Posts Tagged ‘European Union’
Ellen Brown, June 17, 2010
Last week, England’s new government said it would abandon the previous government’s stimulus program and introduce the austerity measures required to pay down its estimated $1 trillion in debts. That means cutting public spending, laying off workers, reducing consumption, and increasing unemployment and bankruptcies. It also means shrinking the money supply, since virtually all “money” today originates as loans or debt. Reducing the outstanding debt will reduce the amount of money available to pay workers and buy goods, precipitating depression and further economic pain.
The financial sector has sometimes been accused of shrinking the money supply intentionally, in order to increase the demand for its own products. Bankers are in the debt business, and if governments are allowed to create enough money to keep themselves and their constituents out of debt, lenders will be out of business. The central banks charged with maintaining the banking business therefore insist on a “stable currency” at all costs, even if it means slashing services, laying off workers, and soaring debt and interest burdens. For the financial business to continue to boom, governments must not be allowed to create money themselves, either by printing it outright or by borrowing it into existence from their own government-owned banks.
By Vanessa Mock in Brussels John Lichfield in Paris and Anita Brooks in Madrid
Thursday, 17 June 2010
European leaders meet in Brussels today amid growing fears that Spain, Europe’s fifth-largest economy, is preparing to ask for a bailout which would dwarf the €110bn (£90bn) rescue plan for Greece.
REUTERS
Financial markets are said to have lost their faith in Spanish banks
The Spanish government yesterday dismissed reports that it was already in discussions with the European Commission, International Monetary Fund and the US Treasury for a rescue package worth up to €250bn.
Officials in Madrid, Brussels and Paris were forced to deny that a Spanish bailout – which would take the European debt and euro crisis into a potentially dangerous new phase – was on the Brussels summit agenda.
“Spain is a country that is solvent, solid and strong, with international credibility,” said its Prime Minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. The European Commission spokesman said: “I can firmly deny [that a Spanish rescue is under discussion]. I can say that that story is rubbish.”
Brussels diplomats have been at pains to send out feel-good signals ahead of a summit in which Europe’s leaders are supposed to take the first steps towards more disciplined and co-ordinated, control of national finances. Those reforms are meant to restore confidence in the euro and underpin the €750m EU and IMF safety-net, created last month for euroland countries that lose the confidence of the financial markets.
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Saturday, June 5, 2010
The 2010 Bilderberg agenda has been revealed by veteran Bilderberg sleuth Jim Tucker and it paints a picture of crisis for the globalists, who are furious at the increased exposure their gatherings have received in recent years, as well as being dismayed at their failure to rescue both the euro and the failing carbon tax agenda, but more alarmingly according to Tucker, the majority of Bilderberg members are now in favor of military air strikes on Iran.
American Free Press muckraker Tucker has proven routinely accurate with the information he obtains from sources inside Bilderberg, which makes this year’s revelations all the more intriguing.
According to Tucker, Bilderberg luminaries are dismayed at the fact that “many important people” are not attending this year because, due to increasing exposure, invitees are “getting in trouble at home” and constituents are embarrassing them by asking irate questions such as “what are you doing with these monsters?”
“All these people are exposing us, we get all this mail and calls,” Tucker paraphrased Bilderberg members as complaining.
This dovetails with the revelations overheard by Guardian journalist Charlie Skelton at the Hotel Dolce Sitges before the meeting began when he heard conference organizers lamenting the fact that protest numbers are growing at Bilderberg events each year and that they represent a “threat” to Bilderberg’s agenda.
In addition, prominent Bilderberg Zbigniew Brzezinski, the man who warned recently that a “global political awakening” was threatening to derail the move towards global government, was expected to be in attendance at this year’s meeting.
By Olga Chetverikova
The Bilderberg group will convene in Sitges, Spain, a resort community 30 km from Barcelona, on June 4-7. As usual, the information is supplied by James Tucker and Daniel Estulin who revealed that this year the issues topping the agenda of the club’s meeting will be the global recession and the approaches to provoking such economic breakdowns that can help justify the establishment of a full-scale world economic governance.
Intending to prolong the global economic downturn for at least another year, the Bilderberg group hopes to take advantage of the situation to set up a “global ministry of finance” as a part of the UN. Though the decision was actually made at the group’s meeting in Greece last year, according to Tucker the plan was torpedoed by US and European “nationalists” (for the Bilderberg group, “nationalists” is a generic term for all nationally-oriented forces espousing national sovereignty and statehood).
All year since the last meeting, representatives of the global executive management have been convincing the public across the world to embrace a “new financial order”. The idea recurred in the statements made by N. Sarkozy, G. Brown, and the freshly elected European Council President H. Van Rompuy, but – against the backdrop of a relatively harmless phase of the crisis – the activity remained limited to psychological conditioning and no practical steps have been taken. As Jacques Attali wrote quite reasonably in his After the Crisis, Europe has no right to demand a reform of the global financial architecture as long as it can’t organize the institutions that would meet its own needs.
Posted on 2010 05, 24 by duo
By Bruce McQwain
Europeans have boasted about their social model, with its generous vacations and early retirements, its national health care systems and extensive welfare benefits, contrasting it with the comparative harshness of American capitalism.Europeans have benefited from low military spending, protected by NATO and the American nuclear umbrella. They have also translated higher taxes into a cradle-to-grave safety net. “The Europe that protects” is a slogan of the European Union.
But all over Europe governments with big budgets, falling tax revenues and aging populations are experiencing rising deficits, with more bad news ahead.
With low growth, low birthrates and longer life expectancies, Europe can no longer afford its comfortable lifestyle, at least not without a period of austerity and significant changes. The countries are trying to reassure investors by cutting salaries, raising legal retirement ages, increasing work hours and reducing health benefits and pensions.
“We’re now in rescue mode,” said Carl Bildt, Sweden’s foreign minister. “But we need to transition to the reform mode very soon. The ‘reform deficit’ is the real problem,” he said, pointing to the need for structural change.
The reaction so far to government efforts to cut spending has been pessimism and anger, with an understanding that the current system is unsustainable.
Reality can be a real problem – in the real world. And Europe has begun to bump up against it.
Anyone reading news feeds on the global financial crisis is painfully aware that the world as we know it is rapidly destabilizing. Bottomless debt is gaping open in unfamiliar terrain like crevasses in Ruth Glacier near the end of June.
Europe debt woes have pummeled the euro and Asian shares. Eurozone taxpayers are now extremely exposed to high credit risk, leading to a panic in the world markets, as foreign holders of Greek and Portuguese debt have seized on emergency intervention by the European Central Bank to scamper out of their positions. The chief executive of Deutsche Bank said it would require “incredible efforts” by Greece for its debt to ever be repaid in full.
By SREERAM CHAULIA
SONIPAT, India, May 14 (UPI) — The revival of the long-dormant Policy Planning Division of India’s Ministry of External Affairs in September through the initiative of Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor is a positive step for a country that wants to climb up the rungs of global status and power.
Policy planning bureaus have played a vital role in foreign ministries of great powers by providing broad direction, outlook and blueprints that percolate through the veins and arteries of the system.
The famous Cold War doctrine of containment, for instance, was the brainchild of George Kennan, the first director of Policy Planning in the U.S. State Department. His “X” article in the journal Foreign Affairs (July 1947) recorded his acute observations on the wellsprings of Soviet conduct and laid out the parameters of a global response to the Soviet Union’s “expansive tendencies.”
My thoughts on this in just a few!!!…This one makes me very MAD…5/17 ~jude
By Timothy R. Homan
May 16 (Bloomberg) — Greece is considering taking legal action against U.S. investment banks that might have contributed to the country’s debt crisis, Prime Minister George Papandreou said.
“I wouldn’t rule out that this may be a recourse,” Papandreou said, in response to questions about the role of U.S. banks in the crisis, in an interview on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS.” The program, scheduled for broadcast today, was taped on May 13. Neither Papandreou nor Zakaria mentioned any banks by name.
U.S. stocks fell and the euro slumped on concern that Europe wouldn’t be able to contain the debt crisis stemming from Greece. The Standard & Poor’s 500Index declined 1.9 percent May 14, while the euro fell below $1.24 for the first time since November 2008.
Papandreou said the decision on whether to go after U.S. banks will be made after a Greek parliamentary investigation into the cause of the crisis.
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