Opinion: Europe Should Protect People, Not Borders By Maximilian Popp Posted By: IZAKOVIC Date: Tuesday, 21-Apr-2015

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Opinion: Europe Should Protect People, Not Borders By Maximilian Popp Posted By: IZAKOVIC Date: Tuesday, 21-Apr-2015 09:41:31

• Posted by Janina Giedraitiene on April 21, 2015 at 7:18pm
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http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/opinion-europe-should-pr...

Migrants arrive at Rhodes island in Greece after narrowly escaping catastrophe on Monday. The bodies of several victims were recovered during the rescueoperation.

The mass deaths of refugees like those seen this weekend on the European Union's external borders is not a consequence of politicians looking away. We are in fact causing the problem with our Fortress Europe policies.

Workers at the Warsaw headquarters of Frontex, the European border protection agency, track every single irregular boat crossing and every vessel filled with refugees. Since December 2013, the authority has spent hundreds of millions of euros deploying drones and satellites to surveil the borders.

The EU registers everything that happens near its borders. In contrast to the claims that are often made, they do not look away when refugees die. They are watching very closely. And what is happening here is not negligent behavior. They are deliberately killing refugees.

People have been perishing as they sought to flee to Europe for years now. They drown in the Mediterranean, bleed to death on the border fences of the Spanish North African conclaves of Ceuta and Melilla or freeze to death in the mountains between Hungary and Ukraine. But the European public still doesn't appear to be entirely aware of the dimensions of this humanitarian catastrophe. We have become accomplices to one of the biggest crimes to take place in European postwar history.

Barbarism in the Name of Europe

It's possible that 20 years from now, courts or historians will be addressing this dark chapter. When that happens, it won't just be politicians in Brussels, Berlin and Paris who come under pressure. We the people will also have to answer uncomfortable questions about what we did to try to stop this barbarism that was committed in all our names.

The mass deaths of refugees at Europe's external borders are no accidents -- they are the direct result of European Union policies. The German constitution and the European Charter of Fundamental Rights promise protection for people seeking flight from war or political persecution. But the EU member states have long been torpedoing this right. Those wishing to seek asylum in Europe must first reach European territory. But Europe's policy of shielding itself off from refugees is making that next to impossible. The EU has erected meters-high fences at its periphery, soldiers have been ordered to the borders and war ships are dispatched in order to keep refugees from reaching Europe.

For those seeking protection, regardless whether they come from Syria or Eritrea, there is no legal and safe way to get to Europe. Refugees are forced to travel into the EU as "illegal" immigrants, using dangerous and even fatal routes. Like the one across the Mediterranean.

A Darwinist situation has emerged on Europe's external borders. The only people who stand a chance of applying for asylum in Europe are those with enough money to pay the human-traffickers, those who are tenacious enough to try over and over again to scale fences made of steel and barbed wire. The poor, sick, elderly, families or children are largely left to their fates. The European asylum system itself is perverting the right to asylum.

EU Policies Are Causing Refugee Crisis

There is widespread dismay in Europe over the latest ship sinking last weekend -- an incident in which more than 650 people died off the coast of Libya on their way to Italy, the greatest number in such an incident yet. Once again, people are saying that a tragedy like this cannot be allowed to be repeated. But the same words were uttered following the disaster off the coast of Lampedusa in autumn 2013 and off the coast of Malta last September. On Monday, just hours after the latest incident, history threatened to repeat itself, with hundreds of people aboard a refugee ship in the Mediterranean in distress.

European politicians lament the refugee drama. But then they continue to seal the borders -- the very act which is the precondition for the disaster.

The leaders of the EU member states and their interior ministers can no longer be allowed to continue to get away with the status quo. The EU must move immediately to create legal ways for refugees to reach Europe. The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), human rights organizations like Germany's Pro Asyl and Human Rights Watch have long pointed out ways in which this might be done.

The Italian Navy's Operation Mare Nostrum rescue mission, which protected hundreds of thousands of refugees from drowning, needs to be resumed without delay. The Italian government suspended the program due to a lack of funding. And Frontex's own Operation Triton, whose aim is to parry migrants, should be eliminated.

The EU should create asylum procedures at the embassies of its member states in the same way Switzerland has done. This would mean that in the future, refugees could apply for asylum at the embassies of EU member states outside of Europe. This would spare them the potentially deadly path across the borders.

The EU also needs to finally begin participating seriously in the UNHCR resettlement program. For years now, the UN has been helping bring refugees from acute crisis areas for a limited period of time to secure states without subjecting them to bureaucratic asylum procedures. UNHCR is currently seeking guest countries for several hundred thousand refugees who need to be resettled. In 2013, North America took in more than 9,000, but Germany only accepted 300.

The visa requirement for people from countries in crisis like Syria or Eritrea should also be temporarily lifted. That would allow asylum-seekers to request admission at European border control posts without being given blanket rejection by police. The EU's Dublin Regulation, which only allows refugees to apply forasylum in their country of arrival, also needs to be eliminated. Instead, asylum-seekers should be distributed among EU countries through a quota system. The freedom of movement that has long applied to EU citizens should then also be extended to recognized refugees.

People fleeing their home country largely for economic reasons rather than political persecution, should be given the possibility of labor migration -- through the creation of a Green Card for immigrants from poorer countries, for example.

These reforms wouldn't suddenly eliminate irregular migration, but they would help to reduce the suffering. Contrary to what European leaders and interior ministers claim, deaths at Europe's borders can be prevented. At the very least, their numbers could be dramatically reduced. But that requires a readiness on the part of Europeans to protect people and not just borders.

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EUROPE was led by obongo & city of london and sarkozy, to kill North Africa societies. Every one of them had personal reasons to do that.

Killing of Libya founder Gaddafi was broadcasted on line (remember the golden pistol).

The scope of that was to create Mediterranean crisis that will, with invasion of African emigrants overflow the Europe, which will be then destroyed, with the help of quasi muslim movement (ISIS; IS) suicide attacks, founded, funded & supplied by US & city of london, by overwhelming invasion by multitude of immigrants that cannot swim and so got killed in Mediterranean sea by ISIL entrepreneurs. On full ship of Arab/ Far East emmigrants with 900+ dead ISIL chiefs earn about $300.000.

Not bad, considering that much of load was dead for years because it had no hope due to Arab Spring US/ city invasion.

Only problem is that Syria did not concede, and Yemenis are so poor that they have nothing to loose.

Not so god future look for israeli state that, being a construct of city of london, has nothing to do with future of Humanity.

IZAKOVIC

[Besimi]

The Most Outrageous Fraud Ever Perpetrated on the Canadian People

• Posted by James Rathey on April 21, 2015 at 7:23pm
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The Most Outrageous Fraud Ever Perpetrated on the Canadian People

by MURRAY DOBBIN

“Once a nation parts with the control of its currency and credit, it matters not who makes the nation’s laws.  Usury, once in control, will wreck any nation.”

—William Lyon Mackenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada, 1935

Powell River, BC.

You know the old aphorism – “If a tree falls in the forest….?” Well, how about this one:  if citizens win a significant victory in court against an autocratic government involving the fleecing of Canadians of billions of their hard-earned tax dollars and no one in the media actually covers it, did it really happen?

That might well be the question being asked over at the Committee for Monetary and Economic Reform (COMER) a very small and low-budget think tank. With their lawyer Rocco Galati (of Supreme Court fame in the Nadon case) they have been steadily winning court battles initiated in 2011 that would oblige the Bank of Canada to return to its pre-1974 practice of lending the government money virtually (.37%) interest free. But the mainstream media, with a single exception, has boycotted the story. Galati believes the Harper government has done some serious arm-twisting to keep the story buried.

The good folks at COMER have for years – decades, actually – been trying to get people to pay attention to what is far and away the biggest, most outrageous fraud ever perpetrated on the Canadian people. I am speaking here of the fact that instead of the Canadian government borrowing money from its own bank, our bank – the Bank of Canada (BoC) – it has, since 1974 chosen instead to borrow from private international and domestic financial institutions providing them with enormous, absolutely risk free profits for almost four decades.

The result, according to economist Ellen Brown: “By 2012, the government had paid C$1 trillion in interest—twice its national debt. Interest on the debt is now the government’s single largest budget expenditure—larger than health care, senior entitlements or national defense.” In the early 1990s, at the height of the media’s deficit hysteria and rhetorical nonsense about hitting a “debt wall,” 91% of the $423 billion debt was due to interest charges. Our real debt – revenue minus expenditures – was just $37 billion.

COMER has been trying to draw attention to this outrageous situation for so long, and have been ignored for so long, that their campaign is often portrayed as an eccentric sidebar, complete with conspiracy theories, to what is happening in the real world. But if you think having squandered a trillion dollars that could have been spent on the public good is a side issue, feel free. And if you think conspiracy theories are unappealing then you’ll have to come up a compelling argument for a coincidence theory that explains why a nation would deliberately impoverish itself in the interests of international finance capital.

The Bank of Canada was established as a private bank in 1935 under private ownership but in 1938, recognizing that money should be created in the public interest, the government amended the Bank Act and turned the Bank into a public institution. The Bank was almost immediately harnessed to finance not only Canada’s war effort (we ranked fourth in production of allied war materiel) but a long list of infrastructure projects including the Trans-Canada highway, the St Lawrence Seaway, and over the decades, hospitals and universities across the country. It was mandated to lend not only to the federal government but to provinces and municipalities as well with a limit of one-third of federal budget and one-quarter of a province’s.

It also created a subsidiary, the Industrial Development Bank  helping create the industrial base that recent Liberal and Conservative governments have all but destroyed through trade and investment agreements. The list goes on and on – and includes social programs like the Old Age Security Act and programs to assist WW2 veterans with vocational training and subsidized farm land. The interest on its loans, of course, simply went back into government coffers.

But after nearly forty years of this incredibly productive use of publicly-created credit, unprecedented economic growth and increasing income equality, international finance got its chance to launch the free market counter-revolution against democratic governance. Stagflation –simultaneous stagnation, unemployment and inflation – was one of the first launching pads for Milton Friedman’s radical free market ideas: putting the creation of credit into private hands and creating debt burdens which would restrict the potential for democratic governance.

Freidman argued that stagflation was the direct result of irresponsible governments issuing too much money or borrowing recklessly from their central banks and sparking inflation. His radical free market ideology was shared by the Bank for International Settlements (the bank of central bankers)  and in 1974 it established a new committee, the Basel Committee, to establish global monetary and financial stability. Canada – that is the Pierre Trudeau Liberals –  joined in the deliberations. The committee’s solution was to encourage governments to borrow from private lenders and end the practice of borrowing interest-free from their own central banks. The rationale was thin from the start:  central bank borrowing was and is no more inflationary than borrowing through the private banks. The only difference was that private banks were given the legal right to fleece Canadians. The effect of the change was to effectively take a powerful economic tool out of the hands of democratic governments.

In 1974 Canada immediately stopped borrowing from the Bank of Canada launching the country on a deficit accumulation path that in 2012 saw interest payments to private lenders top $1 trillion. Fast forward to the present and the lawsuit which seeks to “restore the use of the Bank of Canada to its original purpose, by exercising its public statutory duty and responsibility. That purpose includes making interest free loans to the municipal/provincial/federal governments for “human capital” expenditures (education health, other social services) and / or infrastructure expenditures.”

The COMER suit goes beyond simply demanding that the BoC return to its former practice and original mandate (which was never repealed). It goes to the heart of the scheming of finance capital in the early 1970s when Western governments were becoming increasingly active socially and interventionist in their economies. COMER “…alleges that the Bank of Canada, the Queen, the attorney general, the finance minister, and minister of national revenue are engaging in a conspiracy with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Financial Stability Board (FSB), and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) to undermine Canada’s financial and monetary sovereignty.”

Given the claim of a conspiracy one might have expected that the courts would agree with the federal government’s only defence to date: that the suit is frivolous and there is “no reasonable cause of action.” But clearly the facts of the case are so compelling that COMER and Galati keep winning. Not everything, as some of their claims (court costs for example) have been dismissed. But two courts have now refused to throw the case out.  The federal government could have appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada but had to file by the end of March. They didn’t.

For Galati that is a sweet victory because now the government will have to produce substantive arguments.  “They have to actually justify why they haven’t been giving interest-free loans to the government. They have to justify why the Minutes of these Meetings in Zurich are kept secret. They have to justify why the Minister of Revenue is not tabling the true figures of revenue coming in. They have to justify this in law.” Galati argues that not only may the BoC lend interest free to the government, it is obliged to.

Of all the destructive elements of so-called Washington Consensus (the name given to the free market counter-revolution launched in the mid-1970s) this one can actually be challenged in court. Free trade deals, tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, privatization, the gutting of social programs, sweeping deregulation – all these either have been or would be deemed by the courts to be the purview of the legislative branch. But the very first initiative in this forty year assault on democracy may actually have breached the law. And the courts seem willing, so far, to agree that this possible breach has to be explained and justified.

MURRAY DOBBIN, now living in Powell River, BC has been a journalist, broadcaster, author and social activist for over forty years.  He now writes a bi-weekly column for the on-line journals the Tyee and rabble.ca. He can be reached at [e-mail]

 

Source: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/04/20/can-the-courts-liberate-the-...