Angela Merkel blames Cypriots for bankers’ gamblings

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | MARCH 26, 2013

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said today that the new rescue program for Cyprus is “right” because it forces “those who have caused the problem.” to take “responsibility” for their actions. In saying this Merkel blames the people of Cyprus for the debt incurred into by the very same banks the German leader so strongly attacks publicly but defends in private.

The head of the German government was said to be “satisfied” with the result reached this weekend, after seven days of media controversy, political unrest and turmoil that followed in the stock market and that stopped the conditions of the first bailout from taking place.

The plan as it is now known includes a 40% charge on depositors who may not even see their savings ever again. According to the plan imposed by the European Union, Cyprus will liquidate both the Laiki and Cyprus Banks and has already mandated the confiscation of almost half of the funds in accounts with more than 100,000 euros.

“The result reached is right and puts the onus on those who have created the problem. Way it should be,” Merkel argued in a brief meeting with media in Langenfeld.

She added that she is “happy” that a “fair division of the burden” has been achieved with Cyprus temporarily bribing its way out of a financial collapse by stealing 7,000 million euros from its people, while the European Union supposedly lends the country 10,000 million euros.

“First, banks must take responsibility. On the other, it has become clear that Cyprus can count on the solidarity of the European countries,” said Merkel. The Chancellor said in this regard that the EU will support Nicosia in the “difficult road” ahead. In other words, Merkel sees the Cypriot people as responsible for the banks gambling on behalf of the Mediterranean nation, whose people will now suffer greater pain than those in Greece, for example.

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François Hollande asks French people to embrace his plan for perpetual slavery

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | NOVEMBER 14, 2012

Convinced that his economic policy is “fair, consistent and effective,” and noting that his top priorities are growth and employment, François Hollande, called on Tuesday for social partners and the French people to seal a “historic commitment” to “reconquer the future.” It is not uncommon to hear failed politicians promising fake hope and change. U.S. president Barack Obama did it in 2008. What is rare is to see a failed politician doing it again, even after his plans showed how untrue they were.

In his first press conference this semester, Hollande spent two hours answering all kinds of questions. The French president told Europe that France will meet its deficit target of 3% next year, and sent a message to economists, analysts, mutual funds and countries warning that France will be the next country to get sick of the European Union: “Some would like it a lot if the markets attacked us, but we will do our utmost to avoid it,” he joked.

Addressing more than 250 journalists and the entire Government, Hollande was loose and confident on economic issues, and tried to reassure the French, who have rejected his policies in polls, that his supposed “strategy” will bear fruit at the end of his mandate. That is a typical talking point used by unaccountable politicians who always plan to get the “results” of all of their magic policies once they are out of office. As history shows, those results never arrive. What president wouldn’t like to be in office when his magic plans turn into real benefits? Only a liar would say he wouldn’t. Or perhaps Mr. Hollande will try to stay in office for another term, in case his “results” don’t arrive as soon as he expects.

During the event Hollande said that the country is a process of social dialogue to change the rules under which the French labor market works. He also ridiculed other ideologies and political groups, while saying that his solution may be the only one that would work given the intricacies of the French situation. As many politicians do it today, Hollande spoke about making France a more competitive nation, which means, he said, that there will be consensus and progress.

“We need more security, more protection, less redundancies, fewer relocations, more industry.” He then tried to swindle the French people by implying that for his plan to work as he crafted it, the people of the country need to accept a compromise to follow his commandments. He said that a social consensus would be historical and would allow the economy to find a new spirit, a new collaboration between all the productive forces. Then he played the leader card by saying that “I am responsible for the future of France, and I am not acting to prepare the next election but the next generation. That is my duty, the French nation should do, do block to reconquer the future. ”

As many other European politicians have done, Hollande spoke against austerity, saying that this policy needs to be accompanied by growth. He said that France will be able to meet the deficit and debt targets, and explained that “if France does not grow is because there is a recession in Italy and Spain”, and that this situation is due, he said, “to the policies of a single direction.”

Perhaps one of the points that Hollande emphasize the most is the idea that Europe needs a strong France in order to move ahead. This message attempts to divert attention from the country’s growing distrust, high unemployment and trade deficit, which the French president intends to pin on those who do not follow his recommendations. “We live, rather than a crisis, in a changing world. The recovery will take time, but we’ll get there.”

In a time when Berlin doubts Hollande capacity to carry out the reforms requested by the European bankers, France’s Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault is set to visit Angela Merkel tomorrow in an attempt to explain in detail what has the French government accomplish and what it intends to accomplish in the near future. “The reality is that the Chancellor and I have a responsibility to move Europe forward. And, therefore, not to do anything will weaken this relationship. What matters is not what is said, but what we say. ” That is also a typical strategy to make people believe that only the politicians who occupy high office are capable of solving a problem they themselves let happen.

On the future of Europe, Hollande was not shy about his support for the News World Order scheme that seeks to unite both financially and politically all the nations in the old continent. He said that after the banking union is in place, the continent will have to prepare for what comes ahead. “After the banking union there will be another big step: to give life to the political Europe “. The French president took the opportunity to make it clear that he will provide complete support to the newly formed Syrian opposition movement that was formed during a meeting in Qatar and which is now recognize by most Western oppressors as the only legitimate transition government in that country.

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Less Sovereignty is the Central Bankers Solution for the Crisis

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | JUNE 29, 2012

Everyone on the main stream seems to believe that the continuous meetings between European central bankers and government officials are seeking to save the Euro and to help the governments deal with their sovereign debts. It is common to hear on television how journalists and so-called analysts explain that their expectations include the proposal of real solutions to the crisis which immediately produce jobs and bring stability to the markets.

They just don’t get it. These meetings between central bankers and European leaders are nothing about stability, a solution to the debt problem or the creation of jobs around the euro zone. The latest agreement between the EU Council and the Prime Ministers of Italy and Spain is an example of how the bankers are in complete control. Although the media has painted the bailout of the Spanish and Italian banks as a triumph for both governments, which according to the reports “had their way” when negotiating with the bankers, the reality is they are simply following orders. It wasn’t the Spanish and Italian governments the ones who imposed the conditions that will rule the bailout, but the banks.

The rescue of the banking system in those countries is indeed a result of Italy and Spain submitting, accepting and supporting the idea that the European Central Bank will officially turn into the manager of all Euro economies. Only after Mariano Rajoy and Mario Monti accepted that condition, was that the central bankers gave the green light to ‘lend the money’ to the Spanish and Italian banks, not the other way around. The main stream media is portraying an outcome that is completely the opposite to reality by saying that Mr. Rajoy and Mr. Monti twisted German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s arm into accepting their conditions. The truth is that Merkel herself had to accept the centralization of economic planning sought by the banks as a condition not to let the EU zone collapse before the expected time, and with it drag every single nation including Germany into the rabbit hole they are all going towards in a controlled fashion.

Less sovereignty in exchange for solidarity; this is the latest talking point that emerged from European leaders to justify the loss of self-rule and the intervention of European bankers in the decision making process at the national level. Governments have publicly adopted what seems to be a socialist standing to try to sell their fiscal irresponsibility and to deviate attention from the acquisition of European nations by the central bankers who are the origin of the current financial crisis. But it is not socialism you see, it’s fascism. Countries must get more debt and surrender their sovereignty in order to solve a crisis that is not supposed to get solved, but that was created and planned to further centralize power in the hands of the bankers themselves.

Everyone who is well-informed is familiar with the World Bank and IMF’s plans to cause the current crisis, — and all the other ones that came before — how they’ve applied the same neo-feudal model throughout history to destroy economies and artificially recreate them using models for growth based on the acquisition of debt and the never-ending payments of interests on that debt. It needs to be said: This crisis is not accidental or unexpected. It was planned and executed for decades to seek a justification for a central government just as it has been promoted by the bankers and the media for the past 12 months. The result of the current negotiations in not to seek an exit to the debt problem or to encourage economic growth, but to hand even more power to the bankers.

The meeting held today where European Prime Ministers pose as the saviors is nothing else than window dressing. There is no solidarity on a proposal that intends to make nations less independent and more enslaved to the central bankers. The result that will came from the meeting held by Mariano Rajoy, Angela Merkel Mario Monti and François Hollande is further consolidation of financial power; nothing else. As explained by Joseph Stiglitz, the World Bank and the IMF pursue a policy of financial enslavement against every country by following four simple steps.

Privatization, which is more like ‘Briberization’, he told Greg Palast. Under this scheme, economies are collapsed from the inside while consolidating national assets for pennies on the dollar. Briberization yields then to the second step,  a one-size-fits-all rescue-your-economy plan, which in theory intends to rescue a country’s economy by using  capital market liberalization. This, again in theory, would allow the free flow of investment in and out of the country, but in reality it is the process through which the bankers complete the theft of resources and send them out every time a country buys into the “rescue your economy’ non-sense. As explained by Palast in his article The Globalizer who came in from the Cold, foreign monies come in to the countries for speculative acquisitions in various sectors of the economy and then leaves just as suddenly as it came. The result is the literal disappearance of a nation’s reserves in a matter of days. In order to get back some of those monies, entities like the IMF and the World Bank immediately demand that the country raise interest rates to anywhere between 30% and 80%.

Next, on step three, the bankers mandate that the government impose steep increases in the prices of basic needs such as food, water and gas. In the mid-term, the unexpected increases cause what Stiglitz calls the “The IMF riot.” During this time the bankers “turn up the heat until, finally, the whole cauldron blows up,” said Stiglitz. The bankers simply cut any and all subsidies to food and fuel for the poorest people as it happened in Argentina at the turn of the century and in Indonesia in 1998. Other examples of these riots were the ones in Bolivian riots over water prices last year and this February, the riots in Ecuador over the rise in cooking gas prices imposed by the World Bank.

Secret documents were also obtained by the BBC and The Observer which showed that the banks wanted to make the US dollar the official currency of Ecuador and by doing that, they would submit more than half of the population there under the poverty line. This is something similar to what was done in Argentina and what is being tried now in Europe. According to Stiglitz, although millions of people end up as losers under this system, there are indeed a handful of winners: The Banks. The western banks and the US Treasury make gigantic amounts of cash by infliction pain over developing nations. He cited the case of Ethiopia, where the World Bank and IMF ordered the government to ‘invest’ money on the Federal Reserve’s Treasuries which pays only 4 percent interest, while the country had to borrow money at 12 percent. Ethiopia was looted by the banks.

On step four of the bankers propose and impose the so-called Free Trade, as they did through NAFTA, CAFTA and other trade agreements. They call these programs “poverty reduction strategies”. However, all they do is open markets for a one way flow of products from powerful nations like the United States and China to the poor countries, while closing their own markets to foreign products. The almost automatic consequence of this free trade agreements is the destruction of the local production and farming since they cannot compete with the ridiculous low prices offered by corporations that have their products manufactured by slave labor in Asia and Africa.

As Greg Palast puts it, let there be no confusion about the role of the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization in the destruction of nation-states, private property and sovereignty, because they are just three masks that hide the faces of the monopoly men who seek to impose a centralized government model based on absolutist conditions.The results of the negotiations to supposedly save the euro zone are not such, they are just another step into the creeping arrival of world tyranny being sold as the only possible solution to deliver all of us from the consequences of “unbalanced economies”. The plans for the creation and implosion of economies were drafted long ago and the result of those practices is one and only one: World Government. This outcome, by the way, is not a solution or the solution to the current economic crisis.

When you have leaches sucking you dry, the only possible solution is to remove the leaches. The bleeding is the collapsing economy, the leaches are the central bankers, the solution is to remove them from our bodies. Nothing else has worked, nothing else will work.

Angela Merkel is Latest Casualty of Global Uprising

Austerity is not popular anywhere.

REUTERS | MAY 13, 2012

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives suffered a crushing defeat on Sunday in an election in Germany’s most populous state, a result which could embolden the left opposition to step up its criticism of her European austerity policies.

The election in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), a western German state with a bigger population than the Netherlands and an economy the size of Turkey, was held 18 months before a national election in which Merkel is expected to fight for a third term.

She remains popular in Germany for her steady handling of the euro zone debt crisis, but the sheer scale of her party’s defeat leaves her vulnerable at a time when a backlash against her insistence on fiscal discipline is building across Europe.

According to first projections, the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) won 38.8 percent of the vote and will have enough to form a stable majority with the Greens, who scored 12.2 percent.

The two left-leaning parties had run a fragile minority government for the past two years under popular SPD leader Hannelore Kraft, whose decisive victory on Sunday could propel her to national prominence.

Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) saw their support plunge to just 25.8 percent, down from nearly 35 percent in 2010, and the worst result in the state since World War Two.

“This is not a good evening for Merkel,” said Gero Neugebauer, a political scientist at Berlin’s Free University.

“The SPD is strengthened by this election, which will stir things up in Berlin.”

The blow comes only two days before France’s new president, Socialist Francois Hollande, is due to visit Berlin and press Merkel for a shift away from austerity and more emphasis on growth-oriented measures in Europe.

Other big countries like Italy also want Merkel to take a more balanced approach to the debt crisis and an election in Greece last week showed massive public resistance to tough austerity.

SPD MOMENTUM

Hollande’s victory, coupled with the NRW result, is bound to give the SPD, which still trails Merkel in national opinion polls, new momentum before the federal vote in the autumn of 2013.

The chancellor needs the support of her rivals to pass a new “fiscal compact” that is meant to anchor budget discipline across the EU. The SPD is already pressing her to delay a parliamentary vote on the pact, keen for her to commit to new growth measures beforehand.

Many in her party will blame the result on regional leader Norbert Roettgen, Merkel’s environment minister in Berlin, who bungled his campaign early on by refusing to commit to staying in the state in the event of a loss.

Roettgen ran on a platform of budget consolidation in a state that, with 180 billion euros in debt, is Germany’s most indebted. Kraft, on the other hand, advocated a go-slowly approach to debt reduction, emphasizing the need to invest in cities, education and childcare.

In that sense, the result will be seen by some as a double defeat for Merkel. Voters in NRW not only rejected her party but also the austerity measures that she has forced on struggling southern states like Greece, Spain and Portugal.

The Free Democrats (FDP), a pro-business party that rules in coalition with Merkel’s conservatives at the federal level, scored 8.6 percent to make it back into the state assembly. The party hailed the result as proof of a comeback after a collapse in support over the last three years.

The upstart Pirates, a new party that campaigns for internet freedom, continued their strong run at regional level, making it into their fourth straight state parliament, winning 7.6 percent of the vote.

NRW, a diverse state with struggling cities in the rust-belt Ruhr region and home to one third of Germany’s blue-chip companies, has a history of influencing national politics.

Seven years ago, a humiliating loss for then-Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s SPD in the state prompted him to call early elections, which he subsequently lost to Merkel. ($1 = 0.7726 euros)

Anti-Austerity Protests Grow in Europe

By PATRICK DONAHUE | BLOOMBERG | APRIL 30, 2012

A recession in Spain and forecasts of rising unemployment in the 17-nation euro area are amplifying criticism of the German-led austerity agenda in election campaigns this week in France and Greece.

With Spain’s largest unions leading marches involving thousands of protesters in 55 cities yesterday, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s government battled to prevent Spain from becoming the next country to seek a bailout. In France, where the presidential-election runoff is set for May 6, Socialist frontrunner Francois Hollande pushed back against German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s focus on deficit reduction.

“Watching Spain now is exactly like watching Ireland around October 2010 before Ireland was forced into its bailout,” Megan Greene, a senior economist at Roubini Global Economics LLC, told Bloomberg Television’s “Street Smart” on April 27. “The government can’t win no matter what it does.”

Spain’s economy shrank in the first quarter as the nation officially entered its second recession since 2009. Gross domestic product contracted 0.3 percent. Joblessness in the euro area probably to rose to 10.9 percent last month, the highest since 1997, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg.

As Spanish joblessness reached almost one in four of the working-age population, Hollande demanded that euro-area leaders move to promoting growth from cutting budgets, as agreed by 25 European governments in the so-called fiscal pact. Merkel drew the line at re-opening talks on the fiscal treaty, though she said growth could be boosted with labor-market reform and European Union funding.

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