Austerity only for poor people, not for wars, Eurozone’s Dijsselbloem says

This 21 February 2015 Dutch satirical music video is called RAP BATTLE [English + GREEK SUBTITLES] – Dijsselbloem vs Βαρουφάκης (Varoufakis). Featuring Angela Merkel and Vladimir Putin. About imposing disastrous austerity on Greece.

By Alex Lantier and Stéphane Hugues in France:

French president exploits terror attacks to suspend democratic rights

17 November 2015

In a speech Monday to both houses of parliament meeting in Versailles, French President François Hollande made clear that in response to the terrorist attacks carried out on Friday by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), he intends to carry through a sweeping assault on democratic rights. Hollande’s speech marked a major step toward the imposition of authoritarian forms of rule in France.

The French government, like other governments do similarly, uses ISIS terrorism not only as a pretext for attacking democratic rights in France. It uses it as pretext for war abroad too. By Glenn Greenwald:

Stock Prices of Weapons Manufacturers Soaring Since Paris Attack

Nov. 16 2015, 5:17 p.m.

The Paris attacks took place on Friday night. Since then, France’s president has vowed “war” on ISIS and today significantly escalated the country’s bombing campaign in Syria (France has been bombing ISIS in Iraq since last January, and began bombing the group in Syria in September).

This French governmental spending of money on merchants of death and attacking civil liberties means that the budget deficit will grow further. For years, the French deficit has been higher than the official European Union ceiling of 3%. President Hollande and Prime Minister Valls admitted yesterday that the deficit will now grow even more.

Now, some people might expect that the Euro zone bigwigs would get very angry and impose all kinds of drastic austerity measures on the French government (in practice, on the French people) by the way of some ‘troika’. However, Dutch Finance Minister Dijsselbloem, also the Euro zone boss, has said today that he ‘understands’ the French government prioritizing of war and attacks on liberties over walking the official European Union 3% deficit line.

So, Dijsselbloem ‘understands’ the French government. While about Greece, the same Mr Dijsselbloem refused and still refuses to understand anything.

The Greek government had a deficit, caused by, inter alia, paying a lot to German and French weapons Big Business. The European Union-IMF–European Central Bank troika reacted to that by ordering the Greek government to destroy democracy, the economy, health care, education, etc. Early this year, the Syriza party won the Greek election, promising voters to stop this destruction. One of their proposals was to balance the budget more by spending less on the military. The pro-austerity Euro bigwig blackmailers of Greece banned that. Another proposal of the new Greek government was closing down the horrible prison camps for refugees. No, you can’t do that, the European Union said.

Dijsselbloem and his cronies kept cajoling and blackmailing the Syriza government till they gave in on continuing the destructive austerity and privatisation in Greece.

Not even a remote trace of that in the case of the French deficit.

Blairite Dijsselbloem is a member of the PvdA party, the junior partner in the Dutch coalition government. The biggest party in that coalition is the VVD. THe VVD parliamentary caucus chairman Zijlstra said today, according to NOS TV:

People who sell weapons are for me as guilty of terrorism as the people who use them.

Right, Mr Zijlstra. Unfortunately, very probably Mr Zijlstra only means a few low level small business sellers of handguns and rifles to private persons, not the Big Business military-industrial complex which now is making deficits in France and elsewhere bigger and bigger.

From the Huffington Post in the USA:

In Germany, Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere told reporters in Berlin that a Syrian passport found with one of the Paris attackers may have been a false flag intended to make Europeans fearful of refugees. The passport showed registrations in Greece, Serbia and Croatia, which he described as “unusual.”

He said the multiple registrations by a person using the passport were “evidence that this was a trail that was intentionally laid”.