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Blog PostsCoups d'etat in Western Europe go unnoticed by Free Press
By Michael McGehee at Nov 22, 2011 |
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| Former Italian Prime Minister Berlosconi and former Greek President Papandreou |
Recently the President of Greece and Prime Minister of Italy were forced out of office and replaced with unelected technocrats with close ties to international banks. According to Barron's, a weekly financial newspaper, "the regime changes forced in Greece and Italy [were] by the bond vigilantes." The weekly goes on to quote Marc Chandler, global head of currency strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman as saying
What is most striking about Italy that appears to have gone largely unnoticed or uncommented on is that . . . what ultimately toppled Berlusconi was not voter moral outrage or even an alternative plan by the opposition, but rather the international capital markets and the loss of credibility among European leaders.The article ends with another disturbing remark on the coups. Quoting Bill Blain, the senior director of the special situations group of Newedge UK Financial: "'To save the euro we had to destroy Europe' would not be a political epitaph to treasure." Translation: the reign of banks requires the end of democracy.
I am not about to shed a tear for Berlusconi or Papandreou, but that banks have this kind of power to overthrow democratically-elected governments and replace them with unelected "leaders" is frightening.
More frightening is the silence of the Free Press, especially in the U.S. where there is an Occupy movement spreading like wildfire and whose sights are aimed at the power and corruption of Wall Street.
The New York Times didn't dare call the two events by their proper name: a coup.
Neither did the Wall Street Journal.
The Washington Post, however, did manage to refer to both events as a coup one time.
In "Lucas Papademos: The President Bartlet of Greece?" we read about "the newly appointed prime minister of Greece," and are told that, "After a reported five-hour debate, the government agreed to Papademos’s nomination. It was not a coup worthy of a Greek drama . . ." Really? A democratically-elected government in Western Europe has been overthrown by financial cartels and replaced with an un-elected technocrat who was "vice president of the European Central Bank from 2002 to 2010" gets a yawn from the Free Press and dismisses it as not "worthy."
To make matters worse, we are told that the "economist and Harvard professor" who has been "tapped to right the listing financial ship" has also "asked that the elections [scheduled for February 19, 2012] be held later so as to have more time to negotiate a way out of the Greek debt crisis." Apparently he doesn't think "negotiat[ing' a way out of the Greek debt crisis" can be done via a democratically-elected government.
Turning to Italy, the most we get in the article "Out of office, Berlusconi faces legal and financial challenges" is how Berlusconi was "was felled by massive international and market pressure" because he was "seen as an impediment to economic reform, [so] his exit came quickly as Italy was swept up by Europe's debt crisis." We are also given the headline of Il Giornale, a "family newspaper": "Stop a Europe of technocrats: This government is a coup." The most the Washington Post provides on Mario Monti, the new Prime Minister, is that he is an economist.
The rest of the article deals mostly with how Berlusconi will handle various scandals and what he will do out of office. It is assumed that "the billionaire [will go] back where he started: running his considerable [media] empire."
That's it. Nothing in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, and rather indifferent treatment from the Washington Post, though it at least uses the phrase "coup" in regards to what happened in the two countries.for more of my blogs please visit: www.truth_addict.blogspot.com
