By Don Quijones, Raging Bull-Shit.
It seems that nary a day goes by without Catalonia receiving some kind of threat about the dire consequences of declaring independence from Spain. If it isn’t former Spanish premier José María Aznar talking about the possibility of imprisoning Catalonian premier Artur Mas should his government grant a referendum on independence, it’s some washed up military general calling for tanks in the streets and an aerial bombardment of Barcelona.
The latest person to weigh in on the issue was the governor of the Bank of Spain, Luis María Linde, who last week warned that declaring independence would ultimately lead to Catalonia’s financial downfall. In what can only be described as a barely veiled threat to a region of more than seven million inhabitants, Linde said that Catalonian banks would tumble and chaos would ensue.
“A small territory that separates from a big one would be obligated to create its own currency and its own (banking) supervisory authority,” Linde said. The fact that the new nation’s assets would be denominated in the new currency and the liabilities in euros would ultimately “lead to its bankruptcy.”
Granted, in time Linde may well be proven right: the abrupt change of currency, the severing of ties with the ECB and the inevitable capital flight that would ensue would probably wreak untold devastation on the new nation’s fragile economy. However, that’s what would happen in the short run. As the U.S. economist Jonathan Tepper has argued, once the dust settled form its rupture with Spain and once it began trading again with its European allies – assuming it would be allowed to – an independent Catalonia would have an economy roughly equivalent in size to those of Norway or Israel.
The Death of the Nation State
Before accusations of independtismo begin pouring in from readers across Spain, let me state categorically that I am still very much on the fence when it comes to Catalonian “independence.” Indeed, it’s not so much the issue of Catalonian separatism that has moved me to write this article but rather the slow, tragic death of the nation state that is gradually unfolding before our eyes.
This, I believe, is the burning issue of our times and as such should be splashed across the front pages of all “serious” newspapers – not just the Daily Mail and The Sun. It should also be dominating drawing room chatter across all supposedly democratic nations. Yet instead what we have is a carefully orchestrated propaganda campaign against two aspiring nation states – Scotland and Catalonia – for daring to even consider giving their people the right to choose their own destinies.
While many Spaniards may spit bile and venom at the merest suggestion of Catalonian autonomy, they would do well to ask themselves what happened to their own national sovereignty. How is it, for example, that the country that was once – admittedly centuries ago – the world’s super power is now taking orders on virtually all economic matters from men in black dispatched from Brussels and Frankfurt?
They might also want to consider what the acronym ESM stands for and why they’ve heard no mention of it from any of their mainstream media sources. What they would discover is that ESM stands for the European Stability Mechanism, an organization created in 2012 to transfer the last remaining vestiges of European nation state sovereignty to a wholly unaccountable organization in Luxembourg.
As a quick glance of Article 31, paragraph 1, of the new organization’s charter shows, the ESM – like the Federal Reserve Bank in the U.S. – has been set above all laws of all Member States (emphasis added):
In the interest of the ESM; the Chairperson of the Board of Governors, Governors, alternate Governors, Directors, alternate Directors, as well as the Managing Director and other staff members shall be immune from legal proceedings with respect to acts performed by them in their official capacity and shall enjoy inviolability in respect of their official papers and documents.
So there you have it: inviolability and immunity, two words that grant full protection to the organization’s management and employees from all consequences of their actions. As I wrote at the time, “It is the closing act of a decades-long (some might say centuries-long) coup d’état; a silent, bloodless counter revolution, by, of and for the bankers. From this day on, the ESM will supersede all national economic laws of all euro zone nations. Put simply, control over the economies of each and every euro zone country has been handed to ranks of faceless apparatchiks and central bankers based in Luxembourg.
A Dastardly Plot
None of this has come into being by accident. Like the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, two trade agreements that are currently being negotiated in silence and complete secrecy by our political representatives and their corporate partners that, if signed, would completely reconfigure the global economic and political order, the latest moves in Europe to establish banking and fiscal union represent nothing less than the final nail in the coffin in the Westphalian system of nation state sovereignty.
Signed in 1648 at the end of the Thirty Years War, the Peace of Westphalia established three basic principles of national co-existence that, while far from perfect, have remained largely unchanged for the last 365 years. They are:
- The principle of the sovereignty of states and the fundamental right of political self-determination;
- The principle of legal equality between states;
- The principle of non-intervention of one state in the internal affairs of another state;
Now, these principles are fast being eroded at the behest of a small group of international bankers and multinational corporations determined to transform this world into their own exclusive oyster. As Michael Synder recently wrote in The Economic Collapse Blog:
A former insider at the World Bank, ex-Senior Counsel Karen Hudes, says the global financial system is dominated by a small group of corrupt, power-hungry figures centered around the privately owned U.S. Federal Reserve. The network has seized control of the media to cover up its crimes, too, she explained. In an interview with The New American, Hudes said that when she tried to blow the whistle on multiple problems at the World Bank, she was fired for her efforts. Now, along with a network of fellow whistleblowers, Hudes is determined to expose and end the corruption. And she is confident of success.
Citing an explosive 2011 Swiss study published in the PLOS ONE journal on the ‘network of global corporate control,’ Hudes pointed out that a small group of entities — mostly financial institutions and especially central banks — exert a massive amount of influence over the international economy from behind the scenes.
The Swiss study that Hudes mentioned was conducted by a team of researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. They studied the relationships between 37 million companies and investors worldwide, and what they found is that there is a “super-entity” of just 147 very tightly knit mega-corporations that controls 40 percent of the entire global economy.
According to one of the study’s lead researchers, James B. Glattfelder, “In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network”. Needless to say, most of these companies were financial institutions such as Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.
In the last 30 years, the primary enablers of this vast power grab have been globalist institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organization and, above all, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). Like the ESM, the BIS is literally immune to all national governments. Established in 1930 as part of the Young Plan and headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, its main purpose is to guide and direct the centrally planned global financial system.
During World War II it was used to launder ill-gotten gains for the Nazis. And now, with 58 affiliate national central banks under its broad umbrella, the BIS operates for the exclusive benefit of the global elite and, as Snyder puts it, is intended to be one of the cornerstones of the emerging one world economic system.
With each passing day it becomes increasingly clear what this new economic system would look like. As the welfare state continues to disintegrate here in Europe, leaving the vast majority of us to grind out a precarious living in a dog-eat-dog world of hyper consumerism, the mega banks and super corporations are fast erecting the castles, moats and citadels of a neo-feudal global economic order.
And we can’t say we weren’t warned. In his 1973 book Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, uber-globalist and Obama advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote the following passage*:
The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.
In the technotronic society, the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason.
This regionalization is in keeping with the Tri-Lateral Plan which calls for a gradual convergence of East and West, ultimately leading toward the goal of one world government. National sovereignty is no longer a viable concept.
Time To Reengage and Resist
As mere lowly citizens of semi-moribund nation states, we are no longer even involved in the discussion on how our societies should evolve in the future. And despite the increasingly obvious pitfalls and nightmarish potential of the globalist dream, the project continues to gain ground.
As John Raston Saul, the president of PEN International, one of the world’s oldest human rights organizations, recently said in a fascinating interview on the Canadian current affairs program The Agenda, the globalist blueprint agenda is all about reconfiguring where power ultimately resides.
The question that was never really raised through all of this was that if you’re going to weaken the nation state in the name of economics and you’re happy to get rid of nasty nationalism what about the really important thing — which is that we spent a couple of hundred years creating citizens who are the source of legitimacy for the lives of their nation states. That’s the positive nationalism. And what they’re doing is taking away the citizens’ power to shape national and regional policy by saying the real power lies somewhere else… Where does the power go? Because power’s something very real.
Regardless of our age, profession, political leaning, nationality or religion, we should all be very concerned about this power grab taking place behind our backs, under the cover of darkness. To paraphrase Mario Savio, there is still time to “put our bodies on the levers” of international governance and to “indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless we’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
There are already promising signs that the massive public uproar provoked by leaked documents of the Trans-Pacific Partnership may well put paid to Obama’s efforts to fast track the new legislation through congress. Meanwhile, here in Europe one of the best ways to start the ball rolling is to lend your support, whether passive or active, to the nationalist movements gaining ground in Scotland and Catalonia. For they represent one of our last throws of the dice to save the nation state from the globalists’ perfidious designs. By Don Quijones, Raging Bull-Shit.
Enjoy reading WOLF STREET and want to support it? You can donate. I appreciate it immensely. Click on the beer and iced-tea mug to find out how:
Would you like to be notified via email when WOLF STREET publishes a new article? Sign up here.
