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I Just Got Back From the EU... and It's Worse Than You Imagined
I just got off the plane from Europe. I went there because I wanted to see the effects of the French election as well as get an "on the ground" perspective of what's really happening in Europe.
I can tell you, the situation in Europe is far FAR worse than the media is even willing to acknowledge.
See below:
The above image was taken at 9PM on Paris’ Avenue de Champs-Élysées (the road leading to the Arc de Triumph) on May 8th, the night Socialist Francois Hollande beat Nicolas Sarkozy.
This is a major four-way intersection, come to an almost complete gridlock as Parisian youth park their cars to block traffic.
The sound was deafening as these kids honked their horns, screamed, sang songs, and waved flags. Did they care about traffic? Nope. Some of them even got out on top of their cars to smoke and dance (like the young man in the white pants in the image above).
These kids, like most youth in the EU are sick of getting the shaft from the political elite. Youth unemployment in France is near 25%. It's at an astounding 50% in Greece and Spain.
So French youth, like others, voted to kick Nicolas Sarkozy out of office. But that's not the BIG story from the French elections.
You see, French Presidential elections take place in two rounds. During the first round, voters will vote for anyone running. The two candidates who receive the most votes will then proceed to the second round, the winner of which will become France's President.
Hollande and Sarkozy were the winners of the first round. But as the final tally in the second round revealed (51% vs. 48%) voters weren't exactly thrilled with either one of them.
Instead, the BIG STORY in the French elections was the fact that the hard right, anti-Euro, anti-immigration party, the Front National Party, or NFP, took the most votes from French youth.
That is correct. When it came time to vote in round one, more French youth voted for a party whose leader wants to break up the Euro, who wants to deal with immigration by kicking out any immigrant who cannot adhere to French principles or who commits a crime, and who once compared the legal French tolerance of Muslims praying in the streets to putting up with Nazi occupation.
Oh, and her father, who founded the NFP, wanted to do away with the concept of immigration completely and once commented that Germany's occupation of France during WWII was "not particularly inhumane..."
As a whole, the NFP took in 20% of ALL French votes during the first round of the French elections. That’s a record high for the party and not far off from Sarkozy’s and Hollande’s first round showings of 25% and 28% respectively.
Put another way, Nationlism is on the rise in France. And it's not over by any stretch.
France will be holding elections for its lower house, the National Assembly, on June 10th and June 17th.
Right now the socialists are in the lead to win, leaving the loosely organized center-right party, Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), with the following options:
1) Join forces with the NFP to take the control of the National Assembly, or...
2) Hand France completely over to the Socialists
I cannot say how this will play out. But for now, we must take into account that there is a very real possibility that the NFP may take control of France's lower house.
IF this happens and Francois Hollande proves to be a Presidential dud, then it is not a stretch to imagine that the NFP will gain even more traction in French politics.
Put another way, France could become a Nationalistic, anti-EU nation in the not so distant future.
And that is nothing compared to what's happened in Greece.
Greece has gone through two Governments since its Crisis began: one was the long- standing President, the other was an EU-appointed bureaucrat.
Now, Greece cannot even form a majority in its parliament. In fact, by the look of things there will be a run-off elction in mid-June in which the ANTI-BAILOUT Syriza party will win the majority.
If this happens you can kiss the Second Greek Bailout good-bye. And that's the BEST potential outcome here: the alternative is once again Greece cannot form a majority in parliament and the country descends into total anarchy and chaos.
After all, if Greece cannot form a government... who will be negotiating on its debt/ bailout agreements/ etc. with the rest of the EU?
Make no mistake, the situation in Europe is bad... How BAD? Well, France, Spain, and Germany have ALL implemented border controls.
That's not a typo. Spain, France, and Germany can each close their borders for up to 30 days at any point if they so choose.
Why are they doing this? Because they know that when the stuff hits the fan and the EU collapses (which it will in the next few months) people are going to attempt to flee with their money... so they have made it so that no one can get it... and no one can get out.
The US media has completely ignored this story because the implications are truly horrifying: that the EU and its banking system could very easily collapse in the coming months.
After all, there are already bank runs taking place in Spain and Greece. Once things pick up steam NO ONE will be immune.
"So what?" You might say. "The EU won't affect the US or other banking systems."
WRONG.
According to Reuters once you include Spain and Italy as well as Credit Default Swaps and indirect exposure to Europe, US banks have roughly $4 TRILLION in potential exposure to the EU.
To put that number in perspective, the entire US banking system is $12 trillion in size.
Heck, no less than Ben Bernanke, Mr. "the sub-prime crisis is contained" has publicly admitted that if the EU goes down, it will potentially take the US with it.
Make no mistake, what's coming will be bigger and worse than 2008. We're talking about bank holidays, civil unrest, and the worse.
On that note, if you have not taken steps to prepare for the end of the EU (and its impact on the US and global banking system), you NEED TO DO SO NOW!
I recently published a report showing investors how to prepare for this. It’s called How to Play the Collapse of the European Banking System and it explains exactly how the coming Crisis will unfold as well as which investment (both direct and backdoor) you can make to profit from it.
This report is 100% FREE. You can pick up a copy today at: http://www.gainspainscapital.com
Good Investing!
Graham Summers
PS. We also feature numerous other reports ALL devoted to helping you protect yourself, your portfolio, and your loved ones from the Second Round of the Great Crisis. Whether it’s a US Debt Default, runaway inflation, or even food shortages and bank holidays, our reports cover how to get through these situations safely and profitably.
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skepticCarl
Dude, it doesn't even compare with the victory riots of western sports teams.
Way to go Vancouver.
So Europe is in bad shape, and could hit us, if there is a major break up of the Euro, what deep insight by this guy. No Shit.
Disneyland Paris is celebrating 20 years in business
Must not be all bad there. Viva La Souris!
did you have any fish soup or onion soup in Paris? The rest of what you said is irrelevent.
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Well-said.
Yep, fantasy land. Lots of people angry and beginning to speak up. Lots of worry, but also many completely tuned out.
Guys, while I agree with the same old drumbeat from Phoenix Capital, it IS worth noting that Nationalism of a rather frightening sort is on the rise. I remember not long ago Le Penn could barely crack 3% for his party in popular votes, now they are up to 20%, Golden Dawn has similar numbers. I wouldn't take that lightly especially when you consider that things aren't even super bad yet. Certainly nothing like 1932 Germany. If people are ALREADY going to those kinds of parties when things are relatively good (again compared to the 1920's 30's German experience) what will happen if things get really bad?
OMG what a MORON. The banksters just got done air bursting a 500 megaton Derivates NUKE over W. Europe!
And some here are all in a dither about what some Nationalists MIGHT do in trying to exit a trap their nations find themselves in????
Are you f*cking kidding? Are you brain dead?
Total Cog Diss. On parade. I need a drink...
These guys aren't JUST nationalists, they are MILITANT Nationalists who seems to have some kind of affinity for Nazism based on publicly available statements. Germany was under the yoke of external debts forced upon them after WWI are you saying that the Nazi party was the answer? Nationalism is fine and dandy its the particular FORM of Nationalism I find disturbing.
I'm considerably less concerned with what a few fringe parties might do than what the politicians and bankers have done
they've fucked/sucked 2 entire continents up (3 inc. Japan) destroying their economies, with tens of millions unemployed ...and not for the first time in history have these greedy few destroyed nations
Can we deal first and foremost with the actual threat unfolding before our very eyes and not the trivia
Look if you review my postings you will see I see exactly what the bankers are up to and I think a repudiation of those debts is the answer. I'm exceedingly worried about what the bankers are doing. I'm saying rushing into the arms of FASCISTS as a solution is not the brightest of ideas. I get that some on ZH may disagree...
Repudiation of debt to keep the sheep pacified and the Fascist EU alive? Yeah.......
Nay, you've been mislead. Those parties have always existed with some backing it's only now being accentuated by TV coverage.
Their backing has increased as much as tenfold in the last 15 years or so (in the case of Golden Dawn). YOU mislead if you claim they have always had that level of backing. I think not. I was wrong in how many votes Golden Dawn got I apologize for that. It has SURGED dramatically since 1996.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dawn_(Greece)
In April 1996, Giannopoulos represented the party at a pan-European convention of nationalist parties in Moscow, where he presented a bust of Alexander the Great to Liberal Democratic Party of Russia leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky for his birthday.[3] Golden Dawn participated in the 1996 legislative election in September, receiving 4,487 votes nationwide; 0.07 percent of the votes cast.[24]
They just got 7% in the most recent vote a ten fold gain since 1996.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_legislative_election,_May_2012
The National Front Party went from 4.5% in 2008 to 17.9% in the most recent election.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Front_(France)#Consolidation_.281988.E2.80.931995.29
Those are both substantial increases not to be ignored IMO. Again times are relatively good compared to what is likely to be coming.
.07 percent to 7% would be a one hundred fold gain, not ten fold.
By comparison here is the Nazi Party from 1924 to 1932
Nazi Party election results[58] Date Totalvotes Votes,
percentage Reichstag
seats Notes May 1924 1,918,300 votes 6.5% Reichstag
seats 32 Hitler in prison December 1924 907,300 votes 3.0% Reichstag
seats 14 Hitler released from prison May 1928 810,100 votes 2.6% Reichstag
seats 12 September 1930 6,409,600 votes 18.3% Reichstag
seats 107 After the financial crisis July 1932 13,745,000 votes 37.3% Reichstag
seats 230 After Hitler was candidate for presidency November 1932 11,737,000 votes 33.1% Reichstag
seats 196
Well presented BtG. By far the biggest risk byproduct of a catastrophic financial collapse is the transfer of voter hopes from centrist to fringe parties promising a better solution to current problems.
I know of no case where in otherwise good or stable economic times a democracy has moved to either political extreme through the ballot box.
Stable economic times neuter the appeal of people like Ralph Reed, Gary Bauer, and their more public and occasionally amusing wackjob minions like Michelle Bachman. But throw in a serious dose of grinding hard times that persist and the logic of extreme positions becomes a whole lot more persuasive to voters understandably alienated from centrist political solutions.
It is also worth noting that the frequent references to Obama and the left as being Nazis or being Hitler like in their behavior are factual misses. The extreme conservative right, the National Socialist Party being that for example, always makes accomodations whereever it rises to power with those that control the levers of capital (although clearly the German Jews suffered beyond measure and successful Jewish business people were clearly not greeted with accommodation, far from it). The radical left, on the other hand, generally never accomodates the capital class and actively moves against that class when the far left assumes power.
This historical reality and future potential repeat is no secret and motivates the wealthy and powerful to hold their nose and align with the far right when extreme parties on both ends of the spectrum gain momentum. This is very much what happended in late Wiemar Germany and will be repeated in other countries if similar extremist parties at both ends of the spectrum gain traction.
I am neither right nor left anymore. I simply want to protect what I have and hope that the apocalypse will remain an entertaining subject for movies. Having traversed the former Yugoslavia during the worst of the fighting there I can say there is not one damn thing entertaining about it in real life. For me, cynical honesty about historical events informs guesses about future events better than anything else.
A lot of people are missing the forest for the trees in this discussion about the rise of radical politics.
It's worth noting that to the commoner little person, they really aren't interested in political ideology, they want results, and many little-people hate the status-quo, because it crushes them whilst pretending to "protect and serve" them.
These may be real or imagined issues, perhaps, and maybe people are a bit over-reactive, or not, but many want the status-quo broken up and replaced - with what, they do not know. They just detest what has arisen during their lives.
I see that commenters are focussing too much on the 'politics', and parties and competeing immiscible ideologies. Politics is supposed to mean a debate on real and viable and worthwhile "policies", and their legislating, a process which almost no one (correctly) trusts any more. So politics is dysfunctional and is being increasingly ignored for the most part. It is the problem, and not even capable of actual solutions at this point. Ron Paul is a very long-shot at best. But he at least might have been able to prevent things descending into internal fragmentation and possible US dissolution and reconstitution (as Russia did with their hopelessly failed central-planning system).
It is then that ideological opportunists waiting in the wings, foreseeing and hoping for the opportunity, will run their solutions up the flag pole to see who salutes.
The little-people's politics is not a problem, nor THE problem.
The system is innately destructive, and the little-people require and will demand that it be changed, "when things get really bad". Not small Obama style 'change', but unthinkable levels of change -- civil revolution type change.
Translated this means; no home, no personal security, no privacy, vital needs not capable of being met acceptably, via work, or savings, or asset sales, or family support. That is the real problem -- same as the last Depression. The ideology more easily recruits and co-opts people within this situation, and no amount of Govt or corporate propaganda is going to succeed in winning them back.
Homeland Security, isn't. It's just a laughable stupid con-job.
Only a system that meets the basic core needs of people will get their functional, but still mostly unwilling or grudging support, and the political calculation will be to do what worked for the little people during the last Great Depression.
And that is what they are doing ... but the problem is, the public financing is totally unmanageable, using a real balance-sheet.
The public sector's finances are completely kaput this time around ... and that wasn't really the case last time. This time the public debt growth has been much larger and faster, as a proportion of GDP, but it still has not solved any of the fundamental problems, of failed TBTFs, and massive corruption, and serial routine mal-investment on a spectacular global-scale, and now competitive debasing and trade snafus.
Nothing's really been done!
The 99-ers aren't even counted as 'unemployed', but there are at least as many unemployed now as in 2009! That's real nature of the 'systemic' failure--people don't matter, 'politicised' faked numbers matter much more. And the politics of the US has become facetious, an international joke, a cautionary tale, and also a revelation of profound hypocracy at every level.
The politics and finer-points and the ethics of all this will be lost on the little people, a side-concern for such enduring harsh times, bought on by a destructive system that's obviously unable to reform, or even to recognise and honestly address the nature of its wretched destructiveness -- and that must now go, so it will. That's what people really care about.
The political old-normal is still dieing, but it is becoming more obvious every month, that it's decomposition stinks all the more.
There are two types of change in nature; reversible (if dirty, get clean), and irreversible change (decomposing corpse).
We are about to get a dose of irreversible change, and we don't know what that'll be. What was, is now as good as gone, it isn't coming back, there is no reverse, the TBTF and Co., destroyed it, because of the MAINSTREAM politicians that were elected.
Not 'radicalised' politicians monf you, no, just your normal Washington hack was required to do this. It didn't need any new RADICAL wack-job, nope, the old ones were more than sufficient.
Now, there is a real possibility this change will lead to much better things to come -- I'm being serious, it could.
But if hystery is a guide for such a situation, as that we face now, we are in for spiral-warfare which becomes more-or-less 'mobile', so that it can migrate across whole regions ... at least once ... possibly several times. This is already occurring, has been for a while, it's just that we don't recognise what it is that has started. The Japanese invaded China and the Spanish were fighting a bitter civil war with German support, long before Germany actually pre-emptively invaded Poland to gain land and resources etc., ... for a larger war.
We are in a similar pre-war period where the preliminary conflicts have been going for years and are spreading, and now threatening to rapidly escalate to a global level at any time, and it's primarily being bought about by run of the mill politicians in the US and Europe deciding to make excuses to invade other countries, and also are pre-emptively financially attacking other countries, that have actually done nothing to the US and Europe--at all!
We don't need to wait for a Hitler figure to arise here! We already have these BELIGERANT BLOOD-THIRSTY RADICALS and WAR-MONGERS in power within western capitals. We are there already.
But the little guy is going to not want war, and the state is not going to easily convince them that it's a good idea, nor 'just', nor in their interests, nor going to provide any security ... well, unless the oil stopped flowing ... then it would be kill-or-be-killed time ...
And that is what's actually radical here.
That's the real danger, it's not the radical ideologies that are the danger! Those are effectively red-herrings, false and distant fears that distract us from where we're already at regarding beligerant radicalism and teritorial invasions, and theft of resources, capacities and market access.
The real danger is the war-mongers; those weapon making 'security'-state oriented Corporations, the haughty General, the flag waving 'Patriot', and let's not forge;
MAINSTREAM MSM-'APPROVED' POLITICIANS!
These loathsome mongrels are the ones who are by far and away the most likely to take us into a new world war, on any given day. Just have a look and listen to Hillary Clinton's ranting, like an insane imbecile! She's supposed to be the chief diplomat and statesman of the USA! But she's actually a war-mongering blood-thirsty lunatic.
So forget the threat of "radicalisation", as you'll be dead long before that occurs in some other meaningless guise, as you already have for-real Fascist National Socialist movements in place in Washington, doing the bidding of an ardent hardline Zionist RADICALISM.
They are still just being coy about it in the MSM is all ... because they still can get away with it.
The best the little-people can do is to not let them get away with taking the world to war.
I have heard stories of snipers in Sarajevo and Artillery in the hills. But the Snipers were worst.
Europe is spiraling down into chaos.
Euro is dead, long live Nationalism.
Tonight were gonna party like it's 1929.
BTW, I like the absurdity of "just getting back" from a political body, acting like it's a place, and not some club.
War.
The last refuge of bankers and politicians.
Eastern Europe or Middle East, most likely.