Evrópskt lögregluofbeldi (MYNDBÖND)

Það mætti halda að þessi myndskeið sem sýna lögreglu berja með kylfum á friðsömum mótmælendum kæmu frá einhverju herstjórnarríkinu í þriðja heiminum. Raunin er hinsvegar sú að þessi ofbeldisverk voru framin núna í morgun af lögreglu á Spáni, einu af stærri ríkjum Evrópusambandsins.

UPPFÆRT 14:30: Þetta var að berast og af framgöngunni að dæma virðist sem skipun dagsins sé að byltingin skuli barin niður af fullri hörku.

Fyrir aðeins hálfum mánuði síðan mátti sjá sambærileg vinnubrögð lögreglu í öðru Evrópusambandsríki, Grikklandi. Ætli sé komin út ný samræmd tilskipun frá Brüssel?

UPPFÆRT 16:30: Munið þið eftir byltingunni í Egyptalandi á vordögum? Já þeir eru byrjaðir aftur að mótmæla, því svo virðist sem byltinginn þar hafi aðeins orðið til þess að leiða nýja stjórn til valda sem reynist álíka slæm og sú fyrri, eða verri eins og gerðist hér á Íslandi. Þessar myndir voru teknar núna síðdegis á Tahrir torgi:

Og eins og fram kemur í athugasemd hér að neðan þá var í dag líka Skotið á mótmælendur í Sýrlandi og Líkin hrannast upp í Jemen. Svei mér þá ef það er ekki bara allt að ganga af göflunum samtímis.

Gúmmíkúlum beitt í Barcelona

Hafa misst tökin á blekkingunni

Verðbólga fer nú aftur vaxandi, og haldi sú þróun áfram með sama hraða er útlit fyrir að ársverðbólga verði aftur komin í tveggja stafa tölu strax í haust. Verði það raunin eru forsendur nýgerðra kjarasamninga sjálkrafa brostnar, og þolendur verðtryggingar munu sjálfsagt hoppa hæð sína í loft upp þegar "110%-leiðin" breytist á svipstundu í 120% og svo 130% og því næst gjaldþrot. Bankarnir sem eiga þessi skuldabréf munu í kjölfarið auðvitað fara á hausinn þegar mestallt húsnæði í landinu verður aftur orðið tvíveðsett og viðskiptavinir hættir að geta greitt af lánunum. Í grunnatriðum 2008 endurtekið. Það sem hefur gerst er að stjórnvöld, ekki bara hér heldur allsstaðar, eru smám saman að missa tökin. Ekki bara á ástandinu því það er löngu orðið stjórnlaust, heldur er allur trúverðugleiki horfinn og því orðið ómögulegt að viðhalda lengur þeirri blekkingu að einhver hafi nokkra stjórn á neinu. Veruleikinn er allastaðar farinn að skína í gegn, og við blasir ringulreið og óvissa eins og lesa má í þessari prýðilegu grein:

ZeroHedge: Things Are Spinning Out of Control

The pretense of centralized control of history is wearing thin.

The single greatest conceit of the Status Quo in the U.S., China and Euroland is that systems and trends can be tightly controlled. That conceit is slowly being revealed as hubris, as all sorts of things are spinning out of the control of the centralized authorities and financial elites in each geopolitical power center.

Does anyone really think the people of Greece will stand idly by while the state treasures of their nation are transferred to the banks which foolishly lent billions to a visibly risky enterprise? The banks, of course, lent freely to insolvent governments throughout the European Union, confident in the backstop of the E.U. itself.

The analogy to subprime mortgages in the U.S. is near-perfect: banks lent freely to extremely risky borrowers, breezily confident that their worker-bees in the Federal Reserve, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Treasury and Congress would all toil feverishly to transfer the risk to the U.S. taxpayers, by whatever means were necessary.

Does anyone really think the uprisings against this transfer of national wealth to the "too big to fail" banks in Europe will fade as unemployment rises and the true costs of the transfer become apparent to all?

Does anyone really think there is no chance that the citizens of one of the nations lined up to be stripmined by the E.U. will openly rebel against the stripmining, throwing out their government until they find some politicians who are not spineless lackeys and factotums of the financial Status Quo?

Does anyone really think the banks are really that precious to the people they are stripmining? Just how awful would it be if all the big banks with exposure to sovereign debt in the E.U. went belly up and were declared insolvent? A handful of very wealthy managers would lose their jobs, a handful of very wealthy owners would lose their stake, and all the pension funds and mutual funds which bet on the infinite passivity of the citizenry and the infinite checkbook of the E.U. would lose, too.

It's called Capitalistic risk and return, baby, and return can be negative. All the big players assumed the citizenry would quietly line up to have the clothing ripped from their backs and their flesh flayed to extract the pound of flesh "owed" the banks. But as the citizenry of Europe wake up to costs of the stripmining, which extends now to the taxpayers of Germany, Finland and beyond, they are withdrawing their support of the financial Status Quo.

Here is my plea: Ireland, Please Do the World a Favor and Default (November 29, 2010).

Things are spinning out of the control of the centralized mandarins in the E.U. They seem to have borrowed the Federal Reserve's playbook to keep the stripmining proceeding as planned: lie, frequently (practice helps); obscure systemic risks by printing money; and issue a foul sewage of propaganda about how nicely the economy is "recovering" to mask the real game, which is diverting the national income stream to the banking cartel.

The levers of interest rates, credit and money supply do not control larger trends; the appearance of control is illusory. The E.U. and the Fed are both busily applying the duct tape of various monetary machinations to the overheating boilers of the global economy, and presenting their frantic improvisations as "finely tuned, guaranteed to work" policies. As things spin out of their control, reality is poking through their rice-paper facade of "normalcy" and control.

Here in the U.S., the Fed's game plan of stripmining the nation to "save" the banking cartel is based on a cruel deceit I explained yesterday in The 'Baseball' Economy: The Fed Strikes Out (May 24, 2011): while the Fed maintains incentives for financial speculation and backstops any cartel losses in those speculations, it claims its policies are designed to "boost employment" in the real economy.

That is the world's most dangerous joke: if you believe it, you die from extreme irony. What the Fed is actually doing is starving the real economy and thus precluding any gains in employment as it diverts the national income to fatten the insolvent banking cartel.

Does anyone seriously believe their scam can endure? As I described in Your Pick, Ben, But One Goes Off the Cliff (April 22, 2011), the Fed's policies are setting up multiple double-binds. The Fed cannot finesse the unraveling of the entire financialization project.

There is currently a "great debate" over QE3, the next round of Fed "stimulus" (read stripmining). As things spin out of control, it no longer matters what the Fed does. That is, after all, their central conceit and the basis of their power: that the Fed actually controls anything. This quote, attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, is increasingly relevant: "Do you know what amazes me more than anything else? The impotence of force to organize anything."

The Fed claims it can force the real economy to "grow" by forcefeeding it credit. But all the Fed is really doing is fattening the banking cartel with guaranteed profits (borrow from the Fed for free and then deposit the funds at the Fed for interest) and enabling another speculative frenzy which generates fees and profits for the banking cartel while the U.S. taxpayers play bagholder.

The Fed has lost control of the reaction to QE3. There is no "surprise" in QE3, so the potential positive is lost. Whatever the limitations the Fed imposes on QE3, they will be recognized as limiting the "high" of the credit-cocaine injected by the Fed.

If the Fed chooses an open-ended, essentially infinite QE3, then it will be recognized by the market that the Fed has lost all control and the pretense of "growth" is truly threadbare. No matter what the Fed does with QE3, the results will be negative. If they try to finesse a limited QE3, the markets will recognize the policy is unable to force-feed more speculative bubbles. If the Fed unleashes the printing press, then inflation will wrench free of the last rotten ropes restraining it, and the market will recognize that the current stock and bond bubbles are so tenuous that only unlimited money printing can keep them inflated.

Simply put, things are spinning out of the Fed's control. The Fed has been transferring the wealth of the nation to the banking cartel and the financial Power Elite for three long years, and the fraud at the heart of their claim to be "stimulating" the real economy is now in plain view.

Does anyone really believe Japan's economy is under control? The tragedy at the out-of-control Daiichi Fukushima reactors might well be an analogy for the entire Japanese economy. Does anyone seriously believe Japan's over-indebted experiment in endless quantitative easing will sustain a demographic sea change and yet another explosion of debt to support rebuilding and more "stimulus," i.e. bailing out Japan's insolvent banking cartel, which has been insolvent for 20 years?

As for China: inflation is now out of control. Party authorities are frantically pulling the same levers of monetary policy, but the wires connecting the levers to the real economy have snapped. All their efforts to "cool" rampant speculative bubble-blowing and rampant inflation are failing. Taking their cue from the U.S., they are desperately trying to mask their loss of control with doctored statistics, but the conceit cannot endure for much longer: rents are rising even as housing sales decline. Local governments are still borrowing and speculating wildly, in a last-ditch effort to prop up their own income streams, which are dependent on real estate speculation and land grabs from peasants.

Things are spinning out of control. Trends are beyond the feeble grasp of central financial authorities. Power is based not just on controlling events in the real world but on the perception of having some control over the real world. Once the central banks' control over large-scale trends and systems is revealed as illusory, then the unraveling of the Status Quo's powers will gain momentum.

 

Verulegur vandi fyrir Seðlabankann

Gengislánarar til Okurveitu

Ingvar Stefánsson hefur verið ráðinn framkvæmdastjóri fjármála hjá Orkuveitu Reykjavíkur. Ingvar var valinn úr hópi 25 umsækjenda en fram til þessa hefur hann starfað sem forstöðumaður Íslandsbanka Fjármögnunar. Þar hefur hann gengið hart fram í aðgerðum til að blóðmjólka íslenskan almenning og fyrirtæki á grundvelli ólöglegrar gengistryggingar, reynsla sem mun eflaust nýtast vel þegar kemur að því að hækka orkureikningana (okurreikningana?).

Orkuveitan hefur um allnokkurt skeið átt við fjárhagsvanda að etja og á liðnum vetri þurfti Reykjavíkurborg að leggja fyrirtækinu til aukið fé svo forðast mætti gjaldþrot. Sú ákvörðun að ráða á þessum tímapunkti einstakling með langan efnahagsbrotaferil sem fjármálastjóra, hlýtur að vera mistök eða hvað?

Stjórnarformaður Orkuveitunnar Haraldur Flosi Tryggvason, hlýtur þó að fagna þessari ráðningu og sérstaklega því að einhver óþægindi úr fortíðinni skuli ekki hamla mönnum frá því að komast í toppstöður. Haraldur er fyrrverandi framkvæmdastjóri hjá annarri blóðmjólkandi fjársvikamyllu, Lýsingu, og hefur einnig afrekað að setja fyrrum rekstrarfélag Viðskiptablaðsins á hausinn og snuða tugi starfsmanna um ógreidd laun. Hafi stjórnarformaðurinn hlutast til um ráðningu fjármálastjórans þarf ekki mikið hugmyndaflug til að ímynda sér að engin mistök hafi átt sér stað, heldur þvert á móti hafi sú ákvörðun verið tekin af yfirlögðu ráði.

Eða eins og máltækið segir: "Sækjast sér um líkir".

Auk Haraldar Flosa sitja í stjórn Orkuveitunnar: Aðalsteinn Leifsson, Brynhildur Davíðsdóttir, Kjartan Magnússon, Sóley Tómasdóttir og Hrönn Ríkharðsdóttir.

Nýr fjármálastjóri Orkuveitunnar

Vort byltingartákn

Íslenski fáninn virðast vera orðin táknmynd þeirrar friðsamlegu byltingar sem hófst á Spáni þann 15. maí og hefur verið að breiðast út til annara Evrópulanda.

Íslenska fánanum veifað í miðborg Madridar

Fréttir og fyrirsagnir:

Spain's Icelandic Revolt

"When we grow up, we want to be Icelanders!" cried one of the leaders of the organisation during the march on Sunday May 15

Spain's Icelandic Revolt; Protests Spread to Italy

Torg á Mallorca kallast nú Íslandstorg - mbl.is

Aðaltorg Pálmaborgar á Mallora, Spánartorg, hefur fengið nýtt nafn því mótmælendur á eyjunni hafa nefnt það Íslandstorg. Mótmælendur hafa einnig komið fyrir íslenska fánanum í hendur styttu af Jaume I sem var fyrsti konungur Baelersku eyjanna...

"Allir vegir liggja til Íslands"

 

"Hugsað um Ísland"

Og það eru ekki bara Spánverjar sem líta til fordæma frá Íslandi. Munið þið eftir framlagi Portúgals í Eurovision keppnina?

"Baráttu er gleði" - vafasöm málfræði en meiningin skilst.

Í gær kl 18:00 var samstöðufundur á Austurvelli þar sem voru samankomnir bæði Spánverjar og Íslendingar. Hér eru myndir frá mbl.is:

"Inspired by Iceland" - kynningarátakið virkaði augljóslega :)

 

Stuðningur frá Íslandi

Samskonar viðburður verður endurtekinn í dag kl. 18:00. Ég hvet þá sem láta sig málið varða að sýna Spánverjum stuðning í verki á þessari friðsamlegu samkomu.

 Fleiri myndir frá útlöndum:

Orð dagsins: þjóðernisklám. (Hvort það er jákvætt eða neikvætt dæmi hver fyrir sig)

Grafískir hönnuðir hafa líka notað fánann óspart:

Þetta er auðvitað gullið tækifæri handa fyrirtækjum eins og Fánasmiðjunni og öðrum sem framleiða íslenska fánann. En hér má líka finna leiðbeiningar um hvernig má prenta fánann sjálfur í A4 stærð og gera sín eigin heimatilbúnu byltingartákn:

Todos somos Islandia - "Við erum öll Íslendingar"

Spánverjar „eru Ísland“

Alþjóðleg bylting í beinni útsendingu

Nei þetta er ekki Egyptaland, ekki heldur Grikkland eða Írland og alls ekki Ísland. Hér er bein útsending frá Madrid á Spáni, þar sem alda mótmæla virðist vera í uppsiglingu:

Spánn er eitt af stærstu hagkerfunum í Evrópu, en alþjóðlegir fjölmiðlar hafa hingað til þagað yfir því að þar hefur verið staðið fyrir fjöldamótmælum alla vikuna og sér ekki fyrir endann á þeim enn. Stemningin minnir einna helst á Tahrir torgið í Kaíro fyrir nokkrum vikum síðan eða Austurvöll í hitteðfyrra... fylgist með.

UPPFÆRT 22.5.2011: Myndefni þar sem tilvísanir til Íslands eru áberandi safnað saman í nýja færslu.

Kort af stöðum þar sem hefur verið mótmælt

Stefnuskrá spænsku lýðræðishreyfingarinnar á ensku:

We are ordinary people. We are like you: people, who get up every morning to study, work or find a job, people who have family and friends. People, who work hard every day to provide a better future for those around us.
Some of us consider ourselves progressive, others conservative. Some of us are believers, some not. Some of us have clearly defined ideologies, others are apolitical, but we are all concerned and angry about the political, economic, and social outlook which we see around us: corruption among politicians, businessmen, bankers, leaving us helpless, without a voice.
This situation has become normal, a daily suffering, without hope. But if we join forces, we can change it. It’s time to change things, time to build a better society together. Therefore, we strongly argue that:

• The priorities of any advanced society must be equality, progress, solidarity, freedom of culture, sustainability and development, welfare and people’s happiness.
• These are inalienable truths that we should abide by in our society: the right to housing, employment, culture, health, education, political participation, free personal development, and consumer rights for a healthy and happy life.
• The current status of our government and economic system does not take care of these rights, and in many ways is an obstacle to human progress.
• Democracy belongs to the people (demos = people, krátos = government) which means that government is made of every one of us. However, in Spain most of the political class does not even listen to us. Politicians should be bringing our voice to the institutions, facilitating the political participation of citizens through direct channels that provide the greatest benefit to the wider society, not to get rich and prosper at our expense, attending only to the dictatorship of major economic powers and holding them in power through a bipartidism headed by the immovable acronym PP & PSOE.
• Lust for power and its accumulation in only a few; create inequality, tension and injustice, which leads to violence, which we reject. The obsolete and unnatural economic model fuels the social machinery in a growing spiral that consumes itself by enriching a few and sends into poverty the rest. Until the collapse.
• The will and purpose of the current system is the accumulation of money, not regarding efficiency and the welfare of society. Wasting resources, destroying the planet, creating unemployment and unhappy consumers.
• Citizens are the gears of a machine designed to enrich a minority which does not regard our needs. We are anonymous, but without us none of this would exist, because we move the world.
• If as a society we learn to not trust our future to an abstract economy, which never returns benefits for the most, we can eliminate the abuse that we are all suffering.
• We need an ethical revolution. Instead of placing money above human beings, we shall put it back to our service. We are people, not products. I am not a product of what I buy, why I buy and who I buy from.

For all of the above, I am outraged.
I think I can change it.
I think I can help.
I know that together we can.I think I can help.

I know that together we can.