Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
Today's edition of the Financial Times carries a lament by reporter Chris Cook about the British government's four-year obstruction of his freedom-of-information request for access to two pages of a ministerial diary.
The lament is headlined: "UK Officials Are Going to Great Lengths to Keep Their Secrets Secret" and it can be found here:
Cook writes: "The contents are easy to find and process. But they refused my request, saying it would cause them 'a disproportionate or unjustified level of disruption, irritation, or distress.'
"What is on those two pages?"
Of course the FT is entitled to its opinion about which secret doings in government are important enough to tell readers about. But people who follow the gold sector are entitled to laugh at the FT's priorities with the news.
For the greatest power of Western central banking long has been not its power to create and deploy infinite money in secret but the refusal of financial news organizations to question how this power is being used.
For example, in May GATA asked the Bank of England and the United Kingdom's Treasury Department if they had been they had been involved with gold leasing in the previous 12 months.
GATA consultant Robert Lambourne, a U.K. citizen (or "subject," as they seem to prefer to call themselves in monarchy land), posed the question in a formal FOI request.
The Bank of England replied to GATA that "there is no further information that can be provided." The UK Treasury did not reply at all. Lambourne did not get an answer either. See:
https://www.gata.org/node/
The UK government's refusal to answer a simple question about market intervention ordinarily might be pretty interesting to financial journalism. But not here.
Mainstream financial journalism is no better in the United States.
For more than a year GATA and a member of Congress, Rep. Alex X. Mooney, R-West Virginia, have asked the U.S. Commodity Futures Commission whether it has jurisdiction over manipulative trading in the futures market undertaken by or at the behest of the U.S. government. The commission refuses to answer:
https://www.gata.org/node/
Of course any sentient being seeing these refusals to answer might fairly conclude that the governments are concealing something improper or at least disreputable and unfair -- that they are striving to deceive and cheat people.
Protecting people against deception and cheating used to be the highest ambition of journalism. But these days mainstream financial journalism's highest ambition seems to be to protect the government against the people instead. At least in that respect the FT continues to do a great job.
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
CPowell@GATA.org
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