Bloomberg Sues ECB to Force Disclosure of Greece Swaps … Bank, seeking the disclosure of documents showing how Greece used derivatives to hide its fiscal deficit and helped trigger the region's sovereign debt crisis. … The ECB case follows a 2008 lawsuit by Bloomberg LP seeking disclosure of the U.S. Federal Reserve's records on emergency lending under the Freedom of Information Act. … "Bloomberg is committed to transparent markets all over the world," said Matthew Winkler, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News. "Decisions made behind closed doors helped contribute to the global economic havoc of the last few years. Money flees secrecy and unanswered questions undermine the financial system …. "Bloomberg wants the ECB, as well as the Federal Reserve and other financial institutions around the world, to end this damaging opacity." – Bloomberg
Dominant Social Theme: Sunshine is the best disinfectant.
Free-Market Analysis: Here at the Bell, we are professional meme watchers. It is a dangerous occupation, fraught with paper cuts and eye-strain; we persevere nonetheless. Comprehending the fear-based promotions of the power elite, helps us in our larger quest to understand the way the world works – and even to make wiser investment decisions. In this article we will examine a meme that we believe may be of the growing importance … TRANSPARENCY.
Actually, we've mentioned it before, but recently we've stumbled across some material that puts it in a larger context. Our attention was brought to it initially by our coverage of WikLeaks' Julian Assange. While analysts have found many rationales for Assange's WikiLeaks philosophy, what seemed most significant to us was Assange's use of leaks to try to make governance more honest.
As we pointed out just recently in our article "Ascension of Assange?" we have our suspicions about Assange (we've speculated in a number of articles that he and his organization may be a kind of COINTELPRO); and his oft-stated goal, which is "to make governments less authoritarian and more transparent." In a March 2010 interview with Democracy Now's Amy Goodman, Assange said the following:
We are transparency activists who understand that transparent government tends to produce just government. And that is our sort of modus operandi behind our whole organization, is to get out suppressed information into the public, where the press and the public and our nation's politics can work on it to produce better outcomes.
Assange has identified transparency as a central 21st century issue. And now comes Bloomberg with its considerable emphasis on transparency as well. We have long been aware of Bloomberg's Mark Pittman, an award-winning investigative reporter who generated a lawsuit on behalf of Bloomberg demanding that America's central bank, the Federal Reserve, open its books. He died in 2009 of a heart attack at age 52, but the lawsuit continued and Bloomberg clinched an initial victory. The lawsuit is on appeal.
Pittman's aggressiveness, given that he wrote for Bloomberg, never made much sense to us. Bloomberg is the quintessential insider news source. The idea that Mike Bloomberg would allow his news network to be used as a wedge-issue against the Anglosphere (of which he is part) seemed ludicrous. Bloomberg as we understand it still makes the bulk of its profits from placing terminals on the desks of Wall Street buy- and sell-side institutions. Bloomberg is even less apt to "afflict the comfortable" than Reuters or AP.
Nonetheless, Bloomberg has launched yet another transparency lawsuit at a major enterprise, this time the European Central Bank. That means that Bloomberg's firm has two outstanding lawsuits against the most powerful financial enterprises in the world – the US and EU central banks. What's going on? Bloomberg is mayor of New York and he is not currently central to his business, which is run by others. But litigation against the two largest Western central banks in the world is a major step to take and we cannot imagine that either of these lawsuits would have gone ahead without his approval – tacit at least.
We looked up "transparency" with "Wall Street" and "banks" and found upwards of five million cites. We looked up "government transparency" and found 25 million cites. Same thing with "business transparency." That's a lot. Barack Obama made "transparency" a major part of his platform. A few months ago, NY Senator Kirsten E Gillibrand announced legislation co-written by John McCain – the "Earmark Transparency act."
There's even an NGO dedicated to transparency – Transparency International (TI). According to Wikipedia, TI is a non-governmental organization that monitors and publicizes corporate and political corruption in international development. It publishes an annual Corruption Perceptions Index, a comparative listing of corruption worldwide. The headquarters is located in Berlin, Germany but operates through more than 70 national chapters. The UN has a transparency initiative as well, authorized by world leaders at its September 2005. The initiative calls for "increased transparency and accountability in the UN Secretariat affairs."
Transparency surely seems to be a growing dominant social theme of the Anglo-American elite. The US Congress is engaged in a late-term effort to pass a "whistleblowers" bill. We are sure if we looked, we would find similar EU efforts. We figure it is because people are so disgusted with civil institutions that the elite has decided something radical must be done. Since the Anglosphere is not about to jettison the architecture of global governance – put together of the past half century – transparency is apparently the chosen remedy.
No, the Draconian infrastructure of a New World Order is not about to be removed, or even lightened. In fact, we have no doubt that the elite will continue to make it more complex and onerous. But as this is done, we expect we will hear a good deal more about how these institutions are becoming increasingly "transparent" as a result of people's complaints.
We even believe the meme could come with an enforcement emphasis. Perhaps some fairly well known names might eventually face jail (though no doubt they will not stay there long). And of course, there is Julian Assange. The entire WikiLeaks enterprise is apparently built around transparency – it is central to his effort, he says.
Now we have never stated with certainty that Assange is part of a CIA/MI6/Mossad psyops, but we have led the charge for skepticism in such articles as "WikiLeaks – Clever Psyops" and "Comes a Blond Stranger." (Little of the informtion produced by WikiLeaks seems especially damning but Assange's organization is certainly be used as a justification to further censor the Web.) We have even pointed out how an elite psyops dialectic might work – with the power elite attempting to make societies more authoritarian on the one hand while offering increased transparency on the other; a methodology to shape and control the authoritarian conversation, in other words.
It is certainly one way to position a "chosen one" – a new world leader who will confront corrupt internationalist government entities and private enterprises that are not open enough. This Assange-like individual (it doesn't actually have to be Assange himself) could certainly emerge as the leader of a global revolution to make powerful forces accountable. It would seem, of course, to be a spontaneous and radical movement. In fact, it would simply be the other side of another elite-established dialectic.
