Press Release 15/01/2010

John F Higgins. Age:   58                         The Lisbon Treaty(TLT)  

Tourlestrane. Co Sligo.   “Confronting real issues with vision”

Personal Paid Press Advertisement for  the holding of an enquiry into Banking May 2007; sixteen months before our government are forced to issue the infamous Bank Guarantee 30th September 2008.

                                                           Are Hedge Funds, Stock Markets secure investments?

                                                           Internal Trade in Ireland is rapidly dying   -  SOLUTION

                       No need to worry about the National Debt etc. Don't worry, Be Happy!

Married, 4 grown-up children

St Nathy’s College, Ballaghaderreen

B.Comm., FCCA, MIB, Trustee Diploma                     TLT Flyer          

Ex Banker and Public Auditor.

Now an Accountant in Practice.

Originally from Kiltimagh, Co Mayo.
Spent 37 years in Dublin

"Ireland is the only democracy in the Western World that demographically has the young men to go to war" From Editorial Mayo Association Yearbook 2002. Editor -  John F Higgins.

“Our Governments have been economically successful, but now need a little change of emphasis!  Our mineral deposits should be exploited instead of our current generation of young people i.e. at present all our young women are encouraged to take up full time jobs at the cost of having children.  This continued out of date and worn out policy in the Materialistic Western World is now causing Stock Markets to crash and is threatening the future pensions of the very young people who have been exploited.  Modern Western Governments are trying to wriggle out of providing State Pensions and are giving 100% tax allowances for private pension contributions.  Do they not know that the strength of a national currency depends on the productivity of its future workers?” Quote taken from “The Irish and UK citizen gets the worst deal in the world from the exploitation of the hydrocarbon resources around their coastline” penned by me, and published in the Mayo Association Yearbook 2003. This article was widely read by people who were deeply hurt by the handover of our hydrocarbon resources.

The attacks on our young children and parents are continuing apace. Recent budgets doubled the cost of school transport, withdrew subsidies from School Books etc. Many other Educational Fees are to be introduced. Medical fees are increasing all the time; outpatients etc. Parents are lumbered with massive mortgage repayments; Negative Equity turn them into “bonded labourers”. The McCarthy report and the Commission for Taxation recommend the abolition of capital allowances for childcare facilities, the income tax exemption for childcare service providers: with tentative caveats mentioned. It also recommends subjecting child benefit to income tax. The attention given to families problems with the rearing of children is abysmal. Is it any wonder that law and order is breaking down? All this indicates that we have not a clue of the problems that the EU is facing. They are suffering from a horrendous fall in the birthrate. Our society is cutting its own throat by concentrating on policy to facilitate an “Aging Society”. This is a trap that the EU is in; what are they doing about it? The Lisbon Treaty (TLT) revisions mention “market” 63 times, “competition” 25 times, “defense” 50 times. “Birthrate” Nil times.  Capitalism requires growth,  the EU is an elderly society and  will be shrinking rapidly. EU pension and hedge funds have lost tens of billions in USA sub-prime; they are also sitting on huge amounts of other toxic assets, the true nature of which has to be revealed to the public. Those people paying into pension funds, not yet drawing a pension will be massively short changed; it is just another ponzi scheme.  TLT will  only result in a continuance of more asset bubbles and rip-offs.

My reflections on Capitalism's fixation on Growth is  receiving attention  from one of the countries whose people rejected  The Lisbon Treaty or at least its  near clone The European Constitution.  Whatever one thinks about Sarkozy, at least he himself appears to be glued into his people's concerns. I quote you the following from the New York Times 22nd Sept 2009  "In a provocative new study, a pair of Nobel price-winning economists, Jpseph E. Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, urge the adoption of new assessment tools that incorporate a broader concern for human welfare than just economic growth. By their reckoning, much of the contemporary economic disaster owes to the misbegotten assumption that policy makers simply had to focus on nurturing growth, trusting that this would maximize prosperity for all. President Nocolas Sarkozy of France, whose dissatisfaction with the available tools of economic assessment prompted him to create the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. The official French statistics agency is already working to adopt the report’s recommendations. Mr. Sarkozy plans to bring it with him to the G-20 summit meeting in Pittsburgh this week, where the leaders of major countries will discuss a range of policy issues.” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/business/economy/23gdp.html?_r=1 

The thinking behind The Lisbon Treaty has beiing taken over by overriding events e.g. the massive Debt throughout the EU. The Dutch rejected it, the French rejected it, the Irish rejected it. Too much time has gone by. It is now irrelevant. Yet the Irish politicians, whose economy is in dire straights as a result of similar outmoded understanding of capitalistic growth, are still promoting it.

I exhorted our politicians etc back in 2001 to use money as a means to achieve an end, not an end in itself. If they picked up on my theme; we, through our MEPs, could have saved Europe from the present emergency that is taking up everybody’s time i.e. the rescue of our banking system i.e. money! Then this is a Christian theme, which the European Parliament appears to not want to have anything to do with e.g. see what happened Buttiglioni and his Roman Catholic values. We could have avoided all the hardship etc. There is a wealth of two millennia of knowledge built up with the development of Christian thought through-out Europe, unique to any other place on Earth. The mind boggles to think of the narrow confines of learning that our modern  EU parliamentarians appear to have restricted themselves to; and because they are our leaders: we all suffer!

A society where “anything goes” is failing us!

We had a society with a robust economy; yet with people who would be regarded as well off, who were prepared to accept brown paper envelopes for unfair rewarding of contracts, land rezoning, planning permission etc. The tribunals have shown that quite a level of corruption existed. The balance of our society is lacking timeless and priceless values. Liberals mean well but have not the heart to stop a progressive rot in our society. What is the level of corruption going to be when people in positions of trust are up to their necks in Negative Equity? Can anybody whose family is threatened with penury or eviction be capable of making fair decisions; certainly there will be times that they maybe taken advantage of by unscrupulous buccaneers. The security of the State will be threatened. Ireland and EU could be well on the way to having a society that will leave the likes of the former East Germany and its Big Brother State in the penny halfpenny place. Already professional people are obliged by law to report suspicious behaviour to the authorities; this rattles an individual who was never obliged to report anything but his own sins in confession.  The Debt situation must be resolved: personal as well as banking and government debt; this can only be done by a complete change of tact on behalf of the EU.

We have got to enter a period of consolidation and drop the notion of economic growth at all cost, which sadly The Lisbon Treaty emphasises quite a lot. Our young people have got to be rescued from the noose of Negative Equity,  and exposure to too much government debt. "No generation has a right to contract debts greater than can be paid off during the course of its own existence."- George Washington to James Madison 1789. Will Durant (US historian and philosopher) wrote "... civilisation is not something inborn or imperishable; it must be acquired anew by every generation. Man differs from the beast only by education, which may be defined as the technique of transmitting civilisation…Through church, or family, or school, or otherwise. There must be a unifying code.”

NAMA

Ironically, the repercussions of Asset Covered Security legislation previously passed by the EU and Leinster House, originally allowing the granting of 100% loans etc., will result in mortgage lenders only giving a token commitment to NAMA. Its success also depends on the continued exploitation of our young adults to purchase property in out of the way places etc. Most of the NAMA property was built mainly because of the enormous profit potential, and not to meet the needs of young people. The property tide prices are running out towards the traditional mean and will overshoot; no amount of wishful thinking or waving of the hand on behalf of our Minister for Finance will reverse this. The good ship NAMA is holed beneath the waterline before it even leaves port!  Read my  piece on The Lisbon Treaty:  we have got to adopt traditional Christian Values from the Vatican or whatever, otherwise we will only keep boring around in circles and going further down the hole that we are in. Our Taoiseacht keeps telling us that he does things on receipt of the best current advice. I am so far removed from the thinking of these advisers that I feel threatened and will shortly be carried off to the Looney Bin! We have got to stop digging!

It has not being my wish to be plastered like this on a website. A kind of duty to the nation's future has taken me over during the last ten years. I have been accused of been all over the place with my writing. "One liner politics" has brought this country to the embarrassing situation that it finds itself in. Early on in my Banking Studies (Quit in 1989), I learned from Rapid Results College that a Trustee of a Pension Fund etc was only allowed to invest in designated funds approved by the government. I often wondered what the upheavals were that dictated these terms. Then I covered the Wall Street Crash etc.  When would the human character revert to similar greediness? I think that greediness was kept in check because of society’s link to religious practice, with constant weekly revision on practical doctrine. Then, as society rebelled against this teaching, it relaxed its monitoring and rules for the whole banking and investment scene.