The Truth About Debt: A Close Look at Ireland and Greece by J Iddhis Bing

I was there for orthodox Easter when the story broke about finding gold ingots in the family home of Akis Tsochadzopoulis, the former PASOK defense minister. PASOK (Center Socialist) was still in power. Tsochadzopoulis was arrested and charged with receiving an €8m bribe from Ferrostaal, the German defense company who sold four Class 214 submarines to the Greek navy 12 years ago. The Greek government still owes a billion Euros on those submarines! It's part of their bloated national debt which just keeps growing and infecting other "peripheral" nations like my own (Ireland).

I call the contagion the Ouzo effect. It shares some similarities with the South American contagion of the 1990s, which economists call the Tequila Effect. The Tequila Effect began in Mexico and culminated in the Argentine collapse. The Ouzo effect is, obviously, still developing.

Since the election there is some hope of change: the markets are not happy, they know that you can't squeeze blood from a stone. Greece may need one more election to realize the change it needs - and that may involve a hard default.

[ ... ]

Maybe it is time to get some more democracy into public finances? The European Central Bank is not a private bank, the Euro is a public currency owned by the Greeks and the Irish, too. The time has come to run the ECB and the Euro in the interest of the public that own them!

More...

See also:

How to underdevelop a nation: IMF-EU prescription for Greece

It is now obvious even to the most casual observer that the IMF-EU austerity measures have reduced Greece from a semi-developed to an underdeveloped country, given that under austerity in the past two years GDP declined by an astonishing 13%, and it is expected to drop an additional 5-8% in 2012, for a combined three-year total of more than 20%.

[ ... ]

The above 13 points illustrate how the IMF and EU have underdeveloped Greece, depriving it of capital to develop its natural resources and take advantage of its highly-educated human labor resources.

[ ... ]

The lessons learned here are not whether Greece remains or leaves the eurozone, for that is not significant, as is the reality that capital has been drained by the domestic and foreign capitalists, leaving the country roughly at the same underdeveloped status as it was in the 1960s.

Rage against the machines: 200th anniversary of the Luddite Rebellion

by Bradley Hughes

“It is Agreedon to Shoot All masters that Puls Down wages or invents things to hurt the Poor.” Two hundred years ago this direction from General Ludd was posted in Macclesfield and the Luddite rebellion against “machinery hurtful to the commonality” was in full swing. This early anti-capitalist movement, challenging the priorities of a system that subordinates people to profit, is still relevant today.

[ ... ]

By the spring of 1813 the Luddite movement was mostly stalled. A combination of brute force, police spies, legal punishments, and determination from the factory owners and Parliament that no obstacles could be put in the way of profit, wore down the movement.

More...

See also:

Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite? By Thomas Pynchon

... No doubt what people admired and mythologized him for was the vigor and single-mindedness of his assault. But the words "fit of insane rage" are third-hand and at least 68 years after the event. And Ned Lud's anger was not directed at the machines, not exactly. I like to think of it more as the controlled, martial-arts type anger of the dedicated Badass.

There is a long folk history of this figure, the Badass. He is usually male, and while sometimes earning the quizzical tolerance of women, is almost universally admired by men for two basic virtues: he Is Bad, and he is Big. Bad meaning not morally evil, necessarily, more like able to work mischief on a large scale. What is important here is the amplifying of scale, the multiplication of effect.

The knitting machines which provoked the first Luddite disturbances had been putting people out of work for well over two centuries. Everybody saw this happening -- it became part of daily life. They also saw the machines coming more and more to be the property of men who did not work, only owned and hired. It took no German philosopher, then or later, to point out what this did, had been doing, to wages and jobs. Public feeling about the machines could never have been simple unreasoning horror, but likely something more complex: the love/hate that grows up between humans and machinery -- especially when it's been around for a while -- not to mention serious resentment toward at least two multiplications of effect that were seen as unfair and threatening. One was the concentration of capital that each machine represented, and the other was the ability of each machine to put a certain number of humans out of work -- to be "worth" that many human souls. What gave King Ludd his special Bad charisma, took him from local hero to nationwide public enemy, was that he went up against these amplified, multiplied, more than human opponents and prevailed.

[ ... ]

It was open-eyed class war. The movement had its Parliamentary allies, among them Lord Byron, whose maiden speech in the House of Lords in 1812 compassionately argued against a bill proposing, among other repressive measures, to make frame-breaking punishable by death. "Are you not near the Luddites?" he wrote from Venice to Thomas Moore. "By the Lord! if there's a row, but I'll be among ye! How go on the weavers -- the breakers of frames -- the Lutherans of politics -- the reformers?" He includes an "amiable chanson," which proves to be a Luddite hymn so inflammatory that it wasn't published until after the poet's death. The letter is dated December 1816: Byron had spent the summer previous in Switzerland, cooped up for a while in the Villa Diodati with the Shelleys, watching the rain come down, while they all told each other ghost stories. By that December, as it happened, Mary Shelley was working on Chapter Four of her novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. ...



Late Spring or Summer 1812: Song entitled "Hunting a Loaf", Derbyshire

GOOD people I pray give ear unto what I say,
And pray do not call it sedition,
For these great men of late they have crack’d my pate,
I’m wounded in a woeful condition.

Fal lal de ral, &c.

For Derby it's true, and Nottingham too,
Poor men to the jail they've been taking,
They say that Ned Ludd as I understood,
A thousand wide frames has been breaking.

Fal lal, &c.

Now is it not bad there’s no work to be had,
The poor to be starv’d in their station;
And if they do steal they’re strait sent to the jail,
And they're hang’d by the laws of the nation.

Fal lal, &c.

Since this time last year I’ve been very queer,
And I’ve had a sad national cross;
I’ve been up and down, from town unto town,
With a shilling to buy a big loaf.

Fal lal, &c.

The first that I met was Sir Francis Burdett,
He told me he’d been in the Tower;
I told him my mind a big loaf was to find,
He said you must ask them in power.

Fal lal, &c.

Then I thought it was time to speak to the prime
Master Perceval would take my part,
But a Liverpool man soon ended the plan,
With a pistol he shot through his heart.

Fal lal, &c.

Then I thought he’d a chance on a rope for to dance,
Some people would think very pretty;
But he lost all his fun thro’ the country he'd run,
And he found it in fair London city.

Fal lal, &c.

Now ending my journey I’ll sit down with my friends,
And I’ll drink a good health to the poor;
With a glass of good ale I have told you my tale,
And I’ll look for a big loaf no more.

Fal lal, &tc.


Westhoughton Local History Group organised a series of events to mark the bi-centenary of the burning of the Westhoughton Mill by the Luddites on 24 April 1812. The highlight was a re-enactment of the burning of the Mill on the former Mill site. This video is a short extract.

Video: 'Remembering the Luddite Martyrs' in Liversedge, 14th April 1812
On Saturday 14th April 2012, a sculpture in memory of the Luddites was unveiled in Liversedge, not far from Rawfolds Mill, which was attacked by Luddites on 12th April 1812, and just down the road from the Shears Inn, where local Luddites allegedly hold some of their meetings. After the official unveiling ceremony had taken place, members of Huddersfield Luddites 200 and the Luddites 200 Organising Forum held a brief ceremony to commemorate the Luddite dead and executed from the area, as well as those from other manufacturing districts across the North and Midlands of England.

The person heckling the ceremony is the Chair of the Spen Valley Civic Society who, during the official unveiling ceremony held earlier, described the assassination of the mill-owner William Horsfall as a 'senseless murder' and had warm words for General Thomas Maitland who held large parts of the West Riding of Yorkshire and the North of England under military occupation in 1812.

Margarethe von Trotta - Rosa Luxemburg and the Personal as Political

See also:

Rosa Luxemburg The Idea of May Day on the March (1913)

The sign under which this whole development, both economic and political, has been consummated, the formula back to which its results point, is imperialism. This is no new element, no unexpected turn in the general historical path of the capitalist society. Armaments and wars, international contradictions and colonial politics accompany the history of capitalism from its cradle. It is the most extreme intensification of these elements, a drawing together, a gigantic storming of these contradictions which has produced a new epoch in the course of modern society. In a dialectical interaction, both cause and effect of the immense accumulation of capital and the heightening and sharpening of the contradictions which go with it internally, between capital and labor; externally, between the capitalist states – imperialism has opened the final phase, the division of the world by the assault of capital. A chain of unending, exorbitant armaments on land and on sea in all capitalist countries because of rivalries; a chain of bloody wars which have spread from Africa to Europe and which at any moment could light the spark which would become a world fire; moreover, for years the uncheckable specter of inflation, of mass hunger in the whole capitalist world – all of these are the signs under which the world holiday of labor, after nearly a quarter of a century, approaches. And each of these signs is a flaming testimony of the living truth and the power of the idea of May Day.

The Accumulation of Capital (1913)

Anonymous - Evolve With Us

The perfect vagina

The perfect vagina from heather leach on Vimeo.

I made this film with Lisa Rogers when I found out about the huge amount of vaginal surgery that is performed.

In this honest, witty and compassionate film Lisa Rogers tries to find out why more and more women are considering vaginal surgery for either aesthetic or cultural reasons.

The Scientific Proof Of Survival After Death

From The Campaign For Philosophical Freedom:

...Few will disagree that the discovery of this etheric substance is the most important scientific breakthrough in history. I must admit to jumping the gun and getting overexcited when I saw a report in the "Sunday Times" on 13th December 1981. It said that physicists could have been wrong for forty years about the make-up of the universe. They were saying that nine tenths of the universe is missing. When we look through a telescope at a galaxy we are only seeing one tenth of the mass. The motion of distant galaxies and the stars in them can only be accounted for under the laws of gravity if there is far more mass associated with each galaxy than there is in the visible stars that comprise it. One theory for this missing mass was centred around a ghostlike subatomic particle called the neutrino that was discovered in 1956. The report said a neutrino would stand a good chance of penetrating a thickness of lead stretching to the nearest star without hitting anything. This really caught my imagination. Arthur Koestler showed in his book "The Roots of Coincidence" that science had discovered something in the building blocks of nature that started to give a rational explanation accounting for the millions of reports from people who say they saw a "ghost" walk through a solid wall...

See also:

Quantum Teleportation to Quantum Thought: Psychism is now real Science by Ray White

Neutrinos Light Up Rogue Nuclear Reactors from Great Distances

The Wolf Creek Nuclear Power Plant was still visible using AVP until I was 13.4 miles away, in which case I discovered a second nuclear shell. When you are in a nuclear shell nodal area when using x/1,000 @ 15, the AVP doesn't work; but once the AVP system is outside of the nuclear shell node it works normally and detection occurs visually.

The Forgotten Holocaust - The 1943/44 Bengal Famine

THE FORGOTTEN HOLOCAUST - THE 1943/44 BENGAL FAMINE: impelled in part by global warming concerns, an account by Dr Gideon Polya of the man-made Bengal Famine of 1943/44 and the unresponsiveness of the world at the time to both the Bengal Famine and the Holocaust in Europe; the total or near-total ignoring in many historical texts and in global public perception of the Second World War Bengal Famine and other such horrendous events such as the Great Bengal Famine of 1769/1770, other Indian famines, the Irish famine (1845/46), genocide in Tasmania and mainland Australia in the 19th century and the genocide of the Armenians (1915); history ignored yields history repeated and global warming through greedy industrial profligacy may next century visit even worse disasters on Bengal and on other low-lying regions such as deltaic Egypt, Thailand, Louisiana and Holland. Remarkably, one of the biggest mortality events of the mid-20th century (that has been written about extensively by Amartya Sen (1998 Nobel Prize Winner for Economics) and which was the subject of the film “Distant Thunder” by world-famous Bengali film-maker Satyajit Ray) remains UNKNOWN to most in the English-speaking World - due to extraordinary, continuing academic and media holocaust denial involving self-censorship, lying by omission and intrinsic, covert racism.

Précis

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the end of World War 2 and the world will reflect on the human cost of this conflict. In particular we will remember the enormous loss of civilian life, particularly in Poland (6 million dead), the Soviet Union (20 million dead) and China (35 million dead). The Holocaust involving the deliberate extermination of 6 million Jews and half a million Gypsies has seared the human conscience, never to be forgotten. However a major man-made tragedy of similar proportions that occurred in Bengal in World War 2 has been effectively ignored by the world from the time it occurred. The man-made famine in Bengal in 1943-1944 killed an estimated 3.5 to 5 million people.

More...

China and Japan begin direct currency trading

Two countries can now trade currencies without using US dollar as intermediary, as Beijing pushes global use of yuan.

Top insurer pulls cover for exports to Greece

The world's biggest trade credit insurer, Euler Hermes, has suspended cover for exporters shipping to Greece because of the mounting risk of them not being paid in the event the debt-laden nation is forced out of the euro.

"Euler Hermes has decided no longer to cover deliveries to Greece for the foreseeable future," a Euler Hermes spokesman told Reuters on Wednesday.

Existing contracts will be honored, but Euler Hermes will not underwrite any new Greek business, the spokesman said, adding that the insurer would reconsider "as soon as the situation improves".

A Greek exit from the euro zone would force companies there to revert to the drachma, which would likely fall sharply against the single currency to reflect Greece's fiscal crisis.

More...

Murder-Minded Crusaders Adorn The U.S. House Chamber. Michael Reagan Would Be Proud.

What is Simon de Montfort, whose father Simon IV was arguably one of the most murderous Crusaders of the early 13th century, doing in the American Legislature as one of “ …twenty-three marble relief portraits over the gallery doors of the House Chamber depict(ing) historical figures noted for their work in establishing the principles that underlie American law. They were installed when the chamber was remodeled in 1949-1950″, about the time the Military Industrial Complex was beginning to roar its ugly head.

More...

Protest groups converge to denounce secretive Bilderberg conference

The protesters were enthused by the turnout over the last two days. "The first day was already a record," said one, Justin Wallis.

Among the most vocal participants at Friday's rally was radio show host Alex Jones, who frequently led the demonstrators by megaphone. He argued the meeting constituted a violation of the law.

"This is illegal. Government officials meeting and discussing policy with private interests in secret, or representatives of other governments, is a violation of the Logan Act," he said, referring to a federal law first passed in 1799 that forbids unauthorized citizens from negotiating with foreign governments.

More...

See also:

Bilderberg 2012: bring on the Bilderbabes

Bilderberg is 'a conspiracy reality'

"...Obviously the complete meltdown of the world’s economy will be high on the agenda. But, you have to understand why this is important. The reason? Population reduction. This has been their goal for a long time.

1. Zero growth, zero progress. Club of Rome (Limits to Growth)
2. CFR’s “Project 1980s” promoting controlled disintegration of world
   economy.
3. Bilderberg’s 1995 “Demand destruction.” How do you destroy demand? By destroying the world’s economy on purpose. By cutting down productivity, through cutting down infrastructure, by cutting inventions, technology, what you are doing is you are forcing a collapse in population. And if you keep people stupid and not too numerous, then the minority can control them. Liebniz’s circles discovered 300 years ago that progress and development is directly proportional to population density. You see, when we build infrastructure, we are actually reorganizing the physical space-time of the biosphere, allowing it to attain higher and higher levels of energy-flux density. Like all feats of human creativity, this is not a project designed for immediate consumption. This is a project designed to extend man’s sense of self far beyond the confines of his sense perceptions and feelings of personal well-being and connect him instead to generations which will continue his legacy long after his generation has left the Earth.

So, if you want to have a future for mankind, you have to grow and progress technologically and scientifically.

“And that has nothing to do with money. What these people want is an empire. And too many people believe that in order to have an empire, you need money. But money is not a determinant of wealth and the economy. Money doesn’t affect the development of the planet. There is a delusionary belief that some intrinsic value is expressed by money. Value is expressed, not as a quantity per se, but only as the relative effects of the increase, or the decrease of the physical potential relative population-density of the individual in a society. The value of money lies not in the individual exchange, but in the functional unity, known as unifying dynamic, of the social process of a nation. You know what affects the development of the planet?

Human mind affects this development. This is how mankind is measured. What separates us from animals is our ability to discover universal physical principles. It allows us to innovate, which subsequently improves the lives of people. Development of mankind, the development of the power of the individual and the nation depends upon scientific developments..."

Bilderberg meeting 2012: Everyone not invited

Bilderberg sitting on a mountain of Nazi flight capital?