As Predicted, Spain on the Brink of Collapse

The tentacles of the international banking cartel are about to envelop the fifth most important economy of the old continent

The Independent

European leaders meet in Brussels today amid growing fears that Spain, Europe’s fifth-largest economy, is preparing to ask for a

The horns of the depression are in Spain's rearview mirror. An aid package is in the works to rescue one more failed State.

bailout which would dwarf the €110bn (£90bn) rescue plan for Greece.

The Spanish government yesterday dismissed reports that it was already in discussions with the European Commission, International Monetary Fund and the US Treasury for a rescue package worth up to €250bn.

Officials in Madrid, Brussels and Paris were forced to deny that a Spanish bailout – which would take the European debt and euro crisis into a potentially dangerous new phase – was on the Brussels summit agenda.

“Spain is a country that is solvent, solid and strong, with international credibility,” said its Prime Minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. The European Commission spokesman said: “I can firmly deny [that a Spanish rescue is under discussion]. I can say that that story is rubbish.”

Brussels diplomats have been at pains to send out feel-good signals ahead of a summit in which Europe’s leaders are supposed to take the first steps towards more disciplined and co-ordinated, control of national finances. Those reforms are meant to restore confidence in the euro and underpin the €750m EU and IMF safety-net, created last month for euroland countries that lose the confidence of the financial markets.

However, it is proving hard to shake off persistent market fears about Spain, which, if it needed a lifeline, would swallow up a large part of the emergency fund. Worryingly for the EU, the doubts about Spain – whether real or driven by speculation – are eerily similar to the gradual seeping away of confidence that sent Greece into a financial death spiral in March and April. The Spanish government’s cost of borrowing hit a new record yesterday. The interest rate gap, or spread, between 10-year Spanish bonds and their German equivalents, rose by more than 0.10 of a point to 2.23 percentage points.

A senior Spanish banker, Francisco Gonzalez, chairman of the BBVA financial services group, confirmed that foreign private banks were now refusing to provide liquidity to their Spanish counterparts. “Financial markets have withdrawn their confidence in our country,” he said. “For most Spanish companies and entities, international capital markets are closed.”

As a result, the European Central Bank is said to have provided record amounts of liquidity to Spanish banks in recent days. The closure of bank-to-bank credit to Spanish institutions recalls to some market commentators the ripple of crisis through the global financial system after the fall of Lehman Brothers in the Autumn of 2008.

The IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn is expected in Madrid tomorrow to see Mr Zapatero – but brushed off speculation of a crisis. “It’s a working visit,” he told reporters in Paris. “I am in France [today] – are there such rumours about France?”

Fears over Spain’s finances checked the recovery of the euro on money markets yesterday. The single currency lost much of the gains it had made in the past seven days.

One of the proposals on the table at the Brussels summit is public “stress tests” to force banks to reveal the state of their books. The Spanish government offered yesterday to open the books of its own private banks unilaterally to prove that they were sound.

Today’s summit in Brussels was intended to be a time for the EU leaders to catch their breath and discuss ways of restoring the euro’s long-term credibility. The threatened Spanish crisis may blow all that out of the water.

Despite an apparent rapprochement between Paris and Berlin this week, President Nicolas Sarkozy and Chancellor Angela Merkel remain deeply divided on how to prevent the currency and debt crisis from dumping Europe back into recession. Mr Sarkozy has agreed to drop his proposals for new institutional machinery for a political “government” of the euro by its 16 member states. Ms Merkel prefers to talk of a vague “governance” of the euro, and European state spending, by all 27 EU governments.

More fundamentally, Paris is deeply concerned that the austerity plans announced by Berlin last week could – on top of budget cuts in other countries – plunge Europe into crisis.

The French fears were echoed yesterday by the billionaire investor, George Soros, who warned that Europe would almost certainly face a recession next year which might generate “social unrest” and the kind of populist nationalism seen in the 1930s. “That’s the real danger of the present situation – that by imposing fiscal discipline at a time of insufficient demand and a weak banking system… you are actually… setting in motion a downward spiral,” he said.

The collapse of Spain’s housing boom has helped fuel a deep downturn which has sent unemployment spiralling to 20 per cent, the second worst in the EU. Mr Zapatero introduced a range of measures last month, including spending cuts of €15bn over two years and reductions in public sector wages and spending. Unions have called a general strike over labour reforms.

The Footprint of the Establishment

The Powers that Be shaped us in more ways than We think!

By Luis R. Miranda
The Real Agenda
June 10, 2010

Every time we need to know what happened in the past we refer to history books, visit a local library, check the Internet or look into

Human Farming is the Establishment's favourite method to enslave the masses.

our own archives to see what history tells us. But how many times do we wonder about what history doesn’t tell us? See, history is not written by historians, they just give us accounts of that official version of history. The reason why many look back in time is to avoid making the same mistakes that our ancestors made as humanity advanced. But how do we avoid those mistakes if we simply don’t know them?

You don’t have to be an expert in history to figure out who wrote it and why. It takes a couple of clicks nowadays. After finishing college, anyone can surely say, for example, what type of government we have, where our educational system comes from and why we fought and continue to fight bloody wars for decades. Can we?  Really?  What if part of the history you know; the one learned in elementary school, high school and college is not as it is drawn by the books we so carefully read?

If your educated guess to the first question is a Constitutional Democracy or a Republic the answer is wrong. If your answer to the second question is from our Founding Fathers, it is wrong, too. And if your answer to the third question is freedom and independence, it is also wrong.

Let’s take for example the origins of what we call today Government, which many believe is representative. The beginnings of our model of government rests in the Hegelian model of government, not on the model our Founding Fathers would have sketched. The Hegelian model of government believes that IT is supreme, and that individuals must be subjects of the government – i.e Patriot Act, Martial Law, Illegal Spying, Torture, Military Commissions Act, RFID card, etc. But how do the elites that support this kind of governance get away with telling us that we live in a free democracy? They indoctrinate us almost from birth in concentration camps called schools, which not only do not follow a democratic government’s educational policy, but instead, a very well redesigned version of the Prussian Universal Education model, put together by the same elite that pays to publish the history you and I know.

Now, you probably think, how can an elite simply get away with all this? To put it simply in one sentence, it’s called a Political Conspiracy. The elite, better known as the powers that be, not only wrote the history you and I know, but also designed and financed the educational system you and I attended, modeled after the Hegelian form of government they adore and praise. That is why we have no clue about it, because we were born and raised in a Matrix type of environment that seems natural to all.

You are right! There need to be hundreds and thousands of people involved in a conspiracy of such level in order for it to work… and there are… The brain of this conspiracy, the Club Bilderberg, meets once a year in cities of their choosing like Virginia, Versailles, Stresa, Munich, Ottawa, Istanbul and Sitges to discuss global policies on economy, environmentalism, politics, health, trade, immigration, etc. Among the attendees are elements from the Bank Industry, The Military Industrial Complex, Academia, The Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex, Mass Media, and of course the politicians we vote for every four years. In one word, the Elite.

I know… You want me to call them by their names… After reading through lists of Bilderberg attendees over the years, I can absolutely and certainly say that crooks like David Rockefeller, the same Dave whose family financed the Hegelian inspired Universal Education system we studied in, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, George Pataki, Texas governor Richard Perry, John Kerry, Henry Kissinger, Etienne Davignon, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton and Donald Rumsfeld, among others. These and other people who have in their hands the present and future of our world, are the cabal responsible for hiding the truth about history that most of us don’t know. Why? Because they wrote it themselves.

The Footprint the Establishment has left and continues to leave in our lives, our society, and our world began early in the 1800′s. As I said before it is a political conspiracy, that is, the use of political power which is passed around from generation to generation in order to keep the secrecy of their association.

Let’s see how a conspiracy works. First, there has to be a secret meeting. Second, those who meet must agree to a course of action; and third, such action must be illegal. The Establishment, or what many call The Order, derives from a German secret society. The order was included as the Russell Trust in 1856, to later be known as the Brotherhood of Death. To us all, it’s better known as “Skull and Bones. The American version of this Order was founded in the U.S in 1833 at Yale University by General William Russell and Alphonso Taft, who in 1876, became Secretary of War under the Grant administration in the United States. The Order meets annually on Deer Island in the St. Lawrence River. Among the original members are Samuel Henshaw Bates, Rufus Hart, Asahel Hooker Lewis, Samuel Marshall and Frederick Mather. All of these people along with the two founders occupied high level position in early forms of government.

The beginnings of this elite governed group can be traced back to the 1600′s when the first wealthy families arrived to the U.S from England. One example is the Lord family. In this particular case there were two branches: The one from Thomas Lord and the other from Nathan Lord. Later members arose from families who managed to make money to send their children to Yale, such as the Harriman, Payne, Davison and of course Rockefeller. The Lord’s established themselves in Hartford Connecticut where they kept a tradition typical of the elite: Intermarriage; in order to further concentrate and maintain power.

From there, they extended their arms to places like New York, where they founded businesses like law firms and consultancies. Among their clients, the New York Times and the Rubin Foundation. The latter is the financial supporter of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC.

So, now that we know how the establishment got to us, let’s see how it’s left a footprint in three of the most important aspects of our lives: Education, Energy and War.

The concept or idea over which The Order works is control; controlling it all through the compartmentalized control of the parts. For example, if they control the politicians, they can get access to powerful governments on two or three or whatever the number of political parties that exist. If they control energy companies, they can subdue society into accepting only the means of energy they can make a profit of. If they control the media, they can tell us their version of world events; who’s the bad guy and the good guy. If they own the producers of weapons, they will encourage war, and finance all the sides involved in the war because they know the profits and the control derived from war will be much greater. If they own the pharmaceutical companies, they will own all the patents to the drugs the population consumes and at the same time ban any claim on medicinal products they don’t control. If they control the food industry, the production of goods, they can sell cheap food to the masses to make them sick and fat, so they have to consume the illicit drugs they produce which by the way make people sicker. If they control the election process through remotely controlled electronic voting machines instead of traceable paper ballots, they will never let go off power.

Why do I point to Education as an important example of the way the Establishment leaves a footprint? Well, because the complete development of a society rests on the educational level of the members. In the case of the Western world, the educational model was founded after the Prussian Educational mold. This model came into existence in 1819 in the military state of Prussia. There, the Elite decided that the population had to be converted into instruments of the State in order to increase efficiency. The system was based on the premise that by erasing the creative, innovative ability of the population was how they would become obedient servants. In a matter of a few years, Prussia, which did not have natural resources, became one of the richest regions in Germany. It became so influential, that it was later the city from where two world wars originated. It was through a fully controlled educational system designed to dumb down the population, that the Elite was successful in their attempt to impose any policy they wanted to a willingly accepting crowd of mental zombies. Many countries around the world studied and continue to study the Prussian model today. From Japan to China to England to the United States. In America, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie imported the Prussian model through their foundations. It later evolved and new concepts appeared. One of them very well known to us all, Human Resources brought upon the masses the infamous Kindergarten, where children are grown up like vegetables to become subjects to the system that saw their parents come up the very same way. Later on, the Elite realized they weren’t getting people young enough so they founded the Pre-Kindergarten.

Behind this system of control was the goal that the Establishment has always had, the disintegration of the most basic form of social unity; the family. The family is the biggest obstacle to create the global system of control, therefore it has to be done away with. Multiple options were offered to parents, among them, to put the children in the hands of “experts” who had been already brainwashed following the Prussian model. The only difference perhaps between the original Prussian system and the one that currently operates around the world, is that in Prussia, the laws explicitly said that the State owned the children. In the U.S efforts were made in the 19th century to create such laws, but they did not bear fruit. The Prussian system was sneaked into society under the fear instilled by world wars, economic depressions and of course the already traditional feeling of dependency that the population has towards the State.

In 1871 in the book called “Descent of Men” Darwin said 95% of the people were inferior and only 5 % were evolving. From this way of thinking came the teachings of Sr. Francis Galton, the father of Eugenics, from whom men like H.G Wells and William Huxley took off to write their famous “scholarly” works. It is important to note, that although many people regard Charles Darwin as an outsider that made it into the circle through his discoveries in he sciences, the truth is that Darwin’s family was one of the richest in the world. Darwin met with the members of the Elite for many years. In those meetings they tailored science to fit the reality they wanted the rest to learn. John Calvin said there are so many of these inferior people that we cannot police them, so we are gonna have to teach them to police themselves; and generation through generation, the population was dumbed down more and more until it fit the corporate fascist model the Elite wanted.

The common denominator of this educational model, no matter where it’s been applied, is the fact that the
masses -from where ingenuity and creativeness emanated- became nothing else than obedient sheep; docile beings that do not know much more than what they learn in high school or college. As a result, we now have a population that cannot find their country on a map, much less other countries like Iraq or Afghanistan.  However, the masses do support invading the two countries in the name of peace. In 1950 the U.S had 90% of all patents in the world, nowadays it only owns about 30 percent and dropping fast. The Prussian model has worked to perfection.  The same can be said about other countries.

Now when we turn our head to the Energy issue, it is important to note other members of the Elite, or the Order that have been key in the implementation of Educational and Energy policies. I earlier said that the origin of this Elite is immigrants from Europe; England to be more specific. The Lords, the Rothchilds and other families that emerged later like the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Morgans and of course, the Bushes. The founders consisted of Puritans who always absorbed the wealth of rich families, without inviting those families to join their organizations. Most of these families were bankers, lawyers and traders that later became the Barons of the Mercantilistic model that substituted free markets. In the energy sector the Bush family has been a continuous player. They have maintained contact with Saudi Arabia’s kingdom for years and have done business with them thanks to the fortunes stolen by Prescott Bush, the grandfather of former president Bush, from the Nazi Empire when he left Germany after their defeat. With him others like Percy Rockefeller, the Paynes, the Pratts, etc are all linked to the Standard Oil Company, the Shell Oil Company, Creole Petroleum and Socony Vacuum. Currently we are fed the idea of the lack of sources of energy. While fossil fuels are painted as necessary evils to the development of the world, we are also told that oil reserves are scarce and that we have reached a peak. The debate in the main stream corporate Elite-controlled media is always centered on the pollution or the scarcity, but very little time is given in comparison to real alternative energy sources. While countries like Brazil run their cars on sugar cane-derived ethanol, the United States still remains in the debate of which alternative source is better or how many miles per gallon should a car provide. Let’s take a look at a source of energy that is never discussed: Cold Fusion.

Cold Fusion occurs when lighter nuclei in an atom fuse together under intense heat in a reaction to form a heavier nucleus. One of the results of this fusion is the release of gigantic amounts of energy which would provide an endless source of energy to carry out the world businesses for as long as humans exist. All this by the way, at conditions near room temperature and atmospheric pressure. However, Cold Fusion has been dismissed as an impossible by the profiteers who own the energy companies we depend on to live. Government agencies have also dismissed the potential of Cold Fusion and denied funding to further investigate the possibility of developing technology that allowed us to be energy independent. Instead, they suggested a bunch of alternative energy sources that counted with their blessing such as corn-based ethanol which has proven to be a new failure.

The cold fusion researchers presenting their review document to the 2004 DoE panel on cold fusion said that the observation of excess heat had been reproduced, that it can be reproduced at will under the proper conditions, and that many of the reasons for failure to reproduce it have been discovered. Despite the assertions of these researchers, most reviewers stated that the effects are not repeatable.The 1989, a DoE panel said: “Nuclear fusion at room temperature, of the type discussed in this report, would be contrary to all understanding gained of nuclear reactions in the last half century; it would require the invention of an entirely new nuclear process”, but it also recognized that the lack of a satisfactory explanation cannot be used to dismiss experimental evidence. (Wikipedia)

However, for those who know what Cold Fusion is and how it works, the future is promising. Dr. Edmund Storms, a retired scientist who worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, said the only problem is the attitude people have towards Cold Fusion as a source of energy. “It’s an interesting time because a number of other ideal sources are being proposed. Cold fusion is probably the most thoroughly documented at this point, but all of them have several things in common. They would be very inexpensive, pollution-free, and inexhaustible.” Questioned about whether Cold Fusion violates the First Law of Thermodynamics, which has been one of the reasons given to keep the experiments and the funding off the table, Dr. Storms says: “No one is proposing to violate the Law of Conservation of Energy. We’re talking about ordinary nuclear energy. There’s nothing magical about it. It’s the mechanism for achieving these nuclear reactions that is poorly understood at this time and, therefore, is in dispute.”

Although according to Storms neither the government nor any enterprise could practically deny access to the knowledge of Cold Fusion, anyone could seriously damage the research and progress of new technologies by claiming that the knowledge is flawed, thereby, making it harder to find funding or support of any kind.

In a book called: Cold Fusion: Secret Energy Revolution, Anthony Sutton declares that Cold Fusion is already being worked with in different laboratories around the globe and that soon, either governments or companies will come forward with practical applications. According to Sutton, Cold Fusion technology is being used by companies like BlackLight Power, Inc, Catalytic Fusion Power, Inc and financed by DARPA to produce catalytic hydrogen technology. “Free energy is here with water as fuel and will revolutionize our world. One device is the size of a thermos flask, uses water as fuel and lasts indefinitely,” Sutton declares. How many times have we heard of Cold Fusion on the news? Read on the papers? In the meantime we are led to believe that we are destined to invade middle eastern countries for their oil as the only way to secure our future energy sources. Of course of the mass population knew a little about alternative energy sources, they wouldn’t support needless wars or the drilling of National Parks or ice shells for petroleum.

Now, the subject of energy brings along a very important issue, which is exactly a consequence of energy dependence: War. If countries were energy independent, there would certainly be less conflict among them. This is because one country would not be able to impose rules onto others because they own energy sources that the other countries need. Today, OPEC controls the supply of petroleum which is vital to the commercial activity that moves the world. A handful of countries decide how much oil is produced and with that, the prices are determined. If the producers feel like they are not getting enough profits for their oil, they can simply decide to limit output so the price goes up. Although energy is probably the clearest example of how dependence causes conflict, there are countless other ones. For example, food production, manufacturing, the printing of paper money -which nowadays has turned out to be worthless, land tenure, immigration, etc.

The important point here is that war; just as many other activities, is a business. Investments are made before war occurs, so profits are expected. The best way to secure maximum profits is to invest on all sides, and that’s what history shows has happened in all major conflicts that humanity has endured: WWI and WWII are two examples. Here of course the Elite has left their Footprint stamped deeper than in any other aspect under their control. Then we have the Spanish-American as well as the Mexican-American wars which are also great examples. All armed conflicts recorded in history have come about due to the greed and evil spirit of those who seek to control us all. Although money and profits are important factors, the end goal is control. This control comes through consolidation. Armed conflicts and economic unrest provide great opportunities to bring about this consolidation and therefore control. When a country or the whole world goes into military or economic crisis, the people are the victims, while the Elite not only increases their resources tenfold, but also their control of industry, the bank system, infrastructure, military, land, and more important… Us. No example of a central government that ruled with an iron fist is responsible for an era of prosperity or bountifulness. On the contrary, it always mirrors repression, crisis, abuses, torture and inequality.

The reason why I linked war and conflict with oil, is because it is the freshest example. But the American civil war, the Spanish-American and WWI and WWII were also about influence and consolidating, a position as the world’s superpower. At the beginning of this essay I mentioned where the members of the Order came from and what type of businesses they are tied to. Nowadays, the war profiteers are weapons contractors, energy companies, security contractors, oil diggers, insurance companies and others. When a war explodes anywhere in the world, the list of companies offering their services to provide weaponry, planes, transportation, security, insurance and medical services is already typed up; and they are the same crooks who have already invested in promoting the wars during which they will provide services. When a country is dominated by the will of global corporations like Shell, NewsCorp, Halliburton, BP, GE, bankers like JP Morgan and wealthy men like Rupert Murdoch, David Rockefeller, Lord Rothchild and Prescott Bush, the decision to go to war or not isn’t made; it is imposed. Every major war has been financed by these and other families who have always held power by dominating all the sides involved in the conflicts. It’s a win-win situation. No president, prime minister or dictator achieved their goal of tyranny and control alone, there have always been the men behind the curtains who provided money, intelligence and hardware to carry out their own agenda. The group of bankers who created the private Federal Reserve, who control the Bank of England, the World Bank… is the same cabal that dictates the policies of the World Health Organization, who created the United Nations and who wrote the Nazi oriented Universal Human Rights Declaration to which they want us all to submit to.

Only those who really know history are able to envision the future; the future they want. The rest of us…, we’d better wake up and fight the bastards or we are doomed to repeat it.

Consulted Materials:

UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION. John Taylor Gatto.
AMERICA’S SECRET ESTABLISHMENT. Anthony Sutton
COLD FUSION AND THE FUTURE. Jed Rothwell
AMERICA: FREEDOM TO FASCISM. Aaron Russo
THE END OF AMERICA. Naomi Wolf
PROGRESS AND POVERTY. Henry George
THE WEALTH OF NATIONS. Adam Smith
WIKIPEDIA

Europe Bailout Designed To Destroy Global Economy

Infowars.net

A secret exit clause written into the trillion dollar European bailout agreement will ensure the creation of more debt in Europe, worsening the global economy, decimating nation states and allowing power to be consolidated into fewer super-elite hands.

As the Financial Times reports today, the major German newspaper Bild says it has obtained a copy of the bailout agreement and has set about “exposing” a series of secret clauses.

The most revealing of these clauses states that if any country finds it cannot raise funding for the bailout at interest rates below the 5pc charge agreed for Greece, it can opt out of the bail-out altogether, leaving the rest of the eurozone states to pay the difference.

If this happened, a domino effect could ensue, as the London Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans Pritchard explains:

BNP Paribas said this would escalate quickly into a systemic crisis if Spain were in such a position, because the other countries cannot carry an ever-rising burden. The bank warned the euro project itself may start to disintegrate rapidly if these rescue provisions are ever seriously put to the test.

As financial analyst Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge explains, this means bad news for American taxpayers because the U.S. is essentially being used as the engine for global consolidation:

The second Portugal, Spain and Italy are dragged under by the vigilantes, their participation in the $1 trillion bailout ends. And when that happens, the full cost of the bailout will be borne by none other than the “richest” member of the IMF, the United States.

Obviously, the incentive to blow up one’s borrowing costs in this arrangement are huge, now that both Germany and the US have no choice but to bail out each and every dropping domino.

The secret clause essentially creates a huge incentive for weaker eurozone countries to blow up their debts – the agreement creates massive moral hazard.

Tyler Durden again:

…the benefit to the first defector is far greater than any downside, with the last to defect left holding the bag on what would basically become a bail out of all of Europe. Many have wondered how arguably intelligent people could come up with a rescue package of Greece in which Greece itself is supposed to contribute to its own bailout. Now we know that this was the ploy all along.

As we have continued to expose, at the heart of the ongoing centralization of national economies is a further viral spread of economic chaos through which the most powerful can consolidate their control over the globe.

The super-elite are essentially siphoning the wealth of every sovereign nation they can lay their hands on, holding the people of those nations to ransom via their elected governments, while slowly draining and using up everything they have.

Exposure and understanding of this agenda and what it means for the masses is key because at the moment the people continue to allow their governments to operate in this system under an illusion that they are working toward some kind of utopian harmonization, when the reality is quite the opposite.

U.S. Administration Supports Indecent Vatican’s Paedophilia Immunity

AFP

The Obama administration in a brief to the Supreme Court has backed theVatican’s claim of immunity from lawsuits arising from cases of sexual abuse by priests in the United States.

The Supreme Court is considering an appeal by the Vatican of an appellate court ruling that lifted its immunity in the case of an alleged pedophile priest from Oregon.

In a filing on Friday, the solicitor general’s office argued that the Ninth Circuit court of appeals erred in allowing the lawsuit brought by a man who claims he was sexually abused in the 1960s by the Oregon priest.

The unnamed plaintiff, who cited the Holy See and several other parties as defendants, argued the Vatican should be held responsible for transferring the priest to Oregon and letting him serve there despite previous accusations he had abused children in Chicago and in Ireland.

The solicitor general’s office, which defends the position of President Barack Obama’s administration before the Supreme Court, said the Ninth Circuit improperly found the case to be an exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, a 1976 federal law that sets limits on when other countries can face lawsuits in US courts.

“Although the decision does not conflict with any decision of another court of appeals, the Court may wish to grant the petition, vacate the judgement of the court of appeals and remand to that court for further consideration”.

The case, which was filed in 2002, does not directly address questions raised in a separate lawsuit in Kentucky alleging that US bishops are employees of the Holy See.

But the Vatican plans to argue that Catholic dioceses are run as separate entities from the Holy See, and that the only authority that the pontiff has over bishops around the world is a religious one, according to Jeffrey Lena, theVatican’s US attorney.

In recent months, large-scale pedophilia scandals have rocked the Roman Catholic Church in a number of countries, including Austria, Ireland, Pope Benedict XVI’s native Germany and the United States.

Senior clerics have been accused of protecting the priests involved by moving them to other parishes — where they sometimes offended again — instead of handing them over to civil authorities for prosecution.

The pope, who has himself faced allegations implicating him in the scandal, has repeatedly said priests and religious workers guilty of child abuse should answer for their crimes in courts of law.

US media demands Greek-style austerity for American workers

WSNM

In recent days, the US media—led by the standard bearer of American liberalism, the New York Times—has insisted that workers inseek truth the US, like their brethren in Greece, have been living the good life for far too long and must accept a drastic and permanent reduction in their living standards.

In a May 9 piece, Times columnist Thomas Friedman denounces workers in the US and Western Europe for believing in the “tooth fairy” and expecting government services without paying for them. In America, Friedman says, the baby-boom generation, which supposedly had inherited the prosperity of the post-war years, had “eaten through all that abundance like hungry locusts.”

“After 65 years in which politics in the West was, mostly, about giving things away to voters, it’s now going to be, mostly, about taking things away. Goodbye Tooth Fairy politics, hello Root Canal politics.”

Describing what he has in mind, two days later Friedman wrote about his meeting with Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou in a rooftop restaurant in Athens. Praising Papandreou for defying mass protests, theTimes columnist hails the government for carrying out a “revolution,” including raising the retirement age and slashing wages and pensions for public sector workers, imposing regressive consumption taxes and wiping out two-thirds of the country’s publicly owned companies.

Another May 11 article, appearing on the front page of the Times, is entitled, “In Greek Debt Crisis, Some See Parallels to U.S.” Its author, David Leonhardt, led the newspaper’s campaign to promote Obama’s health care overhaul, explicitly supporting limits on medical treatments ordinary people could receive. (“In truth, rationing is an inescapable part of economic life”).

“It’s easy to look at the protesters and the politicians in Greece—and at the other European countries with huge debts—and wonder why they don’t get it,” Leonhardt writes. “They have been enjoying more generous government benefits than they can afford…

“Yet in the back of your mind comes a nagging question: how different, really, is the United States?… Both countries have a bigger government than they’re paying for. And politicians, spendthrift as some may be, are not the main source of the problem.

We, the people, are.”

It is rich to hear demands for sacrifices and lectures about “the people” living beyond their means, particularly from the likes of Leonhardt and Friedman. The latter, who is paid $50,000 per speaking engagement, is married to the heir of a multi-billion dollar real estate fortune. According to theWashingtonian magazine, the couple owns “a palatial 11,400-square-foot house” in suburban Washington, DC, valued in 2006 at $9.3 million.

In these circles it is taken for granted that massive cuts must be imposed on the living standards of the working class, but not a word is said about the hundreds of billions that are funneled into the personal fortunes of the financial aristocracy and the subordination of the entire economy to increasing their piles of wealth.

The events of the last several years have revealed to the world that the greatest burden on society is not ordinary working people but the anti-social activities of an unproductive and parasitic financial elite. The grotesque consumption and appropriation of social wealth by this oligarchy is not a minor factor in the crisis of the global capitalist system itself.

The bankrupting of whole countries—chiefly through the transferring of the bad debts of the financial speculators onto the books of various governments—is being used to demand austerity from workers and ever-greater riches for the elite.

The four biggest US financial firms—Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase—made money from trading every single day during the first quarter of the year, according to their financial filings. The banks, which all benefited from the Wall Street bailout, reaped hundreds of millions in profits from betting on the movement of currency, commodity and sovereign debt markets, including in relation to Greece.

At the same time, the value of corporate shares has risen, chiefly through a campaign of job cutting, wage and benefit concessions and a staggering 3.8 percent increase in worker productivity in 2009. As a result, corporate CEOs, who took stock options in lieu of pay increases when profits were down, are now cashing in, according to an Associated Press report, entitled, “America’s top CEOs are set for a once-in-a-lifetime pay bonanza.” Yahoo’s Carol Bartz, for example, received a $47.2 million package during her first year on the job, 90 percent of which came from stock awards and options.

While these vast personal fortunes have been made, there has been no recovery in the wages and benefits workers have lost during the recession. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reported that real wages fell last year by 2.7 percent in Japan and Ireland, 1.1 per cent in Germany and 0.8 percent in the US.

The unbridled greed of America’s ruling elite—and the complete subservience of the political establishment, from Obama on down, to its needs—can only be compared to the ancien régime in France. The parasitism and extravagance of the aristocracy became a major factor in the country’s breakdown, and ultimately the eruption of the French Revolution in 1789.

Workers must reject the demand for austerity. The working class did not create this crisis and must not pay for it. Instead, the ill-gotten gains of the ruling elite must be confiscated and used to meet the interests of society as a whole, instead of gutting social programs and destroying jobs.

This must include a multi-trillion dollar program of public works to put the unemployed to work—at decent wages and full medical care—to rebuild the cities and suburbs, repair the nation’s infrastructure and provide high quality housing, medical care and education for all.

In the midst of the Great Depression, the founder of the Fourth International, Leon Trotsky, argued in the Transitional Program that it is “impossible to take a single serious step in the struggle against monopolistic despotism and capitalistic anarchy—which supplement one another in their work of destruction—if the commanding posts of the banks are left in the hands of predatory capitalists. In order to create a unified system of investment and credits, along a rational plan corresponding to the interests of the entire people, it is necessary to merge all the banks into a single national institution. Only the expropriation of the private banks and the concentration of the entire credit system in the hands of the state will provide the latter with the necessary actual, i.e., material, resources—and not merely paper and bureaucratic resources—for economic planning.”

The nationalization of the banks, however, will produce positive results, Trotsky explained, “only if the state power itself passes completely from the hands of the exploiters into the hands of the toilers.”

For this to be realized the working class must build its own mass political party, independent of and irreconcilably opposed to the two parties of big business, and dedicated to the fight for a workers’ government to replace capitalism with socialism.

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