All Roads Lead to Cyprus
Daniel Greenfield
March 19, 2013

"Cyprus is Europe's original failure. It was the first part of modern Europe to be invaded and colonized by Muslims, while its native Christian population was ethnically cleansed. Cyprus is to Islam what Czechoslovakia was to Nazism; the canary in the coal mine warning of worse things to come.

Now Cyprus has wound up in the middle of the European Union's meltdown as everyone scrambles to salvage what they can from an unsustainable system at the expense of everyone else. It's easy to look at what almost happened as another case of powerful elites abusing ordinary pensioners, but it's a good deal more complicated than that.

What we are actually seeing are the beginnings of bailout cannibalism as the Eurocrats manipulate entire nations into fighting each other while scrambling to gain some political advantage out of the mess. The real purpose of the deposit grab was to wreck Cyprus' banking sector and continue the centralization of international finance. At the same time it was meant to give German voters, who have been funding much of the mess, the feeling that other people were getting screwed as well.
. . .
Beating Mitt Romney was no great achievement. Neither was beating McCain. But at some point the government-media complex of social welfare and crony capitalism will go up against an angry populist with an agenda and an organized movement, from the right or the left, and then things will get properly ugly. That man isn't on the scene yet, but he's probably hanging around meetings somewhere and imagining what he will do if he ever gets the chance. And if he ever gets the chance, it won't be pretty.

The establishment has no plan except to continue doing its thing while pretending that nothing is wrong. It can't fill the hole in the boat so it bails in more water from the ocean and calls it investment. It's a madness that will begin nearing its end once people are standing outside banks demanding their money back. And that is as true for the United States as it is for Europe.

The last century saw the development of a variety of unstable political and economic systems while this century tried to universalize them. Now we are all paying the price. "

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2013/03/...-to-cyprus.html

More:
"But the real question is how long it will stay that way. For now everyone subscribes to the myth that a recovery is here and that all the really big investments that depend on working countries are safe.

China pretends that America isn't being run by lefty professors-for-life with worse math skills than manatees and America pretends that China's economy isn't one giant Potemkin village maintained with currency manipulation and slave labor. Everyone pretends that everyone wants to be in the EU, despite a pesky refusal to hold actual referendums on the topic (and to ignore those that have been held) and also pretends not to notice all the money in the EU budget that can't be accounted for.

All this is Cyprus and Greece, but on a much bigger scale. Everyone is spending money that they don't have as a return on future investments that depend on improved productivity and development; even as most of those countries commit to a Green worldview that exchanges development and productivity for austerity and malaise. China can still put pedal to the metal, because its middle class is still only forming. Once it has fully formed and the currency games end, then so will China's boom.

Whether or not other governments and their banking systems begin looting consumers as crudely as the Cyprus scheme attempted to do; loot them they shall. They have been looting them for some time already and there is no way that they are going to stop. The social and financial systems of the modern world are much too expensive and too unsustainable to do anything else. All this will be declared necessary. It will hit the rich harder than the middle class, on paper, though the reality will be different. And it will go on hitting the middle class, because that is, as a famous bank robber once said, where the money is.

The middle class is the economic heart of a nation. Building it up moves a country into first rank status. And then everything else follows, including a gargantuan government. Unbuilding a country requires trashing the middle class. And we are now in the unbuilding phase of human civilization."

As usual, his whole article is well worth the time to read it! Thanks.