Some of
you might remember I posted a series of articles about
Bankia; the Spanish Central Bank. Their
building
was a satanic symbol and they were already underwater at the
time the EU bailed them out. I don't
know why
the Holy Spirit focus my attention to Spain and the European
financial meltdown.
Michael C.
4.92/5
(12)
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:
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.
Notably,
the article also indicates that a peculiarity of Spanish
law allows such a grass roots approach (imagine, for a
moment, if a similar thing were in place in the United
Kingdom, the United States, Germany, or Canada, rather
than reliance upon all-but-totally corrupted grand jury
processes or corrupted government regulatory agencies).
But whatever
one makes of those observations, one thing is clear from
the Spanish story: the story of the corruption of the
west's financial system simply is not going to go away any
time soon, and in this case, we have the Spanish to thank
for that. But the real story
here will be what details may come out from these trials
in Spain... those will doubtless be threads that lead all
the way to Rome, Athens, Frankfurt, Paris, London, and of
course, Washington. This will be a story to watch,
and I suspect, that during 2016, we're going to hear more.
See you on
the flip side...