Trouble in Lisbon.

Portugal 2010 budget deficit overshoots target

LISBON (Reuters) - Portugal's budget deficit surged past its 7.3 percent target last year, figures on Thursday showed, deepening the scale of its problems as it faces a daunting debt repayment schedule over the next three months.

The revision of the deficit to 8.6 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) piled more pressure on Lisbon to follow Ireland and Greece in seeking an international bailout, sending the country's bond yields to new euro lifetime highs.

The losses followed a visit by the EU's Eurostat statistics body and are caused by higher than expected losses for a nationalised bank and public transport companies.

But they add to the problems for the government that emerges from elections which are expected within months after a debt crisis which has forced eye-watering budget cutbacks, crippled growth and forced the current administration to resign.

Finance Minister Fernando Teixeira dos Santos said Lisbon would honour its debt payments even though it has no power to seek a bailout.

"The negative element is that we are appearing more like Greece than we would like, indicating that in the past there must have been some carelessness in the accounts," said Cristina Casalinho, chief economist at Banco BPI.

"It is a question of methodology. Eurostat has made the rules tougher."

POLITICAL LIMBO

Portugal's troubles were already mounting before last week's resignation by Prime Minister Jose Socrates after parliament rejected his minority Socialist government's latest austerity measures to help to cut the budget deficit.

That move prompted downgrades by credit rating agencies and warnings by economists that the country could be forced to quickly seek a bailout.

The president is expected to decide on Thursday to call a snap election for late May or early June.

But the political limbo left by the crisis ahead of the expected election made it impossible for the interim government to seek a bailout now, Teixeira dos Santos said.

"We have to face these difficulties and understand that the government doesn't have the conditions nor the powers to ask for any kind of external help," the minister told reporters.

Portugal has to redeem 4.2 billion euros of bonds in April and 4.9 billion euros (4.3 billion pounds) in June.

"The government is not irresponsible and will guarantee that there is the necessary financing for the country to honour commitments to creditors," he said.


Opinion.

The message and recommendation for Portugal is clear yet radical. Crises such as these will be followed by ever more crises. Within the EU, a club of bankers, Portugal will be for ever a vassal state. The solution is to leave the EU and join the revitalised Commonwealth we propose. Also reconnecting with Luso-tropical Africa in order that they too together come into the fold of the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth given a real economic dimension, not for the furtherance of neo-con "free trade", but as a zone for a trans-continental managed trade and exchange, guided by an indicative economic plan formed by us all.

Camelots Du Roi

http://camelotsduroi.canalblog.com/archives/p1-1.html Archive of photos/stories/documents from the Camelots Du Roi - Action Francaise. French monarchist integralists.

Association of British Muslims

Brief History of the ABM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By Daoud Rosser-Owen In 1889, the Shaykhu-l Islam of the British Isles, HE Shaykh Abdullah Quilliam Bey (born William Henry Quilliam in 1857 of Manx parents), a Liverpool solicitor (who famously, as borough solicitor for Bradford, inaugurated the new Town Hall at its Grand Opening with a recitation of the first surah of the Quran "Al Fatihah"), founded the English Islamic Association. He published a newspaper and a magazine, and wrote a number of illuminating articles and pamphlets on Islam - attracting some opprobrium from Stanley Lane Poole in the Letters column of The Times. He also translated some parts of the Quran into Manx Gaelic (Gaelg). After Quilliam and his community were forced to migrate to the Ottoman Empire in 1908, the Association fell into abeyance. Just before the outbreak of World War I, Quilliam (disguised as "Professor Henri Marcel Leon", sometimes "Haroun Mustapha Leon" under which name he is buried at Brookwood Cemetery, near Woking) returned to England. He revived his organisation on 20 December 1914 as the British Muslim Society, basing it at the Shah Jehan Mosque in Woking, with Lord Headley as President and Khalid Sheldrake as Secretary. The organisation was revived again in 1924 as the Western Islamic Association. By 1927, it was located in London's Notting Hill and the Amir was HE Khalid Sheldrake (né Bertram William Sheldrake, known as "the Pickle King"). In 1930 he had established a branch of it in South Shields. He was for a while in 1934 the Emir of Islamistan (Kashghar in East Turkestan) on the invitation of the Emirs of Khotan. It was located at 111 Campden Hill Road where there was a library, lectures were held, and the Friday Prayers led by Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, the famous polymathic translator of the Quran. It absorbed the activities of the Muslim Literary Society (founded 1916 and headed by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, himself a famous translator of the Quran, classical scholar, and sometime Collector in the ICS) that had become effectively defunct after 1917. Since its gradual decline and virtual demise in the late 1940s with the death of Abdullah Yusuf Ali, there have been several attempts to revive it. In 1969, Daoud Rosser-Owen, Abdur Rashid Craig, Abdul Rashid Ansari, Dr Ya'qub Zaki, and Kamaruddin Peckham held meetings but received extreme opposition from nationality organised immigrant Muslim organisations that were accusing them of racialism. In 1975, no longer willing to accept further marginalisation of the converts, Rashid Craig, Daud Relf, Daoud Rosser-Owen and others went ahead and re-established it as the Association of British Muslims, with Shaykh Daoud Rosser-Owen as Amir, and the endorsement and authority of Shaykh Nazim al-Haqqani. In 1978, on advice from Kamaruddin Peckham, Yusuf Islam and others, it was renamed the Association For British Muslims with Hajji Abdur Rasjid Skinner as Amir and Abdullah Ibrahim, rahmatu-Llahi 'alayh, as Secretary although it has continued all along using both names. This was the most recent revival of Quilliam's organisation. It has struggled to survive, and still functions with Shaykh Daoud as caretaker Amir. Conscious of the earlier accusations, but aware that activity by functional groupings was most effective and conscious of the Shari"i requirement for Muslims to engage with communities through their own people, the ABM affiliated to the "Union of Muslim Organisations in the UK and the Republic of Ireland" as an appropriate umbrella body soon after that organisation was founded.

With usura - Ezra Pound

France nearly in Commonwealth, 1950's

When Britain and France nearly married
By Mike Thomson
Presenter, Document


From BBC News,2007

The major event of the year was the Suez episode
Formerly secret documents unearthed from the National Archives have shown Britain and France considered a "union" in the 1950s.

On 10 September 1956 French Prime Minister Guy Mollet arrived in London for talks with his British counterpart, Anthony Eden.

These were troubled times for Mollet's France. Egypt's President Gamel Abdel Nasser had nationalised the Suez Canal and, as if that was not enough, he was also busy funding separatists in French Algeria, fuelling a bloody mutiny that was costing the country's colonial masters dear.

Monsieur Mollet was ready to fight back and he was determined to get Britain's help to do it.

Formerly secret documents held in Britain's National Archives in London, which have lain virtually unnoticed since being released two decades ago, reveal the extraordinary proposal Mollet was about to make.


The following is an extract from a British government cabinet paper of the day. It reads:

"When the French Prime Minister, Monsieur Mollet was recently in London he raised with the prime minister the possibility of a union between the United Kingdom and France."

Mollet was desperate to hit back at Nasser. He was also an Anglophile who admired Britain both for its help in two world wars and its blossoming welfare state.

There was another reason, too, that the French prime minister proposed this radical plan.

Tension was growing at this time along the border between Israel and Jordan. France was an ally of Israel and Britain of Jordan. If events got out of control there, French and British soldiers could soon be fighting each other.

With the Suez issue on the boil Mollet could not let such a disaster happen.

Secret document

So, when Eden turned down his request for a union between France and Britain the French prime minister came up with another proposal.
This time, while Eden was on a visit to Paris, he requested that France be allowed to join the British Commonwealth.
A secret document from 28 September 1956 records the surprisingly enthusiastic way the British premier responded to the proposal when he discussed it with his Cabinet Secretary, Sir Norman Brook.

It says: "Sir Norman Brook asked to see me this morning and told me he had come up from the country consequent on a telephone conversation from the prime minister who is in Wiltshire.

"The PM told him on the telephone that he thought in the light of his talks with the French:


•"That we should give immediate consideration to France joining the Commonwealth

•"That Monsieur Mollet had not thought there need be difficulty over France accepting the headship of her Majesty

•"That the French would welcome a common citizenship arrangement on the Irish basis"
Seeing these words for the first time, Henri Soutou, professor of contemporary history at Paris's Sorbonne University almost fell off his chair.

Stammering repeatedly he said: "Really I am stuttering because this idea is so preposterous. The idea of joining the Commonwealth and accepting the headship of Her Majesty would not have gone down well. If this had been suggested more recently Mollet might have found himself in court."


Nationalist MP Jacques Myard was similarly stunned on being shown the papers, saying: "I tell you the truth, when I read that I am quite astonished. I had a good opinion of Mr Mollet before. I think I am going to revise that opinion.


"I am just amazed at reading this because since the days I was learning history as a student I have never heard of this. It is not in the textbooks."

It seems that the French prime minister decided to quietly forget about his strange proposals.

No record of them seems to exist in the French archives and it is clear that he told few other ministers of the day about them.

This might well be because after Britain decided to pull out of Suez, the battle against President Nasser was lost and all talk of union died too.

Instead, when the EEC was born the following year, France teamed up with Germany while Britain watched on. The rest, it seems, is history.

Why Ireland should rejoin the Commonwealth

Why Ireland should rejoin the Commonwealth
By Conn Corrigan, from Ireland and the Commonwelath
The biggest mistake Irish republicans ever made says former Irish rugby star Trevor Ringland, was that "they never asked." Ringland, the sports spokesman for the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), likes saying this to his southern Irish friends to explain unionist objections to a united Ireland. And worse than not asking, Ringland says, is that the "only method used to persuade unionists of the benefits of a united Ireland was violence."
Northern Ireland, despite enjoying almost a decade of relative peace, remains a fractured society, and Ringland, as chairman of the One Small Step Campaign (a cross community organisation that tries to integrate the two communities) is doing more than his bit to correct this. The point he makes, I believe, neatly encapsulates the two major flaws in Irish republicanism: the assumption that unionism could not be a deeply held belief, and the connected assumption that Northern Protestants could be forced into a united Ireland through the barrel of a gun.
The first draft of the 1987 Sinn Féin policy document Scenario for Peace betrays the former flaw. While assuring Protestants that their rights would be protected in a united Ireland, Sinn Féin kindly offered to give grants to any Protestant who wished to be repatriated to Britain. The presumption was that the day a united Ireland arrived unionists would either snap out of their false consciousness and realise that they have been Irish all along, or have to go back to where they came from.
This republican view, strongly streaked in socialism, was that the British were using Protestants as a ‘pretext' to remain in Northern Ireland. But with the end of the Cold War, the IRA's self-image - an anti-imperialist organisation involved in a war of liberation against a colonial power - became increasingly impossible to sustain. Republicans soon realised that partition existed not because of British interests, but because of unionists' desire to remain part of the United Kingdom. "In a way," said Sinn Féin strategist Tom Hartley, "we made them a non-people...We didn't even see them as part of the problem, never mind as being part of the solution."
The use of violence, as Trevor Ringland points out, was one very obvious way in which republicans made the possibility of a united Ireland all the more unlikely. But republicans did further damage to their cause by the way in which they set out their vision of what a united Ireland would look like: Catholic, Gaelic and monolithic. Unionists could argue, with considerable justification, that their British culture, their British identity, would be obliterated in a country like this.
In 1998, Fianna Fáil TD (MP) Eamon O'Cuiv, the grandson of Eamon De Valera, said that while he was a "committed republican" he would see no problem with rejoining the commonwealth if it would reach out to unionists.
In April 2006, Jeffrey Donaldson also said: "We have made clear we would like to see a deepening and strengthening of the east-west frameworks. We would like to see the Irish Republic join the Commonwealth." In May, during a debate on the Northern Ireland Assembly's reapplication to membership of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association,
Donaldson and Alliance Party's MLA Sean Neeson both said that they thought it would be a good idea for the republic to rejoin the commonwealth. Sinn Féin's Mitchel McLaughlin also said, interestingly, that "while this is not, as you would understand, a primary matter of interest for us, neither should we create any obstacles to those who feel it reflects their particular cultural, political and social affinity."
Support for this idea also emanates from outside Ireland: in May, the secretary general of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA) Dr William Shija, called for Ireland to rejoin the commonwealth, 58 years after it had left. And in July, Labour MP Andrew Mackinlay told the House of Commons that it was time to issue an invitation to Ireland to rejoin so as to "take its natural place" in the commonwealth.
This would not be a surrender to an imperial past. It would not mean that the Queen would be the head of state, which is the case only for the 16 states of the commonwealth realm. There are 54 countries in the commonwealth, 33 of which are republics, and many of which, like Ireland, had to fight for their independence. Instead, it would be a gesture - that a Northern Unionist identity could survive - even flourish - as part of a united Ireland.
There is no reason why today, with the redefinition of what it means to be Irish, Irishness shouldn't be absolutely compatible with being British. And for republicans to ever succeed, the two cannot be considered mutually exclusive concepts. Were Ireland to rejoin the commonwealth, it would send out a message to Northern Protestants not simply that their Britishness would be tolerated (which implies a kind of reluctant acceptance) - but would be actively promoted in a united Ireland. Which is why Gerry Adams and Co. should be reaching for the commonwealth application forms.

Full script at http://tinyurl.com/yf5qmeg

Social Nationalism VS National Socialism

Social Nationalism VS National Socialism:

(By Dr. Adel Bshara)





At the core of National Socialism was the Nationalism advocated by the historian Heinrich von Treitschke. A basic theme was Social Darwinism: individuals and nations are both subject to a continuous struggle for life. In this struggle, race is the center of life and all other elements are rated with reference to it. National Socialism claimed that keeping the blood and the race pure is a nation's noblest task. It proclaimed the Germanic race as the new ‘icorpus mysticum’ on which the salvation of the Aryan race and consequently that of the world depended. Accordingly, Nazist policies "figured solely as an expedient intended to improve the Germanic race genetically and to protect it against racial interbreeding which according to the National Socialists, always entails the doctrine of the higher race."



By contrast, Saadeh excluded the notion of race as a criteria of nationality. In one of his most vigorous statements against the national socialist conception of the N.S.D.A.P, he declared: "The alleged purity of the race or the blood of any nation is a groundless myth. It is found only in savage groups, and even there it is rare." For the same reason, Saadeh reproached both Count Gobineau and Chamberlain, the forefathers of National Socialism, and Pascal Mancini who unconsciously lapsed into the use of the catchword race in defining the concept of the nation.



In National Socialism, the national idea lost any pretense of scientific objectivity. This is because there is no correlation between race and national frontiers. More importantly, when seen from a purely social perspective, the nation is not a single race in the scientific sense, but a multiracial society fused together in multitudes. This fusion is a process by which two or more races combine to produce a new whole which is significantly different from each of its parent races, but includes elements from all of them, produced through the stimulation of contact and subsequent internal development.



Another significant difference between National Socialism and Social Nationalism relates to the concept of national history. In National Socialism purity of blood speaks louder than reason, and race is the center of all human history. Ernest Kriek, a National Socialist philosopher at Heidelberg, asserted the contrast as follows: "There has arisen ... blood against formal reason; race against purposeful rationality; honour against profit; unity against individualistic disintegration; martial virtue against bourgeois security; the folk against the individual and the mass."



In Mein Kampf Hitler stated the basic postulates of the race theory as follows: First, a struggle for the survival of the fittest sets the pace for social progress. This struggle occurs within the race, thus giving rise to a natural elite; it also occurs between races and the cultures that express the inherent natures of different races. Second, hybridization by the intermixture of two races results in the degeneration of the higher race. Third, that all high civilizations or important cultures are the creation of one race, or at most of a few. One particular race singled out is the 'culture-creating Aryan' which, according to Hitler, achieved its superior moral qualities through dutifulness and idealism (honour) rather than intelligence. In this organic conception of life, all history "must be rewritten and reinterpreted in terms of the struggle between the races and their characteristic ideas, or more specifically, as a struggle between the Aryan or culture-creating race and all the lower breeds of mankind."



On the contrary, Saadeh regarded racial fusion as one of the driving forces of human history. Although he distinguished between higher and lower civilizations he never lost sight of the common sense approach to the question of race relations. This distinction itself was maintained on the ground of racial hybridization. Higher civilization was thus seen as the product not of racial purity, as the national socialists would have us believe, but of the group's on-going inter-racial mixture, and vice versa in relation to lower civilizations. Moreover, whereas in national socialism the nation, in both its existence and history, is seen in a purely racial sense, in social nationalism, it is based on human as well as geographical factors. "There can be no people," wrote Saadeh, "where there is no land, no society where there is no physical environment, and no history where there is no society."



In short, National Socialism and Social Nationalism operate on two separate intellectual planes: the former connects between race and nation and the later discounts any such connection. While they may be similar in certain limited ways, it must be recognized that, from both a theoretical and practical perspective, a certain correlation exists between all ideologies no matter how far apart they may be. More obvious, at any rate, is the difference between the intrinsic elements of an idea and its extrinsic parts which can become the great enemy of the intrinsic. It is within this context that comparative analysis should take place, not only between National Socialism and Social Nationalism but also between any two ideas.