Tag Archives: bankers

Syrian Girl: “Top 8 Reasons Why They Hate Us”

27 Sep

The young lady featured in this article has also appeared on Australia’s own “Insight” TV show, on SBS (video below).

From RT:

A young, soft-spoken girl living the Syrian tragedy spells it out with far more common sense, truth and honesty than powerful Western governments and their money-controlled mass media puppets.

Identifying herself only as “Syrian, Patriot, anti-Neocon, anti-NWO, anti-Zionist”, early last year she set up her own YouTube Channel (YouTube/User/SyrianGirlpartisan).

In a short (nine-minute) video she explains “eight reasons why the NWO (New World Order) hates Syria.” We would all do well to listen in…

Her ‘Top Eight Reasons Why They Hate Us’ is an excellent wrap-up, applicable to just about every self-respecting country in the world: no Rothschild-controlled Central Bank, no IMF debt, no genetically modified foods, oil and pipelines, anti-secret societies, anti-Zionism, secularism and nationalism.

Her brief message unravels as a sort of common sense manual which explains why the United States of America, the United Kingdom, the European Union (especially France) and Israel are so keen on destroying Syria, a country whose leadership just won’t bow down to the New World Order elites embedded deep inside the Western powers’ own public (government) and private (corporate/banking) power structures.

She describes these eight reasons succinctly and convincingly, giving the world much food for thought and should hopefully inspire deep soul-searching. Especially amongst the people of the US, UK, EU and Israel who are the only populations that can put very direct pressure on their elected politicians in Washington, London, Paris, Tel Aviv and other Western capitals, forcing them to stop behaving like global criminals gone berserk, and to start heeding the word of We the People, in a responsible and democratic manner.

8 reasons the New World Order hates Syria

1) Syria’s Central Bank is state-owned & controlled – In other words, it manages its national currency so that it serves the Syrian people and not the Rothschild-controlled global bankers operating from their New York, London, Frankfurt, Tel Aviv, Basel and Paris hideouts.

This means that the volume of currency it issues is in proper sync with the true needs of real economy of work, labor, production and all that is useful to Syria’s people, instead of being in sync with parasitic, usurious, speculative foreign financiers. The latter seek to control local central banks so they can artificially limit the volume of currency available for genuine economic needs, especially the no-interest credit needed to finance useful things in the real economy: power plants, roads, gas works, housing, private enterprise and initiatives. This forces productive players – public and private – to have to resort to deadly interest and usury-based private banking loans whereupon the eternal debt chain starts to grow and grow as the so-called ‘sovereign debt crises’ that hit country after country throughout decades of time eloquently show.

By artificially distorting the volume of ‘public currency’ issued by sovereign central banks that generates no interest, countries are thus forced to resort to high interest bearing ‘private currency’ (loans) handled by the monopolistic private bankster cabal in the hands of Rothschild, Rockefeller, Warburg, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, CitiCorp, JP Morgan Chase interests.

Clearly, a very good reason for these parasitic banksters to want to take out Syria.

2) Syria has no IMF (International Monetary Fund) debt. This means that Syria’s leadership understands that the IMF – a public multilateral agency of member governments – is controlled by the global mega-bankers, and acts as their auditor and debt collection police whenever one of its weaker member states runs into sovereign debt trouble, which is another way of saying when those countries reach a point where they cannot siphon enough money out of their real economies – the work, toil and labor of its people – to hand it over to the parasitic private global bankers.

In a sense, the IMF’s real job is to act as the global power elite’s tax office – its ‘IRS’ so to speak – only that it does not tax people directly, but rather through proxy government and nation-states’ tax offices. Are we starting to understand the real roots of the ‘debt crises’ hitting Greece, Cyprus, Ireland, Argentina, Spain, Italy, UK, US, Portugal, France?

Global slavery couldn’t have been better thought out and planned!

Actually, true Islamic nations rightly reject banking fractional lending and interest practices as being immoral. That’s what Libya’s Gaddafi did, and what Syria and Iran presently do.

Clearly, a very good reason for parasitic banksters to want to take out Syria, just as they took out Libya and now target Iran.

3) Syria has banned genetically modified (GMO) seeds – Bashar Assad banned GMO’s in order “to preserve human health,” knowing full well that the Monsantos of this world are out to control the world’s entire food supply, because coming global crises will not only be about oil, but about how much food countries will be able to put on their people’s tables.

That’s why after invading Iraq, the US ordered that only Monsanto seeds should to be used. That’s why submissive client states like Argentina are poisoning their own soil and people by bowing down really low to Monsanto’s demands.

Clearly, a very good reason for Monsanto to want to take out Syria.

4) Syria’s population is well informed about the New World Order – Its media and universities openly debate the global power elite’s influence in things. This means that they fully grasp the fact that real power in the West lies not in the White House, 10 Downing Street, Congress or Parliament, but rather with the complex and powerful grid of elite think-tanks led by New York’s Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Conference, Trilateral Commission, Americas Society, World Economic forum and London’s Royal Institute of International Affairs, which interact with mega-bankers, media, universities, the military, multinationals and the corporate over-world.

As our young friend aptly explains, Syrians dare to talk about secret societies like Freemasonry or Yale University’s Skull & Bone Lodge whose members include top cats like former President George W Bush and current Secretary of State John Kerry.

Clearly, a very good reason for those top cats to order their errand boy Obama to take out Syria.

5) Syria has massive oil and gas reserves – here we go again! Every time the West goes to war to protect “freedom, human rights and democracy,” there’s always the nauseous stench of oil; whether in Iraq, Libya, Kuwait, the Falklands, Afghanistan… Syria has offshore and onshore oil and gas reserves, and is helping to build a massive pipeline together with Iran, but without Western oil giants’ control. Clearly, the full militarization of all oil production and reserve zones, and the militarization of transportation routes to ‘bring oil home’ from everywhere in the world, is a key on-going joint US/UK strategy.

Clearly, a very good reason for BP, Exxon, Royal Dutch Shell, Texaco, Total, Repsol and Chevron to want to take out Syria.

6) Syria clearly and unequivocally opposes Zionism and Israel – Israel practices criminal racist apartheid against the occupied Palestinians. Syria’s leadership has no qualms in accusing Israel of being what it is: a racist, imperialist, genocidal entity, as the Wall of Hate Israel erected around Palestine clearly shows. Israel manages what can only be described as an Auschwitz-like mega-concentration camp in Palestine with millions of ill-treated, often-assassinated and humiliated prisoners.

Such geopolitical clarity of mind was shared by Gadhafi’s Libya and Saddam’s Iraq, and today also by Iran, China, Russia and India.

Clearly a very good reason for political juggernauts like AIPAC (American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee), the World Jewish Congress, the ADL (Anti-Defamation League), Likud, Kadima and Netanyahu/Lieberman to want to take out Syria.

7) Syria is one of the last secular Muslim states in the Middle East, whilst Zionist Jewish supremacists – in line with born-again-Israel-First-Bushite ‘Christian’ kooks in the West – need for everybody to align to the will of their dark demiurge god which has its own ‘chosen people’.

The Global Power Elite’s implicit order is clear: everybody must believe in Israeli superiority, whilst our young Syrian friend aptly points out that Syria, like Saddam’s Iraq, Gaddafi’s Libya and Iran just could not be convinced of that.

She adds that in Syria, “asking about religion is not polite,” because Syria has bred many of mankind’s prime religions for thousands of years, and those millennia have taught Syrians to be sensitive, tolerant and respectful of all creeds. Something we clearly do not see in the pro-West Arabian sheikdoms, nor in the US, UK and EU with its anti-Islamic paranoia, and where laws are passed imposing the most blatant cultural, political and historical lies demanded by religious bigots who insist that their god will only accept their own holocaust offerings.

Clearly, another very good reason for neocon fanatics and their Orwellian Thought Police to want to take out Syria.

8) Syria proudly maintains and protects its political and cultural national identity – she stresses how Syria “holds on to its uniqueness,” whilst respecting the uniqueness of others. The standardized coming world government simply abhors anybody standing up to its imposed standardization of thought, behavior and ‘values’, where the West’s global megabrands, shopping malls, and fashion & style dictatorships “makes every place look pretty much the same, which leads to a very boring world.”

Today, revolutionary thought in the West even amongst the young, boils down to choosing between Coke and Pepsi.

Clearly, a very good reason for Coke, Pepsi, McDonalds, Levis, Lauder, Planet Hollywood and Burger King to want to take out Syria.

Our young Syrian friend ends her message by reminding us that “if Syria falls, it could be the tipping point the ends in victory for the New World Order,” adding that today “Syria is the frontline against the New World Order.”

Wise words from a young lady who understands the catastrophic failure of the Western powers’ political class, who have now completely turned our world upside down; where the very worst and most malignant criminals have infected governments and private power structures, be it in Washington, New York, London, and Paris, or in Berlin, Rome, Bogota, Madrid, Tokyo, Seoul, Amsterdam, Buenos Aires or Riyadh.

If sometimes Hollywood serves as a showcase that reveals the darkest recesses of the Western power elite’s sick group psyche, we might even say that they are playing our the ‘Planet of the Apes’ saga, where a weird and hellish genetic inversion places horrendously destructive animals in places of world power, whilst noble vanquished humans are enslaved and thrown into cages.

Is this today’s metaphor best describing the US against Syria drama?

The eight points mentioned above are as good a guide to get all our countries back on course as we can muster in today’s troubled, out-of-control world.

Whether American, European, Arab, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu or Shinto, the time has come for ‘We the People’ to make our voices heard on the streets, with neighbors, family and friends, work and school colleagues, through social networks, demanding that Western so-called ‘democratically-elected’ governments – all of which are the direct result of the will of money-sloshing elites that financed their climb to top government posts through their favorite lie they call ‘democracy’ – stop doing what they are doing, and start doing what we demand they do. Now; immediately: we must take our countries back.

Our young Syrian friend has certainly set an example for all of us to follow.

Here is the clip from SBS’ “Insight” last year:

UPDATE:

Interestingly, it appears that SyrianGirl forewarned of a likely “chemical weapons” false flag event more than a year ago –

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Bankers Crucified On Live TV

5 Sep

WARNING: Do not watch if bad language offends.

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Spain Introduces Sunlight Tax

28 Jul

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Are you one of those millions of “useful idiots” who believe that our elites really, truly want to reduce CO2 emissions, to “save the planet” from “man-made global warming”?

Ask yourself WHY then, why they would try to stop you from privately harnessing the energy of the sun for yourself and your family — CO2 emissions-free — by introducing a sunlight tax, designed to “encourage” (ie, force) you to use the state-“sponsored” — make that, privatised, international banker-financed — energy providers instead.

From Mike Shedlock’s “Mish’s Global Economics”:

Spain Levies Consumption Tax On Sunlight

Proving that idiocy truly has no bounds, Spain issued a “royal decree” taxing sunlight gatherers. The state threatens fines as much as 30 million euros for those who illegally gather sunlight without paying a tax.

The tax is just enough to make sure that homeowners cannot gather and store solar energy cheaper than state-sponsored providers.

Via Mish-modified Google Translate from Energias Renovables, please consider Photovoltaic Sector, Stunned

The Secretary of State for Energy, Alberto Nadal, signed a draft royal decree in which consumption taxes are levied on those who want to start solar power systems on their rooftops. The tax, labeled a “backup toll” is high enough to ensure that it will be cheaper to keep buying energy from current providers.

Spain Privatizes the Sun

Via Google translate from El Pais, please consider Spain Privatizes The Sun

If you get caught collecting photons of sunlight for your own use, you can be fined as much as 30 million euros.

If you were thinking the best energy option was to buy some solar panels that were down 80% in price, you can forget about it.

“Of all the possible scenarios, this is the worst,” said José Donoso, president of the Spanish Photovoltaic Union (UNEF), which represents 85% of the sector’s activity.

Before the decree it took 12 years to recover the investment in a residential installation of 2.4 kilowatts of power. Following the decree, it will take an additional 23 years according to estimates by UNEF.

Petition of the Candle Makers Revisited

And so the “Petition of the Candle Makers” comes to pass.

I have written about the “petition” on many occasions, but here is the latest reference: Extremely Difficult to Keep Up With Economic Stupidity

Reflections on “Unfair Competition”

Corporations always consider it “unfair” when any other company can do things faster, smarter, or cheaper than they can. The buggy whip industry once protested cars.

Today, land-line telecom companies have to compete with wireless and they don’t like it. Now, we see protests about VOIP (voice over internet protocol).

Technology marches on. But France does not like it. The French solution is to tax Skype because it has an “unfair advantage“.

This is an age-old unwinnable argument.

Petition of the Candle Makers

The ultimate irony is France’s preposterous “unfair advantage” argument was lampooned by French economist Frederic Bastiat back in 1845 when he penned ‘Petition of the Candle Makers‘.

In his article, candle makers were incensed that the light of the sun could be had for free. The sun’s unfair trade advantage was to the “detriment of fair industries” who could not compete against the sun’s price.

Something had to be done to “shut off as much as possible, all access to natural light, and thereby create a need for artificial light” so that “industry in France will encouraged”.

The moral to this story is “Don’t propose something purposefully stupid hoping to make a point. Some idiot might actually think it’s a good idea and do it”.

Mike “Mish” Shedlock

 

Mike Shedlock and others are wrong to mock this as simple greed and idiocy.

Because it is symptomatic of something far more evil, planned, and pervasive.

Every mainstream “issue” — like “man-made global warming” — is really all about something other than what you see, at “face value”.

It is really all about Money. And far more importantly, Control.

More and more of both, for the international banker class.

And less and less for you.

Know Your Real Enemy.

 

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“I Picked 7 Billion Out Of My Arse”: Audio Reveals Bankers Joking About Bailouts

26 Jun

Screen shot 2013-06-26 at 9.07.18 AM

This is the culture, the mind-set, the spirit which has now almost completely enslaved the world to the power of usury.

From Business Insider:

Once again, we have some more embarrassing conversations between bankers…

The Irish Independent, a Dublin-based newspaper, has uncovered tapes of an internal phone conversation from September 2008 between two executives at Anglo Irish Bank during its bailout deal and they sound pretty scandalous.   The Irish Independent points out that the recordings show they misled the Central Bank.

The executives from the recording have been identified as John Bowe (head of the bank’s capital markets) and Peter Fitzgerald (director of retail banking).

However, Bowe “categorically denied” that he misled the Central Bank and Fitzgerald, who wasn’t involved in discussions with regulators, said he was unaware of any intention to mislead, the report said.

Either way, the newly revealed recordings are still embarrassing.

Here are some partial excerpts (via the Irish Independent):

The two bankers begin their conversation jokingly comparing themselves to being able to walk on water and drink beer out of both hands.

John Bowe: “Hello”

Receptionist: “John I have Peter Fitz for you.”

Bowe: “Oh yeah, OK.”

Bowe: “As me granny used to say, you must be therapeutic…”

Peter Fitzgerald: “What does that mean? Can I work the computer is it? (Both laugh)

Bowe: “Therapeutic. Therapeutic…I was just ringing you.”

Fitzgerald: “I’m ambidextrous as well. It means I can walk on land and water.” (More laughter)

Bowe: “You can drink, you can drink beer out of both hands…” (laughter)

Then they get down to business.  Bowe tells Fitzgerald that they met with the Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority (IFSRA) the previous day about getting €7 billion.  They laugh how they will never be able to pay it back.

Bowe:  ”So we went down..and we basically said. In Central, yeah. And I mean, to cut a long story short we sort of said. ‘Look, what we need is seven billion euros…and we’re going to give you and we’re going to give you, what we’re going to give you is our loan collateral so we’re not giving you ECB, we’re giving you the loan clause.

“We gave him a term sheet and we put a pro not facility together and we said that’s what we need. And that kind of sobered up everybody pretty quickly, you know.”

Fitzgerald: “Yeah.”

Fitzgerald: “And is that €7 billion a term?”

Bowe: “This is €7 billion bridging.”

Fitzgerald: “Yeah.”

Bowe: “So…so it is bridged until we can pay you back…which is never.” (Both laugh)

Then they joke how the regulators would need to change their underpants after hearing the terms of that deal.

Bowe: ”So under the terms that say repayment, we say; ‘No…’” (laughter)

Fitzgerald: (Laughing) “None…just none. Not applicable. OK and what did he say? ‘I need a change of underwear?’

Fitzgerald: “Jesus that’s a lot of dosh…Jesus f—–g hell and God…well do you know the Central Bank only has €14 billion of total investments so that would be going up 20…Gee..that would be seen.

Bowe: (Laughing) “There was a bit of that…there was a bit of that.  ’And how would we do that? We would need to give you…we need to…’Jesus you’re kind of asking us to play ducks and drakes with the regulations.’ And we said: ‘Yeah.’ We said: ‘Look what we are telling you is if we get into difficulties, we have 100,000 plus lump sum depositors in Ireland all of whom would be very vocal.’”

Fitzgerald asks Bowe how he came up with the 7 billion figure.  Bowe responds that like then-CEO David Drumm, he picked it out of his “arse.”

Fitzgerald: “Ah we are, yeah, yeah and, em, what, how did you arrive at the seven?

Bowe: “Just, as Drummer would say, ‘picked it out of my arse’, you know. Em…I mean, look, what we did was we basically said: ‘What is the amount we can securitize over the next six months?’ And basically say to them: ‘Look our problem is time, it’s not our ability to create the liquidity, the enemy is time here.’”

Fitzgerald: “Yeah.”

Bowe: “So we can rebuild, in other words, we can rebuild the liquidity off our loan book, but what we can’t do, we can’t do it now and the balance sheet’s leaking now.”

Bowe tells Fitzgerald that they actually need more money than the 7 billion figure.

Bowe: Yeah and that number is seven, but the reality is that actually we need more than that. But the strategy here is you pull them in, you get them to write a big [check] and they have to keep, they have to support their money, you know.”

Fitzgerald: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They’ve got skin in the game and that’s the key.”

Bowe: “They have and they have invested a lot. If they saw, if they saw, the enormity of it up front, they might decide, they might decide they have a choice. You know what I mean? They might say the cost to the taxpayer is too high. But…em…if it doesn’t look too big at the outset…if it looks big, big enough to be important, but not too big that it kind of spoils everything,

Fitzgerald: “Yeah, Yeah.”

….

The actual audio recording is available at the link.

UPDATE:

Good to see the mainstream media picking up this story. From The Australian:

IRISH government ministers have been accused of turning a blind eye to the country’s financial collapse after tapes emerged of top bankers joking about bailouts.

In a set of phone calls recorded five years ago, executives at the toxic Anglo Irish Bank laugh about abusing a blanket bank guarantee to beef up the books at the expense of the UK and Germany.

One conversation – taped two days after the fateful September 30 2008 bank guarantee, and published by the Irish Independent – features former chief executive David Drumm giggling while his colleague John Bowe recites lines from Deutschland Uber Alles.

Drumm, who has since fled to the US, and Bowe are heard laughing about concerns that the guarantee would drive a wedge between Ireland and its EU partners.

The former said he would give “two fingers” to UK concerns…

Drumm and Bowe laugh about damage being done to Ireland’s reputation and concerns of flight of deposits out of Britain.

“So f***in’ what. Just take it anyway… stick the fingers up,” Drumm said about cash flowing in from Europe.

The bankers, recorded in January 2009, sound delighted with the temporary financial windfall, saying it was “fantastic” that if Anglo was nationalised they would keep their jobs and become civil servants.

Ah yes, a common dream of parasites everywhere.

To be a highly-paid, job-guaranteed, Big Government “employee”. A “public servant”.

Like politicians.

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The Bankers’ Net Is Closing

25 Jun

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MacroBusiness’ chief economist Leith van Onselen, aka Unconventional Economist, has today posted a video clip from CNBC featuring one Stephen Cecchetti, economic advisor to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). The context of the interview is the recent annual report from the BIS warning against continued “stimulus” by the world’s central banks (my bold emphasis added):

“What we are saying is not that there needs to be immediate austerity, but that the trajectories, the long run health of the balance sheets of the governments in many of the advanced industrialised economies is pretty bad at this point; that with aging populations and with commitments that have been made to the elderly for pension and health care, that the debt that’s created by governments is going to skyrocket, and before it does that they need to implement reforms. Now what this means is that you have to worry about the long run…”

Note the use of the term “trajectories”. This is precisely the description that has been used by our own Barnaby Joyce in making the same warning, since late 2009.

However, that is not the primary point I wish to make here.

What most captured my attention on reading the Unconventional Economists’ post, was the title he chose.

“Are central banks living on borrowed time?”

Presumably this is referring to the BIS’s warning that central banks cannot continue “printing” monetary “stimulus”. But I see a deeper, if unintended truth in that title. I suggest that it might be interpreted literally.

It would not surprise this blogger in the least to see a global scenario begin to play out at some point in the not-too-distant future, one somewhat similar to the following abbreviated plot line:

1. GFC 2.0 — stock markets crash, global credit “squeeze”, economic collapse, mass bank failures.

2. Attempted “bail-in” to “save” banks using account holders’ deposits; proves insufficient, governments “have” to assist anyway.

3. Government balance sheets continue to explode with unsustainable debt; those (like Australia) not yet underwater are now drawn into the maelstrom.

4. Austerity measures plus unemployment lead to social chaos, war/s, etc.

5. Central banks increasingly blamed for (a) failing to foresee trouble, (b) poor interest rate settings leading to high debt levels, thus causing the crisis, and (c) excessive money “printing” in failed attempts to restore the economy.

6. Growing calls for Public Central Banking; (ie) the end of fractional reserve banking, and of “independent” central banks.

7. Under the “guidance” of a Grand Plan designed by a “neutral”, global body — the BIS, IMF, etc — national governments take over control of the money supply in their country — or region.

8. The BIS, IMF etc establish a new “global reserve currency”, that each national / regional currency must be linked to — for “financial stability”.

This scenario is not so far-fetched as some may imagine.

Already there are increasing numbers of “experts” and other august entities arguing for point #6. Perhaps the most prominent example being the IMF’s 2012 paper, “The Chicago Plan Revisited”:

IMF’s epic plan to conjure away debt and dethrone bankers

One could slash private debt by 100pc of GDP, boost growth, stabilize prices, and dethrone bankers all at the same time. It could be done cleanly and painlessly, by legislative command, far more quickly than anybody imagined.

The conjuring trick is to replace our system of private bank-created money — roughly 97pc of the money supply — with state-created money.

We return to the historical norm, before Charles II placed control of the money supply in private hands with the English Free Coinage Act of 1666.

Specifically, it means an assault on “fractional reserve banking”. If lenders are forced to put up 100pc reserve backing for deposits, they lose the exorbitant privilege of creating money out of thin air.

The nation regains sovereign control over the money supply.

And if the sovereign has lost (or loses) control over itself, due to that sovereign debt “trajectory”?

The real question we might ask ourselves is, “Who or what would really control the ‘money’ supply then?”

For my part, the long history of predatory incursions on national sovereignty by the IMF in particular, is reason sufficient to vigorously oppose any idea or suggestion that comes from within their ranks.

Or the BIS ranks.

Remember, it is thanks to the Financial Stability Board (FSB) — an entity under the auspices of the BIS — that the G20 Governments All Agreed To Cyprus-Style Theft of Bank Deposits … In 2010.

The speed with which the FSB co-opted the agreement of the world’s politicians, granting the FSB the power to design a new regulatory system for achieving “financial stability” — in April 2009, mere months after ‘Peak Fear’ in October 2008 — should cause any critically-thinking person to wonder whether this has come about entirely by “unforeseen” accident, or by design.

UPDATE:

With thanks to reader Kevin Moore, the following clip offers some insight into why supposedly “neutral”, harmless, above-politics, centralised global bodies such as the IMF, BIS, World Bank et al, should never be trusted –

UPDATE:

MacroBusiness contributor Greg McKenna, aka Deus Forex Machina, says that central bankers appear to be coordinating their language, and potentially causing increased negative sentiment, in the midst of the present global stock market falls (my bold emphasis added) –

Central banks want stocks lower

“With so many Fed Governors talking this week I thought we would get soothing words from them so as to not spook the market any further than it had already been but in the release from the BIS over the weekend, in the statement from the PBOC yesterday and in comments from two senior Fed Governors overnight I see almost the exact opposite to what I had expected.

Clearly there is a global central bank compact that has emerged which says that stock and property market bubbles are not the way to get a sustainable cure to the economic woes of the globe…”

Could it simply be that certain people now want the markets (thus, economies) to crash?

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The Financialisation Of Nature

12 Mar

From Carbon Trade Watch:

The banks have successfully infiltrated the international institutions. The creation, and official recognition, of an UNEP Finance branch allows them to promote their private interests as public interests. Central in this strategy is the launch, at Rio+20, of a “Natural Capital Declaration”. What is this? The vision of the financiers, based on the conception of environment and of life as a simple capital resource, and their support for mechanisms that push the financialization of nature.

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Fisked By Fisk: “Bankers Are The Dictators Of The West”

9 Apr

A few months ago, Robert Fisk of The Independent UK took the gloves off (my emphasis added):

Writing from the very region that produces more clichés per square foot than any other “story” – the Middle East – I should perhaps pause before I say I have never read so much garbage, so much utter drivel, as I have about the world financial crisis.

But I will not hold my fire. It seems to me that the reporting of the collapse of capitalism has reached a new low which even the Middle East cannot surpass for sheer unadulterated obedience to the very institutions and Harvard “experts” who have helped to bring about the whole criminal disaster.

Let’s kick off with the “Arab Spring” – in itself a grotesque verbal distortion of the great Arab/Muslim awakening which is shaking the Middle East – and the trashy parallels with the social protests in Western capitals. We’ve been deluged with reports of how the poor or the disadvantaged in the West have “taken a leaf” out of the “Arab spring” book, how demonstrators in America, Canada, Britain, Spain and Greece have been “inspired” by the huge demonstrations that brought down the regimes in Egypt, Tunisia and – up to a point – Libya. But this is nonsense.

The real comparison, needless to say, has been dodged by Western reporters, so keen to extol the anti-dictator rebellions of the Arabs, so anxious to ignore protests against “democratic” Western governments, so desperate to disparage these demonstrations, to suggest that they are merely picking up on the latest fad in the Arab world. The truth is somewhat different. What drove the Arabs in their tens of thousands and then their millions on to the streets of Middle East capitals was a demand for dignity and a refusal to accept that the local family-ruled dictators actually owned their countries. The Mubaraks and the Ben Alis and the Gaddafis and the kings and emirs of the Gulf (and Jordan) and the Assads all believed that they had property rights to their entire nations. Egypt belonged to Mubarak Inc, Tunisia to Ben Ali Inc (and the Traboulsi family), Libya to Gaddafi Inc. And so on. The Arab martyrs against dictatorship died to prove that their countries belonged to their own people.

And that is the true parallel in the West. The protest movements are indeed against Big Business – a perfectly justified cause – and against “governments”. What they have really divined, however, albeit a bit late in the day, is that they have for decades bought into a fraudulent democracy: they dutifully vote for political parties – which then hand their democratic mandate and people’s power to the banks and the derivative traders and the rating agencies, all three backed up by the slovenly and dishonest coterie of “experts” from America’s top universities and “think tanks”, who maintain the fiction that this is a crisis of globalisation rather than a massive financial con trick foisted on the voters.

The banks and the rating agencies have become the dictators of the West. Like the Mubaraks and Ben Alis, the banks believed – and still believe – they are owners of their countries. The elections which give them power have – through the gutlessness and collusion of governments – become as false as the polls to which the Arabs were forced to troop decade after decade to anoint their own national property owners. Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank of Scotland became the Mubaraks and Ben Alis of the US and the UK, each gobbling up the people’s wealth in bogus rewards and bonuses for their vicious bosses on a scale infinitely more rapacious than their greedy Arab dictator-brothers could imagine.

I didn’t need Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job on BBC2 this week – though it helped – to teach me that the ratings agencies and the US banks are interchangeable, that their personnel move seamlessly between agency, bank and US government. The ratings lads (almost always lads, of course) who AAA-rated sub-prime loans and derivatives in America are now – via their poisonous influence on the markets – clawing down the people of Europe by threatening to lower or withdraw the very same ratings from European nations which they lavished upon criminals before the financial crash in the US. I believe that understatement tends to win arguments. But, forgive me, who are these creatures whose ratings agencies now put more fear into the French than Rommel did in 1940?

Why don’t my journalist mates in Wall Street tell me? How come the BBC and CNN and – oh, dear, even al-Jazeera – treat these criminal communities as unquestionable institutions of power? Why no investigations – Inside Job started along the path – into these scandalous double-dealers? It reminds me so much of the equally craven way that so many American reporters cover the Middle East, eerily avoiding any direct criticism of Israel, abetted by an army of pro-Likud lobbyists to explain to viewers why American “peacemaking” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be trusted, why the good guys are “moderates”, the bad guys “terrorists”.

The Arabs have at least begun to shrug off this nonsense. But when the Wall Street protesters do the same, they become “anarchists”, the social “terrorists” of American streets who dare to demand that the Bernankes and Geithners should face the same kind of trial as Hosni Mubarak. We in the West – our governments – have created our dictators. But, unlike the Arabs, we can’t touch them.

The Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, solemnly informed his people this week that they were not responsible for the crisis in which they found themselves. They already knew that, of course. What he did not tell them was who was to blame. Isn’t it time he and his fellow EU prime ministers did tell us? And our reporters, too?

Fisk is right.

If you have any doubts about that, take the time to review this blog’s many articles showing how banksters rule Australia too.

Here’s just a small selection out of many, many examples:

The World’s Most Immoral Institution Tells You How

Ticking Time Bomb Hidden In The Carbon Tax

By Saul’s Own Words They Stand Condemned

Funding For Policy Scandal – Australia Is A Kleptocracy

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“We Should Make The Legs Of The Bankers Tremble”

17 Dec

Some politicians, at least, are finally waking up.

Since everyone missed the sterling example (pun intended) of Iceland defaulting on British and Dutch bankers, perhaps some will now sit up and take notice of the Portuguese Socialist Party threatening to take the “nuclear option” on German and French bankers:

“We have an atomic bomb that we can use in the face of the Germans and the French: this atomic bomb is simply that we won’t pay,” said Pedro Nuno Santos, vice-president of the Socialist Party in the parliament.

“Debt is our only weapon and we must use it to impose better conditions, because recession itself is what is stopping us complying with the (EU-IMF Troika) accord. We should make the legs of the German bankers tremble,” he said.

Mr Santos is right.

Debt as a weapon can be a two-edged sword. At the level of nations, at least.

The bigger the debt, the bigger the danger for the lender.

If you or I default on our debts, we’re in the poorhouse.

If a nation defaults … things get better. Faster.

Icelandic politicians woke up. Only after nearly the entire population took to the streets, of course.

Rather than have “the nation” (ie, the taxpayer) take on the debts of its collapsed banks, the people insisted on telling the British and Dutch bankers where to go (ie, they defaulted).

In the face of enormous international pressure to “do the right thing”, and “honour the debts” by “socialising the losses”.

The Icelandic people didn’t fall for the “Too Big To Fail” con.

And so, how is Iceland travelling today?

From a must-read article in Business Insider:

Iceland’s basic economic indicators are now stronger than countries that received bail-outs.

Iceland’s economy will have shrunk by an average of 0.75% a year in the 4 year period of 2008-2012. For comparison, Ireland’s economy has declined at a rate just under 2% while Greece will have decline 1.6% a year.

Unemployment has been less of a problem in Iceland as well:

  • Iceland: 5.8%
  • Ireland: 14%
  • Greece: 15%
  • Portugal: 12.4%

Iceland’s economy today is growing, with 3% annual growth expected in 2012, and the government anticipating a budget surplus by 2013:

Click to enlarge

All the fearmongering that is pushed by banksters, their shadow banking overlords in the IMF, World Bank etc, and of course, their political muppets, about the “dire” consequences of letting banks fail or defaulting on national debt … is self-serving lies.

It’s long, long past time that all the rest of the people of the world followed Iceland’s lead, and chose to “make the legs of the bankers tremble”.

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Goldman Sachs Conquers Europe

28 Nov

From the UK’s Independent:

Click to enlarge

What price the new democracy? Goldman Sachs conquers Europe

The ascension of Mario Monti to the Italian prime ministership is remarkable for more reasons than it is possible to count. By replacing the scandal-surfing Silvio Berlusconi, Italy has dislodged the undislodgeable. By imposing rule by unelected technocrats, it has suspended the normal rules of democracy, and maybe democracy itself. And by putting a senior adviser at Goldman Sachs in charge of a Western nation, it has taken to new heights the political power of an investment bank that you might have thought was prohibitively politically toxic.

This is the most remarkable thing of all: a giant leap forward for, or perhaps even the successful culmination of, the Goldman Sachs Project.

It is not just Mr Monti. The European Central Bank, another crucial player in the sovereign debt drama, is under ex-Goldman management, and the investment bank’s alumni hold sway in the corridors of power in almost every European nation, as they have done in the US throughout the financial crisis. Until Wednesday, the International Monetary Fund’s European division was also run by a Goldman man, Antonio Borges, who just resigned for personal reasons.

Even before the upheaval in Italy, there was no sign of Goldman Sachs living down its nickname as “the Vampire Squid”, and now that its tentacles reach to the top of the eurozone, sceptical voices are raising questions over its influence. The political decisions taken in the coming weeks will determine if the eurozone can and will pay its debts – and Goldman’s interests are intricately tied up with the answer to that question.

Simon Johnson, the former International Monetary Fund economist, in his book 13 Bankers, argued that Goldman Sachs and the other large banks had become so close to government in the run-up to the financial crisis that the US was effectively an oligarchy. At least European politicians aren’t “bought and paid for” by corporations, as in the US, he says. “Instead what you have in Europe is a shared world-view among the policy elite and the bankers, a shared set of goals and mutual reinforcement of illusions.”

This is The Goldman Sachs Project. Put simply, it is to hug governments close. Every business wants to advance its interests with the regulators that can stymie them and the politicians who can give them a tax break, but this is no mere lobbying effort. Goldman is there to provide advice for governments and to provide financing, to send its people into public service and to dangle lucrative jobs in front of people coming out of government. The Project is to create such a deep exchange of people and ideas and money that it is impossible to tell the difference between the public interest and the Goldman Sachs interest.

Mr Monti is one of Italy’s most eminent economists, and he spent most of his career in academia and thinktankery, but it was when Mr Berlusconi appointed him to the European Commission in 1995 that Goldman Sachs started to get interested in him. First as commissioner for the internal market, and then especially as commissioner for competition, he has made decisions that could make or break the takeover and merger deals that Goldman’s bankers were working on or providing the funding for. Mr Monti also later chaired the Italian Treasury’s committee on the banking and financial system, which set the country’s financial policies.

With these connections, it was natural for Goldman to invite him to join its board of international advisers. The bank’s two dozen-strong international advisers act as informal lobbyists for its interests with the politicians that regulate its work. Other advisers include Otmar Issing who, as a board member of the German Bundesbank and then the European Central Bank, was one of the architects of the euro.

Perhaps the most prominent ex-politician inside the bank is Peter Sutherland, Attorney General of Ireland in the 1980s and another former EU Competition Commissioner. He is now non-executive chairman of Goldman’s UK-based broker-dealer arm, Goldman Sachs International, and until its collapse and nationalisation he was also a non-executive director of Royal Bank of Scotland. He has been a prominent voice within Ireland on its bailout by the EU, arguing that the terms of emergency loans should be eased, so as not to exacerbate the country’s financial woes. The EU agreed to cut Ireland’s interest rate this summer.

Picking up well-connected policymakers on their way out of government is only one half of the Project, sending Goldman alumni into government is the other half. Like Mr Monti, Mario Draghi, who took over as President of the ECB on 1 November, has been in and out of government and in and out of Goldman. He was a member of the World Bank and managing director of the Italian Treasury before spending three years as managing director of Goldman Sachs International between 2002 and 2005 – only to return to government as president of the Italian central bank.

Mr Draghi has been dogged by controversy over the accounting tricks conducted by Italy and other nations on the eurozone periphery as they tried to squeeze into the single currency a decade ago. By using complex derivatives, Italy and Greece were able to slim down the apparent size of their government debt, which euro rules mandated shouldn’t be above 60 per cent of the size of the economy. And the brains behind several of those derivatives were the men and women of Goldman Sachs.

The bank’s traders created a number of financial deals that allowed Greece to raise money to cut its budget deficit immediately, in return for repayments over time. In one deal, Goldman channelled $1bn of funding to the Greek government in 2002 in a transaction called a cross-currency swap. On the other side of the deal, working in the National Bank of Greece, was Petros Christodoulou, who had begun his career at Goldman, and who has been promoted now to head the office managing government Greek debt. Lucas Papademos, now installed as Prime Minister in Greece’s unity government, was a technocrat running the Central Bank of Greece at the time.

Goldman says that the debt reduction achieved by the swaps was negligible in relation to euro rules, but it expressed some regrets over the deals. Gerald Corrigan, a Goldman partner who came to the bank after running the New York branch of the US Federal Reserve, told a UK parliamentary hearing last year: “It is clear with hindsight that the standards of transparency could have been and probably should have been higher.”

When the issue was raised at confirmation hearings in the European Parliament for his job at the ECB, Mr Draghi says he wasn’t involved in the swaps deals either at the Treasury or at Goldman.

It has proved impossible to hold the line on Greece, which under the latest EU proposals is effectively going to default on its debt by asking creditors to take a “voluntary” haircut of 50 per cent on its bonds, but the current consensus in the eurozone is that the creditors of bigger nations like Italy and Spain must be paid in full. These creditors, of course, are the continent’s big banks, and it is their health that is the primary concern of policymakers. The combination of austerity measures imposed by the new technocratic governments in Athens and Rome and the leaders of other eurozone countries, such as Ireland, and rescue funds from the IMF and the largely German-backed European Financial Stability Facility, can all be traced to this consensus.

“My former colleagues at the IMF are running around trying to justify bailouts of €1.5trn-€4trn, but what does that mean?” says Simon Johnson. “It means bailing out the creditors 100 per cent. It is another bank bailout, like in 2008: The mechanism is different, in that this is happening at the sovereign level not the bank level, but the rationale is the same.”

So certain is the financial elite that the banks will be bailed out, that some are placing bet-the-company wagers on just such an outcome. Jon Corzine, a former chief executive of Goldman Sachs, returned to Wall Street last year after almost a decade in politics and took control of a historic firm called MF Global. He placed a $6bn bet with the firm’s money that Italian government bonds will not default.

When the bet was revealed last month, clients and trading partners decided it was too risky to do business with MF Global and the firm collapsed within days. It was one of the ten biggest bankruptcies in US history.

The grave danger is that, if Italy stops paying its debts, creditor banks could be made insolvent. Goldman Sachs, which has written over $2trn of insurance, including an undisclosed amount on eurozone countries’ debt, would not escape unharmed, especially if some of the $2trn of insurance it has purchased on that insurance turns out to be with a bank that has gone under. No bank – and especially not the Vampire Squid – can easily untangle its tentacles from the tentacles of its peers. This is the rationale for the bailouts and the austerity, the reason we are getting more Goldman, not less. The alternative is a second financial crisis, a second economic collapse.

Shared illusions, perhaps? Who would dare test it?

And in Australia?

We have the Right Honourable Malcolm Turnbull MP.

I would suggest to readers that independent trader Alessio Rastani wasn’t too far wrong:

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Funding For Policy Scandal – Australia Is A Kleptocracy

26 Jul

Do you want to know how deep the rabbit hole goes?

h/t to Twitterer @Kmorefive for bringing the following to my attention.

From Business Spectator (emphasis added) –

An ALP funding horror

Robert Gottliebsen

If an election is held in the next few months, Australian banks will play a big role in the outcome. And unless there is a dramatic change in the fortunes of the parties, the banks will still be key players if (as is likely) the next election is two years away.

Australia has rarely seen such a banking/election event in its history and it certainly did not occur in recent elections. The looming role of the banks could force the ALP into a pre-election leadership change and in extreme situations force it to modify its carbon tax.

To understand the pivotal role of Australian banks in the funding of political parties requires a deep knowledge of how the system works.

For the most part, in the vicinity of three quarters of a major party’s funding in most elections comes from the public purse. The ‘public purse’ amounts are allocated to parties after the election in accordance with the proportion of the votes that are achieved.

But there is no forward allocation of money. The distribution of ‘public purse’ money is strictly governed by the proportion of the votes actually achieved.

ALP organisers are not looking forward to meeting with their bankers as the election nears. They are deeply apprehensive that as a result of current opinion polls, their bankers will slash the amount of election funding available to the ALP and lock it into a low vote.

Conversely, Liberal and National Party organisers believe that as a result of their opinion polling they will receive a huge increase in support from their bankers to fund unprecedented amounts of advertising and promotion.

If, theoretically, an election was to be held in a few months’ time, ALP organisers would go to their bankers and negotiate to borrow the money required to fund the campaign expecting to pay it back when they receive their ‘public purse’ money after the election. This might be the conversation:

Banker: What proportion of the votes do the opinion polls suggest you will gain?

ALP organiser: The current Nielson poll suggests we would gain 26 per cent of the primary vote but we know we will do better.

Banker: Maybe you will, but if I lend you money that represents the amount you will receive from the ‘public purse’ if you attained, say, 40 per cent of the vote, I might bankrupt the ALP if you only receive 26 per cent because you could not pay me back. That would not only give my bank a bad debt but it would be disastrous for Australian democracy.

ALP organiser: But it will be disastrous for Australian democracy if we are decimated at the polls because we have only meagre advertising money.

Banker: I am sorry but I have shareholders and I need a safety margin. I will fund your advertising on the basis that you receive 20 per cent of the votes. You will need to be much more skilled in using non-advertising promotions.

The Coalition conversations with their bankers would be the exact reverse of this.

The ALP organisers fear that the party is going to be much more dependent on union contributions than it has been in recent times. This may tend to spin the party to the left, although many unions are opposed to the carbon tax. Those unions opposed to the carbon tax may require modification before they inject ‘rescue’ money. However, if they see Tony Abbott moving to water down industrial relations legislation they may be tempted to dig deep.

In the case of the Coalition, the parties will depend less on contributions from party members and corporate supporters, assuming they maintain the current lead in the polls.

In reality, if the current opinion poll levels are maintained then it will make it very difficult for the ALP to gain the election funding to change its fortunes at the polls.

As the horror of this outcome becomes apparent to party members, they may seek to replace the prime minister with someone who might either lift the party’s ratings in the polls or who will attract more union rescue money. The ALP has its back to the wall.

There you have it.

The banksters do have a powerful, direct influence over the direction this nation goes.

Now we understand even more clearly, why a Banksters’ Glee Club comprising a clear majority bank-employed “leading” economists has been publicly barracking for the government’s carbon pricing scheme scam.

Mr Gottliebsen’s revelations on how electoral funding really works in practice are seriously troubling, in their implications for what amounts to a clear opening for the perversion of the democratic process.

And yet, I think he is (perhaps naively?) completely misunderstanding what those implications are, in terms of the most controversial public policy right now.

Quite simply, he’s reading the implications backwards.

Because I suspect that the ALP will not have much difficulty in getting the loans they want/need for their election campaign. Especially whilstever they cling to the bankster-driven “pricing carbon” policy.

And in terms of the Liberal Party, in light of the constant appeals for donations that seemingly appear in all of their public communications collateral (emails, newsletters etc), I suspect that the anti-carbon tax Abbott-led Coalition is not sitting as prettily with their bankers as Mr Gottliebsen seems to believe.

Now, to an interesting and directly related front.

If our basic contention – as implied by Mr Gottliebsen’s article – is that our political parties’ policies can be and ultimately are determined by their financial backers’ willingness to loan (or donate) to their election campaign funding, then we only see further supporting evidence for that somewhat chilling reality check in this news story about another of Green-Labor’s proposed policies (emphasis added) –

About 1800 cement industry jobs are at risk from Labor’s carbon tax and proposed new shipping rules, the federal opposition says.

Nationals leader Warren Truss says the $2 billion a year industry is facing a double whammy under the Gillard government.

He says domestic cement manufacturers could be killed off by “dirtier” imports, made cheaper under the carbon tax.

“The paradox is Australian cement production is a leader in low emission technology and any shift to imports will force global CO2 emissions to rise,” Mr Truss said in a statement.

Mr Truss said Australian cement had the world’s second lowest greenhouse gas emissions behind Japan.

“But the carbon tax will price Australia’s cleaner cement out of the market, giving the green light to our international competitors to boost their higher CO2-emitting production and flood Australia with dirty cement,” he said.

“… the Australian cement industry will be crushed by competitors who will not be paying a carbon tax.”

Mr Truss said Labor was also rewriting the Navigation Act to force businesses that ship products around Australia to use local, union-dominated vessels.

He said “unionised shipping” costs significantly more than current market rates, which would be another blow to the industry.

“Right now it costs about the same to ship cement from China to Australia as it does to ship it from Adelaide to Port Kembla,” he said.

“Under the Gillard government’s sop to the maritime union, our biggest competitors in cement – China, Indonesia, Taiwan and Thailand – will dramatically undercut Australian suppliers on shipping costs alone.”

He said a large section of the cement manufacturing sector would not be compensated under the carbon tax plan.

The compensation package only applied to processing clinker, the first stage of making cement, he said.

“The second milling stage to make what we know as cement receives no compensation,” Mr Truss said.

So, the real reason why the Green-Labor Government has been slowly re-regulating (ie, re-unionising) the Australian economy … is because they need their money to finance their election campaign.

The lesson we must learn?

When it comes to the all-important consideration of why a politician or party really adopts the policy/s that they do, the Golden Rule always applies.

Follow The Money.

The following of which will always lead you down the rabbit hole … into the wonderland of global finance.

More honestly and accurately called, “bankstering”.

Ladies and gentlemen … we are not living in a democracy.

We are living in a kleptocracy.

What are you going to do about that?

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