Muscat is running out of great European socialist leaders
Back in March, the Labour Party’s news portal Maltastar boasted that Muscat had met Hollande (while waiting for the lift, apparently, as this picture indicates).
Last March, the Labour Party got all excited because its leader had met that other great socialist leader, Francois Hollande, in Paris.
Judging by the photograph they released, it looks like he met him by chance while waiting for the lift, and that Kurt Farrugia took the picture by angling his smartphone upwards.
But never mind. Now that Hollande has introduced income tax rates of 75% and 45% and increased capital gains tax, and with unemployment in France massively on the up, are Muscat and his dwarf adviser going to carry on making comparisons to Hollande?
What a tragedy, eh? They’re running out of great European socialist leaders with whom Muscat can brand himself. That explains the desperate grab at Barack Obama. Except that ‘socialist’, anywhere in the United States and whatever the party, is considered to be a deeply offensive term of abuse, like ‘communist’.
56 Comments Comment
Reply to VIGILANT Click here to cancel reply
I suppose laissez-faire capitalism is better?
Yes . . it did win the cold war after all . . . easier to understand cheap Dezerta or expensive Cadbury?
Oh well, maybe we’ll see more French businesses coming our way
It’s a hollow campaign, anyway. Anyone who knows who Hollande is knows isn’t impressed and the sort to be impressed don’t know much about the world outside the reality TV of their own existence.
“…and that Kurt Farrugia took the picture by angling his smartphone upwards.”
Priceless!
So, as you rightly say, “Muscat is running out of great European socialist leaders”.
I cannot say that he is also running out of ideas because he never had any. However he and his party are following on the PL’s past that is “he who is not with us, is against us” (min mhux maghna, kontra taghna”.
We have seen this happening with the termination of employment from PBS of Claudette Buttigieg Pace because she is a PN candidate and a few hours back we heard that Mario Rizzo Naudi’s job as Medical Officer with Freeport has been terminated for the same reason. These people never change.
Obama is hardly a Socialist the way we Europeans understand the term. All American political parties are based very firmly to the right.
It is instructional how every time Socialists are elected to government the first thing they do is stab everybody in the back though. It is our experience of them in Malta as well are all around Europe.
The fact that they keep on being voted in makes you wonder about the theoretical basics of democracy.
Watching the PES Congress held currently in Brussels contradicts evidently the title in caption. Dr Joseph Muscat is not running out of great European Socialist Leaders.
Dr Joseph Muscat is involved in the discussion and workshops organized between European Socialist Leaders and is considered an effective leader of Malta an EU Member State.
Muscat would grab at Obama, wouldn’t he? Another epic failure!
Just out: Obama giving $450 million to Egypt, despite the rabid anti-americanism on show daily in Egypt. So, Obama gives what he doesn’t have to those who hate the Americans! Is Obama naive or stupid, or both?
Much like Muscat.
Any American considering voting for Obama in the States or any Maltese considering voting for Muscat in Malta needs to have his/her head examined. Literally.
agree
The only thing in common between Obama and Joseph Muscat is that the names of their wives are the same. The comparision stops there.
Are you sure they met in front of the lift and not the gents?
Can we have a caption competition on this please?
“That explains the desperate grab at Barack Obama. Except that ‘socialist’, anywhere in the United States and whatever the party, is considered to be a deeply offensive term of abuse, like ‘communist’.”
Very true. But before blaming Joseph for being artificial, if not superficial, try twisting your heads around these few facts:
In the 2008 elections Obama was overwhelmingly backed by Wall Street. This is public knowledge, and widely known at that.
The rest of the military-industrial complex – it’s one whole cabal, see Dwight Eisenhower for the term – backed the corpse pitted against him, the ridiculous McCain character playing ‘conservative’.
Since then, Obama has proved his loyalty not only to his Federal Reserve backers (in huge trillions), but also to his opponent’s warmongering backers. All the while, the Nobel Prize winner hasn’t stopped speaking peace-speak unless he’s had to break when it came to the ‘war on terr’r’ that is now morphing into a war on home-grown terr’r that doesn’t really exist – not yet, anyway, but they’re working on it.
So let’s start with Obama the ‘peacenik’.
Forget the unceasing violence in Afghanistan and Iraq, hardly reported on nowadays. Why bother? But take Syria, where the only reformist, relatively-rational and truly secular Arab leader is fighting Obama-backed Islamists inundated with Al Qaeda t’rr’rsts in a Western-managed destabilisation job which the BBC has dubbed a ‘fight for democracy’.
Also consider Obama’s belligerence towards Iran and his subtle support for Israel’s obsession with attacking that country – which hasn’t breached the non-proliferation treaty, even while being surrounded by hostile, mostly Western-backed, nuclear-armed regimes, including Israel, which did not bother to sign the treaty in the first place.
What about Obama the civil libertarian?
Obama promised to close Guantanamo. He did not deliver. He said he will protect privacy, instead he’s signed in laws aimed at controlling the internet and surveilling users. He’s even given himself kill-switch powers over the Internet.
He said he will not sign the unconstitutional NDAA bill into federal law, and when he eventually did sign, he said he’ll never use it. [Note: the “National Defense Authorization Act” (NDAA) empowers the military, under presidential authority, to summarily and indefinitely detain US citizens without charge. Please digest that sentence fully… there’s much more to this, but we’ll stop there.]
Here’s the other twist.
Obama’s handlers act through a colourful cocktail of ‘advisers’ largely comprising 1960s-70s Marxist-Green social engineers and former Wall Street/Fed front-men.
These handlers are continuing to direct the US towards a more socialising, collectivising, intrusive type of big government that works in tandem with the major global institutions and corporations in the fiscal (currency issuance), financial, energy, food & commodities, education, pharmaceutical and ‘defence’ (arms) sectors. (There is also the global drugs trade, but that’s a wee too complex for this site).
A hybrid collectivist-socialist-corporate system where big government and large corporations work hand in hand is what Mussolini’s ‘fascism’ was about. This would have been a hard sell in the US and can only be accomplished by stealth and deceit, relying heavily on the gradual, boiling-frog syndrome – as well as career politicians who move with the flow, and a dumbed-down electorate glued to TV soundbites.
Anyone who follows US politics in detail – and not just the soundbites – knows that the red-blue contest is a spectacle that does not change the system’s direction in the key sectors mentioned above.
In these fields President Mittens Romney would continue on the same lines as Obama, as Obama did on Bushes line, which could only ensue after Clinton paved the way. So the issuance of money will remain in the hands of the few, more perpetual wars will be waged, civil liberties will continue to be eroded and the social control grid will continue to take shape.
Keep your eyes on the US. There’s where the action will be, even as the EU disintegrates into a Union of dysfunctional nation states.
You see, we’ll at least be saved by the EU’s Politburo and its GosBank with their newly acquired powers and a new ‘federation’ with enough central planners to take care of us from cradle to grave.
We should hardly even notice the gradual reboot.
But in the US, only the Department of Homeland Security can save them now. Good thing their Darth Vader riot-hounds are being set loose with state-of-the-art crowd management equipment for their intricate control grid to fully emerge.
But I guess Joseph wouldn’t be thinking on these lines when he endorses the soundbite version of Obama. Like you, he is completely sane. So I must be the one that’s ill-informed.
Zzzz
kev, today you have overdone what you like best -twisting facts out of context. Also it is too long and knowing your way of thinking, I will not read the above.
Your loss, A. Charles.
Although I cannot guess how you managed to spot the fact-twisting without reading it, I’d advise you to substantiate your allegations whenever you can. Otherwise we’d think you’re another hollow Baxxter, who’s long proved himself by revealing nothing but multi-layered frustration.
Kevin, you are a stain upon God’s clean earth. If there were any justice in this universe you’d be dead.
Nice one Kev.
You’d make the perfect skinhead.
Apart from my being a death-deserving stain, Baxxter, have you any opinion about Obama, or does it coincide with Joseph’s?
I think Obama is a bloody fraud and the worst sort of demagogue. But Romney’s total and complete subservience to Israeli policy on Iran and other imagined world perils make him even worse. I’d vote for Obama.
You of course, will answer that I should vote for the great Karma of Non-Existent Fist In The Air Age of Aquarius Harmony.
Mur lura l-Maltafly u l-intervisti ma’ Norman Lowell. Hemmhekk kien postok.
I’m not surprised with that soundbite perspective of yours, Baxxter. It’s hard to argue when you know very little. Poor Baxxter.
As for Maltafly, did you know that within just two months after launching in September 2002 it overtook the Times of Malta in world ranking at 20 thousandth?
How’s your site doing, Baxxter? Has it reached 5 millionth yet?
(Ara min irid jghajjar ukoll. Qas jaf jaqfel iz-zarbun, ahseb u ara kemm se jiddiskuti dwar Obama…)
Michael Farrugia should be sacking his IT gurus;
http://www.independent.com.mt/news.asp?newsitemid=151303
There is a malady that effects politicians , they believe that they are greater than the world at large around them , it has been coined the Hubris syndrome . ( Read Daily Mail , Tony Blair by Lord Owen ) .
Sorry , Lord Owen is the correct analyst of character .
“angling his smartphone upwards”
Initially I tried to figure out the context of this sentence. Then I realized what you meant.
I thought of sharing these quotations from Franco Debono’s famous thesis.
1. “Members of Parliament of the party in office should be extremely reluctant to vote against the government or even to hold individual ministers to account, if that would embarrass it.”
2. “The team must not be weakened by some of its members making clear in public that they disapprove of the government’s policy.”
3. “If they do not like what the team is doing, they must either keep quiet or leave.”
He’s moaning for a mature campaign now.
He could set an example by specifying the total number of false letters and comments to all newspapers to distort public opinion.
The next step would be to quit being everything to everyone and commit himself to something.
The third, and this could be too much for him to bear, would be to stop the maneouvering in parliament to bag a snap election face an electoral campaign.
Sneak.
Off-topic, I know, but he’s put Malta in the news. What better publicity than that? http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20120929/world/Piano-leaves-mark-in-Oslo.438865
“Except that ‘socialist’, anywhere in the United States and whatever the party, is considered to be a deeply offensive term of abuse, like ‘communist’.”
The idiots in that regard are the Americans precisely because they don’t distinguish between socialism and communism but lump the two together.
As do many of us still, since there was precious little difference when it was our misfortune to live in it.
“Dar tiempo al tiempo”.
The expression coined by Cervantes, who was obsessed with el tiempo, was a favourite of Mitterand.
Donner/laisser du temps au temps.
It has now been taken up by Hollande when pressed about his reforms.
He is completely stuck with a country on the verge of the abyss facing surging unemployment.
What he has done so far is increase taxes and increase the minimum wage by the derisory cost of a baguette.
I wonder what Joey will be saying in a year’s time.
He has no clue of either French or Spanish.
Maybe ” ghatu il-hin liz-zmien”. “Tghuna cans”.
Any suggestions?
Mhux fair
Dear Daphne,
NEWSFLASH—
NO ONE GIVES A FUCKING SHIT ABOUT YOU ANYMORE!!!! YOUR PLAN FAILED!!! FUCK YOUR SAD LAJJF HAHHAHAHAHAHAHA
OH SORRY, NEED SPELLCHECK……..I DONT GIVE A FUCK!!!!!!! GO GET HIT BY A BUS YOU FUCKED UO BITCH
LEJBERRRRRR FOR EVVAAA… AND YOU CAN SAY I’M A HAMALLU AS MUCH AS YOU WANT, COS I DONT GIVE A SHIT ABOUT WHAT YOU SAY!!!!!!! HAMALLA INT JA OXX UZAT!!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!! FUCK YOU DEEEEEFFFFFFFFF!!!!!!
ah I needed that
Foxx kemm andek (sic)
Ara, tal-Lejber rebhu.
Franco’s last stand before he votes himself into political oblivion.
How in the world would the Labour voter know that ‘Except that ‘socialist’, anywhere in the United States and whatever the party, is considered to be a deeply offensive term of abuse, like ‘communist’.
They just understand one word, state handouts even if only promised.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20120930/local/car-parks-motion-needs-to-be-tackled-with-urgency-muscat.439035
“He also referred to a statement by Fitch this week that whatever the election result, Malta’s financial situation would remain stable.
The PL, Dr Muscat said, had already acquired its first certificate of stability from foreign experts.”
Huh? Is that what they said? So what does he mean they said? That Malta’s financial situation is good and will remain so? Or that it’s bad and will remain so? So in both cases, why do we need him?
Bloody hell, he can’t open his mouth without sounding like a complete idiot. If it quacks like a duck…
Maybe he can look up to and emulate Castro. The guy’s been there forever. Must be a very likeable hardline socialist with the added advantage of having the ability of passing the power to your brother in old age.
Three articles which I found quite interesting and somehow related to much of the posts written here.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444358804578014534111905680.html?mod=ITP_opinion_1
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443921504577643811017389058.html?mod=ITP_opinion_1
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444165804578012904284534228.html?mod=ITP_opinion_1
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20120930/local/Mintoff-left-everything-to-his-daughters-in-will.438901
U lilna l-orfni halliena b’xejn.
Socialists never change. They want total control of our lives, our trade, our jobs, our wages, our food, our education, our health, our entertainment and above all control our free speech unless we praise the comrades at the ivory tower.
It’s not like we have never experienced them before and if we elect them again, we will only get what we deserve.
Amen to that.
All socialists are liars. I’ve never met a socialist politician who wore blue overalls, or who lived on the minimum wage, or who ever worried about making ends meet. Bunch of lying, hypocritical scum.
Once I read a European think-tank statistic on political corruption and the socialists came out at the top of the list by a huge margin.
You mean they are all John Prescotts.
The British socialist par excellence and Tony Blair’s deputy prime minister.
While still in opposition he was known as two-jag Prescott. He had one for himself and one for his wife, each costing over 50000 GBP.
When in government he spent most of his time screwing his secretary in his office and at Chequers.
The John Prescotts in Malta are notorious.
This says it all about socialism.
http://www.importanceofphilosophy.com/Bloody_Socialism.html
Somewhat off topic, The Sunday Times is reporting that Muscat said “that from a technical point of view, Malta could never need a bailout because it was not in debt with foreigners but with the Maltese.”
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20120930/local/car-parks-motion-needs-to-be-tackled-with-urgency-muscat.439035
Assuming this quote is correct, this is a very naive and totally incorrect statement by an aspiring prime minister who claims to be an economist. Indeed, it is actually shocking that Muscat could have made this statement. It shows that he has absolutely no understanding of how the eurozone functions and the parameters by which all eurozone countries are bound. And clearly, this demonstrates that he is completely clueless with regards to the eurozone crisis, which he will have to navigate the country through when he will be prime minister. The thought that Muscat and his team of muppets will be running the country in a few months time is frightening!
It is perfectly possible for Malta to need a bailout and the fact that currently all the government debt is funded locally is completely irrelevant. While this is definitely a healthy situation, there is absolutely no guarantee that this will always be the case and incredibly naive of Muscat to assume that the local investors will always be there to backstop the government irrespective of the fiscal situation. Ultimately, the current conditions reflect the confidence local investors have in the government’s ability to pay interest and to repay the bonds on maturity. However, it is perfectly possible for investors to lose confidence and to refuse to continue to buy MGS.
If the fiscal deficit blew out of control (for example, due to increasing electricity & water subsidies) and the rating agencies downgrade Malta, it is conceivable that the local banks & investors would be wary of buying more Malta Government Stock. This would have two potential issues, firstly the government will have to borrow money at higher interest rates leading to a deterioration in the fiscal deficit and secondly, if there is a buyers strike it could be possible for the government to be unable to borrow sufficient funds to cover the deficit. This would force the government to try to raise funding in the international markets which could push the country towards a bailout scenario. (Note that during Sant’s brief period in government, the interest paid on MGS had risen substantially and MGS paying 7.8% had been issued compared to 5% recently.)
In addition, Muscat’s claim naively ignores the crucial fact that we have no control over our currency since Malta’s currency is the euro. If we had our own currency, it would be possible to “print money” in order to fund the fiscal deficit. However, this is no longer possible and this in fact a crucial factor influencing the eurozone crisis in Spain & Italy.
The words “fucking moron” do not do justice to the situation.
Most of Spain’s debt was also held locally, by not-for-profit banks run by local politicians, if you please. When the economy imploded, and those banks found themselves undercapitalised, the Spanish government had to turn to Europe for – wait for it – a bailout.
Edward Scicluna is a “Professur”, right? I think someone at Labour needs to take private lessons from him.
Spain’s bank bailout is nothing compared to the sovereign bailout that’s coming shortly.
Gonzi should be preparing the half a billion euros he’s pledged to the ESM bailout fund. And since, as Alfred Mifsud reminded us recently, the people have lots of money, we can sponge what’s left of it and forget about local investment.
Let’s have more debt, for debt is the way forward. The EU told us so. We must raise our debt levels so we can attain European levels, for, as Barroso himself said two weeks ago, this will be a federation where the debt burden is shared by all eurozone citizens.
Ahleb, Guz! The natives know not what’s coming their way.
Has Muscat left Enemalta’s debt out of the equation? That debt is mainly with non-Maltese entities. And it is guaranteed by the government of Malta.
If Dr. Joseph Muscat the Economist and Prime Minister takes decisions which threaten Enemalta’s financial stability, those guarantees may need to be cashed.
Mr Hollande is delivering what he promised. He is increasing the income tax rates to 75% for the super rich and 45% for the very high income earners.
Spain and Italy are generally considered to be in a much worse position than France and both do not have Socialist governments.
Bollocks. Hollande promised he’d balance the budget by 2013.
That’s now been moved back to at least 2017, when figures show that there’ll still be at 0.3% deficit. He promised he’d renegotiate the European budget pact.
He didn’t, and was forced to make drastic cuts to government spending.
He promised he’d turn around the unemployment rate within 100 days. It’s still rising, and has now topped 3 million.
His only reply? To blame it on the previous government. Hollande is a fraud. Like most socialists.
They had. The Spaniards coined the name Zappaterismo when the socialists in power enacted stupid laws and economy was not their forte.
Spain is sill reeling from the disastrous state of affairs left over after two terms under Zapatero.
Apart from his looks there was nothing good about him.
In Italy, you are perfectly right, the government was far from Socialist.
However you must agree that Berlusconi was otherwise occupied.
The government in Italy WAS Socialist, Berlusconi’s party was made of survivors of Craxi’s PSI, wrecked by the corruption scandals during Tangentopoli.
His populism along with the perpetuation of incestuous capitalism reduced Italy to an economic no-go area.