Category Archives: Bailouts & Banks
Iceland’s anarcho-surrealist “Best Party” led by punk mayor transforms politics
“Its first pledge was to break all its promises, making the party almost impossible to attack, then it promised a polar bear to the zoo and a drug-free parliament within 10 years.
The party’s only advertisement was in a newspaper personal column, saying: “The Best Party wishes to meet good people aged between 18 and 90.” Its 10-point plan had 13 points. And the party’s campaign video featured candidates singing Tina Turner’s Simply the Best, with the chorus: “We are the best, the bestest of parties, best for Reykjavik, best city of every week.” It works in Icelandic.
Iceland was ripe for change, having effectively gone bust thanks to the cronyism of a cluster of politicians and bankers who thought that they could turn an island of fishermen with a population of 318,000 into a financial superpower.
In less than four years, the most rapid expansion of a banking system in history saw three privatised banks develop assets 10 times the size of the country’s GDP. It was the Icarus economy. Property prices tripled, the stock market multiplied nine times, and people borrowed heavily – often in foreign currencies – to cash in on the boom. The crash was fast, hard and painful, worsened by the collapse of the krona as the state, unable to bail out the banks, refused to pay foreign creditors.
The strategy looks smart now, compared with events in Greece and Ireland, but the country was angry and frightened. Voters wanted change, and the Best Party caught the mood, capturing Reykjavik with 34.7% of the vote. “No one has to be afraid of the Best Party,” said Jón in his acceptance speech. “Because it is the best party. If it wasn’t, it would be called the Worst Party or the Bad Party. We would never work with a party like that.”
“Given the frivolity of their campaign and the fact the mayor is a famous comedian, best known for playing a bad-tempered Marxist on television, they have surprised people with the seriousness they have shown in running the city.”
Poets should be lawgivers; that is, the boldest lyric inspiration should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead, the civil code, and the day’s work. But now the two things seem irreconcilably parted.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 -1882)
Looks like Iceland has found a way with Jon Gnarr! Apart from being in a punk band and a comedian and a suspected jedi, he also used to be a cab driver. That’s the kind of mayor Melbourne needs. Then again, if it ends up being Sean Bedlam or (God forbid) Carl Scrace, I may have to eat my words. Maybe, for the time being, we are better off with the devil we know.
http://http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/19/iceland-reykjavik-mayor-best-party
http://www.messynessychic.com/2012/11/28/meet-the-coolest-mayor-in-the-world/
Gippsland free store activist arrested and charged.
This morning in Sale Victoria the “Gippsland free store” was again shut down after complaint by a bank branch.
Victoria police scrambled to the bank where a free shop activist was alleged to have been writing on the footpath with chalk and handing out political campaign flyers.
“Screw the banks “
and
“Free Bradley Manning”
The free store activist was then taken to a police station and locked in a room, he was eventually charged with
“Writing on a structure”
The activist has stated he did not write on anything vertical and it was an unlawful arrest.
Writing political messages on the footpath with chalk is not destructive in anyway, it is not illegal and has always been a valid form of political expression. Australia’s behavior in relation to treatment of political activists and human rights in general has sent alarm bells ringing among civil liberties groups globally this federal election year.
Being able to express your political opinion is more important than ever before, even with social networking gimmicks such as facebook it is getting harder counter the dominance of the global media machine and corrupted governments.
Regardless of our ideals, its a human right to express them even with chalk on a footpath.
The first Gippsland free store:
More info at Gippsland free store.
Occupy Is An Inside Job
How freakishly familiar this all is, from the other side of the world.
Thanks for your insight abandontv
ADDITION:
This Occupy media site was taken back from the hijackers who initially stole all the media resources and refused access to them.
We simply started all over again on the messages we believe in, the messages we believed occupy was about:
Jail the banksters, no bailouts or bail ins.
Fiat currency is a scam that must be stopped
End corporate corruption of politics
No special legal privileged reserved for those with wealth and/or power
Have reasoned debates about our future on this world
How we can live better
End the corporate engineered wars for profits
What kind of world we want to live in
Finally we also expose the corrupt insiders who hijacked our occupy for their own agendas, and those who still continue to try to do so.
For all those who came to occupy this is more like Occupy Melbourne you thought you were getting, rather than the fake one served to you.
Rolling stone delivers again, It’s all fixed
The bailouts were just the tip of the enormous iceberg of corruption in the global finance system.
Today Cyprus, Tomorrow The World
How long will they get away with it? How long?
Wise words from our favorite Left-Wing Liberitarian:
Yeah, sing it hard and sing it well
Send the robber barons straight to hell
The greedy thieves who came around
And ate the flesh of everything they found
Whose crimes have gone unpunished now
Who walk the streets as free men now
Ah, they brought death to our hometown, boys
Death to our hometown, boys
Death to our hometown, boys
Death to our hometown, whoa!
(Bruce Springsteen” Death To My Hometown” 2012)
Wise words from our favorite Right-Wing Liberitarian :
The Great Cyprus Bank Robbery by Ron Paul
The dramatic recent events in Cyprus have highlighted the fundamental weakness in the European banking system and the extreme fragility of fractional reserve banking. Cypriot banks invested heavily in Greek sovereign debt, and last summer’s Greek debt restructuring resulted in losses equivalent to more than 25 percent of Cyprus’ GDP. These banks then took their bad investments to the government, demanding a bailout from an already beleaguered Cypriot treasury. The government of Cyprus then turned to the European Union (EU) for a bailout.
The terms insisted upon by the troika (European Commission, European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund) before funding the bailout were nothing short of highway robbery. While bank depositors have traditionally been protected in the event of bankruptcy or liquidation, the troika insisted that all bank depositors pay a tax of between 6.75 and 10 percent of their total deposits to help fund the bailout.
While one can sympathize with EU taxpayers not wanting to fund yet another bailout of a poorly-managed banking system, forcing the Cypriot people to pay for the foolish risks taken by their government and bankers is also criminal. In their desire to punish a “tax haven” catering supposedly to Russian oligarchs, the EU elites ensured that ordinary citizens would suffer just as much as foreign depositors. Imagine the reaction if in September 2008, the US government had financed its $700 billion bank bailout by directly looting American taxpayers’ bank accounts!
While the Cypriot parliament rejected that first proposal, they will have no say in the final proposal delivered by the EU and IMF: deposits over 100,000 euros are likely to see losses of at least 40 percent and possibly as much as 80 percent. “Temporary” capital controls that were supposed to last for days will now last at least a month and might remain in effect for years.
Especially affected have been the elderly, who were unable to use ATMs or to transfer money electronically. Despite the fact that ATMs severely limited the size of withdrawals during the two week-long bank closure, reports indicated that account holders who had access to Cypriot bank branches in London and Athens were able to withdraw most of their funds, leading to speculation that there would be no money available when banks finally opened up again. In other words, the supposed Russian oligarch money may well be already gone.
Remember that under a fractional reserve banking system only a small percentage of deposits is kept on hand for dispersal to depositors. The rest of the money is loaned out. Not only are many of the loans made by these banks going bad, but the reserve requirement in Euro-system countries is only one percent! If just one euro out of every hundred is withdrawn from banks, the bank reserves would be completely exhausted and the whole system would collapse. Is it any wonder, then, that the EU fears a major bank run and has shipped billions of euros to Cyprus?
The elites in the EU and IMF failed to learn their lesson from the popular backlash to these tax proposals, and have openly talked about using Cyprus as a template for future bank bailouts. This raises the prospect of raids on bank accounts, pension funds, and any investments the government can get its hands on. In other words, no one’s money is safe in any financial institution in Europe. Bank runs are now a certainty in future crises, as the people realize that they do not really own the money in their accounts. How long before bureaucrat and banker try that here?
Unfortunately, all of this is the predictable result of a fiat paper money system combined with fractional reserve banking. When governments and banks collude to monopolize the monetary system so that they can create money out of thin air, the result is a business cycle that wreaks havoc on the economy. Pyramiding more and more loans on top of a tiny base of money will create an economic house of cards just waiting to collapse. The situation in Cyprus should be both a lesson and a warning to the United States. We need to end the Federal Reserve, stay away from propping up the euro, and return to a sound monetary system.
Bitcoin & Cyprus Scheme: How Technocrats Manipulate All Digital Currency
http://occupycorporatism.com/bitcoin-cyprus-scheme-how-technocrats-manipulate-all-digital-currency/
Bitcoin & Cyprus Scheme: How Technocrats Manipulate All Digital Currency
Susanne Posel
Occupy Corporatism
March 20, 2013
Banks in Cyprus have declared a bank holiday for the early part of this week to prevent more customers from extracting funds from their private accounts.
Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades recently stated that he has the “feeling . . . that the house is going to reject it because they feel and think it isn’t just and that it’s against the interest of Cyprus.”
The 5.8 billion euro bailout has prompted technocrats in conjunction with elected officials to raid customer private bank accounts.
The worth of the euro has taken a huge fall, being down 0.4% on the Stoxx Exchange 600 Index.
In response, the pressure is mounting in Cyprus to ignore the public outrage and continue to plunder the citizen’s bank accounts under the European Central Bank (ECB) Emergency Liquidity Assistance program (ELAP).
The ECB appears to be blackmailing the Cypriot government while out right confiscating depositor’s money under this “project”.
Earlier this year, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervisors (BCBS) applied the underlying pressure on US banks to liquidate to appease global markets. The American taxpayer is picking up the tab for this turn of events. BIS is giving these banks until 2019 to comply with their new rules. Capital to prop up the banks will be needed while they liquidate assets such as bonds, mortgages, loans and stock shares.
Consequences of the liquidation have been evidenced in governmental austerity and movement toward sovereign debt by the technocrats. Any asset assessed by BIS can and is being used as collateral of the banksters in an anything goes temperament while the squandering of wealth continues.
BIS has used the scheme of forcing capital from the banks to control the measures taken globally. International banking constraints mandated in these new rules are putting more control into the hands of “shadow banks” where supervision is unheard of.
Michel Barnier, commissioner of BIS, stated that the Basel Committee has “revised liquidity coverage ratio and the gradual approach for its phasing-in by clearly defined dates. This is significant progress which addresses issues already raised by the European Commission. We now need to make full use of the observation period, and learn from the reports that the European Banking Authority will prepare on the results of the observation period, before formally implementing in 2015 the liquidity coverage ratio under EU law in line with the Basel standards.”
Liquidity is seen by the technocrats as a necessity for “the stability of banks as well as for their role in supporting wider economic recovery.”
At a time when the introduction of a global currency to replace all fiat across the globe is at hand, it makes perfect sense that the technocrats are positioning themselves to control the central banks as offshoot branches of their operation. At the head of this monster, the BIS sets the tone and directs the banksters with limitations and orders.
The European Central Bank (ECB) is setting the stage of a complete financial collapse of fiat currencies across the globe. Joining in the scheme are other technocratic institutions such as the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan and the Swiss National Bank.
Under the guise of preventing a system failure during the global financial crisis, there will be “an extension of the existing temporary US dollar liquidity swap arrangements until February, 1 2014.” This action allows the central bankers to liquidate currencies under their jurisdiction “should market conditions so warrant.” Under this plan, euros backed by nothing can continue to pour into the system throughout the Eurozone “in addition to the existing liquidity-providing operations” in the US. This liquidation will take place “until further notice.”
Alternative media is reporting that to salvage their funds, Europeans are beginning to invest in Bitcoin. Indeed, Bitcoins have been purchased and “downloaded” at a record high of $52 euros per Bitcoin in an attempt to keep customer cash safe from the plundering of technocrats.
Bitcoin has begun to thrive under the threats in Cyprus with an app for iPhones to make purchasing the digital currency easier.
Supporters of Bitcoin incorrectly claim that the scheme is not centralized as an alternate form of currency that would be of itself a protest to the technocrats.
However Bitcoin has been given that status of a “payment service provider” (PSP) by French financial institutions Aqoba and Crédit Mutuel. Officially, they are not a PSP because of the banks they are aligned with who are. This means Bitcoin is able to take advantage of their PSP status without having to be one themself.
Crédit Mutuel is the “main component of the Crédit Mutuel-CIC Group” which includes a federation of French financial institutions that have assets totaling over $581 billion. The federation’s holding corporation, the Banque Federative du Crédit Mutuel (BFCM) control French and foreign operational subsidiaries in Germany, Belgium, Spain and Portugal.
Crédit Mutuel is classified as a retail bank, yet it also services corporate investments, asset management, private banking and conducts international activities. They also are involved in:
• Finance leasing
• Real estate investment
• Property development
• Collection services
• Insurance policies
Bitcoin now has an International Bank ID number (IBAN) which allows transactions through PayPal and WorldPay and other digital payment networks; as well as issue debit cards, enabled to process monetary transfers to other banks and accept transfer of digital currency to their own “location”.
A Bitcoin account will be as viable as any other bank account with other established banks worldwide. Deposits will be subject to compensatory laws that are applicable when dealing with printed fiat in traditional accounts and balances in Bitcoin accounts can be exchanged for the fiat in that country (i.e. euros, US dollars, Yaun, etc. . . ).
The illusion is that this digital currency can allow any “two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party”; however while based on the collective control of computers, a “chain of digital signatures” and a “trusted central authority” to keep the monetary system from relying on printed fiat.
Virtual cash, the digital exchange offered by Bitcoin, is gaining ground as the possible future replacement for global currencies as a network of global computers.
The actuality of Bitcoin is that it is no different than any other type of e-currency and subject to manipulation by the technocrats. Should people transfer their fiat into Bitcoin thinking they can avert theft from banksters, they will soon realize that ALL digital currency plays into the central banking schemes to extract wealth from the people.
Grand theft Cyprus 2: Take the money and (bank) run!
Cypriots are clearly not trusting the banks right now. Many banks are having special bank holidays.
ATM bank runs have occurred. A rather coincidental ‘out of order’ message.
![Bank robbery a la Cyprus 2013_thumb[3]](http://occupymelbournenet.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/bank-robbery-a-la-cyprus-2013_thumb3.jpg)
5 of 17 EU countries need a bail out now. Bailout is the new word for robbery
More here:
http://www.dailyreckoning.com.au/as-the-bank-run-hits-cyprus-dr-cowie-hits-hong-kong/2013/03/21/
Grand theft Cyprus
Cyprus government planning to steal money from bank deposits as part of bail out deal.
Cyprus president Nicos Anastasiades
όχι hayır
A last minute flip flop?
