Bankers Trump Democracy

Hey Barry:

It's looking like bankers really do run the world. They caused the mess we're in now and their solution is to appoint bankers, 'technocrats', to solve it.

Bankers appoint prime ministers in Italy and Greece because they bought Italian and Greek bonds and don't want to lose 'too' much.

Read it here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-coates/banker-power-trumping-dem_b_1101305.html

Here's a quote from the article by David Coates, Worrell Professor of Anglo-American Studies, Wake Forest University, Department of Politics:

'The problem of sovereign debt is currently being compounded by the terms which financial institutions inside and outside the Eurozone are now demanding as proof of the ultimate reliability of the loans they have made/are making. The terms are austerity terms - demands for huge and immediate cuts in public spending of the sort normally only inflicted on third world economies in receipt of an IMF bailout. The casualties of those requirements are not bankers. They are European workers and the European poor. By hitting both, so lowering consumer demand, the terms set as new loan guarantees will inevitably push economy after economy into stagnation/recession, lowering the level of GDP and perversely increasing the debt burden. As Martin Wolf put it, "the Eurozone has decided that the losses of private sector creditors should be socialized and the ultimate burden fall on the taxpayers of deficit countries. The latter will then suffer first a slump and then years of fiscal austerity." How then can we be surprised that Eurozone unemployment is now at record heights - some 15.7 million people were out of work across the zone as a whole in September - and that sane voices, in the European labor movement and beyond, are now arguing strongly for a jobs and growth strategy rather than an austerity one, begging European leaders not to compound a banking crisis with a self-inflicted recession. It is a call that major European political leaders - particularly those in Berlin and Frankfurt - are not yet heeding, to their immediate discredit and to our future discomfort. '

Holy cow, Barry, it's really scary.

Maybe we should burn a few bankers at the stake, just like Philip IV of France did to Jacques de Molay and the Knights Templar in 1314.

What goes around comes around.

Your pal,

War With Iran Coming

Hey Barry:

One of the former CIA guys - Michael Scheuer - gives a realistic view of our policy in the Middle East.

See it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLjZoA3GaVE&feature=player_embedded#!

Bottom line: we'll be there for a long time, but we should try to stop creating more enemies while we're there. Our idea of putting more troops on the Arabian peninsula, even after leaving Iraq and Afghanistan, gives the radicals ammunition to hate America.

That means we need to be more realistic about Israel and about democracy.

Democracy probably will not take over there, despite the Arab Spring. Their histories argue against it in Tunisia, Libya and other places.

And, there's a good chance we will be at war with Iran.

Here's something new about that: 'ISRAEL has refused to reassure President Barack Obama that it would warn him of a pre-emptive strike on Iran's nuclear infrastructure, raising fears that it may be planning an attack as early as the next northern summer.' [http://www.smh.com.au/world/israel-refuses-to-alert-us-over-iran-attack-20111113-1ndq4.html]

Holy cow, Barry, I hope Scheuer is wrong. Right or wrong, it's a thought provoking discussion from a man who knows his way around.

Hillary has her work cut out.

Your pal,