At yesterday’s press conference May talked about NATO and ISIS but chose not to mention the bonfire of rights and regulations and the deeper privatisation of NHS services and imminent entry of GM food, pesticides, cloned meat and growth hormones in UK supermarkets if Britain increases trade with America.
The Prime Minister talked about family ties and kinship when referring to the Special Relationship with the US but conveniently forgot, despite posing in front of the Churchill bust, that Churchill was passionately pro EU and that the English language that Britain apparently shares with the USA is derived from French, German and Scandinavian countries that happen to also be in the EU.
Allowing deeper co-operation with the US is a great idea on many levels but at what price? Allowing free movement of workers between the UK and the US could be even more catastrophic for public services than the unpreparedness with which UK allowed almost unlimited EU expansion and other commitments from 2004.
Just as Trump has banned citizens from poorer Muslim countries from seeking political asylum in the US, UK is now telling Trump how important it is to have a strong EU and NATO while telling EU citizens they’re no longer welcome.
So May gets Trump to help her stop EU citizens working in the UK and begs Turkey to stop victims of Islamic extremism and various bombing campaigns from living and working in the EU.
Looks like we’re going back to the same Ronnie and Maggie hypocritical neo-liberal logic of supporting Israeli and South African Apartheid while telling Communist countries to tear down walls and open up in the name of freedom.
Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.
Handing €1.1 trillion of public money to ANONYMOUS bankers with no publicly available audit trail is an act so corrupt as to be beyond comprehension.
Yet that is what has happened to residents of that well known museum — the European Union.
Inventing Money
The European Central Bank, owner of the world’s third biggest money printing machine — behind the Federal Reserve’s and the People’s Bank of China’s — has already printed and distributed the best part of a trillion Euros to private financial institutions in exchange for various bonds over a two year period.
In November 2014 just as they started what became known as their Quantitative Easing (ECB QE) programme, I asked them to publicly state exactly which bonds they were printing money to buy.
Seeing as they were spending billions of euros of public money per month during a time of extreme austerity – it felt normal that EU citizens be told how the money was being spent.
Disclosure
The only information the public had been told at that time was that the ECB were buying repackaged bank loans (Covered Bonds) and Asset Backed Securities (ABSs) in order to stop deflation and maintain inflation at 2%.
But the question remains: What happened to the money?
Groupthink
Bizarrely the woman who runs the European Ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, has a reputation for being a fair-minded adjudicator.
This week the Irish papers portrayed O’Reilly as a friend of transparency who had rebuked the Irish Central Bank and the ECB for not publishing their correspondence during the Irish Bailouts of 2010.
If only those newspapers had known how O’Reilly has sided with commercial confidentiality and non-disclosure of the multibillion Euro QE recipients.
O’Reilly ruled in favour of the ECB without once consulting me — the complainant — to find out why I had brought the case or to let me challenge the groupthink logic of her flawed judgment.
Too little, too late
Ironically on the date of the ruling (18th July 2016) the ECB itself announced that another slice of its QE programme, the Corporate Bond Purchase Programme, would publish its ISIN codes.
This is a screenshot of the paywalled Financial Times story with the announcement about the new stance on ISIN codes.
How funny that I had to wait 18 months to get a definitive ‘no’ on receiving the ISIN codes for the Covered Bond and ABS QE programme, only for the Corporate Bond Purchase Programme to publish its ISIN codes on the very same day.
A Pyrrhic Victory perhaps?
Time will Tell.
Corruptissima respublica, plurimae leges
The most corrupt state, the most laws – Tacitus
My feeling is that the ECB don’t want to the public to know how much they are protecting the very same German financiers that benefited from the ECB’s imposition of austerity, deregulation and privatisation policies in southern Europe.
Just as the IRA and Baader Meinhoff are known for their politically inspired terror campaigns in the 1970s so has Deutsche Pfandbriefe exported financial terrorism throughout Europe from its tax avoiding, financial engineering Dublin Headquarters as of the early 2000’s when it re-domiciled to save cash.
ECB QE and commercial confidentiality for public money are the very definition of double standards and, in this case, perpetuate the myth that North Europeans are honest and that everyone else is corrupt.
I appreciate that this is not something many people are willing to accept – such is the scale of our programming.
Just as with PPP / PFI in the UK, commercial confidentiality and financial engineering remain the respectable face of corporate fascism and fraud.
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The Independent 
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London Conversation 