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Bankers Have Seized Europe: Goldman Sachs Has Taken Over

November 26, 2011 By 2 Comments

On November 25, two days after a failed German government bond auction in which Germany was unable to sell 35% of its offerings of 10-year bonds, the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble said that Germany might retreat from its demands that the private banks that hold the troubled sovereign debt from Greece, Italy, and Spain must accept part of the cost of their bailout by writing off some of the debt.

The private banks want to avoid any losses either by forcing the Greek, Italian, and Spanish governments to make good on the bonds by imposing extreme austerity on their citizens, or by having the European Central Bank print euros with which to buy the sovereign debt from the private banks. Printing money to make good on debt is contrary to the ECB’s charter and especially frightens Germans, because of the Weimar experience with hyperinflation.

Obviously, the German government got the message from the orchestrated failed bond auction. As I wrote at the time, there is no reason for Germany, with its relatively low debt to GDP ratio compared to the troubled countries, not to be able to sell its bonds.

If Germany’s creditworthiness is in doubt, how can Germany be expected to bail out other countries? Evidence that Germany’s failed bond auction was orchestrated is provided by troubled Italy’s successful bond auction two days later.

Strange, isn’t it. Italy, the largest EU country that requires a bailout of its debt, can still sell its bonds, but Germany, which requires no bailout and which is expected to bear a disproportionate cost of Italy’s, Greece’s and Spain’s bailout, could not sell its bonds.

In my opinion, the failed German bond auction was orchestrated by the US Treasury, by the European Central Bank and EU authorities, and by the private banks that own the troubled sovereign debt.

My opinion is based on the following facts. Goldman Sachs and US banks have guaranteed perhaps one trillion dollars or more of European sovereign debt by selling swaps or insurance against which they have not reserved. The fees the US banks received for guaranteeing the values of European sovereign debt instruments simply went into profits and executive bonuses. This, of course, is what ruined the American insurance giant, AIG, leading to the TARP bailout at US taxpayer expense and Goldman Sachs’ enormous profits.

If any of the European sovereign debt fails, US financial institutions that issued swaps or unfunded guarantees against the debt are on the hook for large sums that they do not have. The reputation of the US financial system probably could not survive its default on the swaps it has issued. Therefore, the failure of European sovereign debt would renew the financial crisis in the US, requiring a new round of bailouts and/or a new round of Federal Reserve “quantitative easing,” that is, the printing of money in order to make good on irresponsible financial instruments, the issue of which enriched a tiny number of executives.

Certainly, President Obama does not want to go into an election year facing this prospect of high profile US financial failure. So, without any doubt, the US Treasury wants Germany out of the way of a European bailout.

The private French, German, and Dutch banks, which appear to hold most of the troubled sovereign debt, don’t want any losses. Either their balance sheets, already ruined by Wall Street’s fraudulent derivatives, cannot stand further losses or they fear the drop in their share prices from lowered earnings due to write-downs of bad sovereign debts. In other words, for these banks big money is involved, which provides an enormous incentive to get the German government out of the way of their profit statements.

The European Central Bank does not like being a lesser entity than the US Federal Reserve and the UK’s Bank of England. The ECB wants the power to be able to undertake “quantitative easing” on its own. The ECB is frustrated by the restrictions put on its powers by the conditions that Germany required in order to give up its own currency and the German central bank’s control over the country’s money supply. The EU authorities want more “unity,” by which is meant less sovereignty of the member countries of the EU. Germany, being the most powerful member of the EU, is in the way of the power that the EU authorities desire to wield.

Thus, the Germans bond auction failure, an orchestrated event to punish Germany and to warn the German government not to obstruct “unity” or loss of individual country sovereignty.

Germany, which has been browbeat since its defeat in World War II, has been made constitutionally incapable of strong leadership. Any sign of German leadership is quickly quelled by dredging up remembrances of the Third Reich. As a consequence, Germany has been pushed into an European Union that intends to destroy the political sovereignty of the member governments, just as Abe Lincoln destroyed the sovereignty of the American states.

Who will rule the New Europe? Obviously, the private European banks and Goldman Sachs.

The new president of the European Central Bank is Mario Draghi. This person was Vice Chairman and Managing Director of Goldman Sachs International and a member of Goldman Sachs’ Management Committee. Draghi was also Italian Executive Director of the World Bank, Governor of the Bank of Italy, a member of the governing council of the European Central Bank, a member of the board of directors of the Bank for International Settlements, and a member of the boards of governors of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Asian Development Bank, and Chairman of the Financial Stability Board.

Obviously, Draghi is going to protect the power of bankers.

Italy’s new prime minister, who was appointed not elected, was a member of Goldman Sachs Board of International Advisers. Mario Monti was appointed to the European Commission, one of the governing organizations of the EU. Monti is European Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, a US organization that advances American hegemony over the world. Monti is a member of the Bilderberg group and a founding member of the Spinelli group, an organization created in September 2010 to facilitate integration within the EU.

Just as an unelected banker was installed as prime minister of Italy, an unelected banker was installed as prime minister of Greece. Obviously, they are intended to produce the bankers’ solution to the sovereign debt crisis.

Greece’s new appointed prime minister, Lucas Papademos, was Governor of the Bank of Greece. From 2002-2010. He was Vice President of the European Central Bank. He, also, is a member of America’s Trilateral Commission.

Jacques Delors, a founder of the European Union, promised the British Trade Union Congress in 1988 that the European Commission would require governments to introduce pro-labor legislation. Instead, we find the banker-controlled European Commission demanding that European labor bail out the private banks by accepting lower pay, fewer social services, and a later retirement.

The European Union, just like everything else, is merely another scheme to concentrate wealth in a few hands at the expense of European citizens, who are destined, like Americans, to be the serfs of the 21st century.

Source: https://www.activistpost.com/2011/11/bankers-have-seized-europe-goldman.html

Filed Under: Banks, European Union, Politicians, Politics

How Germany Overlooked the Threat from the Right

November 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The victim had stayed out late drinking — a fatal mistake, as it turned out. On the night of Nov. 24-25, 1990, Amadeu Antonio Kiowa was sitting with friends in Hüttengasthof, a bar with an adjacent discotheque in the town of Eberswalde, in the eastern German state of Brandenburg. Shortly after midnight, the owner of the establishment received a phone call from the police saying that he should send his guests home because a group of skinheads was on its way there. But the warning came too late for the Angolan-born factory worker.

“There are the niggers,” someone yelled from the group, which had been loudly rampaging through the town since that afternoon. There were around 40 to 60 young men wearing paratrooper boots and bomber jackets, some of them armed with baseball bats and fence pickets. Kiowa was punched twice in the stomach, he fell down and struggled to get back up on his feet, but the group had already set upon him. The thugs pulled him up and tossed him back and forth, as if they were throwing around a ball. When the brutalized man fell to the ground again, they kicked him until he lay unconscious on the street. Two weeks later, the young man died of severe head injuries in the intensive care unit of the Berlin-Buch Hospital.

Turning Point

Kiowa is one of the first victims of racist violence after German reunification in 1990. His death marks a turning point where far-right terror became apparent, even if the state long refused to recognize it as such. In September 1992, the district court in Frankfurt-Oder convicted five of the men involved in the attack of committing assault and battery leading to death. The most severe sentence was four years of juvenile detention, and one man got off with a two-year suspended sentence.

The judges ruled that the “general political and social circumstances” following reunification were mitigating factors. “The state and the FDJ (the former East Germany’s communist youth organization, the Free German Youth) used to regulate everything, including recreational activities,” they wrote in their decision, “but now these young people have become disoriented as a result of the political upheaval.”

That was 20 years ago and Germany has had a great deal of time to learn from its mistakes. Now, the country annually spends €24 million ($32.5 million) on violence-prevention programs. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which is responsible for monitoring extremism, has many informers in the far-right political milieu — so many, in fact, that an attempt to ban the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) failed in 2003 because of the presence of informers in senior positions within the party. But right-wing terror has not ended — on the contrary, it has escalated. One could even say that it has become commonplace.

Journalists from the weekly German newspaper Die Zeit and the center-left newspaper Die Tagesspiegel carried out research into the number of victims of far-right violence. They came to a total of at least 137 deaths between 1990 and 2008 — 137 people who died because they had the wrong skin color, or had a different accent, or because they simply didn’t fit into the right-wing extremists’ view of the world. They were brutally kicked, stabbed to death or set on fire. One was trampled to death and thrown into the nearest cesspool.

Trail of Blood

A horrifying trail of blood extends across the entire country — and perhaps the most spine-chilling aspect of all is that so few people have noticed it. It’s been a long time since Germans have staged candlelight vigils in memory of the victims of far-right violence. This gives the impression that politicians and the general public were busy with more important things than this form of murderous, everyday violence. But perhaps simply no one, aside from a small circle of committed citizens, saw the connection — the hate that tied all the crimes together.

Now, Germany has been startled from its slumber. Ever since the discovery of an underground far-right terror group which apparently targeted Turkish small businessmen all across Germany for many years, the law enforcement agencies have been asking themselves how they could have overlooked something that is actually impossible to overlook.

There’s a deep sense of shock and dismay. German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke of a “disgrace for Germany” and German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich warned of “enormous damage to the trust that people have in our law enforcement agencies” in an interview with SPIEGEL. On Tuesday, the German parliament, the Bundestag, will deal with the issue. On Friday of last week, a large crisis summit was held in Berlin. Participants discussed every option that could be quickly implemented: a new joint center to curb far-right violence, more staff members for the special units of police and the public prosecutors’ offices and a renewed attempt to ban the NPD. The government is trying to calm the public — and also itself.

Indeed, the issues that are being raised go beyond the case of the murderous trio from Jena in eastern Germany. While investigators are still focusing on who was in contact with the terror cell, what other crimes they may have committed, and which individuals helped them along the way, the politicians have already turned to the question of who is responsible for the debacle.

“The question is: Did individuals fail here or was it the entire system?” asks the governor of North Rhine-Westphalia, Hannelore Kraft, a member of the opposition center-left Social Democrats (SPD). The SPD mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit, already seems to have decided that the blame cannot be placed on government agencies alone. “While conservatives immediately said that left-wing extremism was behind the series of arson attacks on cars in Berlin, they didn’t really want to recognize the threat posed by right-wing terror,” he says.

Challenging the State

There are, of course, significant differences between far-left and far-right terror. Political terror on the right in Germany has never had the logistics of the far-left Red Army Faction (RAF), which terrorized Germany in the 1970s, or its circle of supporters which, at least during the early days, extended into the homes of the educated middle classes. Many left-wing terrorists had an academic background that translated into a propensity for developing political theories, something that right-wing extremists tended to lack.

But there is more than one way to challenge the state, as both types of terror show. It’s possible to attack its representatives, which is the path that was taken by the RAF. However, it’s also possible to stake out regions in which the state loses its monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force, thereby suspending the laws that govern civil society.

Far-right terrorists rarely leave letters claiming responsibility or voluminous treatises drumming up support for the struggle against the system. Most perpetrators are barely able to justify their violent acts in coherent sentences. But there is no ignoring the fact that this terror also has a message: Anyone who is different will be struck down. And: Stay away, because we call the shots here.

No-Go Areas

The message has certainly been received. Anyone who lives in the western part of Berlin, and can be easily recognized as a foreigner, still avoids taking trips to the city’s eastern outlying districts, let alone to the states of the former East Germany. Travel guides have long warned dark-skinned Americans against visiting certain regions in the east.

Far-right terror is random but it is not indiscriminate, and in that sense it resembles leftist terror. It also seeks out its victims according to political criteria, but it doesn’t care how affluent or influential someone is. What counts is whether someone could pass as “German,” although in addition to national origin, other deadly criteria could be an individual’s sexual orientation or being a Jew.

Every society whose citizens have to fear for their lives because they belong to a certain group is affected at its core.

This raises the following question: Why has the German state so far not felt truly challenged by the far right?

Part 2: Attacks Every Week

Shivers run down the spine of anyone who takes the trouble to read the police reports. Every week, somebody in Germany is attacked by right-wing extremist thugs — and it’s often only purely by chance that they escape with their lives. Many incidents, though, do not appear in the official records.

German government statistics show that 46 homicides were committed by right-wing extremists between 1990, the year of German reunification, and 2008. This official figure remains unchanged despite the research of a team of editors from the weekly German newspaper Die Zeit and the center-left newspaper Die Tagesspiegel, which last year set out to find the “missing victims.”

Forty-six victims is already a horrific number. It is, at least, larger than the number of dead left behind by the RAF wave of terror. But the list of victims which the journalists came up with is even more terrible. It contains at least 137 dead. Now, the 10 victims of the neo-Nazi trio have to be added to this figure.

Inventory of Hate

Even this total only gives an incomplete picture. The actual extent to which radical right-wing terror has now become commonplace in certain regions of the country only becomes apparent when other offenses are included, such as illegal acts of propaganda and attacks that don’t necessarily lead to murder and manslaughter. Investigators in the eastern state of Brandenburg recently conducted an exemplary inventory for Zossen, a small town just a few kilometers south of Berlin. There, a group calling itself the “Free Forces of Teltow-Fläming” (FKTF), after the district where Zossen is located, spread fear and panic for years before it was banned this past spring.

Here is an excerpt from the first three months of last year:

  • Jan. 22, 2010. At 10:40 p.m. a 16-year-old boy set fire to the House of Democracy in Kirchstrasse. The building was completely burnt down. During a police interview, the perpetrator said his motive was that he wanted to make himself popular among the members of the FKTF.
  • Jan. 27, 2010. At an event commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day, a group of hecklers gathered near the market square. When the organizers began to read the names of the Holocaust victims, they yelled “lies, all lies!” and a number of individuals gave the Hitler salute.
  • Feb. 16, 2010. Six members of the FKTF were charged in a regional court with disseminating a flyer showing a gravestone with the inscription “Federal Republic of Germany 1949-2009. In this grave rests an absolutely pitiful, cowardly state.”
  • Feb. 28, 2010. Unknown perpetrators used light-blue paint to spray right-wing graffiti on a property wall on Thomas-Müntzer-Strasse, including two swastikas, an image of Hitler, the letters “NS” (the abbreviation for National Socialism) — with the “S” written as a rune — and the word “now!”
  • March 7, 2010. A police patrol discovered a swastika and the sentence “Hagen, you’ll die soon!” on the facade of the “Honey Store” in Berliner Strasse. One of the co-owners of the business, whose first name is Hagen, is a man who is involved in a local anti-right-wing citizens’ initiative, “Zossen Shows Its True Colors,” and publishes the group’s monthly newsletter. After the incident, he was placed under police protection.

The list goes on, and not only in Zossen. All it takes is a careful examination of the facts to recognize that these individual cases represent a pattern.

Ignoring Reality

The peculiar unwillingness to look reality in the face is also reflected in German court convictions. Word has got out that leniency is only understood as a sign of the state’s weakness, yet a number of judges still hesitate to cite the political aspects of offenses.

One of the reasons for this reluctance lies in the German legal system. The Federal Court of Justice demands an extremely thorough justification when a court passes a conviction for murder perpetrated with “particularly base motives.” This is a legal term for homicide based on political motives. In cases where this serves as a justification for a conviction, there is an increased likelihood that the defendant will win on appeal, and it appears that some judges are striving to avoid this.

It is not only the justice system’s need to take the safe route that protects extremist perpetrators from being labeled far-right. In some regions, politicians and the police have entered into a sinister alliance to play down the extent of right-wing extremism. For a long time, particularly in the eastern part of the country, a misguided sense of regional pride led authorities to look away, instead of calling a spade a spade.

Not Sufficiently Racist

In 2007, there was a scandal in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, which had the highest rate of right-wing violence in the country at the time, when it emerged that the police had deliberately understated the number of far-right crimes in a bid to improve the state’s image.

Minutes from Saxony-Anhalt’s state parliamentary investigative committee into the scandal provide an insight into how right-wing offenses were downplayed all the way down the chain of command. Three police officers who were extraordinarily dedicated to pursuing Saxony-Anhalt’s right-wing offenders testified that their superior told them in 2007 that they “didn’t have to notice everything.” He said that too many registered offenses by right-wing extremists would further “damage the state’s image,” and added that political campaigns to promote civil courage were nothing more than initiatives that “play to the crowd.”

A witness said that the Saxony-Anhalt State Office of Criminal Investigation received instructions from the state Interior Ministry “to adjust the case numbers.” He said that there were disagreements over which offenses could be classified as racially motivated. The witness went on to say that they argued over whether the term “nigger slut” or the sentence “I’ll kill your nigger child” were sufficiently racist. The witness said that this made it possible to keep 135 cases out of the statistics in Saxony-Anhalt alone.

The right-wing extremist scene, which hates democracy, foreigners and everything foreign, has experienced a slow decline for years. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the proportion of radical activists has grown. In 2010, German authorities counted a total of 25,000 right-wing extremists, 9,500 of whom were categorized as violence-prone. This includes the so-called “autonomist nationalists,” who have recently increased in numbers. These are primarily young men who have copied the black clothing and symbolism of “black bloc” radical leftists.

‘We’re Thinking about Attacking the Police Station’

In addition to the everyday terrorism of right-wing extremist thugs, since 2007 militant neo-Nazis have joined forces in the so-called Free Network. All of the members agree that violence is an essential part of their political struggle. In the run-up to a neo-Nazi demonstration in Dresden, a man named “Hugo” posted in an internal forum: “We’re thinking about attacking the police station and setting it on fire!” Elsewhere a comrade asked for support in the struggle against world Jewry: “Tomorrow around 6 p.m. there is going to be a spontaneous protest in Chemnitz against Israel.” Anybody who wants to participate, he said, should bring torches and “firecrackers.”

Until now, such announcements were occasionally dismissed as typical bragging by confused individuals on the right-wing extremist scene, but the government intends to change that. German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger has proposed restructuring the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and consolidating the current 16 state branches into three or four agencies. Interior Minister Friedrich is planning to set up a new joint center against right-wing extremism. And all political parties in Germany are discussing a new attempt to ban the NPD.

The plan’s proponents point to a number of advantages: They say that the NPD would have to vacate its seats in the two eastern German state parliaments where it is represented. Its bank accounts would be frozen, and its party offices would be closed. Taxpayer money would no longer be used to help fund the party’s election campaign costs.

Failed Attempt

But many German politicians still vividly recall the last failed attempt to ban the NPD. In January 2001, former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s center-left coalition government of the SPD and the Green Party submitted a proposal to outlaw the party, which contained some 100 pages of argumentations presented by then-German Interior Minister Otto Schily.

But before the case could be properly heard by the German Constitutional Court, Schily had to admit that important NPD functionaries had also worked for German intelligence. This derailed the application’s chances of success. Indeed, the judges in Karlsruhe asked themselves how unconstitutional a party could be that was controlled by paid informers.

It doesn’t look as if things will go better the second time around. Then, as now, there are reportedly some 100 NPD functionaries that pass on inside information to domestic intelligence agents. This practice has changed very little over the years.

Nevertheless, at least one thing was cleared up at the highest level last week: the question of how best to commemorate the victims of the neo-Nazi trio from Thuringia. It has been decided that there will be a meeting at Bellevue Palace, the official residence of the German president, followed by a photo op. German President Christian Wulff personally urged that the ceremony be held as soon as possible.

[REPORTED BY SVEN BECKER, STEFAN BERG, MARKUS DEGGERICH, JAN FLEISCHHAUER AND GUNTHER LATSCH]

Source: https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,798935-2,00.html

Filed Under: European Union, Extremism, Politics, Violence

A Philosopher’s Mission to Save the EU

November 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Jürgen Habermas is angry. He’s really angry. He is nothing short of furious — because he takes it all personally.

He leans forward. He leans backward. He arranges his fidgety hands to illustrate his tirades before allowing them to fall back to his lap. He bangs on the table and yells: “Enough already!” He simply has no desire to see Europe consigned to the dustbin of world history.

“I’m speaking here as a citizen,” he says. “I would rather be sitting back home at my desk, believe me. But this is too important. Everyone has to understand that we have critical decisions facing us. That’s why I’m so involved in this debate. The European project can no longer continue in elite modus.”

Enough already! Europe is his project. It is the project of his generation.

Jürgen Habermas, 82, wants to get the word out. He’s sitting on stage at the Goethe Institute in Paris. Next to him sits a good-natured professor who asks six or seven questions in just under two hours — answers that take fewer than 15 minutes are not Habermas’ style.

Usually he says clever things like: “In this crisis, functional and systematic imperatives collide” — referring to sovereign debts and the pressure of the markets.

Sometimes he shakes his head in consternation and says: “It’s simply unacceptable, simply unacceptable” — referring to the EU diktat and Greece’s loss of national sovereignty.

‘No Convictions’

And then he’s really angry again: “I condemn the political parties. Our politicians have long been incapable of aspiring to anything whatsoever other than being re-elected. They have no political substance whatsoever, no convictions.”

It’s in the nature of this crisis that philosophy and bar-room politics occasionally find themselves on an equal footing.

It’s also in the nature of this crisis that too many people say too much, and we could definitely use someone who approaches the problems systematically, as Habermas has done in his just published book.

But above all, it is in the nature of this crisis that the longer it continues, the more confusing it gets. It becomes more difficult to follow its twists and turns and to see who is responsible for what. And the whole time, alternatives are disappearing before our very eyes.

That’s why Habermas is so angry: with the politicians, the “functional elite” and the media. “Are you from the press?” he asks a man in the audience who has posed a question. “No? Too bad.”

Habermas wants to get his message out. That’s why he’s sitting here. That’s why he recently wrote an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper, in which he accused EU politicians of cynicism and “turning their backs on the European ideals.” That’s why he has just written a book — a “booklet,” as he calls it — which the respected German weekly Die Zeit promptly compared with Immanuel Kant’s 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch.”

But does he have an answer to the question of which road democracy and capitalism should take?

A Quiet Coup d’État

“Zur Verfassung Europas” (“On Europe’s Constitution”) is the name of his new book, which is basically a long essay in which he describes how the essence of our democracy has changed under the pressure of the crisis and the frenzy of the markets. Habermas says that power has slipped from the hands of the people and shifted to bodies of questionable democratic legitimacy, such as the European Council. Basically, he suggests, the technocrats have long since staged a quiet coup d’état.

On July 22, 2011, (German Chancellor) Angela Merkel and (French President) Nicolas Sarkozy agreed to a vague compromise — which is certainly open to interpretation — between German economic liberalism and French etatism,” he writes. “All signs indicate that they would both like to transform the executive federalism enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty into an intergovernmental supremacy of the European Council that runs contrary to the spirit of the agreement.

Habermas refers to the system that Merkel and Sarkozy have established during the crisis as a “post-democracy.” The European Parliament barely has any influence. The European Commission has “an odd, suspended position,” without really being responsible for what it does. Most importantly, however, he points to the European Council, which was given a central role in the Lisbon Treaty — one that Habermas views as an “anomaly.” He sees the Council as a “governmental body that engages in politics without being authorized to do so.”

He sees a Europe in which states are driven by the markets, in which the EU exerts massive influence on the formation of new governments in Italy and Greece, and in which what he so passionately defends and loves about Europe has been simply turned on its head.

A Rare Phenomenon

At this point, it should be mentioned that Habermas is no malcontent, no pessimist, no prophet of doom — he’s a virtually unshakable optimist, and this is what makes him such a rare phenomenon in Germany.

His problem as a philosopher has always been that he appears a bit humdrum because, despite all the big words, he is basically rather intelligible. He took his cultivated rage from Marx, his keen view of modernity from Freud and his clarity from the American pragmatists. He has always been a friendly elucidator, a rationalist and an anti-romanticist.

Nevertheless, his previous books “Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere” and “Between Facts and Norms” were of course somewhat different than the merry post-modern shadow-boxing of French philosophers like Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard. What’s more, another of Habermas’ publications, “Theory of Communicative Action,” certainly has its pitfalls when it comes to his theory of “coercion-free discourse” which, even before the invention of Facebook and Twitter, were fairly bold, if not perhaps naïve.

Habermas was never a knife thrower like the Slovenian thinker Slavoj Žižek, and he was no juggler like the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. He never put on a circus act, and he was always a leftist (although there are those who would disagree). He was on the side of the student movement until things got too hot for him. He took delight in the constitution and procedural matters. This also basically remains his position today.

Habermas truly believes in the rationality of the people. He truly believes in the old, ordered democracy. He truly believes in a public sphere that serves to make things better.

Part 2: A Vision of Europe at the Crossroads

This also explains why he gazed happily at the audience on this mid-November evening in Paris. Habermas is a fairly tall, lanky man. As he stepped onto the stage, his relaxed gait gave him a slightly casual air. With his legs stretched out under the table, he seemed at home. Whether he’s at a desk or not, this is his profession: communicating and exchanging ideas in public.

He was always there when it was a question of putting Germany back on course, in other words, on his course — toward the West, on the path of reason: during the vitriolic debate among German historians in 1986 that focused on the country’s approach to its World War II past; following German reunification in 1990; and during the Iraq War. It’s the same story today as he sits here, at a table, in a closed room in the basement of the Goethe Institute, and speaks to an audience of 200 to 250 concerned, well-educated citizens. He says that he, the theorist of the public sphere, doesn’t have a clue about Facebook and Twitter — a statement which, of course, seems somewhat antiquated, almost even absurd. Habermas believes in the power of words and the rationality of discourse. This is philosophy unplugged.

While the activists of the Occupy movement refuse to formulate even a single clear demand, Habermas spells out precisely why he sees Europe as a project for civilization that must not be allowed to fail, and why the “global community” is not only feasible, but also necessary to reconcile democracy with capitalism. Otherwise, as he puts it, we run the risk of a kind of permanent state of emergency — otherwise the countries will simply be driven by the markets. “Italy Races to Install Monti” was a headline in last week’s Financial Times Europe.

On the other hand, they are not so far apart after all, the live-stream revolutionaries from Occupy and the book-writing philosopher. It’s basically a division of labor — between analog and digital, between debate and action. It’s a playing field where everyone has his or her place, and it’s not always clear who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. We are currently watching the rules being rewritten and the roles being redefined.

A Dismantling of Democracy

“Sometime after 2008,” says Habermas over a glass of white wine after the debate, “I understood that the process of expansion, integration and democratization doesn’t automatically move forward of its own accord, that it’s reversible, that for the first time in the history of the EU, we are actually experiencing a dismantling of democracy. I didn’t think this was possible. We’ve reached a crossroads.”

It also has to be said: For being Germany’s most important philosopher, he is a mind-bogglingly patient man. He is initially delighted that he has managed at last to find a journalist whom he can tell just how much he abhors the way certain media ingratiate themselves with Merkel — how he detests this opportunist pact with power. But then he graciously praises the media for finally waking up last year and treating Europe in a manner that clearly demonstrates the extent of the problem.

“The political elite have actually no interest in explaining to the people that important decisions are made in Strasbourg; they are only afraid of losing their own power,” he says, before being accosted by a woman who is not entirely in possession of her faculties. But that’s how it is at such events — that’s how things go with coercion-free discourse. “I don’t fully understand the normative consequences of the question,” says Habermas. The response keeps the woman halfway at a distance.

He is, after all, a gentleman from an age when having an eloquent command of the language still meant something and men carried cloth handkerchiefs. He is a child of the war and perseveres, even when it seems like he’s about to keel over. This is important to understanding why he takes the topic of Europe so personally. It has to do with the evil Germany of yesteryear and the good Europe of tomorrow, with the transformation of past to future, with a continent that was once torn apart by guilt — and is now torn apart by debt.

Without Complaint

In the past, there were enemies; today, there are markets — that’s how the historical situation could be described that Habermas sees before him. He is standing in an overcrowded, overheated auditorium of the Université Paris Descartes, two days before the evening at the Goethe Institute, and he is speaking to students who look like they would rather establish capitalism in Brussels or Beijing than spend the night in an Occupy movement tent.

After Habermas enters the hall, he immediately rearranges the seating on the stage and the nametags on the tables. Then the microphone won’t work, which seems to be an element of communicative action in practice. Next, a professor gives a windy introduction, apparently part of the academic ritual in France.

Habermas accepts all this without complaint. He steps up to the lectern and explains the mistakes that were made in constructing the EU. He speaks of a lack of political union and of “embedded capitalism,” a term he uses to describe a market economy controlled by politics. He makes the amorphous entity Brussels tangible in its contradictions, and points to the fact that the decisions of the European Council, which permeate our everyday life, basically have no legal, legitimate basis. He also speaks, though, of the opportunity that lies in the Lisbon Treaty of creating a union that is more democratic and politically effective. This can also emerge from the crisis, says Habermas. He is, after all, an optimist.

Then he’s overwhelmed by the first wave of fatigue. He has to sit down. The air is stuffy, and it briefly seems as if he won’t be able to continue with his presentation. After a glass of water, he stands up again.

He rails against “political defeatism” and begins the process of building a positive vision for Europe from the rubble of his analysis. He sketches the nation-state as a place in which the rights of the citizens are best protected, and how this notion could be implemented on a European level.

Reduced to Spectators

He says that states have no rights, “only people have rights,” and then he takes the final step and brings the peoples of Europe and the citizens of Europe into position — they are the actual historical actors in his eyes, not the states, not the governments. It is the citizens who, in the current manner that politics are done, have been reduced to spectators.

His vision is as follows: “The citizens of each individual country, who until now have had to accept how responsibilities have been reassigned across sovereign borders, could as European citizens bring their democratic influence to bear on the governments that are currently acting within a constitutional gray area.”

This is Habermas’s main point and what has been missing from the vision of Europe: a formula for what is wrong with the current construction. He doesn’t see the EU as a commonwealth of states or as a federation but, rather, as something new. It is a legal construct that the peoples of Europe have agreed upon in concert with the citizens of Europe — we with ourselves, in other words — in a dual form and omitting each respective government. This naturally removes Merkel and Sarkozy’s power base, but that’s what he’s aiming for anyway.

Then he’s overwhelmed by a second wave of fatigue. He has to sit down again, and a professor brings him some orange juice. Habermas pulls out his handkerchief. Then he stands up and continues to speak about saving the “biotope of old Europe.”

There is an alternative, he says, there is another way aside from the creeping shift in power that we are currently witnessing. The media “must” help citizens understand the enormous extent to which the EU influences their lives. The politicians “would” certainly understand the enormous pressure that would fall upon them if Europe failed. The EU “should” be democratized.

His presentation is like his book. It is not an indictment, although it certainly does at times have an aggressive tone; it is an analysis of the failure of European politics. Habermas offers no way out, no concrete answer to the question of which road democracy and capitalism should take.

A Vague Future and a Warning from the Past

All he offers is the kind of vision that a constitutional theorist is capable of formulating: The “global community” will have to sort it out. In the midst of the crisis, he still sees “the example of the European Union’s elaborated concept of a constitutional cooperation between citizens and states” as the best way to build the “global community of citizens.”

Habermas is, after all, a pragmatic optimist. He does not say what steps will take us from worse off to better off.

What he ultimately lacks is a convincing narrative. This also ties Habermas once again to the Occupy movement. But without a narrative there is no concept of change.

He receives a standing ovation at the end of his presentation.

“If the European project fails,” he says, “then there is the question of how long it will take to reach the status quo again. Remember the German Revolution of 1848: When it failed, it took us 100 years to regain the same level of democracy as before.”

A vague future and a warning from the past — that’s what Habermas offers us. The present is, at least for the time being, unattainable.

Source: https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,799237,00.html

Filed Under: Corporations, Corruption, European Union, Financial Crisis, Rights

Financial Watchdog Warns UK Banks To Brace Themselves For Impact Of Chaotic Euro Break-Up

November 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment

British banks must brace themselves for a chaotic break-up of the euro, the City watchdog has warned.

Andrew Bailey, a senior executive at the Financial Services Authority, said there was no room for ‘complacency’ as the storms over the monetary union continue to rage.

He said lenders should draw up emergency plans for the exit of stricken eurozone members from the bloc – or even a complete collapse of the single currency.

Financial fears: Andrew Bailey insists that British banks should be drawing up emergency plans

‘We must not ignore the prospect of the disorderly departure of some countries from the eurozone,’ he warned.

Although ‘unlikely’, a meltdown in the 17-member club could hit the UK financial system hard because of the ‘network’ of relationships between British and European banks, Bailey argued.

He told a conference in London yesterday: ‘There’s no road map out there that says “this is how it happens”. We have been talking to [banks] already and we will be talking to them again and asking questions.’

The stark warning came as borrowing costs for eurozone governments climbed again, amid the ongoing deadlock among their leaders over how to tackle the debt crisis.

For the first time in two-and-a half years, the yield on UK government debt fell below Germany’s in a sign that the contagion is spreading to the very heart of the union.

The turmoil is already having a substantial impact on Britain’s banks by driving up the cost of raising money from international investors.

The problems have affected UK lenders even as they charge customers rates that are ‘substantially out of line with history’ relative to the Bank of England base rate, according to Bailey. The banking supervisor painted a bleak picture of the financial sector’s prospects over the coming years, in which banks will be forced to cut back their sprawling empires.

In a bid to restore their credibility with investors, many are already withdrawing en-masse from peripheral businesses.

This will lead to a ‘sharp reduction’ in the amount of cash used for more speculative activities, Bailey said. In a clear reference to Royal Bank of Scotland, he predicted that some institutions could pull out of so-called ‘casino’ banking altogether.

‘I don’t think we should rule out that for some banks an exit from investment banking . . . is the sensible outcome,’ he said.

Regulators would be ‘watching banks carefully’ and ensure that they build up reserves to absorb future losses ‘where they can’, he added.

 

Source: https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-2065911/The-Financial-Services-Authority-warning-lenders-euro.html#ixzz1eoc8IcJV

Filed Under: Banks, European Union, Financial Crisis, United Kingdom

Nigel Farage- Unelected Puppets Of A German-Dominated EU

November 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Neil Cavuto talks to Nigel Farage MEP, UKIP, Co-President of the EFD Group in the European Parliament (Europe of Freedom and Democracy)

 

Filed Under: European Union, Politics, Propaganda

Top Ten Reasons Why The Euro Was A Dumb Idea

November 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Op-Ed: Except for soccer and the Eurovision Song contest, there isn’t much common ground holding Europe’s diverse nations together. Then there are problems like trust, language and mobility – plenty of reasons, in other words, why the euro was a bad idea from the start.

BERLIN - We now have to rescue whatever is left to rescue of the euro, at any price. And as the crisis continues, one thing is abundantly clear: a decade ago, when the currency was introduced, we were way too gullible.

Here are 10 reason why the euro was a mistake. Some of them – superficially at least – seem fairly obvious. Some were aired, and discarded, in the various public and private debates that took place in the 1990s. Other aspects were simply overlooked at the outset, even by currency’s most ardent opponents.

1. No conflict resolution mechanism In its first decade, Europe’s economic integration was uniquely successful. At their summits, leaders divvied up profits. That dynamic changed with the euro crisis: now they had to share burdens — something no one was prepared for, either institutionally or mentally. This, in turn, has led to squabbling among nations at a level that hasn’t been seen since 1957, when the Rome Treaties were signed.

2. No rallying points With the exception of soccer and the Eurovision Song Contest, there’s nothing around which Europeans rally as a whole – no regional TV stations or newspapers, and certainly no common language. During the win-win period, this wasn’t much of a problem. But as soon as the euro crisis broke out, a bad-mouthing “us vs. them” attitude quickly took hold. Even if the crisis itself doesn’t tear the European Union apart, the basic rallying point problem remains.

3. Language barriers Why were institutions such as Germany’s central bank, or the EU Commission not made aware during the last decade of the extent of the problems in Greece and Portugal? Because experts depended on the Greek and Portuguese governments for whatever information they were getting. Not knowing the languages meant they couldn’t independently read Greek and other newspapers, which would have made the situation abundantly clear. This is an ongoing problem.

4. Trust Experiences so far are sobering. A case in point is the fudged figures on which Greece’s entry into the zone were based in the first place. And there are no signs presently of any behavior anywhere that would warrant greater trust.

5. Control It’s not just about the four big economies: Germany, France, Italy and Spain, which together represent three-fourths of the euro zone’s economic performance. The crisis has made it clear that even a country like Greece, which barely contributes 2% of the currency zone’s GDP, is “system relevant.” That means that with the possible exception of tiny Malta, any euro country has the potential to blow up the whole system. A related problem is shifting power – usually seen as German dominance, but it can also mean weaker members taking the others hostage.

6. Shared-value deficit Europe wouldn’t necessarily need many shared values to function as a free trade tone. But as a currency union, survival depends on shared economic and political values. Some northern European governments seriously thought the euro would bring a German-style “culture of stability” to southern European countries. But it’s become clear that France, Italy, Spain and Greece continue to perceive the European Central Bank as an opportunity. Seen objectively, that may not be wrong, but it contradicts the deeply-held German conviction forged out of negative experience that an independent central bank is the only guarantee against governments piling up debt that is then “inflated away” by printing more money.

7. The missing European mind Differences in mentality between nations would not pose a problem if at the very least there were people in national government and the joint institutions who had cast off national thinking. But there are no “true Europeans” either among politicians, technocrats or among the members of the supposedly independent European Central Bank.

8. Interest rates When the euro was first introduced, even skeptics thought the economic situations among currency union members would soon balance out. Not so, and that’s a problem because there’s only one key interest rate. It’s too high for some countries, too low for others. The results are unnecessarily long declines in economic activity and high rates of job loss on the one hand, and high inflation — and in some cases bubbles (think: real estate markets in Spain and Ireland) – on the other.

9. Lack of mobility People have to be mobile in a currency union – ready to move to wherever the good jobs are so that areas where jobs are plentiful balance areas where they aren’t. With time, Europeans are becoming more mobile, as the number of Spaniards migrating to Germany shows. But there’s still a long way to go.

10. No real will to enforce the rules Despite all the difficulties, the currency union could work if governments would exert “peer pressure” on each other. But the fathers of the currency union overestimated their own political caste. Greece, Italy, Germany – all have treated Maastricht Treaty rules like non-binding suggestions and no amount of EU Commission “Blue Letters” have done any good in changing that. None of the violators, in other words, have been punished.

 

Source: https://www.worldcrunch.com/top-ten-reasons-why-euro-was-dumb-idea/4139

Filed Under: Debt, European Union, Money

EU Court Rules Against Web Filters To Block File Sharing

November 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

LUXEMBOURG — Internet service providers cannot be forced to install filters aimed at preventing people from illegally downloading music and other files, the EU’s top court ruled Thursday.

The decision by the European Union Court of Justice is a defeat for backers of web filters, including artists and the enterainment industry, who are fighting to protect their work from circulating freely on the Internet.

The judges ruled that a national court cannot impose an injunction ordering an Internet provider to install a filtering system for all electronic communications, saying it is too expensive for the company and could infringe on people’s fundamental rights.

The case arose from a dispute in Belgium pitting web provider Scarlet Extended SA against SABAM, a Belgian management company responsible for authorising the use of music of authors, composers and editors.

SABAM complained in 2004 that Scarlet’s customers were using peer-to-peer networks, which allow people to share files online, to download works from its catalogue without authorisation and without paying royalties.

A Belgian court then ordered Scarlet to make it impossible for its customers to send or receive any electronic files containing SABAM music.

But the EU court ruled that such filters require the monitoring of all electronic comunications, which is incompatible with the Union’s E-Commerce rules.

An injuction would “result in a serious infringement of Scarlet’s freedom to conduct its business as it would require Scarlet to install a complicated, costly, permanent computer system at its own expense,” the court said.

“The filtering system would also be liable to infringe the fundamental rights of its customers, namely their right to protection of their personal data and their right to receive or impart information,” it added.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, which represents the record industry worldwide, said that despite the rejection, the ruling only affected one system to protect copyrighted material online in Europe.

“In this particular case, the court rejected the content filtering measure presented by the Belgian court as too broad,” said IFPI chief executive Frances Moore.

“However, this does not affect the forms of ISP cooperation that IFPI advocates including graduated response and the blocking of rogue websites, which are already being implemented in countries across Europe,” he said.

The European Internet Services Providers Association, which represents 1,800 ISPs across Europe, welcomed the ruling, saying it would have “serious implications” for content blocking systems imposed in other EU states.

“Considering the major contribution that the Internet industry can make to the economic recovery, it was indeed not the time to put the innovation of the Internet at risk,” said association president Malcolm Hutty.

 

Source: https://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/11/24/eu-court-rules-against-web-filters-to-block-file-sharing/

Filed Under: Censorship, European Union, Internet

General Strike In Portugal

November 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

LISBON - A general strike took place all over Portugal, in Lisbon a march of protesteres walked from Marquês de Pombal roundabout to the front of the parliament where some conforntations with the police occurred. [24 November 2011]

The 24th of November marked yet another protest march, with demonstrations in Lisbon and several other portuguese cities on the day of a general strike.

The protesters once again stood in front of the parliament with reivindications for less social and economical injustice and to protest against the policies the government have implemented in order to face the debt crisis.

Several union groups and anti-capitalism groups were involved, in a demonstration of thousands where situations of confrontations with the police occurred at several locations, including a small group of demonstrators trowing glass bottles at the police, fire crackers explosions and the use of pepper spray on the crowd.

In front of the parliament the protesters took down the fences separating them from the police. at least three demonstrators were arrested and one photojournalist got injured.

 

Source: https://fsimaging.wordpress.com/2011/11/24/general-strike-in-portugal/

Filed Under: Economy, European Union, Protests

Fitch Cuts Portugal Rating To Junk Status

November 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Rating agency Fitch downgraded Portugal’s rating to junk status on Thursday, citing large fiscal imbalances, high debts and the risks to its EU-mandated austerity program from a worsening economic outlook.

Fitch cut Portugal to BB+ from BBB-, which is still one notch higher than Moody’s rating of Ba2. S&P still rates Portugal investment grade.

Fitch said a deepening recession makes it “much more challenging” for the government to cut the budget deficit but it still expects fiscal goals to be met both this year and next.

“However, the risk of slippage - either from worse macroeconomic outturns or insufficient expenditure controls - is large,” Fitch said.

Portugal’s 10-year bond yields rose sharply to around 13.15 percent after the downgrade from 12.71 percent late on Wednesday, with the spread over benchmark German bunds rising 21 basis points on the day to 1,095 basis points.

Portugal sought a 78-billion-euro bailout from the European Union and IMF earlier this year and has adopted sweeping austerity measures to bring public accounts under controls.

Under the loan program Portugal must cut the budget deficit to 5.9 percent of gross domestic product this year from around 10 percent in 2010. Next year it must cut the deficit further to 4.5 percent.

Fitch said the state-owned “enterprise sector is another key source of fiscal risk” and has caused a number of upward revisions to the country’s debt and budget deficit figures this year. The government has said there was an unexpected fiscal shortfall of about 3 billion euros this year.

“Given these downside risks, Fitch sees a significant likelihood that further consolidation measures will be needed through the course of 2012,” Fitch said.

It sees Portugal total debt peaking at 116 percent of GDP in 2013 from 93.3 percent at the end of last year.

Filipe Garcia, an economist at Informacao de Mercados Financeiros, said that while the downgrade does not change the government’s financing conditions as it is under a bailout, it could worsen the situation for companies.

“Where (the downgrade) has an impact is on companies, such as banks and other issuers like EDP or Brisa, whose ratings are greatly influenced by the sovereign rating, leaving them in a more difficult situation,” said Garcia.

The agency said Portugal’s debt crisis poses big risks for the country’s banks. “Recapitalisation and increased emergency liquidity provision from the ECB to Portugal’s banks will, in Fitch’s view, be needed and provided,” it said.

Under Portugal’s bailout, 12 billion euros has been set aside for funding banks if necessary.

Fitch warned that a worsening fiscal or economic situation could lead to further downgrades. “Furthermore, although Portugal is funded to end-2013, sovereign liquidity risk may increase materially toward the end of the program if adverse market conditions persist,” Fitch said.

The government hopes to return raising debt in financial markets at the end of 2013.

 

Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/24/us-portugal-fitch-idUSTRE7AN0O120111124

Filed Under: Debt, Economy, European Union

Conspiracies, Coups and Currencies

November 24, 2011 By 1 Comment

The murmurs about Barack Obama being forced out began in Berlin and Beijing. After his party lost the midterm vote, there were hints that a government of technocrats would be imposed on America, to save the country from a debt crisis and the world from a depression.

As the debt-ceiling negotiations stalled out over the summer, a global coalition — led by Germany, China and the International Monetary Fund — began working behind the scenes to ease Obama out of the White House. The credit downgrade was the final blow: the president had lost the confidence of the world’s shadow government, and his administration could no longer survive.

Within days, thanks to some unusual constitutional maneuvering, Obama resigned the presidency and Michael Bloomberg was invited to take the oath of office. With Beijing issuing veiled threats against our currency, Congress had no choice but to turn the country’s finances over to the Senate’s bipartisan Gang of 6, which in turn acceded to Chinese and German “supervision” of their negotiations. Meanwhile, there was a growing consensus in Europe and Asia that only a true global superstate could prevent the debt contagion from spreading …

FOR Americans, the scenario I’ve just imagined is a paranoid fantasy, the kind of New World Order nightmare that haunts the sleep of black-helicopter watchers and Trilateral Commission obsessives.

But for the inhabitants of Italy and Greece, who have just watched democratically elected governments toppled by pressure from financiers, European Union bureaucrats and foreign heads of state, it evokes the cold reality of 21st-century politics. Democracy may be nice in theory, but in a time of crisis it’s the technocrats who really get to call the shots. National sovereignty is a pretty concept, but the survival of the European common currency comes first.

There were few tears in Italy and Greece for Silvio Berlusconi and George Papandreou, the prime ministers — respectively corrupt and hapless — whose downfalls were engineered by the Brussels-Berlin-Paris axis. But their forced departures, however welcome, open a troubling window on what a true European state would look like. Stability would be achieved at the expense of democracy: the rituals of parliaments and elections would endure, but the real decision-making power would pass permanently to the forces represented by the so-called “Frankfurt Group” — an ad hoc inner circle consisting of Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and a cluster of bankers and E.U. functionaries, which has been spearheaded European crisis management since October.

The preview is important because this is precisely the future that almost every informed commentator assumes Europe needs to embrace in order to save the euro and prevent an economic meltdown. The old conventional wisdom held that a continent-wide currency union was a wonderful idea, and that euroskeptics were all knuckle-dragging troglodytes. The new conventional wisdom is that yes, well, maybe the knuckle-draggers were right about the perils of the euro, but it’s far too late to back out now.

Or at least it’s too late at the moment. After the current crisis has passed, some voices have suggested, there will be time to reverse the ongoing centralization of power and reconsider the E.U.’s increasingly undemocratic character. Today the Continent needs a unified fiscal policy and a central bank that’s willing to behave like the Federal Reserve, Bloomberg View’s Clive Crook has suggested. But as soon as the euro is stabilized, Europe’s leaders should start “giving popular sovereignty some voice in other aspects of the E.U. project.”

This seems like wishful thinking. Major political consolidations are rarely undone swiftly, and they just as often build upon themselves. The technocratic coups in Greece and Italy have revealed the power that the E.U.’s leadership can exercise over the internal politics of member states. If Germany has to effectively backstop the Continent’s debt in order to save the European project, it’s hard to see why the Frankfurt Group (its German members, especially) would ever consent to dilute that power.

One could argue that the Greeks and Italians — and the Spanish and the Irish and everyone else — should have known what they were signing up for when they joined the euro in the first place. But the fact is that the project of European union has never enjoyed deep popular support. Its advocates were always adept at re-running referendums until the vote came out their way, or designing treaties that bypassed the voting public entirely. The people of Europe have always been wary of trading their sovereignty for ever-greater unity — and now we can see why.

From the American perspective, a more centralized and undemocratic Europe is clearly preferable to the risk of another recession. For the staggering world economy, it would be disastrous if a burst of nationalism somehow broke up Europe’s common currency.

But that’s easy for us to say: it isn’t our self-government that’s at stake.

 

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opinion/sunday/douthat-conspiracies-coups-and-currencies.html?_r=2

Filed Under: Economy, European Union, USA
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