years of expensive wars had left the latter heavily indebted to the former? Good thing we never made that mistake again.
"SPIEGEL: Proponents of the G-20 want to reform the body and also to provide it with additional competencies -- in combating climate change, international development and in health care."
A bunch of environment wreckers, ponzi schemers, and people who live in gated communties with no medical experience want to do what?
On a related note, I met a Norwegian equity saleswoman at a party a few months ago. Like many of her compatriots here in London, she'd left Norway several years ago for work reasons. To my surprise she kept saying that corruption in Norway is endemic and has reached stratospheric levels. For a moment I thought I was having a conversation on Berlusconi's Italy!
I hope this guy knows what he's doing when he insults the Council of Vienna.
The Russian Royal family tried that and the Rothschilds never forgave them.
Norway always kind of impressed me...but this item gave me pause:
Norway Gives Approval for Oil Fund to Buy Real Estate02. Mar, 2010 Comments Off
According to Businessweek, “Norway gave approval for its $440 billion sovereign wealth fund to invest as much as 5 percent of its value in real estate to increase returns and limit overall risk after record losses in 2008.
“By investing in real estate, we spread the fund’s risk even more,” Finance Minister Sigbjoern Johnsen said in a statement today. “Real estate is the largest asset class after shares and bonds, and these investments fit well with the fund’s investment profile.”
The fund, built from Norway’s oil and gas revenue, gets its investment guidelines from the government and is managed by the central bank. It was last year allowed to raise its stake in stocks to 60 percent, and will be allowed to build a position in real estate, estimated today at $22 billion, and cut its bond holdings by an equivalent amount.
The Government Pension Fund Global, as it’s formally known, invests petroleum revenue abroad to avoid stoking inflation and is Europe’s biggest owner of stocks. Norway is the world’s sixth-biggest oil exporter and second-largest gas exporter.”
http://www.swfinstitute.org/tag/real-estate/
Miss Expectations,
Nothing wrong with real estate if it is intelligently acquired.
Good farmland is a low yield investment but, with 300 million+ people in the country it can be expected to be relatively inflation proof and safe (in the hands of a responsible tenant). Rentals, acquired at the right price can also be good but require a little more management. Unless it is a situation with professional management, it seems to be more trouble to manage than farmland.
Yes - but a bit rich calling them fascists when their bravery did more than most to stop real fascists getting nuclear weapons. They also suffered their arctic regions burnt to the ground in winter when the real fascists retreated - with great loss of life. A bit more respect for history would not go amiss - might even help you realise why they don't want to join the EU; especially as they don't have to.
Cautious yes; savers yes; sober yes. I would have thought zero hedge commentators would approve.
Board,
Støre sounds like a fundamentelist preacher lecturing his flock. He obviously felt that something needed to be said to the powers that be.
An old "saw" about the differences between the Scandinavian countries says that "If a Norwegan, a Swede and a Dane were engaged it a project, the Norwegan would 'invent' it, The Swede would exploit it and the Dane would sell it.
It will be interesting to see how this particular line of policy discussion plays out.
My parents were Norwegian. Stupid @#$@#$@'s moved to US just before they had me. Apparently they were blinded by fiat-based currency.
R.E.S.P.E.C.T
My 1/3rd spare cash position is going into NOK.
third dollars , third nok , third gold.
Come fking get some.
We don’t need the elites of the world all to work together, either… “for a reform of the global financial world.” In other words, they’re going to divide it all up, and Norway wants its share…
They're still playing monopoly, they’ve just invited a few more to join that's all--same game more players.
Frankly, when did Bernanke and the other central bankers ever ask the American people if they wanted the government to intervene to establish a “transition to a new global economy” that they defined and will control?
Market economies, whether they operate in a small village or in a nation or in the world, are still best based on allowing each entity, whether it be individuals, corporations, or countries, to operate with as much freedom as possible to make their own marketing agreements. If a small village is controlled by two or three rich men who own most of the real estate and select the council and mayor, sheriff, et cetera, it's just as damaging to the market economy as powerful members of the G-20 making agreements that benefit only the most powerful elites using the lie about globalization as an excuse. Because money can be transferred electronically in seconds around the world, contracts can be negotiated and agreed to on the Internet and corporate and government jet aircraft can connect the world's capitals does not change the simple authenticity of two parties agreeing to a contract or sale where both will benefit mutually.
Unfortunately, powerful oligarchs are using the offices of their governments to blackmail, threaten with force and even occupy other countries for their own economic advantage; hardly an environment for economic freedom and free enterprise capitalism, i.e, Isabel Paterson's "god of the machine."
As Ron Paul has said, the free market “has been wrongly accused of doing so many things it just doesn’t do, that are really the fault of crony corporatism and convoluted government policies that brought on the crisis. Too many people equate the free market with big business doing whatever it wants, but that is not the free market. Unconstitutional taxpayer-funded (national and international) bailouts are what allow giant corporations to run roughshod over the economy. The free market is what puts them out of business when they misbehave…
“The free market is about respecting property rights and contracts. It is not about building up oligarchs and monopolies and confiscatory tax-theft. These are creatures of government. We must watch out when government comes up with interventionist solutions to interventionist problems. The root of our problems lies in interventionism. Trusting the free market is the solution.”
I wish Canada wasn't part of the G20. We are footing the shindig this week at a tune of one billion dollars. Downtown Toronto is shut down with many businesses closing and their staff out of work for a week.
Could somebody please break it to our Dear Leader Kim Jong Stevie that paying a couple million to create a fake lake next to Lake Ontario for the international reporters during the G20 meeting when we are running big deficits isn't very frugal.
Over a billion for a meeting where nothing will get resolved. What country needs to be a member of this club?
I've got some family in Toronto law enforcement and I can tell you that they're completely flabbergasted (and furious) that the G20 is being held where it is...and that's just from a logistical standpoint, completely ignoring the price tag.
Could you think of a worse place to hold it in Canada ? In one of those tar ponds in Alberta maybe or the bottom of Lake Superior
Of course I probably don't have to tell you that we just had the Olympics here in Vancouver and the price tag for security was less than 1/4 the price of that of the G20.
Stoere has lost his mind - 'setback since ww2' - what would then be a catastrophe for Stoere ? He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and epitomizes the corruption of the system. What does this guy have to do with labour, which part he is representing ? His CV reads a bit like that of Bernard Kouchner. This faceless Euro/bureaucrat works for himself and his backers, not for the common good. He has the audacity to say that Norwegians voted against the EU and he respects their decision, even if he does not like it. But then why is Norway always touted as the "best pupil in the class" when it comes to implement EU directives. This undemocratic elitist will go the way of the financial system: Straight to hell.
One more thing which has received practically no attention in the media is the political prisoner Synnoeve Fjellbakk Taftoe who wrote a critical piece on Stoere on www.nyhetsspeilet.no . The day after they put her in the psychiatric ward and chemically lobotomized her.
Your comments about the destination of the financial system reminded of Thomas Lawson’s description in Jules Abels’ book, “The Rockefeller Millions”:
“John D. Rockfeller can be fully described as a man made in the image of the ideal money maker… An ideal money-maker is a machine the details of which are diagrammed on the asbestos blueprints which paper the walls of hell.”