"Where Antarctica keeps its Sovereign Wealth"

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The Antarctica Sovereign Wealth Fund

A Guide Compiled for the Public by 

the UANT Economic Sciences Dept.

Please consider the following table, on which is shown the new public perceptions of ideas and the main events contributing to the newly negative perception:

Ideas of progress like nation-building can be ruined in the public imagination by actual events exposing as unrealistic their overarching philosophies. The idea of "World Democratic Revolution" promoted by the American neo-conservative establishment of the first decade of the 21st Century and continuing now into the second, is debunked in the public perception by the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan. The idea of a world of free movement unrestricted by arcane national boundaries has proven unpalatable by the wealthier segments of humanity in Europe and North America, as the people of these regions resent the dissolution of their historical cultures by waves of newcomers with their own ingrained identities and biological quirks. But global free-trade is still accepted as dogmatic by most elites. Something changing this perception in 2012, however, are the growth of Sovereign Wealth Funds. These enormous capital funds are the great new tools of foreign investment. That is why the public mis-perception of them is so troubling. The public tends to chunk all SWF's into one conceptual framework, and it is a negative one. Why?

As the public learns more about what they are and what their usage represents, they grow more uneasy, simply because they are funds controlled by foreign governments. They equate "Sovereign Wealth Fund" with "Foreign Wealth Fund" as if the owners of the wealth fund are not acting in the best interests of the entity from which it uses its financial resources to purchase assets from. While admittedly true for most SWF's, this scenario is not true, in the case of the Antarctica Sovereign Wealth Fund (ASWF).

American public is growing more wary of SWF because they are realizing the enormous defecits their government has been borrowing for so many years is now literally being used by foreign SWFs to purchase the essential national resources of their country.

What do those countries do with the American public's wealth their government has spent in their name? They put their surpluses into gigantic SWF cash reserves, which expand to titanic proportions. This is alarming for Antarctica as well- as will be shown herein- but first, please find below the table showing the 2010 holdings of all nations who have the equivalent of over 70 Billion US dollars employable as Sovereign Wealth (please note this is a list of potentiality, not actual conversion to SWF). Below this chart is another, which names the world's largest SWFs and shows where the Antarctica Fund stands among them:

As can be seen above, due to the gigantic trade defecit run by the United States and China, China has 2.2 trillion in reserves, while Japan has 1.1 trillion, the European Union weighs in at 696 billion and Russia 441 billion, while the United States government is, without these states, essentially bankrupt and indebted to them.

That is where Sovereign Wealth Funds come in. The American money sent around the world to these nations by the US Government and multinationals is being transferred in part to SWFs. Please consider the chart below, showing the biggest SWFs:

The unnatural way all of these have been created- based on either US trade defecits with the sovereign government or the exploitation of finite non-renewable resources such as oil, as in the cases of QIA, LIA, RNWF, KIA ADIA and SAMA, stands in contrast to ASWF the Antarctica Fund, which was created organically through investment in the University of Antarctica.

The argument being made is that not all SWFs are of the same intention. Some are benign and communitarian, such as the ASWF, and some are very much to be feared... but why? What is it that makes many of the others dangerous?

After the fall of communism in eastern Europe, large government firms were privatized, and in fact are still being privatized. In the last twenty years, however, SWF's have inverted this concept and allowed governments to buy back imperative resources and take control of the private assets, even of other countries, including probably yours and for sure ours.

Former American presidential candidate Pat Buchanan of the Reform Party ponders the following scenario:

"Suppose China... begins to invest, through its SWF, in Boeing, Microsoft, IBM, GE and U.S. companies that build our strategic submarines, stealth bombers, satellites and missiles. Will the United States rope off the industries that build the weapons of our national defense from any ownership by SWFs? If foreign investors can buy stock in these companies, why not foreign countries through SWFs? Will we let China invest at all in such assets? What percent will Beijing be permitted to buy? Will SWFs be allowed to buy a controlling interest in a company responsible for weapons of national defense? Will they be allowed to buy controlling stakes in companies responsible for what remains of America's lead in high-tech? Will they be allowed to extract the technology? Who will decide what companies are vital national assets that foreigners, or at least some foreigners, will not be allowed to take over, or even to invest in? Under free trade, we Americans have seen our jobs, technology, factories and wealth leave these shores for foreign lands. Now, our money is coming back to buy up our companies and our country. Yes, indeed, we are witnessing how empires end."1

This pessimism is understandable from the standpoint of the great power competition between the emerging superpower China and the fading superpower America, but does it hold true for Antarctica? While no outside sources are permitted to purchase Antarctica's territory as per the 1961 ATS regulations on the continent's neutrality, the primary fear is that the simply enormous amounts of money located in untrustworthy regimes can be used to influence Antarctica's politics and maybe assult the natural resource base by bribing everyone from UN officials to Antarctica's scientists. What bureaucrat would not sell out their country for millions of USD, euro or Yen?

Furthermore, echoing the above analyst, what might happen if China invested in extracting oil and minerals from Antarctica? This is the only place in the world with an enormous amount of resources and absolutely no military. If our minuscule population is considered comparing with the 7.000.000.000 plus up-worlders, what chance do we have at all to protect ourselves?

But Antarctica has an ace-in-the-hole. The Antarctica Sovereign Wealth Fund was created to stand its ground against other world-wealth funds, and provides a shield for our resources and our posterity's by protecting the largely unspoilt environment. If and when Antarctica is to be mined, it must be done by Antarctica's people with our own interests in mind. American leaders and others may trust the various world regimes' strategic movements, by stealth, into their backyards and permit the purchase of their inheritence, but we do not trust foreign wealth funds. That is why we pool our resources as a community- and whatever is left after funding UANT's programmes goes directly to defending the continent as a whole. The Antarctica Sovereign Wealth Fund is not out to buy other countries' resources. It is out to protect ours- a goal being made tangible through the 2009 creation of the Antarctica Defence League and the Southern Cross Defence Force. The ASWF: a true investment in our future. Please consider helping to take our ASWF to the full fruition we envision it to have, and the tool we envision it to be. -Dr. hab. S. Levine, Prof. UANT Economic Sciences