Author: Spencer

Helga Zepp-LaRouche took on the ideology of the British Monarchy and its Green movement in an article posted July 25 on the website of the German Civil Rights Movement-Solidarity (BüSo), of which she is chairwoman. The article is also published in the weekly Neue Solidarität.

Here is an abridged translation, the full German text is available here.:

Zepp-LaRouche then looks into the human-hating ideology behind Prince Philip and the COP21 conference, as peddled by the likes of John Schellnhuber and Martin Palmer. Palmer has called for a major debate among religious leaders on the idea that mankind is just another animal species and nothing special.

The ideology shared by the “Conservative Revolution,” the Nazis, and the Green movement, Zepp-LaRouche writes, is that man is but a more evolved animal, and therefore human life is no more sacrosanct than that of animals. “Therefore, if need be, one can reduce the number of human beings — be it the helots of ancient Sparta or the ‘useless eaters’ of the Nazis, or the 6 billion people who would be sacrificed to the goals of saving the climate. Armin Mohler, head of the Siemens Foundation, described in his 1949 book, The Conservative Revolution, that the Conservative Revolution aimed to go back to the pre-Christian Gaia mythology, because the Christian image of man first brought the cultural optimism which allowed the modern development of mankind.”

Therefore, continues Zepp-LaRouche, “the sooner the entire historical truth about the British Empire leads to its much-deserved downfall, the better.”

Former Polish Prime Minister Marek Belka, now the head of the Polish central bank, in an interview with the Telegraph, was asked about Poland joining the eurozone. “You shouldn’t rush when there is still smoke coming from a house that was burning…It is simply not safe to do so. As long as the eurozone has problems with some of its own members, don’t expect us to be enthusiastic about joining.”

Belka, also a former Finance Minister and head of the IMF’s Europe Department, said that Greece must have debt relief or there will be no “sustainable growth” and “Greece will periodically fall into problems.”

Belka also expressed Poland’s deep concern about the emerging right-wing forces in Europe: “If we have a political change more into the right, then the enthusiasm to join the euro is going to be even weaker.” Earlier this week, Polish politician Miroslaw Orzechowski said that right-wing forces were “flourishing in contemporary circumstances in Europe…[and that]…Right Sector is especially dangerous.”

Belka indicated that there may be a break-up of the Eurozone along north-south lines due to the debt crisis:

He also warned that Europe would not be able to handle the next crisis: “We have used so much of our war chest to fight the former crisis that it would be difficult to fight another one. We don’t have the option of decreasing interest rates. Much fewer countries have fiscal space to intervene, so we are less prepared.”

Former Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond, now a Scottish National Party (SNP) member of the British Parliament, told the BBC today that “a second independence referendum is inevitable. The question of course is not the inevitability, it is the timing.” Salmond said the timescale of the vote lies “in the hands of” current SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon.

He said there were three issues driving the move for a second referendum, after SNP candidates swept all but one of the seats from Labour in the Parliamentary elections, despite losing the earlier referendum.

“One is the refusal to deliver ‘the vow,'” Salmond said, referring to the pledge made by the three major UK parties before the last referendum, promising to grant more power to Scottish local government.

Second is the Cameron government’s discussion of leaving the EU. If the country were “dragged out on the votes of people in England,” Salmond argued, that would produce a “material change in circumstance.”

“The third thing emerging comes out of the budget and the welfare bill. Instead of getting devo[lution] to the max, we are getting austerity to the max,” Salmond said.

Tony Blair this week denounced the SNP as “cavemen” when asked about their declaring themselves the leading opposition to the government welfare cuts, after the Labour Party abstained on the issue of the cuts — just one of the reasons that the Blairites are getting crushed in polls for the Party elections by Glass-Steagall supporter Jeremy Corbyn.

The British Empire system is continuing to collapse under the weight of the implosion of its financial system.  Now it is time to put together a new system that is free of deductive mathematics.

We have been living in a world of folly, of believing in the dollar, in monetary values, instead of the creative, productive values, Lyndon LaRouche told a gathering in Manhattan on Saturday.  LaRouche told the participants, the future of Mankind depends on rejecting these mathematical approaches and getting back to some principled standards which are human physical standards. Not mathematical standards, human standards.  The increase of the productive powers of labor as represented by the applications of physical principles of development, which can be applied by the practice of human beings.

To do this, the British monarchy and its stooge Obama must be swept away and a new presidency must be brought into existence that will collaborate with Russia, China, and the rest of the BRICS nations.  That process is continuing. As the Empire collapses, more countries and institutions are distancing themselves from the collapsing system.

Typical is the statement of the Governor of the Polish Central Bank, Marek Belka, saying Poland will not join the Euro, as reported in the London Daily Telegraph. Belka said, “You shouldn’t rush in when there is still smoke coming from a house that was burning.  It is simply not safe to do so.  As long as the eurozone has problems with some of its own members, don’t expect us to be enthusiastic about joining.”  Belka also said that the world was running out of ammunition to fight the next financial crisis.  In a discussion yesterday, LaRouche said that the Polish position is a factor of great significance.  The average Pole does not want to be part of a war between Germany and Russia. The would prefer to be a bridge, not a battlefield.

Closer to home, the United Kingdom is coming apart.  In the last week we saw the major British press disclose the home movie of Queen Elizabeth II learning the Nazi salute as a girl, and the Queen’s attack poodle, Tony Blair, geek out at the revolt within the Labour Party against the Queen’s Nazi austerity.  Yesterday, it was reported that the former First Minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond, says that a second referendum on Scottish independence is inevitable.  Earlier this week, Blair called the Scottish National Party a bunch of cavemen for declaring themselves the leading opposition to the government’s welfare cuts.

And in the U.S., the momentum is growing for Glass-Steagall, which has taken center stage in the Presidential campaign.  On Sunday, the U.S. press was filled with commentary about Hillary Clinton’s collapsing campaign due to the trust factor, and some are even pointing to the Obama White House as being behind the leaks of the potential investigation into Hillary’s emails.  But LaRouche emphasized that Glass-Steagall is the issue, and anything that doesn’t focus on that is not to be trusted.

The political means to sweep all this mess aside and bring in a new system based on the common interests of mankind is at hand.  It can only be done on a global basis, and that is what LaRouche is bringing into existence through his Manhattan project.  Forget trying to change the world from a local-yokel perspective.  That won’t work.  Only by elevating the moral qualities of humanity through science and art, as in the Manhattan sessions with LaRouche and the associated choral organization, can the means to actually defeat the British Empire be achieved.

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The discredited Tony Blair’s sudden re-emergence today in a bitter televised attack on the potential next leader of Britain’s Labour Party, may be the next shoe falling in a British Monarchy breakup crisis, after furor arising from exposure of film of the British royals giving Nazi salutes in the 1930s. 

The potential Labour leader is veteran MP Jeremy Corbyn, among other things a supporter of Glass-Steagall legislation and organizer for a debt writedown for Greece. His “shocking” and wide lead in a national poll of Labour Party members showed the drastic split, amidst a Europe-wide financial and economic crisis, between the British population and the British royals. It was, after all, the Queen personally, along with Prime Minister Cameron, who went to Germany at the height of the “negotiations” with Greece, and shifted the German position to an ultra-hard line, of the effective murder of Greece by unpayable debt.

Thus the sudden and furious mobilization of Blair and his former top aides to attack the Labour base publicly as “morons” and try to destroy Corbyn’s candidacy.

Blair has been the British Empire’s conveyor of policy orders to both U.S. Presidents “W” Bush and Obama — especially regarding the policy of regime changes, wars, and war provocations against Russia and China. Now he is desperate to defend the British financial empire’s debt slavery and depopulation policies, against, particularly, the threat of a “global Glass-Steagall policy.”

EIR Founding Editor Lyndon LaRouche, driving that global Glass-Steagall mobilization, said today the British Monarchy appears to be in a probable breakdown crisis. “We’re trying to estimate how close the collapse of that British system is,” LaRouche told a national policy discussion. “It might break down in a matter of weeks. But if it isn’t brought down, the human race might disappear” through population reduction and war policies which radiate from the British Royal Family. “The genocide policy of the British monarchy, to reduce the world population, as they’ve publicly stated, from 7 billion to 1 billion. That’s what’s at stake!” LaRouche said.

“Our best option is for the monarchy to be thrown out by the British themselves.” 

The Glass-Steagall policy has suddenly re-emerged in the United States Congress and the Presidential race because of the potential Wall Street crash. “Hillary’s Glass-Steagall Mistake,” as her husband’s Labor Secretary Robert Reich called her silent opposition to Glass-Steagall, has now seen her drop behind potential Republican candidates in swing-state polls. Other Democratic candidates are publicly demanding Glass-Steagall restoration. 

It’s the way not to wait for the British imperial system’s collapse, but to crush it.

Finian Cunningham, an Irish writer on international affairs whose articles appear in several languages, had a piece Monday on the website of the Strategic Culture Foundation that put the worldwide buzz about the long-ago Nazi salute of Princess Elizabeth and her family in proper perspective: the salute wasn’t a fun family faux pas from long ago, but a direct reflection of the financial oligarchy’s commitment to fascism—then and now.

Cunningham writes:

Cunningham concludes, “Britain’s Queen Elizabeth’s fascist salute as a young princess is not just a sign of historical times in the distant past. It is a sign of the present times where fascism is the ideology lurking behind the facade of Western democracy.”

“The British Monarchy’s system is in serious trouble, and I think they are going to lose it, too,” Lyndon LaRouche stated today. “Just wait two weeks or so,” he advised, and what is now underway will become evident. The Monarchy’s unabashed commitment to Nazi depopulation policies, their open promotion of wiping out six-sevenths of the human race, and the attendant policy of provoking global thermonuclear war, is too much for many people, who are now mustering and making their views felt.

“History is shaped by interruptions,” LaRouche told colleagues earlier this week, not by some sort of pre-programmed “sequence” of mathematically unfolding events. We saw this in the case of Hillary Clinton’s political self-destruct last week, in her response to a question posed by an LaRouche PAC organizer about Glass-Steagall. And we are seeing it in the firestorm unleashed by the publication of an 82-year-old video and photographs of the future Queen Elizabeth II giving a precocious Nazi salute.

An article published today by the widely-ready Irish-born columnist Finian Cunningham, nails the Nazi nature of the British Monarchy—then and today. It is not a matter of an old photograph, Cunningham asserts, but

as indications of that policy.

“He’s right,” LaRouche commented. Greece has all along been a British operation. “The British Monarchy has always had this radical depopulation approach, and Greece is an extension of that.”

However, that system, that policy, is now rapidly approaching a point of interruption. Not only is the entire trans-Atlantic system hopelessly bankrupt, and could come crashing down at any time in any number of different crisis points; but an entirely new international system is being steadily put in place to replace it. Today, July 21, the BRICS New Development Bank was officially opened in Shanghai, China, with that country’s Finance Minister Lou Jiwei announcing its mission: “NDB’s support for infrastructure construction will effectively ease the bottleneck that has constrained emerging and developing nations for long, and will offer support for their economies’ upgrade and growth.”

That result is the British Empire’s worst nightmare—along with an accompanying return to Glass-Steagall policies in the United States and Europe.

In the wake of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun tabloid publication of home movies of a 7 or 8 year old Princess Elizabeth giving a Nazi salute, the entire history of the British Monarchy’s love affair with Hitler and the Nazis has gone viral globally. Hundreds of newspaper articles have appeared in Britain, the United States (Daily Beast), Israel (Times of Israel) and as far away as Japan (Japan News), all picking up on strands of the high-level collusion between the British Crown and the Nazis throughout the 1930s, right up to the launching of the 1940 Battle of Britain bombing campaign.

While the Duke of Windsor (King Edward VIII), the uncle of Queen Elizabeth II, is one central player in the British Royals-Nazi alliance, a second central figure is Prince Philip, whose three sisters were all married to top Nazi Party and SS officials.  On July 30, British TV Channel 4 will air a documentary, “The Plot to Make a King,” documenting Philip’s own deep Nazi ties, and the campaign by Philip and his uncle, Lord Mountbatten, to arrange a marriage between Philip and Elizabeth, from the time Elizabeth was 13 years old.  According to news accounts in all of the British tabloids on July 20, the documentary will, for the first time, reveal excerpts from Philip’s older sister Sophie’s diaries, revealing her deep affection and personal ties to Hitler.

The headlines of the world’s media were full of damning and fully-documented evidence of the deep alliance throughout the 1930s between Hitler and the British Royals, much of it engineered by German aristocrats who were blood relatives of both Philip and the Windsors themselves.  Headlines in The Mirror, which was at the center of the exposés of the Royals’ role in the assassination of Princess Diana, read “Adolf Hitler ‘Tried To Arrange a Marriage’ between Germany and the British Royal Family.”  As far away as Tokyo, the Japan News (formerly the Japan Times) ran banner headlines, “‘Heil Hitler’ Salute Photo Shines Light on British Royals, Nazis.”

The Times of Israel published an extensive interview with German-British historian Karina Urbach of the University of London, under the headline “British Archives Hiding Royal Family’s Links to Anti-Semitism in 1930s, Says Historian.” Urbach is the author of a new book, Go-Betweens for Hitler, detailing the role of the Coburg family in mediating ties between Hitler and the British Royals.  The scandals go far beyond the known profile of Edward VIII.  Carl Edward, Duke of Coburg, was a Hitler intimate from 1922, and was a grandson of Queen Victoria. He remained loyal to Hitler, and was a bridge to the British Royals for decades, using his family ties to promote the Anglo-Nazi alliance—that was already an essential part of British geopolitical strategy in the interwar period.

Urbach is leading a campaign to force the Windsors to publicly release the Royal Archives, which still contain extensive evidence of the British courtship with Hitler, despite the fact that, at the end of World War II, as reported in the Daily Beast of July 19, under the headline “Britain’s Royal Nazi Cover-Up,” Churchill sent a high-level team of British intelligence officers called “The Weeders” to Germany to seize archive material of correspondence between the British Royals and the Nazis and destroy them.  Clive Irving, author of the Daily Beast story, reported that “The weeders did a fine job.  Of any damning new evidence of treachery there was no trace.  I discovered that the Weeder-in-Chief had been none other than Anthony Blunt, whom we now know had, since the outbreak of the war (and long afterward) been a Communist mole at the highest levels of British intelligence.” 

In his regular weekly dialogue with members of his Policy Committee on Monday, Lyndon LaRouche pointed to the events of July 13, when a single question, posed to Hillary Clinton, altered the course of American politics.  Hillary Clinton’s failure to answer a simple question about whether or not she supported the reinstating of Glass-Steagall, created a political firestorm, which has not yet subsided, and has further put the Glass Steagall issue in the center of the 2016 presidential campaign.

LaRouche told colleagues in the publicly aired discussion that “one minute” altered the course of the U.S. presidential race.  “History is shaped by interruptions,” LaRouche explained, like the insertion of the Glass-Steagall issue into Hillary Clinton’s New School appearance.  LaRouche went on to explain that “a sane society requires such creative interruptions.”

Another relevant instance of such “creative interruptions” is the scandal that erupted on Saturday, July 18, with the publication of a simple video of a 7-year old Princess Elizabeth, now Queen Elizabeth II, doing a Heil Hitler salute, under the watchful eyes of her uncle, (the man who would become King Edward VIII and later the Duke of Windsor), her mother, and her father, the later King George VI.  The home movie footage, lasting all of 17 seconds, has triggered an international firestorm of coverage of the British Royals’ love affair with Adolf Hitler, throughout the 1930s.  On July 30, British TV Channel 4 will air a documentary of Royal Consort Prince Philip’s own deep Nazi ties (his three sisters all married top Nazi Party officials and SS officers).

Prince Philip has never abandoned the Nazi policies of mass population genocide, and to this day, he promotes the idea that the human population should be reduced from seven billion people down to one billion.  Suddenly, the very future of the British Monarchy is in doubt, at the precise moment that they are promoting a showdown confrontation between the United States and Russia, using their control over President Barack Obama as their key tool in promoting a war that could rapidly lead to a thermonuclear war of extinction.

Ukraine is the spark for provoking just such a war, and it is no coincidence that Ukraine is dominated by outright Nazis, offspring of the Banderist pro-Hitler forces who slaughtered Ukrainian, Russian and Polish citizens for the Third Reich during the Eastern Front campaign of the Second World War.  Not only does the Kiev government refuse to abide by the Minsk II accords; Right Sector killers are now manning border crossings in western Ukraine to Transdniestria, blocking the flow of supplies to Russian peace-keepers there.

A Nazi trigger for war with Russia is in place, so long as the British Monarchy remains in power and President Barack Obama remains in office in Washington.

The eruption of scandals that can bring down the House of Windsor and their Barack Obama is occurring at this moment because the survival of the human race is on the table, and not everyone is so insane as to march, like lemmings, into that fire.

As LaRouche emphasized to his colleagues, this is how history is actually determined.  Human willful intervention can alter events on a moment’s notice.

Glass-Steagall in the United States is another option for bringing down London, the British Crown, Wall Street and Obama.

The process of pulling out began after both the Lugansk People’s Republic and the Donetsk People’s Republic announced on Saturday that it was their intention to withdraw.

“Following the order from head of the Lugansk People’s Republic Igor Plotnitsky, we begin today a unilateral withdrawal from the line of engagement of the weapons under 100mm calibre to the distance of at least three kilometres,” from the line of contact, Kozlov said, adding that the withdrawal was being organized in the presence of the OSCE mission representatives.

Kozlov also said, “While demonstrating the adherence to the Minsk agreements, we are making this step openly and unilaterally hoping the Ukrainian side follows suit.”

On Saturday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had separate phone conversations with both German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin about the line of contact.  According to a statement from the Russian Foreign Ministry, Lavrov emphasized in the conversation with Steinmeier, “the necessity of a speedy withdrawal of Ukrainian military units from the village of Shirokino where Donbass independence militia units have already been withdrawn,” reported Sputnik news.

In a February ceasefire agreement, both the Ukrainian military and the Donbass independence forces agreed to pull out weapons with a caliber of more than 100mm, but by late Sunday, Kiev was not honoring the moves by the LPR and DPR regarding weapons of lower caliber, reported Sputnik news.

“Documents, orders that would oblige us to withdraw weapons and vehicles to certain distances—weapons with a caliber of less than 100mm—we have not got them,” said Vladislav Seleznev, a spokesman for the General Staff of Ukraine, quoted in the Ukrainska Pravda newspaper, Sputnik reported.

The new capabilities of the modernized B61-12 nuclear bomb have been getting a lot of press lately, particularly since the first drop test of the bomb (without nuclear explosive package) on July 1. Revealnews.org, a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting, posted a long investigative report which makes the case that the new capabilities that are being integrated into the B61-12 actually risk lowering the nuclear threshold.

The first part of the report argues that the genesis of the B61-12 project was a deal that President Obama made with Senate Republicans to get Senate ratification of the New START treaty. It also describes a cozy relationship between the weapons labs, the contractors that manage them, and Congress, especially the Congressional delegation from New Mexico, where the Sandia and Los Alamos labs are located. In combination, all of this means hundreds of billions of dollars going to the labs to build weapons that Obama said, in his 2009 Prague speech, he wanted to rid the world of. In 2010, Obama agreed to commit $85 billion in nuclear weapons modernization over a decade in order to get Republican support for New START, but that price tag has since gone up to an estimated $348 billion over ten years. The B61-12 program accounts for $10.4 billion of that, and is the largest project currently underway at Sandia, accounting for a third of its budget, this year.

The report concludes with the military dimensions of the new weapon, including points that people like MIT professor Theodore Postol and the Federation of American Scientists’ Hans Kristensen have been making about it, that because of its design, it will have the effect of lowering the nuclear threshold:

The Obama Administration and the Defense and Energy Departments claim that the B61-12 is not a new weapon, only an upgraded version of an old weapon and therefore, it doesn’t violate any commitments about nuclear weapons that the U.S. has made over the past couple of decades. “The tail kit provides the ability to get more accuracy,” says Sandia engineer Phil Hoover, who is charged with integrating the tail kit and other new components into the bomb. “We’re reducing the potential for collateral damage.” This kind of guided system, he continued, is “consistent with our digital aircraft today.”

The “digital aircraft” that Hoover is referring to is the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which will replace older aircraft not only in the U.S. Air Force, but also in the air forces of Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Turkey—NATO countries that are part of NATO’s nuclear mission.

“If the Russians put out a guided nuclear bomb on a stealthy fighter that could sneak through air defenses, would that add to the perception here that they were lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons?” asked Kristensen. “Absolutely.”

The threat of a thermonuclear war of extinction, provoked by the British Royals via their agents, including U.S. President Barack Obama, has reached a critical mass.  The Obama Administration is rushing ahead with the development of a new generation of tactical nuclear weapons, to be stationed throughout Europe, targeted on Russia.  The B61-12 is, in reality, an intermediate range missile, with greatly improved accuracy, permitting the use of much smaller scale nuclear warheads, thus lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear arms in combat.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is well aware of this accelerating drive towards war.  On Saturday, he issued a presidential order, establishing a new reserve military force, to address some of the threats coming from NATO and the United States, particularly centered in Ukraine.  While Putin has put pressure on the Russian minorities in eastern Ukraine to fully comply with the Minsk II accords and more, the government in Kiev remains in the grip of the outright Banderist neo-Nazis.

As Lyndon LaRouche warned in a pointed statement last week, the British are using the neo-Nazi networks in Ukraine to stage the kind of provocation that can trigger a general war between the United States and Russia, a war that will be started by the American side under British asset Obama.

In discussions with colleagues on Sunday, LaRouche noted that the provocations around the deployments of the B61-12 will not in the least diminish Russia’s ability to launch a devastating second strike retaliation, and only heightens the danger of imminent war.  With the neo-Nazi Right Sector networks on a rampage in Ukraine, LaRouche observed, Germany and other European countries are going to be terrified by the growing war danger. They will be impelled to act to shut down the neo-Nazi operations in Ukraine now for their own survival.

If Putin makes clear public statements about the neo-Nazi character of the Ukraine regime, this will add to the pressure on Germany.  This miscalculation by the British can lead to the urgently needed strategic shift.  Germany cannot be associated with the likes of the Ukrainian Right Sector, who are outright Nazis.  A Nazi organization is running Ukraine, and that apparatus is being backed by the U.S. President and the British Royals.

If there were ever a moment to bring down the House of Windsor and its entire apparatus, that time is now.

The big question now on the table, is, who will implement the bailout deal just worked out…  or not worked out? The issue is not which Greeks will implement it, but who among the creditors? On the Greek side, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras lost his coalition’s majority in Parliament on the issue, which could mean a cabinet reshuffling or early elections as soon as September or October.

The Greek Parliament passed the bill titled “Emergency Regulations for the Negotiation and Conclusion of Agreement with the European Stability Mechanism (ESM).”  A majority of 229 of a total of 299 deputies voted yes, with the main opposition New Democracy, To Potami, and Pasok voting in support of the government.  Sixty-four deputies voted against it, 32 of whom were Syriza members, and the rest from the fascist Golden Dawn and the Communist Party of Greece (KKE).  Another six MPs from Syriza abstained.

Voting no were former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, Energy Minister Panagiotis Lafazanis, Deputy Labor Minister Dimitris Stratoulis, and the President of Parliament Zoe Konstantopoulou.

Responding to rumors that he was among several ministers who could be reshuffled out of the government, Lafazanis said he remained loyal to the government, but was ready to offer his resignation if asked.  “We support Syriza in government and we support the Prime Minister.  We don’t support the bailout,” he said after the vote.

Speaking in Parliament, Konstantopoulou said Parliament should not approve the bill or give in to the blackmail.  She referred to the IMF report on the unsustainability of the public debt and underscored that the Greek Parliament should take advantage of it.  She said:

In a radio interview, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras tried to justify the agreement, and took full personal responsibility, going so far as to say: 

  He said he was subjected to real blackmail which aimed at the government’s collapse, and said the only choice he had was between disorderly bankruptcy and the acceptance of the “Schäuble plan” for Grexit.

He said German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble had first suggested a Grexit “in March or April,” but explained that Greece did not have the necessary foreign exchange reserves to support a return to the drachma, and as such, would be facing a disorderly bankruptcy.  In his meetings in China and Russia he did not receive support to pursue such an option.

Even ahead of a reshuffle of the cabinet, resignations have already taken place.  Deputy Finance Minister Nadia Valavani, who was in charge of taxation and privatization, resigned on July 15 over opposition to the agreement.   The General Secretary of Social Insurance also resigned, telling ANT 1 television:  “I will not stick around to implement things that I do not believe in … I will not remain in my post just to collect EU4,750 each month.”