Thousands of Portuguese protest against government's austerity measures

Thousands of Portuguese took to the streets in the national capital of Lisbon Saturday to protest against government's austerity measures while calling for the government to step down.
"We are having a boot held on our throats," said Candida Carvalho, 52, a pensioner, adding that despite having worked for 40 years, she was earning a pension below the national minimum wage of 485 euros a month.
"Next year the government will make cuts worth thousands in education, which means they'll close more schools and lay off teachers," said Paulo Macedo, 52, a secondary school teacher. "My position has been frozen and I am forced to take yearly auditions. "
The protest, organized by national trade unions, came after the country's Constitutional Court recently struck down several measures in the state budget for the year of 2014, including further cuts to pensioners and salary cuts in the public sector.
The country's national trade unions want the center-right ruling coalition to ease off spending cuts and lift the national minimum wage to 515 euros.
Source and full story: Xinhua News Agency, 21 June 2014

Buying Up the Planet: Out-of-control Central Banks on a Corporate Buying Spree

Finance is the new form of warfare – without the expense of a military overhead and an occupation against unwilling hosts. It is a competition in credit creation to buy foreign resources, real estate, public and privatized infrastructure, bonds and corporate stock ownership. Who needs an army when you can obtain the usual objective (monetary wealth and asset appropriation) simply by financial means?  Dr. Michael Hudson, Counterpunch, October 2010
When the US Federal Reserve bought an 80% stake in American International Group (AIG) in September 2008, the unprecedented $85 billion outlay was justified as necessary to bail out the world’s largest insurance company. Today, however, central banks are on a global corporate buying spree not to bail out bankrupt corporations but simply as an investment, to compensate for the loss of bond income due to record-low interest rates. Indeed, central banks have become some of the world’s largest stock investors.
This is a rather alarming development. Central banks have the power to create national currencies with accounting entries, and they are traditionally very secretive. We are not allowed to peer into their books. It took a major lawsuit by Reuters and a congressional investigation to get the Fed to reveal the $16-plus trillion in loans it made to bail out giant banks and corporations after 2008.
What is to stop a foreign bank from simply printing its own currency and trading it on the currency market for dollars, to be invested in the US stock market or US real estate market?  What is to stop central banks from printing up money competitively, in a mad rush to own the world’s largest companies?
Apparently not much. Central banks are for the most part unregulated, even by their own governments. As the Federal Reserve observes on its website:

[The Fed] is considered an independent central bank because its monetary policy decisions do not have to be approved by the President or anyone else in the executive or legislative branches of government, it does not receive funding appropriated by the Congress, and the terms of the members of the Board of Governors span multiple presidential and congressional terms.

As former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan quipped, “Quite frankly it does not matter who is president as far as the Fed is concerned. There are no other agencies that can overrule the action we take.”
The Central Bank Buying Spree
That is how “independent” central banks operate, but it evidently not the US central bank that is gambling in the stock market. After extensive quantitative easing, the Fed has a $4.5 trillion balance sheet; but this sum is accounted for as being invested conservatively in Treasuries and agency debt (although QE may have allowed Wall Street banks to invest the proceeds in the stock market by devious means).
Which central banks, then, are investing in stocks? The biggest player turns out to be the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), the Chinese central bank.
According to a June 15th article in USA Today:

Evidence of equity-buying by central banks and other public sector investors has emerged from a large-scale survey compiled by Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF), a global research and advisory group. The OMFIF research publication Global Public Investor (GPI) 2014, launched on June 17 is the first comprehensive survey of $29.1 trillion worth of investments held by 400 public sector institutions in 162 countries. The report focuses on investments by 157 central banks, 156 public pension funds and 87 sovereign funds, underlines growing similarities among different categories of public entities owning assets equivalent to 40% of world output.
The assets of these 400 Global Public Investors comprise $13.2 trillion (including gold) at central banks, $9.4 trillion at public pension funds and $6.5 trillion at sovereign wealth funds.

Public pension funds and sovereign wealth funds are well known to be large holders of shares on international stock markets. But it seems they now have rivals from unexpected sources:

One is China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE), part of the People’s Bank of China, the biggest overall public sector investor, with $3.9 trillion under management, well ahead of the Bank of Japan and Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF), each with $1.3 trillion.
SAFE’s investments include significant holdings in Europe. The PBoC itself has been directly buying minority equity stakes in important European companies.
Another large public sector equity owner is Swiss National Bank, with $480 billion under management. The Swiss central bank had 15% of its foreign exchange assets – or $72 billion – in equities at the end of 2013.

Public pension funds and sovereign wealth funds invest their pension contributions and exchange reserves earned in foreign trade, which is fair enough. The justification for central banks to be playing the stock market is less obvious. Their stock purchases are justified as compensating for lost revenue caused by sharp drops in interest rates. But those drops were driven by central banks themselves; and the broad powers delegated to central banks were supposed to be for conducting “monetary policy,” not for generating investment returns. According to the OMFIF, central banks collectively now have $13.2 trillion in assets (including gold). That is nearly 20% of the value of all of the stock markets in the world, which comes to $62 trillion.
From Monetary Policy to Asset Grabs
Central banks are allowed to create money out of nothing in order to conduct the monetary policies necessary to “regulate the value of the currency” and “maintain price stability.”  Traditionally, this has been done with “open market operations,” in which money was either created by the central bank and used to buy federal securities (thereby adding money to the money supply) or federal securities were sold in exchange for currency (shrinking the money supply).
“Quantitative easing” is open market operations on steroids, to the tune of trillions of dollars. But the purpose is allegedly the same—to augment a money supply that shrank by trillions of dollars when the shadow banking system collapsed after 2008. The purpose is not supposed to be to earn an income for the central bank itself. Indeed, the U.S. central bank is required to return the interest earned on federal securities to the federal government, which paid the interest in the first place.
Further, as noted earlier, it is not the US Federal Reserve that has been massively investing in the stock market.  It is the PBoC, which arguably is in a different position than the US Fed. It cannot print dollars or Euros. Rather, it acquires them from local merchants who have earned them legitimately in foreign trade.
However, the PBoC has done nothing to earn these dollars or Euros beyond printing yuan. It trades the yuan for the dollars earned by Chinese sellers, who need local currency to pay their workers and suppliers. The money involved in these transactions has thus doubled. The merchants have been paid in yuan and the central bank has an equivalent sum in dollars or Euros. That means the Chinese central bank’s holdings are created out of thin air no less than the Federal Reserve’s dollars are.
Battle of the Central Banks?
Western central banks have generally worked this scheme discreetly. Not so much the Chinese, whose blatant gaming of the system points up its flaws for all to see.
Georgetown University historian Professor Carroll Quigley styled himself the librarian of the international bankers. In his 1966 book Tragedy and Hope, he wrote that their aim was “nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.” This system was to be controlled “in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert by secret agreements,” central banks that “were themselves private corporations.”
It may be the Chinese, not acting in concert, who break up this cartel. The PBoC is no more transparent than the US Fed, but it is not an “independent” central bank. It is a government agency accountable to the Chinese government and acting on its behalf.
The Chinese have evidently figured out the game of the “independent” central bankers, and to be using it to their own advantage. If the Fed can do quantitative easing, so can the Chinese – and buy up our assets with the proceeds. Owning our corporations rather than our Treasuries helps the Chinese break up US dollar hegemony.
Whatever power plays are going on behind the scenes, it is increasingly clear that they are not serving we-the-people. The global central banking scheme is systemically flawed and needs to be radically overhauled.
Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute and the author of twelve books, including the best-selling Web of Debt. Her latest book, The Public Bank Solution, explores successful public banking models historically and globally.
Source: Center for Research on Globalization, 21 June 2014

Big Agri's GMO "Super Bananas for Brown People"

Perhaps the most racist, disgusting public relations stunts yet to sell genetically modified poison to the masses and monopolize the world's food supply.

Tony Cartalucci
Activist Post

Much of the starvation and malnutrition across the so-called "developing" or "Third" world, is due to the unmitigated, global campaign of human exploitation driven by globalization. The Walmarts and Tescos of the world line their shelves with goods cultivated, manufactured, and otherwise sourced from millions of people living under unhealthy, inhumane conditions up to and including literal slavery across the Third World. This system of global interdependency, lorded over by Wall Street and London corporate-financier monopolies, doesn't just coincidentally allow such conditions to exist, but is built on this perpetual and ever expanding socioeconomic disparity.

Clearly the solution to solving destitution that leads to malnutrition and starvation is addressing the socioeconomic disparity that created it in the first place, but the monopolies that benefit from this disparity the most are in no way about to do so. Instead, their proposal is to feed the Third World with genetically modified gruel to make up for the fact that poor populations cannot access a normal, balanced diet.

This "GMO gruel" not only allows big-agricultural monopolies to expand their markets under the guise of "charity," but allows them to monopolize a greater portion of the world's food supply. By hooking the Third World on "GMO gruel" that will be patented, centrally controlled, and beyond the means of local populations to reproduce independently, the very perpetrators of global disparity will only tighten their grip on humanity tighter still.

From "Golden Rice" to "Super Bananas," this GMO gruel represents the very worst of a long history of inhuman, racist imperialism. It is essentially corporate-financiers handing out "Super Bananas for Brown People."

The same propaganda networks focused on keeping consumers globally ignorant about what is in their food through anti-GMO labeling campaigns, are pushing poisoned, monopolizing GMO schemes like "Golden Rice" and "Super Bananas," disguised as "socially conscious" biotech "charity." But GMO gruel for the most destitute of society is not an answer. At best, it is a cheap publicity stunt designed to push GMO into new markets while painting opponents of big-agri multinationals as "promoting starvation." At worst it is a sovereignty usurping assault on a global, national, local, and even personal level. Either way, it should be wholly condemned and rejected.

The Real Solution

The real and most obvious solution is not peddling GMO gruel to the impoverished to make up for the fact that they don't have access to a normal diet, but to give them access to a normal diet in the first place. This is done with first stabilizing the geopolitical chaos that creates and perpetuates socioeconomic injustice. This must be done by exposing and foiling the West's various hegemonic geopolitical campaigns in Africa, South America, Asia, and even Eastern Europe.

Next, education and localizing agriculture through training and assistance could be done in the short term, providing a long term, self-sustaining solution. Organic farms producing a variety of crops for local consumption, rather than devastating, debt-incurring monoculture pursued by farmers worldwide in a self-defeating cycle of debt and dependency on big-agri, could begin solving deficiencies in local diets - not to mention a whole host of other socioeconomic challenges.

Image: The multinational corporations pushing for "super bananas for brown people" are the very monopolies that have created and perpetuated the conditions of immense disparity that have caused malnutrition and starvation for millions in the first place. Understanding that these monopolies are the problem, and that decentralizing their power is the answer, is the first step to truly solving injustices now being exploited to further expand the power of these special interests.  

For the hundreds of millions being wasted on "Super Bananas" and "Golden Rice," such funding could be directed toward truly solving malnutrition and starvation. By solving these problems permanently and locally, big-agricultural giants like Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer, and others, would be denied an opportunity to exploit human misery they themselves have contributed to creating and perpetuating, to merely expand their monopolies and negative impact on humanity further.

In Thailand, the new military-led government that has come to power is attempting to ween the population off of subsidies and dependency on big-agricultural giants through a national organic agriculture initiative that includes creating localized fertilizer production, local processing, and even training in marketing to give farmers the power to sell their crops directly to the markets rather than depend on big-retail monopolies.

Real solutions that truly help the people, are implemented at the expense of corporate-financier monopolies. By decentralizing everything from fertilizer, pesticide, and herbicide production, to distribution and retail, the very existence of multinational monopolies are challenged. Since the governments many people believe serve their interests, in fact are directed by corporate-financier special interests, expect none of these solutions to ever be implemented by "them."

Instead, we must come together as communities to solve these issues locally for ourselves, and create sustainable models that can be replicated around the world by others who need them most. It is not a solution that can be implemented overnight, but it can be done, step by small step, year by year, toward a better tomorrow. Since "Super Bananas" and "Golden Rice" are in fact, not solutions at all, it is guaranteed that the problems of malnutrition and starvation, as well as dependency on unjust multinational monopolies, will persist or in fact, worsen. We have nothing to lose, no matter how slow our progress may seem, by taking the first tentative steps today.  

Tony Cartalucci's articles have appeared on many alternative media websites, including his own at Land Destroyer Report, Alternative Thai News Network and LocalOrg.

Read other contributed articles by Tony Cartalucci here.

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Super Surge: 1 Million Illegals A Month To Crash Economy

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