Ireland is under Pension Attack. Saw that one coming here:
August diary Social Security/Pensions Attacked Globally
We have to wake up. I think this is a key to understanding the "Global Austerity Moves" and the risk to our currency:
The Global Financial Master: IMF
In short, Our World is being Ordered in new ways.Perhaps our newly ordered world will be directed by The IMF and The Masters of the Universe.
It seems as though we are regressing: Working longer hours, being paid less, losing our social safety nets, unsafe from banking behemoths, diminished education, etc. So sad. And, yet, atypical of history. There always have been and are the haves and the have nots. Nothing New World about this.
Workers and retirees worldwide are under duress, perhaps even under attack.
Those who dream of infinite growth, power, and profit rule our world.
Let's start with a Jeffersonian quote: Thank you to Ministry of Truth for sharing this link, btw.
"Certainly no nation ever before abandoned to the avarice and jugglings of private individuals to regulate according to their own interests, the quantum of circulating medium for the nation --
to inflate, by deluges of paper, the nominal prices of property, and then to buy up that property at 1s. in the pound, having first withdrawn the floating medium which might endanger a competition in purchase.
Yet this is what has been done, and will be done, unless stayed by the protecting hand of the legislature.
The evil has been produced by the error of their sanction of this ruinous machinery of banks; and justice, wisdom, duty, all require that they should interpose and arrest it before the schemes of plunder and spoilation desolate the country." --Thomas Jefferson to William C. Rives, 1819. ME 15:232
It is time to be hypervigilant to subtleties that, on the surface, seem beyond our understanding. We can understand what is being planned IF we carefully read, anticipate the trajectory, and then connect the dots. Be on the look out for Double Speak within the quotations.
We must see the correlation between the attack on social safety nets and World Dominance by the IMF/Banks as two heads of the same serpent.
Add to this concern, the reality that a few Private Equity Firms are buying up private companies that have been given the reins of our National Security and Services to the DOD, State Department, and the branches of the military. That's right, Private Equity Investment Firms own our National Security. Check it out. A quote:
There have been 68 announced acquisitions of aerospace and defense companies in the past 12 months with an average size of about $261 million including net debt, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The average premium of 23 deals for which information was available was 68 percent.
(see link for ref.)
And, THE TOO BIG TO FAIL BANKS WE BAILED OUT, are financing the acquisitions!!! In essence, our National Security apparatus is now traded on Wall Street. I think this used to be called War Profiteering.
PLEASE TAKE THE TIME TO READ THE DETAILS. THIS IS NOT A GLOSS OVER DIARY.
Dig in. Think. Anticipate. And please organize before the words Democracy and Sovereign become quaint memories.
Here's is what appears to be a trajectory for the US Dollar and currencies in general:
From this diary:
The Global Financial Master: IMF
Illustrative Currency Amounts in New Special Drawing Rights (SDR) Basket
The IMF has announced that on January 1, 2006 changes in the method of valuation of the Special Drawing Right (SDR) will come into effect (Press Release No. 05/265). The weights assigned to each currency in the SDR basket have been adjusted to take account of changes in the share of each currency in world exports of goods and services and international reserves.
On December 30, 2005, the IMF will determine a fixed amount of each currency in the SDR basket based on the initial weights and exchange rates over the preceding three months. These amounts will produce a value of the SDR in terms of the U.S. dollar on that date that is the same under the current and new valuation methods.
The IMF is providing interim calculations of the currency amounts every week for the remainder of this year based on exchange rates over the preceding three months to assist users of the SDR in preparing for the changeover to the new SDR valuation.
http://www.imf.org/...
And this:
China to use renminbi for $50bn IMF bond deal
Leo Lewis, Asia Business Correspondent
China is using a $50 billion bond deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to expand the global reach and influence of its currency, a move which analysts see as a potentially huge development in Beijing’s campaign to internationalise the “redback”.
The strategy could ultimately see the Chinese yuan jostling its way into the foreign exchange reserves of central banks in Asia, Africa and Latin America — an intrusion that would directly challenge the US dollar as the world’s default reserve currency.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/...
Personally, using the term BRIC is a bit unsettling as it also the name of the Shock Doctrine that trounced economies and policies throughout the world. But it is now used to refer to Russia, Brazil, India, and China.
BRICs Buy IMF Debt to Join Big Leagues, Goldman Says (Update3)
By Lester Pimentel and Valerie Rota - June 11, 2009 14:55 EDT
The dollar’s status as the world’s sole reserve currency may deteriorate, said Nouriel Roubini, the New York University economics professor who predicted the financial crisis.
“We may see complementary reserve currencies,” Roubini said at a conference today in Athens. While it’s “not going to happen overnight,” the development “will diminish the role of the dollar over time,” he said.
Former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker said today that there are “no practical alternatives” to the dollar as an international currency, in the text of a speech delivered in Beijing.
‘Sudden Shock’
Treasuries slid yesterday in part because the announcement by Russia and Brazil was a “sudden shock,” said David Spegel, head of emerging-market strategy at ING Groep NV in New York.
China has 3.66 percent of votes in the IMF, Russia 2.69 percent, India 1.89 percent and Brazil 1.38 percent, according to the fund’s Web site. The U.S. has a 16.77 percent.
“We are asking to increase the voice and representation of emerging economies,” China’s He said at a June 9 briefing ahead of a BRIC summit next week in Russia.
Alexei Ulyukayev, first deputy chairman of Bank Rossii, said Russia would sell some of its $140 billion of Treasuries to make room for the purchase of the IMF bonds.
Mantega said Brazil’s central bank would decide which assets to sell from its reserves portfolio for the transaction.
http://www.bloomberg.com/...
What does this all mean to US citizens? I hope some here might have some insights to share with the rest of us. This is important, so please, if you contribute please share your links to back up assertions, etc. Thank you.
What I intuit is that this new offering by the IMF, home-based in DC, is a way to assuage countries holding US Treasuries accumulated by lending the US money. Apparently, the IMF SDRs will pay a bit more interest. Also, these so-called BRIC investors in our debt will gain more voice in economic policies via the IMF positions they are buying.
So, WTO, IMF, WHO, World Bank, International Monetary Fund are pieces of, for lack of a better phrase, The Newly Ordered World puzzle which, by its very complexity is easily puzzling.
As my dad taught me, confusion hides sin.
The economic ruination of many nations is very confusing and easily sets the stage set for diminished democracies, dispirited sovereignty, and the demise of what are called social safety nets: The Hallmark of the World's Greatest Democracies.
It feels like a move to more of a global control of economic policies especially for indebted countries, like the USA. And if so, does total sovereignty become a word only?
I believe Ireland might agree with this summation. Ireland Forced to Put Up Her Pension Funds for a Taxpayer Bailout, a most excellent diary by Badabing.
Perhaps we can take comfort that the IMF consists of a Board of Governors, two each from each country.
Our Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke are the US Governors sitting on the IMF Board of Governors.
And perhaps we can take comfort that the US has the greatest % of standing at the IMF for now.
Voting power (voting share). The quota largely determines a member's voting power in IMF decisions. Each IMF member has 250 basic votes plus one additional vote for eachSDR 100,000 of quota. Accordingly, the United States currently has 371,743 votes (16.74 percent of the total), and Tuvalu currently has 268 votes (0.01 percent). The number of basic votes will change once the April 2008 reforms become effective.
ibid.
For a general understanding of the IMF goal the following is helpful. Again, be sensitive to subtleties and keep a keen eye out for Double Speak:
The IMF and the Global Crisis: Role and Reform
Edwin M. Truman
Senior Fellow, Peterson Institute for International Economics
Remarks delivered to the Tulsa Committee on Foreign Relations on January 22, 2009
and to the Dallas Committee on Foreign Relations on January 23, 2009.
© Peterson Institute for International Economics (note by WoE: Do read the Board of Directors at this link. It helps to understand why the PIIE is so against social security and social safety nets globally, etc. It costs its Board of Directors a great deal of $$/profits. This list might just be The Masters of the Universe, btw)
The International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and what is now the World Trade Organization were established at the end of World War II to mitigate, if not prevent, recurrence of such destructive policies.
......First, the IMF is the principal institution of global economic governance positioned to help deal with the current economic and financial crisis...
Second, in the near term, the Fund should:
(a) lend to countries that have been adversely affected by the crisis,
(b) help to establish an agreed approach to global economic and financial recovery, and
(c) , in particular exchange-rate policies, to minimize the negative, spillover effects of one country’s policies on other countries.
Third, in the longer term, the IMFund should step up its surveillance of national financial systems and the global system and
help to develop a better framework for macroprudential supervision. (There is not even a generally accepted definition of macroprudential supervision.
I define it as a concern for the influence of financial system developments on the global economy and, equally important, vice versa.)
And who doesn't know that Peter G Peterson is all about dismantling Social Security and other social safety nets. If Peterson and his Board had their way, health care would be a luxury few of us could afford. But, as this article kind of snarkily states:
"The issue isn't whether these new [universal health] benefits would be nice to have. They would. The issue is whether we can afford it. We can't."
That's our boy. His remark lends piquancy to his wife's explanation that her husband needed his $2.5 million, $1,500-an-hour helicopter to safeguard his health.
The question is not whether this kind of healthcare is nice. It is. The question is whether he can afford it. He can.
The Stabiliation of Currencies, not people are foremost in the minds of those who seem to have grabbed the reins of power away from sovereign democracies.
The health and welfare of banks is now more important than preserving the sovereignty of the Irish Pension Fund so says the IMF who will back the Euro which will bail out the Irish banks.....I think I have that right. Confusion hides sin.
The Irish Banks are more important than the Irish People, or so it appears. The people are rioting/protesting in Ireland. The Banks are like bunkers in more ways than one. The people can't topped the actual buildings and the IMF will make sure nothing can topple their bank sovereignty and safety.
Looks like the people, the workers and the retirees, are set to lose this one and people world-wide are set to suffer for decades, maybe forever.
Because, as history has taught us, when enough people are sufficiently unhappy for a prolonged time, chaos ensues, constitutions are shredded, and an authoritarian/totalitarian/fascist ruling entity fills the void.
When enough people suffer sufficiently, all hell breaks loose, or so history alludes.
Well, that's one way to reduce world populations. Heartless however.
Do the Masters of the Universe really, really believe they, their children and grandchildren will escape the chaos unscathed?
Here's my 1999 poem.*
While urban sprawl
mauls Mother Nature's wonder.
The greedy capitalists' sins,
profit and gain,
reign while Chaos grins.
Slowly sowing the seeds of destruction
with a manic push for production;
lulled into carnal security,
too blind to see.
In the end, many will have profited
their temporary gain,
then watch helplessly
their desperate childrens' pain.
Wondering when they could have saved
their tiny ones
from dying of thirst
or a belly full of hunger.
A man will trade his mansion on high
for food and water so his child won't die.
Nothing will escape the planet-wide mistake
of Mother Nature's rape! @copyright, 1999
Maybe they will as they fly off in their helicopters to their bunkers.
Death is looking a lot less dark these days. More of a relief for many I think. There's just too much uncertainty for the 99% of us who don't sit on the Boards of Directors for the IMF, WTO, WHO, FED, CFR, WTF, and the Peter G Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Well, again, at least we have Tim and Ben on the Board at the IMF.
We can sleep a bit lighter.
But wait! What if the US with less than 17% voting power is outvoted by a group of IMF directors that conspires to harm the US Dollar? What could that mean to us?
Or, what if the entire Board of Directors agree on a Newly Ordered World that no longer sees fit to use the US Dollar as the dominant currency?
the world is buying a lot of gold and silver.
Or is there a case for buying the Renmimbi?
Perhaps our newly ordered world will be directed by The IMF and The Masters of the Universe. decide on a One Currency World?
Sometimes it feels as though both get to make up the rules as we go in their secret chambers.
Today, go figure:
Gold Falls as Dollar Rally Curbs Demand for Precious Metal as Alternative
Maybe we need to buy our ownCyborg Insects:
After all, our tax dollars were used as Venture Capital for their research and development. Shouldn't we be able to get them at cost?
CONCLUSION:
There are a lot of hints that powerful people are carefully considering our fates which are directly attached to monetary/commodity policies.
I hope they do so with consideration for all the people on the planet. To do otherwise, will invite more wrath from those who might be harmed by the way The Masters of the Universe decide to play their Monopoly Board Game. Will they collectively protect the US Dollar?
Dare we dream?
_________________________
*You can read my 341 esoteric, didactic rhymes (so-called out of respect for real poets) here.