JOHN F HIGGINS,
FORMER INDEPENDENT EURO ELECTION CANDIDATE 2009, NORTH WEST
AND GENERAL ELECTION CANDIDATE 2007 SLIGO-NORTH LEITRIM
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.
I am am a contributer to Politics.ie Forum under the
name WTTR.
I joined to comment on an analysis of my
appearance on the Vinvent Browne Show TV3 during the Euro elections.
No
need to worry about the National Debt etc. Don't worry, Be Happy!
A
little working knowledge of Christian Teaching - not a bad economic
tool!
Extracts
from Western People newspaper article April 2, 2003.
Vital
that educated people who see wrong, speak out to protect the unwary!
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

Ph: 071
9181865
Ireland's problem is an EU one
Mb: 087 2779885
See brief Q & A session on
Candidatewatch.ie
“Do the
government not realise the
gravity
of the international
situation now
facing us? We will be caught in the
dangerous eddy as the great
Western
Economies go into rapid decline, caused by the
hidden
power of demographics and
not any highly visible terrorist deed.
The
hole that Leinster House is digging is getting deeper and the further
down they go, the
less opportunity for movement. A former leader had much firmer
foundations to
stand on, when he resisted international pressure. Leinster House now,
more
than ever for the sake of
our
future, our young workforce, badly needs a stabilising influence.” From
Editorial Mayo Association Yearbook 2002. Editor – John F Higgins.
"When the leaders
choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their
talent, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They
will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the
guides of the people"
Edmund Burke 1729 - 1797
"The Maastricht agreement, along
with the pending single currency, will copperfasten the shrewd pension
investment in our economy by our European neighbours. The EC is rapidly
becoming a joint retirement home. The elderly will represent nearly 33
per cent of the population between the ages of 15-64 by the year 2020"
from letter of mine published inThe Irish Times 19th April 1997.
"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 felt that taxation advantages of
taking out pensions was not enough to offset the lack of understanding
that Fund Managers had of the Global political and demographic scene.
SO I CEASED FROM OFFERING INVESTMENT ADVICE TO MY CLIENTS"
from letter to the ACCA on 21st December 2003, explaining why I did not
register as an Investment Adviser; even though I was probably the most
qualified accountant in practice to do so. If asked, I told clients to
keep it in cash, or in a bank deposit; and to concentrate on what they
were good at i.e. their own work. I always told clients the story of
what McDonalds did before they opened a shop in high rent Grafton
Street: they for two weeks counted the footfall passing the door of the
premises they wish to rent. Then I quoted Birthrate
figures in our near Capitalist countries ; it usually did the trick!
What is an Irish
Citizen to do, in order to get going a debate on the real issues of the
day? I ran as an independent candidate in the
Euro Election. During Radio Shows, I raised the
topic of the European Commission’s Capital
Requirements
Directive (CRD) and the
resulting
harm done to Irish society. Our MEPs present just bowed their
heads, made sure that they
did not
engage. Then they reverted
to type,
arguing with Mr Ganley re: election funding, MEPs expenses etc. The
chasm
between the ordinary guy
and the elite in the
EU is too wide for any future good things to come out of the
EU. I enclose a page from my
Election website where I tried to
highlight the injustices
done to the
youth of Ireland
as a result of our MEPs lobbying to make changes to this Directive.
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.
Man
did not need God
any
longer; the
individual was fully programmed
to do right. Compulsory Professional Development (35 hours) was to take
over the role of teaching
self discipline. There is an awful lot of wasted time if one does CPD
and goes to weekly Mass!
Religion was now separated from business as well as the State. People
actually drew a demarcation line between personal morality and
business. I
read about the
Rothschilds (English and
French), the
Morgans (USA), House of Medici (Italian),
all great historic international
bankers.
What they
had in common was that they
operated with the
sure back-up of military armies if they ever needed them!
The young men of small countries in Debt will be conscripted to fight
someone else's battles. How many unemployed young men have we got since
we last voted down The Lisbon Treaty; does anyone read the
undercurrents? We are well and truly being snared by international
events. All politics is local; who is looking after Ireland's place in
the bigger picture? I watched with awe as I saw the
Irish setting up the
the
IFSC banks, certainly a new departure; its related Debt has caused our
External
Debt to rise to $2.4trillion, (yes
twelve zeros). No other
off-shore financial centre has such debts; neither has London,
Frankford or New York in proportion to their pop. Ruthlessness was the
name of the game.
I sensed that our politicians did not have the wherewithal to keep a
lid
on this. I
really got worried when house prices doubled between 1996 and 2000.
This was
getting too close to the
bone of Irish Citizens. I
had four young children growing towards this expanding financial web of
intrique; where money and profit came before need for an adequate
lifestyle, for young people raising a family. For a
summary on
what followed: Read my thoughts on The
Lisbon Treaty. click!
Registered to campaign on The Lisbon
Treaty with the Standards in Public Office Commission.090909