At the root of this are fallacious and malignant policies of Mrs Merkel and Mr Schauble '"Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unto God that which is God's" -- words of Jesus with relevance to the euro crisis. The euro-elite has confused the monetary union and the euro -- surely Caesar's department? -- with religion.' 'It is not just that Euroland politicians are pig-headedly determined to avoid admitting they were and are wrong -- they also feel obliged in a quasi-religious way to defend the indefensible. But they are bound to fail.' 'In the process, policies adopted on the continent make a slump next year (if not sooner) virtually inevitable, and a prolonged depression quite likely.' 'It would be nice to compare Mrs Merkel's defiance of market forces with John Major's in 1992...but that comparison is too flattering -- hers is the stubborn folly of the sound-money men of the early 1930s. And we know where that led...' But as Mr Dumas points out, 'the world savings rate, at an all-time high by a significant margin in 2006-07 (an underlying cause of the crisis), has risen to within a whisker of 2007's record this year.' 'Next year, the projected reduction of government deficits...will take the world savings rate into a new high ground. Yet we live in a world in which private sector savings already far exceed profitable investment opportunities in Japan and north-central Europe (Germany, Benelux, Nordics, Switzerland/Austria) -- and investment is a positively insane and unsustainable 48 percent of GDP in China.' Yet what is needed is the stimulation of consumption in the savings-glut countries. And the conclusion? 'It follows that the subsidies will have to be large and indefinitely prolonged. And this is where the political pain will come back to visit mr Schauble. Germany will have to pay.' 'Also, because the deficit countries will be in or close to recession next year, including the US and UK, both China and Germany will suffer a major loss of income, as they did in the great recession.' 'So the long-suffering German citizens will not only have to pay for the euro-elite's unremitting pursuit of its unachievable ideal, but will have to do so out of shrinking income. If people save too much, their apparent wealth has to be destroyed.' 'As history tells us, this sort of political pain can have worse consequences than a debt crisis.' At the risk of getting out of Caesar's department, Mr Dumas: Amen to that. From Gaddafi to the 'Yes to Lisbon Treaty' campaign in just five steps Back in early September 2009, I was scratching around in the international press watching the link between Allen and all this, and Peter Sutherland, former chairman of Goldman Sachs International and former chairman of BP, one of the rich men backing the Yes to Lisbon Treaty campaign in Ireland. Here is what I wrote on September 7, 2009 in the Irish Daily Mail: Stay with me for five short hops, and I will take you from Colonel Gaddafi and Abdelbaset Al Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, to the ‘Ireland for Europe’ campaign and questions about who is backing this Yes propaganda outfit being run by Pat Cox. The connections will illuminate the sort of company with which the Yes campaign feels comfortable. Start at one. The mass-murderer Megrahi has just been set free from prison in Scotland and returned to Libya. Two, last week Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, admitted for the first time that a Libyan oil deal with BP was an essential part of the government’s decision to included Megrahi in a prisoner transfer deal. Three, the oil deal was worth $900m (€630m) deal and struck with BP six weeks after Megrahi was included in the prisoner transfer agreement. A report in the British press at the weekend said that BP had warned the Foreign Secretary that the failure to include Megrahi in the deal could damage BP’s interests, but BP denied actually mentioning Megrahi by name. Five, Mr Sutherland is a patron of ‘Ireland for Europe,’ of which Pat Cox is campaign director. The organisation’s website does not disclose the extent or source of its funding. Me, personally, the only way I could stay in a room with someone who worked to get a billion-deal from the release of the man who killed 270 men, women and children in a fireball over Scotland is if I were wearing the kind of kit you’d wear to unclog London sewers. However, Mr Cox and his Yes-to-Lisbon colleagues appear not to mind the smell coming off the BP recently-ex-chairman. I suppose that since Mr Sutherland is now one of the richest bankers on the planet Mr Cox is willing to hold his nose. That is the sort of pass you can get when you are also chairman of Goldman Sachs International, part of the globally-greedy Goldman’s which has famously and accurately been denounced in America as ‘a vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity relentlessly jabbing its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.’ Perhaps, since Mr Cox is a professional Brussels lobbyist running two lobbying firms which he has kept unregistered, maybe he doesn’t notice the smell. Now, this Libya-Sutherland-Yes lobby connection should have been spotted long ago. I only spotted it when a No-to-Lisbon friend pointed out what the blogger CookieMonster wrote about it on politics.ie. Until now I have been viewing Mr Sutherland just as a representative for Goldman’s and their tarnished reputation. And I do not forget his history a non-executive director and member of the remuneration committee of the Royal Bank of Scotland. You will remember Mr Sutherland’s RBS committee: it allowed Sir Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive, to walk away from the wreck of the bank with a pension of £703,000 (€837,000) a year. Which is not to say that the Yes campaign isn’t fastidious in its own way about just whom they believe should be allowed to join in the Lisbon debate. Yesterday in the Irish edition of the News of the World, the Defence Minister, Willie O’Dea, told the London-based Open Europe think tank to ‘butt out’ of the Lisbon debate here. He was reacting to a research just released by Lorraine Mullally, director of Open Europe, which showed that during negotiations on the original text of the Lisbon Treaty between 2002 and 2004, the Irish government objected to many of the treaty’s most important elements – but failed in the overwhelming majority of the amendments it tried to make to the text. According to the research, Dick Roche, the government’s representative to the European Convention, made 149 proposed amendments, but only 36 resulted in changes to the text, meaning three out of four attempts by Ireland to get the text changed failed. This wasn’t minor stuff that the convention ignored. Mr Roche objected to the appointment of a permanent EU president. He wanted to stick with the present rotating presidency, and who can blame him: at least under the pre-Lisbon system, Ireland was sure to take the presidency eventually. Mr Roche also wanted to stick to the present voting arrangement, but failed. Now the new voting weights will dilute Ireland’s power to influence or block legislation. According to Open Europe’s research, Mr Roche opposed many of the moves to abolish the national veto, including in the area of social security policy, on EU definitions of criminal offences and sanctions, on decision relating to the European Defence Agency, and much else. He failed to change the text on these and other issues. Because of Mr Roches’ failures, Lisbon will now abolish our national veto in 60 areas of policy. Mr Roche also failed to stop the creation of a European Public Prosecutor, even though the official Irish position was that there was ‘no convincing or compelling case’ for one and that the proposed arrangements ‘do not respect the different legal traditions of the Member States.’ Mr Roche and the Government also failed in their attempt to let national parliaments have a say in the election of the Commission President. However, all Mr O’Dea can say to Open Europe and Miss Mullally is, ‘Butt out,’ and claim they form some part of a British tradition of underestimating the Irish people. Note first of course that Mr O’Dea did not dispute the findings of the Open Europe research, all of which show how absurd it is for the Government to pretend we have some great influence in shaping the future of the EU. We don’t. All Mr O’Dea offered by way of reply to the research was an attempt to paint Miss Mullally and her work as ‘British’ and therefore be ignored. Yet of course Miss Mullally is Irish, with family in Dublin. And Open Europe itself is full of people from different European nationalities. More than that, you would have though a Fianna Fail man such as Mr O’Dea would have recognised the name. Miss Mullally is the grand-daughter of the late Martin Mullally, a Drangan, Tipperary man and a founder member of An Bord Bainne. This Irish-speaking Mullally grandfather also fought in the War of Independence as a member of the 7th Battalion of the 3rd Tipperary Brigade of the IRA. Between 1919 and 1924, he was in and out of nine jails, took part in two hunger strikes, one in the Curragh and the other alongside Terence MacSwiney in Cork. Miss Mullally’s family is run-through with men who fought for the republic.—and indeed helped build Fianna Fail. Her great-uncle James served with republican forces in the civil war, and was later appointed first secretary of the Fianna Fail cumann in Drangan. Yet all Mr O’Dea can say to this Irishwoman is, ‘Butt out.’ He’d rather get butt in with Peter Sutherland. He may have to wait his turn, of course. Mr Sutherland is busy being butt in with Colonel Gaddafi. Not that Cayla explains why this is a problem -- mind you, it is a problem if you dislike ideological independence in your news reporting -- except perhaps that more people would rather watch real news put out by these ‘problem’ media organisations than by his own. Anyway, the Euronews boss proposes a solution to this ‘problem.’ He wants the EU to impose a license fee (ie, a new tax ) on all of us, to be taken by the EU but distributed by independent -- yes, sure --bodies outside the control of national governments. The money would go to ‘a number ‘of media organisations. Yes, not to all, just to ‘a number.’ As in, the new tax revenues will go to broadcasters anointed by the eurocrats. ‘EU citizens must be better informed’ is code for ‘the wretched little people aren’t buying the propaganda so far.’ You see, whenever it becomes clear that real citizens of real countries in fact want less Europe – evidence the result in almost any treaty referendum you could name – the euro-cult leaders in Brussels never allow themselves to read that result as more evidence that millions of people are very fed up with the EU and want less of it. Instead the euro-cult leaders insist that the problem is that all of us little people are just not well-informed enough about the alleged wonderfulness of all the things the EU does for them, so the solution must be to spend more on ‘information.’ Otherwise known as propaganda, the annual commission budget for which is estimated by Open Europe to stand at more than £2bn. And here is something so Brussels. Cayla, the Euronews boss, made his comments in an interview with Euractiv, an on-line journal which is also part-financed by the EU; the Euractiv reporter doesn't mention until the final paragraph that 'independent' Euronews is 25 percent funded by the Commission, 'to provide coverage of EU affairs with an EU perspective.' You bet. Or as Euractiv reported it: ‘Only [only?] 25 percent of Euronews’ funding comes from the European Commission, said Cayla, stressing that this allows it to maintain full independence.’ One out of every four euros in their news budget comes from the commission. That’s what passes for ‘independent’ in Brussels.
06 September 2011 2:33 PM
The 'fallacious and malignant policies of Merkel and Schauble' drive the euro 'into the abyss'
EU propaganda: or how news is supposed to go on the euro-payroll but stay 'independent'
Sunday, 11 September 2011
I've been following the analysis of the euro by Charles Dumas of Lombard Street Research for more than six years. His notes are never less than excellent -- and over the years his analysis has been proved right time and again. Today's LSR Daily Note from Dumas is another cracker, which is why I'm going to give you some long quotes from it. Mr Dumas explains how Euroland is sleep-walking into the abyss:
'The euro was adopted for reasons of political ideology and is regarded as sacrosanct by its
proponents. But it is, and always has been, economically and financially indefensible, as we said from the early 1990s on, and as is now becoming clear.'
Mr Dumas then dismembers an article by the German finance minister Schauble in this morning's Financial Times. To paraphrase Schauble, the highly indebted western democracies need to cut spending, raise taxes and liberalise 'however politically painful.' This is the austerity that the Germans are forcing on every distressed member of the eurozone.
Mr Dumas then goes on through some excellent technical stuff and shows how Greece is
doomed to see its GDP 'simply slide away from under' because of the austerity forced on it by Schauble-style policies: 'Within the euro context, there is simply no solution for Greece's debt problems that will make it solvent.'
The Mail's news pages today have an excellent story on Sir Mark Allen, the spy who quit MI6 for BP's oil cash -- and thereby set in train Labour's love-in with the tyrant Gaddafi.
Four, up until last Tuesday, the chairman of BP was Peter Sutherland. In 2004, Sir Mark
Allen, a Middle East expert, resigned from the British intelligence service MI6 to join Mr Sutherland’s BP for £200,000 (€230,000) a year. Six months before joining BP, Sir Mark chaired a secret meeting with the Colonel’s spy chief in London, which included discussion of the Megrahi case. It turns out it was Mr Sutherland’s ex-spook who then lobbied the Foreign Secretary. He urged his old friend Mr Straw to speed up an agreement over prisoner transfers, which had been expected to lead to Megrahi’s return, to avoid jeopardising a trade deal with Libya worth up to £15bn (€17bn) to Mr Sutherland’s BP.
It was the blogger who showed me I now have to see Mr Sutherland also as someone who is happy to cosy-up to the Libyan killer, Colonel Gaddafi, the man who provided the Provos with all that Semtex. But as CookieMonster says: ‘We won’t be seeing the Prime Time “Citizen Sutherland” programme, and we won’t be seeing any of this reported in the Irish Times, and we won’t see any Yes-siders spitting feathers about having Peter Sutherland, chairman of the prisoner release-profiting BP, on their side.’
And on and on, and you can only admire the depth of research Open Europe is willing to
put into this issue.
This is how it starts: first a European Commission fellow-traveller (in this case, Philippe Cayla, the head of Euronews, the broadcaster of so-called EU perspective news which is 25 percent funded by the commission) identifies a 'problem' – which is, according to Cayla, the fact that news broadcasters in Europe are largely depend on advertising and subscription.
If this idea follows the usual pattern, expect at some point more polls financed by the
commission which will claim to have identified a desire among ‘citizens of the EU’ – jeez, these people never let up – to be ‘better informed’ about the EU and that, yes, 'EU citizens' would be willing to pay extra tax to be better informed.
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