Les dessous de l’information mondiale-Downside World News

Crisis in Greece – the country and its economy

REUTERS
Reuters North American News Service

Dec 09, 2008 08:58 EST

Dec 9 (Reuters) – Hundreds of protesters clashed with police outside Greece’s parliament on Tuesday and socialist opposition leader George Papandreou called for elections to end four days of riots.

Here are some key facts about Greece:

– The government also faces a general strike on Wednesday over its welfare reforms and economic policy.

– Greek industrialists said earlier this month the government had done too little, too late to avert a steep economic downturn and urged structural reform to boost the flagging productivity of the economy.

– The conservative government has forecast Greece’s economic growth rate will fall to 2.7 percent in 2009 from 3.2 percent this year, but many economists have said this is too optimistic. The OECD predicts 2.0 percent growth in 2009.

– Economic growth was 3.1 percent in the third quarter, slower than the second quarter of 2008 and weaker than expected.

– Greece has approved a 28 billion euro ($36 billion) plan to increase liquidity at banks to help them weather the credit crunch and limit its impact on the 240 billion euro economy. — Greece’s manufacturing sector shrank at a record pace in November due to a fall in new orders. The purchasing managers’ index (PMI) fell to 42.3 points from 48.1 in October, reflecting a fall in both domestic and foreign demand. — Greece’s 2009 budget, submitted to parliament last month, foresaw a deficit below the 3 percent EU limit, at an ambitious 2 percent of GDP, from 3.5 percent in 2007 and an estimated 2.5 percent this year.

• THE COUNTRY: SOME DETAILS:

POPULATION: 11.2 million. (2007)

ETHNICITY: Most people are of Greek origin. There are small Turkish, Albanian, Macedonian and Roma minorities. RELIGION: About 98 percent of Greeks are baptised Greek Orthodox Christians, according to official figures. About 1.3 percent are Muslim.

CAPITAL: Athens: Almost half the population live in Athens or the surrounding Attica region.

LANGUAGE: Greek.

GEOGRAPHY: Area: 131,900 sq km (50,930 sq miles), including more than 2,500 islands in the Aegean and the Ionian sea. Mainland Greece is bordered by Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Turkey.

POLITICS:

– Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis and his conservative New Democracy party won a second term in national parliamentary elections in Sept. 2007. Its majority was cut to one seat by the dismissal of a dissident legislator last month.

– Karamanlis had led his party to a clear 2004 election win and his government won praise from the European Union for slashing budget deficits, pushing on with unpopular reforms and privatisations and putting the economy on a steady growth track.

– However, his efforts were often met with violent street protests. Financial and political scandals, as well as this week’s riots, have eroded his party’s popularity.

Source: Reuters North American News Service

http://wiredispatch.com/news/?id=481828

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Financial Times Editorial Admits Agenda For Dictatorial World Government

Jaw-dropping report concedes that “global governance” is a euphemism for anti-democratic global government

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, December 9, 2008

The Financial Times, one of the most respected and widely read newspapers on the planet, features an editorial today that openly admits the agenda to create a world government based on anti-democratic principles and concedes that the term “global governance” is merely a euphemism for the move towards a centralized global government.

For years we were called paranoid nutcases for warning about the elite’s plans to centralize global power and destroy American sovereignty. Throughout the 1990’s people who talked about the alarming move towards global government were smeared as right-wing lunatics by popular culture and the media.

Now the agenda is out in the open and in our faces, the debunkers have no more ammunition with which to deride us.

A jaw-dropping editorial written by the Financial Times’ chief foreign affairs commentator Gideon Rachman entitled ‘And now for a world government’ lays out the plan for global government and how it is being pushed with deceptive language and euphemisms in order to prevent people from becoming alarmed.
“For the first time in my life, I think the formation of some sort of world government is plausible,” writes Rachman, citing the financial crisis, “global warming” and the “global war on terror” as three major pretexts through which it is being introduced.

Rachman writes that “global governance” could be introduced much sooner than many expect and that President elect Barack Obama has already expressed his desire to achieve that goal, making reference to Obama’s circle of advisors which includes Strobe Talbott, who in 1992 stated, “In the next century, nations as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. National sovereignty wasn’t such a great idea after all.”

Rachman then concedes that the more abstract term “global governance,” which is often used by top globalists like David Rockefeller as a veil to offset accusations that a centralized global government is the real agenda, is merely a trick of “soothing language” that is used to prevent “people reaching for their rifles in America’s talk-radio heartland”.

“But some European thinkers think that they recognise what is going on,” says Rachman. “Jacques Attali, an adviser to President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, argues that: “Global governance is just a euphemism for global government.” As far as he is concerned, some form of global government cannot come too soon. Mr Attali believes that the “core of the international financial crisis is that we have global financial markets and no global rule of law”.

Rachman proceeds to outline what the first steps to an official world government would look like, including the creation of “A legally binding climate-change agreement negotiated under the auspices of the UN and the creation of a 50,000-strong UN peacekeeping force”.

“A “world government” would involve much more than co-operation between nations,” writes Rachman. “It would be an entity with state-like characteristics, backed by a body of laws. The European Union has already set up a continental government for 27 countries, which could be a model. The EU has a supreme court, a currency, thousands of pages of law, a large civil service and the ability to deploy military force.”

“So, it seems, everything is in place. For the first time since homo sapiens began to doodle on cave walls, there is an argument, an opportunity and a means to make serious steps towards a world government,” concludes Rachman, before acknowledging that the path to global government will be “slow and painful”.

Tellingly, Rachman concedes that “International governance tends to be effective, only when it is anti-democratic,” citing the continual rejection of EU expansion when the question is put to a vote. “In general, the Union has progressed fastest when far-reaching deals have been agreed by technocrats and politicians – and then pushed through without direct reference to the voters,” writes Rachman.

So there you have it – one of the world’s top newspapers, editorially led by chief economics commentator Martin Wolf, a top Bilderberg luminary, openly proclaiming that not only is world government the agenda, but that world government will only be achieved through dictatorial measures because the majority of the people are dead against it.

Will we still be called paranoid conspiracy theorists for warning that a system of dictatorial world government is being set up, even as one of the world’s most influential newspapers admits to the fact? Or will people finally wake up and accept that there is a globalist agenda to destroy sovereignty, any form of real democracy, and freedom itself in the pursuit of an all-powerful, self-interested, centralized, unrepresentative and dictatorial world government?

http://www.prisonplanet.com/financial-times-editorial-admits-agenda-for-dictatorial-world-government.html