George Soros

Further evidence showing who The President works for. Further proof that the corporatocracy is taking over

In this, the fourth post on the subject of the murder of the Rule of Law by the political corporatocracy, The Slog looks at the interplay between the US finance & investment sector, and the south American State of Argentina. A story not unlike that of the Greece v Troika epic since 2010, the difference this time around is that observers have become more willing to question ‘the investors’ over the last fur years…and the victim seems more determined to ignore the brazen sanctimony of the munneeee-men.

“Law is just one public institution, but it is a corner stone of society,” observed the radical American commentator Paul Craig Roberts yesterday, “When law goes, everything goes.” I don’t always agree with Mr Roberts, but he is a lucid writer, clear thinker, and a bollocks-free zone. He is of course right about the Law: my only finessing of his remarks would be to say that included in ‘everything’ are civilisation, the rights of the citizen, freedom of speech, and the right to an equal opportunity.

In this series, I have tried to plot the role of corporate interests in the shady background to perversion of the due process of law. James Foley is dead (and his demise was faked in some manner or other) after covering a war to advance the interests of the US energy axis….and even Foley’s real role is now in some doubt – of which, more anon.The men who killed him are backed by Arab investors whose geopolitical hypocrisy is probably unparalleled in world events.

Rolf Harris is in prison 20% because he was a silly man when younger, and 80% because Australian mining and media interests want both the BBC and ecologists out of the game. Greek Radio has become the mouthpiece of a Greek leader who smears Alexis Tsipras and framed Golden Dawn, while acting in the interests of the Troikanauts – who in turn represent largely corporate interests.

The rights to the American radio waves were quietly signed over to the Obamagandists last June.

Boris Johnson has given corporate corruption a free hand in London, and invested in huge supplies of riot equipment in order to protect those neoliberal interests. His crazy proposal to reverse ‘innocent until proven guilty’ caused his to write this dangerous tosh in the Telegraph earlier this week: ‘We need to make it crystal clear that you will be arrested if you go out to Syria or Iraq without a good reason.’ A woman to whom he has for many years been close was found Not Guilty at the Old Bailey this summer in a prosecution performance that leaves many doubting WTF the cps thought it was up to…but the real man behind the acquittal was a media mogul whose UK television ambitions helped do for Rolf Harris.

“Twas ever thus,” people keep telling me, but they’re wrong. The protection of Establishment figures like Bob Boothby, Ted Heath, Jeremy Thorpe, Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, Lord Brittan and Jeremy Hunt has indeed been ever-present in British (and human) society. It is The Establishment that has changed: today, it is the Fred Goodwins, Bob Diamonds, Rupert Murdochs, Stephen Hesters and Lloyd Blankfeins who are well beyond the reach of any law.

Having run their various Sovereign vassals into the ground over the last century, the political class in the West clings onto a flimsy semblance of power thanks entirely to the help of corrupt support and obscene donations from lobbyists, multinational interests, media gargoyles, bankers, and the generally powerful but unelected rich. That the legislators are far too often lawyers (they are 9700% over-represented in the House of Commons) explains why new Laws benefit their profession and their political backers, not We the People.

This general sellout also explains why the citizens of ClubMed countries have been subjected to the impenetrable insanity of debt repayment alongside austerity for the last four years. The world’s bourses and lenders sell poorly regulated debt to greedy Sovereign élites, and when the fat folks can’t pay it back, the People become thin folks. This is not an economic strategy, it is the shifting of corporacratic responsibility onto the populace…in short, it is the piper-payers calling the tune.

The Troika’s three elements include the IMF, an institution run for the benefit of Wall Street, and headed by a woman, Christine Lagarde, who now faces criminal corruption charges in France. She is in the job solely because her predecessor Dominique Strauss-Kahn (a socialist politician) was taken out of the game in a sex-sting. The other two elements are Brussels-am-Berlin – an axis controlled by corrupt bureaucrats, a former spymaster, and a former Communist youth-leader with a past of ruthless ambition – and The Investors. Most of this last group have now been paid off (at enormous gains based on opportunistic buying): the Greek debt is largely owned today by the EU and the ECB – or put another way, the taxpayers. By 2015, the percentage down to us will be 85%.

The new model of government in the West is very simple for any citizen young, old, rich, poor, bright or stupid to understand: “Heads we win, tails you lose”.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the detail of what’s going on now between Wall Street sociopaths and Argentina. Vulture funds, which have been trying to force it into an involuntary bankruptcy (that way their insurance pays out) are demanding what will effectively be a 600% return on sovereign bonds bought for under 10% of face value. To do this they will have to defeating the obvious majority of their class: a 2005 settlement in which 92% of creditors agreed to accept a 70% haircut on their bonds. But then, democracy and the Vulture’s mindset are strangers to each other.

Perhaps nobody should’ve been surprised when former UK interest-rate inflater and Hungarian shithead George Soros’s involvement in all this suddenly came to light yesterday. Although a US court has, you’ll never guess, backed the vulture funds, two weeks ago Argentina sidestepped its jurisdiction by transferring the trusteeship for repayment from Mellon Bank in New York to its own central bank. It is expected that this neat sidestep will be approved by the Argentine Congress, thus avoiding default on the vulture-owned funds.

But according to court documents filed in London last week, Quantum Partners LP, a fund managed by Soros’s family office, has joined a group of investors suing bond trustee Bank of New York Mellon Corp for ‘failing to distribute €226 million euros of interest payments’ on Argentine debt. These investors are all under the wing of wannabe dictator Paul Singer, the boss of Elliot Associates – just about the most unscrupulous discounted debt buyer in the world.

Now, neither side is getting covered in glory here (I am no fan of Ms Fernandez) but the truth of the matter is that she, Ecuador and Iceland have less than politely told the Troikanauts to f**k off…and the sky hasn’t fallen in. Quite the opposite, in fact: all three countries are infinitely better off than Greece – whose “business-friendly” élite acquiesced in the greed of their paymasters.

The Slog is on the record since 2011 as saying, ultimately, debt forgiveness is the cheapest and most economically effective way of getting out of this hole, but of course the Carpetbankers don’t see it that way. I’ll go further: they cannot afford to let a high-profile debtor like Argentina “get away with it”….otherwise, 7 key EU members will start to get ideas….primarily, Italy and France.

This is what makes Argentina so pivotally important from here on. Empires are being built in all this, but not by sovereign States. The aim – annexation by the corporacrats in order to exploit raw materials – could not be more clear. One article published in 2002 by the IMF’s Anne Krueger proposed some “new and creative ideas” on what to do about Argentina. Krueger said that, for creditors, “the lesson is clear: we need to learn from corporate bankruptcy regimes like Chapter 11 in the US”. Immediately afterwards, two US newspapers floated the idea of Argentina paying off its debts by ceding its immensely rich region of Patagonia….which would be “floated off as an independent State”. (In the energy game, Norway is being bought up bit by bit with what looks to me like a path towards a similar end: the ownership of sub-arctic energy by Business)

Christina Fernandez needs to put on some heavy armour and double her bodyguard. We are seeing in Hungary what happens when a leader like Viktor Orban comes out publicly as being “against my country being colonised by bankers and foreign money”: Orban has been subjected to a stream of falsehoods and Nazi smears by the Western media, and bigtime US business fixers have been airlifted in to destabilise the regime. The Hedgies will do the same to Argentina.

Some are heartened by the fact that the Black Dude in the White House is supporting Argentina in the dispute: but don’t be fooled by Obama’s rhetoric. Read this fact instead: Obama could prevent Paul Singer and George Soros from bankrupting Argentina with one stroke of his pen. All Uncle Obamatom needs to do is use the Emergency authority granted to presidential  power, by asserting that Singer’s suit interferes with the President’s Constitutional right to conduct foreign policy effectively. The precedents are all for Obama and against Singer: even Dubya invoked it during his White House occupation. But Obama won’t. Which shows you who owns the Yes We Can Man.

So there you have it: pretty damning behavioural evidence that the needs of Vulture Funds are more important than the White House. And the strong likelihood that no turd will remain unstoned in the bid to stop Argentina escaping the pillage of the corporacrats.

If Argentina wins, I’d give you evens that Italy definitely (and France probably) will immediately start to go the same route. Then watch, fascinated, as the European Union implodes.

Stay tuned.

Last night at The Slog: Doris Jobsdone and the Burden of Proof