Budget cuts cause revolt in Ecuador too

Update: Oct. 1: all this is nonsense. I was mislead by intoxications and lack of information. I can be a fool too at times and should be much more cautious, specially in a situation as confuse as this one. See my correction at my new blog For what we are... they will be. The only truth in all this is that there was a coup attempt, which failed, but everything else is wrong. 

President Rafael Correa was hurt by tear gas shot by mutinied police. Not only the police is mutinying but his own party has blocked Correa's attempts to cut spending by reducing the public sector. While the Army has sided with the president, there are reports of riots in Quito and the airport has been shut. 

Correa could technically rule up to two years without Parliament, assuming that this decision is approved by the Supreme Court, what is not likely.

Ecuador, like many European countries, has a budget problem (even after partial bankruptcy years ago) because it does not control the money it issues since the dollarization imposed by an unpopular right-wing government in the past. In order to take control of its own economy, it should be able to issue its own money, even if inflationarily. 

Correa and the parliamentary majority (59/100 seats) belong to Alianza PAIS (Patria AltIva y Soberana), a moderate left-wing political party, that sympathizes with the Bolivarian system of Venezuela. However it is surrounded by US allies with right-wing governments: Colombia and Peru, being maybe the weakest piece of the Bolivarian bloc, organized in the ALBA economic group. 

Sadly it is likely that the USA and its local puppets will try to take advantage of the situation, if they have not already helped to trigger it. A better solution is maybe that Correa is impeached or abdicates, as it is obvious that his new IMF-style policies have no support and governing by decree is not a viable solution anyhow (Ecuadoreans have already thrown away more than one such pretentious president)

Source for the main news item: Al Jazeera.

Greece and Spain like Latvia, Portugal to tax the rich instead.

There's a nice article of economist I. Esnaola at Gara today, illustrating how the "rescue plan" of the IMF-EU tandem is a recipe for disaster. It is exactly the same "medicine" Latvia got in 2008 and things have only got worse for them since then: growing unemployment (even higher than Spain!), "growth" of -18% in a single year, and all without being able to stop public deficit from running wild at all.

That's exactly what they want to impose to Greece, just that the Greek people seem much less sheeply than Latvians and may just send IMF, EU and everything of the like to the trash bin in the process.

Spain does not seem to need an IMF package: it is already applying one: on its own will nearly all state income is reliant on a growing VAT (consume tax, now to be raised to 18%) and from tobbacco, alcohol and gasoline special taxes. Meanwhile the wealthy enjoy the best deals, what makes Spain unable to collect enough money for its expenses.

Instead, the only conservative government of the three South European countries, that of Portugal, has decided to tackle the tax crisis by raising taxes to the wealthy segment, up to 45%. It's clear that they are the only ones who know how to deal with the budget crisis: redistributing and not just loading the scales against the working class even more.

Iceland massively rejects to pay private debt

93% of voters chose NO in the referendum to validate or reject the bill that approved massive payments to foreign investors for debts acquired by a private bank, Icesavings, now nationalized after going bankrupt.

The Parliament had approved the bill agreeing to pay 5 billion dollars in exchange for a loan of 10 billions and support for an entrance into EU that Icelanders do not seem to desire anymore. However the President of the small republic, in a rare show of politic honesty of the kind you seldom see anymore in this rotten old Europe, vetoed the bill and demanded a referendum that has finally ended in a total defeat for the government. I commented on this neocolonialist abuse in a previous post.

Source: Rebelión, BBC, etc.

Greece becomes a colony... in exchange of nothing

Greece has got just "good words" (and "not a cent" as the German economy minister put it) in exchange of ceding the control of its whole economy to the IMF and Brussels. The, ahem, "socialdemocratic" government is now approving the so-called "austerity measures" which include massive cut of social spending and high tax raises.

Naturally, this has caused some serious street warfare between police and revolutionaries, reminding of the serious conflict that took place last winter, still under conservative rule. Though divided, Greece has one of the strongest revolutionary traditions in modern Europe, so I still have hope that the people will overturn these abusive ultra-capitalist and colonialist measures for which, in the very words of PM Papandreou, they did not vote the socialdemocrats to power.

James Petras, whom I just now realize is Greek by ancestry, declared to Uruguayan Radio Centenari that "the worst in Greece is what the imperialist European countries like Germany, and also the USA, demand: that the control of the economy is transfered to the IMF, Germany and France. This is the colonization of the economy".

Source: Gara.

Greece accuses US and British speculators, Greenspan involved

It has been known yesterday that the Greek intelligence services have discovered that four multinational corporations based in the USA and UK were behind the artificial devaluation of its bonds, selling them "massively" and "buying them again at reduced prices at the end of the day". This information was published yesterday by To Vima newspaper (though I gather it from Gara).

The financial corporations accused are: Moore Capital, Fidelity International, Paulson & Co (these three from the USA) as well as Brevan Howard from the UK. All them are described in Wikipedia as "hedge funds", so it seems just another case of speculative attack by the usual financial criminals against the real economy. It is noticeable that former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan is nowadays "adviser on economic issues and monetary policy" for Paulson & Co.

So guess I would not be too wrong if I'd directly blamed Greenspan for the financial attack against Greece and more in general for the speculative attacks against the periphery of the Eurozone. However blaming the speculators alone would be naive, as it's obvious that EU played it wrong when it did not provide the euro with the appropriate political resorts and is playing it wrong now when it does not allow for a devaluation of the european currency, which would only help the continental economy, favoring much needed exports.

Prime Minister Giorgos Papandreu explained that these attacks are not directed against just Greece but that have a further goal: the euro.

Meanwhile the class conflict in Greece, sparked by the FMI-style draconian measures, is reaching extremes that will probably force a rethink of the policy because the strike public workers of the customs sector is leaving Greece without gasoline and other first need products. This upcoming wednesday a general strike has been called.

Should Iceland pay bank debts with taxpayer's money?

The President of the small North Atlantic country, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, has vetoed a bill designed to satisfy the blood-sucking international financial institutions such as the IMF and the EU by using taxpayers' money to pay debts acquired by a now nationalized private bank, owed to mostly Dutch and British citizens.

If the bill would be approved, each Icelander would have to pay 12,000 euros on average, for debts they did not generate. I'm not sure how are salaries in Iceland but here it would amount to a full year salary for the typical low wage worker.

In exchange they would get a roughly 10 billion dollar loan. So in exchange of paying more than 5 billion dollars, they'd get a loan that would further indebt the nation. It looks like a total neocolonial scam of the ones the infamous IMF usually organizes.

President Grimsson has yielded to a civic campaign that demands a referendum on the matter. If the bill goes to referendum it is very likely it will be rejected. Logically normal citizens see absolutely no point nor logic on assuming the debt generated by private capitalists.

Source: BBC.

Istanbul IMF-WB summit protests: silenced?

I have been looking in several news sites and could find nothing. Only Basque left-wing newspaper Gara makes a meaningful mention of the protests and violent repression that have shaken Istanbul as the yearly IMF and World Bank summit took place. Please, if you know anything more, let me know.

Per Gara, the city of the Bosporus has been virtually taken over by a huge police deployment, very specially at the centric area of Sisli, where the globalist financial meeting took place.

On Tuesday ago the main fights happened at the district of Beyoglu, beginning at Taksim Plaza and and continued for hours until the gases made the situation unbearable. The demonstration called there was mercilessly smashed by the police, what nevertheless did not avoid inccidents but in fact seems to be the main cause of them. A trader, Issac Kalvo, died of a heart attack in them.

Yesterday it was the centric district of Sisli the scene of the main struggles. In spite of the overwhelming police presence, demonstrators managed to block Pangalti Avenue for some time. There, a student identified as Mehmet, declared that the IMF and World Bank have sunk our country into misery, those who make deals to sell weapons that are used to kill Kurds, Alevis, Communists and that dissidence is smashed, want to come here to sell recipes to get out of the crisis.

Some masked street guerrilla groups managed to succesfully attack cash machines, bank offices and shops of multinational corporations. A different group managed to reach to the E5 highway and block it for some time.

Yesterday there were 34 people arrested, three of which in the mostly Alevi (a progressive Shia sect) and leftist neighbourhood of Gaziosmanpasa, who are being accused of membership in the illegal Revolutionary People's Liberation Party (DHKP-C) and of carrying more than twenty molotov cocktails.
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Bread for today, hunger for tomorrow

I just love the economic opinion section of Samah El-Shahat at Al Jazeera. She has such a clear and sharp mind... and pen that I can't but agree with most of what she writes.

Yesterday's article again nails it. Shahat explains that, if before the financial crisis, the banking sector was already very concentrated and protected, now, after the new laws and loads of gratis taxpayer money because they are "too big to fail", it is even more concentrated and also more protected by law. But not better regulated at all.

So we went from having 15 banks to having around six. And these remaining banks have more power as their importance is now set in regulatory stone - and they know it.

The IMF, the guardian of economic neoliberalism, has also been strenghened.

So, all in all, our leaders multilateral solutions to the crisis have been about entrenching the existing world economic order rather than changing it.

But where does this leave us? You know, us in the real economy.

Well, the banks haven't yet started lending. All the money, as you will see from my previous posts, remains constipated within the new banking behemoths.

The level of toxic debt on their balance sheets is still unknown and, because of that, we will never get a recovery.

She argues that the contrast of recent financial "good news" and employment "very bad news" does not mean as some pretend that employment is lagging behind the overall recovery but that there is no recovery at all in fact.

So, in brief, we are living in a delusion of recovery: the bad news are set to ome back soon enough because nothing has been done to make the banks less all-powerful, but exactly the opposite.

It's probably a matter of months, a few years in the "best" case, before the bad financial news begin accumulating again, specially as the demand is unable to recover without a people-oriented (and not super-rich-oriented) stimulus package. We're used to think that the workers depend on the capitalists but, in most aspects, it's the other way around: because capitalists need to sell and for that they need demand, which can only be sustained by workers with decent salaries and healthy credit lines.
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Bilderberg Meeting 2009

I have already mentioned the secretive meeting of the Western elite at Athens this year. Now Andrew G. Marshall reviews what seem to have been the contents of this meeting, centered in the economy (available at Global Research Center and at Voltaire Network).

It seems that the core issues of this secretive aristocratic meeting have included as central issue the current gloomy economic situation, and whether this will be a sharp and short depression or a long looming structural crisis, as most forecast. It seems that the Bilderberg billionaires and proconsuls want to make this a sharp crisis leading to an increased global government, by pushing ahead the more centralized but terribly undemocratic version of the EU, reinforcing the WHO and the IMF and expanding the NAFTA (ALCA) elsewhere into Latin America.

Nevertheless there seem to be opposed fractions within the hyper-rich and hyper-powerful. Some actually fear that the crisis will cause the collapse of their own power and the unsustainability of the system overall and want by any means a rapid recovery. While others seem to prefer to use the economic downturn into their benefit and push ahead even more radical imperial plans within this context.

One of the most troubling rumors is maybe that a plan has been proposed to dramatically reduce global population to some 2 billion people, in what would be the largest ever genocide of history. The worst thing about this is that they actually seem to have reached a consensus in this matter, though the details are unclear.

Another apparent consensus have been reached into destroying the US dollar's hegemony and creating a global currency instead, based on the expansion of IMF's special drawing rights (SDRs).

As I mentioned before, it is surprising that with the huge US military representation at the conspirational meeting, no informations have been leaked at all regarding the Iraq-Iran-Afghanistan-Pakistan issues. This is odd to say the least and makes me suspect that the informations that are being leaked, even if accurate, are only part of the whole issue. The fact that next year's meeting will be held in Israel, suggests that Zionist global and regional projects, including this sensitive Euphrates-Indus region are high in the Bilderberg agenda in spite of not being unofficially even mentioned.

Also there is an interview with investigative journalist Daniel Estultin on the Athens meeting:



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IMF in most serious food crisis warning

Thousands, hundreds of thousands of people will be starving. Children will be suffering from malnutrition, with consequences for all their lives.

These are the words of one of the most important global financial leaders: IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

The International Monetary Fund meeting in Washington was scheduled to talk about the credit and structural crisis but the food-related problems could not be avoided, specially after several countries already had food riots.

Strauss-Kahn also warned that it's not a humanitarian problem only: the food crisis will fuel conflicts and trade imbalances that can't but eventually affect the rich countries too.

Source: BBC: IMF head gives food crisis warning.

Map of Food Crisis (click to expand)