Siim Kallas confirmed that the EU would apply "maximum pressure" to force airlines to comply with European legislation and offer refunds to passengers, but said individual countries could provide aid to companies in the form of market-rate loans and guarantees.
He said the EU aimed to fast-track proposals by the end of the year for an integrated European airspace, with a "single sky" to replace the current system of each country monitoring its own airspace.
"The volcanic ash crisis that paralysed European air transport for nearly a week made it crystal clear that the single European sky is a critical missing link in Europe's infrastructure," Iata director general Giovanni Bisignani said this week.
Kallas said the EU was also aiming to introduce Europe-wide planning to provide other forms of transport should one mode become so stricken again.
John Taylor Gatto is a remarkable man. Voted teacher of the year in New York, he stood up and gave one of the most incendiary speeches I have ever seen transcripted.
The following are exerpts from the text of a speech by him accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990 (emphases mine).
Although teachers do care and do work very hard the institution is psychopathic, it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to different cell
Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnard Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and some other men to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce through the application of formulae, formulaic human beings whose behaviour can be predicted and controlled.
To a very great extent schools succeed in doing this, but in a national order increasingly disintegrated, in a national order in which only humanly successful people are independent, self-reliant, confident, and individualistic (because community life which protects the dependent and weak is dead and only networks remain), the products of schooling are, as I’ve said, irrelevant. Well-schooled people are irrelevant. They can sell film and razor blades, push paper and talk on the telephones, or sit mindlessly before a flickering computer terminal but as human beings they are useless. Useless to others and useless to themselves.
It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home demanding that you do its “homework”.
“How will they learn to read?!” you say and my answer is “Remember the lessons of Massachusetts.” When children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cellblocks they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease if those things make sense in the kind of life that unfolds around them.
I want to tell you what the effect is on children of taking all their time from them — time they need to grow up — and forcing them to spend it on abstractions. You need to hear this because no reform that doesn’t attack these specific pathologies will be anything more than a facade.
The children I teach are indifferent to the adult world. This defies the experience of thousands of years. A close study of what big people were up to was always the most exciting occupation of youth, but nobody wants to grow up these days and who can blame them? Toys are us.
The children I teach have almost no curiosity and what they do have is transitory; they cannot concentrate for very long, even on things they choose to do. Can you see a connection between the bells ringing again and again to change classes and this phenomenon of evanescent attention?
The children I teach have a poor sense of the future, of how tomorrow is inextricably linked to today. As I said before, they have a continuous present, the exact moment they are at is the boundary of their consciousness.
The children I teach are ahistorical, they have no sense of how past has predestined their own present, limiting their choices, shaping their values and lives.
The children I teach are cruel to each other, they lack compassion for misfortune, they laugh at weakness, they have contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly.
The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candour. My guess is that they are like many adopted people I’ve known in this respect — they cannot deal with genuine intimacy because of a lifelong habit of preserving a secret inner self inside a larger outer personality made up of artificial bits and pieces of behaviour borrowed from television or acquired to manipulate teachers. Because they are not who they represent themselves to be the disguise wears thin in the presence of intimacy so intimate relationships have to be avoided.
The children I teach are materialistic, following the lead of school teachers who materialistically “grade” everything — and television mentors who offer everything in the world for free.
The children I teach are dependent, passive, and timid in the presence of new challenges. This is frequently masked by surface bravado, or by anger or aggressiveness but underneath is a vacuum without fortitude.
FAMILY is the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents — and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850 — we’re going to continue to have the horror show we have right now. THE CURRICULUM OF FAMILY is at the heart of any good life, we’ve gotten away from that curriculum, time to return to it.
Fairly brings tears to my eyes to hear such things. Bravo. Here's the great man elaborating further:
Marc Faber seems to make a rather common mistake: that of making a distinction between the free market and government, without recognising that the "third way" is the way the world works now - that is to say, the merger of state and corporate powers, aka fascism.
He even says this:
I think Goldman Sachs is a very honest firm. They have a very strict compliance department compared to the others — they're like an angel. But they targeted Goldman as it stands as a symbol of Wall Street.
Maybe the intention is not to hurt Goldman Sachs, but just to gain popularity with the middle class and the lower class of America, so they will perceive Mr. Obama to have done something against the evil of Wall Street.
What. The. Fuck. Like an angel? I had to play that bit twice to see if any irony was being projected, but no.
Let's have a look at some key players here.
Henry Paulson - 74th United States Treasury Secretary. Previously served as the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Goldman Sachs.
Lloyd Blankfein - current Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Goldman Sachs. After the nomination of Hank Paulson as Secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush, Blankfein was announced as his replacement.
Greg Craig - former White House Counsel under President Barack Obama. He has represented Goldman Sachs.
Gary Gensler is the chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission under President Barack Obama. Spent 18 years at Goldman Sachs, becoming the company’s co-head of finance.
The list goes on, but you get the picture. It's other banks too, they're all complicit, but calling Goldman Sachs an angel because it complies with regulations (???) is an enormous misunderstanding of the situation. The government is in bed with the bankers, and scared of the CIA-military complex, and acts accordingly. It's like a symbiotic organism of bully-boys, back-scratchers and back-slappers - an old boys club. Like Celente says, Harvard Princeton Yale, bullets, bombs, banks.
They're like an international gang of financial terrorists, as Max Keiser has often said. They hid billions of debt for Greece when they joined the EU, and you can bet the farm they are short Greek bonds right now, all the way, leveraged up to the hilt. They are going to make a lot of money when Greece defaults, like they did with Iceland. Actually, they will be doing Greece a favour, like Soros did when he knocked us out of the ERM. But when the debt is all re-financed, it will be the Greek people who suffer most in the short term, because that's essentially their money that Goldman Sachs just sucked out of the system. The fact that it's measured in euros is good for GS because it will keep its value - if it were drachmas, the currency would inflate and the play would be less lucrative, which is the only reason Britain is safe from this kind of predatory action, unlike the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain).
You hear the defence, often from people in the industry, that they're smart, they're good at their jobs, they work hard, they're a money making machine, that's what they do, and you must be jealous to attack them, or ignorant - implying that they're doing "God's work" to use Blankfein's phrase, some mysterious mission that we're not able to comprehend.
There's no mystery. These guys simply don't know how to make money. They're not entrepreneurs. They don't create wealth. What are investment banks? They're casinos that gamble. With other people's money. They certainly don't respect their clients, they don't genuinely go out looking for worthy ventures to invest in. They invent derivatives instead. They front-run, they short the things they're telling their clients to buy - all this is well-documented.
So no, they're not smart, they're autistic. They're not a money-making machine, they're a money-sucking parasite. They contribute nothing to society but bribes and corruption. They would not exist were it not for their buddies at the Fed and in government, and in their alliance with the military elements.
Indeed, bad as GS are, the major problem is central banks, particularly Fed policy, and indeed the existence of the Fed. Everything else, all the corruption, is just a symptom of that. You give a select few unelected people complete control of the money supply, and what do you expect? It will only all come to a head when everyone realises that dollars are just that - pieces of paper, backed by a government's promise which, as we all know equals... zero. It never ceases to amaze me just how long these fiat currencies have managed to last. I guess it's a mass hypnosis, a big waking dream, or nightmare, that we're all a part of and are on the verge of waking up from.
The trigger could be anything. Drop in the dollar. Chinese revaluation. Commercial property bubble burst. It doesn't matter - the system is so out of balance now, the pinprick to the bubble could come from anywhere, at any time. And the longer this eerie calm exists, the bigger will be the pop.
Max Keiser predicts that the financial terrorists will go after Hollywood next.
I like what he says about Coca-Cola - let's boycott it, until its stock hits zero. There is no more potent a symbol of everything that is wrong with corporatism. The triumph of marketing, psychological manipulation and imperialist muscle over local markets and culture, common sense, and health.
Maybe a Facebook campaign is in the offing?
He also points out that that the French Revolution started just following an Icelandic volcano eruption which affected Europe.
Let's sacrifice some bankers to the gods of the volcano. Lloyd Blankfein, Dick Fuld, Jamie Diamond, Hank Paulson, Timmy Geithner, get in. Gordon Brown and Merv King, you too.
His books may not be Great American Novels, but his analysis here is spot-on and his recommendation to buy silver compelling. His face when asked if Obama is running the country like a Rich Dad is priceless:
Perhaps the single most damaging thing schools teach is that it's bad and wrong to fail.
But when we learn to walk, we fail over and over before we get it right.
Indeed, without failure we as humans simply cannot truly learn anything.
What we can do is parrot things back - in fact we can get 100% that way in school tests.
In life there's no such thing as 100%, there's only the hustle. If scared of failure, we become paralysed, unable to function with the creativity and originality which is our own peculiar character make up. We keep doing the same things, the safe things, over and over. We specialise. We practice routine. Our minds relax, our hearts stiffen. We practice frivolity without gaiety, and earnestness without seriousness. We forget how the game should be played.