Tuesday, March 12, 2013

The demons of Europe aren’t gone; they’re only sleeping...

 
 
The demons of Europe aren’t gone; they’re only sleeping...
 

There have been waves of threats by Eurozone politicians to bully people into accepting “whatever it takes” to keep the shaky construct of the monetary union glued together. These threats peaked last year with disorderly default, and when that wasn’t enough, with the collapse of the Eurozone. But now, the ultimate threat has been pronounced: war...

It wasn’t an idle thought by a wayward parliamentarian on the radical fringe but a well-articulated statement by Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker who was, until January, the President of the Eurogroup that manages the political aspects of the euro. And he’d picked Europe’s largest magazine, Der Spiegel...
He’d alluded to it before. Last August, as he was jabbering about Greece’s potential exit from the Eurozone, he lamented that “many Germans and the German media” talked about Greece as if it were “a people you couldn’t respect,” and that Greeks depicted Chancellor Angela Merkel as if she were “the heiress of the Nazis.” And then his big threat, albeit in veiled form: “What we thought had been buried long ago, very quickly rises again.”
His problem: the halting integration of Europe. European countries were small, but there was a solution. “We must show the world something giant, and that’s the euro,” he said. He wanted Europeans to integrate more closely. And not just within the EU, but “the total continent, with extensions”—so maybe Turkey. They’d all eventually use the euro. And if it didn’t work out....
That was last year. Now, given the Italian election, he made it explicit. “For my generation, the common currency has always been a policy of peace,” he said. He was worried that people were getting lost in national naval gazing. “Those who believe that the eternal question of war and peace in Europe would never reappear could be seriously mistaken,” he said. “The demons aren’t gone; they’re only sleeping, as the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo have shown.”
The possibility of war—unless the euro survived and became the currency of the entire EU.
He was struck by the realization how much the European conditions resembled those of 1913, on the eve of World War I. But then, after having thrown “war” on the table, he backed off; he didn’t believe that Europe was facing armed conflicts, but he saw “conspicuous parallels.” In 1913, the prevailing wisdom was that there could never be another war in Europe because the powers on the continent were economically so interwoven that they couldn’t afford it, he said. “Particularly in Western and Northern Europe, there reigned a complacency that assumed that peace had been secured forever.”
By 2050, Europe would have about 7% of the world population, he said. In order to remain relevant, it would have to be united. The heads of the governments in Germany, France, etc, knew that their voices were heard internationally only because they were speaking through the “megaphone” of the EU.
And the EU’s destiny was the euro. He listed proudly the “serious reforms” that had been carried out, like keeping Greece in the Eurozone—regardless of what that did to the Greeks whose belts had been tightened by five notches, or what it did to their  economy that would be downgraded to “developing nation” effective June 2013. He praised the bailout funds and the European banking union—regardless of how they’d use taxpayers in some countries to bail out banks and their investors in others.
But hadn’t the elections in Italy shown that Southern Europeans weren’t all that enthusiastic about his glorious plans? Hadn’t Italian voters just demolished Prime Minister Mario Monti and his pro-euro course of reforms and austerity? It didn’t matter. Abandoning the austerity policies “would be a big mistake,” he explained. Politicians shouldn’t promote the “wrong policies” just because they were afraid they’d lose the next election. “If you want to govern, you must take responsibility for your country and Europe overall. And that means: you must implement the correct policies even if many voters find them wrong.”
A curious understanding of democracy. One fraught with peril. But one that has become all too common in the Eurozone where the will of the people has consistently been trampled into the ground. To make his message more persuasive, to get politicians to toe the line, to get taxpayers in financially stable countries to give up resisting the transnational wealth transfers, and to get the people in crisis countries to swallow without demur the bitter pills of his reform programs, he’d added what has become the ultimate threat in the euro bailout and austerity racket—the possibility of war.
But there may be complications. The ECB and the national central banks of the Eurozone set out to collect information on household wealth. A massive bureaucratic undertaking. Results are now ready. No one in Europe had ever done a survey on that scale before. And no one might ever do it again. Because the results are so explosive that the Bundesbank is keeping its report secret—and word has leaked out why. A “Politically Explosive” Secret: Italians Are Over Twice As Wealthy As Germans... 
ZIO-Britain hasn't been sovereign since the Second World War since when we've been a satellite of the United States. The right wing media and the Tory Eurosceptics rage against the threat to British sovereignty from the European Union and certainly the EU has many faults but they are incapable of recognizing that the foreign power that actually controls Britain is the ZIOCONNED USA and its most infamous White House Murder INC,...
The potential war aims of any of Britain’s early 20th century rivals are easy enough to imagine or, for that matter, to look up. First, the British Empire would have been dismantled, such portions of it as the conquering nation wanted would have been seized, other parts would have been allowed self-government under the overall control of the new imperial power, and a few token colonies would be left under British control where that suited the conqueror’s interests. Second, the British government would become a permanent and subordinate ally of the new imperial power. Third, Britain’s military would have been reduced to a fraction of its previous size, and the British government would be obligated to provide troops and ships to support the new imperial power when the latter decided on a military adventure. Fourth, Britain would be expected to pay a large sum of money as reparations for the costs of the war. Finally, to guarantee all these things, the British government would have been forced to accept an occupying force in Britain, and permanent military bases would be signed over to the new imperial power in Britain and its remaining colonies. That, by and large, is what happened to defeated nations in the wars of the 19th and 20th centuries...
Now compare that list to the relations between Great Britain and the United States from 1945 to the present. That’s the thing that can’t be mentioned to this day in polite company: the British empire ended in the early 1940s when the United States conquered and occupied Britain. It was a bloodless conquest, like the German conquest of Denmark, and since the alternative was submitting to Nazi Germany, the British by and large made the best of it. Still, none of Queen Victoria’s prime ministers would have tolerated for a moment the thought of foreign troops being garrisoned on British soil, which is where thousands of US military personnel are garrisoned now...
That is a very interesting point of view which would explain a lot of things, such as the gradual "Americanization" of the labor relationships in Britain.
Still, you are probably aware that a lot of people see it the other way around. You will find a lot of people in Russia who believe that the USA is still controlled from London, in particular the City and the entire international banking network.
And then, there are those who see what they could call the transnational Anglosphere, basically the ECHELON countries, the signatories of the UKUSA/AUSCANNZUKUS Security Agreement: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Add to that the quasi-colonial status of the USA as a vassal of Israel via the Zionist Lobby and the picture gets really complex.
My personal feeling is that all of the above theories are true and that what is truly ruling the planet is a combination of all of the above...
A combination of all three... Yes. The world is a complex place...

As far as London is concerned the old City was a very different place from the cowboy casino capitalism that operates there now. Until the mid Eighties the City of London was ruled by the old British establishment families and to make a successful career in London finance you either had to know the right people or bring money to the bank with you when you joined. The culture was arrive late, leave early and have long lunches. It was a club based on trust and despite its faults it was more or less functional...
In the mid Eighties the Thatcher government deregulated the City and ended what they saw as restrictive practices. These reforms were labeled Big Bang. Once the City opened up the Wall Street boys basically bought up the place and took it over. The culture changed completely and a hyper aggressive market fundamentalism took over. The deregulation made it possible to take insane risks with other people's money and the level of fraud and scandals shot up...
There is plenty of evidence that the City is worse regulated and more corrupt than Wall Street. The maverick financier Max Keiser recently interviewed a former Scotland Yard detective on his show

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iswT3PfMec&feature=player_embedded


He confirms that London is the fraud capital of the world and that the government has been knowingly conniving at it for years. The British establishment has been quite cynically protecting the City fathers and weakening the regulator in order to attract criminal money as a business decision. UK plc home of innovative financial entrepreneurs and light touch regulation.
Wall Street used London as a means of circumventing US regulation. One of the reasons Clinton repealed Glass Steagal was because the Wall Street boys were dodging regulation via their London offices.
As for Israel I believe before 1967 the US Israel lobby was nothing like as powerful as it is now and the US was not Israel's prime ally. After 1967 the US saw Israel as a Cold War asset in the Middle East which could be used to intimidate the Arabs but after the Cold War Israel ceased to be an asset in my opinion and has become a strategic liability for the US. It would be easier for Uncle Sam to manage the princes and dictators of the Middle East if US support for Israel didn't lead to massive anti American feeling among the Arab public. The Lobby has grown in power to the point where the tail is wagging the dog. Walt and Mearsheimer demonstrate this quite powerfully.
The prime concern of the plutocracy that control the Anglosphere is making money not ethnicity or religion or Eretz Israel. However I do believe that certain Mafiosi and oligarchs who happen to be Jewish such as those who nearly destroyed Russia in the 1990s support Israel because it offers a refuge to which they can emigrate should they get in trouble. The ideology of Israel as a Jewish state means any Jew anywhere in the world can migrate to Israel and make aliyah as of right. This is rationalized as offering Jews protection from the threat of another Holocaust but it also potentially serves to protect criminals from retribution as well as protecting those facing unjust persecution.
The scales fell from my eyes about Israel when they buried the British crook Robert Maxwell on the Mount of Olives despite the fact that he'd stolen from the pension fund of his employees. Apparently he had put his financial and intelligence resources in Israel's service throughout his career and they stood by him as one of their own...
 

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