The Moral Unraveling of the EU, Bailouts and Central Banking

by Anthony Wile
The Daily Bell

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Slovakia has now approved the European debt-crisis bailout fund, but the problems Europe is experiencing are similar to those faced by America in the grip of the Fed's immense bailouts of the past two years.

Increasingly, these are seen as morally repugnant by citizens throughout the West. And this has significant consequences that the mainstream press declines to report.

Dominant social themes work by omission as well as commission; in this column, I want to re-examine potential ramifications. I've done it before, but I think it's worth repeating. Not enough commentators, even in the alternative media, point them out in my humble opinion.

Money continues to flood Western regimes and financial institutions with billions and billions that they don't deserve and cannot properly apply. Perhaps there is no alternative but to "kick the can down the road." On the other hand, perhaps the bailouts are part of a wider elite destabilization effort, one intended to generate chaos and misery that will pave the way for global governance and maybe a new world currency. This is the view of the more conspiratorially-minded among the alternative media.

For whatever reasons, the bailouts, against all logic, continue apace and are being increasingly resisted ... not merely for their Draconian impacts but because people are using technology to become more informed. This bailout saga, therefore, has been unusual, not only for the incalculable wealth that's been extended but also because it's played out in front of millions.

The ramifications continue to be felt in my view. The push-back began in the US with TARP and then continued with revelation of US$16 trillion-plus (probably more) in short-term loans extended by the US Federal Reserve to financial institutions – not just in America but around the world.

Now US Congressman Ron Paul is conducting the Federal Reserve's first "audit." Ben Bernanke speaks, but his pronouncements have nowhere near the power or authority of his predecessor Alan Greenspan. Occupy Wall Street and alternative journo Alex Jones are both holding organized protests outside Fed buildings. In Southern Europe, protests and riots (Greece) rise wherever the EU and its bankers attempt to impose "austerity."

The Internet has allowed people to see – finally – exactly what's going on. Prior to the Internet, the controlled mainstream news would have explained in unison that the Fed "made massive adjustments to the global financial fabric to ensure that systemic collapse was mitigated ..." or employed other nonsensical euphemisms. These sorts of non-explanations would have been repeated ad nauseum.

But in the era of the Internet, such gobbledygook has been effectively negated by literally millions of articles (and thousands of videos) explaining what central banking really is – monetary price fixing – and how central bankers "print money from nothing" to advantage their cronies at the expense of everyone else.

The system survived because it appeared so incomprehensible that it was beyond criticism. Not anymore. People around the world "get it" and the anger is breaching even the indolence of the political class. Eventually, if certain fundamental knowledge becomes widespread enough, the elites may have to take a "step back" as we have predicted they might. Resistance is spreading.

We can see this in Slovakia, where that Eastern European nation was the last holdout among euro-zone nations to approve the EU's most recent sovereign bailout fund. On Tuesday, the parliament rejected the fund and brought down the government of Prime Minister Iveta Radicova. On Thursday, the parliament voted FOR it, but the point had been made.

Even parliamentary representatives, notoriously resistant to the public sentiment they are supposed to be accommodating, are now beginning to reflect the animosity of their constituents. The Telegraph's Ambrose Evans-Pritchard recently captured this sentiment in a column entitled, "EU bailout is racket for financial elites."

Twenty years ago, no mainstream paper in the world would have run such an article – even given today's extreme stress and provocation. But times have changed. The financial system has come in for criticism the likes of which has not been seen (or heard) for decades. Here's an excerpt from Evans-Pritchard's article:

What the Slovak debate has shown us yet again – as if the political storm in Germany over the past two months has not been enough – is that escalating bailouts are nearing their political limits. The traumatic affair almost brought down the German government. It has in fact brought down the Slovak government. You can't keep doing this. Democracies are not to be toyed with ...

Slovakia's cry of defiance has not been entirely pointless. Richard Sulik – the speaker of parliament – has caught a mood of popular disgust that goes far beyond his own country. His objections are unanswerable.

How can there be any justification for a state of affairs where a poor but rule-abiding EMU state must bail out a serial violator with twice the per capita income, and triple the level of the pensions – a country which is in any case irretrievably bankrupt? How can it be that the no-bail clause of the Lisbon Treaty has been ripped up?

But he also touched on the most neuralgic issue, reminding everybody that the EFSF is 'mainly for saving foreign banks'. These are French, German, British, Dutch, and Belgian banks, of course ... 'I'd rather be a pariah in Brussels than have to feel ashamed before my children,' Sulik said ... Bravo.

"Bravo," writes Evans-Pritchard, summing up the New Age's defiance to establishment ways. We began to write about this back in August of 2009 when The Market Oracle's Stewart Dougherty – a financial consultant – sent us a column entitled "The Metastasis of Moral Hazard and its Effect on Gold." He wanted us to see what he'd written. Here's an excerpt:

The colossal miscalculation made by Washington and Wall Street is that they could control the moral hazard genie once they removed it from the bottle. They believed they could use the genie to enrich themselves with trillions of dollars' worth of taxpayer money, and then replace it in the bottle before its magic spell of immorality metastasized throughout society at large. They assumed that the people would be too stupid to see what was going on. And that even if the people did figure things out, they would willingly wear the thick, choking chains of debt being welded to their necks by the financial elite and its Washington enablers.

Instead, thanks to the Internet and the democracy of information and insight it affords, the people were instantly wise to what was happening, and it stirred them. The concept of "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," harkens to the Bible. And perhaps Shylock was speaking for all of humanity when he said, "If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?"

We thought then, and believe now, that Dougherty wrote one of the decade's most profound columns, capturing the MORAL dimension of the fraud of "bailouts" and the impact of their fundamental – even obscene – unfairness. We wrote about his column (you can see it here: Have the Immoral Actions of Central Bankers Precipitated the Decline of the West?) and commented:

Dougherty has written a REAL article of REAL observations about the end of Western civilization. Sheesh, ... Spengler's Decline of the West in three darn pages ... He's right, he has gotten the morality right. It's not just the culture of the West, or its promotions, or even its social organization that is finished.

You CANNOT, as a society, witness a couple of guys pull a trillion out of their back pockets without feeling, well ... snookered. And after feeling snookered, something else begins to percolate. "Hey," you say, "wait a minute. I sit here with my debts and my job and my house in foreclosure and this guy – THIS GUY – throws around trillions? Wait a minute. WHEN DO I GET MINE!"

Now the rage spreads.

The Internet Reformation is a process, not an episode.

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Bell.

October 17, 2011

Anthony Wile is an author, columnist, media commentator and entrepreneur focused on developing projects that promote the general advancement of free-market thinking concepts. He is the chief editor of the popular free-market oriented news site, TheDailyBell.com. Mr. Wile is the Executive Director of The Foundation for the Advancement of Free-Market Thinking – a non-profit Liechtenstein-based foundation. His most popular book, High Alert, is now in its third edition and available in several languages. Other notable books written by Mr. Wile include The Liberation of Flockhead (2002) and The Value of Gold (2002).

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