Portuguese coup

[Magda Hassan]

There has been a coup in Portugal and hardly a mention in the MSM. Extraordinary. Surprisingly the Torygraph and the spooky Ambrose Evans-Pritchard did cover it. Presumably because he is a Euro-skeptic.

Eurozone crosses Rubicon as Portugal's anti-euro Left banned from power

Constitutional crisis looms after anti-austerity Left is denied parliamentary prerogative to form a majority government

Portugal's president: 'This is the worst moment for a radical change to the foundations of our democracy'









By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

4:30PM BST 23 Oct 2015

2363 Comments


Portugal has entered dangerous political waters. For the first time since the creation of Europe's monetary union, a member state has taken the explicit step of forbidding eurosceptic parties from taking office on the grounds of national interest.

Anibal Cavaco Silva, Portugal's constitutional president, has refused to appoint a Left-wing coalition government even though it secured an absolute majority in the Portuguese parliament and won a mandate to smash the austerity regime bequeathed by the EU-IMF Troika.

Indebted Portugal is still the problem child of the eurozone

He deemed it too risky to let the Left Bloc or the Communists come close to power, insisting that conservatives should soldier on as a minority in order to satisfy Brussels and appease foreign financial markets.




This is the worst moment for a radical change to the foundations of our democracy.
President Cavaco Silva

Democracy must take second place to the higher imperative of euro rules and membership.
"In 40 years of democracy, no government in Portugal has ever depended on the support of anti-European forces, that is to say forces that campaigned to abrogate the Lisbon Treaty, the Fiscal Compact, the Growth and Stability Pact, as well as to dismantle monetary union and take Portugal out of the euro, in addition to wanting the dissolution of NATO," said Mr Cavaco Silva.



"This is the worst moment for a radical change to the foundations of our democracy.
"After we carried out an onerous programme of financial assistance, entailing heavy sacrifices, it is my duty, within my constitutional powers, to do everything possible to prevent false signals being sent to financial institutions, investors and markets," he said.
Mr Cavaco Silva argued that the great majority of the Portuguese people did not vote for parties that want a return to the escudo or that advocate a traumatic showdown with Brussels.
This is true, but he skipped over the other core message from the elections held three weeks ago: that they also voted for an end to wage cuts and Troika austerity. The combined parties of the Left won 50.7pc of the vote. Led by the Socialists, they control the Assembleia.
Stalemate threatens to derail eurozone's model pupil
The conservative premier, Pedro Passos Coelho, came first and therefore gets first shot at forming a government, but his Right-wing coalition as a whole secured just 38.5pc of the vote. It lost 28 seats.
Newly re-appointed Portuguese prime minister Pedro Passos Coelho
The Socialist leader, Antonio Costa, has reacted with fury, damning the president's action as a "grave mistake" that threatens to engulf the country in a political firestorm.
"It is unacceptable to usurp the exclusive powers of parliament. The Socialists will not take lessons from professor Cavaco Silva on the defence of our democracy," he said.
Mr Costa vowed to press ahead with his plans to form a triple-Left coalition, and warned that the Right-wing rump government will face an immediate vote of no confidence.
There can be no fresh elections until the second half of next year under Portugal's constitution, risking almost a year of paralysis that puts the country on a collision course with Brussels and ultimately threatens to reignite the country's debt crisis.
The bond market has reacted calmly to events in Lisbon but it is no longer a sensitive gauge now that the European Central Bank is mopping up Portuguese debt under quantitative easing.
Portugal is no longer under a Troika regime and does not face an immediate funding crunch, holding cash reserves above €8bn. Yet the IMF says the country remains "highly vulnerable" if there is any shock or the country fails to deliver on reforms, currently deemed to have "stalled".
Public debt is 127pc of GDP and total debt is 370pc, worse than in Greece. Net external liabilities are more than 220pc of GDP.

The IMF warned that Portugal's "export miracle" remains narrowly based, the headline gains flattered by re-exports with little value added. "A durable rebalancing of the economy has not taken place," it said.
"The president has created a constitutional crisis," said Rui Tavares, a radical green MEP. "He is saying that he will never allow the formation of a government containing Leftists and Communists. People are amazed by what has happened."
Mr Tavares said the president has invoked the spectre of the Communists and the Left Bloc as a "straw man" to prevent the Left taking power at all, knowing full well that the two parties agreed to drop their demands for euro-exit, a withdrawal from Nato and nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy under a compromise deal to the forge the coalition.
Defiant Portugal shatters the eurozone's political complacency
President Cavaco Silva may be correct is calculating that a Socialist government in league with the Communists would precipitate a major clash with the EU austerity mandarins. Mr Costa's grand plan for Keynesian reflation led by spending on education and health is entirely incompatible with the EU's Fiscal Compact.
The secretary-general of the Portuguese Socialist Party, Antonio Costa, appears on Saturday after the election results are made public Photo: EPA
This foolish treaty law obliges Portugal to cut its debt to 60pc of GDP over the next 20 years in a permanent austerity trap, and to do it just as the rest of southern Europe is trying to do the same thing, and all against a backdrop of powerful deflationary forces worldwide.
The strategy of chipping away at the country's massive debt burden by permanent belt-tightening is largely self-defeating, since the denominator effect of stagnant nominal GDP aggravates debt dynamics.
It is also pointless. Portugal will require a debt write-off when the next global downturn hits in earnest. There is no chance whatsoever that Germany will agree to EMU fiscal union in time to prevent this.
What Portugal needs to pay off (Source: Deutsche Bank)
The chief consequence of drawing out the agony is deep hysteresis in the labour markets and chronically low levels of investment that blight the future.
Mr Cavaco Silva is effectively using his office to impose a reactionary ideological agenda, in the interests of creditors and the EMU establishment, and dressing it up with remarkable Chutzpah as a defence of democracy.
The Portuguese Socialists and Communists have buried the hatchet on their bitter divisions for the first time since the Carnation Revolution and the overthrow of the Salazar dictatorship in the 1970s, yet they are being denied their parliamentary prerogative to form a majority government.
This is a dangerous demarche. The Portuguese conservatives and their media allies behave as if the Left has no legitimate right to take power, and must be held in check by any means.
These reflexes are familiar and chilling to anybody familiar with 20th century Iberian history, or indeed Latin America. That it is being done in the name of the euro is entirely to be expected.
Greece's Syriza movement, Europe's first radical-Left government in Europe since the Second World War, was crushed into submission for daring to confront eurozone ideology. Now the Portuguese Left is running into a variant of the same meat-grinder.
Europe's socialists face a dilemma. They are at last waking up to the unpleasant truth that monetary union is an authoritarian Right-wing enterprise that has slipped its democratic leash, yet if they act on this insight in any way they risk being prevented from taking power.
Brussels really has created a monster.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/econo...power.html

[Peter Lemkin]

All over the World now we are witnessing anti-democratic moves, maneuvers, coups, black ops, dirty tricks, etc. This seems like just one more. Portugal has an sad anti-democratic past to deal with too...but it was recently getting along fairly well until....now.

I'll bet there are outside forces at work here, as in most other places...the nexus of those forces seem to be centered somewhere in the belly of the 'Beast'.

[Magda Hassan]

NATO is doing 'exercises' just outside Lisbon....

http://www.tasnimnews.com/english/Home/Single/897122

[Peter Lemkin]

NATO is doing 'exercises' just outside Lisbon....

http://www.tasnimnews.com/english/Home/Single/897122

Hmmm......what a 'coincidence'::bowtie::

[David Guyatt]

I can see this becoming a general strategy for Europe, the US and anywhere else required. The left are not to be elected, but if they are, they are not to be allowed to govern. It's a more direct form of Gladio.

What we take away from this is that elections and democracy are simply a mirage.

[Peter Lemkin]

I can see this becoming a general strategy for Europe, the US and anywhere else required. The left are not to be elected, but if they are, they are not to be allowed to govern. It's a more direct form of Gladio.

What we take away from this is that elections and democracy are simply a mirage.

SUN APR 20, 2014 AT 07:01 PM PDT

The role of elections in an oligarchy

bydon mikuleckyFollow

• 29 Comments / 0 New
  

I am revisiting a recent "scientific study": US Is an Oligarchy Not a Democracy, says Scientific Study. My purpose is to ask a fundamental question. If we are to accept the findings of this study, what is the role of elections? The study says:

A study, to appear in the Fall 2014 issue of the academic journal Perspectives on Politics, finds that the U.S. is no democracy, but instead an oligarchy, meaning profoundly corrupt, so that the answer to the study's opening question, "Who governs? Who really rules?" in this country, is:"Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But, ..." and then they go on to say, it's not true, and that, "America's claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened" by the findings in this, the first-ever comprehensive scientific study of the subject, which shows that there is instead "the nearly total failure of 'median voter' and other Majoritarian Electoral Democracy theories [of America]. When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."

. Unless you are willing to just write this off as nonsense, you must wonder what we are doing here at a site dedicated to electing people that are supposed to be representing us. Read on below and we can delve deeper into this question for it has many facets.
As a scientist I shudder when the words "scientific study" are attached to such reports. On the other hand I do not need scientific studies to convince me that this Nation is ruled by the rich. So why the scientific study angle?

The authors of this historically important study are Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, and their article is titled "Testing Theories of American Politics." The authors clarify that the data available are probably under-representing the actual extent of control of the U.S. by the super-rich:Economic Elite Domination theories do rather well in our analysis, even though our findings probably understate the political influence of elites. Our measure of the preferences of wealthy or elite Americans though useful, and the best we could generate for a large set of policy cases is probably less consistent with the relevant preferences than are our measures of the views of ordinary citizens or the alignments of engaged interest groups. Yet we found substantial estimated effects even when using this imperfect measure. The real-world impact of elites upon public policy may be still greater.

We can go back to Plato and find that we are really not in new territory: The Trouble with Oligarchy: Plato's Surprising Perspective

Oligarchy, wrote Plato in the Republic, is government by "greedy men" who love money so much that "they are reluctant to pay taxes" for the common good (Republic VIII, 551e). Although the Greek word "oligarchy" literally means government by the few, Plato spins the word to mean the wealthy few. He thus distinguishes oligarchy from timocracy (from the Greek "timos" or honor), which was also a form of government by the few. For Plato, timocracy is government by a few virtuous men who love honor, whereas oligarchy is government by a few rich men who love money.Oligarchs believe that the wealth of a society should be redistributed to themselves and their rich cronies, while the rest of the society is reduced to poverty. In fact, observes Plato, nearly all the citizens of an oligarchy are impoverished, except for those in the ruling class who subvert the laws to protect their own interests, leaving the majority of the populace burdened by debt and disenfranchised.

If that does not have a familiar ring to it we must not be living on the same planet. Here's a bit of insight Plato had:

Plato believed, rather poetically, that there is a similarity between a country's form of government and the moral character of the citizens of that country. Just as an oligarchic state is internally torn apart into two countries, so a member of the oligarchic class is conflicted within himself. In Plato's words, "he is not really one person, but in some way a double man." This type of person may pretend to be quite respectable, but he is not, at least in Plato's eyes, really virtuous.

Do you get the picture we have some kind of time travel in effect here? The duplicity of the people who rule us is as Plato describes.

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Somewhere I have, but can't find, a political cartoon that shows a cut-away view of a voting booth - showing that the vote lever connects to nothing behind the panel of the voting machine. That was way before electronic voting made it even easier...but they let the Plebs vote to make them think they are participating in democracy, when the Oligarchs really make all the decisions and even disallow certain persons or governments to remain, if they feel it to their advantage....we have certainly come to a new Dark Ages in World Politics. The internet is out last hope to regain democracy, IMHO.