The EU summit on the weekend has announced that banks could now get direct access to a country’s tax revenue without any democratic oversight.
Let me just repeat what European leaders have agreed to.
European taxpayers will fund the European Stability Fund. This fund will be run by the European Commission whose members are unelected by the citizens of Europe.
The banks will then have direct access to this fund, ie banks can access this fund without having to go through a democratically elected government first.
I believe this is a text-book example of fascism. ie citizens being compelled to contribute to private businesses with the threat of imprisonment if they resist.
This is a huge precedent and one has to ask where it will lead.
Taxes are now being imposed on people who have no say if they agree with the taxes or not and who have not say in how their taxes are spent. ie taxation without representation.
The European Stability Fund is not controlled in anyway by the countries in the European Union or by members of the European parliament.
The European Stability comes under the suprvision of the Euorpean Commission which is entirely made up of unelected bureaucrats.
Do I need to spell out the simply massive moral hazard that has been created here?
You have bureaucrats whose position does not depend in anyway on how poular they are, in other words there is no way to remove these people and these people are seizing the taxes of European taxpayers and giving the money to private businesses ie the large multinational banks.
Can you imagine how much of a target the European Commission is to the banks. Can you imagine how appealing it is for banks to have the unlected beuaracrats have control of taxpayer money?
Can you imagine what these banks are prepared to do in order to give this control to these bureaucrats?
If I was a large mulitnational bank with serious money problems I would be doing some pretty desperate things to force governments inside the EU to give power over taxpayers funds to the European Commission.
Government having control is far to messy and slow. If I am asking elected politicians to do as I want they could get voted out if my requests are too unpopular and then I have to start again with a new group of people.
My ideal solution would be to have bureaucrats to have the same power as democtractically elected officials, ie the power to seize people’s assets against their will through taxation and yet at the same time not have to deal with the inconvenience of elections if the taxpayers are unhappy with the level fo the taxation or what it is being spent on.
But the mainstream media is saying nothing about the dangerous moral precedent that is being set here. The silence coming from the mainstream media is deafening.
But is goes further than that, the mainstream media, is misleading it readers. Let me take a Reuters article as an example of the misreporting of the ESF.
Media > “Under pressure to prevent a catastrophic breakup of their single currency, euro zone leaders agreed on Friday to let their rescue fund inject aid directly into stricken banks from next year and intervene on bond markets to support troubled member states.”
This is a typical line to come out of the mainstream media. It makes it sound, to me at least, like there are only positives to the ESF and that it is stupid to resist. But let me rewrite that paragraph using more specific terms.
Reality > “Under pressure to prevent states in the Euro Zone returning to their national currencies, euro zone leaders agreed to take money from their citizens and give it directly to banks with no democratic oversight and for taxpayer money to also be used to buy government debt on the open market so countries in trouble can continue spending unwisely”.
The article continues
“It is a first step to break the vicious circle between banks and sovereigns,” European Council President Herman Van Rompuy told a final news conference after talks which stretched right through the night.
Again, total spin from van Rompuy, who incidentally will recevie massively more responsibility due to this decision. In short Van Rompuy is completely biased in his reporting of this story as he is one of the primary beneficiaries on terms of political power and yet the media reports van Rompuy’s words are fair and unbiased.
The reality is this,
“It is a first step in the elimination of the democratic process in the allocation and collection of taxes”
There is absolutaly no negative reporting of this the new deal on the ESF. This on it’s own rings alarm bells for me.
Everything is a compromise, there are problems to every solution, no solution is perfect and yet reading press reports of this ESF deal, the mainstream media reports aboslutely no negative effects which to my mind shows the reports are biased and in my mind are deliberately hiding the facts from the public by simply regurgitation statements from government spokespeople instead of analysing what is being said.
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