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Apr 12, 2012

Jim Willie: Golden Eye of Hurricane

From GoldseekThursday, 12 April 2012 
By: Jim Willie CB,  GoldenJackass.com

What an incredibly complex confusing and treacherous month. It can be safely said that 80% of the activity is almost totally kept from the public. The financial system is breaking in an accelerated fashion. Compare to some grisly horror movie where a man is strapped in a chair. The more he moves, the tighter the bindings pull on his gasping throat and pressed nether stones. The most significant two factors at work are the Iran sanctions and their powerful backfire, and the futile efforts in Europe to stem the banking center collapse. The anti-USDollar federation that spans widely across the globe is gathering strong momentum. Financial aggression is being met by financial alternative development. As Greece moved off the daily news fabrication factory, the reality of a collapse in Spain and Italy has moved to the front center of observations. Meanwhile, the American nitwits continue to argue over Quantitative Easing when it never stopped, and in fact, went global under their noses. The US news machine, dominated by the syndicate, churns out absurdities after more nonsensical bites on an economic recovery. The subprime loan machinery has ramped up. The retail factor does not tell of strength, but of weakness. Spending on consumption does not indicate strength, but a path to ruin still not well recognized. The gap between reality and reports is diverging.

Back at the gold desk, another cartel member kill is in progress. A string of UBS-type gold arena deaths is the biggest untold story of the new decade. The UBS rogue trader story was a total fabrication, written and staged to conceal the removal of all UBS gold from their reserves inventory. They are a dead gold player. The gold community, even LeMetropole Cafe and GATA, appears to be missing the coalition kills taken place in sequence with each paper gold ambush. If the cartel wishes to drive down the paper gold price, then they must deal with the consequences of having one more cartel member bank offered on the physical altar in a death sacrifice. They are vulnerable from sovereign bond positions and weak currency positions. In the margin call vise, they must forfeit their gold, but in a long slow process as truly enormous physical gold orders are being filled over a pyramid of prices lower than the cartel bank wishes. Details are scanty, but the trail can be followed to some extent by false stories to cover the damaging tracks. The press did a wretched job in checking the facts on the UBS rogue story. The loss was over $6 billion. The trades were all approved at VP level. The trap was laid and UBS entered with both feet, the consequence for which was being expelled from the gold arena, probably forever, in a total loss of its gold bullion. No wonder the press did not report the actual story. It would have been a monster bull story for gold. If Barclays or Royal Bank of Scotland or Bank of America were having their golden blood removed on a table, with straps in place for directors of their gold desks, and hot pokers applied by coalition forces to extract their gold, the outcome dictated by incredibly insolvency and margin call vulnerability, the effect on the gold market would be magnificent. Such events are in progress in my opinion, based on some juicy information feeds. Rather than divulge the entire details of the cartel kill, the coalition prefers to move to the next victim in the Wall Street & London cesspool of finance.

What follows will not be presented in great detail. That is saved for the Hat Trick Letter reports, where research has come across magnificent events in progress. As the calm spreads like a fog over the financial sphere, the level of risk rises. As the phony recovery stories propagate like a disease from the host, the level of risk rises. As the US political race takes center stage and the stakes increase, the level of risk rises. Events are catapulting in a loose coordination that is very difficult to observe, except for the quicksand in Spain.

POWERFUL FALSE CALM EVENTS
The subprime cancer has returned. The struggle to revive the credit engines has drawn the weaker elements into the room. Banks wish to lend more. While few players qualify for loan approval and partnership grants, the banks themselves have never been more insolvent. Without the FASB accounting largesse and generosity, all large US banks would be declared insolvent and prepared for liquidation proceedings. The junk bond warning lights are flashing. The movement to even remain standing still has come with greater risk assumed and embraced.

The anti-USDollar forces gather strength. The emerging nations had been making numerous significant bilateral agreements a month ago. The Iran oil deals had dictated some degree of innovation in payment systems in response. The sanctions forced their hands. Additional sanctions like usage of SWIFT bank systems as a weapon, threatening usage in Europe, resulted in a flash point. The BRICS nations, led by China, appear to be on the verge of launching a rival SWIFT bank procedure that might be critical in trade settlement. It is likely to be outside the US$ setting.

Prepare for the possibly sudden cardiac arrest event to the Petro-Dollar. In April 2010, a major conference took place in Abu Dhabi among Arab royals. They arrived in unmarked jets, over 200 strong in number. They struck important accords, including the reliance upon Russia and China in the security role for the protectorate. In essence, the Saudis worked to replace the United States in the protection racket that has endured since the 1973 embargo, manifested in trade surplus recycling, even as the Germans worked to establish the Eastern Alliance. If a new SWIFT system comes, then the foundation will be set to walk away slowly from the Petro-Dollar. Few see the pieces coming together. The impact on the USEconomy would be something between a wrecking ball and catastrophic.

China prepares to wrest control of the USDollar, for the stacks of reserves held outside the US boundaries. This is history in the making. If a Chinese USDollar is launched, and trades independently of the domestic USDollar, then it is Third World curtain time for the United States. The practical effect would be rampant price inflation from a devalued domestic Dollar. It would be rampant shortages, since the restated Dollar would not be a favored piece of paper, not with tremendous economic weakness, absent industry, insolvent banks, ruined states, bond fraud charges in every nook & cranny, war cost impact, and the big storm cloud of the runaway USGovt deficits which could tack on another $200 billion in March. The path is clear, which begins with over 50% in external held debt, then lost sovereignty, then foreign voices influencing key decisions, then wearing down the muscle mass of tools like the IMF and World Bank, and finally lost control of the global reserve currency. Never in history has a nation had control of its currency wrested by another nation. The reaction process by foreign entities to the USFed and USDept Treasury abuses to the USDollar in hyper monetary inflation have wrought vengeance at worst and survival tactics at best.

Germany has made preparations to leave the Euro currency union. The more accurate statement should be that Germany is preparing to take the Euro ball out of the park, to improve it, to sign new free agency team members, and to leave the Southern European nations to fend for themselves in a sandlot. The Latin remnant will be essentially bagholders left with the gristle, fat, and toxic matter of the Euro currency itself. What they hold onto will be devalued in a fast moving storm. The risk to Germany will be the opposite. They must sign up enough new trade partners so that whatever new currency (Nordic Euro, New Marc, Euro Mark) is not a victim of its own success. A fast rising new currency would inflict damage on the German export trade. Numerous financial safety nets have been created and loaded, designed to aid large German banks. Some might fail.

Spain is on the verge of rejecting the austerity measures and maybe the Euro currency. Refusal to swallow the poison pill might have some benefits, like not pulling the rug from under the economy in vast spending cuts. But the reality bites hard, as the Spanish Govt Bond yield will revisit its old high levels. Funding problems will become acute. Think NO WAY OUT. The 23% jobless rate in Spain is written like an unusual figure in the West, but it equals the United States. The US simply has better liars in the economic trenches and more thorough press control. The strain in Spain will likely rain chaos on the bond plains, sufficient to cause their leaders to show disdain for remaining within the strained Euro domain.

The USFed and Euro Central Bank are guilty of $5 trillion in paper binges in the last several months alone. The US Federal Reserve and the European Central Banks are operating like desperate siamese twins in the frantic rescue attempt to prevent a Western banking system collapse. ECB head Draghi might have expressed reluctance to trade in bad PIGS debt paper, but he has been the champion in EUR 3.1 trillion in window activity over just the last six months. Notice nothing is fixed despite the massive effort that has been no more than glorified paper mache application. It is a futile battle akin to the task of Sisyphus, who was forced to push a stone uphill, but every time he rested, it rolled back down the hill. Since the central bank paper merchants can only apply paper bandages to the paper wounds, the rotten limbs and appendages cannot distinguish between the old rot and the new fester that begins immediately upon treatment. Nothing is fixed, no remedy in place, none even attempted, nor is recognition of the problem part of the debate.

The US financial markets have become an abandoned playground left to the High Frequency Trading freaks and their cadre of corrupt video game ilk. Volume is way down on the NYSE. Fund outflows are magnificent for stocks, as the public aint so dumb after all. ETF-type congames are losing their appeal. As the LTRO effect wanes from central bank paper shell games played at windows, the financial markets are experiencing a vast low pressure zone. The windows will eventually all be shattered.

The US housing market is permanently destroyed. The Jackass has played word games since 2007 calling for a two-year decline. But my call has been repeated every year. Let the forecast be made in more plain terms. The US housing market will never come back. Its decline will go hand in hand with the deterioration of the USEconomy and lead the nation on the path to a USGovt debt default, accompanied by over 25 individual State defaults (called another name in legal parlance). The foreclosure parade is unending. The delinquencies mount unabated. The decline in home prices puts new household ranks into negative equity territory, exactly as Greenspan warned a year ago. What irony that the chief architect also acted as the Cassandra in warning. The banks refuse to liquidate, since doing so would expose their insolvent ruin and inflict even more deadly downdrafts in home prices, as well as expose the vast corruption among bonds, from false property titles to duplicate title usage to outright bond counterfeit, even to raids by past presidents.

The hidden factor in the systemic ruin was the China card played in the last decade. The decision to send US factories to Asia, starting in the 1980 decade with Intel to the PacRim, followed by a climax to China in the 2010 decade, will serve as the basis of a chapter in history that led to the US systemic ruin. The gold card was played within the Most Favored Nation status deal granted in 1999, since the Rubin team ran out of US gold, ran out of European gold, and needed fresh gold meat. The Chinese committed their gold hoard and promised to recycle trade surplus, just like the Saudis did with oil money. The Gold Carry Trade began but did not end with Fort Knox raids. The carry trade is the singlemost financial factor that pushed the nation to ruin. Nothing backs the USGovt debts, not with an empty Fort Knox, never to be audited, the home of nerve gas storage if truth be told. The deep storage gold on the USGovt balance sheets does not fool many people anymore, the subject of ridicule. The US is insolvent without collateral, facing a margin call, soon to lose control over its own currency. American life savings are at risk, while pensions have been gutted, but the sirens are silenced.

GOLD CONSOLIDATES IN REVOLVING DOOR
Since October, the pressure has been squarely on the US and EU central bankers to print money, to direct it to insolvent giant banks, and to prevent a collapse. They reacted to sovereign bond pressures. But at the same time they had to exert extreme force on the gold market, so it did not reflect the extreme debasement of money itself. Thus the huge naked short ambushes of gold. But during these past six months, a new coalition has emerged to exact a heavy cost on the gold cartel. They will lose one additional cartel member to the gold war battlefield with each and every illicit paper ambush. A big order is being filled in the last two weeks, a very big order, at a low price, by brute force. The result will be another dead cartel member. Its completion will be followed by another nice price rise. Whether the cartel is willing to lose another member bank afterwards as the cost of yet another paper ambush, hard to know. But the unshakable fact is that the global monetary system is being ruined. The confidence in sovereign bonds is at rock bottom. In Europe it is more clearly in the open, but in the US it is more hidden, as the safe haven ruse plays on.


Somehow a $200 billion single month deficit for the USGovt credit card line does not juxtapose well with any claim of being a safe haven, no more than a metal flagpole is during a lightning storm. The biggest buyers of the USTreasury Bonds are the USFed and its handy printing press, used and abused frantically and at high volume speeds. Distrust of the monetary system will bring about the rise of a new system, backed by gold. However, the old system cannot be permitted to fall unless and until the new system is ready, in place, and fully wired. That day is coming soon. The signposts are in place, the painted messages legible.

THE HAT TRICK LETTER PROFITS IN THE CURRENT CRISIS.

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Washington’s bizarre Kosovo strategy could destroy NATO


Not satisfied with having sponsored the artificial creation of Kosovo, the United States has now decided to ram the mafia state through NATO and the European Union. A new member with those characteristics is the last thing that Europe needs right now. However, it should work wonders for the consolidation of U.S. political and military agenda in the region, not to speak of the flourishing heroin trade from Afghanistan...both of which, as Engdahl points out in this sharp analysis, pose a threat to Russia and may backfire in the end.
VOLTAIRE NETWORK 


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State Secretary Clinton at a press conference in Washington D.C. with Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, 9 April 2012.
Photo: EFE / END
In one of the more bizarre foreign policy announcements of a bizarre Obama Administration, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has announced that Washington will “help” Kosovo to join NATO as well as the European Union. She made the pledge after a recent Washington meeting with Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci in Washington where she praised the Thaci government’s progress in "European integration and economic development" [1].
Her announcement no doubt caused serious gas pains among government and military officials in the various capitals of European NATO. Few people appreciate just how mad Clinton’s plan to push Kosovo into NATO and the EU is.

Basic Kosovo geopolitics

The controversial piece of real estate today called Kosovo was a part of Yugoslavia and tied to Serbia until the NATO bombing campaign in 1999 demolished what remained of Milosevic’s Serbia and opened the way for the United States, with the dubious assist of EU nations, above all Germany, to carve up the former Yugoslavia into tiny, dependent pseudo states. Kosovo became one, as did Macedonia. Slovenia and Croatia had earlier split off from Yugoslavia with a strong assist from the German Foreign Ministry.
Some brief review of the circumstances leading to the secession of Kosovo from Yugoslavia will help locate how risky a NATO membership or EU membership would be for the future of Europe. Hashim Thaci the current Kosovo Prime Minister, got his job, so to speak, through the US State Department and not via free democratic Kosovo elections. Kosovo is not recognized as a legitimate state by either Russia or Serbia or over one hundred other nations. However, it was immediately recognized when it declared independence in 2008 by the Bush Administration and by Berlin.
Membership into the EU for Kosovo would be welcoming another failed state, something which may not bother US Secretary Clinton, but which the EU at this juncture definitely can do without. Best estimates place unemployment in the country at as much as 60%. That is not just Third World level. The economy was always the poorest in Yugoslavia and today it is worse. Yet the real issue in terms of the future of EU peace and security is the nature of the Kosovo state that has been created by Washington since the late 1990’s.

Mafia State and Camp Bondsteel

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Kosovo is a tiny parcel of land in one of the most strategic locations in all Europe from a geopolitical standpoint of the US military objective of controlling oil flows and political developments from the oil-rich Middle East to Russia and Western Europe. The current US-led recognition of the self-declared Republic of Kosovo is a continuation of US policy for the Balkans since the illegal 1999 US-led NATO bombing of Serbia—a NATO “out-of-area” deployment never approved by the UN Security Council, allegedly on the premise that Milosevic’s army was on the verge of carrying out a genocidal massacre of Kosovo Albanians.
Some months before the US-led bombing of Serbian targets, one of the heaviest bombings since World War II, a senior US intelligence official in private conversation told Croatian senior army officers in Zagreb about Washington’s strategy for former Yugoslavia. According to these reports, communicated privately to this author, the Pentagon goal already in late 1998 was to take control of Kosovo in order to secure a military base to control the entire southeast European region down to the Middle East oil lands.
Since June 1999 when the NATO Kosovo Force (KFOR) occupied Kosovo, then an integral part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (comprising Serbia and Montenegro), Kosovo was technically under a United Nations mandate, UN Security Council Resolution 1244. Russia and China also agreed to that mandate, which specifies the role of KFOR to ensure an end to inter-ethnic fighting and atrocities between the Serb minority population and the Kosovo Albanian Islamic majority. Under 1244 Kosovo would remain part of Serbia pending a peaceful resolution of its status. That UN Resolution was blatantly ignored by the US, German and other EU parties in 2008.
Germany’s and Washington’s prompt recognition of Kosovo’s independence in February 2008, significantly, came days after elections for President in Serbia confirmed pro-Washington Boris Tadic had won a second four year term. With Tadic’s post secured, Washington could count on a compliant Serbian reaction to its support for Kosovo.
Immediately after the bombing of Serbia in 1999 the Pentagon seized a 1000 acre large parcel of land in Kosovo at Uresevic near the border to Macedonia, and awarded a contract to Halliburton when Dick Cheney was CEO there, to build one of the largest US overseas military bases in the world, Camp Bondsteel, with more than 7000 troops today.


The Pentagon has already secured seven new military bases in Bulgaria and Romania on the Black Sea in the Northern Balkans, including the Graf Ignatievo and Bezmer airbases in Bulgaria and Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base in Romania, which are used for "downrange" military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Romanian installation hosts the Pentagon’s Joint Task Force–East. The US’s colossal Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo and the use and upgrading of Croatian and Montenegrin Adriatic harbors for US Navy deployments complete the militarization of the Balkans. [2]
The US strategic agenda for Kosovo is primarily military, secondarily, it seems, narcotics trafficking. Its prime focus is against Russia and for control of oil flows from the Caspian Sea to the Middle East into Western Europe. By declaring its independence, Washington gains a weak state which it can fully control. So long as it remained a part of Serbia, that NATO military control would be politically insecure. Today Kosovo is controlled as a military satrapy of NATO, whose KFOR has 16,000 troops there for a tiny population of 2 million. Its Camp Bondsteel is one of a string of so-called forward operating bases and "lily pads" as Donald Rumsfeld called them, for military action to the east and south. Now formally bringing Kosovo into the EU and to NATO will solidify that military base now that the Republic of Georgia under US protégé Saakashvili failed so miserably in 2008 to fill that NATO role.

Heroin Transport Corridor

US-NATO military control of Kosovo serves several purposes for Washington’s greater geo-strategic agenda. First it enables greater US control over potential oil and gas pipeline routes into the EU from the Caspian and Middle East as well as control of the transport corridors linking the EU to the Black Sea.
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Kosovo drugs
It also protects the multi-billion dollar heroin trade, which, significantly, has grown to record dimensions in Afghanistan according to UN narcotics officials, since the US occupation. Kosovo and Albania are major heroin transit routes into Europe. According to a 2008 US State Department annual report on international narcotics traffic, several key drug trafficking routes pass through the Balkans. Kosovo is mentioned as a key point for the transfer of heroin from Turkey and Afghanistan to Western Europe. Those drugs flow under the watchful eye of the Thaci government.
Since its dealings with the Meo tribesmen in Laos during the Vietnam era, the CIA has protected narcotics traffic in key locations in order partly to finance its covert operations. The scale of international narcotics traffic today is such that major US banks such as Citigroup are reported to derive a significant share of their profits from laundering the proceeds.
One of the notable features of the indecent rush by Washington and other states to immediately recognize the independence of Kosovo is the fact that they well knew its government and both major political parties were in fact run by Kosovo Albanian organized crime.
Hashim Thaci, Prime Minister of Kosovo and head of the Democratic Party of Kosovo, is the former leader of the terrorist organization which the US and NATO trained and called the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, or in Albanian, UCK. In Kosovo crime circles he is known as Hashim “The Snake” for his personal ruthlessness against opponents.
In 1997, President Clinton’s Special Balkans Envoy, Robert Gelbard, described the KLA as “without any question a terrorist group.” It was far more. It was a klan-based mafia, impossible therefore to infiltrate, which controlled the underground black economy of Kosovo. Today the Democratic Party of Thaci, according to European police sources, retains its links to organized crime.
A February 22, 2005 German BND, labeled Top Secret, which has since been leaked, stated, “Über die Key-Player (wie z. B. Haliti, Thaci, Haradinaj) bestehen engste Verflechtungen zwischen Politik, Wirtschaft und international operierenden OK-Strukturen im Kosovo. Die dahinter stehenden kriminellen Netzwerke fördern dort die politische Instabilität. Sie haben kein Interesse am Aufbau einer funktionierenden staatlichen Ordnung, durch die ihre florierenden Geschäfte beeinträchtigt werden können.“ (OK=Organized Kriminalität). (Translation: “Through the key players—for example Thaci, Haliti, Haradinaj—there is the closest interlink between politics, the economy and international organized crime in Kosovo. The criminal organizations in the background there foster political instability. They have no interest at all in the building of a functioning orderly state that could be detrimental to their booming business.” [3]
The KLA began action in 1996 with the bombing of refugee camps housing Serbian refugees from the wars in Bosnia and Croatia. The KLA repeatedly called for the “liberation” of areas of Montenegro, Macedonia and parts of Northern Greece. Thaci is hardly a figure of regional stability to put it mildly.
The 44 year old Thaci was a personal protégé of Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright during the 1990s, when he was a mere 30-year old gangster. The KLA was supported from the outset by the CIA and the German BND. During the 1999 war the KLA was directly supported by NATO. At the time he was picked up by the USA in the mid-1990s, Thaci was founder of the Drenica Group, a criminal syndicate in Kosovo with ties to Albanian, Macedonian and Italian organized mafias. A classified January 2007 report prepared for the EU Commission, labeled “VS-Nur für den Dienstgebrauch” was leaked to the media. It detailed the organized criminal activity of KLA and its successor Democratic Party under Thaci.
A December 2010 Council of Europe report, released a day after Kosovo’s election commission said Mr Thaci’s party won the first post-independence election, accused Western powers of complicity in ignoring the activities of the crime ring headed by Thaci: "Thaci and these other ’Drenica Group’ members are consistently named as ’key players’ in intelligence reports on Kosovo’s mafia-like structures of organised crime," the report said. "We found that the ’Drenica Group’ had as its chief – or, to use the terminology of organised crime networks, its ’boss’ – the renowned political operator ... Hashim Thaci." [4]
The report stated that Thaci exerted "violent control" over the heroin trade. Dick Marty, the European Union investigator, presented the report to European diplomats from all member states. The response was silence. Washington was behind Thaci. [5]
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The same Council of Europe report on Kosovo organized crime accused Thaci’s mafia organization of dealing in trade in human organs. Figures from Thaçi’s inner circle were accused of taking captives across the border into Albania after the war, where a number of Serbs are said to have been murdered for their kidneys that were sold on the black market. In one case revealed in legal proceedings in a Pristina district court in 2008 organs were said to have been taken from impoverished victims at a clinic known as Medicus – linked to Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) organ harvesting in 2000. [6]
The question then becomes, why are Washington, NATO, the EU and inclusive and importantly, the German Government, so eager to legitimize the breakaway Kosovo? A Kosovo run internally by organized criminal networks is easy for NATO to control. It insures a weak state which is far easier to bring under NATO domination. Combined with NATO control over Afghanistan where the Kosovo heroin controlled by Prime Minister Thaci originates, the Pentagon is building a web of encirclement around Russia that is anything but peaceful.
The Thaci dependence on US and NATO good graces insures Thaci’s government will do what it is asked. That, in turn, assures the US a major military gain consolidating its permanent presence in the strategically vital southeast Europe. It is a major step in consolidating NATO control of Eurasia, and gives the US a large swing in the European balance of power. Little wonder Moscow has not welcomed the development, nor have numerous other states. The US is literally playing with dynamite, potentially as well with nuclear war in the Balkans.
[1RIA Novosti, "US to Help Kosovo Join EU NATO: Clinton," April 5, 2012.
[2] Rick Rozoff, "Pentagon and NATO Complete Their Conquest of The Balkans," Global Research, November 28, 2009.
[4The Telegraph, "Kosovo’s prime minister ’key player in mafia-like gang,’" December 14, 2010.
[5Ibid.
[6] Paul Lewis, "Kosovo PM is head of human organ and arms ring Council of Europe reports," The Guardian, 14 December 2010.

GREEK SUBMARINE SCANDALS: FORMER TOP MINISTER ARRESTED, CLAIMS HE IS ‘SACRIFICE’

From The Slog 


Tsochatzopoulos flanked by plain-clothes police yesterday

Tsochatzopoulos and family also face tax, money-laundering charges

Elections put back a week to May 6th
Earlier this year with the help of guidance and documents supplied by Athenian contacts, The Slog posted extensively about graft in Greek government circles, and specifically the corrupt purchase of two submarines from Germany.


In that article, I alleged ‘But it is the now even more heavily burdened taxpayers of Greece who are paying the price for this crude rip-off. Most of the perpetrators are doing very nicely thank you. For example, Ferrostaal worked with Yannis Beltsios and paid him €1 million because Greek Defence Minister Akis Tsohatzopolous instructed them to…’


Yesterday [Wednesday] Akis Tsochatzopoulos was arrested by police, and charged with money-laundering in relation to submarine purchases. Yesterday morning, an unmarked police car pulled up outside the luxury home of the former minister – a dwelling  his wife bought for cash some years ago for more than 1 million euros…..from an offshore company. The house, which is on the Dionysiou Areopagitou walkway in one of Greece’s most expensive residential areas, has been impounded.


But Tsochatzopoulos immediately labelled his arrest a “pre-election gift” for his former party and New Democracy, designed to make the two main Parties look ‘clean’ as they are lagging behind in the polls. Both PASOK and New Democracy awarded themselves the bulk of a 29m euro paxpayer-funded grant towards election expenses last week. And yesterday, Prime Minister Papademos announced an election date of May 6th. This is a week later than the date he gave to EU officials last month.


“The theory here is that the big Parties want more time to regain ground,” a Brussels source told The Slog last night, “but as to whether this arrest is a conspiracy, I would have no idea”.


This weekend is Easter in Greece. Tsochadzopoulos, 72,  will appear before magistrates on Monday. A conviction on such charges carries a maximum 10-year prison sentence. He was one of the top officials in Greece’s majority PASOK party for 25 years, and narrowly lost a vote to become party leader — and prime minister — in the mid-1990s. He also faces further charges of submitting false income declarations.


Police later announced further arrests: Tsochadzopoulos’ cousin and his accountant. His wife and daughter face charges of complicity in money-laundering.


But here’s an interesting twist: Akis Tsochatzopoulos was investigated for alleged bribery last year, but the case was dropped because the statute of limitation shields politicians from most forms of prosecution in Greece. This law was personally authored by….Evangelo Venizelos. However, Venizelos’ Party PASOK expelled him after last year’s bribery investigation. And this meant he could face the same charges as every other Greek citizen…and become a convenient  scapegoat?
This is Greece: anything is possible.

RECOVERED ECONOMIC HISTORY: “EVERYONE BUT AN IDIOT KNOWS THAT THE LOWER CLASSES MUST BE KEPT POOR, OR THEY WILL NEVER BE INDUSTRIOUS”

From Exiled Online:


CLASS WAR FOR IDIOTS / APRIL 5, 2012
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“…everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.”
—Arthur Young; 1771
Our popular economic wisdom says that capitalism equals freedom and free societies, right? Well, if you ever suspected that the logic is full of shit, then I’d recommend checking a book called The Invention of Capitalism, written by an economic historian named Michael Perelmen, who’s been exiled to Chico State, a redneck college in rural California, for his lack of freemarket friendliness. And Perelman has been putting his time in exile to damn good use, digging deep into the works and correspondence of Adam Smith and his contemporaries to write a history of the creation of capitalism that goes beyond superficial The Wealth of Nations fairy tale and straight to the source, allowing you to read the early capitalists, economists, philosophers, clergymen and statesmen in their own words. And it ain’t pretty.
INVENTION OF CAPITALISM - COVER
One thing that the historical record makes obviously clear is that Adam Smith and his laissez-faire buddies were a bunch of closet-case statists, who needed brutal government policies to whip the English peasantry into a good capitalistic workforce willing to accept wage slavery.
Francis Hutcheson, from whom Adam Smith learned all about the virtue of natural liberty, wrote: ”it is the one great design of civil laws to strengthen by political sanctions the several laws of nature. … The populace needs to be taught, and engaged by laws, into the best methods of managing their own affairs and exercising mechanic art.”
Yep, despite what you might have learned, the transition to a capitalistic society did not happen naturally or smoothly. See, English peasants didn’t want to give up their rural communal lifestyle, leave their land and go work for below-subsistence wages in shitty, dangerous factories being set up by a new, rich class of landowning capitalists. And for good reason, too. Using Adam Smith’s own estimates of factory wages being paid at the time in Scotland, a factory-peasant would have to toil for more than three days to buy a pair of commercially produced shoes. Or they could make their own traditional brogues using their own leather in a matter of hours, and spend the rest of the time getting wasted on ale. It’s really not much of a choice, is it?
But in order for capitalism to work, capitalists needed a pool of cheap, surplus labor. So what to do? Call in the National Guard!
Faced with a peasantry that didn’t feel like playing the role of slave, philosophers, economists, politicians, moralists and leading business figures began advocating for government action. Over time, they enacted a series of laws and measures designed to push peasants out of the old and into the new by destroying their traditional means of self-support.
“The brutal acts associated with the process of stripping the majority of the people of the means of producing for themselves might seem far removed from the laissez-faire reputation of classical political economy,” writes Perelman. “In reality, the dispossession of the majority of small-scale producers and the construction of laissez-faire are closely connected, so much so that Marx, or at least his translators, labeled this expropriation of the masses as ‘‘primitive accumulation.’’
Perelman outlines the many different policies through which peasants were forced off the land—from the enactment of so-called Game Laws that prohibited peasants from hunting, to the destruction of the peasant productivity by fencing the commons into smaller lots—but by far the most interesting parts of the book are where you get to read Adam Smith’s proto-capitalist colleagues complaining and whining about how peasants are too independent and comfortable to be properly exploited, and trying to figure out how to force them to accept a life of wage slavery.
This pamphlet from the time captures the general attitude towards successful, self-sufficient peasant farmers:
The possession of a cow or two, with a hog, and a few geese, naturally exalts the peasant. . . . In sauntering after his cattle, he acquires a habit of indolence. Quarter, half, and occasionally whole days, are imperceptibly lost. Day labour becomes disgusting; the aversion in- creases by indulgence. And at length the sale of a half-fed calf, or hog, furnishes the means of adding intemperance to idleness.
While another pamphleteer wrote:
Nor can I conceive a greater curse upon a body of people, than to be thrown upon a spot of land, where the productions for subsistence and food were, in great measure, spontaneous, and the climate required or admitted little care for raiment or covering.
John Bellers, a Quaker “philanthropist” and economic thinker saw independent peasants as a hindrance to his plan of forcing poor people into prison-factories, where they would live, work and produce a profit of 45% for aristocratic owners:
“Our Forests and great Commons (make the Poor that are upon them too much like the Indians) being a hindrance to Industry, and are Nurseries of Idleness and Insolence.”
Daniel Defoe, the novelist and trader, noted that in the Scottish Highlands “people were extremely well furnished with provisions. … venison exceedingly plentiful, and at all seasons, young or old, which they kill with their guns whenever they find it.’’
To Thomas Pennant, a botanist, this self-sufficiency was ruining a perfectly good peasant population:
“The manners of the native Highlanders may be expressed in these words: indolent to a high degree, unless roused to war, or any animating amusement.”
If having a full belly and productive land was the problem, then the solution to whipping these lazy bums into shape was obvious: kick ‘em off the land and let em starve.
Arthur Young, a popular writer and economic thinker respected by John Stuart Mill, wrote in 1771: “everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.” Sir William Temple, a politician and Jonathan Swift’s boss, agreed, and suggested that food be taxed as much as possible to prevent the working class from a life of “sloth and debauchery.”
Temple also advocated putting four-year-old kids to work in the factories, writing ‘‘for by these means, we hope that the rising generation will be so habituated to constant employment that it would at length prove agreeable and entertaining to them.’’ Some thought that four was already too old. According to Perelmen, “John Locke, often seen as a philosopher of liberty, called for the commencement of work at the ripe age of three.” Child labor also excited Defoe, who was joyed at the prospect that “children after four or five years of age…could every one earn their own bread.’’ But that’s getting off topic…
Happy Faces of Productivity…
Even David Hume, that great humanist, hailed poverty and hunger as positive experiences for the lower classes, and even blamed the “poverty” of France on its good weather and fertile soil:
“‘Tis always observed, in years of scarcity, if it be not extreme, that the poor labour more, and really live better.”
Reverend Joseph Townsend believed that restricting food was the way to go:
“[Direct] legal constraint [to labor] . . . is attended with too much trouble, violence, and noise, . . . whereas hunger is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure, but as the most natural motive to industry, it calls forth the most powerful exertions. . . . Hunger will tame the fiercest animals, it will teach decency and civility, obedience and subjugation to the most brutish, the most obstinate, and the most perverse.”
Patrick Colquhoun, a merchant who set up England’s first private “preventative police“ force to prevent dock workers from supplementing their meager wages with stolen goods, provided what may be the most lucid explanation of how hunger and poverty correlate to productivity and wealth creation:
Poverty is that state and condition in society where the individual has no surplus labour in store, or, in other words, no property or means of subsistence but what is derived from the constant exercise of industry in the various occupations of life. Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilization. It is the lot of man. It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.
Colquhoun’s summary is so on the money, it has to be repeated. Because what was true for English peasants is still just as true for us:
“Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society…It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.”
***
Yasha Levine is a  founding editor of The eXiled. You can reach him at levine [at] exiledonline.com.
Want to know more recovered history? Read Yasha Levine’s investigation into the life of Harry Koch, the man who spawned Charles and David Koch, the two most powerful oligarchs of our time:The Birth of the Koch Clan: It All Started In a Little Texas Town Called Quanah

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