In this mailing:
Who Will Suffer As A Result of Euro Policies? The Jews.
by Peter Martino
May 14, 2012 at 5:00 am
May 14, 2012 at 5:00 am
|
Share:
 |
Be the first of your
friends to like this.
It is as if
the U.S. were to renounce the dollar for the "amro," a common
currency with countries as different as Mexico. Colombia, Brazil and Argentina.
A documentary on German television last week revealed that the political class
in Europe knew that the Greeks were cooking the books, but did not care.
Extremist parties of the Left and the Right (all of them anti-Semitic) are
rapidly gaining electoral support at the expense of mainstream parties....
The European Union, and especially its common
currency, the euro, is on the brink of collapse. The Greeks, unable to form a
government after the May 6 elections, will have to go to the polls again next
month. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel is rapidly losing support. If she
cares about her reelection next year, she had better push Greece out of the
eurozone rather than keep that country afloat with German taxpayers' money. If
Greece leaves, the whole euro edifice might come down – a better outcome than
the present situation, in which extremist parties on the Left and the Right
(all of them anti-Semitic) are rapidly gaining electoral support at the expense
of mainstream parties which keep clinging to the failed project of the common
European currency.
A recent program on German television revealed
that former German Chancellor Kohl had exchanged the strong D-mark for the
crisis-prone euro because he wanted to atone for Germany's role in the Second
World War. Contemporary Germans, however, are not inclined to pay for the
Greeks and other southern Europeans to make up for their grandfathers' role in
the Second World War.
The euro project was flawed from the beginning.
It lumped various countries with widely divergent economies, cultures and
languages together in a single monetary union, imposing a "one size fits
none" monetary policy on 17 countries which have little in common but the
fact that they are all located on the European continent. It is as if the U.S.
were to renounce the dollar for the 'amro,' a common currency with countries as
different as Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and Argentina.
In this fashion, a prosperous and industrious
northern European country such as Germany, the economic powerhouse of Europe,
renounced the D-mark for a euro, which also included a nation such as Greece,
where corrupt politicians lied and cheated about the country's dire economic
situation.
A documentary
on German television last week revealed that the political class in Europe knew
that the Greeks were cooking the books, but did not care. The euro was a
political project. Former European Commissioner Frits Bolkestein admitted as
much in the documentary. Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl renounced the
D-mark for a euro which was to include as many countries as possible.
"Kohl was a romantic as far as the EU was concerned," Bolkestein
said. "For Kohl, European unification was the way for Germany to atone for
the Second World War. That is why he wanted to have as many countries in the
eurozone as possible, whether they qualified or not."
Bolkestein admitted that he had misgivings
about the inclusion of countries such as Greece in the eurozone. In the same
documentary, Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank from
2003 to 2011, admitted that the financial crisis in Greece, which is currently
dragging the euro down with it, could only have happened because the EU refused
to see the obvious. It was an eye-opening documentary that enraged many Germans
viewers.
The euro crisis is leading to a general
dissatisfaction of the Europeans with the governing political class, whether
left, the right or center. In less than one and a half years, 10 of the 17
government leaders of the eurozone have been brought down or voted out of
office. This happened in February 2011 to Ireland's centrist Prime Minister
Brian Cowen; in April 2011 to Finland's centrist Prime Minister Mari Kiviniemi;
in June 2011 to Portugal's socialist Prime Minister Jose Socrates; in September
2011 to Slovenia's socialist Prime Minister Borut Pahor; in October 2011 to Slovakia's
center-right Prime Minister Iveta Radicova; in November 2011 to Italy's
center-right Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Greece's socialist Prime
Minister George Papandreou and Spain's socialist Prime Minister Jose Zapatero;
in April 2012 to the Netherlands' center-right Prime Minister Mark Rutte; in
May 2012 to France's center-right President Nicolas Sarkozy.
All ten of them fell -- directly or indirectly
-- as a result of the eurocrisis. It is generally expected that the same fate
will befall Germany's center-right Chancellor Angela Merkel in next year's
German general elections. Merkel is Helmut Kohl's successor as leader of the
Christian-Democrat Party CDU. In last Sunday's state elections in North
Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), Germany's most populous state, where almost a quarter
of all Germans live, the CDU lost its position as the biggest party in the
state to the Socialists. The CDU lost a quarter of its votes, while the Pirate
Party, some of whose leaders acknowledge
that the party is infiltrated by neo-Nazis, entered the NRW state parliament.
The largest European countries, Germany, France
and Italy, which were (or, in Germany's case, are) led by center-right
politicians, are shifting to the left. In countries where the left has lost the
leadership, the extreme-left won significantly in the elections.
Extreme-right parties are also on the rise. In
Greece, the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn won 7% of the vote on May 6. For the first
time, the Nazis entered the Greek parliament, winning no fewer than 21 seats.
Europe's shift to the Left will also affect its
domestic policies: the Left's penchant for deficit spending and
multiculturalism will become dominant again. Rather than bringing peace and
prosperity to Europe, the failed EU project may lead to economic decline and
risky political behavior.
As explained earlier,
the shift in European politics will surely affect Europe's future relations
with the rest of the Western world, in particular the U.S. and Israel. While
Golden Dawn remains a fringe party, the extreme-left Greek Syriza party became
the second biggest party in the country on May 6, surpassing the socialist
Pasok party. Syriza has a party
platform which includes "disengagement from NATO" and
"termination of the military cooperation with Israel." Syriza is
expected to become the largest party when the Greeks are called to the voting
booths again next month.
In France, too, the election victory of the
Socialist Francois Hollande has driven Jewish unease. "More French Jews
will leave France," journalist Melanie
Phillips predicts.
The fact that Kohl's atonement policy for
German crimes during the Second World War has led to the euro disaster is
bitterly ironic: the people bound to suffer the worst as a result of Kohl's
hubristic euro policies are Israel and the Jews.
Related Topics: Peter Martino
Our Intelligence Community: What Are We Getting for Our $80 Billion?
by Peter Huessy
May 14, 2012 at 4:00 am
May 14, 2012 at 4:00 am
|
Share:
|
Be the first of your
friends to like this.
The
briefers knew less than the Commission members they were briefing. What the
intelligence community failed to do was see weapons of mass destruction and
missiles as "instruments of state power," rather than as
"contraband traded contrary to traditional norms."
Americans are justifiably concerned that our
national leaders do not seem to anticipate looming threats. They quite
correctly ask, "What are we getting for the $80 billion a year we pay to
gather intelligence?"
"Don't worry" says the former deputy
director of its Counterterrorist Center: it is not the fault of the
intelligence community: "They screw things up all by themselves" he
states. "On major foreign policy decisions, intelligence is not the decisive
factor".
Is the intelligence community really that
innocent?
Now retired, this same 28-year CIA veteran had
a hand in the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran. The report was
a bombshell: its summary dismissed Iran as a threat to US, effectively taking
it out of the mix of national security issues in the 2008 Presidential
campaign.
This was apparently accomplished by a sleight
of hand. In a footnote, the NIE report clarified that Iran had stopped its
nuclear weapons program in 2003, and that the report was referring only to the
warhead design and not the harder part, the enrichment of uranium and the
production of nuclear weapons fuel.
In this instance, US policy on Iran was being
guided by an intelligence community as an accomplice in dumbing-down our
security assessments to make the "Iranian problem go away." The
former Secretary of Defense, the late Les Aspin, had a phrase for such work:
"They cooked the books."
This was not, however, the first time the
intelligence community was complicit in fooling the American people. After the
election of 1994, Republicans controlled the US Congress for the first time in
half a century. One of the keys to their victory was a call to defend the
United States from ballistic missile threats.
But the CIA had a better idea. it sent the Hill
a new assessment: There would be no threat to the United States from ballistic
missiles for at least the next fifteen years.
The House then narrowly turned down funding for
missile defenses.
Two assumptions made in the assessment,
however, were not made public at the time: (1) any country building such
missiles would have no outside help; and (2) for purposes of the assessment,
the "United States" did not include Alaska and Hawaii.
These revisions managed to cook the books
exactly as the CIA wanted. The threat was sufficiently over the horizon to
require no immediate action on missile defense. And as Hawaii and Alaska were
much closer to one of the major threat countries, North Korea, excluding both
states from the definition of the "United States" was a convenient
way of dismissing the threat that might arise from Pyongyang: missiles able to
strike Hawaii, after all, could be of a much shorter range than those capable
of striking San Francisco.
So the administration, far from ignoring the
intelligence, was perfectly happy to have the "intelligence
community" backstop political opposition to what it saw as dangerous
missile defense ideas. The bias evident in the 1995 threat assessment was,
however, part of a pattern of poor intelligence generated by a host of bad
thinking and wrong assumptions. This incompetence became glaringly evident
three years later.
On March 19, 1999, in a little-known
side-letter to the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of the US
Senate, the members of the Rumsfeld Commission on "Ballistic Missile
Threats to the United States" issued a number of warnings.
Significant missile capabilities were emerging
in a large number of hostile states, and far faster than previously assumed, as
technology and expertise became increasingly available. Worse, our ability to
detect such capability was being increasingly frustrated by our adversaries'
sophisticated deception and denial capabilities.
The letter then highlighted an extraordinary
insight acquired during the Commission's work, that the US intelligence
community viewed ballistic missile acquisition and development by hostile
nations as principally a problem of enforcing nonproliferation measures. What
the intelligence community failed to do was see WMD and missiles "as
instruments of state power" rather than as "contraband traded
contrary to international norms."
The U.S. effort therefore became tracing the
evidence of the commercial activity and determining the complicity of the
seller and its government in the sale of various technologies.
The letter then explained that considerably
less attention is given to the motivation of those who seek to acquire such
capabilities; the leverage that such a purchase might impart to the buyer in
global or regional affairs,; the growth paths for ballistic missile programs;
the likelihood that buyers cooperate among themselves, and the effects of
deception and denial activities.
After one briefing, the Commission members were
apparently told that everything they had heard from the analysts was
"mostly incorrect" because the briefers "did not have access to
the information" the Commission had received or was about to receive from
other "compartments". The briefers, the Commission concluded, knew
less than the Commission members they were briefing.
Recently, Russian General Nikolai Makarov, the
Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Russia, threatened
pre-emptive military strikes against US missile defense sites in Europe.
Russia -- an ally of Iran, with its ballistic
missiles, its nuclear weapons program, and its obedient proxy, Syria -- has
assisted North Korea and Iran in their nuclear and missile programs.
Is there thus any doubt that Moscow is very
much part of terrorism's global coalition?
Related Topics: Peter Huessy
To subscribe to the this mailing list, go to http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/list_subscribe.php
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment