The World Bank and the IMF have played out this pattern over the past 50 years; and we see it emerging among the PIGS as well. The result has far more to do with intensifying control than top-line black ink. Ireland, if we are correct, will doubtless emerge with less independence than now. The Anglosphere will have more control and so will Anglo-American dominated multinationals. As the “crisis” widens, the same process will occur with other PIGS. It is inevitable, given the grinding-on of elite financial mechanisms. Central banking provides the trigger through fiat money booms and busts and banks and IMF-style bailouts do the rest.
News & Analysis
Irish Shadow-Play
Monday, November 22, 2010 – by Staff Report
EU Working on EU100 Billion Package for Ireland, Spiegel Says … European Union countries are preparing a rescue package for Ireland amounting to 100 billion euros ($137 billion) “or more,” with the U.K. contributing around 20 billion euros, Spiegel magazine reported, without saying where it got the information. While this “grand solution” would free Ireland from having to borrow in capital markets, a smaller package of 45 billion to 50 billion euros is also under consideration, which would be used to plug shortfalls at Irish banks, the magazine said. – Reuters
Dominant Social Theme: It will all be OK once we put the financial packages in place and rescue the banks.
Free-Market Analysis: For months we have been reading articles about how the Irish, unlike the Greeks or even those in Iceland, really understood what had gone wrong. This in our estimation was a kind of sub dominant social theme, that the Irish were “good” Europeans and reasonable about their fate. Nonetheless this was a constant focus of the mainstream Western media, especially as unrest began to percolate throughout the ruined European PIGS and the Greeks rioted. The Irish were different. The Irish were behaving. They were said to have “swallowed the medicine,” realizing that the hangover from the great boom of the mid-2000s was a mirage and that the reality is generational “austerity.”
But now it turns out that the Irish government was not telling the truth about the crisis and neither were the banks. And tolerance is beginning to diminish. We would tend to believe that the reason there has not been trouble sooner is because the Irish themselves, subject to a kind of endless mind-control from messages of their leaders and the media, bought into the concept that they were responsible for their troubles, but that may be ending now. Here’s an excerpt from an article that appeared recently in the UK Guardian:
Ireland fears civil unrest as bank crisis deepens … Trade union leader warns of riots if government imposes further ‘draconian’ cuts to public sector. Brian Cowen the taoiseach, Brian Cowen: an emergency cabinet is to discuss the new round of cuts today. One of Ireland’s biggest trade unions warned today that the nation was on the brink of civil unrest as government officials negotiated a multibillion euro bailout for the country’s ailing banks.
The Technical Engineering and Electrical Union said further “draconian” public sector cuts of €15bn (£13bn) over four years could lead to street disorder. It urged a campaign of civil disobedience unless the taoiseach, Brian Cowen, calls an immediate election. An emergency cabinet tomorrow will discuss the new round of cuts. “When the measures being proposed are heaped on top of the €14.5bn cuts already implemented in the last three brutal budgets, life in Ireland will be unbearable,” said the TEEU leader, Eamon Devoy …
Financial sources told the Observer that a strategy could be announced as soon as Monday to stabilise Ireland’s banks. A first priority is to restore confidence and halt an outflow of cash – Anglo Irish Banks revealed on Friday that customers have withdrawn €13bn of deposits this year. Measures under consideration include hiving off rotten loans into a freestanding “bad bank”. – UK Guardian
Ireland is a small country of five million, and just as it is struggling today to avoid being assimilated by the EU (an Anglo-American creation in our view), so it has struggled against Britain directly in the past. While the population of Ireland is fairly small, there are about 80 million people of Irish ancestry throughout the world including 50 million in America alone. This tells is that being Irish in Ireland has always been difficult, and it hasn’t gotten any less so.
The Anglosphere is relentless but after centuries of repetition and adjustment it is very well hidden. One has to look hard to uncover it; but the clues are there. Just the other day in an article entitled Elite Eye on Africa, we went into considerable detail about the worldwide economic system the Anglo-American elites have created. The system is based on the interactions between the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Basically, the two entities act as a tag team, with the World Bank lending money and the IMF coming in later on to restructure a country’s deficits when the leadership’s profligacy has led to ruin.
We pointed out as well that there was a second stage to this approach. Sometimes money is lent and the borrowing country generates internal projects. But when it comes to larger countries (and Europe), the aid can become much more intensive and involve considerable penetration by Western industry. We would argue that it is this kind of approach that has been taken when it comes to Europe’s Southern PIGS – and has been applied in a kind of collapsed time frame. (In this case it was often direct or indirect EU aid, granted to ease the way of the PIGS into the EU itself.)
Because everything the Western elites are doing right now seems to have speeded up, the cause and effect is far more recognizable. The 1990s saw the Asian Tigers, and while the mechanism was not so clearly defined in those pre-Internet days we can see in hindsight that the latter part of the first decade of the 2000s has clearly repeated the pattern. First there is a boom, facilitated by Western institutions and then, during the bust phase, Western powers-that-be further consolidate business and cultural dominance.
In analyzing this occurrence, the ‘Net alternative media, influenced by leftist analysis, inevitably points to profit as the main motive. But it is not merely profit, in our view, that is the underlying cause for what occurs. As with the war in Afghanistan, leftist interpretation has inevitably focused on somewhat ephemeral exploitation of natural resources, etc. when the much more pertinent rationale is one of control. When it comes to Ireland, we can see how the former explanation informs much of the coverage in the mainstream media (UK Observer) as well:
Ireland has been betrayed by its leaders … The need for a bailout is the consequence of the government’s incompetence. It should pay for its failure … It never seemed to matter in the boom years, but strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a Celtic Tiger. The image was coined in the mid-90s to compare with the voraciously expanding economies in east Asia.
Now that boom has turned to bust, and Ireland is negotiating a European bailout, the mythical nature of the beast is poignant. There were no big cats in Dublin after all. But there were fat cats. The Irish boom saw a vast property bubble puffed up by appallingly managed banks with the complicity of idle regulators and political cronies. House prices between 1994 and 2006 rose by around 520%. The relationships between developers, their financiers and the officials who authorised the building spree were usually cosy, often corrupt.
Towards the end of the growth years, the country’s financial sector descended into full- blown mania. Banks doled out credit indiscriminately and borrowed on international capital markets on a scale that far exceeded the nation’s economic output. When the bubble burst, the government stepped in to rescue the banks, but their debts were ultimately bigger than the state’s capacity to raise revenue. Ireland started sliding towards insolvency. Hence, the bailout.
All of this describes the mechanism without explaining its history or evolution. What is going on in the EU today, especially among the PIGS, is perhaps deliberate, not merely coincidental, or the result of blundering, as this article seems to imply. We come to this conclusion based on the larger pattern we have observed. When one looks at events in isolation, the repetition is not clear. But the Internet allows us to see these patterns in greater detail. Not only are they repetitive, they are seemingly institutionalized.
The World Bank and the IMF have played out this pattern over the past 50 years; and we see it emerging among the PIGS as well. The result has far more to do with intensifying control than top-line black ink. Ireland, if we are correct, will doubtless emerge with less independence than now. The Anglosphere will have more control and so will Anglo-American dominated multinationals. As the “crisis” widens, the same process will occur with other PIGS. It is inevitable, given the grinding-on of elite financial mechanisms. Central banking provides the trigger through fiat money booms and busts and banks and IMF-style bailouts do the rest.
We have tried to be consistent in our arguments regarding what is occurring in Europe. We have always argued that the bailouts have little or nothing to do directly with the banks. We have maintained that the rescue packages are just what they seem to be, money pools aimed at rescuing the EU itself and giving the Anglosphere the justification for further EU consolidation. But in watching the entire mess unfold, we confess to an uneasy feeling that the larger financial crisis itself is in a sense manufactured.
Increasingly, we arrive, logically, at the idea that most of the Western money pools in existence must be controlled at some level by the Anglo-American elites themselves, who evidently and obviously control the West’s central banking network. This would explain why the crisis has affected only the smallest and most controllable economies – Greece and Ireland (and Iceland) so far.
Now we are not sure of this, for the world is fairly large place and money pools in aggregate are hard to control, we imagine. And the market has its own ineluctable logic. But the patterns here seem pretty well-worn, and even the rhetoric seems predictable. Irish leaders, severely pressured, will take the pro-offered EU bank “bailout” that has been packaged for them (or so it is being reported as we close out this article). We would guess that Portugal is next on the list and then Spain and Italy, and even France. Somehow something will be worked out – and EU nation states may lose more freedoms as a result of bailouts that demand larger integration.
Conclusion: There is a catch, though. The Internet itself has exposed much of the power elite’s larger strategy as it drives the West toward one-world government. As a result, at least some of the elite’s fear-based promotions are crumbling. And while the “sovereign crisis” of the EU may have certain Kabuki-like aspects, the urgency among the Eurocrats is undeniable. It is the tribes of Europe they fear and the possibility of mass unrest, which can without doubt derail what is currently being planned and carried out. It is this that experienced meme watchers will want to track when making determinations about the future of Europe and the euro.