If the ECB & IMF get away with this robbery, Greece will spiral into chaos and revolution. Watch for scapegoat violence … we are run by gutless, bureaucrats who probably don’t even know how to punch out of a paper bag.. they cant even open their own car doors and why they need red carpet … when they are talking about global depression !

Isn’t it time to bring out the guillotine!

http://geraldcelentechannel.blogspot.com/2011/11/daniel-estulin-sarkozy-threatened.html

By JOHN DRENNAN

The legitimacy of the infamous bank guarantee of September 2008, which was the catalyst for Ireland’s subsequent bailout by the IMF, has been called into question by two of the senior ministers in the cabinet on that fateful night.

In a major new RTE documentary, Crisis — Inside the Cowen Government, former ministers Willie O’Dea and Mary Hanafin are deeply critical of the rushed manner in which the decision was taken.

And, in a further revelation, the former Green Party leader John Gormley openly admits that the bank guarantee, where the State took responsibility for more than €400bn of banking debt, was totally based on the theories of the celebrity economist David McWilliams.

Speaking to the Sunday Independent, one figure involved in the making of the documentary claimed the programme casts “real doubts on the validity of the decision taken by the cabinet on the guarantee”.

They added that the testimony of the two former ministers certainly suggests the methodology by which the decision was taken “verged on the territories of being ultra vires” and that ministers were “bounced” into a decision in circumstances that resembled “an ultimatum” where they were effectively given “no choices or opportunities for debate”.

In the documentary, both Ms Hanafin and Mr O’Dea say they were effectively given no alternative but to approve the decision to offer a blanket guarantee to all of Ireland’s banks in the early hours of the morning.

According to Mr O’Dea, ministers who were phoned to approve an incorporeal cabinet decision in the early hours of September 30, 2008, were told that, “the markets were opening in the morning and there was the possibility of no money in the ATMs” and that “nothing short of this full absolute guarantee would save the situation”.

Ms Hanafin, who in the programme is shown defending the Irish banking system on the night of the guarantee, said ministers were told that “it was the only option to protect people’s money and it had to be done before the markets opened”.

Both ministers are now critical of the way decisions were taken.

“It was probably the most far reaching decision I ever participated in my five years in cabinet and I would have liked to have sat around the table to discuss it,” Mr O’Dea says.

Mr O’Dea openly admits that “the government did not have a mandate” to do the banking guarantee and says “in retrospect, it would have been better for the country if a fresh government” had come to power at that stage.

Mary Hanafin, who in the documentary says that she had been informed earlier that day that “there will be decisions” taken on the banking crisis “before the night was over” is openly critical of the shambolic nature of the decision making.

She claims “that decision shouldn’t have been taken at a quarter to two in the morning. . . on the phone.”

The former minister also said that in a scenario where Finance “had known for some time that there was going to be a decision. . . all cabinet members should have been called to Dublin”.

Ms Hanafin also notes that in spite of the serious level of disagreement within Finance over the best solution to the crisis, ministers were presented with a fait accompli.

The former minister is backed by Mr O’Dea, who says the cabinet were told “nothing short of the full, unequivocal guarantee would save the situation”.

Current FF leader Micheal Martin will say that at the time of the guarantee “the solvency issue did not surface. Time and time again it was liquidity, liquidity, liquidity”.

Mr Martin, though, is implicitly contradicted by the former government minister Eamon Ryan, who admits that whilst everyone in the wake of the guarantee was talking about a liquidity crisis, “most of the people knew we had gone over the cliff”.

In a stark display of the lack of faith that then Finance Minister Brian Lenihan had in his department officials, Mr Gormley tells the documentary of his “clear recollection” of asking Mr Lenihan: “Are you going with the David McWilliams option?” and of feeling “fairly satisfied” when Mr Lenihan said he was.

Though the decision was to ultimately play a central role in the IMF/EU bailout; Mr McWilliams defends his advice on the grounds that whilst he advocated a guarantee, having done “the easy bit”, the government had failed to follow his advice to “fire the top guys”, to “default on some of the bond-holders” and close down bad banks in the manner that the Swedes did.

The programme also paints a poignant portrait of Mr Cowen as a Taoiseach “haunted by a sense of guilt” over his failures as a finance minister.

In tomorrow’s episode, Mary O’Rourke charitably observes of the allegations that surrounded Mr Cowen’s relationship with alcohol that “Brian Cowen was very shy. . . maybe the few drinks helped him. . . loosened his tongue” and “brought him back to a happier time, a space where life wasn’t as difficult or humdrum as it had become”.

But it is believed that in a subsequent episode, Ms Hanafin is scathing about the drinking culture that would ultimately drown the party.

The programme also reveals that PJ Mara and other senior Fianna Fail figures begged Mr Cowen to address the communications deficit in his performance.

Mr Mara says that he and several others tried to persuade Mr Cowen “at least four or five times over a period of nine months” but it was “drift, drift, drift”.

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/john-drennan/john-drennan-exff-ministers-lament-rushed-bank-guarantee-2927164.html

To all those in the United States currently occupying parks, squares and other spaces, your comrades in Cairo are watching you in solidarity. Having received so much advice from you about transitioning to democracy, we thought it’s our turn to pass on some advice.

Indeed, we are now in many ways involved in the same struggle. What most pundits call “The Arab Spring” has its roots in the demonstrations, riots, strikes and occupations taking place all around the world, its foundations lie in years-long struggles by people and popular movements. The moment that we find ourselves in is nothing new, as we in Egypt and others have been fighting against systems of repression, disenfranchisement and the unchecked ravages of global capitalism (yes, we said it, capitalism): a System that has made a world that is dangerous and cruel to its inhabitants. As the interests of government increasingly cater to the interests and comforts of private, transnational capital, our cities and homes have become progressively more abstract and violent places, subject to the casual ravages of the next economic development or urban renewal scheme.

An entire generation across the globe has grown up realizing, rationally and emotionally, that we have no future in the current order of things. Living under structural adjustment policies and the supposed expertise of international organizations like the World Bank and IMF, we watched as our resources, industries and public services were sold off and dismantled as the “free market” pushed an addiction to foreign goods, to foreign food even. The profits and benefits of those freed markets went elsewhere, while Egypt and other countries in the South found their immiseration reinforced by a massive increase in police repression and torture.

The current crisis in America and Western Europe has begun to bring this reality home to you as well: that as things stand we will all work ourselves raw, our backs broken by personal debt and public austerity. Not content with carving out the remnants of the public sphere and the welfare state, capitalism and the austerity-state now even attack the private realm and people’s right to decent dwelling as thousands of foreclosed-upon homeowners find themselves both homeless and indebted to the banks who have forced them on to the streets.

So we stand with you not just in your attempts to bring down the old but to experiment with the new. We are not protesting. Who is there to protest to? What could we ask them for that they could grant? We are occupying. We are reclaiming those same spaces of public practice that have been commodified, privatized and locked into the hands of faceless bureaucracy , real estate portfolios, and police ‘protection’. Hold on to these spaces, nurture them, and let the boundaries of your occupations grow. After all, who built these parks, these plazas, these buildings? Whose labor made them real and livable? Why should it seem so natural that they should be withheld from us, policed and disciplined? Reclaiming these spaces and managing them justly and collectively is proof enough of our legitimacy.

In our own occupations of Tahrir, we encountered people entering the Square every day in tears because it was the first time they had walked through those streets and spaces without being harassed by police; it is not just the ideas that are important, these spaces are fundamental to the possibility of a new world. These are public spaces. Spaces forgathering, leisure, meeting, and interacting – these spaces should be the reason we live in cities. Where the state and the interests of owners have made them inaccessible, exclusive or dangerous, it is up to us to make sure that they are safe, inclusive and just. We have and must continue to open them to anyone that wants to build a better world, particularly for the marginalized, excluded and for those groups who have suffered the worst .

What you do in these spaces is neither as grandiose and abstract nor as quotidian as “real democracy”; the nascent forms of praxis and social engagement being made in the occupations avoid the empty ideals and stale parliamentarianism that the term democracy has come to represent. And so the occupations must continue, because there is no one left to ask for reform. They must continue because we are creating what we can no longer wait for.

But the ideologies of property and propriety will manifest themselves again. Whether through the overt opposition of property owners or municipalities to your encampments or the more subtle attempts to control space through traffic regulations, anti-camping laws or health and safety rules. There is a direct conflict between what we seek to make of our cities and our spaces and what the law and the systems of policing standing behind it would have us do.

We faced such direct and indirect violence , and continue to face it . Those who said that the Egyptian revolution was peaceful did not see the horrors that police visited upon us, nor did they see the resistance and even force that revolutionaries used against the police to defend their tentative occupations and spaces: by the government’s own admission; 99 police stations were put to the torch, thousands of police cars were destroyed, and all of the ruling party’s offices around Egypt were burned down. Barricades were erected, officers were beaten back and pelted with rocks even as they fired tear gas and live ammunition on us. But at the end of the day on the 28 th of January they retreated, and we had won our cities.

It is not our desire to participate in violence, but it is even less our desire to lose. If we do not resist, actively, when they come to take what we have won back, then we will surely lose. Do not confuse the tactics that we used when we shouted “peaceful” with fetishizing nonviolence; if the state had given up immediately we would have been overjoyed, but as they sought to abuse us, beat us, kill us, we knew that there was no other option than to fight back. Had we laid down and allowed ourselves to be arrested, tortured, and martyred to “make a point”, we would be no less bloodied, beaten and dead. Be prepared to defend these things you have occupied, that you are building, because, after everything else has been taken from us, these reclaimed spaces are so very precious.

By way of concluding then, our only real advice to you is to continue, keep going and do not stop. Occupy more, find each other, build larger and larger networks and keep discovering new ways to experiment with social life, consensus, and democracy. Discover new ways to use these spaces, discover new ways to hold on to them and never givethem up again. Resist fiercely when you are under attack, but otherwise take pleasure in what you are doing, let it be easy, fun even. We are all watching one another now, and from Cairo we want to say that we are in solidarity with you, and we love you all for what you are doing.

Comrades from Cairo.
24th of October, 2011.

http://occupywallst.org/article/solidarity-statement-cairo/