Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release Friday, 5 September 2014

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://cec.cecaust.com.au

Australia tries to exclude from G20 most vocal opponent of ‘bail-in’—Putin

All is not as it seems. Tony Abbott is using the Ukraine crisis to lobby other G20 members to agree to exclude Russian President Vladimir Putin from the Brisbane summit in November.

But it so happens that on the main subject of that summit—creditor bail-ins of too-big-to-fail (TBTF) banks—Putin of all G20 leaders has been the most vocal critic.

Putin strenuously opposed the bail-in of Cyprus depositors in March 2013, which he slammed as “unfair, unprofessional and dangerous”. He was instrumental in successfully lobbying the Cyprus legislators to initially reject the European demand for a depositor “haircut”.

Later, under extreme pressure from the “Troika” of the EU, European Central Bank, and IMF, Cyprus caved and imposed bail-in on deposits above 100,000 euro. The effect was as dangerous as Putin had warned: it destroyed confidence in banking and threatened bank “runs” that the authorities only averted by freezing all deposits, limiting withdrawals to 300 euro per day, which smashed the Cypriot economy.

A few months later, at the 20-21 June St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), Putin was joined onstage for a Q&A session by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who at one point complained that Putin sometimes “talks too loud.” Then, after Merkel gave a long and intricate, but not very substantial, reply to a question about too-big-to-fail banks, Putin demanded the microphone and said, “Madame Federal Chancellor has said that she doesn’t know how the banks will be recapitalised. She also said that I sometimes talk too loud. So, let me say this in a whisper: ‘I hope it won’t be at the expense of their customers!’”

Resisting the BRICS faction?

Putin’s views on bail-in are just one potential sticking point at November’s G20 Leaders’ Summit in Brisbane.

All five members of the powerful BRICS group of nations—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—are in the G20, constituting a sizeable faction, not to mention the majority in terms of population. Since the last G20 meeting, the BRICS have effectively declared war on London and Wall Street’s control over the global financial system, by establishing alternatives to the World Bank, called the New Development Bank, and the IMF, called the Contingent Reserve Fund, to finance an historic perspective of collaborative economic development.

They are also firm supporters of another G20 member, Argentina, in its fight against the London and Wall Street vulture funds, which, like mafia debt collectors, prey on indebted nations, buy up their bonds for cents on the dollar, and then get U.S. courts to rule those nations must pay in full, so they can profit to the tune of hundreds of percent. The nation of Argentina is asserting its sovereignty, to reject that it comes under the jurisdiction of a U.S. court, and to insist on sticking with the existing agreement it had with all of its creditors except the vulture funds. Other G20 member nations, such as France, join the BRICS in supporting Argentina’s fight.

But this potentially sets the scene at the Brisbane G20 for a massive brawl, between the major BRICS-plus faction which insists on economic sovereignty and development, and the Anglo-American faction, that includes the presently disgustingly sycophantic Australia, which insists that all nations bow to the private financial power of London and Wall Street, suck up banker-dictated policies that destroy their populations such as austerity and bail-in, and let those same bankers and hedge fund and vulture fund managers get off scot-free for the financial crimes that caused the worst meltdown in living memory.

Argentine President Christina Fernández de Kirchner has foreshadowed using the forum of the Brisbane G20 to promote the BRICS-Argentina policies. When she met Putin in Buenos Aires 12 July, Fernández revealed they discussed the need for the “next G20 meeting to have a much broader agenda than it’s had to date, due to the problems existing in the world.” Of particular importance, she said, is the need for global economic and financial regulation, noting that “President Putin also agrees on the need for global reform.” The two presidents agreed that on a global scale, capital flows “which have practically turned the world into a financial casino” must be regulated.

There is so much at stake at the G20 meeting, Abbott’s deployment of Julie Bishop to lobby for Putin’s exclusion has all the hallmarks of a classic, British-style divide-and-conquer move to resist the BRICS agenda, rather than anything to do with Ukraine.

Australians must ask themselves: which economic perspective—the London-Wall Street financial dictatorship or BRICS-style economic development—do we prefer?

The CEC is fighting against bail-in and for Australia to join the BRICS agenda for economic development. Join us!

Click here for a free copy of the 29 August EIR magazine featuring an analysis of the BRICS economic development perspective entitled, “The New Silk Road Leads to the Future of Mankind!”

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