IN SPAIN, THEY’RE GOING AFTER THE BANKSTERS
Not all the stories I've been getting have concerned mind manipulation efforts, and certainly 2o16 has also started out with some interesting news in the financial sectors as well. Consider what's happening in Spain.
This story is intriguing from any number of levels, not the least of which because some of the regular readers of this website live in Spain, and from time to time have updated us about the dire straits not only of the Spanish economy, but the cultural assault that country - home to Cervantes, Soler, Velasquez - has been under. This article was shared by Mr. L.B., and it concerns a series of court actions against the corrupt financial oligarchs that have been responsible for so much of the country's current economic crisis:
To Put Bankers Behind Bars, Spanish Citizens Take the 1% to Court
Consider just the first five paragraphs here, and one tidbit of information that I find highly significant in terms of its implications for the type of financial analysis of the situation that one encounters in the analyses of former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Catherine Austin Fitts:
The case of Rodrigo Rato is perhaps the most interesting among some 150 high-level corruption cases scheduled to take place this year in Spain – involving over 2,000 elite figures in Spanish society. Rato was the country's Minister of Economics from 1996 to 2004, and a leading political force in the conservative Popular Party (PP) as well as managing director of the IMF (2004-2007) and chairman of Bankia, Spain’s largest bank (2010-12).
These institutions’ combined actions spurred Spain’s economic crash and intensifying poverty crisis, as Bankia’s massive debts were nationalized by the PP-controlled government and Rato's bank became the main recipient of the bailout deal with the EU and IMF. From these business-government arrangements, Rato and the rest of Spain's 1% profited while imposing austerity on the majority.
Last April, the Financial Times described Rato being shoved by a law officer during his arrest. “The touch lasted only a few seconds, but it will be seared into the mind of Rodrigo Rato — and of millions of Spaniards — for years to come,” wrote the paper. Millions saw the clip repeated on rolling TV coverage and the Internet. The Times article quotes an editorial by Spain’s El Mundo newspaper, illuminating its importance: “The precise moment in which the customs agent grabs his head... marks a point of no return, in which we leave behind an era.”
Translation: Rato and many others were no longer untouchable.
The case now underway against Rato and Bankia hinges around three aspects. First, the bank is charged with false advertising when it floated its stock for purchase. Second, it is accused of mis-selling toxic assets to unsuspecting members of the public. And third, it issued "black visa cards" to senior Bankia management, facilitating both tax evasion and bribery of politicians and government officials.(Emphasis added)
What intrigues me here is that the pattern in Spain so closely resembles Ms. Fitts' analysis of the overarching pattern one sees in the past few years in the wake of the various bailouts of the major banksters: toxic assets were moved off the balance sheets of the banks, and shifted to the public via their governments, while more liquidity was added to the balance sheets, creating, for want of a better word, a vast slush fund in private hands.
And of course, in this mix, the major banksters seldom went to jail for two decades' worth of casino-like behavior, but awarded themselves fat bonuses.
But wait, there's much more going on in Spain, at least, according to this article, for the indictments did not arise from a haphazard approach, but rather from a considered strategy:
In May of 2012, on the first anniversary of the 15M movement that took to the squares in a two-month occupation that helped spur Occupy Wall Street four months later, 15MpaRato launched its plan to jail Rodrigo Rato. According to law, Spanish citizens or organizations can file complaints that judges will consider and decide whether, and whom, to prosecute. This is exactly what happened with Rato.
“One of the first things we did was publicize an anonymous dropbox, and we received information from the citizens on Rato and Bankia. This grew and grew and included receiving 8,000 pages from the bank employees,” Simona Levi from 15MpaRato told Occupy.com.
15MpaRato used global leaks, an open-source program that creates a secure Internet space to receive sensitive information. By early June of 2012, enough evidence had been collected to initiate the case against Rato. Victims were also found to stand as claimants.
Next, activists launched Spain’s first-ever political crowdfunding campaign to pay the legal fees associated with the case. The campaign reached its funding target in less than 24 hours, and the anonymous drop-box provided essential information to citizens eager to get involved. For instance, they discovered that Bankia employees had leaked internal documents that read “DO NOT SHOW THIS TO THE CLIENTS,” and were instructed to target unsuspecting customers to buy the bank's toxic assets that should have only been sold to financial investors.
In other words, there was a definite campaign to create (1) a secure internet source for those inside the Spanish banking system to provide information that would lead to indictments, and (2) an financial effort was launched to fund it. One can expect, via some high octane speculation, that similar strategies will emerge this year in Europe, as it deals not only with an ongoing financial crisis, but also a "refugee" crisis on top of that, and governments that are increasingly isolated from popular sentiment. This is a movement, in other words, that eventually will engulf not just bankers, but the politicians who enabled them.
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so if my vision is accurate:
where mr global can, he puts corrupt laws in place that protect parasites and predators to the resources of the 99.999%. otherwise, mr global resorts to gladios and propaganda to get such laws in place. barring that, standard false flagged military operations are used.
where mr everyman survives and/or thrives in spite of mr global (if anywhere) it’s because these tactics don’t work, are futile and are not used. so far it looks like iceland. is this true anywhere else? is this true in iceland?
joseph are you saying this is by degrees becoming true in spain? or anywhere else? i’ve seen this meme of oases for mr everyman before. it was spread around about north dakota a few years back with their state owned bank. believed it mattered until i got more familiar with fracking and shale oil industries. and industrial farming.
these are not rhetorical questions. please. anyone?
while we’re at it has anyone a clue as to what is the point of more and more of us being woken up to more accurate layers of perceived reality?
i read a huffpost article on zika last week that did not surprise me. the comments posted by readers did. the article rambled on about various speculations as to causes of such crazy nasty disease pathogens – and carefully avoided discusing probable causes like gmo mosquitos and industrial tetracycline released last year in the areas of brazil recently hit with zika.
along these lines i still wonder how it is mr global doesn’t have his darpa pull an erdogan and simply shut down our access to sites like doc’s.
as an aside (or maybe the whole point) comparisons to louis 14 do not provide insights to preferable paths forward from here. the vatican and amschel mayer profited from louis as well as from robespierre.
ZDB, as far as the Zika virus scam is concerned, a controversial website author whose name sounds like ‘Gem Stone’ has it nailed, in my opinion:
‘Of the 4,200 reported cases of microcephaly, only SIX (6) you read that right, six babies had been exposed to zika virus. This proves the fraud, just like I said it from day one. Lo and behold, all 4,200 moms got that new Tdap shot while pregnant!’
There are multiple pages around this issue at his site, if you want to get up-to-speed. A very dangerous ‘move’ is occurring…
wow. layers upon layers of deception. just like every other false flag.
yeh please. can you be more obvious than gem stone?
btw speaking of layers, you read last week that some clinton operative just bought 40% controlling stake in the onion, right?
wait gosh. that means the vaccine demons are trying to blame the gmo demons? apparently we don’t have any gmo’d vaccines yet?
too funny. what goes around surely does come around eh? funny as, well funny as hell really, if one of these wannabe demon gmo seed producers fight in courts that they own that vaccine mfr wannabe demons should lose their immunity to all vaccine liability?
hmm wonder what kinda dialectic would cause those two multiheaded dogs from hell to set on each other. can’t ya just hear big pharma lawyers arguing that gmo seeds are contaminating big pharma’s medicinal marijuana fields?
“hey you got round up in my bud dude.”
“no dude, you got thimerosol in my high fructose corn syrup.”
ZDB
Google:
peeling the onion fetzer.
ZDB: The last time I mentioned his name, the whole post got deleted. Not just moderated. Gone.
Try ‘jim’ instead of ‘gem’.
Another member (Belgian-born) of the fraternity has jumped, this time off a balustrade high over an indoor atrium in one of the steel-and-glass temples of Money in the City of London; was said to have been depressed…
Marcos, I dont think the current purge in Spain is anything related to what went down in Iceland. The target is to seemingly bringing down a system of fraud and corruption built under the connivance of the Monarchy, to rebuild a Syriza type of goverment under Podemos, to follow down the path of Greece. Privatize the country: roads, high speed rail tracks, ports etc…
Banksters are expendable in Spain…they were never in control… ETA (run from the deeper state) was always in control… the whole system got bailed out…not only the banksters…most prominent the developers and companies who got incubated early on by Nazi International capital… They have literally walked away from their bad loans with worthless colaterral “Land” seized or foreclosed…
NO! to the non-future of a capitalist futuristic accumulation of: job-loss, debt, eviction, foreclosure, acidified and radioactive oceans, etc., etc. Move on toward A Human Front opposed to capital’s potential machine subsumption of the species.
NO! to Singularity Capitalism where capital’s priority becomes reproduction of cybernetic systems, vaporizing capital’s dependency on the humans. We are reading accounts daily of Dark-side re-writes of doctrines currently percolating through the very core of capitalist-class by assorted transhumanist and extropians populating the research centers of high-technology industries – the doctrine of singularity capitalism. The continuing exponential growth in computing power will soon break through the barrier posed to accumulation posed by the very form of HUMAN – to end-time conflicts between humans and artilects. A ruined planet unfit for all but machine habitation. Even the coming Androids might be proletarianized by dependency on energy supplies controlled by capital. In this singularity capital, an inhuman power rules over everything.
Knock Them OUT! Spain.
To fight it, a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless HORIZONTILATION.
There will be civil divisions, foreign intervention, media blackouts and blockades, censorship and viral mis- and disinformation saturation, potentially deadly information monitoring and abrupt communication disruption. They should prepare accordingly to understand anonymization, encryption and verification techniques, carefully distinguish public and covert operations, and laying the groundwork for organization when the net goes down.
What’s coming…
https://rt.com/shows/keiser-report/330968-episode-keiser-report-870/
Go 15:15 clicks in
What’s coming?
Privatization in SPADES!
Joseph, it appears to me that the ‘organizers’ have taken a look at what happened in Greece and drawn some lessons:
The Spanish people are already two-thirds of the way down the path of the Greek people. They saw that the newly-elected Greek government (by the people) was either a ‘plant’ or ‘caved’ almost immediately under pressure. So, doing anything from a ‘beseeching the banksters’ (BIS, IMF, DeutchesBank, etc.) for mercy was not going to work.
The one thing that the banksters have had (outside of Iceland) is total immunity for their persons. No jail time, no ‘off with their heads’. Minor monetary penalties, in some cases – but that doesn’t hit ‘them’, just the corporate small-change drawer. ‘Privatize the gains, socialize the losses’ has worked.
What if the ‘organizers’ have decided to take-away that ‘safe space’? A ‘preemptive strike’, as it were? A notice to banksters that – if you come after us, the way you came-after Greece – there will be personal consequences.
This could be a quiet and low-key way that big-power-people behind the scenes (ones with the public interest in mind) have drawn a line in the sand. Come-after-us the way you came-after Greece at your personal peril…
If it becomes simply an act to demonstrate an example, I can only hope they start with Jon Corzine. He not only gouged some of Wall Street, but literally raped cattle ranchers and smaller commodity investors who support middle America. After that, there are hundreds of names but Jon stands out as one of the worst.
Next up, zero interest rates. That ought to fill the coffers of the central banks while taking what little is left of our savings.
Agreed, 100%! But keep in mind that Corzine is one of the worst only because he was caught.
The Best Spanish Translation I read in years!
The Financial Oligarch are no longer untouchable!
Now if only Greece, Italy, UK, Ireland and the USA can do the same and bring these murderous stupid parasites to justice. Spain in beginning to do what Iceland did with it’s banksters. How much is enough for these addicts money and power to do what in what World to these parasites live in have they no thoughts of self preservation the future. Or are they perpetual children living in the never ending now.
This is the first heartening news I’ve read in ages. Grass-roots organized, open-source and crowd-funded pushback to systemic corruption and frankly, organized looting.
I don’t see why this model cannot be applied elsewhere, at least in organizing similar targeted investigations and collecting evidence as they’ve done in Spain. The legal component is more challenging to overcome, but with enough public awareness similar cases of blatant corruption and pillage can be pushed forward — and would be denied by the legal system only at its peril.
basta, I agree on sooo many points.
It appears that ‘we the people’ need some sort of ‘leverage’ over the legal system. It will be interesting to see if the organizers of the Spanish ‘rebellion’ have thought that far ahead. Are they looking to actually-win in the court system, or spark a public-outcry – and action – when the perp gets ‘acquitted’?
The problem here is that the judicial system is as corrupt as the financial system it should be seeking to punish. It’s like Public Enquiries into establishment scandals – typically a whitewash overseen by the very same people who are under investigation. Of course the odd sacrificial lamb is thrown to the slaughter to give the impression that there has been some sort of accountability.
I can’t help but think that to get any sort of real justice it would have to be forced upon them. At that point, I’m sure they have an emergency plan (release some sort of virus, artificial meteor strike etc.)in place to deal with the troublesome plebs while they scurry off to their DUMBs hideouts and wait for it all to pass over.
I’ve wondered the same. If serious prosecutions started w/ RICO style Asset Forfietures, would the sky start to fall? I believe their response would go out of it’s way to spare criticall infrastructure. Let’s face it they own all the stuff of real value..
Aridzonan_13, you sparked a thought. Just like the I.G. Farben factories were not bombed in WWII (coincidence, of course), the safest place to be-in prior-to a *ahem* distraction-incident might be in an oligarchy-owned factory or profitable establishment. (Stay away from any money-losing structures like the WTC…)