Santa gets early to Egypt as U.S. gives Morsi’s Military 20 new F-16s

December 11, 2012 1 Comment

AP | DECEMBER 11, 2012

The Egyptian military on Monday assumed joint responsibility with the police for security and protecting state institutions until the results of a Dec. 15 constitutional referendum are announced.

The army took up the task in line with a decree issued Sunday by President Mohammed Morsi. The Islamist leader on Monday also suspended a series of tax hikes announced the previous day on alcohol, cigarettes and other items.

The presidential edict orders the military and police to jointly maintain security in the run-up to Saturday’s vote on the disputed charter, which was hurriedly approved last month by a panel dominated by the president’s Islamist allies despite a boycott of the committee’s liberal, secular and Christian members.

The decree also grants the military the right to arrest civilians, but presidential spokesman Yasser Ali said it was nowhere near a declaration of martial law.

“It is merely a measure to extend legal cover for the armed forces while they are used to maintain security,” Ali told The Associated Press.

There were no signs of a beefed up military presence outside the presidential palace, the site of fierce street clashes last week, or elsewhere in the capital on Monday.

Still, Morsi’s decision to lean on the military to safeguard the vote is widely seen as evidence of just how jittery the government is about the referendum on the draft constitution, which has been at the heart of days of dueling protests by the opposition and Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood backers. The two sides clashed in Cairo last week, leaving at least six people dead and hundreds wounded in the worst violence of the crisis.

Both the opposition and Morsi’s supporters have called for mass rallies on Tuesday.

The opposition has rejected the referendum, but has yet to call for a boycott or instead a “no” vote at the polls.

“A decision on whether we call for a boycott of the referendum or campaign for a `no’ vote remains under discussion,” Hossam Moanis, a spokesman for the National Salvation Front grouping opposition parties and groups told the AP on Monday. “For now, we reject the referendum as part of our rejection of the draft constitution.”

The military last week sent out several tanks and armored vehicles in the vicinity of the presidential palace in Cairo following protests there by tens of thousands of Morsi’s critics. It was the first high-profile deployment by the military since it handed power in June to Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected president.

Morsi on Saturday rescinded decrees issued Nov. 22 granting him near absolute powers and placing him above any oversight, including by the courts. He has, however, insisted that the referendum will go ahead on schedule.

Judges have gone on strike to protest Morsi’s perceived “assault” on the judiciary and have said they would not oversee the Dec. 15 vote as is customary for judges in Egypt. Judges of the nation’s administrative courts announced Monday they were conditionally lifting their boycott of the vote, but they said their supervision of the process was conditional on bringing an end to the siege of the Supreme Constitutional Court by Morsi’s supporters.

In exchange for their supervision, they also demanded assurances that authorities would crack down on vote canvassing outside polling stations and offer life insurance policies to the judges.

Morsi’s deputy, Mahmoud Mekki, has said the vote could be staggered over several days if there were not enough judges to oversee the referendum.

The court was widely expected to dissolve the panel that drafted the constitution in a session scheduled for Dec. 2. The siege of the Nile-side building in Cairo’s Maadi district began Dec. 1.

In a surprise move, Morsi on Monday rescinded a series of decrees issued the previous day to raise taxes on a wide range of items and services, including alcohol, cigarettes, mobile phones, services offered by hotels and bank loans.

The state-owned daily Al-Ahram said the Sunday decrees to raise taxes were issued by Morsi. On Monday, the official MENA news agency carried a statement from Morsi’s office saying the president has decided to “suspend” the tax increases.

“The president does accept that citizens shoulder any additional burdens except by choice,” the statement said. Morsi, it added, has ordered a public debate on the increases to gauge popular reaction.

“The people will always have the loudest voice and final decision,” it added.

It was not immediately clear why Morsi changed his mind about the tax hikes in a matter of hours, but the about-face appeared to have more to do with inexperience rather than a bid by the president to appear sympathetic with the majority of Egyptians who struggle daily to make end meet as the economy’s woes deepen. A popular backlash against tax hikes could hurt the chances of the Morsi-backed draft constitution being ratified in the referendum.

Egypt and the IMF last month have reached an initial agreement for a $4.8 billion loan to revive the country’s ailing economy. The deal, agreed after nearly three weeks of negotiations in Cairo, will support the government’s economic program for 22 months, the IMF said in a statement.

Egyptian authorities said at the time that it intended to raise revenues through tax reform, using the resources generated from new taxes to boost social spending and investment in new infrastructure.

 

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IMF presses Euro countries to hand over Sovereignty

November 9, 2012

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | NOVEMBER 9, 2012

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has urged countries that are under pressure from markets and high financing costs, including Spain, to seek the help of the European bailout funds to enable the debt purchase program created by the European Central Bank (ECB) to be initiated.

“Countries should implement plans to adjust and, if necessary, seek appropriate support from the EFSF / ESM. This would allow the ECB to intervene using the recently established program,” said an IMF document prepared for the meeting of Finance ministers and central bank governors of the G20 for the past 4 and 5 November.

In this regard, the organization stresses that although the ECB’s decision has removed some of the main risks for the eurozone, political and economic factors can cause these countries to not seek help from European partners and the ECB at the right time.

The institution led by Christine Lagarde said that although progress has been made, the resolution of the eurozone crisis will require “timely and decisive” policy implementation.

The IMF warns that access to finance at a reasonable cost is “essential to enable successful economies to adjust. While the economies of the periphery must continue to adjust their fiscal balances at a rate that they can afford in the current fragile environment, they should also adopt the right policies.” The document warned that changes that do not include a so-called rescue may not be sufficient to fully recover the confidence of the markets, especially risk implementation.

So, the supposed solution provided by the bankers is not only not effective, but also a double whammy. On top of keeping countries in debt, the bankers also want to deepen the crisis by issuing more debt so that more risk can be created and nothing will ever change. That is why the banks want to take complete control, micromanaging every single country’s fiscal and monetary policies, so that they can risk as much as they want with other people’s money without having to be accountable to anyone.

The IMF disingenuously stresses that measures adopted because of the crisis should be accompanied by a roadmap towards creating a banking union and greater fiscal integration to strengthen the monetary union. That is exactly the mechanism that would, once and for all, given them the complete control of all financial decisions in Europe. They also intend to export this to the rest of the world once the EU nations are fully absorbed.

In the opinion of the IMF, the union should be based on a unique mechanism of supervision — controlled by the banks who created the crisis –, a resolution mechanism at the level of the Euro zone, with support from all members and a scheme where all countries pitch in to have a deposit guarantee scheme for the entire currency union. That money will also be spent at the banker’s discretion and countries or banking institutions will be ‘rescued’ only if they agree to all terms in the contracts.

The IMF also stresses that continued implementation of financial, fiscal and structural reforms is “essential”, while acknowledging that several years will pass before all policies are fully implemented. This means that bankers, at least for now, do not intend to collapse the European financial system at once, as long as they can continue to postpone it by creating more debt and adding sovereign nations to their portfolio of debt slaves.

The bankers have smartly warned about using austerity as a way to curb out of control spending, and instead advocate for perpetual indebtedness. That is because this is the most efficient mechanism for them to get to control nations directly from the inside. The truth is however, that the IMF is one of the main pushers of austerity as a first step in the acquisition of indebted nations. Once government bureaucrats are no longer able to cut anything else, the bankers pose as saviors by lending fake money so the countries can begin another cycle of debt-based ‘development’.

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Greece ‘unlikes’ freedom of the press

October 29, 2012

Journalist arrested for disclosing a list of tax evaders

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | OCTOBER 29, 2012

Investigative journalist Kostas Vaxevanis will go on trial for publishing the so-called ’Lagarde list’, which contains the names of 2,059 Greek people with bank accounts in Switzerland. The document, whose authenticity the government in Athens refuses to confirm, includes at least three politicians, two of them from the New Democracy, the party of Prime Minister Andonis Samaras. These people have accounts at the HSBC bank. The journalist appears Monday in court accused of publishing confidential data.

Vaxevanis was arrested Sunday morning at a friend’s house in Athens, amid a security deployment that he called a “fascist militia” in one of his Twitter messages. This Saturday, Hot Doc, who runs the fortnightly magazine where Vaxevanis made the documents public, ran the headline “All the names of the Lagarde list”.

The story is not new. In autumn 2010, six months after the first bailout of Greece, the then French Finance Minister, Christine Lagarde, gave his Greek counterpart, George Papaconstantinou, a list of 2059 names of Greek citizens with accounts in Switzerland as documentary evidence of the inveterate habit of evading taxes by professionals and entrepreneurs in Greece.

The fight against tax fraud was one of the flags of the socialist government of George Papandreou, along with a clamorous demand from international lenders, the troika form by the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund (the latter currently headed by Lagarde).

But the ‘Lagarde list’ apparently fell into oblivion and did not surface until earlier this month when Papaconstantinou’s successor as head of the Ministry of Economy and now leader of a party adrift, the socialist Evánguelos Venizelos, surrendered the list to authorities. Both declared that they had no information on the whereabouts of the list, but gave conflicting testimonies, said journalist Michalis Samozraki a Hot Doc hournalist during a phone conversation.

“In recent months there has been much controversy over the matter. Papaconstantinou and Venizelos were summoned by a special parliamentary committee, but told a different story from their previous one, that they had no knowledge about the existence of the ’Lagarde list’; while later, they said they could not publish it because it was confidential … They used this as an excuse. But the Greeks began to feel cheated. That is why the fact that his colleague was arrested for publishing the list, is seen by Samozraki as an “act of total censorship. “

Sources say the magazine received a copy of the ‘Lagarde list’ anonymously and Vaxevanis himself vindicated his obligation to disclose it, despite the threat of legal action: “I have done nothing but what a journalist is obliged to do: reveal some hidden truth “, says in a video sent to Reuters. “If anyone should be prosecuted, those are ministers who hid the list, the ‘lost’ list that they said it didn’t exist. I just did my job. I am a journalist and that’s my job. “

In the list published by Hot Doc there are the names of at least three politicians, including two former ministers of New Democracy, one of them is dead, and a current is a director for Samaras. The former Minister Giorgos Voulgarakis denied having money in Switzerland, despite being on the list.

The potential arrest of Vaxevanis was known since Saturday after it was issued by a Greek prosecutor. Vaxevanis has under his belt investigations that include the scandal known as  the Vatopedi case — one of the largest corruption scandals in the last five years and also collaborates as a journalist on the website Koutipandoras.gr (Pandora’s Box). “They entered the house with a prosecutor,” said Vaxevanis on his Twitter account. ”They are detaining me. Please spread the word.” Pictures of the outside of the building where he was showed a large police operation which included a strong checkpoint.

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Do you want a recovery? Let the foreign banks fail

October 24, 2012

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | OCTOBER 24, 2012

Although the financial crisis is said to have begun in 2008, its actual inception started many years before. As explained yesterday, the so-called recovery that almost every politician says governments are seeking is a sham. There are no plans drawn to have a recovery of the kind spoken of on the main stream media. In fact, it is totally the opposite.

It is true; the crisis that we are experiencing is the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930′s, but the conditions that created the crisis are the same that have existed for the past century. The system of creating money out of thin air enables the money makers to inject fake capital into economies, in what is called investments. After the economies get addicted to ‘free’ quick money to build their businesses, the issuers of the fake money take it away quickly or demand immediate return on those ‘investments’, which causes the decapitalization of those economies and consequently their collapse.

The causes of what seemed to have unraveled in 2008 began at the start of the 20th century with the adoption of the debt-based economic model. According to its precepts, governments yield the power to issue money to a group of international bankers who issue the it on behalf of governments around the world at a profit of as much as 30 percent or so. The interests accrued due to the issuance of the money — which is given to governments as a credit — is charged on those governments’ credit card and are immediately added to the tabs of the people who work to sustain government spending.

In a sense, the debt-based economic model originated on the irresponsibility from the part of the bureaucrats who manage the  government. Instead of spending the people’s money responsibly, the bureaucrats thought it was a better idea to borrow cash at immense interest rates, rather than decrease spending. Then, they decided to accept bribes and advice from international bankers to finance their out of control expenditures while charging the interests of the debt on the working classes.

The same system initiated in 1913, is still used today everywhere there is a central bank. Whether the bank is a private entity or an agency of the government is irrelevant. The bureaucrats elected to represent the people borrow money from the IMF and the World Bank, for example, in exchange for adopting specific policies that will guarantee the international bankers their ownership of the labor force for many generations into the future.

The money paid by working people to the central governments is not used to improve the communities where they live. They go to pay the interests on the debt acquired by the same central government in the name of the people. The type of improvements promised by politicians during their political campaigns are not paid with taxpayer money, but with the cash borrowed from the international bankers. The bankers arrive to nation-states and offer loans to governments that do not have enough liquidity to carry out the promises made during the political campaign. The government accepts all the conditions on the loan contract and effectively sign away sovereignty to the money makers.

The collapse of the kind the world is experiencing now is the last step of the plan that bankers have put together and implemented to become the sole owners of everything out there. The important difference between previous crises and the current one is that this may just be the last time bankers need to use their plan. That is because this time the bankers may simply walk away with everything, so no more manufactured crises will be needed.

The question is then, how do we stop the bankers from doing the same they’ve done in Greece, where they’ve looted it all? It is very easy, actually. All of Europe and the rest of the world needs to do the same that Iceland did. Instead of saying that international financial institutions were too big to fail, Iceland decided to kick them out. As it turns out, around 90 percent of the debt held by the Icelandic government was debt created by the banks and only 10 percent was actual debt incurred into by the people. After that fact was carefully determined, Iceland decided to take the other path towards a real recovery.

Believe it or not, Iceland decided to let the banks fail, which is exactly the opposite of what was done in Italy, France, Greece, Spain, England and the United States, to cite a few countries. Everywhere else where the crisis touched international banks, governments decided that it was a bad idea to tell the banks to get out of their countries and to take their debt with them. Instead, they printed more fake money to ‘rescue’ those banks and passed the debt to the people, who will have to pay interests on that debt for generations to come. This move not only did not solve the problem because the only thing it accomplished was to increase the debt, but also worsened economic conditions as no real solutions to the crisis were enacted.

At the beginning of 2008, the banks operating in Iceland owed the equivalent of 6 times the country’s GDP. The government there decided to nationalize the 3 most important debtor banks, which caused the devaluation of the local currency — the króna — by 85 percent. This seemed to spell trouble for Iceland, but contrary to common wisdom it actually help the nation have a real recovery while it maintained much of its independence and sovereignty. The government went bankrupt by the end of the year, but the country avoided having to make the citizens responsible for the debt generated by the international banks.

Along with the devaluation of the króna, Iceland experienced soaring inflation immediately after the declaration of bankruptcy. Meanwhile, the government decided to take all monies and deposit them in the recently nationalized banks in order to start all over again. The move by the Icelandic government meant a short period of real pain, but also gave the opportunity to the people there to start fresh, with no debt and with spending under control.

By 2010, just two years after the declaration of bankruptcy and the nationalization of the banks, Iceland experienced its first signs of economic growth, which marked the beginning of the recovery. By letting the international banks fail, Iceland not only punished irresponsible bankers for their overreach, but also prevented their people from becoming slaves to the banks. The country also admitted to having some real debt — a tiny portion of the total — and is now working on a successful path to a full recovery.

The lesson we get from all this is the following: We cannot fight fire by dumping gasoline on it. If the origin of the current crisis is the debt-based economic system, no solution will emerge when all we do is create more debt to pay the existing one. The reason why most countries decided to choose the issuance of more debt — as nations in Europe are doing now — is because their politicians are bought and paid for by the bankers to make that decision. If the opposite is done, that is, if the debt generated by the banks is rejected and they are left to fail, we will have many other successful recoveries. It is so simple that even Paul Krugman understands it.

So if you want your country to be free from fake money and fake debt, ask your government to renounce the debt-based development model, which is not even a development model. If all you want is a real recovery, let the banks fail.

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If no one believes in the recovery, why are Europe and the world Trying?

October 23, 2012

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | OCTOBER 23, 2012

I don’t know you, but I’m sick and tired of hearing about the financial collapse. The financial crisis we are now in was predicted long ago, and those predictions were correct. So why hasn’t it happened? First of all, it is happening. In fact it began a while ago. While many people expected to have a sudden collapse, which dragged the world into a whole, the fall of the international financial system was not planned to take place that way. Second of all, the financial collapse was planned to occur slowly and painfully, not only because the elites that planned it are financial sadists, but also because that is the only way to carry out their plan successfully.

The slow financial collapse allows the perpetrators to slowly bite off pieces from the grand pie, inflicting lethal but manageable pain and damage into the world’s economic and financial systems. This tactic in turn prepares the field for further deterioration and acquiescence from the public and the governments who they control. The kind of financial terrorism carried out by the largest financial entities in the history of the world, which are controlled by the smallest amount of people ever, makes it possible to successfully materialize the elite’s dream to create the most powerful monopoly of money and resources while they present themselves as the saviors.

The truth however, is that they are not saving anyone but themselves. While they buy off politicians and buy up land and essential resources for pennies on whatever currency they want, governments continue to fail to hold them accountable for their crimes. In fact, the bureaucrats in governments are faithful accomplices of the elites. Only one country has been able to partially defeat these monopoly men, and that country is Iceland. After kicking the bankers out, Iceland is now racing on the path of recovery, with a growing economy that simply sparked to life after telling the bankers that the illegal debt they had put under Iceland’s name was not theirs.

Iceland did what no other country had the guts to do: let the banks fail. Four years later, the country is being praised by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). That’s right. One of the most important globalist organizations who are out to destroy countries like Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain, congratulates Iceland for doing the right thing. The Icelandic people did not need to go through austerity programs, they did not lose millions of jobs and neither did they have their pensions or retirement accounts looted by the bankers. “The recovery has been quite impressive. GDP growth has picked up in the last couple of years and is now running around three percent a year,” says Franek Rozwadowski, a visitor from the IMF.

On the other side of the road there are countries like Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal, all of which chose to follow the bankers’ path to destruction. Spain has increased its debt dramatically in a supposed effort to curb the government’s deficit, imposed massive austerity measures, looted pension and retirement accounts, cut public jobs, accumulated a 24% unemployment rate, “rescued” its banks at least twice, adopted deadly economic policies as ordered by Brussels, but still is on its way to the financial precipice. The same model has been used by Greece, Italy and Portugal, who are following Spain on their way to social collapse. It is estimated that the Spanish debt will reach  23 billion euros by the end of the year, with no hope to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

The main reason for this is that the pact completed between the Spanish government and Brussels never intended to take Spain out of the dark tunnel. As explained in the documents obtained from the World Bank, the collapse of most European nations is part of a well-crafted plan that the elite has applied over and over again throughout the world. It happened in small countries like Guatemala, Nicaragua, mid-size countries like Argentina, and now in larger economies like Spain, the United States, France, Italy, Greece and others.

As it turns out, the so-called bailouts are not such things. They are more like acquisitions. As explained by Journalist and researcher Greg Palast — who broke the story about the World Bank’s plan — the idea is to secretly repossess the assets of every country in the world. This is achieved through a bribery system in which the global bankers buy off the politicians in different countries so that they adopt IMF and World bank policies that intend to destroy their economies. Once the policies have been adopted, the bankers begin to slowly but surely subtract the resources of those countries unnoticeably, mainly through financial aid programs and trade agreements.

The mistaken belief that a recovery will come out of the current austerity measures and financial bailouts stems from the well engineered propaganda campaign orchestrated by the banking system and the main stream media, who have gone from denying that there is a crisis to accepting there is one and that the same bankers who caused it, who planned it, are going to be the saviors. Little do most people know that the kind of crisis we are now going through is part of the plant to carry out a planet wide extortion scheme through which the globalist banking elite once again walks away with significant amounts of resources.

The difference is that this time the looting is not limited to once small or mid-sized nation, but to several large countries in Europe and the world. Greek islands are now for sale to the best bidder, because the country cannot pay its debt. Guess who will come to the rescue? The monopoly men will come and buy the islands for cents on the Dragma. The same situation will happen in Spain, once Mariano Rajoy requests the financial rescue. So if you are asking yourself why is it that the economy isn’t getting better despite the continuous assurances that everything on the books is being done to get to that point, the truth is that the banker plan does not contemplate a recovery. At least not one where everyone will have the opportunity to thrive.

Read the complete interview given by Greg Palast after learning about and getting the World Bank’s secret documents that detail how the global financial entities destroy nations.

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