Socializing losses: Trilateral takeover of Europe? …………

http://rt.com

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Published: 13 November, 2011, 19:07
Edited: 14 November, 2011, 02:17

Anti-austerity protesters hold a Greek flag reading ‘not for sale’ during a student parade in Athens, attended by the Greek minister of education (AFP Photo / LOUISA GOULIAMAKI)

The sovereign debt crisis tightening its grip on Europe has claimed the scalps of two prime ministers – those of Greece and Italy. Looking at the men poised to replace them, one cannot but ask – is this another turn of the screw for ordinary people?

Greece and Italy hold huge swathes of public debt they are unable to service unless they get massive European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund support, as a prelude to refinancing by international banks.

Greece has replaced its prime minister after he dared to say he would put a further round of harsh austerity measures to a referendum vote. The country’s new PM is Lucas Papademos, former vice president of the ECB and of Greece’s own Central Bank, and a member of David Rockefeller’s (JPMorgan Chase/Exxon) powerful Trilateral Commission.

As for Italy, instead of Silvio Berlusconi they got the former European Commissioner Mario Monti, who happens to be European chairman of the Trilateral Commission.

Whenever we hear of “sovereign debt crises” – whether in Mexico 1997, Brazil 1999, in my native Argentina in 2001/2, or today in Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and (soon to come) the UK, France, or the US – what it really means is that governments cannot collect enough tax revenues from their people to pay interest and capital on debt that is mostly in the hands of private banking institutions.

Cutting through the Orwellian Newspeak* of the media, this means that the people of Greece, Italy, and Argentina must pay for the mistakes of bankers and corrupt governments, suffering higher taxes, unemployment, lower wages and pensions, and a deterioration in public healthcare, education, and infrastructure.

So, whenever there is a public debt crisis, “We the People” must pay for it.

­Adrian Salbuchi is a political analyst, author, speaker and radio/TV commentator in Argentina

However, when in September 2008a private debt crisis exploded due to the derivatives swindle which buried Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, AIG and many other private institutions, the US and other governments came to the rescue of the bankers, providing bailouts for banks “too big to fail” (Newspeak for too powerful to fail). They saved the likes of CitiCorp, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs with…. taxpayers money (TARP), and by having the FED (hyper)inflate the US dollar (know in Newspeak as “Quantitative Easing I, II and III”), which means passing a huge chunk of the cost of those bailouts on to the Rest of the World using the US dollar as global currency.

So again, irrespective of whether debt collapses are public or private, it is always “We the People” who pay because, under the current system, all profits are privatized and all losses are socialized.

But let us go back to Messrs Monti and Papademos. They sit on the Trilateral Commission together with hundreds of corporate chairmen and CEOs such as Ana Botin (Bank Banesto/Santander, Spain), Peter Sutherland (Goldman Sachs/BP, UK), Michel David-Weill (Lazard Bank, France), Jurgen Fitschen (Deutsche Bank, Germany), Stephen Green (HSBC, UK), Nigel Higgins (Rothschild Group, UK), Lord Guthrie (N M Rothschild, UK), Klaus-Peter Müller (Commerzbank, Germany), Dieter Rampl (UniCredito, Italy), Otto Ruding (CitiCorp Europe), Lord Simon of Highbury (Morgan Stanley, UK), Emilio Ybarra (BBVA, Spain), Robert Kelly (Bank of NY Mellon) Lord Brittan (UBS, UK), Robert Zoellick (World Bank), plus Timothy Geithner, Henry Kissinger and many, many others…

In fact, the Trilateral Commission articulates with the powerful Council on Foreign Relations (New York), Chatham House (London) and many other think-tanks forming an intricate web of private global power-brokers bringing together key players in finance, industry, media, government, academia, intelligence and the military, who run today’s global system focusing on their interests, and clearly not on those of “We the People.”

No doubt Messrs Papademos and Monti will do everything necessary to ensure Italy and Greece do not default on their debts – but rather that their peoples endure all the hardship, undergo all the pain, and make all the sacrifices so that major bankers sitting on the Trilateral can all get their money back. Those who should never have made loans to Greece and Italy (and Argentina and Portugal…) the way they did.

Adrian Salbuchi for RT

* Newspeak – a fictional language in George Orwell’s novel “1984”.

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Ex-Bush Adviser: Germany Prints Old Currency in Case Euro Ditched ……….

http://www.moneynews.com

Tuesday, 04 Oct 2011 01:06 PM

By Michael Kling

Germany is printing deutsche marks in preparation to leave the euro common currency, says Philippa Malmgren, a former economics adviser to George W. Bush.”My view is that it is Germany that will have to pull out of the euro,” Malmgren said at an investors’ conference in London recently, according to the Citywire news website.

“The decision has already been made by the government that leaving the euro is a possibility. I think they have already got the printing machines going and are bringing out the old deutsche marks they have left over from when the euro was introduced.”

Malmgren, co-founder of Principalis Asset Management, acknowledged that leaving the euro would be a radical move that would cause Germany’s export prices to jump, but said German industries are strong enough to handle price increases, Citywire reported.

Other countries have let currency unions before, Malmgren said, citing the report, “Checking Out: Exits from Currency Unions.”

Countries leaving currency unions are usually larger, wealthier, and more democratic and typically have higher inflation than their partners, according to the report, published by the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

Malmgren predicts that more eurozone countries will default, causing deep changes in society, Citywire reported. “It is important to begin preparing the public to deal with this situation.”

Malmgren isn’t the only one saying the euro is in trouble.

“The euro is nearing its ugly end,” said Stefan Homburg, head of Germany’s Institute for Public Finance, according to The Telegraph. “A collapse of monetary union now appears unavoidable.”

The Bundestag, Germany’s legislature, approved more bailout funds for Greece but the growing rescue fund is becoming increasingly unpopular in Germany. Many economists and investment professionals say the fund is not large enough to save Greece and other eurozone countries from defaulting.

Meanwhile, Ireland’s central bank reportedly is printing Ireland’s old currency in case that country leaves the eurozone. At least that’s the rumor circulating in Dublin, notes Alan McQuaid, chief economist at Bloxham stockbrokers in that city.

McQuaid, writing a guest commentary for The Guardian, says he’s not sure if the rumor is true. But he does hope Ireland has contingency plans in case the euro disintegrates.
© Moneynews. All rights reserved.

Read more: Ex-Bush Adviser: Germany Prints Old Currency in Case Euro Ditched

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London on Fire ! ………….

Norway Premier “Begged” Putin To Stop Massacre Planned By “Elites” ………

Posted by EU Times on Jul 25th, 2011

A startling Federal Security Service (FSB) report on the 22 July massacre in Norway states that two-days prior to this catastrophic attack Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg [photo top right with Putin] placed an “urgent” call to Putin “begging” Russia’s leader to help stop the events that left nearly 100 innocent civilians dead.

According to the FSB, Stoltenberg first learned of this plot against his country this past Wednesday after reading a “top secret” report prepared for him by the Norwegian Intelligence Service (NIS) on the late March computer attack against Norway’s top military leaders that showed them involved in a conspiracy with Britain’s MI5 Security Service and the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to launch a “two-phase” attack upon Norway modeled after false-flag operations in both Australia and America in the mid-nineties.

The false-flag operations being modeled in Norway were based on the 19 April 1995 bombing attack on the Oklahoma Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building said caused a lone right-wing Christian fundamentalist who used a fertilizer bomb that killed 168, and the 28 April 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Australia where a lone gunman killed 35 mainly because the police failed to show up in a timely manner, and which the aftermath of both attacks caused a fundamental shift away from freedoms and liberties these peoples once enjoyed.

The FSB further reports that this false-flag attack on Norway was a “clear textbook example” of an Operation Northwoods operation designed and prepared by US Military experts. Operation Northwoods was a series of false-flag proposals that originated within the United States government in 1962. The proposals called for the CIA or other operatives, to commit acts of terrorism in US cities and elsewhere in order to influence public opinion and have been used by many Western governments over these past five decades.

FSB experts note in this report that the false-flag attacks on Norway further mirror those of Oklahoma City and Port Arthur in: 1.) A large vehicle holding a powerful fertilizer bomb was able to gain undetected entrance to a protected government centre; 2.) The armed police response to an ongoing massacre of civilians was delayed for reasons still not explained; 3.) A lone suspect has been indentified as the sole perpetrator of the attacks contrary to witness statements that more people were involved; 4.) The lone suspect is denied the right to an open hearing before the public.

This report also notes that within hours of these attacks occurring, a “virtual flood” of information relating to the suspected mastermind of this massacre was released indentifying him as a “blond-haired blue-eyed” Norwegian named Anders Behring Breivik and caricatured as a right-wing Christian fundamentalist. A person which (coincidentally?) the United States had warned barely 24-hours earlier in a video released by their Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was the type of person they feared most would carry out such a terror attack.

The critical problem with the flood of information being released on/or by Breivik, the FSB asserts, is to what is true and what isn’t. This issue was made even more important by American computer experts noting that the Facebook page said belonging to Breivik appears to have been faked, and as they note:

1: Why is there a version of Anders Behring Breivik’s Facebook profile not showing Christian / Conservative? Even Google’s cache of the Facebook profile retrieved on Jul 22, 2011 23:52:36 GMT supports this factor.

2: How was Christian / Conservative added prior to the profile being removed from Facebook? If our PDF was printed out/saved at Jul 23 01:39 GMT, and the profile was deleted soon afterwards by Facebook, how was a detained Anders Behring Breivik able to change it?

3: Which then needs to be asked, Who had access to in changing the Profile before it was removed?

Aside from the “most likely” faked Facebook page, Breivik is, also, said to have posted an astonishingly detailed 1,500-page manifesto and video [view on left] titled “2083: A European Declaration Of Independence” datelined “London, 2011” on the Internet that claims “the number of Muslims in Western Europe is “reaching critical mass” and there is a core of Cultural Communist elites in Western Europe who really want to destroy Western civilization” and that “Europe will burn again.”

Breivik further said he regarded himself as a successor to the medieval Knights Templar, and claimed to have been recruited at a meeting in London in April 2002, which was hosted by two English extremists and attended by eight people in total. Breivik’s ties with London, and hence MI5, was due to his father being a top economist at the Norwegian Embassy in London where Anders was described as a “mummy’s boy” and “privileged” son of an elite liberal family. [Especially interesting to note about this description of “mummy boy” Breivik is his stating that the main target of his attack was Norway’s “Mother of the Nation” and former Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland.]

The FSB, however, in this report disputes Breivik’s ties with the Knights Templar stating, instead, that this false-flag attack has provided an “ancillary benefit” to the West’s royal and banking elite classes in discrediting this ancient order as “open warfare” between them looms, and as we had detailed in our 21 July report “Murdoch Threat To Expose Obama As “Christ-Child” Ignites Western Fury.”

To the reason(s) behind this attack, this FSB report states, is a “desperate attempt” by British, European Union and American banking interests to force Norway into their “union” [Norway is not a member of the EU] in order to loot their Sovereign Wealth Fund of its estimated $1.5 Trillion in wealth which without the entire Western economy may collapse. Important note, the FSB says, is that what is being done to Norway has already been done to Libya when in what is now called the “Financial Heist of the Century” these same elites launched an unprovoked attack upon this North African nation and promptly looted it of nearly $150 Billion of their Sovereign Wealth Fund in order to sustain their crumpling empire.

Though there is more, much more, contained in this FSB report that we will have to examine further in order to report to you on it accurately upon it. So, and in closing this first report on this tragedy we’ll end with some of the words attributed to Breivik that in light of what this whole issue is being made out to be do, indeed, note us paying attention to them:

“A majority of the people I know support my views, they are just apathetic. They know that there will be a confrontation one day, but they don’t care because it will most likely not happen within the next two decades I am a pioneer in this fight, and I have no doubt whatsoever that we will see a political shift in our favor sooner than we might expect. It might look grim at the moment, but we are after all fighting a self-defeating ideology (Cultural Communism that is, not Islam). The only pragmatic approach towards Islam is to isolate it to Muslim countries once we are in a position to do so — on September 11th, 2083.”

Source

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Netherlands first EU country to enshrine net neutrality into law

http://euobserver.com

HONOR MAHONY

23.06.2011 @ 09:26 CET

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS – The Netherlands on Wednesday (22 June) became the first EU member state to enshrine in law the concept of net neutrality, the idea that there should be no hierarchy of information or services in the internet.

The measure, passed by a large majority in the lower house and expected to pass without hitch through the senate, will prevent Dutch mobile telephone operators from blocking or charging consumers more for using internet-based communications services.

Verhagen: ‘This measure guarantees a completely free Internet which both citizens and the providers of the online services can then rely on’ (Photo: Rupert Ganzer)

It will also prevent Dutch telecommunications company KPN as well as the Dutch arms of Vodafone and T-Mobile from blocking or charging for internet services such as Skype

“The blocking of services or the imposition of a levy is a brake on innovation,” deputy prime minister Maxime Verhagen said, according to the New York Times.

“That’s not good for the economy. This measure guarantees a completely free Internet which both citizens and the providers of the online services can then rely on.”

Net neutrality is one of the hottest global regulatory issues around. Internet service providers argue they need to be allowed to charge premiums for some services, such as the video-sharing website YouTube, which they say congest the networks.

Digital activists meanwhile say that data on the information highway needs to be treated without discrimination regardless of their nature or source, otherwise a hierarchy will be introduced whereby some information is only available to those who can pay.

The European consumers group, Beuc, welcomed the “landmark” initiative.

“Contrary to the EU Telecoms Package and the UK approach, where transparency of traffic management is the tiny step taken, this Dutch law safeguards consumers’ right to have access to the content, service and applications of their choice,” said the group’s Monique Goyens.

The telecommunications industry immediately warned that the law may put operators off from making investments in high-speed net infrastructure, for fear of not recouping their money.

The Dutch law is the first such in the EU and second globally. Chile has also written net neutrality into its telecommunications law that came into effect in May.

So far the EU has indicated it will not introduce legislation to protect net neutrality. In April, digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes said she would leave it to the markets to self-regulate.

Her report on the issue said that traffic management on the Internet “is necessary to ensure the smooth flow of internet traffic, particularly at times when networks become congested, and so guarantee a consistent good quality of service.”

However, she would not hesitate to come up with “more stringent measures” if Brussels deems that internet service providers go too far in their “traffic management” measures.

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The Invincible (Los Invencibles) at Plaza Cataluña

Los Invencibles de la plaza Cataluña – May 27th, 2011

http://dprogram.net

Spanish Police Beat And Shoot Peaceful Protesters And Journalists

http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com

Posted by Alexander Higgins – May 27, 2011 at 3:54 pm – Permalink – Source via Alexander Higgins Blog

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In attempt to crack down on the peaceful protests spreading all over Europe that originated in spain, police have been dispatched to disperse the protesters who refuse to move. Watch as the Spanish Police Beat And Shoot Peaceful Protesters and Journalists.

The mainstream media remains silent as if the protests aren’t even happening. Will president Obama give Spain the same ultimatum to stop cracking down on peaceful protesters that he has given to Libya and Syria? The Associated Press and Reuters report that 121 people were injured by the police crackdown in Spain today.

The report of 121 injuries followed a BBC report of dozens of reported injuries earlier today.

Dozens injured after riot police and youths collision Barcelona

The riot police cracked down hard this morning against sit-in demonstration of young people in Barcelona.  AP Photo / Emilio Morenatti

by Pim van den Dool

AbroadSpanish riot police have intervened hard this morning when a youth demonstration in the Plaza de Cataluna in Barcelona. Including through the use of rubber bullets and batons on the square there were dozens of wounded.

About fifty people held a sit-in demonstration in a makeshift tent camp and blocked the road for trucks of the local appliance. The police arrived a few minutes then collided with the young demonstrators. In the confrontation between police and young people were a total of 43 minor injuries, including a cop. Five people were taken to hospital.

Source: BBC NL

Here are some videos of the protests and the violent police crackdown

Spanish Police beat on innocent protesters in a crowd and even on a journalist taking photos.

Indignats | Desallotjament de la Plaça Catalunya

Spanish Police Beat And Shoot Peaceful Protesters, Journalists

Retirada de Mossos de Plaza Cataluña. Desalojo 27-M

This video shows the Spanish Police beating protesters and even driving by in vehicle and shooting protesters.

More protests are scheduled all over Europe this weekend.

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Media Ignores #SpanishRevolution As It Turns To #WorldRevolution

http://dprogram.net

(HigginsBlog) – I previously wrote that the revolution has began in Spain.

The Revolution Has Started In Spain (Update 5)

The revolution has started in Spain as tens of thousands take to the streets in protest of high unemployment and draconian austerity measures.Read more…

While that post has received the attention it has deserved by making it to the front page of social networking sites like reddit I am shocked the media – both the Mainstream media and the alternative media – has been quiet on this issue.

Regardless of the lack of coverage, check out this map of protests sites that have popped up around the world in the name of protest against the corrupt bankers and goverments (details on the map below).

Camp Sites Around The World That Have Popped Up In The Name Of Revolution Calling For Real Democracy

To be fair, as I pointed out in the post above, there has been coverage on this story –  which has been buried –  in several corporate media publications but none that reveal that there is a worldwide call for revolution breaking out around the world.

Indeed the #SpanishRevolution has quickly grown beyond just being Spanish. First it grew into the #EuropeanRevolution with revolution protest sites being set up throughout Europe. Then with in a matter of days it has  become the #WorldRevolution as protests sites spread across the US. (More on these #hash tags below) (Yes.. the media hasn’t ran any stories but there are plenty of YouTube videos confirming #WorldRevolution protests through the United States… Come on Wake UP! Of course the media is going to bury this story)

In fact 676 different camp sites – were revolutionary protestors have set up camps, including tents, in public owned areas – have been set up worldwide including dozens of places here in the United States.

The media can ignore the revolution all they want but the fact is citizens around the world are fed up and the are coming out in full force saying the revolution against corrupt governments and bankers has began. Media coverage or not, over 22 million people hitting the streets saying this is a revolution, and those numbers growing daily… well I call it a revolution.

With or without media coverage, people are organizing and spreading the world through online social networking tools. Here is a map that that has been set up to track revolution camp sites around the world and the number of revolution sites has grown to over 676 around the world with several sites here in the United States alone.

You can put the revolution camp map on your website with this code…

<iframe style=”width: 600px; height: 350px; border: 0;” src=”http://www.thetechnoant.info/campmap/frame.php”>

Again word is being spread via social networking using hashtags including #SpanishRevolution, #EuropeRevolution and #WorldRevolution. The media is not covering this but be assured the movement is in fact real with millions of people hitting the streets around the world.

The question is America, are you ready to hit the street yet in protest of our own government? Several sites have already sprung up across the nation. Will you join in the protests?

To see this is real, you can visit the following revolution facebook pages which are popping up daily around the world.e:

• Ya ha empezado
• ¡DEMOCRACIA REAL YA! Monterrey
• Global Liberation Network
• Italian Revolution – Ancona
• Democracy Now!
• ΠΡΑΓΜΑΤΙΚΗ ΔΗΜΟΚΡΑΤΙΑ ΤΩΡΑ!! – DEMOCRACIA REAL YA, GRECIA
• Love & Support from Egypt
• Democracia real ya La Plata
• Mouvement 26 juin pour une nouvelle France
• Italian Revolution – Bologna
• Portuguese Revolution
• Call for a revolution in Ireland
• Revolución global YA
• Spanish Revolution, Italian Revolution – Democrazia reale ora -

The following twitter has tags are being used to discuss via twitter.

• #SpanishRevolution
• #EuropeanRevolution
• #WorldRevolution
• #acampadaprat
• #dutchrevolution
• #frenchrevolution
• #globalcamp
• #portugueserevolution
• #yeswecamp
• #brusselscamp

So we have the Dutch, the French, the Portugese, the Italian, The Spanish, The English, The Irish, people all over the world coming out in revolutionary protest…

Is it time to add #AmericanRevolution to the #GlobalRevolution?

Regardless, this is a story that should be getting lots of attention from both the Alternative and the Corporate media.

Source: Alexander Higgins Blog

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When Irish Eyes Are Crying

found on : http://dailybail.com

org. source : http://www.vanityfair.com

First Iceland. Then Greece. Now Ireland, which headed for bankruptcy with its own mysterious logic. In 2000, suddenly among the richest people in Europe, the Irish decided to buy their country—from one another. After which their banks and government really screwed them. So where’s the rage?

By Michael Lewis•

Photograph by Jonas Fredwall Karlsson

March 2011

CRASH COURSE
University College Dublin professor Morgan Kelly, in Hogans pub, in Dublin. He predicted the Irish Crash in 2006.

When I flew to Dublin in early November, the Irish government was busy helping the Irish people come to terms with their loss. It had been two years since a handful of Irish politicians and bankers decided to guarantee all the debts of the country’s biggest banks, but the people were only now getting their minds around what that meant for them. The numbers were breathtaking. A single bank, Anglo Irish, which, two years before, the Irish government had claimed was merely suffering from a “liquidity problem,” faced losses of up to 34 billion euros. To get some sense of how “34 billion euros” sounds to Irish ears, an American thinking in dollars needs to multiply it by roughly one hundred: $3.4 trillion. And that was for a single bank. As the sum total of loans made by Anglo Irish, most of it to Irish property developers, was only 72 billion euros, the bank had lost nearly half of every dollar it invested.

The two other big Irish banks, Bank of Ireland and, especially, Allied Irish Banks (A.I.B.), remained Ireland’s dirty little secrets. Both older than Ireland itself (the Bank of Ireland was founded back in 1783; A.I.B. is made up of three banks founded in the 19th century), both were now also obviously bust. The Irish government owned big chunks of the two ancient banks but revealed less about them. As they had lent vast sums not only to Irish property developers but also to Irish homebuyers, their losses were also obviously vast—and similar in spirit to the losses at the upstart Anglo Irish.

Even in an era when capitalists went out of their way to destroy capitalism, the Irish bankers set some kind of record for destruction. Theo Phanos, a London hedge-fund manager with interests in Ireland, says that “Anglo Irish was probably the world’s worst bank. Even worse than the Icelandic banks.”

Ireland’s financial disaster shared some things with Iceland’s. It was created by the sort of men who ignore their wives’ suggestions that maybe they should stop and ask for directions, for instance. But while Icelandic males used foreign money to conquer foreign places—trophy companies in Britain, chunks of Scandinavia—the Irish male used foreign money to conquer Ireland. Left alone in a dark room with a pile of money, the Irish decided what they really wanted to do with it was to buy Ireland. From one another. An Irish economist named Morgan Kelly, whose estimates of Irish bank losses have been the most prescient, made a back-of-the-envelope calculation that puts the losses of all Irish banks at roughly 106 billion euros. (Think $10 trillion.) At the rate money currently flows into the Irish treasury, Irish bank losses alone would absorb every penny of Irish taxes for at least the next three years.

In recognition of the spectacular losses, the entire Irish economy has almost dutifully collapsed. When you fly into Dublin you are traveling, for the first time in 15 years, against the traffic. The Irish are once again leaving Ireland, along with hordes of migrant workers. In late 2006, the unemployment rate stood at a bit more than 4 percent; now it’s 14 percent and climbing toward rates not experienced since the mid-1980s. Just a few years ago, Ireland was able to borrow money more cheaply than Germany; now, if it can borrow at all, it will be charged interest rates nearly 6 percent higher than Germany, another echo of a distant past. The Irish budget deficit—which three years ago was a surplus—is now 32 percent of its G.D.P., the highest by far in the history of the Eurozone. One credit-analysis firm has judged Ireland the third-most-likely country to default. Not quite as risky for the global investor as Venezuela, but riskier than Iraq. Distinctly Third World, in any case.

Yet when I arrived, in early November 2010, Irish politics had a frozen-in-time quality to it. In Iceland, the business-friendly conservative party had been quickly tossed out of power, and the women booted the alpha males out of the banks and government. (Iceland’s new prime minister is a lesbian.) In Greece the business-friendly conservative party was also given the heave-ho, and the new government is attempting to create a sense of collective purpose, or at any rate persuade the citizens to quit cheating on their taxes. (The new Greek prime minister is not merely upstanding, but barely Greek.) Ireland was the first European country to watch its entire banking system fail, and yet its business-friendly conservative party, Fianna Fáil (pronounced “Feena Foil”), would remain in office into 2011. There’s been no Tea Party movement, no Glenn Beck, no serious protests of any kind. The most obvious change in the country’s politics has been the role played by foreigners. The Irish government and Irish banks are crawling with American investment bankers and Australian management consultants and faceless Euro-officials, referred to inside the Department of Finance simply as “the Germans.” Walk the streets at night and, through restaurant windows, you see important-looking men in suits, dining alone, studying important-looking papers. In some new and strange way Dublin is now an occupied city: Hanoi, circa 1950. “The problem with Ireland is that you’re not allowed to work with Irish people anymore,” I was told by an Irish property developer, who was finding it difficult to escape the hundreds of millions of euros in debt he owed.

Ireland’s regress is especially unsettling because of the questions it raises about Ireland’s former progress: even now no one is quite sure why the Irish suddenly did so well for themselves in the first place. Between 1845 and 1852, during the Great Potato Famine, the country experienced the greatest loss of population in world history—in a nation of eight million, a million and a half people left. Another million starved to death or died from the effects of hunger. Inside of a decade the nation went from being among the most densely populated in Europe to the least. The founding of the Irish state, in 1922, might have offered some economic hope—they could now have their own central bank, their own economic policies—but right up until the end of the 1980s the Irish failed to do what economists expected them to: catch up with their neighbors’ standard of living. As recently as the 1980s one million Irish people—a third of the population—lived below the poverty line.

What has occurred in Ireland since then is without precedent in economic history. By the start of the new millennium, the Irish poverty rate was under 6 percent and by 2006 Ireland was one of the richest countries in the world. How did that happen? A bright young Irishman who got himself hired by Bear Stearns in the late 1990s and went off to New York or London for five years returned feeling poor. For the better part of a decade there has been quicker money to be made in Irish real estate than in investment banking. How did that happen?

For the first time in history, people and money longed to get into Ireland rather than out of it. The most dramatic case in point are the Poles. The Polish government keeps no comprehensive statistics on the movement of its workforce, but its foreign ministry guesstimates that, since the country’s admission to the European Union, more than a million Poles have left Poland to work elsewhere. At the peak, in 2006, as many as a quarter-million of them were in Ireland. For the United States to achieve a proportionally distortive demographic effect, it would need to hand green cards to 17 million Mexicans.

How did any of this happen? There are many theories: the elimination of trade barriers, the decision to grant free public higher education, the persistent lowering of the corporate tax rate, beginning in the 1980s, which turned Ireland into a tax haven for foreign corporations. Maybe the most intriguing was offered by a pair of demographers at Harvard, David E. Bloom and David Canning, in a 2003 paper called “Contraception and the Celtic Tiger.” Bloom and Canning argued that a major cause of the Irish boom was a dramatic increase in the ratio of working-age to non-working-age Irish brought about by a crash in the Irish birthrate. This had been driven mainly by Ireland’s decision, in 1979, to legalize birth control. That is, a nation’s fidelity to the Vatican’s edicts was inversely proportional to its ability to climb out of poverty: out of the slow death of the Catholic Church arose an economic miracle.

The Harvard demographers admitted their theory explained only part of what had happened. At the bottom of the success of the Irish there remains, even now, some mystery. “It appeared like a miraculous beast materializing in a forest clearing,” writes the pre-eminent Irish historian R. F. Foster, “and economists are still not entirely sure why.” Not knowing why they were so suddenly so successful, the Irish can perhaps be forgiven for not knowing exactly how successful they were meant to be. They had gone from being abnormally poor to being abnormally rich, without pausing to experience normality. When, in the early 2000s, the financial markets began to offer virtually unlimited credit to all comers—when nations were let into the dark room with the pile of money and asked what they would like to do with it—the Irish were already in a peculiarly vulnerable state of mind. They’d spent the better part of a decade under something very like a magic spell.

A few months after the spell was broken, the short-term parking-lot attendants at Dublin Airport noticed that their daily take had fallen. The lot appeared full; they couldn’t understand it. Then they noticed the cars never changed. They phoned the Dublin police, who in turn traced the cars to Polish construction workers, who had bought them with money borrowed from Irish banks. The migrant workers had ditched the cars and gone home. Rumor has it that a few months later the Bank of Ireland sent three collectors to Poland to see what they could get back, but they had no luck. The Poles were untraceable: but for their cars in the short-term parking lot, they might never have existed.

True Love’s First Kiss

Morgan Kelly is a professor of economics at University College Dublin, but he did not, until recently, view it as his business to think much about the economy under his nose. He had written a handful of highly regarded academic papers on topics (such as “The Economic Impact of the Little Ice Age”) considered abstruse even by academic economists. “I only stumbled on this catastrophe by accident,” he says. “I had never been interested in the Irish economy. The Irish economy is tiny and boring.” Kelly saw house prices rising madly and heard young men in Irish finance to whom he had recently taught economics try to explain why the boom didn’t trouble them. And they troubled him. “Around the middle of 2006 all these former students of ours working for the banks started to appear on TV!” he says. “They were now all bank economists, and they were nice guys and all that. And they were all saying the same thing: ‘We’re going to have a soft landing.’ ”

The statement struck him as absurd: real-estate bubbles never end with soft landings. A bubble is inflated by nothing firmer than expectations. The moment people cease to believe that house prices will rise forever, they will notice what a terrible long-term investment real estate has become and flee the market, and the market will crash. It was in the nature of real-estate booms to end with crashes—just as it was perhaps in Morgan Kelly’s nature to assume that, if his former students were cast on Irish TV as financial experts, something was amiss. “I just started Googling things,” he says.

Googling things, Kelly learned that more than a fifth of the Irish workforce was employed building houses. The Irish construction industry had swollen to become nearly a quarter of the country’s G.D.P.—compared with less than 10 percent in a normal economy—and Ireland was building half as many new houses a year as the United Kingdom, which had almost 15 times as many people to house. He learned that since 1994 the average price for a Dublin home had risen more than 500 percent. In parts of the city, rents had fallen to less than 1 percent of the purchase price—that is, you could rent a million-dollar home for less than $833 a month. The investment returns on Irish land were ridiculously low: it made no sense for capital to flow into Ireland to develop more of it. Irish home prices implied an economic growth rate that would leave Ireland, in 25 years, three times as rich as the United States. (“A price/earning ratio above Google’s,” as Kelly put it.) Where would this growth come from? Since 2000, Irish exports had stalled, and the economy had been consumed with building houses and offices and hotels. “Competitiveness didn’t matter,” says Kelly. “From now on we were going to get rich building houses for each other.”

The endless flow of cheap foreign money had teased a new trait out of a nation. “We are sort of a hard, pessimistic people,” says Kelly. “We don’t look on the bright side.” Yet, since the year 2000, a lot of people had behaved as if each day would be sunnier than the last. The Irish had discovered optimism.

Their real-estate boom had the flavor of a family lie: it was sustainable so long as it went unquestioned, and it went unquestioned so long as it appeared sustainable. After all, once the value of Irish real estate came untethered from rents there was no value for it that couldn’t be justified. The 35 million euros Irish entrepreneur Denis O’Brien paid for an impressive manor house on Dublin’s Shrewsbury Road sounded like a lot until a trust controlled by the real-estate developer Sean Dunne’s wife reportedly paid 58 million euros for a 4,000-square-foot fixer-upper just down the street. But the minute you compared the rise in prices to real-estate booms elsewhere and at other times, you re-anchored the conversation; you biffed the narrative. The comparisons that sprung to Morgan Kelly’s mind were with the housing bubbles in the Netherlands in the 1970s and Finland in the 1980s, but it almost didn’t matter which examples he picked: the mere idea that Ireland was not sui generis was the panic-making thought. “There is an iron law of house prices,” he wrote. “The more house prices rise relative to income and rents, the more they subsequently fall.”

The problem for Kelly, once he had these thoughts, was what to do with them. “This isn’t my day job,” he says. “I was working on medieval-population theory.”

By the time I got to him, Kelly had angered and alienated the entire Irish business and political establishments, but he himself is neither angry nor alienated, nor even especially public. He’s not the pundit type. He works in an office built when Irish higher education was conducted on linoleum floors, beneath fluorescent lights, surrounded by metal bookshelves, and generally felt more like a manufacturing enterprise than a prep school for real estate and finance—and he likes it. He’s puckish, unrehearsed, and apparently—though in Ireland one wants to be careful about using this word—sane. Though not exactly self-effacing, he is clearly more comfortable talking and thinking about subjects other than himself. He spent years in graduate school, collecting a doctorate from Yale, and yet somehow retained an almost child-like curiosity. “I was in this position—sort of being a passenger on this ship,” he says. “And you see a big iceberg. And so you go and ask the captain: Is that an iceberg?”

His warning to his ship’s captain took the form of his first-ever newspaper article. Its bottom line: “It is not implausible that [Irish real-estate] prices could fall—relative to income—by 40 to 50 per cent.” (They did.) He sent his piece to the small-circulation Irish Times. “It was a whim,” he says. “I’m not even sure that I believed what I was saying at the time. My position has always been ‘You can’t predict the future.’ ” As it happened, Kelly had predicted the future with uncanny accuracy, but to believe what he was saying you had to accept that Ireland was not some weird exception in human financial history. “It had no impact,” Kelly says of his piece. “The response was general amusement. It was What will these crazy eggheads come up with next? sort of stuff.”

What the crazy egghead came up with next was the obvious link between Irish real-estate prices and Irish banks. After all, the vast majority of the construction was being funded by Irish banks. If the real-estate market collapsed, they would be on the hook for the losses. “I eventually figured out what was going on,” says Kelly. “The average value and number of new mortgages peaked in summer 2006. But lending standards were clearly falling after this.” The banks continued to make worse loans, but people borrowing the money to buy houses were growing wary. “What was happening,” says Kelly, “is that a lot of people were getting cold feet.” The consequences for Irish banks—and the economy—of the inevitable shift in market sentiment would be catastrophic. The banks’ losses would lead them to slash their lending to actually useful businesses. Irish citizens in hock to their banks would cease to spend. And, perhaps worst of all, new construction, on which the entire economy was now premised, would cease.

Kelly wrote his second newspaper article, more or less predicting the collapse of the Irish banks. He pointed out that in the last decade they and the economy had fundamentally changed. In 1997 the Irish banks were funded entirely by Irish deposits. By 2005 they were getting most of their money from abroad. The small German savers who ultimately supplied the Irish banks with deposits to re-lend in Ireland could take their money back with the click of a computer mouse. Since 2000, lending to construction and real estate had risen from 8 percent of Irish bank lending (the European norm) to 28 percent. One hundred billion euros—or basically the sum total of all Irish public bank deposits—had been handed over to Irish property developers and speculators. By 2007, Irish banks were lending 40 percent more to property developers than they had to the entire Irish population seven years earlier. “You probably think that the fact that Irish banks have given speculators €100 billion to gamble with, safe in the knowledge that taxpayers will cover most losses, is a cause of concern to the Irish Central Bank,” Kelly wrote, “but you would be quite wrong.”

This time Kelly sent his piece to a newspaper with a far bigger circulation, the Irish Independent. The Independent’s editor wrote back to say he found the article offensive and wouldn’t publish it. Kelly next turned to The Sunday Business Post, but the editor there just sat on the piece. The journalists were following the bankers’ lead and conflating a positive outlook on real-estate prices with a love of country and a commitment to Team Ireland. (“They’d all use this same phrase, ‘You’re either for us or against us,’ ” says a prominent bank analyst in Dublin.) Kelly finally went back to The Irish Times, which ran his article in September 2007.

A brief and, to Kelly’s way of thinking, pointless controversy ensued. The public-relations guy at University College Dublin called the head of the department of economics and asked him to find someone to write a learned attack on Kelly’s piece. (The department head refused.) A senior executive at Anglo Irish Bank, Matt Moran, called to holler at Kelly. “He went on about how ‘the real-estate developers who are borrowing from us are so incredibly rich they are only borrowing from us as a favor.’ I wanted to argue, but we ended up having lunch. This is Ireland, after all.” Kelly also received a flurry of worried-sounding messages from financial people in London, but of these he was dismissive: “I get the impression there’s this pool of analysts in the financial markets who spend all day sending scary e-mails to each other.” He never found out how much influence his little newspaper piece exerted on the minds of people who mattered.

It wasn’t until almost exactly one year later, on September 29, 2008, that Morgan Kelly became the startled object of popular interest. The stocks of the three main Irish banks, Anglo Irish, A.I.B., and Bank of Ireland, had fallen by between a fifth and a half in a single trading session, and a run on Irish bank deposits had started. The Irish government was about to guarantee all the obligations of the six biggest Irish banks. The most plausible explanation for all of this was Morgan Kelly’s narrative: the Irish economy had become a giant Ponzi scheme and the country was effectively bankrupt. But it was so starkly at odds with the story peddled by Irish government officials and senior Irish bankers—that the banks merely had a “liquidity” problem and that Anglo Irish was “fundamentally sound”—that the two could not be reconciled. The government had a report thrown together by Merrill Lynch, which declared that “all of the Irish banks are profitable and well capitalised.” The difference between this official line and Kelly’s was too vast to be split. You believed either one or the other, and until September 2008, who was going to believe this guy holed up in his office wasting his life writing about the impact of the Little Ice Age on the English population? “I went on TV,” says Kelly. “I’ll never do it again.”

Kelly’s colleagues in the University College economics department watched his transformation from serious academic to amusing crackpot to disturbingly prescient guru with interest. One was Colm McCarthy, who, in the Irish recession of the late 1980s, had played a high-profile role in slashing government spending, and so had experienced the intersection of finance and public opinion. In McCarthy’s view, the dominant narrative inside the head of the average Irish citizen—and his receptiveness to the story Kelly was telling—changed at roughly 10 o’clock in the evening on October 2, 2008. On that night, Ireland’s financial regulator, a lifelong Central Bank bureaucrat in his 60s named Patrick Neary, came live on national television to be interviewed. The interviewer sounded as if he had just finished reading the collected works of Morgan Kelly. Neary, for his part, looked as if he had been dragged from a hole into which he badly wanted to return. He wore an insecure little mustache, stammered rote answers to questions he had not been asked, and ignored the ones he had been asked.

A banking system is an act of faith: it survives only for as long as people believe it will. Two weeks earlier the collapse of Lehman Brothers had cast doubt on banks everywhere. Ireland’s banks had not been managed to withstand doubt; they had been managed to exploit blind faith. Now the Irish people finally caught a glimpse of the guy meant to be safeguarding them: the crazy uncle had been sprung from the family cellar. Here he was, on their televisions, insisting that the Irish banks were “resilient” and “more than adequately capitalized” … when everyone in Ireland could see, in the vacant skyscrapers and empty housing developments around them, evidence of bank loans that were not merely bad but insane. “What happened was that everyone in Ireland had the idea that somewhere in Ireland there was a little wise old man who was in charge of the money, and this was the first time they’d ever seen this little man,” says McCarthy. “And then they saw him and said, Who the fuck was that??? Is that the fucking guy who is in charge of the money??? That’s when everyone panicked.”

The Drinks Cabinet

On the morning in early November when the Irish government planned to unveil a brutal new budget, I take my seat in the visitors’ gallery of the Irish Parliament. Beside me sits an aide to Joan Burton, who, as the Labour Party’s financial spokesperson, was at the time a fair bet to become the next minister of finance, the unnatural heir to an unholy mess. Down on the floor the seats are mostly empty, but a handful of politicians, Burton included, discuss what they have been discussing without intermission for the past two years: the nation’s financial crisis.

The first thing you notice when you watch the Irish Parliament at work is that the politicians say everything twice, once in English and once in Gaelic. As there is no one in Ireland who does not speak English and a vast majority who do not speak Gaelic, this comes across as a forced gesture that wastes a great deal of time. I ask several Irish politicians if they speak Gaelic, and all offer the same uneasy look and hedgy reply: “Enough to get by.” The politicians in Ireland speak Gaelic the way the Real Housewives of Orange County speak French. To ask “Why bother to speak it at all?” is of course to miss the point. Everywhere you turn you see both emulation of the English and a desire, sometimes desperate, for distinction. The Irish insistence on their Irishness—their conceit that they’re more devoted to their homeland than the typical citizen of the world is—has an element of bluster about it, from top to bottom. At the top are the many very rich Irish people who emit noisy patriotic sounds but arrange officially to live elsewhere so they don’t have to pay tax in Ireland; at the bottom, the waves of emigration that define Irish history. The Irish people and their country are like lovers whose passion is heightened by their suspicion that they will probably wind up leaving each other. Their loud patriotism is a cargo ship for their doubt.

On this day, in addition to awaiting word on the budget, the Dáil (pronounced “Doyle”), as the Irish call their House of Commons, has before it a vote on whether to hold elections to fill its four empty seats. The ruling party, Fianna Fáil, holds a slim majority of two seats and, because they are universally believed to have created a financial catastrophe, an approval rating of 15 percent. If the elections were held today, they’d be tossed from power—in itself a radical idea, as they have more or less ruled Ireland since its founding as an independent state. Yet they have successfully resisted the call to fill the empty seats.

A bell rings for a vote, and Irish politicians stream in. A few minutes before the vote, the doors to their chamber will be closed and guarded. A politician who is late is a politician who cannot vote. A glass barrier separates the visitors’ gallery and the floor: I ask my tour guide about it. “It’s not to stop people from throwing things at their government,” she says, then goes on to explain. Some years ago an Irish politician came late, after the doors had been locked. He ran up to the visitors’ gallery, jumped down from it into the press gallery, 10 feet below, and from there rappelled down the wall to the floor. They allowed the vote, but put up the glass barrier. They disapproved of the loophole, but rewarded the guy with the wit to exploit it. This, she claims, is very Irish.

The first to take his seat is Bertie Ahern, the prime minister from June 1997 until May 2008 and Political Perp No. 1. Ahern is known both for a native shrewdness and for saying lots of spectacularly dumb-sounding things that are fun to quote. Tony Blair had credited him with a kind of genius in how he brokered the Northern Ireland peace negotiations; on the other hand, seeking to explain the financial crisis, he actually said, “Lehman’s was a world investment bank. They had testicles everywhere.” Ahern spent his last days in office denying he’d accepted bribes from property developers, at least in part because so much of what he did in office seemed justified only if he were being paid by property developers to do it. But Bertie Ahern too obviously believed in the miracle of Irish real estate. After Morgan Kelly published his article predicting the collapse of the Irish banks, for instance, Ahern famously responded to a question about it on national radio by saying, “Sitting on the sidelines, cribbing and moaning is a lost opportunity. I don’t know how people who engage in that don’t commit suicide.”

Now Ahern is just another Irish backbencher, with a hangdog slouch and a face mottled by broken capillaries. To fill the empty hours, he’s taken a job writing a sports column for the Rupert Murdoch tabloid News of the World, which might just be the least respectable job in global journalism. Ahern’s star, such as it was, has fallen.

When the Irish land boom flipped from miracle to catastrophe, a lot of important people’s status, along with perhaps their sense of themselves, flipped with it. An Irish stockbroker told me that many former bankers, some of whom he counts as clients, “actually physically look different.” He’d just seen the former C.E.O. of A.I.B., Eugene Sheehy, in a restaurant, being heckled by other diners. Sheehy once had been a smooth and self-possessed character, whose authority was beyond question. “If you saw the guy now,” says my stockbroker friend, “you’d buy him a cup o’ tea.”

The Irish real-estate bubble was different from the American version in many ways: it wasn’t disguised, for a start; it didn’t require a lot of complicated financial engineering beyond the understanding of mere mortals; it also wasn’t as cynical. There aren’t a lot of Irish financiers or real-estate people who have emerged with a future. In America the banks went down, but the big shots in them still got rich; in Ireland the big shots went down with the banks. Sean Fitzpatrick, a working-class kid turned banker, who built Anglo Irish Bank more or less from scratch, is widely viewed as the chief architect of Ireland’s misfortune: today he is not merely bankrupt but unable to show his face in public. Mention his name and people with no interest in banking will tell you with disgust how he disguised millions of euros in loans made to himself by his own bank. What they don’t mention is what he did with the money: invested it in Anglo Irish bonds! When the bank failed Fitzpatrick was listed among its creditors, having (in April 2008!) purchased five million euros of Anglo Irish subordinated floating-rate notes.

The top executives of the three big banks all operated in a similar spirit: they bought shares in their own companies right up to the moment of collapse, and continued to pay dividends, as if they had capital to burn. Virtually all of the big Irish property developers who behaved recklessly signed personal guarantees for their loans. It’s widely assumed that they must be hiding big piles of money somewhere, but the evidence thus far suggests that they are not. The Irish Property Council has counted at least 29 suicides by property developers and construction workers since the crash—in a country where suicide often goes unreported and undercounted. “I said to all the guys, ‘Always take money off the table.’ Not many of them took money off the table,” says Dermot Desmond, an Irish billionaire, who made his fortune from software in the early 1990s, and so counts here as old money.

The Irish nouveau riche may have created a Ponzi scheme, but it was a Ponzi scheme in which they themselves believed. So too for that matter did some large number of ordinary Irish citizens, who bought houses for fantastic sums. Ireland’s 87 percent rate of home-ownership is among the highest in the world. There’s no such thing as a non-recourse home mortgage in Ireland. The guy who pays too much for his house is not allowed to simply hand the keys to the bank and walk away. He’s on the hook, personally, for whatever he borrowed. Across Ireland, people are unable to extract themselves from their houses or their bank loans. Irish people will tell you that, because of their sad history of dispossession, owning a home is not just a way to avoid paying rent but a mark of freedom. In their rush to freedom, the Irish built their own prisons. And their leaders helped them to do it.

Just before the closing bell, the two men who sold the Irish people on the notion that they, the people, were responsible not merely for their own disastrous financial decisions but also for the ones made by their banks arrive in the chamber: Prime Minister Brian Cowen and Finance Minister Brian Lenihan. Along with the leader of the opposition, and the second in command of their own party, both are offspring of politicians who died in office: Irish politics is a family affair. Cowen happens also to have been the minister of finance from 2004 until mid-2008, when most of the bad stuff happened. He is not an obvious Leader of Men. His movements are sullen and lumbering, his face numbed by corpulence, his natural resting expression a look of confusion. One morning a few weeks before, he went on national radio sounding, to well-trained Irish ears, drunk. To my less trained ones he sounded merely groggy, but the public is in no mood to cut him a break. (Four different Irish people told me, on great authority, that Cowen had faxed Ireland’s 440-billion-euro bank guarantee into the European Central Bank from a pub.) And the truth is, if you were to design a human being to maximize the likelihood that people would assume he drank too much, you’d have a hard time doing better than the Irish prime minister. Lenihan, who follows on Cowen’s bovine heels, comes across, by comparison, as a decathlete in peak condition.

On this day, incredibly yet predictably, the Parliament decides not to hold a vote to fill three of the four empty seats. Then they adjourn, and I spend an hour with Joan Burton. Of the major parties in Ireland, Labour offers the closest thing to a dissenting opinion and a critique of Irish capitalism. As one of only 18 members of the Dáil who voted against guaranteeing the banks’ debts, Burton retains rare credibility. And in an hour of chatting about this and that, she strikes me as straight, bright, and basically good news. But her role in the Irish drama is as clear as Morgan Kelly’s: she’s the shrill mother no one listened to. She speaks in exclamation points with a whiny voice that gets on the nerves of every Irishman—to the point where her voice is parodied on national radio. When I ask her what she would do differently from what the Irish government is doing, even she is stumped. Like every other Irish politician, she is now at the mercy of forces beyond her control. The Irish bank debt is now Irish government debt, and any suggestion of default will only raise the cost of borrowing the foreign money they now can’t live without. “Do you know that Irish people are now experts on bonds?” says Burton. “Yes, they now say 100 basis points rather than 1 percent! They have developed a new vocabulary!”

As the scope of the Irish losses has grown clearer, private investors have been less and less willing to leave even overnight deposits in Irish banks and are completely uninterested in buying longer-term bonds. The European Central Bank has quietly filled the void: one of the most closely watched numbers in Europe has been the amount the E.C.B. has loaned to the Irish banks. In late 2007, when the markets were still suspending disbelief, the banks borrowed 6.5 billion euros. By December of 2008 the number had jumped to 45 billion. As Burton spoke to me, the number was still rising from a new high of 86 billion. That is, the Irish banks have borrowed 86 billion euros from the European Central Bank to repay private creditors. In September 2010 the last big chunk of money the Irish banks owed the bondholders, 26 billion euros, came due. Once the bondholders were paid off in full, a window of opportunity for the Irish government closed. A default of the banks now would be a default not to private investors but a bill presented directly to European governments. This, by the way, is why there are so many important-looking foreigners in Dublin, dining alone at night. They’re here to make sure someone gets his money back.

One measure of how completely the Irish can’t imagine offending their foreign financial rulers is how quickly Burton declines to contemplate such a default. She bears no responsibility for the banks’ private debts, and yet, when we creep up on the possibility of simply walking away from them, she veers off. Actually, she ups and leaves. “Oh, I have to go,” she says. “I have to meet the finance minister with the bad news.” Brian Lenihan has called a private meeting with the opposition, so that its leaders will be the first to hear of the Draconian new Irish budget. This meeting is held not inside the Parliament, where the media can be kept at arm’s length, but in a nearby building, where the media are allowed to congregate. “We tried to have it in here, but he moved it outside,” says Burton. “He’s taken to bringing us in to tell us the bad news first so that when we walk out we’re the ones announcing it to the media.” She smiles. “He’s tricky that way.”

Ireland’s Choice

Brian Lenihan is the last remaining Irish politician anywhere near power whose mere appearance does not cause people on the streets of Dublin to explode with either scorn or laughter. He came to the job just months before the crisis and so escapes blame for its origins. He’s a barrister, not a financial or real-estate person, with a proven ability to earn a good living without being bribed by property developers. He comes from a family of political people who are thought to have served honorably, or at any rate not used politics to enrich themselves. And in December 2009 he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Anyone who has been anywhere near an Irish Catholic family knows the member who has had the most recent run of bad luck enjoys exalted status—the right to do pretty much whatever he wants, while everyone else squirms in silence. Since news of Lenihan’s illness broke—just days after he’d learned of it himself, rushing him into telling his children—he has minimized his suffering. Underlying the public-opinion polls that show the Irish feel a lot better about the minister of finance than they do about other politicians in his party is a common, unspoken understanding of his bravery.

Brian Lenihan is also, as Joan Burton points out, tricky. It’s racing up on eight in the evening when I meet him in a Department of Finance conference room. He has spent most of his day defending the harshest spending cuts and tax hikes in Irish history to Irish politicians, without offering any details about who, exactly, will pay for the banks’ losses. (He’s waiting to do that until after the single by-election the Dáil authorized is held.) He smiles. “Why is everyone so interested in Ireland?” he asks almost innocently. “There’s really far too much interest in us right now.”

“Because you’re interesting?” I say.

“Oh no,” he says seriously. “We’re not, really.”

He proceeds to make the collapse of the Irish economy as uninteresting as possible. This awkward social responsibility—normalizing a freak show—is now a meaningful part of the job of being Ireland’s finance minister. At just the moment the crazy uncle leapt from the cellar, the drunken aunt lurched through the front door and, in front of the entire family and many important guests, they carved each other to bits with hunting knives. Daddy must now reassure eyewitnesses that they didn’t see what they think they saw.

But the physical evidence that something deeply weird just happened in Ireland is still too conspicuous. A mile from the conference table where we take our seats is a moonscape of vast, two-year-old craters from which office parks were once meant to rise. There are fully finished skyscrapers that sit empty, water pooling on their lobby floors. There’s a skeleton of a tower, cranes resting on either side like parentheses, which was meant to house Anglo Irish Bank. There’s a city dump for which a developer paid 412 million euros in 2006—and which is now, when you include the cleanup costs, valued at zero. “Ireland is very unusual,” says William Newsom, who has more than 30 years of experience valuing commercial real estate for Savills in London. “There are whole swaths of either undeveloped land with planning permission or even partially developed sites which, I believe, for practical purposes have zero value.” The peak of the Irish madness is frozen in time, for all to see. There’s even an empty Starbucks, in the heart of what was meant to be a global financial center to rival London’s, where a carton of low-fat milk curdles beside a silver barista pitcher. The finance minister might as well be standing in Pompeii and saying that actually the volcano wasn’t really worth mentioning. Just a little lava!

“This isn’t Iceland” is what Lenihan actually says. “We’re not a hedge fund that’s populated by 300,000 farmers and fishermen. Ireland is not going back to the 80s or the 90s. This is all in a much narrower band.” And then he goes off on a soliloquy, the main point of which is: Ireland’s problems are solvable, and I am in control of the situation.

Back in September 2008, however, there was evidence that he wasn’t. On September 17 the financial markets were in turmoil. Lehman Brothers had failed two days earlier, shares of Irish banks were plummeting, and big corporations were withdrawing their deposits from them. Late that evening Lenihan phoned David McWilliams, a former senior European economist with UBS in Zurich and London, who had moved back home to Dublin and turned himself into a writer and media personality. McWilliams had been loudly skeptical about the Irish real-estate boom. Two weeks earlier he had appeared on a radio show with Lenihan, and Lenihan appeared to him entirely untroubled by the turmoil in the financial markets. Now he wanted to drive out to McWilliams’s house and ask his advice on what to do about the Irish banks.

The peculiar scene is described in McWilliams’s charmingly indiscreet book, Follow the Money. Lenihan arrives at the McWilliams residence, a 45-minute drive from Dublin, marches through to the family kitchen, and pulls a hunk of raw garlic out of his jacket pocket. “He kicked off by saying if his officials knew he was here in my house, there’d be war,” writes McWilliams. The finance minister stayed until two in the morning, drinking tea and anxiously picking McWilliams’s brain. McWilliams came away with the feeling that the minister didn’t entirely trust the advice he was getting from the people around him—and that he was not merely worried but confused. McWilliams told me that he sensed that the mental state of the Department of Finance was “complete chaos.”

A week later the department hired investment bankers from Merrill Lynch to advise it. Some might say that if you were asking Merrill Lynch for financial advice in 2008 you were already beyond hope, but that is not entirely fair. The bank analyst who had been most prescient and interesting about the Irish banks worked for Merrill Lynch. His name was Philip Ingram. In his late 20s, and a bit quirky—at the University of Cambridge he had studied zoology—Ingram had done something original and useful: he’d shined a new light on the way Irish banks lent against commercial real estate.

The commercial-real-estate loan market is generally less transparent than the market for home loans. Deals between bankers and property developers are one-offs, on terms unknown to all but a few insiders. The parties to any loan always claim it is prudent: a bank analyst has little choice but to take them at their word. But Ingram was skeptical of the Irish banks. He had read Morgan Kelly’s newspaper articles and even paid Kelly a visit in his university office. To Ingram’s eyes, there undoubtedly appeared to be a vast difference between what the Irish banks were saying and what was really happening. To get at it he ignored what they were saying and went looking for knowledgeable insiders in the commercial-property market. He interviewed them, as a journalist might. On March 13, 2008, six months before the Irish real-estate Ponzi scheme collapsed, Ingram published a report, in which he simply quoted verbatim what British market insiders had told him about various banks’ lending to commercial real estate. The Irish banks were making far riskier loans in Ireland than they were in Britain, but even in Britain, the report revealed, they were the nuttiest lenders around: in that category, Anglo Irish, Bank of Ireland, and A.I.B. came, in that order, first, second, and third.

For a few hours the Merrill Lynch report was the hottest read in the London financial markets, until Merrill Lynch retracted it. Merrill had been a lead underwriter of Anglo Irish’s bonds and the corporate broker to A.I.B.: they’d earned huge sums of money off the growth of Irish banking. Moments after Phil Ingram hit the Send button on his report, the Irish banks called their Merrill Lynch bankers and threatened to take their business elsewhere. The same executive from Anglo Irish who had called to scream at Morgan Kelly called a Merrill research analyst to scream some more. Ingram’s superiors at Merrill Lynch hauled him into meetings with in-house lawyers, who toned down the report’s pointed language and purged it of its damning quotes from market insiders, including its many references to Irish banks. And from that moment everything Ingram wrote about Irish banks was edited, and bowdlerized by Merrill Lynch’s lawyers. At the end of 2008, Merrill fired him. One of Ingram’s colleagues, a fellow named Ed Allchin, was also made to apologize to Merrill’s investment bankers individually for the trouble he’d caused them by suggesting there was still money to be made on shorting Irish banks.

It would have been difficult for Merrill Lynch’s investment bankers not to know, at some level, that in a reckless market the Irish banks had acted with a recklessness all their own. But in the seven-page memo to Brian Lenihan—for which the Irish taxpayer forked over to Merrill Lynch seven million euros—they kept whatever reservations they may have had to themselves. “All of the Irish banks are profitable and well capitalised,” wrote the Merrill Lynch advisers, who then went on to suggest that the banks’ problem wasn’t at all the bad loans they had made but the panic in the market. The Merrill Lynch memo listed a number of possible responses the Irish government might have to any run on Irish banks. It refrained from explicitly recommending one course of action over another, but its analysis of the problem implied that the most sensible thing to do was guarantee the banks. After all, the banks were fundamentally sound. Promise to eat all losses, and markets would quickly settle down—and the Irish banks would go back to being in perfectly good shape. As there would be no losses, the promise would be free.

What exactly was said in meetings on the night of September 29, 2008, remains, amazingly, something of a secret. The government has refused Freedom of Information Act-type requests for records. But gathered around the conference tables inside the prime minister’s offices was an array of top government and finance officials, including Lenihan, Cowen, the attorney general, and bank officials and regulators. Eventually they brought in the heads of the two yet-to-be-disgraced big Irish banks: A.I.B. and Bank of Ireland. Evidently they either lied to Brian Lenihan about the extent of their losses or didn’t know themselves what those were. Or both. “At the time they were all saying the same thing,” an Irish bank analyst tells me. “ ‘We don’t have any subprime.’ ” What they meant was that they had avoided lending to American subprime borrowers; what they neglected to mention was that, in the general frenzy, all of Ireland had become subprime. Otherwise sound Irish borrowers had been rendered unsound by the size of the loans they had taken out to buy inflated Irish property. That had been the strangest consequence of the Irish bubble: to throw a nation which had finally clawed its way out of centuries of indentured servitude back into it.

The report from Merrill Lynch, which touted the banks as fundamentally sound, buttressed whatever story they told the finance minister. Ireland’s financial regulator, Patrick Neary, had echoed Merrill’s judgment. Morgan Kelly was still viewed as a zany egghead; at any rate, no one who took him seriously was present in the room. Anglo Irish’s stock had fallen 46 percent that day; A.I.B.’s had fallen 17 percent; there was a fair chance that when the stock exchange reopened one or both of them would go out of business. In the general panic, absent government intervention, the other banks would have gone down, too. Lenihan faced a choice: Should he believe the people immediately around him or the financial markets? Should he trust the family or the experts? He stuck with the family. Ireland gave its promise. And the promise sank Ireland.

Even at the time, the decision seemed a bit odd. The Irish banks, like the big American banks, managed to persuade a lot of people that they were so intertwined with their economy that their failure would bring down a lot of other things, too. But they weren’t, at least not all of them. Anglo Irish Bank had only six branches in Ireland, no A.T.M.’s, and no organic relationship with Irish business except the property developers. It lent money to people to buy land and build: that’s practically all it did. It did this mainly with money it had borrowed from foreigners. It was not, by nature, systemic. It became so only when its losses were made everyone’s.

In any case, if the Irish wanted to save their banks, why not guarantee just the deposits? There’s a big difference between depositors and bondholders: depositors can flee. The immediate danger to the banks was that savers who had put money into them would take their money out, and the banks would be without funds. The investors who owned the roughly 80 billion euros of Irish bank bonds, on the other hand, were stuck. They couldn’t take their money out of the bank. And their 80 billion euros very nearly exactly covered the eventual losses inside the Irish banks. These private bondholders didn’t have any right to be made whole by the Irish government. The bondholders didn’t even expect to be made whole by the Irish government. Not long ago I spoke with a former senior Merrill Lynch bond trader who, on September 29, 2008, owned a pile of bonds in one of the Irish banks. He’d already tried to sell them back to the bank for 50 cents on the dollar—that is, he’d offered to take a huge loss, just to get out of them. On the morning of September 30 he awakened to find his bonds worth 100 cents on the dollar. The Irish government had guaranteed them! He couldn’t believe his luck. Across the financial markets this episode repeated itself. People who had made a private bet that went bad, and didn’t expect to be repaid in full, were handed their money back—from the Irish taxpayer.

In retrospect, now that the Irish bank losses are known to be world-historically huge, the decision to cover them appears not merely odd but suicidal. A handful of Irish bankers incurred debts they could never repay, of something like 100 billion euros. They may have had no idea what they were doing, but they did it all the same. Their debts were private—owed by them to investors around the world—and still the Irish people have undertaken to repay them as if they were obligations of the state. For two years they have labored under this impossible burden with scarcely a peep of protest. What’s more, all of the policy decisions since September 29, 2008, have set the hook more firmly inside the mouths of the Irish public. In January 2009 the Irish government nationalized Anglo Irish and its 34-billion-euro (and mounting) losses. In late 2009 they created the Irish version of the tarp program, but, unlike the U.S. government (which ended up buying stakes in the banks), they actually followed through on the plan and are in the process of buying 70 billion euros of crappy assets from the Irish banks.

A single decision sank Ireland, but when I ask Lenihan about it he becomes impatient, as if it isn’t a fit topic for conversation. It wasn’t much of a decision, he says, as he had no choice. The Irish financial markets are governed by rules rooted in English law, and under English law bondholders enjoy the same status as ordinary depositors. That is, it was against the law to protect the little people with deposits in the bank without also saving the big investors who owned Irish bank bonds.

This rings a bell. When U.S. Treasury secretary Hank Paulson realized that allowing Lehman Brothers to fail was viewed not as brave and principled but catastrophic, he, too, claimed he’d done what he’d done because the law gave him no other option. But in the heat of the crisis, Paulson had neglected to mention the law just as Lenihan didn’t bring up the law requiring him to pay off the banks’ private lenders until long after he’d done it. In both cases the explanation was legalistic: narrowly true, but generally false. The Irish government always had the power to impose losses on even the senior bondholders, if it wanted to. “Senior people have forgotten that the government has certain powers,” as Morgan Kelly puts it. “You can conscript people. You can send them off to certain death. You can change the law.”

On September 30, 2008, in the heat of the moment, Lenihan gave the same reason for guaranteeing the banks’ debts that Merrill Lynch had given him: to prevent “contagion.” Tell financial markets that a loan to an Irish bank was a loan to the Irish government and investors would calm down. For who would doubt the credit of the government? A year and a half later, when suspicions arose that the banks’ losses were so vast they might bankrupt the government, Lenihan offered a new reason for the government’s gift to private investors: the bonds were owned by Irishmen. Up until then the government’s line had been that they had no idea who owned the bank’s bonds. Now they said that, if the Irish government didn’t eat the losses, Irish credit unions and insurance companies would pay the price. The Irish, in other words, were simply saving the Irish. This wasn’t true, and it provoked a cry of outrage from the credit unions, which said that they owned hardly any of the bonds. A political investigative blog called Guido Fawkes somehow obtained a list of the Anglo Irish foreign bondholders: German banks, French banks, German investment funds, Goldman Sachs. (Yes! Even the Irish did their bit for Goldman.)

Across Europe just now men who thought their title was “minister of finance” have woken up to the idea that their job is actually government bond salesman. The Irish bank losses have obviously bankrupted Ireland, but the Irish finance minister does not want to talk about that. Instead he mentions to me, several times, that Ireland is “fully funded” until next summer, which is to say that the Irish government has enough cash in the bank to pay its bills until next July. It isn’t until I’m on my way out the door that I realize how trivial this point is. The blunt truth is that, since September 2008, Ireland has been, every day, more at the mercy of her creditors. To remain afloat, Ireland’s biggest banks, which are now owned by the Irish government, have taken short-term loans from the European Central Bank amounting to 86 billion euros. Two weeks later Lenihan will be compelled by the European Union to invite the I.M.F. into Ireland, relinquish control of Irish finances, and accept a bailout package. The Irish public doesn’t yet know it, but, even as we sit together at his conference table, the European Central Bank has lost interest in lending to Irish banks. And soon Brian Lenihan will stand up in the Irish Parliament and offer a fourth explanation for why private investors in Ireland’s banks cannot be allowed to take losses. “There is simply no way that this country, whose banks are so dependent on international investors, can unilaterally renege on senior bondholders against the wishes of the E.C.B.,” he will say.

But there was once a time when the wishes of the E.C.B. didn’t matter to Ireland. That time was before the Irish government used E.C.B. money to pay off the foreign bondholders in Irish banks.

Bring Me a Little Ire

Once a decade I experiment with driving on the wrong side of the road, and wind up destroying dozens of side-view mirrors on cars parked on the left. When I went looking for some Irish person to drive me around, the result was a fellow I will call Ian McRory (he asked me not to use his real name in this article), who is Irish, and a driver, but pretty clearly a lot of other things, too. Ian has what appears to be a military-grade navigational system, for instance, and surprising knowledge about abstruse and secretive matters. “I do some personal security, and things of that nature,” he says, when I ask him what else he does other than drive financial-disaster tourists back and forth across Ireland, and leaves it at that. Later, when I mention the name of a formerly rich Irish property developer, he says, casually, as if it were all in a day’s work, that he had let himself into the fellow’s vacation house and snapped photographs of the interior, “for a man I know who is thinking of buying it.”

Ian turns out to have a good feel for what I, or anyone else, might find interesting in rural Ireland. He will say, for example, “Over there, that’s a pretty typical fairy ring,” and then explain, interestingly, that these circles of stones or mushrooms that occur in Irish fields are believed by local farmers to house mythical creatures. “Irish people actually believe in fairies?,” I ask, straining but failing to catch a glimpse of the typical fairy ring to which Ian has just pointed. “I mean, if you walked right up and asked him to his face, ‘Do you believe in fairies?’ most guys will deny it,” he replies. “But if you ask him to dig out the fairy ring on his property, he won’t do it. To my way of thinking, that’s believing.” And it is. It’s a tactical belief, a belief that exists because the upside to disbelief is too small, like the former Irish belief that Irish land prices would rise forever.

The highway out of Dublin runs past abandoned building sites and neighborhoods without people in them. “We can stop at ghost estates on the way,” says Ian, as we clear the suburbs of Dublin. “But if we stop at every one of them, we’ll never get out of here.”

We pass wet green fields carved by potato farmers into small plots, and every now and then a small village, but even the inhabited places feel desolate. The Irish countryside remains a place people flee. Among its drawbacks, from the outsider’s point of view, is the weather. “It’s always either raining or about to rain,” says Ian. “I drove a black guy from Africa around the country once. It’s raining the whole time. He says to me, ‘I don’t know why people live here. It’s like living under an elephant.’ ”

The wet hedgerows cultivated along the highway to hide the wet road from the wet houses now hide the wet houses from the wet road. picture of the village of the future, reads a dripping billboard with a picture of a village that will never be built. Randomly selecting a village that appears to be more or less finished, we pull off the road. It’s an exurb, without a suburb. GLEANN RIADA, reads the self-important sign in front. It’s a few dozen houses in a field, attached to nothing but each other, ending with unoccupied slabs of concrete buried in weeds. You can see the moment the money stopped flowing from the Irish banks, the developer folded his tent, and the Polish workers went home. “The guys who laid this didn’t even believe it was supposed to be finished,” says Ian. The concrete slab, like the completed houses, is riven by the kind of cracks you see in a house after a major earthquake, but in this case are caused by carelessness. Inside, the floors are littered with trash and debris, the fixtures have been ripped out of the kitchen, and mold spreads spider-like across the walls. The last time I saw an interior like this was in New Orleans after Katrina.

In October, Ireland’s Department of the Environment published its first audit of the country’s new housing stock after inspecting 2,846 housing developments, many of them called “ghost estates” because they’re empty. Of the nearly 180,000 units that had been granted planning permission, the audit found that only 78,195 were completed and occupied. Others are occupied but remain unfinished. Virtually all construction has now ceased. There aren’t enough people in Ireland to fill the new houses; there were never enough people in Ireland to fill the new houses. Ask Irish property developers who they imagined was going to live in the Irish countryside, and they all laugh the same uneasy laugh and offer up the same list of prospects: Poles; foreigners looking for second homes; entire departments of Irish government workers, who would be shipped to the sticks in a massive, planned relocation that somehow never materialized; the diaspora of 70 million human beings with a genetic link to Ireland. The problem that no one paid all that much attention to during the boom was that people from outside Ireland, even those with a genetic link to the place, have no interest in owning houses there. “This isn’t an international property market,” says an agent at Savills’s Dublin branch named Ronan O’Driscoll. “There aren’t any foreign buyers. There were never foreign buyers.” Dublin was never London. The Irish countryside will never be the Cotswolds.

Which way entire nations jumped when the money was made freely available to them obviously told you a lot about them: their desires, their constraints, their secret sense of themselves. How they reacted when the money was taken away was equally revealing. In Greece the money was borrowed by the state: the debts are the debts of the Greek people, but the people want no part of them. The Greeks already have taken to the streets, violently, and have been quick to find people other than themselves to blame for their problems: monks, Turks, foreign bankers. Greek anarchists now mail bombs to Angela Merkel and hurl Molotov cocktails at their own police. In Ireland the money was borrowed by a few banks, and yet the people seem not only willing to repay it but to do so without a peep of protest. Back in October 2008, after the government threatened to means-test for medical care, the old people marched in the streets of Dublin. A few days after I’d arrived the students followed suit, but their protest was less public anger than theater, and perhaps an excuse to skip school. (DOWN WITH THIS SORT OF THING, read one of the students’ signs.) I’d tapped two students as they stumbled away from the event to ask why they had all painted yellow streaks on their faces. They looked at each other for a beat. “Dunno!” one finally said and burst out laughing. Other than that … silence. It’s more than two years since the Irish government foisted the losses of the Irish banks on the Irish people, and in that time there have been only two conspicuous acts of social unrest. In May 2009, at A.I.B.’s first shareholder meeting after the collapse, a senior citizen hurled rotten eggs at the bank’s executives. And early one morning in September 2010, a 41-year-old property developer from Galway named Joe McNamara, who had painted his cement mixer with anti-banker slogans, climbed inside the cab, drove through Dublin, and, after cutting the brake lines, stalled the machine up against the gates of the Parliament. The elderly egg thrower was a distant memory, but McNamara was still, more or less, in the news: declining requests for interviews. “Joe is a private person,” his lawyer told me. “He feels like he’s made his point. He doesn’t want any media attention.”

Before he’d parked his cement mixer in the Parliament’s driveway, McNamara had been a small-time builder. He’d started out laying foundations, and like a lot of rural tradesmen, he’d been given a loan by the Anglo Irish Bank. Thus began his career as a property developer. He’d moved to Galway, into a tacky new development beside a golf course, but the real source of his financial distress lay an hour or so beyond the city, in a resort hotel he’d tried to build on a remote island called Achill, in the tiny village in which he’d grown up, called Keel. “Achill,” says Ian after I tell him that’s where I’d like to go, then goes silent for a minute, as if giving me time to reconsider. “This time of year Achill’s going to be fairly bleak.” He thinks another minute. “Mind you, in the summer it can be fairly bleak as well.”

It’s twilight as we roll across the tiny bridge and onto the island. On either side of the snaking single-lane road peat bogs stretch as far as the eye can see. The feel is less “tourist destination” than “end of the earth.” (“The next stop is Newfoundland,” says Ian.) The Achill Head Hotel—Joe’s first venture, still run by his ex-wife—was closed and dark. But there, smack in the middle of the tiny village of Keel, was the source of all of Joe McNamara’s financial troubles: a giant black hole, surrounded by bulldozers and building materials. He’d set out in 2005 to build a modest one-story hotel, with 12 rooms. In April 2006, with the Irish property market exploding, he’d expanded his ambition and applied for permission to build a multi-story luxury hotel. At exactly that moment, the market turned. “We went away in June of 2006,” Ronan O’Driscoll, the Savills broker, had told me. “We came back in September and everything had just stopped. How does everyone decide at once that it is time to stop—that it’s become mad?” For the past four years the hotel’s site had scarred the village. But it wasn’t until early 2010 that Anglo Irish Bank, which had lent McNamara the money to develop it, threatened to force him into receivership. Irish bankruptcy laws were not designed for spectacular failure, perhaps because the people who wrote them never imagined spectacular success. When a bank forces an Irish person into receivership, a notice is published in a national and a local newspaper—ensuring the bankrupt’s widespread shame. For as many as 12 years the person is not permitted to take out a loan for more than 650 euros without disclosing his bankruptcy status or own assets amounting to more than 3,100 euros, and part of whatever he earns may pass to his creditors at the discretion of the court. “It’s not like the United States, where being bankrupt is almost a badge of honor,” says Patrick White, of the Irish Property Council. “Here you are effectively disbarred from commercial life.”

There is an ancient rule of financial life—that if you owe the bank five million bucks the bank owns you, but if you owe the bank five billion bucks you own the bank—that newly applies to Ireland. The debts of its big property developers—now generally defined as anyone who owed the bank more than 20 million euros—are being worked out behind closed doors. In exchange for helping the government to manage or liquidate their real-estate portfolios, the biggest failures are hoping to be spared bankruptcy. Smaller developers, like McNamara, are in a far harder place, and while no one seems to know how many of these people exist, the number is clearly big.

Ireland’s National Asset Management Agency (its tarp) controls roughly 70 billion euros of commercial-property loans. It is believed that smaller Irish property-related loans amount to another 85 billion euros. Some very large number of Irish former tradesmen are in exactly Joe McNamara’s situation. Some very large number of Irish homeowners are in something very like it.

The difference between McNamara and everyone else is that he complained about it publicly. But then, apparently, thought better of it. I’d tracked down and phoned his ex-wife, who just laughed and told me to get lost. I finally reached McNamara himself, ambushing him on his cell phone. But he just muttered something about not wanting to draw further attention to himself, then hung up. It was only after I texted him to say I was en route to his hometown that he became sufficiently aroused to communicate. “What are you doing in Keel????” he hollered by text message, more than once. “Tell me Why are you going to Keel???” Then, once again, he fell silent. “The problem with the Irish people,” Ian says, as we drive away from the black hole that ruined Joe McNamara, “is that you can push them and push them and push them. But when they break they go wacko.” A month later, after a period of silence, McNamara would reappear, blasting the theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly from the top of a cherry-picker crane that he had parked, once again, in front of the Parliament.

Two things strike every Irish person when he comes to America, Irish friends tell me: the vastness of the country, and the seemingly endless desire of its people to talk about their personal problems. Two things strike an American when he comes to Ireland: how small it is and how tight-lipped. An Irish person with a personal problem takes it into a hole with him, like a squirrel with a nut before winter. He tortures himself and sometimes his loved ones too. What he doesn’t do, if he has suffered some reversal, is vent about it to the outside world. The famous Irish gift of gab is a cover for all the things they aren’t telling you.

So far as I could see, by November 10, 2010, the population of Irish people willing to make a stink about what has happened to them has been reduced to one: the elderly egg thrower. The next day we pull up outside his home, a modest old semi-detached house on the outskirts of Dublin. The cheery gentleman who opens the door in a neat burgundy sweater and well-pressed slacks has, among his other qualities, fantastically good manners. He has the ability to seem pleased even when total strangers ring his doorbell, and to make them feel welcome. On the table in Gary Keogh’s small and tidy dining room is a book, created by his grandchildren, dated May 2009, called “Granddad’s Eggcellent Adventure.”

In the months after Lenihan’s bank bailout, Keogh began to pay attention to the behavior of Irish bankers. His own shares in A.I.B., once thought to be as sound as cash or gold, were rapidly becoming worthless. But the bank’s executives exhibited not the first hint of remorse or shame. A.I.B. chairman Dermot Gleeson and C.E.O. Eugene Sheehy troubled Keogh the most. “The two of ’em stood up, time and again, and said, ‘Our bank is 100 percent sound,’ ” he says. “As if nothing at all was the matter!” He set out to learn more about these people in whom he had always placed blind trust. And what he found—high pay, corporate boondoggles—outraged him further. “The chairman paid himself 475,000 [euros] to chair 12 meetings!” Keogh still shouts.

What Keogh learned remains both the most shocking and the most familiar aspect of the Irish catastrophe: how easily ancient financial institutions abandoned their traditions and principles. An upstart bank, Anglo Irish, had entered their market and professed to have found a new and better way to be a banker. Anglo Irish made incredibly quick decisions: an Irish property developer who was an existing client could walk into its office in the late afternoon with a new idea and walk out with a commitment of hundreds of millions of euros that night. Anglo Irish was able to shovel money out its door so quickly because it had turned banking into a family affair: if they liked the man, they didn’t bother to evaluate his project.

Rather than point out the insanity of the approach, the two old Irish banks simply caved to it. An Irish businessman named Denis O’Brien sat on the board of the Bank of Ireland in 2005, when it was faced with the astonishing growth of Anglo Irish, which was about to double in size in just two years. “I remember the C.E.O. coming in and saying, ‘We’re going to grow at 30 percent a year,’ ” O’Brien tells me. “I said, How the fuck are you going to do that? Banking is a 5-to-7-percent-a-year-growth business at best.”

They did it by doing what Anglo Irish had done: writing checks to Irish property developers to buy Irish land at any price. A.I.B. even opened a unit dedicated to poaching Anglo’s biggest property-developer clients—the very people who would become the most spectacular busts in Irish history. In October 2008, the Irish Independent published a list of the five biggest real-estate deals in each of the past three years. A.I.B. lent the money for 6 of the 15, Anglo Irish for just 1, as a co-lender with A.I.B. On Irish national radio recently, the insolvent property developer Simon Kelly, whose family’s real-estate portfolio has run up bad debts of 2 billion euros, confessed that the only time in his career a banker became upset with him was when he repaid a loan, to Anglo Irish, with money borrowed from A.I.B. The former Anglo Irish executives I interviewed (off the record, as they are all in hiding) speak of their older, more respectable imitators with a kind of amazement. “Yes, we were out of control,” they say, in so many words. “But those guys were fucking nuts.”

Gary Keogh thought about how Ireland had changed from his youth, when the country was dirt-poor. “I used to collect bottles. Now the health service doesn’t even bother to take back crutches anymore? No! We’re far too wealthy.”

Unlike most people he knew, he had no debts. “I had nothing to lose,” he says. “I didn’t owe anyone any money. That’s why I could do it!” He’d also just recovered from a serious illness, and so, emotionally, felt a bit as if he were playing with house money. “I had just got a new kidney and I was very pleased with it,” he says. “But I think it must have been Che Guevara’s kidney.” He describes his elaborate plot the way an assassin might describe the perfect hit. “I only had two rotten eggs,” he says, “but by God they were rotten! Because I kept them six weeks in the garage!”

The A.I.B. shareholders’ meeting of May 2009 was the first he’d ever attended. He was, he admits, a bit worried something might go wrong. Worried that parking might be a problem, he took the bus; worried that his eggs might break, he used a container to protect them; worried that he didn’t even know what the room looked like, he left himself time to case the meeting hall. “I got to the front door early and had a little recce,” as he puts it, “just to see what was going to happen.” His egg container was too large to sneak inside, so he ditched it. “I had one egg in each jacket pocket,” he says. Worried that his eggs might be too slippery to grip and throw, he’d put Band-Aids on them. “I positioned myself four rows back and four seats in,” he says. “Not too close but not too far.” Then he waited for his moment.

It came immediately. Right after the executives took their places at the dais, a shareholder stood up, uninvited, with a point of order. Gleeson, A.I.B.’s chairman, barked, “Sit down!”

“He thought he was a dictator!” says Keogh, who had heard enough.

He rose to his feet and shouted, “I’ve listened to enough of your crap! You’re a fucking git!” And then he began firing.

“He thought he had been shot,” he says now with a little smile, “because the first egg hit the microphone and went POW!” It splattered onto the shoulder pad of Gleeson’s suit. The second egg missed the C.E.O. but nailed the A.I.B. sign behind him.

Then the security guards were on him. “I was told I would be arrested and charged, but I never was,” he says. Of course he wasn’t: this was at bottom a family dispute. The guards wanted to escort him out, but he left the place on his own and climbed aboard the next bus home. “The incident happened at 10 past 10 in the morning,” he says. “I was home by 10 to 11. At 10 past 11 the phone rang. And I was on the radio for an hour.” Then, but briefly, all was madness. “The press descended on the house and they wouldn’t get out,” he says. It didn’t really matter; he wasn’t sticking around. He’d done exactly what he’d planned to do, and saw no need to make a further fuss. He flew out of Dublin Airport at seven the next morning, for a long-planned Mediterranean cruise.

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Swiss whistleblower Rudolf Elmer plans to hand over offshore banking secrets of the rich and famous to WikiLeaks

http://www.sott.net

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 21:43 CST

Ed Vulliamy
Observer

© Rene Soobaroyen/Guardian
Rudolf Elmer in Mauritius

Swiss whistleblower Rudolf Elmer plans to hand over offshore banking secrets of the rich and famous to WikiLeaks

He will disclose the details of ‘massive potential tax evasion’ before he flies home to stand trial over his actions.

The offshore bank account details of 2,000 “high net worth individuals” and corporations – detailing massive potential tax evasion – will be handed over to the WikiLeaks organisation in London tomorrow by the most important and boldest whistleblower in Swiss banking history, Rudolf Elmer, two days before he goes on trial in his native Switzerland.

British and American individuals and companies are among the offshore clients whose details will be contained on CDs presented to WikiLeaks at the Frontline Club in London. Those involved include, Elmer tells the Observer, “approximately 40 politicians”.
Elmer, who after his press conference will return to Switzerland from exile in Mauritius to face trial, is a former chief operating officer in the Cayman Islands and employee of the powerful Julius Baer bank, which accuses him of stealing the information.

He is also – at a time when the activities of banks are a matter of public concern – one of a small band of employees and executives seeking to blow the whistle on what they see as unprofessional, immoral and even potentially criminal activity by powerful international financial institutions.

Along with the City of London and Wall Street, Switzerland is a fortress of banking and financial services, but famously secretive and expert in the concealment of wealth from all over the world for tax evasion and other extra-legal purposes.

Elmer says he is releasing the information “in order to educate society”. The list includes “high net worth individuals”, multinational conglomerates and financial institutions – hedge funds”. They are said to be “using secrecy as a screen to hide behind in order to avoid paying tax”. They come from the US, Britain, Germany, Austria and Asia – “from all over”.

Clients include “business people, politicians, people who have made their living in the arts and multinational conglomerates – from both sides of the Atlantic”. Elmer says: “Well-known pillars of society will hold investment portfolios and may include houses, trading companies, artwork, yachts, jewellery, horses, and so on.”

“What I am objecting to is not one particular bank, but a system of structures,” he told the Observer. “I have worked for major banks other than Julius Baer, and the one thing on which I am absolutely clear is that the banks know, and the big boys know, that money is being secreted away for tax-evasion purposes, and other things such as money-laundering – although these cases involve tax evasion.”

Elmer was held in custody for 30 days in 2005, and is charged with breaking Swiss bank secrecy laws, forging documents and sending threatening messages to two officials at Julius Baer.

Elmer says: “I agree with privacy in banking for the person in the street, and legitimate activity, but in these instances privacy is being abused so that big people can get big banking organisations to service them. The normal, hard-working taxpayer is being abused also.

“Once you become part of senior management,” he says, “and gain international experience, as I did, then you are part of the inner circle – and things become much clearer. You are part of the plot. You know what the real products and service are, and why they are so expensive. It should be no surprise that the main product is secrecy … Crimes are committed and lies spread in order to protect this secrecy.”

The names on the CDs will not be made public, just as a much shorter list of 15 clients that Elmer handed to WikiLeaks in 2008 has remained hitherto undisclosed by the organisation headed by Julian Assange, currently on bail over alleged sex offences in Sweden, and under investigation in the US for the dissemination of thousands of state department documents.

Elmer has been hounded by the Swiss authorities and media since electing to become a whistleblower, and his health and career have suffered.

“My understanding is that my client’s attempts to get the banks to act over various complaints he made came to nothing internally,” says Elmer’s lawyer, Jack Blum, one of America’s leading experts in tracking offshore money. “Neither would the Swiss courts act on his complaints. That’s why he went to WikiLeaks.”

That first crop of documents was scrutinised by the Guardian newspaper in 2009, which found “details of numerous trusts in which wealthy people have placed capital. This allows them lawfully to avoid paying tax on profits, because legally it belongs to the trust … The trust itself pays no tax, as a Cayman resident”, although “the trustees can distribute money to the trust’s beneficiaries”.

Now, Blum says, “Elmer is being tried for violating Swiss banking secrecy law even though the data is from the Cayman Islands. This is bold extraterritorial nonsense. Swiss secrecy law should apply to Swiss banks in Switzerland, not a Swiss subsidiary in the Cayman Islands.”

Julius Baer has denied all wrongdoing, and rejects Elmer’s allegations. It has said that Elmer “altered” documents in order to “create a distorted fact pattern”.

The bank issued a statement on Friday saying: “The aim of [Elmer's] activities was, and is, to discredit Julius Baer as well as clients in the eyes of the public. With this goal in mind, Mr Elmer spread baseless accusations and passed on unlawfully acquired, respectively retained, documents to the media, and later also to WikiLeaks. To back up his campaign, he also used falsified documents.”

The bank also accuses Elmer of threatening colleagues.

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The Daily Bail ………

http://dailybail.com

« Rothschild Bank AND Goldman Sachs Are Both On The LIST Of Bondholders Getting U.S. Taxpayer Billions In Irish Bailout »

Complete list of bondholders inside, and BBC footage of Sir Eveylyn de Rothschild.  The deceased Guy de Rothschild, pictured, no longer exploits the masses for banking profit, but his progeny carry on his legacy effectively.

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Scroll down for VIDEO of Sir Evelyn de Rothschild…

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U.S. taxpayers finance approximately 20% of the IMF’s budget.

Guess what, Ireland.  Brian Lenihan and Brian Cowen just sold you down the IMF river.  Why?  To bail out bank bondholders and giant European banks.  Of course! That’s what governments are for these days, apparently.  And they’ll tell you that the bailout policy is all for you own good.   And for little old ladies and pensioners and orphans.  Just don’t tell that to the cancer patients.

Yep, another nation made IMF debt slaves on behalf of the international banking cartels.  And Goldman Sachs and Rothschild & Compagnie are on the list.

Check it out below — Guido Fawkes’ blog has acquired the list of Anglo-Irish Bank’s bondholders.

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From Guido Fawke…

Anglo-Irish Bank did not represent a systemic risk to the Irish economy, it wasn’t a high street bank like AIB or the Bank of Ireland. If it had been allowed to go the way of Lehmans the only losers would have been shareholders and bondholders. The Irish state stepped in and nationalised a bank that was basically run by crooks lending to property speculators.

• The Irish people are taking losses that should rightly have been shouldered by bondholders.

Every child in Ireland is being bequeathed a huge debt at birth to protect the interests of foreign, mainly German, bondholders – why?  Guido was once a bond trader, it was always understood that sometimes the bond issuer defaults.

• That is the risk investors take.

So why is Dublin’s political establishment so keen to protect foreign investors at the expense of future generations?  Guido has obtained the list of foreign Anglo-Irish bondholders as at the close of business tonight.  These are the people whom Dublin’s politicians really seem to care about:

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Great analysis of the list from the Golem XIV…

Of the 80 listed companies only 7 listed pensions and being a cooperative savings institution. Of those only 4 listed churches and unions as their clients, the others could well have been big pension funds. The churches and unions in question were in Germany not Ireland.  Those seven companies are amongst the smallest of Anglo Irish’s bond holders.  I only have figures for four of the seven.  The largest, Union Investments of Germany, has a mere €165 billion in assets under management.

The total assets under management which I was able to compile from publicly available figures is €20,871,150,000,000.   That is an underestimate because the bond holders who turn out to be Private and Swiss banks don’t publish any figures.  So Anglo Irish’s ‘bond holders’ hold and invest MORE than 20.8 trillion euros.  Guido lists those bond holders as holding between them 4 Billion euros in Anglo Irish bonds.

Now, in my opinion both figures are likely to be wrong.  Certainly my figure is a large underestimate.  But taking them at face value Anglo Irish would account for one 5000th of the total assets being managed by all the bond holders.  So would even a total default by Anglo Irish cause that much, let alone systemic, pain and risk? Why are the ‘Bond holders’ and the Irish government so concerned that the Irish people be forced to take the loss and pay the debts for them?

Now lets look at the other side of the equation, at Ireland itself.  Well Ireland’s GDP before the crash, in 2008, was … drum roll please… €207 billion.  Or 0.207 trillion.

SO….  on one side we have Ireland whose bond holders, its people, have between them a total GDP wealth of 0.207 trillion euros.  Who are being FORCED, against their will, to pay Anglo Irish bank’s debts to its bond holders, who between them hold 20.8 Trillion euros.  The people of Ireland are paying to, and protecting the wealth and power of, people who have 100 times more wealth!

So where do these wealthy bond holders live and work?

Germany has the most with 15 of the bond holders. Who between them hold 5.3 trillion euros.
France is next with 10 bond holders.  Who have about 4 trillion to keep them warm.
Britain is third with 9 who have around 3 trillion.
The Swiss have 6 but who have about 8.5 trillion.
America has only three and hold only a trillion.

Other nations include, Spain, Belgium, Portugal, Holland Finland, Norway, Sweden, Poland, South Africa and Italy.

All these figures are very rough.  The figure for Switzerland is certainly under because Private Swiss banks just don’t publish figures.  What we can say for sure, figures or no figures, is these are not banks investing widow’s pensions or orphan’s pennies.

So who are they? Well many of the bond holders are privately held banks, which list their activities as asset management for off-shore, non-resident and high value individuals.  To give you an example, one of the private banks is EFG Bank of Luxembourg.  EFG stands for European Financial Group which is the third largest private bank group in Switzerland.  It manages over €7.5 trillion in assets.  It is ‘mostly’, 40%, owned  by Mr Spiro Latsis, son of a Greek shipping magnate.  He also owns 30% of Hellenic Petroleum.  His personal fortune is estimated to be about $9 Billion.

Continue reading…

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DB here.  Blasphemous rape of a nation in order to reward billionaire bondholders who were reckless investors and malignant in oversight.

Video – Text from Youtube page – Sir EVELYN DE ROTHSCHILD talks about the global financial crisis to the BBC in October 2008…

In 2003, following the retirement of Sir Evelyn de Rothschild as head of N M Rothschild & Sons of London, the English and French firms merged to become one umbrella entity called “Group Rothschild.”  Ownership was shared equally between the French and English branches of the family under the leadership of David de Rothschild.  In 2007, the English branch sold their share to the French branch.  The French branch now fully own N M Rothschild & Sons.

Related stories:

• Irish Protestors Occupy Ministry Of Finance In Massive Anti-Bank Bailout Show Of Force (VIDEO)

• Ireland To Spend More Than 50% Of GDP To Bailout Banks (But Bank Bondholders Will Not Lose A Dime!)

• In Ireland, Cancer Patients Lose Out To Bank Bondholders

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Student Riots : Democracy pure in UK , a model for Europe ?

related Guardian Post :

Royal car attack: Cameron calls for ‘full force of law’

• Student leaders claim protesters suffered police brutality
• PM condemns ‘mob’ who attacked Charles and Camilla’s car

• James Meikle, Vikram Dodd and agencies
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 10 December 2010 17.28 GMT
• Article history
Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, react as the royal car is attacked by protesters in London. Photograph: Matt Dunham/APDavid Cameron today promised the full force of the law would be used on the “mob” who attacked a car carrying Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, and smashed property in central London last night, while student leaders hit back, claiming protesters had suffered police brutality.

Mark Bergfeld, of the Education Activist Network, claimed demonstrators had suffered “horrendous” conditions as they were kettled for up to 10 hours and said the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall were just in “the wrong place at the wrong time”.

“There was police brutality,” he said. “I saw 14-year-olds carry out their friends with cracked heads and things like that.

“I saw that people were being kettled until 1am on Westminster bridge. They were held there without toilet facilities, without water or food for 10 hours. We don’t live in that kind of regime.”

Cameron and the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, said more than a small number of people were involved in violence during and after a Commons vote paving the way for a trebling of university tuition fees.

The prime minister admitted concerns over royal security must be addressed, but said the responsibility for violence lay with the protesters.

“We want to learn the lessons from that but, above all, we want to make sure that the people who behaved in these appalling ways feel the full force of the law of the land … There were quite a number of people who clearly were there wanting to pursue violence and to destroy property.”

Attacks on the Treasury, supreme court and other buildings in central London left the Met facing questions about again losing control of the streets during a demonstration. It also faced questions about some officers being heavy handed, and the kettling of peaceful protesters. A total of 33 arrests were made.

An awful 24 hours for the police continued this morning with the announcement of an Independent Police Complaints Commission investigation into the case of a 20-year-old student who was apparently struck by a truncheon and left unconscious with bleeding on the brain.

Alfie Meadows, a philosophy student at Middlesex University, has undergone a three-hour operation. His mother said he was hit by police as he tried to leave the area outside Westminster Abbey and lost consciousness on the way to hospital.

Susan Meadows, 55, an English literature lecturer at Roehampton University, said: “He was hit on the head by a police truncheon … he’s got tubes coming out of him everywhere. He will be in hospital for quite a while, it was a very major thing.”

Speaking outside No 10, Cameron condemned the “completely unacceptable” behaviour of protesters. “It is no good saying this was a very small minority. It was not. There were quite a number of people who clearly were there wanting to pursue violence and to destroy property.

“I know that the Metropolitan police commissioner is going to be working hard to report on this. I also know, quite rightly, he will look into the regrettable incident where the Prince of Wales and his wife were nearly attacked by this mob. We want to learn the lessons from that.”

The attack on the royal car was not the fault of the police, he said. “This was the fault of people who tried to smash up that car.”

His remarks came after Stephenson said that armed officers protecting the royal couple showed enormous restraint and condemned the “thugs” involved in violence.

The commissioner said the attack on the royal car was a “hugely shocking incident and there will be a full criminal investigation” but added that “short of locking everything down” police had to try to find a balance between allowing protest and stopping violence.

He praised his officers and the royal protection officers for their actions in coping with a “very unpredictable demonstration … and very difficult night” and said they showed enormous restraint in the most difficult of circumstances.

“The route was thoroughly recced in advance, including up to several minutes beforehand when the route was still clear.

“The unpredictability of thugs and how they moved about the capital meant the protection officers were placed in a very difficult position.”

He said kettling and other police tactics did not contribute to the violence. “It is an excuse people are hiding behind … People need to be responsible for their own behaviour,” he said, adding that a significant number of protesters had behaved reprehensibly.

He denied the police operation had been “undercooked” and said it had involved nearly 3,000 officers.

Dozens of protesters and a number of officers were injured. The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, blamed a “large number of agitators who were determined to cause the maximum possible trouble and provocation and they succeeded”.

He said a balance had to be struck between allowing protest and proportionate policing, saying the country could have a “different system”, using watercannon and harsher police tactics that would have left “more broken heads this morning”.

Charles and Camilla’s car was surrounded by a mob as it drove down Regent Street on the way to a Royal Variety performance, with protesters kicking at the doors and shattering a rear window.

The protesters had spilled into the West End after an initially peaceful demonstration outside parliament deteriorated and spread.

Witnesses described how about 400 to 500 protesters were on Regent Street when the royal car was attacked. Charles and Camilla were visibly shaken but unharmed after demonstrators set upon the vehicle with fists, boots and bottles, chanting “Off with their heads” and “Tory scum”.

Video footage posted on YouTube suggested the rear window was lowered as protestors surrounded the car but it was unclear whether Camilla, Charles or the driver was responsible.

Media reports that Camilla was prodded in the chest by a stick could not be confirmed. Today Charles and Camilla praised the efforts of police. A Clarence House spokesman said they understood the difficulties the police faced and were grateful for the job they did in “very challenging circumstances”.

In other developments today, Charlie Gilmour, son of Pink Floyd guitarist David, apologised for climbing the Cenotaph during the protests, saying he “would like to express his deepest apologies for the terrible insult to the thousands of people who died bravely for our country”.

The National Union of Students distanced itself from at least part of its London membership, pointing out that London University’s student union had organised the demonstration in Parliament Square while the NUS held a rally on Victoria Embankment. The NUS president, Aaron Porter, said violent action was deplorable but it would continue to organise peaceful protest.

Clare Solomon, president of London University’s student union, called the NUS leadership a disgrace. “They should have backed this demonstration. They are clearly out of touch,” she said.

The NUS had paid thousands of pounds for “a glow-stick vigil”, attracting 200 people, she said, when her union had spent hundreds on a protest that involved 35,000.

Solomon said it was hypocritical for people in the Tory party and others who voted for the war in Iraq to say that “this is violence when people are breaking windows as opposed to killing people”.

The police should also take some responsibility, she said. “They were the ones beating us up and putting us in hospital when we were attempting to peacefully protest.”

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European Students Fight Governments and Banks Photos

 

Pics from the student riots ,that took place all over Europe !

‘The Euro Game Is Up! Who the hell do you think you are?’ – Nigel Farage MEP

i.m.h.o.:

Farage  is the Man of the Hour in Europe .

 

European governments must provide justice for victims of CIA programmes

http://www.amnesty.org

15 November 2010

All rendition victims interviewedsaid that they were tortured or ill-treated in custody© Nancy Ross/iStockphoto

 

Amnesty International has called on European governments to provide justice for the victims of the CIA’s unlawful rendition and secret detention programmes which led to the enforced disappearance, torture and ill-treatment of a number of people.

Amnesty International’s report published today, Open secret: Mounting evidence of Europe’s complicity in rendition and secret detention compiles the latest evidence of European countries’ complicity in the CIA’s programmes in the context of the fight against terrorism in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks in the USA.

“The EU has utterly failed to hold member states accountable for the abuses they’ve committed,” said Nicolas Beger, Director of Amnesty International’s European Institutions Office.

“These abuses occurred on European soil. We simply can’t allow Europe to join the US in becoming an ‘accountability-free’ zone. The tide is slowly turning with some countries starting investigations but much more needs to be done.”

A number of individuals have been subjected to enforced disappearance, including in secret CIA detention, and the whereabouts of some remain unknown. Every one of the rendition victims interviewed by Amnesty International has said they were tortured or otherwise ill-treated in custody.

“No one should escape responsibility for the unlawful transfer, enforced disappearances, torture, and secret detention which occurred in the context of these CIA-led operations. National governments have a legal obligation to ensure their full accountability for such violations,” said Nicolas Beger.

Intergovernmental organizations such as the Council of Europe, the European Union and the UN have been at the forefront of investigating human rights violations associated with the CIA rendition and secret detention programmes.

Following disclosures in their reports, inquiries into state complicity or legal processes aimed at individual responsibility took place or are currently in progress in countries such as Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

“There is progress in a number of European countries toward accountability. The momentum must not be lost. The too often repeated mantra of ‘need for state secrecy in order to protect national security’ must not be used as a screen for impunity,” Nicolas Beger said.

Which countries did what?

Germany was complicit in the secret detention of Muhammad Zammar, interrogated by German agents while held in secret detention in Syria in November 2002. Germans officials acknowledged that torture occurred in Syrian prisons. He has yet to receive justice, despite a German parliamentary inquiry into his and others’ claims of abuse.

Italy has convicted US and Italian agents for their involvement in the February 2003 abduction of Abu Omar in Milan. He was then unlawfully sent to Egypt where he was held in secret and allegedly tortured. But the cases against high-level US and Italian officials were dismissed on the basis of state secrecy and diplomatic immunity. The prosecutor has appealed against those dismissals while Italian claims of the need to protect ‘state secrets’ continue to obstruct justice.

Lithuania has admitted that two secret prisons existed. The prisons were visited in June 2010 by a delegation from the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture, the first visit by an independent monitoring body to a secret CIA prison in Europe. An on-going criminal investigation must ensure that those responsible are held accountable.

Macedonia is alleged to have assisted in the unlawful detention and subsequent CIA-led rendition to Afghanistan of German national Khaled el-Masri, who has taken the against Macedonia before the European Court of Human Rights: the first time this court is likely to consider a case involving a Council of Europe member state’s alleged complicity in the CIA programmes. Macedonia continues to deny that its agents acted unlawfully.

Poland’s Border Guard Office in July 2010 revealed that seven planes, many carrying passengers, operating in the CIA’s rendition programme landed at Szymany airport, near the alleged site of a secret prison at Stare Kiejkuty. In September, the prosecutor’s office confirmed it was investigating claims by Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, that he was held in secret in Poland. He was granted ‘victim’ status in October 2010, the first time a rendition victim’s claims have been acknowledged in this context.

Romania is alleged to have hosted a secret CIA prison. It totally denies responsibility despite fresh evidence of its involvement in the rendition programme.

Sweden is charged with failing to investigate fully the renditions at the hands of the CIA in December 2001 of Ahmed Agiza and Mohammed al-Zari to Egypt, where the men reported that they were tortured. Despite having awarded the men compensation, the government has also failed to provide the men with full and effective redress.

The UK announced in July 2010 that it would establish an inquiry into the involvement of British officials in the alleged mistreatment of individuals detained abroad by foreign intelligence services. The Government has also acknowledged that the US used British territory for rendition flights.

Europe: Open Secret: Mounting Evidence of Europe’s Complicity in Rendition and Secret Detention

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Index Number: EUR 01/023/2010
Date Published: 15 November 2010
Categories: Europe And Central Asia

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Europe: Open secret: Mounting evidence of Europe’s complicity in rendition and secret detention: Executive Summary

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Index Number: EUR 01/024/2010
Date Published: 15 November 2010
Categories: Europe And Central Asia

This document is the executive summary of a report in which Amnesty International focuses on the “state-of-play” with respect to accountability for European states’ complicity in the abusive practices of rendition and secret detention. The report documents key developments in Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Sweden, and the United Kingdom – countries where inquiries into state complicity or legal processes aimed at individual criminal responsibility have occurred or are currently in process.

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A Surprise Boost for Euro from China

http://www.voltairenet.orgby F. William Engdahl* The embattled Euro has gotten a surprise boost from an unexpected quarter―China. The country with the world’s largest foreign exchange currency reserves, China, has pledged to support Greek debt as well as the Euro in what is clearly a geopolitical decision. In doing so, China has signaled it seeks to prevent the US financial warfare attack on Europe and to play the EU off against the USA in a geopolitical chess game of a fascinating dimension.

 

6 October 2010 From Frankfurt (Germany) Tools Print Send Countries China Greece Themes Economic globalisation

China’s Premier Wen Jiabao is congratulated by his Greek counterpart George Papandreou, left, and President of Greek Parliament Philippos Petsalnikos, right, after receiving the gold medal of the Parliament in Athens on Sunday, 3 October 2010. Photo: AFP Chinese Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao, on an unusual visit to tiny Greece, a country which normally would never warrant such a high-level visit from the world’s fastest growing economic giant, has pledged support for Greece and for the Euro. According to the official Chinese Xinhua News Agency (and China Daily), “China supports Greece in firmly carrying out structural reforms and cutting its fiscal deficits to improve competitiveness. China welcomes the EU and the IMF’s rescue package for Greece and stands ready to help Greece out of recession.” What it means concretely was made clear by Wen Jiabao at a press conference early October in Athens when he stated, “‘China is holding Greek bonds and will keep buying bonds that Greece issues. We will undertake to support eurozone countries and Greece to overcome the crisis.” The last statement is far the most significant. It indicates that China has made a strategic decision to counter any future attempt by US-based hedge funds and banks to attack the weak countries of the Eurozone, including Ireland, Spain, Portugal or Greece. Early this year, as we noted at the time, Wall Street banks such as Goldman Sachs, working in tandem with the US-based credit rating agencies, Standard & Poors and Moodys and Fitch, exploded the Greece financial crisis at the precise time China and other major investors were beginning to have serious doubts about the fiscal stability of the United States and of the dollar. Let me be clear. The Euro as it stands, the supranational European Central Bank and the EU approach to international financial stability is not merely a flawed construct. It is inherently programmed to crises. It was born as the product of flawed rotten political compromises in te 1990’s through the Treaty of Maastricht as an attempt by France and Italy and Britain to control an emerging German economic colossus after German unification. However, the concerted attack by a group of New York hedge funds such as George Soros’ and Paulson’s earlier this year and the precisely timed credit downgrade of Greece to “junk” status were part of a concerted US strategy of financial warfare against that Eurozone, the only potential alternative to the dollar as world reserve currency. Should the US dollar lose its status as the world leading reserve currency—today it still counts for some 65% of central bank currency reserves—the United States would be ultimately doomed as world sole Superpower. Now the surprise announcement by China of plans to support Greece and the euro give an unexpected boost to the embattled country and to the euro and expose the dollar even more to possible selloff. Greece desperately needs foreign investment to help it meet terms of a €110 billion bailout from eurozone members and the international monetary Fund that saved it this spring from state debt default.” I am convinced that with my visit to Greece our bilateral relations and cooperation in all spheres will be further developed,” Wen said on his way to Brussels for an EU-China Summit. Like most things that China does these days, it is part of a shrewd political calculation. Greece has agreed to support EU recognition of full market economy status for China within the EU, while China agrees to back Greece’s call for UN mediation over Cyprus. The two countries will will cooperate on development as well of Piraeus Pier, upgrading it to a distributing and transfer center for Asian exports to Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Black Sea. As if specially timed, US hedge fund speculator, George Soros, who is currently appealing a French court conviction for insider trading, [1] has come out publicly blaming the German government of Angela Merkel for austerity measures he says will lead the Euro Zone into a “deflation spiral,” demanding instead more of a US-style fiscal stimulus. US financial warfare against euroland? Notably, Soros has been one of the strongest voices against the Euro at a time when the world, at the end of 2009 was losing confidence in not the euro but the US dollar. On February 26, the Wall Street Journal reported details of a secret New York meeting involving billionaire hedge fund speculator George Soros of the $27 billion Soros Fund Management, along with SAC Capital Advisors LP, Greenlight Capital and undisclosed others. Accoording to the Journal report, they agreed on a concerted attack on the Euro, using the Greek financial crisis as the lever to make the attack credible. Earlier this year, speaking at the Davos World Economic Forum, the same Soros boosted the potential of the secretly planned collusion against the Euro, when he told press there was “no attractive alternative” to the dollar, a signal for a de facto attack on the Euro which was regarded six months ago as an alternative to the dollar as world reserve currency. He added that the Euro’s “problems” made it an unviable substitute reserve currency. Soros’ anti-Euro remarks were followed by prominent New York economist Nouriel Roubini, who said that Europe’s fiscal woes were creating “a rising risk” that its single-currency alliance will splinter. “Down the line, not this year or two years from now, we could have a breakup of the monetary union,” Both Roubini and Soros are close to the Obama Administration. Soros was one of the first financial backers of Obama and Roubini is reported very close to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. Following his hedge fund “chat” about the future of the euro, on February 22, Soros wrote an OpEd article in London’s Financial Times, the world’s most prominent financial daily in which he stated, “The survival of Greece would still leave the future of the euro in question.” The attack on Greece and the euro early this year also involved the most powerful players on Wall Street, the Gods of Money as I term them in my new book. The politically powerful Wall Street bank, Goldman Sachs, has been in the middle of the Greek financial manipulations since Greece entered the Euro in 2001. They were also involved in the January 2010 Greek crisis attack. On January 29, Goldman Sachs went with a number of top Wall Street firms to Greece where they met the Greek deputy finance minister and the National Bank of Greece. The Soros hedge fund attacks began several days after that. According to the Wall Street Journal report, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and London’s Barclays Bank joined Soros and the hedge funds, making bets against the Euro at the same time Goldman Sachs is acting as an advisor to the Papandreou government, which would appear to be a rather clear conflict of interest. The US-based credit rating agencies, Moodys and Standard & Poors also played a critical role in weakening the Euro earlier this year. At the time the EU governments announced agreement in principle on a Greek bailout package in order to stabilize the speculative attacks on the euro, on Appril 27, Standard & Poors announced an unprecedented rating downgrade of Greek government debt by three-levels to “junk grade.” That move insured that pension funds and other investors would be forced to panic sell Greek bonds, a move that greatly exacerbated the pressures on the Euro. Asia Crisis and British Pound EMU crisis The pattern of the hedge fund attacks on the Euro follows the financial warfare strategy carried out by select US hedge funds previously. In 1992, on what many market professionals believe must have been insider information, Soros claimed to have made $1 billion speculating against the British Pound Sterling and forcing the British government to abandon plans to bring Britain into the emerging Eurozone. Had Britain and the powerful financial resources of the City of London come into the new Eurozone, many in Wall Street and Washington privately feared that could spell the death knell for the dollar as world reserve currency. The fact that the dollar is world reserve currency has been one of two strategic props for American power in the world, the other being the Pentagon. Were the dollar to lose that, the future of the American Century, the sole superpower would be mortally in doubt. Similarly, in May 1997, it was a concerted hedge fund attack again led by George Soros’s Quantum Fund, joined by Moore Capital Management and Julian Robertson’s Tiger Management Group and his Jaguar and Tiger funds, against the currencies of the Asian “Tiger” economies that turned Korea, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia. The wrecking of the Tiger economies in 1997-1998 turned those economies from self-sustaining dynamic economic growth, largely financially independent of US or IMF control, into de facto buyers of US Government debt as Asia tried to defend against future attacks. Like the Sterling crisis of 1992 the 1997-1998 Asia Crisis also served to give a few more years of life support to the fragile dollar. Now, as the US depression deepens and the dimension of the banking problems worsens by the Day; the dollar’s future is threatened as never before. To counter this, clearly the most powerful circles of Wall Street and the Treasury and Federal Reserve are magnifying the small Greek crisis into an exaggerated picture of “collapse of the EU” in hopes of ruining the Euro as a potential alternative to the dollar for foreign central banks. This is not to say that the Euro and the Maastricht Treaty are a model for a healthy alternative to the problems of the dollar region. Far from it. It is merely to identify the geopolitical power battle going on behind the scenes to keep the dollar Titanic from sinking. China has evidently decided to weigh in on that battle on the side of the euro. Share this F. William Engdahl Author of Gods of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century and Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order. His other books include Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation. and A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order.

”I like to compare EU with Soviet Union”- European Parliament member

http://rt.com

The European Union should not be expected to last forever, believes British politician and member of the EU Parliament Roger Helmer.

”I do not think that the European Union can last forever,” Helmer told RT. “I like to compare it to the USSR, we should not do the comparison too far, but I think there are a lot of factors.”

“Essentially, both the USSR and the European Union have decided to create structures that ignore the identity and aspiration of the people and eventually the aspiration and identity of the people reasserts itself,” he added.

“The Soviet Union lasted for about 70 years, the European Union has just lasted for about 50 years [meaning beginnings of the European Economic Community] and I would not be at all surprised to see the same pattern, I think, in 20 years time. There may be something that is called European Union but I think it will look very different and be much less influential than it is today.”

Germany : People power defending 25 trees and the democratic police brutality . 30/Sept/2010 ( filed under ; Democracy and modern fascism )

bye bye EURO ? Nigel Farage about the Euro and Bruxelles !

One of my favorite European politicians :

Mr. Nigel Farage in his own words :

How We Can Ignite a Bicycle Revolution in the U.S.

http://www.alternet.org

A trip to the Netherlands offers insight into how American cities should transform our transportation culture and infrastructure to be bike-friendly.

September 21, 2010 |

A busy bikeway in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Photo Credit: Jay Walljasper

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I joined a team of latter-day explorers in the Netherlands this month on a quest to discover what American communities can learn from the Dutch about transforming bicycling in the U.S. from a largely recreational pastime to an integral part of our transportation system. Patrick Seidler, vice-chairman of the Bikes Belong Foundation, sponsor of this fact-finding mission for key decision-makers from the San Francisco Bay Area, announced we were in search of the “twenty-seven percent solution”–the health, environmental, economic and community benefits gained in a nation where more than a quarter of all daily trips are made on bicycle.

Of course, the bicycle enjoys certain advantages in the Netherlands, notably a flat landscape and a long cycling tradition. But the idea of learning from the success of the Dutch is not far-fetched. The Netherlands resembles the United States as a prosperous, technologically advanced nation where a huge share of the population owns automobiles. They simply don’t drive them each and every time they leave home, thanks to common sense transportation policies where biking and transit are promoted as an attractive alternative to the car. Indeed, millions of Dutch commuters combine bike and train trips, which offers the point-to-point convenience of the automobile and the speed of transit.

Seidler noted that a delegation of public officials from Madison, Wisconsin returned home from a similar tour of the Netherlands last spring, and within three weeks was implementing what they learned on the streets of the city. Bikes Belong, a non-profit group dedicated to getting more people on bikes more often, regularly takes public officials on tours of cities where biking is popular.

My fellow explorers on this journey included the president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (city council) and the city’s director of public works, chief traffic engineer and director of the livable streets program. From San Jose, comes a city council member, the chief traffic engineer and representatives of the business community. Suburban Marin County was represented by city council members from San Rafael, Mill Valley and Corte Madera as well as a transit project director.

Here is what we discovered in the world capital of biking.

Kids Just Wanna Ride Bikes

The trip started in Utrecht, where our group marveled at the parade of bicyclists whizzing past us all over town. This raised an immediate question: Why is biking a way of life in the Netherlands and only a tiny portion of the transportation picture in United States?

We uncovered a large part of the answer that afternoon at a suburban primary school, where Principal Peter Kooy told us that 95 percent of older students–kids in the 10-12 age range–bike to school at least some of the time. Compare that to the 15 percent who either walk or bike to school in the United States, down from 50 percent in 1970, according to the National Center for Safe Routes to School program.

“I came to the Netherlands to have my mind blown about biking,” declared Damon Connolly, vice-mayor of San Rafael, California. “And that sure happened when I heard that 95 percent of kids bike to school.”

This helps explain the childhood obesity epidemic in the U.S., but also why so few adult Americans ride a bike to work or to do errands–a mere one percent of trips compared to 12 percent in Germany, 18 percent in Denmark, and 27 percent in the Netherlands.

A commitment to biking is not uniquely imprinted in the Dutch DNA. It is the result of a conscious push to promote biking that has resulted in a surge of cycle use since the 1970s. And a large part of that success can be attributed to what happens in school. Kids learn how to bike safely as part of their education, said Ronald Tamse, a Utrecht city planner who led our group on a two-wheel tour of the city and its suburbs. A municipal program sends special teachers into the schools to conduct bike classes, and students go to Trafficgarden, a miniature city complete city with roads, sidewalks and busy intersections where students hone their pedestrian, biking and driving skills (in non-motorized pedal cars). At age 11, most kids in town are tested on their cycling skills on a course throughout the city, winning a certificate of accomplishment that ends up framed on many bedroom walls.

“To make safer roads, we focus on the children,” Tamse explained. “Because it not only helps them bike and walk more safely, but it helps them to become safer drivers who will look out for pedestrians and bicyclists in the future.” These kinds of programs would make a huge difference in the United States, where 60 percent of people report in surveys they would like to bike regularly if they felt safer–but only eight percent actually do.

Squarely Addressing the Problems of Bike Safety & Theft

Next stop was the Hague, where bikes account for 27 percent of all trips around the city of 500,000–exactly the average for the Netherlands as a whole. But not content with being merely average, the Hague is spending 10 million euros a year (roughly $14 million) to improve those statistics.

Hidde van der Bijl, a policy officer for cycling in Hague’s city government, outlined the city’s strategy for improving bicycle speed and safety: separating bike paths as much as possible from city streets; and when that is not possible, designating certain streets as bike boulevards where two wheelers gain priority over cars and trucks. The latter are known as bike boulevards in the U.S., and are being used in Portland, Berkeley, Minneapolis and other cities.

These are practical innovations that could make a dramatic difference in nearly every American town, because research on this side of the Atlantic shows that physical separation from motorized traffic on busy streets is the single most effective policy that gets more people to bike.

But officials in the Hague are realizing that fear about safety isn’t the only thing that discourages people from riding bikes more frequently; that’s why they are tackling the problems of bike parking. This might seem a minor point to Americans cyclists who seldom find it hard to park bikes just a few steps from their destinations. But upon closer look, parking emerges as a significant issue for cyclists in any large city.

“The car is parked out in front of the house on the street, while the bike is stuffed away out back in a shed or they have to carry up and down the stairs in their buildings,” van der Bijl explained. “So people choose the car because it is easier.”

“It’s an issue for me personally,” agreed Ed Reiskin, San Francisco’s director of public works, “because I always have to carry my bicycle down to the street.” People also worry about their bike being stolen off the street at their home or job. That’s why creating more secure bike parking in residential neighborhoods, commercial districts and workplaces is a priority for Hague’s transportation planners.

The city is busy building parking facilities in the basement of new office developments and at strategic outdoor locations throughout the city center, many of them staffed by attendants like at a parking garage. You can park your favorite bike there for a nominal fee, confident it will still be then when you return. (Groningen, the Netherlands biking capital with 59 percent of urban trips made on two wheels, debuted the first guarded parking facility in 1982 and now sports more than 30 in a town of 180,000.)

Meanwhile, in high-density residential neighborhoods, the city is installing bike racks or special bike sheds to make life easier for two-wheel commuters, sometimes taking over auto parking spaces to do it. One parking space can be converted to 10 bikes spaces, according to van der Bijl.

Something Hopeful in Rotterdam

On our third day in the Netherlands, we biked across the Atlantic–at least it felt that way in Rotterdam, a city whose streets seemed almost American. We came face-to-face with familiar road conditions: heavy traffic on four-lane roads with aggressive drivers.

Bob Ravasio, a Marin County Realtor and city council member in the town of Corte Madera, said, “Utrecht seems like a fantasy land now. This is what we’re up against at home.” Rotterdam heightened our optimism about boosting biking in the U.S. when we learned that 22 percent of trips around town each day are made on bicycles–below average among Dutch cities but more than double the rate of any major American city. If they could do it, so could we.

“Rotterdam could be San Francisco or Oakland with more bikes,” observed Damon Connolly.

Even more encouraging was the news from Tom Boot of the city’s planning department that Rotterdam has been increasing its share of bike traffic by three percent annually for the last several years. They’ve achieved this phenomenal growth by expanding and improving the network of bikeways–separating them from car traffic whenever possible and coloring the asphalt bright red everywhere else to clearly mark bike lanes for motorists to see.

“Good things are happening here,” observed Bruno Maier, vice-president of Bikes Belong, “and you can really envision it happening back home.”

Amsterdam’s New Neighborhood: Where Bikes are King of the Road

The experience of biking through four Dutch cities provided our team of Bay Area transportation leaders with plenty of examples of what they can do to make cycling more safe, popular and pleasurable back home. Bridget Smith, director of San Francisco’s Livable Streets Program, is excited about using more color on the roadways as an inexpensive but dramatic way of making sure everyone can tell bike lanes from car lanes.

The experience also fueled our imaginations about the future of cities. We saw one glimpse of what’s possible on Java Island, a cluster of neighborhoods constructed over the past 10 years in what was once the city’s harbor. It’s a scenic waterfront location with strikingly handsome modern architecture in a pleasing variety of styles that is linked to the rest of the city by tram, road and bike paths. Although brand-new, it exudes a charm reminiscent of the city’s famous canal neighborhoods–which for my money are one of the most vibrant and pleasing urban quarters on earth.

Like old Amsterdam, Java Island enjoys a picturesque waterfront setting. But it shares another trait with the city’s medieval districts that you would never expect in a newly built housing development–it accommodates bicycles more easily than cars. Motorized traffic is shunted to the side of each cluster of apartment buildings in underground parking garages, while pedestrians and bicyclists have free rein of the courtyards that link people’s homes like a green commons.

The result of this visionary planning is more than just lovely–Java Island represents a bold new vision of urban life where people matter more than motor vehicles. You feel a liberating sense of ease moving about these new neighborhoods–and so do the residents. I’ve never seen kids–even really young ones–who look so completely comfortable running around their neighborhoods, not even during my own childhood in the days before autos completely ruled the road. We passed two sets of young girls staging tea parties, one of them taking place on a blanket just inches from the joint biking/walking trail that served as the neighborhood’s main street.

Pascal van den Noort, executive director of the transportation organization Velo Mondial leading our tour through the city, urged the group to “imitate this in California, please.”

Amsterdam city council member, Fjodor Molenaar, who met up with us on Java Island, explained that the Dutch call this an “Auto Luw” development, which translates as “car light” or “car sparse,” adding that this planning idea is now the official policy of the city.

To get a sense of how it feels to bike in the Netherlands, Molenaar recommended this video to us at a meeting the next day with city transportation officials at the mayor’s residence. It’s a trailer for a new movie called Riding Bikes With the Dutch, in which filmmaker Michael W. Bauch chronicles his family’s adventure swapping homes with a family in Amsterdam.

Bringing It All Back Home

After five days of biking around Dutch cities, the Bay Area delegation was fired up about the potential of bicycling to improve life in American cities. On our last day, after a lengthy jaunt through Amsterdam–covering medieval and modern neighborhoods, rich and poor ones, all full of bikers–we dismounted for one last discussion at an outdoor café overlooking the waterfront. The next day most of us would be headed back to our homes and jobs and cars in the U.S., where most people would dismiss the idea of bikes making up a quarter percent of urban traffic as science fiction.

One question popping up all over the group was how we reconcile our amazing experience of biking in the Netherlands with the auto-choked streets of San Francisco, San Jose and Marin County. But as Hillie Talens of CROW (a transportation organization focusing on infrastructure and public space) reminded us, it took the Dutch 35 years to construct the ambitious bicycle system we were now enjoying. In the mid-1970s biking was at a low point in the country and declining fast. Even Amsterdam turned to an American for a plan to rip an expressway through its beautiful central city. But the oil crises of that time convinced the country it needed to lessen its dependence on imported oil.

The Dutch gradually turned things around by embracing a different vision for their cities. While the country’s wealth, population and levels of car ownership have continued to grow through the decades, the share of trips made by cars has not. We could accomplish something similar in the United States, by enacting new plans to make urban cycling safer, easier and more convenient.

Following the Dutch model will make biking mainstream in America. The morning and evening rush hour of cyclists you see on the streets in the Netherlands are not all the young, white, male ultra-fit athletes in Spandex we are accustomed to seeing in the U.S. People of all ages and income levels use bikes for everyday transportation, with women biking more than men.

Of course, we won’t do everything the same as the Dutch– there are considerable differences between the two countries geographically, politically and culturally. This was reflected in the questions our team posed to the numerous transportation experts we met during the week. Where did you find the money to do that? How did you overcome the opposition of motorists, merchants and developers?

Inevitably, American ingenuity will envision solutions that the Dutch, the Danish, the Germans or the Chinese never thought of. But the Netherlands does offer plenty of practical ideas to get started, as well as the inspiration of seeing a place where bikes have gained their rightful role as a form of transportation.

Jay Walljasper is a contributing editor of National Geographic Traveler, senior fellow at Project for Public Spaces and co-editor of OnTheCommons.org. Editor of Utne Reader magazine for 15 years, he is the author of The Great Neighborhood Book and (coming this winter) All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons.

Tony Blair’s Journey

from : http://www.truthdig.com

Posted on Sep 17, 2010

By Peter Stothard

This review originally appeared in The TLS, whose website is www.the-tls.co.uk, and is reposted with permission.

Tony Blair’s political memoir has been pulled apart this week as though it were the palace of a fallen dictator, not so much reviewed as ransacked. Reporters have raced through its 700 pages as though each were some hitherto shuttered room hiding unused ammunition, looted antiquities, piles of purposeless propaganda, racks of vintage wines and extravagant wardrobes. With no prior newspaper serialization deal, there was a stampede for stories that matched the frenzy for Saddam’s Picassos or Mrs Marcos’s shoes. The British may not like him much any more but the media remain fascinated by the man who led their government for a decade, led an unelectable party to three election victories, followed an unprecedentedly unpopular American President into even more unpopular wars and redefined the role of Prime Minister for an age in which the lines between the political and the personal were themselves being redefined.

The best prospects for looters seemed to lie in the pages indexed under the name of Blair’s sometime collaborator, rival and loathed successor, Gordon Brown. Early results here were good. Although it was hardly any longer a surprise for Blair to say that his Chancellor of the Exchequer was “maddening” and had “zero emotional intelligence”, the news that in March 2006 Brown had blackmailed Blair with the threat of a formal investigation into the selling of peerages unless plans for pension reform were abandoned was sharp. “I have considered at length whether to include this episode”, Blair writes of the day when Britain seems to have come closest to an outright coup by one politician against another.

Revelation of the “truly nasty side of politics” is not, however, what Blair wants his book to be remembered for. Much of the personal abuse that marked the relationship between the two founders of the New Labour project remains unrepeated, at least for now. The consequence, in the Brown zones of Blair’s ransacked palace, has been unexpected emphasis on the long-time policy differences between the two men. Disputes over the modernization of welfare and the State’s role in solving the financial crisis were revealed in detail that was fresher, feeding the simultaneous media battle over who should be the next Labour leader and whether the TB-GBs (as the two men’s hatred became known) would continue into future generations, Blairites vs Brownites like some second-rate curse on the House of Atreus.

A Journey: My Political Life

By Tony Blair

Knopf, 720 pages

The other area that seemed a ripe source of stories was the one marked Iraq, especially the shrines to the genius of George W. Bush that the book’s limited pre-publicity had promised. The result here was more of a disappointment to those seeking new facts. But there are no new heights of hagiography either: when Bush is described as having been both “very smart” and of “immense simplicity in how he saw the world”, it is of interest now only to collectors of narrative contradiction. Blair has always been empathetic to a fault (he has a voice for every room), and in these parts he is writing for American readers who like their leaders treated with a pale-toned respect. Describing Camp David as “a collection of log cabins, very much American-style and very well done” is perhaps a little too lame even for the lowering prose that is the dominant vocal style here.

One paragraph, however, stands out and in a way which becomes peculiarly characteristic of the whole. The description of the Blair family’s arrival at Bush’s Crawford Ranch in April 2002 begins as expected, a place “pretty much in the middle of nowhere, 1,600 acres with a house and guest house and various outbuildings”. And then:

“as usual I turned up mob-handed with Grandma [Cherie’s mother] and Leo [their baby son] in tow. It was all very odd. Cherie used to like the family to travel with me but, frankly, when I was working, I preferred to be on my own and undistracted, able to concentrate entirely on the matter in hand, not having to worry about Leo feeling bored, Grandma complaining or making sure that everyone got on together. ”

To see long excerpts from “A Journey: My Political Life” at Google Books, click here.

For some readers this enlivening of the political by the personal may be merely charming, a reminder of just how like the rest of us our Prime Minister once was. For others it may bring a mild alarm. Ten months later when the Iraq war was close and unstoppable, Blair faced hundreds of thousands of critics who were sceptical that he was still negotiating in good faith and that he had not long ago given his word to back the American removal of Saddam. The British ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, has said that at this Crawford Ranch meeting the Prime Minister had pledged his backing “in blood”. Blair has always denied this claim; but then perhaps he was worrying about Grandma when the blood-dipped pens were handed around the table. There are truly some details that one would rather not know.

The former Prime Minister spends little time in Britain now, preferring the popularity, the profit, and the opportunities to spread religious harmony which are open to him overseas. His single high-security signing session in London has been cancelled after bottles and shoes greeted his first publicity appearance in Dublin. There is a popular internet campaign for bookshop customers to move his oeuvre to the “True Crime” or “Dark Fantasy” shelves.

As long as he is abroad Blair sees a continuing future for himself as a professional guru and guide. The future has always been the time zone in which he feels most comfortable. “I’m not really a retrospective person”, he writes. He describes how he told his wife in Paris in 1994, before there was a vacancy as leader of the Labour Party, that the then occupant would die and he would take over the job: “I think this will happen, I just think it will”. As he told Peter Mandelson after the first part of this prediction had come true, “this is mine, I know it and I will take it”. He predicts confidently now about the prospects of China, seeking “to set out a view of the world both as it is and as it may become”.

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France Votes to Ban the Burqa !

Note from My Logic of truth Admin. :

the only Foto ,of the following ones ,i have chosen on purpose ,and thats Sarah Palins Bikini/Gun Pic .

All the other Pics where chosen randomly !

So ,before the Main Artikel starts ,here a few pics fresh from our rich Western culture .

( i just googled simple key phrases like girls,chicks a.s.o,)

here some of the results :

as we can see ,a very rich culture !

Org. Artikel starts here :

from : http://www.bbc.co.uk

French Senate votes to ban Islamic full veil in public

France’s Senate has overwhelmingly approved a bill that would ban wearing the Islamic full veil in public.

The proposed measure was already backed by the lower house of parliament, the National Assembly, in July.

The ban will come into force in six months’ time if it is not overturned by constitutional judges.

The ban has strong public support, but critics point out that only a tiny minority of French Muslims wear the full veil.

President Nicolas Sarkozy has backed the ban as part of a wider debate on French identity but opponents say the government is pandering to far-right voters.

Continue reading the main story

Muslim headscarves

The word hijab comes from the Arabic for veil and is used to describe the headscarves worn by Muslim women. These scarves come in myriad styles and colours. The type most commonly worn in the West is a square scarf that covers the head and neck but leaves the face clear.

The niqab is a veil for the face that leaves the area around the eyes clear. However, it may be worn with a separate eye veil. It is worn with an accompanying headscarf.

The burka is the most concealing of all Islamic veils. It covers the entire face and body, leaving just a mesh screen to see through.

The al-amira is a two-piece veil. It consists of a close fitting cap, usually made from cotton or polyester, and an accompanying tube-like scarf.

The shayla is a long, rectangular scarf popular in the Gulf region. It is wrapped around the head and tucked or pinned in place at the shoulders.

The khimar is a long, cape-like veil that hangs down to just above the waist. It covers the hair, neck and shoulders completely, but leaves the face clear.

The chador, worn by many Iranian women when outside the house, is a full-body cloak. It is often accompanied by a smaller headscarf underneath.

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Spain and Belgium are debating similar legislation, and with such large-scale immigration in the past 20 or 30 years, identity has become a popular theme across Europe, correspondents say.

Council’s warningOn Tuesday, the Senate voted 246 to 1 in favour of the bill.

Continue reading the main story

PATH TO VEIL BAN

• Ratification: Becomes law if passed by Senate in September
• Review: French Constitutional Council studies new law once it is ratified
• Introduction: Takes effect six months after ratification
• Ruling: Challenge possible through the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg

• Face-veil driver fined in France

It will be now sent immediately to France’s Constitutional Council watchdog, which has a month to confirm its legality.

Another challenge is possible at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, where decisions are binding.

There are estimated to be only about 2,000 women wearing the full veil in France.

The bill makes it illegal to wear garments such as the niqab or burka, which incorporate a full-face veil, anywhere in public.

It envisages fines of 150 euros (£119) for women who break the law and 30,000 euros and a one-year jail term for men who force their wives to wear the burka.

The niqab and burka are widely seen in France as threats to women’s rights and the secular nature of the state.

The bill is also seen as a touchstone for the Mr Sarkozy administration’s policy of integration. It is grappling with disaffected immigrant communities as it seeks to prevent a repeat of the mass unrest of 2005 on run-down French housing estates.

In March, the Council of State, France’s highest administrative body, warned that the law could be found unconstitutional.

More on This Story

Related stories

• French MPs vote to ban full veil 13 JULY 2010, EUROPE
• Making veil-wearers criminals 18 AUGUST 2010, EUROPE
• Should France ban the full veil? 13 JULY 2010, EUROPE
• Behind France’s Islamic veil 08 APRIL 2010, EUROPE
• Sarkozy says burka ‘not welcome’ 14 JANUARY 2010, EUROPE
• The Islamic veil across Europe 15 JUNE 2010, EUROPE
• France country profile 14 SEPTEMBER 2010, COUNTRY PROFILES

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France must end stigmatization of Roma and Travellers

from : http://www.amnesty.org

27 August 2010

Amnesty International has called on the French government to end the stigmatization of Roma and Travellers (Gens du Voyages) in France, as the authorities continue to dismantle around 300 irregular camps and return hundreds of people to Romania and Bulgaria.

Around 280 Roma were returned to their country of origin on Thursday, in addition to the 216 returned on 19 and 20 August. According to the French Minister of Immigration Eric Besson, around 800 Roma are to be returned by the end of August.

The measures followed a special ministerial meeting in July to discuss “problems related to the behaviour of certain Roma and Travellers in France”.

During the meeting, French President Nicolas Sarkozy reportedly referred to irregular camps inhabited by Roma as “sources of criminality”, allegedly including child exploitation and prostitution.

“French officials should be working to fight discrimination, rather than making inflammatory statements that link entire communities to alleged criminality and may lead to even further discrimination against Roma and Travellers,” said David Diaz-Jogeix, Deputy Director of Amnesty International’s Europe and Central Asia programme.

“Under no circumstances should anyone be returned or expelled simply because they are Roma.”

In July, before the evictions started, around 20,000 Roma from Eastern and Central Europe were estimated to be residing in France, many of them in unauthorized camps.

Members of France’s Traveller communities, the majority of whom are French citizens, have also been targeted by the announcement to close 300 irregular camps.

Around 400,000 itinerant French Travellers are already subject to discriminatory requirements to report periodically to the police and to be registered with a municipality for three years before acquiring the right to vote.

Under French law, all municipalities with more than 5,000 inhabitants must establish authorized halting sites for Travellers.

In April 2009 only 25 per cent of the municipalities had done so, resulting in an increase in the number of Travellers living in unauthorized halting sites.

“Instead of scapegoating Roma and Travellers, France should focus on fully implementing its own legislation and provide adequate halting sites and protection of the housing rights of all,” said David Diaz-Jogeix.

Under international human rights law, the French authorities are obliged to guarantee the rights of all persons, including Roma and Travellers, to adequate housing. They cannot evict anyone from their home, even if it is in an irregular settlement, unless all other alternatives have been exhausted and they have consulted all affected residents.

Evictions can only be carried out when appropriate procedural protections are in place; adequate alternative accommodation provided; and relocated residents offered compensation for all losses.

Amnesty International has urged the French authorities to remove any provisions of French law which are discriminatory against Travellers, such as requiring them to carry travel permits and restricting their voting rights.

Russia Wildfires : EVACUATE NOW!: This is Not a Drill

from :      http://www.veteranstoday.comAugust 15, 2010 posted by Bob Nichols · 21 Comments

REUTERS / Denis Sinyakov – Forest fires hit areas remaining radioactive since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

(San Francisco) – Russia is burning down this summer. The smoke is engulfing Moscow and the European Union. Embassies are emptying.

What’s the deal?

Thousands of forest fires are burning all over Russia. More importantly, the nuclear weapons factories and reactors around Mayak and the former Soviet Union’s Uranium Project are going up in smoke. The smoke is toxic and radioactive in every possible sense of the words.

Russian forest fires are burning down old H-Bomb factory areas and the Chernobyl poisoned woodlands. This holds the virtual certainty of at least 241,000,000 Lethal Doses of radioactivity becoming air borne during a fire. Due to peculiar nuclear forces the tiny ceramicized radioactive particles stay in the air for months
or even years till they are “rained out” by some form of precipitation.

Snowflake edges are particularly good scavengers of radioactive particles.

Two US Air Force C130s just flew into Moscow. Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab, or one of the seven other nuclear weapons labs in the US, are more than likely involved. Ask yourself this. What on earth could
have scared the Russian nuke forces enough to call in their old hated Cold War foe – the US Air Force – for help?

There is a simple way to let the people of the world know what is going on with airborne Chernobyl and Mayak data. We paid for all the data, anyway, whether Russian, American or European Union Data.

Free the Data. Release it to the InterNet all over the world and let people decide for themselves which country is safe enough for their families to live in.

If you are planning a trip to Europe or Russia – don’t go. If you are already there – leave immediately. If you have family or friends there – get them out if you can. This is not a drill. It is the real deal.

Another way to look at the Mayak national sacrifice zone in Russia is that the old Soviet Union manufactured 30,000 global thermonuclear weapons. There were numerous “accidents” at Mayak that weren’t supposed to happen and “officially” never did happen. The government lied, of course.

Thousands of forest fires are burning in Russia around old H-Bomb factories.

The 1,000 sq km around the Mayak bomb factory is one of the most contaminated areas on Earth because the Mayak Uranium Project manufactured the most poisonous substances on Earth for the most lethal weapons on Earth.

Manufacturing thermonuclear weapons is a really nasty business. As far as Weapons of Mass Destruction goes, there are the real McCoy.

As of 8/15/2010 all personnel in Russia and the European Union are advised to evacuate immediately. I repeat. This is not a drill.  If you can’t leave, get your kids out. It may be too late already.

Notes:

1. Russia Burns, Mark Sircus, MD, http://tinyurl.com/3agtr23

2. Radioactive Contamination of the Techa River and its Effects Dmitriy Burmistrov*#, Mira Kossenko *) and Richard Wilson+) Research Center for Radiation Medicine, Chelyabinsk +) Harvard University, # now at Menzie-Cura and Associates Inc, Department of Physics, Harvard University, http://tinyurl.com/2ep4dma

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The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website.

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