Financial technocrats were put in place to serve the domestic oligarchy and foreign bondholders. Greece was under financial attack just as deadly as a military attack. Finance is war. That is this week’s lesson.
And for the first time, debtor countries are realizing that they are in a state of war.
Greece has a unique opportunity to exit the Eurozone gracefully, head high, telling the troika, especially the fratricidal Brussels gang, that honoring the election commitment to the Greek people is a priority – no more austerity, no more pension cuts, no more privatization of public services and public assets, no more closing of hospitals – for these honorable reasons Greece will exit the Eurozone – not surrender, never surrender. This is not surrender; this is a wise move that will lead Greece into a new and prosperous future.
What people forget is that those who’ve merely been charged with crimes aren’t officially guilty yet. And not-yet-guilty people aren’t supposed to go to the hole, except under very narrowly defined sets of circumstances – for flight risks or for threats to the community. It’s certainly not supposed to be a punishment for not having $500.
the Greek “sovereign debt crisis” is being used to create a precedent that will apply to every EU member government. The member states will cease to exist as sovereign states. Sovereignty will rest in the EU. The measures that Germany and France are supporting will in the end terminate their own sovereignty, very little of which actually remains as they do not have their own currency and their foreign policy is subservient to Washington.
Greece’s former representative to the IMF, Panagiotis Roumeliotis, in front of the special parliamentary committee on the Greek debt, said that several Greek journalists were “trained” in Washington D.C. in order to support the positions of the IMF and the European Commission in Greek media.
The deal is that Greece gets new loans with which to repay existing loans in exchange for selling municipal water companies to private investors (water rates will go up on the Greek people), for selling the state lottery to private investors (Greek government revenues drop, thus making debt repayment more difficult), and for other such “privatizations” such as selling the protected Greek islands to real estate developers.
“Given that the BRICS countries mostly show a much higher growth rate than the countries of ‘Big Seven,’ we can assume that in the next two or three years, the combined GDP of the BRICS member states will surpass the same indicator of G7 nations”.
Clearly, our creditors’ demand for more austerity has nothing to do with concerns about genuine reform or moving Greece onto a sustainable fiscal path. Their true motivation is a question best left to future historians – who, I have no doubt, will take much of the contemporary media coverage with a grain of salt.
At this juncture the only thing clear is that Washington has finally realized the stupidity of its provocations against Russia in Ukraine and globally. What their next scheme will entail is not yet clear. Clear is that a dramatic policy shift has been ordered on the Obama administration from the highest levels of US institutions. Nothing else could explain the dramatic shift. If sanity replaces the neo-con insanity remains to be seen
Under the TPP, could the US government be sued and be held liable if it decided to stop issuing Treasury debt and financed deficit spending in some other way (perhaps by quantitative easing or by issuing trillion dollar coins)? Why not, since some private companies would lose profits as a result?
As long as the media represent the span of interests of the 1% – from the psychopathic Murdoch empire to the capitalism with a little heart of the Guardian Media Group – our politicians will range from the Blue Tories of the Conservative party to the Red Tories of the Labour party. And we will remain enslaved.
And the political fare on offer is all manufactured and presented to placate big business, to court corporate approval and to ensure that the ways in which we vent our dissatisfaction is safely-boundaried by QuestionTime-type ‘participation’.
