From: The Corbett Report
Transcript & Sources:
The European sovereign debt crisis which has been gestating for years
seems ready to come to a head as the IMF met last weekend in Washington. The meetings were dominated by talks about Greece, debt, and the risk of global
contagion.
Amidst tense talks about the future of the Eurozone in which the idea
of allowing Greece to default on its insurmountable half-trillion
dollar debt was floated, even the usually staid US Treasury Secretary,
Timothy Geithner, warned
that “cascading default, bank runs, and catastrophic risk” was a real
possibility. G20 Finance Ministers and central bank governors are now calling
for the European Central Bank to double their existing bailout fund to
create a trillion Euro emergency stockpile to recapitalize European
banks and fund Spain and Italy as their economies teeter on the edge of a
Greek-like meltdown.
For now, the next step in this unfolding crisis lies with the German parliament, where lawmakers are preparing for a vote
on whether to expand the existing European Financial Stability
Facility. The bill is expected to pass, but is deeply unpopular with the
German people, who have shouldered most of the burden of the Greek
bailout already and are now being asked to pay even more to prop up what
many see as an unsalvageable economic mess.
Earlier this week, I had the chance to talk to financial analyst Bob
Chapman of The International Forecaster about the next step in the
Eurozone crisis, and what the long-term fallout from these bailouts is
likely to be.
**INTERVIEW
So far, the European Central Bank’s answer to the unfolding crisis
has been to urge indebted nations to impose strict austerity measures as
a condition for obtaining bailout funds.
As protests in country after country throughout the summer have
shown, however, the citizens of these indebted nations find it difficult
to understand why they should be held responsible for the profligate
spending of corrupt politicians in collusion with major corporations and
financial institutions. This sense of injustice has been compounded by
the willingness of national governments to provide bailouts to banks at
the expense of the taxpayers with the justification that large financial
instutions are “too big to fail.”
Just as the US government’s TARP program in 2008 was met by
widespread protest from the overwhelming majority of voters, so too are
the governmental institutions of Europe ignoring the fierce backlash
these bailout programs and austerity measures are generating.
Although it is commonly understood that large scale quantitative
easing, recapitalization, bailout, and lending operations by central
banks are an opportunity for large financial institutions to make even
more money at the expense of the average taxpayer, this reality is
seldom mentioned in the establishment media. A recent admission that the
ongoing financial crisis in fact benefits the financial institutions,
however, did get airtime on the BBC last week.
That the ongoing economic collapse is a consciously manipulated
transfer of wealth to a few institutions at the top of the economic
pyramid is by no means a new idea. In 2009 I had the chance to interview
Professor Michel Chossudovsky of the Centre for Research on
Globalization on the meaning of the 2008 bailout in which he addressed
this very topic.
In a sign of the growing awareness of the wealth transfer embedded in
these bailout operations, as well as growing distrust of unaccountable
international institutions like the IMF and the European Union which
have been embolded by this crisis, thousands of concerned citizens have
taken to the streets of New York in a campaign dubbed Occupy Wall Street which has so far received scant attention from the establishment media.
The campaign, now in its 12th day, has garnered attention for incidents of police violence against those participating, as well as being blocked by Yahoo Mail in an incident that Yahoo is describing as an innocent error. Now the idea is spreading to other cities
in what is threatening to become a widespread grassroots movement to
direct the attention of the public away from the political theatre that
is used to distract the citizenry from the key issues of economy and
finance.
In a sign that the Federal Reserve is taking these issues quite seriously, it was recently revealed
that the Fed is now soliciting software to monitor social media such as
tweets, Facebook posts and YouTube comments to analyze what people are
thinking and saying about the United States’ privately-owned central
bank.
The Request for Proposal, entitled “Sentiment Analysis and Social Media Monitoring Solution” was officially opened on September 16, 2011 with responses due by September 28th.
The document states that “There is a need for the the Communications
Group to be timely and proactively aware of the reactions and opinions
expressed by the general public as it relates to the Federal Reserve and
its actions on a variety of subjects.” It goes on to identify key
functionalities of the desired software, including the ability to
monitor social media conversations in real time, provide “sentiment
analysis” of conversations to determine whether people are talking about
the Federal Reserve in positive, negative, or neutral terms, and
provide summaries and overviews of specific topics.
This is not the first time that high-level governmental interest in
the public’s awareness of the Federal Reserve has been displayed. In
2009, leaked US Army Reserve command documents
revealed that Army Reserve personnel had been dispatched to monitor a
series of “End the Fed” protests outside of the main Federal Reserve
branches in November of 2008.
It remains to be seen whether this growing public awareness of the
manipulation of the current economic crisis in the interest of elite
financial interests will grow into a meaningful political movement, or
if these protests can be co-opted and the concerned citizens placated by
more official obfuscations and temporary stopgap measures.
