End Game as Elite Trap Closes: Economic Chaos For An EU Super-State

By A.M. Freyed

Infowars.com

Appetiser cost of Greek exit is €155bn for Germany, France: trillions for meat course … These are upper bounds, but even in the case of a partial default, the losses would be huge … This nonsense can of course be stopped in ten minutes if the EU: 1) announces that it will equip itself with a real central bank (a lender of last resort) that takes all risk of sovereign default off the table — with conviction and overwhelming force, with no ifs and buts, and no ambushes from the Bundesbank. 2) announces EMU debt-pooling, fiscal union, a joint EMU budget and tax system, and an EMU government as a counterpart for the enhanced the ECB … Yes, this means rewriting the German constitution, and in effect means the abolition of Germany as a functioning sovereign nation. – UK Telegraph (5/16/12)

Analysis: Lagarde’s next battle at IMF: power shift … When Lagarde passed around the hat among finance ministers last week to raise funds to contain the euro zone’s debt crisis, China, India, Brazil and Russia said they would be part of the effort but chose not to announce each of their contributions until a June summit of the Group of 20 leading economies. Europe may have to yield something in return. The crisis in Europe and a fragile recovery from recession in the United States has hastened the shift in world economic power towards the emerging markets, and they want their growing heft to be reflected in finance institutions like the IMF. – Reuters (4/23/2012)

The trap created by the old men who run Europe – and want to run the world – is about to close.

Either the EU turns into a “real country” or chaos, starvation and depression shall result. This is what they want us to understand anyway.

We can see the choices spelled out quite clearly in the above articles. In the first one, we see that the EU must create a real central bank, a real tax system, a real budget … a real government, in fact, or there will be overwhelming chaos and “anarchy.”

The second article, above, reveals a still-larger elite strategy – which is apparently to gradually bankrupt the West while raising up the developing world.

Given what may be an upcoming worldwide depression, all parts of the globe shall likely suffer equally. But nonetheless, it is the plan over time of those who run globalist facilities such as the IMF to use various economic crises as a way to continually centralize power and authority.

Europe and America have not recovered from the “crisis” of 2008, nor shall they, probably, for years. The global misalignment of resources, businesses and money remains in force. The top elites have refused to put their failing banks out of business and the world cannot recover until this biggest-bubble-ever has been lanced.

The elites know this, but they provide, nonetheless, a different rhetoric. There are companies that are “too big to fail” they explain. This almost guarantees there will be no recovery in the short term. It continues to be impossible to know which companies are healthy and which are not.

In fact … the global elites likely want – seek and crave – a global depression. They seek global governance; a global money; a global central bank.

This was surely the plan all along. The EU was built up through subterfuge and trickery – and its current situation was carefully planned as well. No, it is no accident.

There were very few central banks at the beginning of the 20th century – today there are something like 150. The world’s economy is perpetually unstable.

Central bank monopoly printing of money gives rise to booms and then busts. During the bust phase, those who control central banking amass greater and greater power.

Put a region, a polity – a presumptive country – into play and let the central banking power-mechanism grind it up. Sooner or later the centralizing elements shall win out as monopoly fiat money bankrupts those who wish to resist, or have different ideas.

Monopoly paper money is merciless. The elites know they simply need to wait. And they do.

The EU was sold as a trade union, but it was no such thing. All along it was planned to be a fully functioning state with a flag, an anthem and an army. Brussels is to be the head of this new nation and the scheme is to rule by regulatory fiat.

This is actually a blueprint for other unions around the world. There is an Asian Union, as well, an African Union and a South American Union. Some are more advanced than others.

There is also a plan to build a “North American Union” constructed of Mexico, Canada and the United States. This has been denied by the powers-that-be – but then they denied plans for a EU super state as well.

Now the trap is closing. The calls by the bought-and-paid-for media for a “real” super state are growing stronger. Alternatively, it is said there will be chaos, panic, bank-runs, devaluations, starvation and anarchy.

This is the dialectic as the elites wish to frame it. But it is a false one.

There will likely be chaos no matter what. It is the preferred tool. If Greece leaves the EU, then the resultant financial and banking ruin shall be used as justification for further centralizations of power within the EU and IMF.

If Greece remains in the Union, the chaos that results will also be used as a methodology of centralization. Either way, the powers-that-be plan to use chaos to consolidate more power for world government.

Here’s hoping the average Europeans see the trap for what it is. Chaos there will be, but the antidote is not a stronger European Union but a weaker one.

And the antidote is not a stronger (if smaller) euro but the removal of the currency entirely.

And the antidote is not a stronger, regnant IMF but a reduction in its powers in Europe and around the world.

This is the TRUE choice. It is not between economic chaos and stronger EU/globalist facilities (as the globalist elites wish to frame it) but between further authoritarianism and freedom.

Let us hope the Internet, a tool that has increasingly shown us the Way the World Really Works helps expose this elite dialectic. Let us hope the increasingly tortured masses of Europe fully realize their manipulation and make a better choice.

In fact, there is only one choice. Throw off the European Union and its euro and regain sovereignty. That would be a start.

Special from AmericanFreed.com
___-

Related:

GET READY: This Is What Happens If Greece Exits The Euro

Greeks chaos turning to panic as €700m ‘withdrawn’ from banks in one day

Fitch Roundtrips On Greece, Re-Downgrades Country

Fitch warns of mass eurozone downgrades as frontrunner to lead Greece rails at 'barbaric' austerity

The Prison Industrial Complex

By Steve Nolan
theintelhub.com - May 17, 2012

“Prison Industrial Complex” is a term that refers to private prison companies and businesses that supply goods and services to government prison agencies. What is interesting about this term and the concept of “prison labor” is how it’s rise parallels the rapid expansion of the US inmate population.

The Prison Industrial Complex is big growth industry. While other sectors of our economy continue to struggle in this recession, the private prison industry is booming!

Is there a connection between this booming business and the record rise in incarceration in this country? Let’s take a deeper look…

Did you know that for every 100,000 Americans, 743 of them reside behind bars? That is nearly 1 out 100 Americans!

Today, the United States has the highest prison population in the world with more than 2 million people either incarcerated in prison or in jail awaiting trail.

The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world, surpassing China, North Korea and Russia.

A study conducted by the Bureau of Justice in 2005 showed that a record 33-year continuous rise in the number of inmates in the United States despite falling crime rates.

To put this concept into perspective, consider the following:

• Consider that for every $1 we spend on higher education in this country, we spend $.60 on correctional facilities.
• Collectively, the States and Federal government spend about $74 billion a year on corrections, and nearly 800,000 people who work in the industry.
• The largest private prison conglomerate in the United States is Corrections Corporations of America(CCA) which controls more than 47% of all private prison and jail beds nationwide, produces a 13% to 15% return annually.
• Nearly ¼ of the world’s total number of prisoners being incarcerated behind bars are Americans.
• 1 out of every 32 Americans is on probation, parole or in prison.
• A total 7,225,800 adults were under correctional supervision in 2009 (about 3.1% of US Adults).
• Of these, 4,933,667 adults were on probation or parole.
• According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, there are over 2,266,800 adults incarcerated in US Federal and States prisons today.
• County jails accounts for another .7% of U.S. adults.
• There are more Americans under “correctional supervision” than were in Stalin’s Gulags.
• Every day, at least 50,000 men—a full house at Yankee Stadium are in solitary confinement.
• 86,927 juveniles were in detention as of 2007.
• Texas alone has sentenced more than 400 teenagers to life imprisonment.
• A black male is 7x more likely to be imprisoned than a white male.
• Prison rape is so endemic—more than 70,000 prisoners are raped each year.

The major myth associated with our Prison Industrial Complex is that the rise in incarceration rates reflects a commensurate rise in crime. The fact is that crime rates have fallen. One of the driving forces behind the sudden rise in prison populations is a result of the “three strikes laws.”

It is estimated over 500,000 Americans are in prison for drug-related, non-violent crimes.  Another driver is the continued privatization of our prison system where these private companies are actually incented to keep their jails full.

Case in point, CCA has an ultra-modern prison in Lawrenceville, Virginia, where five guards on dayshift and two at night watch over 750 prisoners. In these prisons, inmates may get their sentences reduced for “good behavior,”but for any infraction, they get 30 days added – which means more profits for CCA.

According to a study of New Mexico prisons, it was found that CCA inmates lost “good behavior time” at a rate eight times higher than those in state-run prisons.

Another big driving force behind our massive prison system is cheap labor.

37% states have legalized the contracting of prison labor by private corporations. The list of these corporations include: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores, and many more.

In private-run prisons, the working inmates receive as little as 17 cents per hour for a maximum of six hours a day, the equivalent of $20 per month. The highest-paying private prison “employer” is CCA in Tennessee, where prisoners receive 50 cents per hour for what they call “highly skilled positions.”

Exploitation of cheap labor by Fortune 500 companies has competition from the Military Industrial Complex. Did you know that prison labor — with no union protection, overtime pay, vacation days, pensions, benefits, health and safety protection, or Social Security withholding — makes complex components for McDonnell Douglas/Boeing’s F-15 fighter aircraft, the General Dynamics/Lockheed Martin F-16, and Bell/Textron’s Cobra helicopter?

And that prison labor produces night-vision goggles, body armor, camouflage uniforms, radio and communication devices, and lighting systems and components for 30-mm anti-aircraft guns to 300-mm battleship guns, along with land mine sweepers and electro-optical equipment for BAE Systems’ Bradley Fighting Vehicle’s laser rangefinder? Prisoners are also “hired” to recycle toxic electronic equipment and overhaul military vehicles.

Labor in federal prisons is contracted out by UNICOR, previously known as Federal Prison Industries, a quasi-public, for-profit corporation run by the Bureau of Prisons. In 14 prison factories, more than 3,000 prisoners manufacture electronic equipment for land, sea and airborne communication. UNICOR is now the U.S. government’s 39th largest contractor, with 110 factories at 79 federal penitentiaries.

The majority of UNICOR’s products and services are on contract to orders from the Department of Defense. Giant multinational corporations purchase parts assembled at some of the lowest labor rates in the world, then resell the finished weapons components at the highest rates of profit.

For example, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Corporation subcontract components, then assemble and sell advanced weapons systems to the Pentagon.

I believe what former Oregon State Representative Kevin Mannix said when he recently urged Nike to cut its production in Indonesia and bring it to his state, telling the shoe manufacturer that “there won’t be any transportation costs, we’re offering you competitive prison labor (here).”

In other words…he is basically offering slave labor!  While our so-called elected officials talk about the massive slave labor camps in North Korea, I think one only has to look into the mirror and let the facts speak for themselves.

Our prison industrial complex is getting out hand, much like our military industrial complex. We need to stand up now and do something about it, before it gets too powerful, too influential, and too out of control.

Until next time, keep your powder dry and your faith strong!

Steve Nolan is the Co-Founder SurvivalWeek.com and Publisher of The Beacon.

US-Backed Syrian Rebels Now Trained by Kosovo’s KLA Terrorists

From RT, May 17, 2012

The same horrors that were witnessed during the war in Kosovo are now apparently being prepared for the multi-confessional Syrian population by Islamist Syrian Liberation Army trained in Muslim Kosovo in the middle of Europe.

_____

Related:

US Officially Arming Extremists in Syria

Panetta: Authority of UN Trumps Congress In Getting Approval For War On Syria

Russia: Military Interference In Others’ Affairs Can Lead To Nuclear War

Infringing national sovereignty could lead to nuclear apocalypse - Medvedev

''US, Israeli and Saudi-funded Terrorists Destabilizing Syria Now Under Fire in Lebanon''

US plan to attack Iran 'ready'

We Have Reached Peak Government

From OfTwoMinds:
By Charles Hugh Smith


As the foundations that supported an expansive centralized State crumble, the entire centralized State is revealed as unsustainable: we have reached Peak Government. 

In previous entries this week, I have detailed the profound unsustainability of government pensions and entitlements such as Medicare. These are symptoms are a larger phenomenon: Peak Government, the realization that Central States cannot sustain their current budgets or future promises.

Most informed people are familiar with the concept of Peak Oil, but fewer are aware that we’re also entering the era of Peak Government.  The central misconception of Peak Oil -- that it’s not about “running out of oil,” it’s about running out of cheap, easy-to-access oil -- can also be applied to Peak Government: It’s not about government disappearing, it’s about government shrinking.

Central government -- the Central State -- has been in the expansion mode for so long that the process of contracting government is completely alien to the nation, to those who work for the State, and to those who are dependent on the State. Thus we have little recent historical experience of Peak Government and few if any conceptual guideposts to help us understand this contraction.

Peak Government is not a reflection of government services or the millions of individuals who work in government; it is a reflection of four key systemic forces that drove State expansion are now either declining or reversing.

The Four Key Drivers of State Expansion

The twin peaks of oil and government are causally linked: central government's great era of expansion has been fueled by abundant, cheap liquid fuels. As economies powered by abundant cheap energy expanded, so did tax revenues.

Demographics also aided Central States’ expansion: as the population of working-age citizens grew, so did the work force and the taxes paid by workers and enterprises.

The third support of Central State expansion was debt, and more broadly, financialization, which includes debt, leverage, and institutionalized incentives for speculation and misallocation of capital. Not only have Central States benefited from the higher tax revenues generated by speculative bubbles, they now depend on debt to finance their annual spending. In the U.S., roughly one-third of Federal expenditures are borrowed every year. In Japan -- which is further along on this timeline, relative to America -- tax revenues barely cover social security payments and interest on central government debt; all other spending is funded with borrowed money.

The fourth dynamic of Central State expansion is the State’s ontological imperative to expand. The State has only one mode of being, expansion. It has no concept of, or mechanisms for, contraction.

In my book Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change, I explain this ontological imperative in terms of risk and gain. From the Central State’s point of view, everything outside its control poses a risk. The best way to lower risk is to control everything that can be controlled. Once the potential sources of risk are controlled, then risk can be shifted to others.

Put another way, once the State controls the entire economy and society, it can transfer systemic risk to others: to other nations, to taxpayers, etc. 

In effect, the State’s prime directive is to cut the causal connection between risk and gain so that the State can retain the gain and transfer the risk to others. The separation of risk from gain is called moral hazard, and the key characteristic of moral hazard can be stated very simply: People who are exposed to risk and consequence act very differently than those who are not exposed to risk and consequence.

Every time the Central State guarantees something, it disconnects risk from consequence and institutionalizes moral hazard.

To take but one example of many, when the Central State guarantees mortgages so lenders and originators cannot lose and the borrower can’t lose more than his modest 3% down payment, then everyone in the chain is encouraged to pursue risky speculations because the State has disconnected risk from the consequence of a potentially large loss. The risk hasn’t vanished; it has simply been transferred to the taxpayers, who absorb the inevitable losses that result when speculation is encouraged.

Separating risk from gain inevitably generates systemic instability. The entire credit-housing bubble can be seen as proof of this dynamic. 

All four of the causal factors itemized above are turning against continued expansion: 

• The key energy source of global transportation, liquid fuel, is no longer cheap and easy to access.
• The demographics have reversed as the population of State dependents is soaring.
• Debt has expanded to the point that servicing that debt now threatens the financial stability of the State and its currency.
• The State’s separation of risk and consequence is generating systemic instability.

There are plenty of models of State expansion -- democracy, socialism, communism, theocracy, and so on -- and none for State contraction. This suggests that the down slope of Peak Government will be disorderly and rife with unintended consequences.

The Failure of Separation of Powers

The predominant Western model of governance assumes, incorrectly, that a “separation of powers” within the State will limit the State’s appetite for control. But rather than limit the State’s expansion, the State’s subsystems -- the institutions of executive power, legislative power and judicial power -- are competing to gain as much control as possible over both the State itself and the nation’s social and financial systems.  

This competition doesn’t weaken or limit the State; rather, it lends the State a fearsome competitive advantage, as each institution gains power as the State expands. So even though the competition between the three may appear to limit the power of each, in aggregate this competition only increases the State’s expansion as each seeks to outdo the others in reach, influence, and power.

Regardless of which institution wins or loses a particular squabble, the State inexorably expands its control and power. And just as inexorably, elites within the State -- systemically protected from the risk created by their policies -- will experience a rising sense of omnipotence as their private power rises in tandem with the State’s expansion. 

These powers also offer State elites a way to radically lower their own risk and dramatically increase their private gain by leveraging the State’s vast powers to their own private benefit.

In other words, not only does each agency and branch of the State seek to expand its reach and power, so, too, does every individual within the State who can leverage the power of the State to protect his/her own individual gain.

The State as Protector of Private Gain

The Central State is granted unique powers of coercion by its membership (the citizenry) to protect them from the predation of foreign powers, individuals, and subgroups seeking monopoly. The citizens grant the State this extraordinary power to protect their freedom of faith, movement, expression, enterprise and association and to insure that no subgroup can dominate the nation for their private gain.

Granting this power to the State creates a risk that the State itself may become predatory. To counter this potential, the State has the self-limiting mechanisms of a separation of powers such that no one institution or agency can dominate the State and thus the nation.

But as we have seen, the separation of powers has failed to limit the expansion of the State; rather, it has become a competitive advantage, feeding the State’s expansion. There are no State-based limits on the State’s concentration of wealth and power.

There is a great irony in this concentration of power in the State: the power is concentrated to protect the citizenry from predation and exploitation, but that concentration becomes an irresistible attractor for all those seeking to increase their private gain via monopoly, cartels, collusion, fraud, and other forms of predation.

The wealth that can be concentrated in private hands is not limited or self-regulated, and so private concentrations of wealth inevitably exceed the ethical threshold of individuals within the State (i.e., their resistance to bribes and self-interest). This structural imbalance leaves the State intrinsically vulnerable to the influence of private wealth. Once this wealth has a foothold of influence within the State, it can then bypass the State’s internal controls and become the financial equivalent of cancer: a blindly self-interested organism bent solely on growth at the expense of the system as a whole.

Rather than protect the citizens from exploitation, the State’s primary role becomes protecting the private gains of elites who have taken effective control of the State’s vast powers.

The Death Spiral of an Expansive State

We can now see that the Central State faces an impossible contradiction: to pursue its primary purpose of protecting the citizenry from predation, it is granted powers that enable it to evade its own self-limiting mechanisms. Private concentrations of wealth gain control over the State’s machinery of governance, and the resulting partnership of private and State elites suppress the mechanisms that were intended to limit private influence over State power.

To enhance their own power, these elites increase the State’s reach until it dominates the entire political, social, and economic system. This sets up an inherently self-destructive feedback loop in which the State’s actions to protect its self-serving elites weaken both the State and the nation. The State’s inefficiencies pressure the nation’s output, even as the State increases its share of the national income to maintain its self-serving elites and quiet its potentially restive dependents. The more the State expropriates, the less surplus is left for productive investment, and so the nation’s output continues to decline.

This dynamic creates a positive feedback loop (i.e., a death spiral) of higher taxes and lower investment in productive assets.

Post Peak-Government Living

In Part II: The End of the Free Lunch, we consider what citizens can do to limit their own risk as the Central State contracts.

We explain how the State has unfairly used taxpayer-funded subsidies to erode participation commerce and investment at the local level that in ages past provided transparency into the true value of labor.

Now that the artificial influence of these subsidies is waning as the State can longer longer afford them, reactivating the infrastructure and processes for enterprise at the community level will be critical to transitioning to a sustainable and more resilient economic model.

Click here to access Part II of this report (free executive summary; paid enrollment required for full access). 

This essay was first published on chrismartenson.com.


New Max Keiser: On the Edge with Charles Hugh Smith. I was sharper in the "live in Paris" interview but Max is always worth watching:

"Renouncing debt would be the way forward and eventually that will happen everywhere--either the currencies will go to zero, what people call hyperinflation, or the debt will be defaulted on."


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---

Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change (print $25)
(Kindle eBook $9.95)

Read the Introduction (2,600 words) and Chapter One (7,600 words) for free.

We are like passengers on the Titanic ten minutes after its fatal encounter with the iceberg: though our financial system seems unsinkable, its reliance on debt and financialization has already doomed it.We cannot know when the Central State and financial system will destabilize, we only know they will destabilize. We cannot know which of the State’s fast-rising debts and obligations will be renounced; we only know they will be renounced in one fashion or another.
The process of the unsustainable collapsing and a new, more sustainable model emerging is called revolution, and it combines cultural, technological, financial and political elements in a dynamic flux.History is not fixed; it is in our hands. We cannot await a remote future transition to transform our lives. Revolution begins with our internal understanding and reaches fruition in our coherently directed daily actions in the lived-in world.

Nothing will save the eurocracy

From Mish, Wednesday, May 16, 2012:

Once again, I sadly report that Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at The Telegraph hits the nail on the head as to what is happening, yet cannot hit the broadside of a barn with a shotgun from 15 feet in regards to the solution.

It really pains me to see excellent analysis go straight into the toilet with hopeless proposals to problems at hand.

Please consider Appetiser cost of Greek exit is €155bn for Germany, France: trillions for meat course by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. 

 Eric Dor's team at the IESEG School of Management in Lille has put together a table on the direct costs to Germany and France if Greece is pushed out of the euro.

These assume that relations between Europe and Greece break down in acrimony, with a full-fledged "stuff-you" default on euro liabilities. It assumes a drachma devaluation of 50pc.

Potential losses for the states, including central banks.

	Upper bound of the losses Billions €
	French State	German State
TARGET2 liabilities of the Bank of Greece	22.7	30.2
Greek sovereign bonds held by the Eurosystem: SMP	9.8	14
Bilateral loans to Greece in the context of the first programme	11.4	15.1
Guarantees to bonds issued by the EFSF to provide loans to Greece in the context of the second programme	8.4	11.2
Guarantees to debts issued by the EFSF in the context of its participation to the “Private Sector Involvement” –restructuration of the Greek debt:“sweetener”	6.5	8.6
Guarantees to debts issued by the EFSF in the context of its participation to the “Private Sector Involvement” –restructuration of the Greek debt: payment of accrued interest	1	1.4
Guarantees to bonds issued by the EFSF to provide loans to Greece in order to buy back sovereign bonds used by banks as collateral to obtain funding from the Eurosystem	7.6	10.2
Total	66.4	89.8

Sounds about right.

So far so good. I think a 70% devaluation is about right, but let's not quibble.

Contagion Silliness

This is where Pritchard's analysis starts getting more debatable.

Pritchard writes ..."Needless to say, the real danger is contagion to Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Belgium, France, and the deadly linkages between €15 trillion in public and private debt in these countries and the €27 trillion European banking nexus."

This idea of contagion sounds much like the totally discredited "domino" theory in regards to Vietnam. Simply put the rest of Asia did not fall into the hands of communists when the US lost the war in Vietnam.

In this case, Spain will sink or swim on its own merits regardless of what Greece does.

If anything, there will be contagion in the reverse sense. There exists a possibility that Greece recovers "because" it exits the Eurozone (however structural reforms are needed as well).

The ridiculous fear is failure in Greece will lead to a failure in Spain. Clearly both states have failed already. 

Mad Hatter Tirade

Pritchard then went off the deep end into a mad hatter tirade.

 This nonsense can of course be stopped in ten minutes if the EU:

1) announces that it will equip itself with a real central bank (a lender of last resort) that takes all risk of sovereign default off the table — with conviction and overwhelming force, with no ifs and buts, and no ambushes from the Bundesbank.

2) announces EMU debt-pooling, fiscal union, a joint EMU budget and tax system, and an EMU government as a counterpart for the enhanced the ECB.

The idea that Greece and Spain can be saved by central bank printing "with conviction and overwhelming force, with no ifs and buts" is of course asinine.

Sorry Ambrose, "asinine" is the best word that describes what you propose. Greece and Spain can only be saved if and only if they implement badly-needed structural reforms. 

Defaulting on debt which would cause inflation in Greece and Spain (not Germany), may assist recovery, but the 100% necessary condition in both cases is structural reform. 

Pritchard then recovers by concluding ... 

 My sympathies to the German people. This is what your leaders got you into (without asking permission). It was the elemental implication of monetary union.

We at the Telegraph screamed from rooftops in the early 1990s that EMU was a destroyer of nation states, and democracies. So did the brave German professors. Nobody would listen.

My guess is that German citizens will not accept this implication.

Precisely!

As Pritchard suggests, Germany will indeed pay. Mathematically Germany must pay. It's something I have pointed out numerous times over the years.

The problem as Pritchard notes is the flaw in the Eurozone in the first place. 

I commend Pritchard for being among the first to point that simple fact out. However, neither Keynesian nor Monetarist nonsense is the cure for anything.

Regrettably, Pritchard keeps attempting to put a square peg into a round hole, and worse yet keeps proposing "asinine" solutions to a fundamental problem.

If Wishes Were Fishes 

• If monetary stimulus worked, the LTRO would have been a spectacular success already. 
• If monetary stimulus worked, housing in the US would be in full-blown recovery.
• If monetary stimulus worked, Japan would not have a debt-to-GDP ratio above 200%. 
• If printing worked, Zimbabwe would have been the greatest country in the world long ago.

It is really sad to see otherwise fine analysis go straight into the toilet with such ridiculous proposals as solutions.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
_____-

Related:

‘Euro faces existential crisis Brussels was oblivious to’

'EU loans undermine Greek sovereignty'

 The Endgame: “Greeks feel hopeless”

A Shrewd Greek Lefty is Holding the Eurozone Hostage

Chart o’ the Day: Americans Couldn’t Care Less About the Problems in Europe

Iceland’s Amazing Peaceful Revolution – Still Not in the News (backstory)

From crazyemailsandbackstories:

Iceland’s peaceful revolution is a stunning example of how little our media tells us about the rest of the world.

Read details about Iceland’s wonderful social evolution at DailyKos, here.

Another great article is  on Bloomberg.com.

The  following summation has been posted by countless people on Facebook; I’ve reposted it in its entirety:

ICELAND (GP) – No news from Iceland? Why? Last we heard, people were rising up and overthrowing the bankers. Then, no news on the television or newspapers for two years. What happened? Why won’t the papers and TV tell us how the bankers successfully crushed or minimized another rebellion? Because… THEY DIDN’T! This time, the people won.

The people of Iceland have overwhelmingly risen up and forced their government puppets of the banks to resign. Primary banks have been nationalized. The debt scam imposed by Great Britain and Holland money printers was declared null and void. A public assembly has been created to rewrite Iceland’s constitution.

The best part is, all of this happened without violence or bloodshed. A whole country’s revolution succeeded against powers that created the current global crisis without a shot being fired. A very good reason exists for the apparent failure of television and newspapers to provide any publicity on this unprecedented event: what would happen if the rest of the EU and the United States took this as an example?

The following is a summary of the facts:

2008 – The main bank of Iceland is nationalized.
The Krona, the currency of Iceland devaluates and the stock market halts. The country is in bankruptcy

2008 – Citizens rise up at Parliament and succeed in forcing the resignation of both the prime minister and the effective government. New elections are held.
Yet, the country remains in a bad economic situation. A Parliament act is passed to pay back 3,500 million Euros to Great Britain and Holland by the people of Iceland monthly during the next 15 years, with 5.5% interest.

2010 – The people of Iceland again take to the streets to demand a referendum. In January of 2010, the President of Iceland denies approval, instead announcing a popular vote on the matter by the people.
In March, a referendum and denial of payment is approved by popular vote of 93%. Meanwhile, government officials initiate an investigation to bring to justice those responsible for the crisis. Many high level executives and bankers are arrested. Interpol dictates an order to force all implicated parties to leave Iceland.

An assembly is elected to write a new constitution (based on the Denmark’s) to avoid entrapments of debt based currency foreign loans. 25 citizens are chosen — with no political affiliation — out of the 522 candidates. The only qualifications for candidacy are adulthood and the support of 30 people. The constitutional assembly started in February of 2011. It continues to present ‘carta magna’ from recommendations provided by various assemblies throughout the country. Ultimately, it must be approved by both the current Parliament and the one created through the next legislative election.

In summary of the Icelandic revolution, we saw:
-resignation of the entire corrupt government of the country
-nationalization of the bank
-referendum enabling the people to determine their own economic system
-incarceration of responsible parties, and
-a rewriting of the Iceland Constitution by its people

This is significant stuff.
Have we been informed about this through the main stream media?
Has any political program on radio or TV commented on this?

Not that I’ve seen. The Icelandic people have demonstrated a way to beat the international money printers and controllers of information. The last thing entrenched usurers would want is for you to think you could also free yourself from their chains.

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The above article is a reprint.

Free to be wrong: European elections spell economic doom

From RT:

Greece has failed to forge a coalition out of a motley crew of impractical and irreconcilable parties and now faces a fresh election. As another wave of the continent-wide crisis looms, it’s time to face up to the flaws of Europe’s political systems.

On May 6 Greeks turned out en masse to vote for the most unworkable parliament in their history. The two mainstream center-left and center-right parties, which occupied more than seventy per cent of parliament after the last election in 2009, were reduced to less than 30 per cent. No party climbed above 20 per cent. The hard-right Golden Dawn party, which harkens back to an idyllic age of an immigrant-free pure Greece and wants to return to it by putting minefields around the borders, received 7 per cent of the votes, up from less than one per cent.

What followed was a farcical nine days when the job of forming a coalition was handed down the winners’ list, as one leader after another failed to strike enough alliances. Fully aware that no coalition was likely, politicians alternated between absolving themselves of responsibility for the gridlock and grandstanding. In this vein, Alexis Tsipras, the youthful leader of the fast-rising Radical Left Party, asked the fallen mainstream leaders to sign a “letter of repentance” for agreeing to EU bailout conditions.

A new election has now been scheduled for next month. Meanwhile, Panagiotis Pikramenos, a senior judge, and a man no one elected, has been made interim prime minister by default after the sides failed to agree on a candidate.

All this is taking place in the middle of Greece’s economic death spiral, genuinely unprecedented for a nominally prosperous European democracy. Latest forecasts say that by the end of the year, the economy will have shrunk by an astonishing 27 per cent since the crisis began in 2008. Greek debt has passed 160 per cent of GDP and the country has borrowed more than a €100 billion in the past two months alone, just to pay its government employees. And yet the EU continues to read daily sermons about belt-tightening as it threatens to withhold further (high-interest rate) loans to a state teetering on the brink.

The parade of black shirts and flag-waving revolutionaries at the latest election is undoubtedly a response to the austerity pacts with the EU which were agreed to by both the mainstream parties. There is also little question that instead of making the Greek economy more competitive, in the short run the measures seem to have strangled it.

But beyond paralyzing Greek politics, what do these alternative parties actually suggest?

Tsipras, who has now been made favorite for the repeat election, says that he is against the Brussels-created structural reforms, but does not want to quit the euro (neither do 70 per cent of the Greeks, whoever they voted for). Berlin has already said that it will be impossible for Greece to default and stay in the eurozone, and that it will not give it any loans if it decides to do so unilaterally.

In fact, Greece’s desire to spend money it does not have and then not pay its debts is a continuation of the same fantasy politics that led the country into this situation in the first place, when Greece borrowed money to spend on its bloated public sector and generous pension schemes.

This appears to be a failure of democracy. Instead of acting as a bottom-up system that channels the wishes of the electorate into beneficial policies, it has produced a fragmented mess of radicalism united only by its penchant for delusional policies. And no one – not even Angela Merkel – can force the Greek people to make a different choice at the ballot box.

Contagious protest

While Greece has been given its own big top in the economic freak show, other European countries aren’t as rational as they like to think.

Francois Hollande has been elected on an anti-austerity program in France. A career socialist bureaucrat, he promises to avoid deep cuts in a country with a munificent welfare system that hasn’t balanced its budget since the 1970s. Hollande says that he wants “growth” instead of austerity – as if they are either/or propositions – but his underlying message appears to be that things won’t have to get worse before they get better. He hopes to finance this at least partly by taxing the rich in a country that already has a notoriously high tax burden and struggles to compete in an increasingly global economy.

Even the Germans appear to be turning away from prescribed economic policies, as the right-wing Chancellor Merkel was trounced by the center-left SDP in a regional election last week.

Once again, the excessive focus on austerity instead of growth may be to blame, and the results can be read as a reaction to this. But at the height of a crisis – the eurozone is predicting a decline in GDP this year, in contrast to 3.5 per cent worldwide growth – Europeans are choosing populism over hard-headed decisions. European democracies are looking at their neighbors writhing in pain, and then deciding to shoot themselves in the foot.

A soured dream

Yet this may not just be a state-level problem and, just possibly, Europeans are not the masochistic dreamers they appear to be. When vulnerable eurozone economies vote recklessly, they often secretly hope that richer states will bail them out. Even now, many in Greece refuse to seriously acknowledge the threat to expel it from the monetary union. Conversely, when Merkel et al make harsh demands on the Greeks, they are as much protecting their own coffers, or at least making sure the euro doesn’t collapse and start an epidemic of economic failure.

While the EU, and specifically the euro, was envisaged as a project of co-operation, it has now become a competition between European electorates to see who can grab the biggest piece of the shrinking pie. After all, these countries are still ruled by their own electorates, who demonstrably care about their national interest over the health of the European project.

Opponents of the euro have always said that integrating substantially different political entities into a single economic space could only have one outcome. Proponents hoped that political union would piggyback on the success of an economic juggernaut of a continent fuelled by a super-currency. Needless to say, this vision of a superstate is unpalatable for most voters in the current climate. A pity perhaps, as political integration during the fatter years might have solved a lot of the current problems.

Instead, what exists currently is a loose alliance of states, with unclear mechanisms for imposing a single collective will: another bottom-up, avowedly democratic system that was meant to work for mutual benefit, but has instead produced a mélange of competing interests. Germany is not a villain, and Greece is not a naughty child, rather they are countries locked in a dysfunctional system.

After the horrors of totalitarianism and World War II, it is clear why Europe desired both democracy and continent-wide unity. But if they are to prosper in the global world, individual European countries, and the EU as a whole, will have to recover their decisiveness and steel. Or risk becoming a continent of landmarks, rather than a place where history is made.

Igor Ogorodnev

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
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