It
all started with the silent coup against Ireland
In 2010,
Ireland experienced
Frankfurt's political blackmail. On the 18th of November, where there
was a governing council of the ECB in Frankfurt. The governor of the
Irish central bank who sat on the governing council, called "Morning
Ireland" which is the most important radio program in Ireland,
to say that Ireland will need what he called a loan. He didn't warn
the government about it and this created a massive panic.
Then,
the next day, there was a letter written from the then president of
ECB, Jean-Claude Trichet, to Brian Lenihan, the minister of finance
at the time, saying that 'if you don't apply the so-called bailout
program, by this opening of the markets the following Monday, we're
going to cut off access to Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA)',
which obviously would have collapsed the Irish banking system.
The ECB
used the liquidity weapon in order to impose its terms on the Irish
government: austerity, privatizations, labor market deregulation. The
ECB enforces fiscal policy, which is not what a central bank should
do. And it does this by denying ELA, or, by providing liquidity, or
not providing liquidity. The ECB had basically taken over the
government. In Ireland, they forced the government to bailout the
banks at huge cost to the Irish population. They blackmailed the
country with shutting its banks.
At the
beginning of the crisis in Europe, which
came
as a shock wave from the United States, the ECB tested its strength
and power on Ireland through this silent coup.
A year
later, it
was the turn of Italy
to find out what the eurozone dictatorship means. Yet, this time it
would not be that easy. Even Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy had to
be involved in order to effectively overthrow Silvio Berlusconi who
(for his own ambition and popularity of course) didn't want to
implement the iron austerity model. The power of markets was involved
in that coup too.
Romano Prodi knew very well the dirty game played in secret: he
told Mario Monti that
"When
Italian spreads reach 300 units, you will be asked to govern."
But it
was sloppy and dangerous. Imagine what would have happened if the
Italian people would somehow learn the direct involvement of the
leaders of
other countries and the involvement of the Italian economic elite. A
more elegant, sophisticated, permanent and widely accepted method had
to be established under the disguise of some kind of 'stability
mechanism' for the safety of eurozone. A mechanism that would appear
as purely technocratic, equally implemented to all members, in order
to hide the huge political interference and blackmail.
And
Mario Draghi found it. A year later, in
2012, he
made
a move that would officially
turn
eurozone into a financial dictatorship with the ECB as its basic
tool. The ECB announced unlimited buying of distressed government
bonds. As the Guardian
reported back then:
Draghi
also set strict terms for triggering the bond-buying programme,
putting pressure on the eurozone's political leaders to request help,
enter austerity programmes, and agree on direct bailouts for
struggling governments before the ECB will act. [...]
The new bond-buying scheme, to be known as outright monetary
transactions or OMTs, means that the ECB will intervene in the
secondary markets to buy up the debt of governments whose bond yields
are too high and are therefore jeopardising the uniform conduct of
monetary policy across the eurozone, Draghi said. [...] It is
understood that the ECB believes IMF involvement in the new policy
and future bailouts is essential. Initial reaction from the Fund's
Washington headquarters was extremely positive. [...] Spanish and
Italian 10-year borrowing costs fell to three- and five-month lows
following Draghi's announcements. [...] While Germany's central
banker, Jens Weidmann, has been a vocal monetarist hawk in the
contentious debate leading to Thursday's move, the other German in
the ECB governing council, Jörg Asmussen, played a key role in
drafting the new policy. The government in Berlin has mounted minimal
resistance to the new ECB policy.
In this
blog, we immediately pointed out Draghi's sinister plan. As we wrote
back then, the
ECB becomes a corresponding Fed in the European area, “serving”
the problematic economies that are excluded from the bond markets,
through the print of new money. Therefore, the problematic economies
will be loaded with more and more debt which the ECB, i.e. the
largest private European banks will hold. Someone could argue that is
not something new, since nations were facing huge debts in previous
years, because they were indebted to banks through the excessive
borrowing from the markets. But in this case, there is an important
difference that makes things much worse: it is the cruel conditions
imposed by the ECB to states that need to buy money. States that are
excluded from markets, are now trapped within the neoliberal economic
empire of the eurozone and will be forced to follow new austerity
measures every time they need ECB to buy their bonds.
With a
completely corrupted old political class in most of the eurozone,
which had been fully taken over by the lobbyists and the neoliberal
doctrine, the ECB had now absolute control over the eurozone members
and no one would dare to challenge its authoritarian nature.
It
seemed to be perfect. A silent and peculiar dictatorship, implemented
under the nose of the Europeans, based on ECB's liquidity firepower.
Most eurozone governments would be forced to implement permanent
austerity and cruel neoliberalism under the threat of the exclusion
from the markets. And if someone would dare to take a different path,
the rating agencies would attack in full force, spreads would
skyrocket making impossible for the country to borrow in a reasonable
interest rate, leaving the country with the only option: the ECB
trap. Only this time ECB's money would come under even heavier
conditions. That is, more austerity, more privatizations, more fiscal
discipline. In other words: more cruel neoliberalism.
As
expected, all the bank-occupied mainstream media and the corrupted
political class praised Draghi, as being a kind of heroic figure that
would save eurozone from further trouble.
Yet,
the Greek political storm came in 2015 to destroy the disguise of the
financial dictatorship and spoil the dreams of the financial elites
who believed that their covert dictatorship could last forever with
no problems. The
Greek political establishment collapsed with the rise of SYRIZA in
power, and the ECB was forced to proceed in an open
financial coup
against Greece when the current PM, Alexis Tsipras, decided to
conduct a referendum on the catastrophic measures imposed by the ECB,
IMF and the European Commission, through which the Greek people
clearly rejected these measures, despite the propaganda of terror
inside and outside Greece. Due to the direct threat from Mario Draghi
and the ECB, who actually threatened to cut liquidity sinking Greece
into a financial chaos, Tsipras finally forced to retreat, signing
another catastrophic memorandum.
This
was the last thing eurocrats wanted, simply because the authoritarian
nature of their financial union has now been fully exposed. After
Greece, nothing would be the same. Their hopes that they would impose
cruel neoliberalism throughout Europe without any reaction from the
people has permanently gone. So, now, Italy
came back,
and their panic started to rise again.
What
we see now in Italy is a similar story with Greece, only in larger
scale. The old political class, unquestionably faithful to the
European institutions, has been nearly vanished from the political
landscape. In their panic, the eurocrats stupidly insist on the same
tactics, openly blackmailing and insulting an entire nation, telling
people who to vote for. And that stupid tactic only fuels further
rage against the authoritarian union.
Well,
you know what they say and what actually history teach us: ruthless
empires usually fall due to the enormous arrogance and corruption of
their rulers.
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