"Plus
ça change, plus c'est la même chose" say the French, and that is what
people must be thinking on the streets of Paris as the real significance
of this month's French presidential election sinks in. The French have
reasons to be skeptical of François Hollande, a President-elect who
couldn't even make it past his first week before intimating that he
would use a summer audit of state coffers as an excuse to renege on his
election spending promises. The very media that were promoting Hollande
so heavily as an anti-Sarkozy who would shake up the status quo in the
Eurozone are now admitting in surprisingly frank terms that every major
Western leader in the NATO countries, "from Blair to Cameron to Obama to
Mario Monti in Italy," Merkel and Hollande included, are that specific
type of well-heeled globalist that the establishment praises as
"centrist pragmatists." In other words, willful servants of the drive
toward unelected, unaccountable regional government.
Indeed,
reading between the lines it seems that the same banking establishment
that has been ruling the EU from its inception, and which has openly
begun to assume control in recent years has merely replaced a
politically dead horse with one that can help them sprint their agenda
further down the track. Among Hollande's key ideas: using the European
Investment Bank (EIB) to underwrite infrastructure projects, and using
the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) as a conduit for distributing
European Central Bank (ECB) loans to faltering countries. In other
words, Hollande's action plan consists of propping up and attempting to
legitimize the very regional banks and institutions that have
perpetuated the Euro mess thus far. Now the EU itself is even attempting
to use the momentum from Hollande's victory to expand its budget in the
coming years.
No
surprise, then, that Hollande's first high-level meeting as head of
state comes not with Merkel or another fellow national leader, but
Hermann von Rompuy, the unelected, unaccountable European Council
President who was vetted by the Bilderberg Group at a closed-door dinner
meeting before being appointed to run the Eurocracy. Nor is it
surprising that Hollande was a spokesman for Lionel Jospin--the former
president of France and himself a Bilderberg attendee. Nor that key
Hollande advisor Manuel Valls is likewise a Bilderberg attendee who has
argued for the European Commission assuming control of the national
budgets of individual EU member states. In many ways it seems Hollande's
insider pedigree is at least as frightening as Sarkozy's.
Why
is it, then, that despite all of the pomp and circumstance, and all of
the election promises and rhetoric, the public ends up voting for
substantially the same thing every time? How can it be that voters can
shift from right-wing to left-wing and end up with the same old
"centrist pragmatist" promising to grow the super state at the expense
of the people yet again? Could it be that the elections are set up to
present a false dialectic that means the public has about as much chance
of voting in a truly revolutionary politician as a craps player at a
crooked casino has of rolling a seven with his loaded dice? It may
happen occasionally, but in the end the house always wins.
If
so, then surely this is not merely a French nor even a European
phenomenon. The continuity of agenda between successive American
presidents--even ones of supposedly opposing ideologies--has been noted
for decades. Like Hollande, Obama ran a campaign promising "Change" but
ended up delivering more of the same...literally. More Guantanamo, more
Afghan war, more drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, more prosecution
of whistleblowers, more immunity for CIA torturers and Wall Street
fraudclosure perpetrators, more TSA abuses and DHS overreach. If Obama
is Bush on steroids, then one can only wonder what the country would
devolve into under Romney, assuming any difference in foreign policy or
the domestic police state rollout could be detected at all.
In
a type of perverse Catch-22, the very idea of electing Hollande as some
sort of "savior of Europe" itself ensures the perpetuation of the EU
status quo, regardless of what policies he advocates within that
framework. Whether calling for stricter austerity as a condition for
EFSF bailouts or arguing for the ECB to open up the spigots for the ESM,
it all serves to empower Brussels at the expense of the citizens of the
European nations. That the French electorate's choice of Monsieur
Hollande is expected to have an impact on the crises playing out in
Greece and Spain and Italy and Ireland and the other EU member states
should at the very least give the citizens of those countries pause for
thought. Where is the space in the media analysis of this election to
question why the French voters should have such an inordinate sway over
Europe, or even whether the European Union should exist at all? Of
course there is no space for that type of analysis, because this is how
the rigged political game is played: give the voters a choice between
growing the EU in the name of austerity or growing the EU in the name of
socialism and let them fight it out amongst each other. Either way, the
EU wins and no one ever thinks to question the game itself.
In
one of those strange synchronicities of world events that plays itself
out from time to time, a number of elections are taking place around the
globe that further prove the rule that the more things change, the more
they stay the same. In Syria the first multiparty elections in five
decades took place this week in the midst of a foreign-funded
insurgency. The combined weight of the "international community" (read
Turkey, the U.S., Israel, and the other so-called "Friends of Syria")
has been thrown at this election to ensure that it fails completely to
derail the festering civil war in the country. As if to underscore the
point, another deadly explosion ripped through Damascus on Thursday,
killing dozens and wounding hundreds, but the international newswires
were putting the Syrian government's description of the perpetrators as
"terrorists" in quotation marks within minutes of the story breaking, as
if the insurgency that is admittedly armed, trained and supplied by
foreign hostile forces is somehow not acting as terrorists when killing
civilians. In this case it certainly doesn't matter how many Syrians
cast a ballot, nor for whom they cast it, nothing is going to get in the
way of the regime change that the foreign interventionists have decided
is the only allowable outcome in the country.
Meanwhile
Egypt's presidential election drama took yet another turn this week as
an administrative court ruled that the entire election would have to be
suspended due to a technicality involving the Supreme Elections
Commission calling for voters to head to the polls on May 23rd,
something the court alleges only the ruling military council has the
authority to order. Although the decision will almost certainly be
overturned by a higher court, it throws yet another wrench in the works
of the Egyptian election saga. That saga began earlier this year when
the Muslim Brotherhood took control of Parliament during parliamentary
elections, a victory that turned out to be less significant than first
believed as the still-ruling military junta has prevented the
Brotherhood from even choosing their own cabinet. In Egypt, too, the
people cast votes for a system that--at least until this point--remains
very much the same.
Russia,
too, is still dealing with the fallout of its own presidential
elections earlier this month, as protests against Vladimir Putin's third
presidential victory continue to linger on the streets of Moscow. More
interesting than the relatively meager protests are the breathless
coverage they have received from the very media that has been openly and
uniformly denouncing the Russian political system and the elections
themselves ever since Putin's intention to run again was announced.
Oddly unreported in those media mouthpieces that seem to have suddenly
become intensely interested in Russian politics is the recently-exposed
video of key (US State Department NED-funded) opposition activists
lining up to meet with newly appointed US Ambassador to Russia, Michael
McFaul. Hounded by the Russian media outside of the secret, closed-door
meetings, the activists could not explain what they were doing meeting
with the US Ambassador, nor why they were being openly funded by the
National Endowment for Democracy, choosing to accuse those reporters of
some vague conspiracy to undermine their credibility. In Russia, too, it
seems that the Russian public are free to vote for any candidate they
want...just so long as that candidate has been approved by the NATO
powers. Otherwise, every dissenter in the land will be given as big a
megaphone as they need in the Western press to air their grievances with
the government.
The
other obvious election story this week is from Greece, where an
indecisive vote last Sunday left no one with a clear majority, and each
party in turn scrambling in vain to put together a coalition government.
As of press time it was all but certain that no deal would be reached
and the Greek people would be forced to head back to the polls. In
essence, the Greeks would have in their hands the chance to do something
truly meaningful with their vote: to kick the bums out and put in place
a party that will actually send the EU packing, perhaps taking Greece
out of the Eurozone altogether. Now the once-unthinkable (in the
establishment media) idea that the Greece should leave the Euro--or
should never have even entered it in the first place--is not just being
talked about, but is increasingly being taken as common sense. Never
mind that this publication has been saying this for years, and calling
the Euro for the failed globalist overreach that it is; if The Economist
and Bloomberg are talking about it, now it is suddenly fit to be taken
seriously. Of course it is an obvious choice and always has been.
If
Greece returns to the Drachma and defaults on the debt that their
previous puppet governments tried to sign the nation onto, there will be
pain, but it is at least conceivable that they can begin steps to
devalue their currency and turn the situation around. This is precisely
what the Icelandic people did when they faced their own crisis in the
wake of their banking collapse and, lo and behold, they are now the
feel-good economic story that everyone would be talking about...if that
story didn't go against the phony socialist/austerity debate that the
Eurocrats want to use to limit the scope of the argument. The only
alternative to Greece leaving the Euro would be a continuation of the
status quo: a long, steady decline pumped up by injections from the EFSF
(which just celebrated its second birthday with understandably little
fanfare). In effect, the game plan in Brussels is to keep applying
cosmetics to the rotting cadaver that is the Eurozone, D.O.A. since its
D.O.B.
In
Greece, we have the possibility of seeing an election that amounts to
something more important than a people with their back against the wall
casting a ballot between running their ship of state into a rock or a
hard place. There is a third way, and Greece has the opportunity to set
an example for that path that will potentially disrupt the seemingly
inevitable rollout of the Eurocratic dictatorship of Brussels.
I'm
not sure if they say "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" in
Greek, but I like to think they have an opposite expression.
