Greece: Tom Winnifrith: I am not a marxist, and my Euro Loon critic has no heart

Comments

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   Adge

   8 July 2015, 02:28

   Seen it all before in this country. Heath & Barber (Carr?) moved to a floating exchange rate. Economy boomed. Lawson (Could have been lovely Labour Chancellors) moved back to something called the snake which was a precursor to the Euro – economy strangled. GBP crashed after trying to live within the snake. Been booming ever since. Economics is easy!

   As an aside. R Bootle? (Capital Economics?) seems to think neutral if we were to leave EEC. Apparently we went in since their growth rate was higher. Now our growth rate is higher than theirs. Does this country really have to look after every poor person in the whole world? ( Benefits Britain C5). No wonder the wicked Tories keep being elected.

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   David Talbot

   8 July 2015, 07:10

   Two interesting articles on sovereign debt relief and German hypocrisy:

   http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/08/business/economy/germanys-debt-history-echoed-in-greece.html?_r=0

   http://qz.com/445373/thomas-pikettys-wise-words-on-german-hypocrisy-and-how-to-solve-the-greek-debt-crisis/

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   Mark

   8 July 2015, 15:27

   Every single mainstream media has the following narrative for the economic crisis in Greece: the government spent too much money and went broke; the generous banks gave them money, but Greece still can’t pay the bills because it mismanaged the money that was given. It sounds quite reasonable, right?

   Except that it is a big fat lie … not only about Greece, but about other European countries such as Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland who are all experiencing various degrees of austerity. It was also the same big, fat lie that was used by banks and corporations to exploit many Latin American, Asian and African countries for many decades.

   Greece did not fail on its own. It was made to fail.

   In summary, the banks wrecked the Greek government and deliberately pushed it into unsustainable debt so that oligarchs and international corporations can profit from the ensuing chaos and misery. Stage 1: The first and foremost reason that Greece got into trouble was the “Great Financial Crisis” of 2008 that was the brainchild of Wall Street and international bankers. If you remember, banks came up with an awesome idea of giving subprime mortgages to anyone who can fog a mirror. They then packaged up all these ticking financial bombs and sold them as “mortgage-backed securities” at a huge profit to various financial entities in countries around the world.

   A big enabler of this criminal activity was another branch of the banking system, the group of rating agencies – S&P, Fitch and Moody’s – who gave stellar ratings to these destined-to-fail financial products. Unscrupulous politicians such as Tony Blair got paid by Big Banks to peddle these dangerous securities to pension funds and municipalities and countries around Europe. Banks and Wall Street gurus made hundreds of billions of dollars in this scheme.

   In Greece, the domestic banks got more than $30 billion of bailout from the Greek people. Let that sink in for a moment – the supposedly irresponsible Greek government had to bail out the hardcore capitalist bankers. Stage 3 is when the banks force the government to accept massive debts. For a biology metaphor, consider a virus or a bacteria. All of them have unique strategies to weaken the immune system of the host. One of the proven techniques used by the parasitic international bankers is to downgrade the bonds of a country. And that’s exactly what the bankers did, starting at the end of 2009. This immediately makes the interest rates (“yields”) on the bonds go up, making it more and more expensive for the country to borrow money or even just roll over the existing bonds.

   From 2009 to mid-2010, the yields on 10-year Greek bonds almost tripled! This cruel financial assault brought the Greek government to its knees, and the banksters won their first debt deal of a whopping 110 billion Euros.

   The banks also control the politics of nations. In 2011, when the Greek prime minister refused to accept a second massive bailout, the banks forced him out of the office and immediately replaced him with the Vice President of ECB (European Central Bank)! No elections needed. Screw democracy. And what would this new guy do? Sign on the dotted line of every paperwork that the bankers bring in.

   (By the way, the very next day, the exact same thing happened in Italy where the Prime Minister resigned, only to be replaced by a banker/economist puppet. Ten days later, Spain had a premature election where a banker puppet won the election).

   The puppet masters had the best month ever in November 2011.

   Few months later, in 2012, the exact bond market manipulation was used when the banksters turned up the Greek bonds’ yields to 50%!!! This financial terrorism immediately had the desired effect: The Greek parliament agreed to a second massive bailout, even larger than the first one.

   Now, here is another fact that most people don’t understand. The loans are not just simple loans like you would get from a credit card or a bank. These are loans come with very special strings attached that demand privatization of a country’s assets. If you have seen Godfather III, you would remember Hyman Roth, the investor who was carving up Cuba among his friends. Replace Hyman Roth with Goldman Sachs or IMF (International Monetary Fund) or ECB, and you get the picture.

   Stage 4: Now, the rape and humiliation of a nation begin under the name of “austerity” or “structural reforms.” For the debt that was forced upon it, Greece had to sell many of its profitable assets to oligarchs and international corporations. And privatizations are ruthless, involving everything and anything that is profitable. In Greece, privatization included water, electricity, post offices, airport services, national banks, telecommunication, port authorities (which is huge in a country that is a world leader in shipping) etc. Of course, the ever-manipulative bankers always demand immediate privatization of all media which means that the country gets photogenic TV anchors who spew establishment propaganda every day and tell the people that crooked and greedy banksters are saviors; and slavery under austerity is so much better than the alternative.

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   J P Spaghetti

   9 July 2015, 04:19

   Mark – great post (but don’t we see Hyman Roth – played by Lee Strasberg – effecting such a diabolical scheme in The Godfather II?)!

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   Mark

   9 July 2015, 15:15

   J P Thought the was enough content as was. But fine comment. The more people who stop staring at the idiot lantern in their living rooms and start looking at alternative/real news the better.