The Bank Guarantee That Bankrupted Ireland - Truthdig

The Bank Guarantee That Bankrupted Ireland - Truthdig

By Ellen Brown, Web of Debt
This piece first appeared at Web of Debt.
The Irish have a long history of being tyrannized, exploited, and oppressed—from the forced conversion to Christianity in the Dark Ages, to slave trading of the natives in the 15th and 16th centuries, to the mid-nineteenth century “potato famine” that was really a holocaust. The British got Ireland’s food exports, while at least one million Irish died from starvation and related diseases, and another million or more emigrated.
Today, Ireland is under a different sort of tyranny, one imposed by the banks and the troika—the EU, ECB and IMF. The oppressors have demanded austerity and more austerity, forcing the public to pick up the tab for bills incurred by profligate private bankers.
The official unemployment rate is 13.5%—up from 5% in 2006—and this figure does not take into account the mass emigration of Ireland’s young people in search of better opportunities abroad. Job loss and a flood of foreclosures are leading to suicides. A raft of new taxes and charges has been sold as necessary to reduce the deficit, but they are simply a backdoor bailout of the banks.
At first, the Irish accepted the media explanation: these draconian measures were necessary to “balance the budget” and were in their best interests. But after five years of belt-tightening in which unemployment and living conditions have not improved, the people are slowly waking up. They are realizing that their assets are being grabbed simply to pay for the mistakes of the financial sector.

Five years of austerity has not restored confidence in Ireland’s banks. In fact the banks themselves are packing up and leaving. On October 31st, RTE.ie reported that Danske Bank Ireland was closing its personal and business banking, only days after ACCBank announced it was handing back its banking license; and Ulster Bank’s future in Ireland remains unclear.  The field is ripe for some publicly-owned banks. Banks that have a mandate to serve the people, return the profits to the people, and refrain from speculating. Banks guaranteed by the state because they are the state, without resort to bailouts or bail-ins. Banks that aren’t going anywhere, because they are locally owned by the people themselves.

The Bank Guarantee That Bankrupted Ireland
Ireland was the first European country to watch its entire banking system fail.  Unlike the Icelanders, who refused to bail out their bankrupt banks, in September 2008 the Irish government gave a blanket guarantee to all Irish banks, covering all their loans, deposits, bonds and other liabilities.
At the time, no one was aware of the huge scale of the banks’ liabilities, or just how far the Irish property market would fall.
Within two years, the state bank guarantee had bankrupted Ireland.  The international money markets would no longer lend to the Irish government.
Before the bailout, the Irish budget was in surplus. By 2011, its deficit was 32% of the country’s GDP, the highest by far in the Eurozone. At that rate, bank losses would take every penny of Irish taxes for at least the next three years.
“This debt would probably be manageable,” wrote Morgan Kelly, Professor of Economics at University College Dublin, “had the Irish government not casually committed itself to absorb all the gambling losses of its banking system.”
To avoid collapse, the government had to sign up for an €85 billion bailout from the EU-IMF and enter a four year program of economic austerity, monitored every three months by an EU/IMF team sent to Dublin.
Public assets have also been put on the auction block. Assets currently under consideration include parts of Ireland’s power and gas companies and its 25% stake in the airline Aer Lingus.
At one time, Ireland could have followed the lead of Iceland and refused to bail out its bondholders or to bow to the demands for austerity. But that was before the Irish government used ECB money to pay off the foreign bondholders of Irish banks. Now its debt is to the troika, and the troika are tightening the screws.  In September 2013, they demanded another 3.1 billion euro reduction in spending.
Some ministers, however, are resisting such cuts, which they say are politically undeliverable. 
In The Irish Times on October 31, 2013, a former IMF official warned that the austerity imposed on Ireland is self-defeating. Ashoka Mody, former IMF chief of mission to Ireland, said it had become “orthodoxy that the only way to establish market credibility” was to pursue austerity policies. But five years of crisis and two recent years of no growth needed “deep thinking” on whether this was the right course of action. He said there was “not one single historical instance” where austerity policies have led to an exit from a heavy debt burden.
Austerity has not fixed Ireland’s debt problems. Belying the rosy picture painted by the media, in September 2013 Antonio Garcia Pascual, chief euro-zone economist at Barclays Investment Bank, warned that Ireland may soon need a second bailout.

According to John Spain, writing in Irish Central in September 2013:

The anger among ordinary Irish people about all this has been immense. . . . There has been great pressure here for answers. . . . Why is the ordinary Irish taxpayer left carrying the can for all the debts piled up by banks, developers and speculators? How come no one has been jailed for what happened? . . . [D]espite all the public anger, there has been no public inquiry into the disaster.

Bail-in by Super-tax or Economic Sovereignty?
In many ways, Ireland is ground zero for the austerity-driven asset grab now sweeping the world. All Eurozone countries are mired in debt. The problem is systemic.

In October 2013, an IMF report discussed balancing the books of the Eurozone governments through a super-tax of 10% on all households in the Eurozone with positive net wealth. That would mean the confiscation of 10% of private savings to feed the insatiable banking casino. The authors said the proposal was only theoretical, but that it appeared to be “an efficient solution” for the debt problem. For a group of 15 European countries, the measure would bring the debt ratio to “acceptable” levels, i.e. comparable to levels before the 2008 crisis.
A review posted on Gold Silver Worlds observed:

[T]he report right away debunks the myth that politicians and main stream media try to sell, i.e. the crisis is contained and the positive economic outlook for 2014.
. . . Prepare yourself, the reality is that more bail-ins, confiscation and financial repression is coming, contrary to what the good news propaganda tries to tell.

A more sustainable solution was proposed by Dr Fadhel Kaboub, Assistant Professor of Economics at Denison University in Ohio. In a letter posted in The Financial Times titled “What the Eurozone Needs Is Functional Finance,” he wrote:

The eurozone’s obsession with “sound finance” is the root cause of today’s sovereign debt crisis. Austerity measures are not only incapable of solving the sovereign debt problem, but also a major obstacle to increasing aggregate demand in the eurozone. The Maastricht treaty’s “no bail-out, no exit, no default” clauses essentially amount to a joint economic suicide pact for the eurozone countries.
. . . Unfortunately, the likelihood of a swift political solution to amend the EU treaty is highly improbable. Therefore, the most likely and least painful scenario for [the insolvent countries] is an exit from the eurozone combined with partial default and devaluation of a new national currency. . . .
The takeaway lesson is that financial sovereignty and adequate policy co-ordination between fiscal and monetary authorities are the prerequisites for economic prosperity.

Standing Up to Goliath
Ireland could fix its budget problems by leaving the Eurozone, repudiating its blanket bank guarantee as “odious” (obtained by fraud and under duress), and issuing its own national currency. The currency could then be used to fund infrastructure and restore social services, putting the Irish back to work.
Short of leaving the Eurozone, Ireland could reduce its interest burden and expand local credit by forming publicly-owned banks, on the model of the Bank of North Dakota. The newly-formed Public Banking Forum of Ireland is pursuing that option. In Wales, which has also been exploited for its coal, mobilizing for a public bank is being organized by the Arian Cymru ‘BERW’ (Banking and Economic Regeneration Wales).
Irish writer Barry Fitzgerald, author of Building Cities of Gold, casts the challenge to his homeland in archetypal terms:

The Irish are mobilising and they are awakening. They hold the DNA memory of vastly ancient times, when all men and women obeyed the Golden rule of honouring themselves, one another and the planet. They recognize the value of this harmony as it relates to banking. They instantly intuit that public banking free from the soiled hands of usurious debt tyranny is part of the natural order.
In many ways they could lead the way in this unfolding, as their small country is so easily traversed to mobilise local communities.  They possess vast potential renewable energy generation and indeed could easily use a combination of public banking and bond issuance backed by the people to gain energy independence in a very short time.

When the indomitable Irish spirit is awakened, organized and mobilized, the country could become the poster child not for austerity, but for economic prosperity through financial sovereignty.


Ellen Brown is an attorney, president of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books, including the best-selling Web of Debt. In The Public Bank Solution, her latest book, she explores successful public banking models historically and globally. Her blog articles are at EllenBrown.com.

Jihadist Terrorists Became Beloved Rebels In The Public Imagination

Jihadist Terrorists Became Beloved Rebels In The Public Imagination

Originally Posted by Saman Mohammadi of The Excavator (http://disquietreservations.blogspot.co.uk/)

When President Obama announced that he ordered the death of Bin Laden, an untruthful claim, his zombie-like followers gathered at the White House to cheer the end of Al-Qaeda's decade of terror. But, while they were busy cheering, their leader was secretly supporting Al Qaeda in its armed struggle against Assad.

This fact was at first suppressed, but now the whole world knows that Al Qaeda is leading the fight against Assad while being backed by the Obama administration, Turkey, Israel, France, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.

According to neoliberal and neoconservative interventionists who hold sway in Washington, stopping Al Qaeda is less important than overthrowing a dictator. They're even bringing Al Qaeda back to life to fulfill their aims. At the same time, they're beginning to publicly acknowledge the long-suppressed reality that Jihadist terrorism is their creation.

Al Qaeda's international backers are telling the world, "Yes, we are international state terrorists, but our aims are noble and pure. Plus, no one can stop us, so there's no point in drawing public attention to our brutal practices and evil methods. We want Assad gone and we are willing to use terrorism to do it."

What is the world's answer to their monstrous aggressive wars and their support for Jihadi terrorism? For the most part, silence and compliance.

It seems terrorism is acceptable if the perpetrator is Barack Hussein Obama rather than Osama Bin Laden.

Terrorism, far from being the weapon of the weak and the fringe, is the cornerstone policy of the world's only superpower. And this begs the question, is the United States a world empire or a failed terrorist state.

The real target of Washington's global war on terror was American power and American liberty, not the loose-knit global network of Jihadist terrorism.

9/11 was an attack on America, but the attackers were operating from inside the heart of power in Washington. They captured the public's imagination with 9/11. The Jihadist scapegoats for that event have been rebranded as beloved rebels in a noble fight against Assad.

But their cause is not noble. So it is only natural and right that Assad treats the Jihadist terrorists who are killing Syrians as Bush and Obama treated them after it was claimed that they killed Americans on 9/11.

In Syria, the world is either with the victims or the terrorists. The world rightfully stood with America on September 11, 2001. It must now stand with Syria.

The Excavator: Flipping The Script: The Western Media's Syria Propaganda Is Falling Apart

Flipping The Script: The Western Media's Syria Propaganda Is Falling Apart

 Excellent post by Saman Mohammadi of the The Excavator (http://disquietreservations.blogspot.co.uk/)

Flipping The Script: The Western Media's Syria Propaganda Is Falling Apart

What is written in the press is lies. What is hidden in plain view is the truth.

Do you remember this guy, Jason Russell? He was the frontman for the short-lived and over-hyped "Kony 2012" propaganda campaign that exploited young people's emotions to popularize a U.S. military invasion of Uganda. After his lies were exposed on the Internet he had a shocking meltdown in public. He ran around naked near traffic lights, smashed his fists on the pavement, and screamed bizarrely. The heavy spirit of Madness conquered his weak will.

The day before his freakish breakdown Russell was idolized in the mainstream press as a saint on a mission to save the children of Africa. His war propaganda documentary about the deceased CIA contractor Joseph Kony became hugely popular on Facebook and other social media outlets. But as soon as his mask came down and his craziness was captured by cameras, the media vultures forgot about his crusade and quickly moved on to the next hot story.

The new story that captured the corrupt Western media's attention was Syria. The conflict was heating up, and the "international community" was being pressed to take action against the country. "Assad is killing his own people," they said, without offering any evidence. "This is the next domino to fall in the Arab Spring, the rebels must be supported and Assad has to step down," so went the propaganda. And yadda yadda. The media's insane lies were repeated for months. Major media channels were engaged in non-stop propaganda warfare to destroy the independent Syrian state and reduce Syrians to slavery.

But then something remarkable and unexpected happened. Some Western journalists began telling the truth about the origins of the conflict, the true motives behind the West's anti-Syria propaganda, and the nature of the unpopular Syrian opposition.

The spell was broken.

In June, German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) reported that the infamous Houla massacre was committed not by Assad's forces, as it was claimed by the Western media at first, but by the NATO-backed terrorist opposition.

The official narrative about the Syrian conflict fell apart at that point. The moral case for overthrowing Assad was lost because it was based on total lies. The naked aggression by NATO's barbaric pawns against Syrian civilians was clear to see for anyone who was paying attention.

II. The Global Alternative Media Rises: End of Mainstream Propaganda

The establishment media no longer has a monopoly on reality. Official lies are challenged, buried truths are dug up, and objective reality is preserved. The magician's tricks have been revealed by spoilers in the crowd. The global alternative media is rising and it is an engine of peace, liberation, understanding, and sanity.

Even mainstream media figures are forced to admit that they have been lying to the world about nearly everything and that their warmongering views are not mainstream. They are losing their control over the minds of the masses, and like Russell of the Kony 2012 stunt, they are also losing control of their own minds.

In fact, establishment journalists have already gone crazy and lost their grip on reality. Their world is falling down around them and their temporary power is disappearing by the day. Truth is too strong a force. The establishment media is going against the gravity of reality and it is losing the battle.

But not everybody in the Western media has lost their heads and hearts. There are still some respectable and honourable journalists around who place the facts of history above the lies of governments. The writer "b" of MoA writes:

"There seems to be slight turn in the western media coverage of Syria. Here in Germany the press has now more reports showing the "rebels" as what they really are: traveling jihadists and foreign paid rabble. Commentators on the news websites are now mostly highly critical about the usual propaganda pieces and the German government policy of supporting the SNC. There also seems to be a slight shift in international media."

Whereas in the recent past the Western establishment media was all-powerful and its official narratives were unquestioningly accepted by the general public, today its legitimacy is rapidly collapsing and it is failing to make people believe in government lies.

Young consumers of news are looking to the rising global independent media to get the facts about critical issues and conflicts. In the process, their worldview is changing and their government-made beliefs are dying.

The truth about Syria, like the truth about 9/11, can be suppressed for the time being but it cannot be erased from the record of history.

Tony Cartalucci says that Western propaganda against Syria has gotten too out of control and as a result it is falling to pieces. The tangled lies are being exposed before their usefulness can be exploited. Here is an excerpt from Cartalucci's article, "US Treasury: Al Qaeda Runs Syrian "Rebellion":

"Now, it appears that the West's Arab "foreign legion," Al Qaeda, is about to suffer an unprecedented defeat - not at the hands of Western anti-terrorism forces, but at the hands of Syrian troops in the city of Aleppo. In a desperate effort to prevent this, the West is employing a series of desperate strategies ranging from portraying the trapped foreign-fighters committing atrocities inside Aleppo as "pending a certain massacre," to using the very presence of these foreign-fighters as evidence "Al Qaeada" is operating in Syria and must be "stopped" by Western intervention.

It is essential to understand that, as empires have always done, the monolithic corporate-financier interests of the West seek regional hegemony as a step toward global domination, and will say and do anything in order to achieve it. As resistance increases, the West's lies become more difficult to sell, the consistency of their propaganda overtly crumbling. The West, in nearly a single breath, has now claimed FSA fighters are both "Al Qaeda" that need to be eliminated, while also impeding a "massacre" by Syrian forces if something isn't done to save them. 

When US President Obama referred to the "depths of depravity" regarding Syrian security operations in Aleppo, he and his script writers do so with the belief that Americans, and the world, are ignorant and disinterested in the truth, and will gladly allow Western foreign policy to once again prey on their emotions and good intentions to sell yet another destructive, self-serving military intervention."

It is strange to hear that Washington is at war with Al-Qaeda in Yemen, and, at the same time, it is an ally of Al-Qaeda in Syria. Only one of these two things can be true. Washington is either at war with Al-Qaeda or it is not.

Washington's sense of logic is funny and twisted, but it is not unique. That's the way of the world. Throughout history, empires first conquer the truth, reality, and human consciousness, and then move their way to resource-rich lands.

The power of an empire is dependent on the cult beliefs and cult personalities that are created to justify its brutal rule at home and abroad.

It is a sign of hope for the world and for the collective life of mankind when the sovereignty of truth overcomes an empire of death, in whatever age in human history.

» Obama The Trojan Horse: A Legacy of Hypocrisy and Deceit with Larry Pinkney

» Obama The Trojan Horse: A Legacy of Hypocrisy and Deceit with Larry Pinkney Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your mind!

Larry Pinkney brilliantly explains the divide and conquer strategy of COINTELPRO and how Obama is a 'deep' fraud



From infowars.com

Why Turkey won't go to war with Syria [Voltaire Network]

Why Turkey won't go to war with Syria

Turkey has yet to understand the new deal struck between U.S. and Russia

Why Turkey won’t go to war with Syria

by Pepe Escobar

 

The tension and likelihood of a world war because of the conflict in Syria is currently on the cards because certain countries are behaving like arsonists, especially Turkey, in continuing to offer a logistical base for mercenaries from "liberated" Libya. Saudi Arabia’s ruling House of Saud will keep providing the money to buy them weapons. As for Washington, London and Paris, they will continue to calibrate their tactics in the protracted anticipation of a NATO attack against Damascus.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan never saw it coming.

He knew he was in trouble when the Pentagon leaked that the Turkish Phantom RF-4E shot down last week by Syrian anti-aircraft artillery happened off the Syrian coastline, directly contradicting Erdogan’s account, who claimed it happened in international air space.
And it got worse; Moscow, via Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, offered "objective radar data" as proof.
There was not much to do except change the subject. That’s when Ankara introduced a de facto buffer zone of four miles (6.4km) along the Syrian-Turkish border - now enforced by F-16s taking off from NATO’s Incirlik base at regular intervals.
Ankara also dispatched tanks, missile batteries and heavy artillery to the 500 mile (800km) border, right after Erdogan effectively branded Syria "a hostile state".
What next? Shock and awe? Hold your (neo-Ottoman) horses.

Lord Balfour, I presume?

The immediate future of Syria was designed in Geneva recently, in one more of those absurdist "international community" plays when the US, Britain, France, Turkey and the Gulf Cooperation Council’s Qatar and Kuwait sat down to devise a "peaceful solution" for the Syrian drama, even though most of them are reportedly weaponising the opposition to Damascus.
One would be excused to believe it was all back to the Balfour Declaration days, when foreign powers would decide the fate of a country without the merest consultation of its people, who, by the way, never asked them to do it on their behalf.
Anyway, in a nutshell: there won’t be a NATO war on Syria - at least for now. Beyond the fact that Lavrov routinely eats US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for breakfast, Russia wins - for now.
Predictably, Moscow won’t force regime change on Assad; it fears the follow-up to be the absolute collapse of Syrian state machinery, with cataclysmic consequences. Washington’s position boils down to accepting a very weak, but not necessarily out, Assad.
The problem is the interpretation of "mutual consent", on which a "transitional government" in Syria would be based - the vague formulation that emerged in Geneva. For the Obama administration, this means Assad has to go. For Moscow - and, crucially, for Beijing - this means the transition must include Assad.
Expect major fireworks dancing around the interpretation. Because a case can be made that the new "no-fly zone" over Libya - turned by NATO into a 30,000-sortie bombing campaign - will become Syria’s "transitional government", based on "mutual consent".
One thing is certain: nothing happens before the US presidential election in November. This means that for the next five months or so Moscow will be trying to extract some sort of "transitional government" from the bickering Syrian players. Afterwards, all bets are off. A Washington under Mitt Romney may well order NATO to attack in early 2013.
A case can be made that a Putin-Obama or US-Russia deal may have been reached even before Geneva.
Russia has eased up on NATO in Afghanistan. Then there was the highly choreographed move of the US offering a formal apology and Pakistan duly accepting it - thus reopening NATO’s supply routes to Afghanistan.
It’s crucial to keep in mind that Pakistan is an observer and inevitable future full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) - run by China and Russia, both BRICS members highly interested in seeing the US and NATO out of Afghanistan for good.
The "price" paid by Washington is, of course, to go easy on Damascus - at least for now. There is not much Erdogan can do about it; he really was not in the loop.

Keep the division of labour intact

So here’s the perverse essence of Geneva: the (foreign) players agreed to disagree - and to hell with Syrian civilians caught in the civil war crossfire.
In the absence of a NATO attack, the question is how the Assad system may be able to contain or win what is, by all practical purposes, a foreign-sponsored civil war.
Yes, because the division of labour will remain intact. Turkey will keep offering the logistical base for mercenaries coming from "liberated" Libya, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Lebanon. The House of Saud will keep coming up with the cash to weaponise them. And Washington, London and Paris will keep fine-tuning the tactics in what remains the long, simmering foreplay for a NATO attack on Damascus.
Even though the armed Syrian opposition does not control anything remotely significant inside Syria, expect the mercenaries reportedly weaponised by the House of Saud and Qatar to become even more ruthless. Expect the not-exactly-Free Syrian Army to keep mounting operations for months, if not years. A key point is whether enough supply lines will remain in place - if not from Jordan, certainly from Turkey and Lebanon.
Damascus may not have the power to strike the top Western actors in this drama. But it can certainly wreak havoc among the supporting actors - as in Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and, of course, Turkey.
Jordan, the weak link, a wobbly regime at best, has already closed off supply lines. Hezbollah sooner or later will do something about the Lebanese routes. Erdogan sooner or later will have to get real about what was decided in Geneva.
Moreover, one can’t forget that Saudi Arabia would be willing to fight only to the last dead American; it won’t risk Saudis to fight Syrians.
As for red alerts about Saudi troops getting closer to southern Syria through Jordan, that’s a joke. The House of Saud military couldn’t even defeat the ragtag Houthi rebels in neighbouring Yemen.
A final juicy point. The Russian naval base at Tartus - approximately a mere 55 miles (90km) away from where the Panthom RF-4E was shot down - now has its radar on 24/7. And it takes just a single Russian warship anchored in Syrian waters to send the message; if anyone comes up with funny ideas, just look at what happened to Georgia in 2008.

Time to shuffle those cards

Erdogan has very few cards left to play, if any. Assad, in an interview with Turkey’s Cumhuriyet newspaper, regretted "100 per cent" the downing of the RF-4E, and argued, "the plane was flying in an area previously used by Israel’s air force".
The fact remains that impulsive Erdogan got an apology from wily Assad. By contrast, after the Mavi Marmara disaster, Erdogan didn’t even get an unpeeled banana from Israel.
The real suicidal scenario would be for Erdogan to order another F4-style provocation and then declare war on Damascus on behalf of the not-exactly-Free Syrian Army. It won’t happen. Damascus has already proved it is deploying a decent air defence network.
Every self-respecting military analyst knows that war on Syria will be light years away from previous "piece of cake" Iraq and Libya operations. NATO commanders, for all their ineptitude, know they could easily collect full armouries of bloody noses.
As for the Turkish military, their supreme obsession is the Kurds in Anatolia, not Assad. They do receive some US military assistance. But what they really crave is an army of US drones to be unleashed over Anatolia.
Turkey routinely crosses into Northern Iraq targeting Kurdish PKK guerrillas accused of killing Turkish security forces. Now, guerrillas based in Turkey are reportedly crossing the border into Syria and killing Syrian security forces, and even civilians. It would be too much to force Ankara to admit its hypocrisy.
Erdogan, anyway, should proceed with extreme caution. His rough tactics are isolating him; more than two-thirds of Turkish public opinion is against an attack on Syria.
It’s come to the point that Turkish magazine Radikal asked their readers whether Turkey should be a model for the new Middle East. Turkey used to be "the sick man of Europe"; now Turkey is "becoming the lonely man of the Middle East", says the article.

It’s a gas, gas, gas

Most of all, Erdogan simply cannot afford to antagonise Russia. There are at least 100,000 Russians in Syria - doing everything from building dams to advising on the operation of those defence systems.
And then there’s the inescapable Pipelineistan angle. Turkey happens to be Gazprom’s second-largest customer. Erdogan can’t afford to antagonise Gazprom. The whole Turkish energy security architecture depends on gas from Russia - and Iran. Crucially, one year ago a $10bn Pipelineistan deal was clinched between Iran, Iraq and Syria for a natural gas pipeline from Iran’s giant South Pars field to Iraq, Syria and further on towards Turkey and eventually connecting to Europe.
During the past 12 months, with Syria plunging into civil war, key players stopped talking about it. Not anymore. Any self-respecting analyst in Brussels admits that the EU’s supreme paranoia is to be a hostage of Gazprom. The Iran-Iraq-Syria gas pipeline would be essential to diversify Europe’s energy supplies away from Russia.
For the US and the EU, this is the real game, and if it takes two or more years of Assad in power, so be it. And it must be done in a way that does not fully antagonise Russia. That’s where reassurances in Geneva to Russia keeping its interests intact in a post-Assad Syria come in.
No eyebrows should be raised. This is how ultra-hardcore geopolitics is played behind closed doors. It remains to be seen whether Erdogan will get the message.

Syria and Turkey’s phantom war

Once upon a time, not too long ago, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu was the prime proponent of a foreign policy dubbed "zero problems with our neighbors" - derided by many in the West as "new-Ottomanism".
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) meets this Tuesday in Brussels not only to craft its response to a Turkish F-4 Phantom jet shot being down by Syria’s anti-aircraft artillery but to seal what sort of "new Ottomanism" is emerging from what actually turned into a "big problem with one of our neighbors" policy.
Davutoglu insists the F-4 was shot in international air space - although conceding it had briefly entered Syrian air space. Contradicting Syria’s official explanation, he said the jet was clearly marked as Turkish; was on a "training flight" to test Turkey’s "national radar system"; and most of all had "no covert mission related to Syria".
Previously, Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi had stressed this was an "accident, not an attack". According to Makdissi, "an unidentified object entered our air space and unfortunately as a result it was brought down. It was understood only later that it was a Turkish plane."
Davutoglu, in a Turkish media blitzkrieg, as reported by Today’s Zaman, reiterated this was a "solo flight"; the jet was "unarmed"; there was no warning before it was shot down; and as for Syria trying to connect the "not ill-intentioned violation" of its airspace to the shooting of the F-4, that was "irrelevant".
Violation of another country’s air space, trying to avoid its defenses by flying at low altitude, is as normal to Davutoglu as a sheesh kebab for lunch; "There were many violations of Syrian air space by other countries before. But Syria shot down our unarmed plane."
But then the foreign minister started deviating (or not) from the script. He stressed, "No matter how the downed Turkish jet saga unfolds, we will always stand by [the] Syrian people". And this; "We will always stand by Syrian people until the advent of a democratic regime there." Forget about the F-4 Phantom; the "Syrian people" may sleep soundly because the heart of the matter remains regime change.

Everything else is irrelevant

NATO will consider Turkey’s case under Article Four of its charter - which allows consultations whenever "the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the parties is threatened". We’re not - yet - at Article Five, which is all about armed response. But we could be, depending how NATO interprets Turkey’s assertion that the F-4 Phantom was "hit 13 miles off the Syrian coast, in international air space".
So according to Davutoglu’s story the F-4 was briefly deviated to Syrian airspace by some irresistible force (Thor?); soon realized its mistake; left in a hurry; but then was shot down. By the way, it was not a "solo flight"; witnesses told Turkish TV they saw two low-flying fighter jets speed by in the direction of Syrian waters, but only one return.
As predictably as England being kicked out of Euro 2012, the usual European warmongering poodles of the William Hague kind have already stepped in, blaming Syria because Turkey violated Syrian airspace. Yet there’s no evidence - so far - that Ankara warned the Syrian government and military they would be conducting some sort of reconnaissance very close to a by now very explosive border.
Whether the F-4 (or the pair of F-4s) was armed or not is, to quote Davutoglu, "irrelevant"; try telling the Pentagon, for instance, that an unknown, low-flying, fast-moving, unidentified object entering your air space is not a threat. If this was a military reconnaissance mission, as Davutoglu himself argues, the F-4 had to be armed.
And imagine if this was a Syrian jet flying over Turkish or Israeli territory.

Burn, Anatolia, burn

Ankara will certainly ask Damascus for a formal apology and payment of reparations. Tehran - which until virtually yesterday, that is, before the Syrian uprising, was part of an Ankara-Damascus-Tehran axis - is calling for cool heads to prevail.
As much as professional warmongers are encouraging a Gulf of Tonkin remix, that remains pure folly. Still, Asia Times Online has learned from a local source about "frantic" movement at NATO’s sprawling Incirlik base in Turkey for days.
Everyone knows - but nobody talks about - NATO’s command and control center in Iskenderun, in Turkey’s Hatay province, near the Syrian border, set up months ago to organize, train and weaponize the motley crew known as the Free Syrian Army. Everyone knows Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the CIA are advising and weaponizing these Syrian NATOGCC "rebels" with essential Turkish help in the logistics/safe haven front.
Everyone knows Washington will settle for nothing less than regime change in Syria - to the benefit of a pliable, sub-imperial puppet (certainly not an Islamist). Everyone knows every provocation advances the not so hidden agenda of an all-out NATOGCC attack on Syria without a UN Security Council resolution, bypassing both Russia and China.
If "neo-Ottomanism" persists with its regime change obsession in Syria - to a large extent tied to the Turkish dream of finding a solution to the Kurdish "problem" - it had better start evaluating how Damascus could shower the Kurdish PKK with funds and logistics so they may unleash hell in Turkish Anatolia.
No doubt this will get much uglier. But in Wag the Dog terms - and that’s what this is all about - no one knows for sure; is Turkey trying to wag the NATO dog into a war, or is it the other way around?

Pepe Escobar

Government by the Banks, for the Banks: The ESM Coup D’Etat in Europe

Government by the Banks, for the Banks: The ESM Coup D’Etat in Europe

Excellent Article by Ellen Brown [http://webofdebt.wordpress.com]

On Friday, June 29th, German Chancellor Angela Merkel acquiesced to changes to a permanent Eurozone bailout fund—“before the ink was dry,” as critics complained.  Besides easing the conditions under which bailouts would be given, the concessions included an agreement that funds intended for indebted governments could be funneled  directly to stressed banks.

According to Gavin Hewitt, Europe editor for BBC News, the concessions mean that:

[T]he eurozone’s bailout fund (backed by taxpayers’ money) will be taking a stake in failed banks.
Risk has been increased. German taxpayers have increased their liabilities. In future a bank crash will no longer fall on the shoulders of national treasuries but on the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), a fund to which Germany contributes the most.
In the short term, these measures will ease pressure in the markets. However there is currently only 500bn euros assigned to the ESM. That may get swallowed up quickly and the markets may demand more. It is still unclear just how deep the holes in the eurozone’s banks are.

The ESM is now a permanent bailout fund for private banks, a sort of permanent “welfare for the rich.”  There is no ceiling set on the obligations to be underwritten by the taxpayers, no room to negotiate, and no recourse in court. Its daunting provisions were summarized in a December 2011 youtube video originally posted in German, titled “The shocking truth of the pending EU collapse!”:

The treaty establishes a new intergovernmental organization to which we are required to transfer unlimited assets within seven days if it so requests, an organization that can sue us but is immune from all forms of prosecution and whose managers enjoy the same immunity.  There are no independent reviewers and no existing laws apply.  Governments cannot take action against it.  Europe’s national budgets [are] in the hands of one single unelected intergovernmental organization.

Here is the text of some of the ESM’s provisions:
[Article 8]  “The authorised capital stock shall be EUR 700 000 [700 billion Euros].”
[Article 9]:  “ESM Members hereby irrevocably and unconditionally undertake to pay on demand any capital call made on them . . . such demand to be paid within seven days of receipt.”
[Article 10]: “The Board of Governors . . . may decide to change the authorised capital and amend Article 8 . . . accordingly.”
[Article 32, paragraph 3]: “The ESM, its property, funding, and assets . . . shall enjoy immunity from every form of judicial process . . . .”
[Article 32, paragraph 4]: “The property, funding and assets of the ESM shall . . . be immune from search, requisition, confiscation, expropriation, or any other form of seizure, taking or foreclosure by executive, judicial, administrative or legislative action.”
[Article 30]:  “ . . . Governors, alternate Governors, Directors, alternate Directors, as well as the Managing Director and other staff members shall be immune from legal proceedings with respect to acts performed by them in their official capacity and shall enjoy inviolability in respect of their official papers and documents.”
And that was before Merkel’s recent concessions, which allow this open-ended indebtedness to be funneled directly to the banks.

Why Did Merkel Cave?

“Reactions back home were devastating,” reported der Spiegel.  “[T]he impression was that [Merkel] had been out-maneuvered by Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti and Spanish Prime Minster Mariano Rajoy.”
As of June 21, 13 of 17 countries still had not ratified the ESM; and the most important ratification needed was Germany’s, the largest economy in the Eurozone.  Earlier, Angela Merkel had opposed using the bailout fund to pump money directly into struggling European banks.  But at the EU summit that began on Thursday and dragged on well into the night, she finally relented.  Late Friday evening, German lawmakers voted 493-106 in favor of the €700 billion ($890 billion) permanent bailout fund.
What caused Merkel to back down?  According to an article in The Economist, the late night was “filled with bluff and bluster,” in which

Mariano Rajoy, the Spanish prime minister . . . , along with Italy’s Mario Monti, had threatened to block any agreement at the summit unless their demands were met. Mr Rajoy obtained satisfaction, but the same is not quite true of Mr Monti, who had been the most adamant of the two.
Mr Monti declared himself satisfied, but caused considerable irritation to partners. Among the deals he had blocked was the “growth pact”, a mixture of stimulus measures.

What Monti achieved by this maneuver was not clear:

“Who needs the growth pact? Not Germany,” said one bemused participant. The euro zone’s fiscal hawks say the bond-buying mechanism will be little different from the existing system. “Mario Monti raised a gun to his head and threatened to shoot himself. In the end he wounded himself in the shoulder,” said one scornful diplomat.

Maybe.  Or maybe the bond-buying mechanism was not what he was really after.

The Italian Coup D’Etat

There is reason to suspect that “Super Mario” Monti may be representing interests other than those of his country.  He rose to power in Italy last November in what critics called a “‘coup d’etat’ engineered by bankers and the European Union.”  He was not elected but stepped in after Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi resigned under duress.
Monti is not only an “international advisor” to Goldman Sachs, one of the most powerful financial firms in the world, but a leader in the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission.  In an article in The New American, Alex Newman calls these clandestine groups “two of the most influential cabals in existence today.”  Monti is listed as a member of the steering committee on the official Bilderberg website and as the European Group chairman on the Trilateral Commission website.
The Trilateral Commission was co-founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski, also Bilderberger attendees.  The Trilateral Commission grew from the thesis in Brzezinski’s 1970 piece Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era that a coordinated policy among developed nations was necessary in order to counter global instability erupting from increasing economic inequality. He wrote in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard that it would be difficult to get a consensus on these issues “except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.”
Naomi Klein calls it “the shock doctrine”—an induced disaster forcing austerity measures on sovereign nations.  In desperation, they would come to heel, relinquishing the sovereign right of governments to an unelected body of technocrats.  And that is what the ESM seems to achieve.
Rockefeller notoriously wrote in his 2002 autobiography, “Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure—one world, if you will.  If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”

Implementing the Shock Doctrine

In another bankers’ coup last November, former Goldman Sachs executive Mario Draghi replaced Jean-Claude Trichet as head of the European Central Bank.  The European Stability Mechanism quickly followed.  It was a permanent rescue facility intended to replace certain temporary facilities as soon as the member states had ratified it, slated to occur by July 1, 2012.  The ESM came to an initial vote in January 2012, when it was passed in the dead of night with barely a mention in the press.
The recent modifications were also agreed to in the dead of night, ostensibly because Italy and Spain were afflicted with onerously high interest rates.  But there are other ways to bring down interest rates on sovereign debt besides forcing whole countries into open-ended pacts to bail out private banks for unlimited sums in perpetuity, in the hope that the banks might bail the governments out in return.
The U.S. 2012 budget deficit is significantly worse than either Italy’s or Spain’s, yet somehow the U.S. has managed to keep interest rates on its debt at record lows.  How has it pulled this off?
One theory is that JPMorgan’s $57 trillion in interest rate swaps have something to do with it.  Another explanation, however, is that the Fed has simply stepped in as lender of last resort and bought up any debt not sold at the low rate set by the Treasury, using “quantitative easing” (money created on a computer screen).  Between December 2008 and June 2011, the Fed bought a whopping $2.3 trillion of U.S. bonds in two rounds of quantitative easing.  Why can’t the European Central Bank do the same thing?  The answer is that there are rules against it, but rules are just arbitrary agreements.  They can be changed by agreement—and often have been, to save the banks.
As the cynic quoted in The Economist article above observed, the bond-buying mechanism for countries under the ESM will be little different from the existing system.  Mario Monti said the plan will support government bond prices only in countries that comply with fiscal targets, and that it will act as an incentive for governments to follow virtuous policies.  That means avoiding deficits, even if it requires further austerity measures and selling of assets.  On the public level, that could mean national treasures like the Acropolis.  On the private level, The New York Times reported Friday that some desperate out-of-work Europeans were going so far as to sell their kidneys to pay household bills. The shock doctrine, it seems, has come to the doorsteps of privileged Westerners.
The German diplomats negotiating the ESM did leave open some escape hatches, including a request by Germany’s highest court to the country’s president not to sign the treaties into law until a legal review can be completed.  At least 12,000 complaints are expected to be filed with the Federal Constitutional Court regarding the ESM and the fiscal pact. The legal review could well conclude that the ESM illegally hijacks taxpayer funds for private bank profit.
It is one thing to pool national resources to bail out other sovereign governments, quite another to write a blank check to bail out the profligate private banks that precipitated the global downturn.  Europe has a strong tradition of publicly-owned banks.  If the people must bear the costs, the people should own the banks and reap the benefits.

War At Any Cost: Another Manufactured Pretext for War with Syria

War At Any Cost: Another Manufactured Pretext for War with Syria

Jun 25th, 2012 by ericdraitser

The downing of a Turkish jet by the Syrian military last week was not merely a military incident making the possibility of an intervention and regional war much more likely.  This episode was the most recent in a long and storied history of “international incidents” or provocations used by imperial powers as pretexts for military aggression.  Without such incidents, the forces of imperialism are seen as nothing more than aggressors, out to destroy weaker nations in their own interests.  However, with the necessary justifications that such episodes provide, those same powers can portray their wars as justified, necessary, and wholly righteous.

This event last week was only the latest in a series of provocations specifically designed to justify a military intervention.  However, as the façade of the Houla “massacre”, the use of children as human shields, and the countless other lies propagated by the Western media have been debunked or otherwise exposed, the Western imperialist ruling class looks for a new incident to legitimize their plan for total war on Syria.

Just the Facts

On June 21^st, a Turkish jet was shot down by Syrian military forces. Initially, the Western media rushed to portray this incident as a blatantly aggressive action by Assad and his military, hoping to play off their many months of propagandizing the public into believing Assad to be the devil incarnate.  Vigorous condemnations were heard from all corners of the Western ruling establishment, as the world seemed to move closer to another so-called intervention.  However, as the episode unfolded, the media had to backtrack and, as usual, reversed their initial story without a fraction of the fanfare that the initial lie had.  They had to admit publicly that, in fact, the Turkish jet had violated Syrian airspace and so, according to international law, Syria was well within their rights to shoot it down.  This fact gets lost in the narrative however, as the world looks to NATO, the military arm of US power projection around the world, to “act decisively”.

This episode is merely the latest attempt by the imperialist establishment to drum up support for some form of military intervention by portraying the Assad regime as bloodthirsty monsters.  Last month, we saw the world recoil in horror at the brutality of what came to be known as the Houla “massacre”.  However, as the United States, France, and the other Western powers attempted to spin the event as a brutal example of why they must wage war on Syria, the truth came out that, in fact, the victims of the massacre were not killed by government shelling, but by close range execution attributable to the NATO-sponsored death squads unleashed on the people of Syria.

Like the Houla massacre, the outrageous claim that the Syrian military was using children as human shields was designed to play on the emotions of the international community in hopes of eliciting a swift response and creating the a climate conducive to war.  Naturally, no evidence exists to back up this claim other than a dubious UN report based on so-called “activists” and “eyewitnesses”.  The Western propagandists are less interested in being able to support these claims than simply making them and implanting them into the public consciousness.

The Historical Precedent

These sorts of manufactured provocations are nothing new.  There is a rich historical record of such incidents being manipulated, distorted, or entirely fabricated in order to create a pretext for war.  One of the most famous examples of what has come to be known as the “false flag” phenomenon is the Gleiwitz incident.  Nazi operatives dressed as Polish soldiers attacked a German radio station and then claimed that this was the work of Polish saboteurs.  The Nazis even went so far as to import bodies and stage an entire scene which could then be offered up to the press as “evidence” of the assault.  Naturally, the incident was used as the direct pretext for the Nazi invasion of Poland and the official start of World War II.

A similar international false flag event, today known as the Gulf of Tonkin incident, led to the official start of the Vietnam War.  The claim was that the North Vietnamese had deliberately fired on two separate US naval vessels and that this, as an act of war, justified the US officially entering the war.  Of course, these incidents have since been totally debunked by declassified documents that show, even at the time, lawmakers were skeptical of the claims.  However, this episode illustrates the power of manufactured provocations to shape the course of foreign policy and the waging of war.

Perhaps no so-called “international incident” demonstrates more plainly the power of the media to influence public opinion and provide the necessary pretext for war than the sinking of the USS Maine.  This event, which was manufactured by William Randolph Hearst and the US establishment in order to justify imperial aggression against Cuba, demonstrates the role of the media in making the case for war.  In the lead-up to the sinking of the Maine, Hearst’s and other papers published wild stories of Spanish atrocities all throughout Cuba, the sorts of atrocities that required intervention.  Naturally, the Maine incident provided the cover and the US entered into what came to be known as the Spanish-American War. More importantly, however, today’s observers should note that this moment in history is perhaps the official beginning of US imperialism (treatment of the indigenous Native population on the continent notwithstanding).

What To Do?

What makes this issue of false flag events and “international incidents” relevant is the fact that the imperialist ruling class will manufacture as many of these sorts of episodes as is necessary for their war.  Because of this, it is incumbent on the forces standing in opposition to such aggression to uphold the principles of international law and justice.  Syria was well within their rights to shoot down a foreign jet operating within their airspace, just as the US military would be within its rights to shoot down a Mexican warplane within US airspace.

However, this episode is far larger than simply international law.  Indeed, it strikes at the heart of the concept of the nation-state.  It demonstrates first, the power of the nation, with its leaders, citizens, and institutions to resist the forces of imperialism.  Conversely, it shows the existential need of the imperialist ruling class to destroy strong, independent nations that refuse to be enslaved by the forces of finance capital and imperial economic domination.  Syria is the frontline of the struggle against these forces, and those who believe themselves to be anti-imperialists must unite to denounce provocations, pretexts, and legitimizations manufactured by the imperialist ruling class and preempt all their attempts to drive the world ever closer to total war.