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Friday, September 26, 2008 |
EUObserver: "Both France and Germany on Thursday (25 September) said the current financial crisis would leave important marks on the world economy, with French president Nicolas Sarkozy declaring that the under-regulated system we once knew is now 'finished', and German finance minister Peer Steinbruck saying the crisis marks the beginning of a multi-polar world, where the US is no longer a superpower.
Speaking to an audience of some 4,000 supporters in Toulon, France, Mr Sarkozy said the financial turmoil had highlighted the need to re-invent capitalism with a strong dose of morality, as well as to put in place a better regulatory system.
'The idea of the all-powerful market that must not be constrained by any rules, by any political intervention, was mad. The idea that markets were always right was mad,' Mr Sarkozy said.
'The present crisis must incite us to refound capitalism on the basis of ethics and wor... Self-regulation as a way of solving all problems is finished. Laissez-faire is finished. The all-powerful market that always knows best is finished,' he added."
He accused 'this system that allows the ones responsible for a disaster to leave with a golden parachute' of having 'increased inequality, demoralised the middle classes and fed [market] speculation.'"
11:50:12 AM 
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Letterman severely lambasted McCain for not appearing on his show. He seems to be hiding somewhere and can't handle the heat. He's not presidential material for sure.
And Palin doesn't have a clue either. The McCain and Palin duo would be an even bigger disaster for America and the world than Bush already is.
WashingtonPost: "The director of the Congressional Budget Office said yesterday that the proposed Wall Street bailout could actually worsen the current financial crisis.
During testimony before the House Budget Committee, Peter R. Orszag - Congress's top bookkeeper - said the bailout could expose the way companies are stowing toxic assets on their books, leading to greater problems.
'Ironically, the intervention could even trigger additional failures of large institutions, because some institutions may be carrying troubled assets on their books at inflated values,' Orszag said in his testimony. 'Establishing clearer prices might reveal those institutions to be insolvent.'"
FT: "Hedge funds charging hefty fees for sophisticated trading strategies aimed at outperforming the wider market have collectively parked $100bn in simple money market funds typically used by investors seeking safe rather than spectacular returns.
Citigroup estimates that hedge funds have now placed $600bn in cash, and that $100bn of this is held in money market funds, normally seen as some of the safest places to invest cash."
OrganizedRage: "The latest edition of the weekly newspaper the Socialist Worker carries a long list of former Ministers in the Labour government, (and the senior civil servants who serviced them) who have benefitted from the privatization of sections of the NHS and State education. One cannot but notice that many are Blairites who are at the fore of the campaign to topple Gordon Brown. Whether this has any direct relevance time only will tell, but it does show that this section of business, who were previously strong supporters of Tony Blair are abandoning Brown for Cameron."
Wherever they are, our politicians have very close ties to the neocon enterprise and its criminal machinations.
11:45:50 AM
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EU: SPECIAL STATEWATCH REPORT: The Shape of Things to Come - the EU Future Group: "This analysis looks at the ideology in the Future group report, Freedom, Security and Privacy - the area of European Home Affairs. The EU is currently developing a new five year strategy for justice and home affairs and security policy for 2009-2014. The proposals set out by the shadowy 'Future Group' include a range of extremely controversial measures including techniques and technologies of surveillance and enhanced cooperation with the United States.
In October 1999 the Council (EU governments) adopted the 'Tampere programme' covering the whole of justice and home affairs for the period 1999-2004. The final text, adopted on 16 October 1999, was not available until the morning of that day and was adopted a few hours later. There was no involvement of national or European parliaments in drafting the text, nor could civil society discuss and comment.
The 'Hague programme' was also negotiated in secret meetings, a text was available a couple of weeks before it was adopted on 5 November 2004 as an 'A' point - simply nodded through - at the European Council (meetings of Prime Ministers). Again there was no time for any democratic input.
In 2006 a Directive on the mandatory retention of all communications data across the EU was adopted. Service providers are obliged to keep and give agencies access to records of all phone-calls, mobile phone calls (and their location), faxes, e-mails and internet usage. This year most EU states that had not done so are implementing this at national level. In short, records of all communications by everyone in the EU are held and can be accessed by agencies in connection with 'serious crime, as defined by each Member State in its national law' which varies from member states to member state or for suspicion of a
'serious crime'.
The finger-printing of everyone applying for a visa to visit the EU from third countries is already underway and fingerprinting of resident third country nationals has been agreed. Discussions are underway on extending the taking of fingerprints for national ID cards as these are used for travel within the Schengen area.
It is sobering to note that the mass surveillance of all telecommunications and mass fingerprinting of all are two proposals that have not been proposed in the USA - thus the EU is set to become the most surveilled place in the world.
In the UK a National Health database will hold the records of all 60 million people with over 350,000 'clinicians' having access - as will police and security agencies.
The Lisbon Treaty will include extensive increases in operational police cooperation at the EU level and the creation of the Committee on Internal Security (COSI).
The creation of a surveillance state, for that is what is being proposed, will take the EU further down the road to authoritarianism, a path which looks less and less likely to be reversible.
One is left with the impression that 'data protection' in the EU seems increasingly referred to as meaning 'protecting' the data held on people from theft or loss (as in the UK), rather than positive rights for the individual to know what is held on them and by whom, who it has been passed to, whether it has been further processed (data or intelligence added to it by a third agency), or whether it has been passed outside the EU and to whom and why.
The concept of 'privacy' on the other hand should mean that most of the private life of an individual is invisible to the state and that it gathers no more information on the individual than is absolutely necessary. What information it does gather (or require) should be for a specific purpose and should not be used for another purpose (as set out in the EC 1995 Directive). Through 'data protection' laws the individual should be able to find out what information is held on them and be told when it has been passed on to a
third party and for what purpose as well as the right to correct wrong information.
The end of the Cold War in 1989 coincided with a recognition that globalisation was underway, a process which was quickly defined as necessitating 'free-market economics'. A definition which would always favour the powerful over the weak - with the 'West' (USA together with the EU and Japan) dictating terms to the third world.
By the 1990s the USA was the hegemonic power in the world. In 1995 the USA met with EU leaders in Madrid and signed the New Transatlantic Agenda (NTA) and the Joint EU-US Action Plan on 3 December. In the same month G8 (founded in 1975) expanded its remit from economic issues to terrorism, organised crime and drugs at a meeting on 12 December in Ottawa, Canada.
Since 11 September 2001 EU-US cooperation on justice and home affairs has reached unprecedented levels through what is termed the 'US/EU channel'. The Council Presidency of the EU ensures that the USA and its agencies are kept up to date with all the latest documents (eg: Action Plans) and EU meetings and seminars are regularly attended by US officials.
What the 'Outcomes' of EU-US meetings show is the extraordinary influence that the US has on EU justice and home affairs policies and practice. The dominant theme is US demands for access to EU data, intelligence and databases and ensuring that US interests are not threatened (eg: by EU data protection standards). There is also evidence of 'policy-laundering' where the USA promotes initiatives through third bodies it would not advance at home. For example, detailed G8 questionnaires drafted by the US which all
EU governments have to respond to (eg: use of intelligence in criminal investigation and prosecution, EU doc no 12064/06).
The 'US/EU channel' is largely a 'one-way street' for US demands. It is rarely used by the EU to meet its needs and when it does it faces intransigency.
When the USA wanted the EU to sign up to its Container Security Initiative (CSI) to assess and check shipping containers bound for their country the EU wanted time to consult. The USA simply by-passed the EU and reached bilateral agreements with a number of individual Member States forcing the EU to reach a general agreement. The CIS currently operates from 21 European ports in 10 EU states.
The USA is now doing exactly the same over a long-standing issue with the EU - the Visa Waiver Programme (VWP).
All the EU-USA agreements are supposedly based on 'reciprocity' (equal rights for both sides of the agreement). Imagine the EU sending officials to the USA to 'comprehensively' review the work of the FBI, CIA, NSA and the DHS before it agreed to any EU member state or the EU centrally transferring any information/intelligence.
EU governments and officials claim that 'Europe and the United States share common values' and there is no doubt that for the most part governments and officials believe this. There is little doubt too that this is the view of the multinationals, the law enforcement, security and intelligence agencies and the military.
On the other had, many in the EU believe it should be friendly to the USA but maintain a distinctive 'European' position in world affairs, while others believe working closely with the USA, not least given its repugnant actions in the 'war on terrorism', is disastrous both for Europe and the future of the world.
The new programme, scheduled to be called the 'Stockholm' programme, will be adopted by the European Council - a meeting of all the Prime Ministers from the 27 member states - and will 'set in stone' the priorities for home affairs for the following five years.
The introduction of the 'convergence principle' is another step in the building of the EU state. This is described in the background papers for the Future group as: 'the pooling of sovereignty'. It builds on the 'principle of availability' (Hague programme) of all data, information and intelligence held all agencies across the EU to all other agencies and outside and the 'interoperability' of EU information systems must be compatible so that all agencies can access each others data.
Taking all these extensive powers of surveillance together it is not too hard to see, for example, why lawyers, journalists and civil society groups might be concerned. The monitoring of a lawyer's communications and correspondence could reveal the defence's case and counter-evidence gathered - especially in cases which are politically sensitive. A journalist's contacts and communications could be watched in order to pre-empt a story or to prepare a plausible denial in advance. While a group organising a protest could find its preparatory work undermined and disrupted and its organisers targeted for detention or arrest - with their demonstrations surveilled by spying 'drones'.
What is much clearer now is that 11 September 2001 was used to accelerate a process already underway. Globalisation and its 'technological revolution' - nurtured by Western states and developed by multinationals - was ready to break out of the constraints imposed by liberal democratic values. Notions of privacy and data protection espoused as basic values stood in the way of progress. The welfare state, where a benevolent state protected and cared for the people, has been replaced by the market state requiring the
social control of market forces, unhindered by rights and regulations. In place of theoretically serving the people, the state now serves the interests of international capital.
Moreover, the 'war on terrorism' presented a massive opportunity not just to use its monopoly of information technology but to apply it to new, highly lucrative, areas: The surveillance of travel and communications, new systems for data-sharing, data-mining, interpreting behaviour, the collection of biometrics and readers to check them. The construction of EU-US standards to record, check and hold people's travel records is intended to set standards which will be laundered to set global standards too - and new markets for the West's multinationals to pursue and profit from.
In reality we have an EU in which national governments predominantly come from the centre-right and far-right, 21 out of 27 governments. This, in turn, means that the discussions in the Council of the European Union and all its working parties are dominated by representatives (officers and officials) from the very same centre-right and far-right perspectives."
What we see is that the US is actively undermining and bullying the EU. It is also clear that the European citizens are not involved in the decision making, and that the sovereignty of nations and their constitutions will be invalidated. Which simply means the end of democracy. The drive for European unity is based on a totalitarian agenda that will only benefit the privatised and deregulated corporations. The Europe that some are trying to push through our throats by all means is undemocratic.
11:16:28 AM
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© Copyright 2008.
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