Tony Greenstein | 06 July 2015 | Post Views:

Democracy not Eurobureaucracy

celebrations in Athens

Democracy – an alien concept in the EU of bankers

The vote by Greeks to reject the blackmail
of the European leaders should be welcomed by any democrat.  The Greek people have said a resounding 60%
NO to the bankers and speculators.  It is
no surprise that our own UKIP, the ‘anti-Europe’ party has been so quiet,
because of course they too are led by a banker.

Burning the EU flag in Athens
On Sunday the Greek people voted, despite
all the pressure put upon them, to reject the ‘offer’ of the IMF and European
Central Bank.  They had been told that a
no vote wouldn’t mean a revised offer but Greek ejection from the Euro zone.  Despite this blackmail Greek people have
refused to accept permanent austerity, further unemployment and savage cuts to
pensions.
Even the IMF has finally accepted, that
Greece’s debt of €340 billion cannot be repaid and that much of it needs to be written
off.  Previous bailouts have, according
to Karl Otto Pöhl, a former head of the Bundesbank, been “about protecting
German banks, but especially the French banks, from debt write-offs.”

In 1941 Nazi Germany invaded Greece and devastated
the country.  Today democratic Germany is
using the banks to achieve the same objective. 
When Martin Schultz, the German ‘social democratic’ President of the
European Parliament, declared that the best outcome of the Greek referendum
would be a technocratic government, he gave the game away.  Europe’s banks and leaders intention is to overthrow
a democratically elected government.

The weakness of Syriza and Alex Tsipras is
that they have not mapped out an alternative strategy to further negotiations
and the present freezing up of the economy. 
What Syriza needs to do is to make it clear that unless there is a debt
write off and an end to austerity, then Greece will exit the straitjacket of
the Euro and go back to a devalued Drachma with all debt written off.  It’s strange that given such a clear example
of the undemocratic bullying of Greece there hasn’t been a word out of
UKIP.  Maybe that’s the price of being
led by a banker!
Given that the Greeks  have the ability to print Euros it is surprising
that they haven’t already done so! 
Either way, there is no alternative other than to resist the
dictatorship of Hollande, Merkel et al. 
It is a great pity that Varoufakis, the Greek’s motor biking Finance
Minister, has resigned.  He showed great
panache and style.
Below is an interesting article presenting
an alternative analysis to that of the BBC’s Robert Peston and all the other
financial pundits.
Tony Greenstein 

Greece – What You are not Being Told by the Media

Woman walks by No posters
According to mainstream media, the current economic
crisis in Greece is due to the government spending too much money on its people
that it went broke. This claim however, is a lie. It was the banks that wrecked
the country so oligarchs and international corporations could benefit.
July 5,
2015  Chris Kanthan
| Nation of Change | Op-Ed
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?
Varoufakis votes
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.
If
you are a fan of mafia movies, you know how the mafia would take over a popular
restaurant. First, they would do something to disrupt the business – stage a
murder at the restaurant or start a fire. When the business starts to suffer, the
Godfather would generously offer some money as a token of friendship. In
return, Greasy Thumb takes over the restaurant’s accounting, Big Joey is put in
charge of procurement, and so on. Needless to say, it’s a journey down a spiral
of misery for the owner who will soon be broke and, if lucky, alive.
Now,
let’s map the mafia story to international finance in four stages.

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.
But
this was just Stage 1 of their enormous scam. There was much more profit to be
made in the next three stages!

Stage
2
 is when the financial time bombs exploded.
Commercial and investment banks around the world started collapsing in a matter
of weeks. Governments at local and regional level saw their investments and
assets evaporate. Chaos everywhere!
Vultures
like Goldman Sachs and other big banks profited enormously in three ways: one,
they could buy other banks such as Lehman brothers and Washington Mutual for
pennies on the dollar. Second, more heinously, Goldman Sachs and insiders such
as John Paulson (who recently donated $400 million to Harvard) had
made bets that these securities would blow up
. Paulson made billions, and
the media celebrated his acumen. (For an analogy, imagine the terrorists
betting on 9/11 and profiting from it.) Third, to scrub salt in the wound, the
big banks demanded a bailout from the very citizens whose lives the bankers had
ruined! Bankers have chutzpah. In the U.S., they got hundreds of billions of
dollars from the taxpayers and trillions
from the Federal Reserve Bank
which is nothing but a front group for the
bankers.

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.
In
addition to that, the banker tyrants also get to dictate every single line item
in the government’s budget. Want to cut military spending? NO! Want
to raise tax on the oligarchs or big corporations?
 NO! Such
micro-management is non-existent in any other creditor-debtor relationship.
So
what happens after privatization and despotism under bankers? Of course, the
government’s revenue goes down and the debt increases further. How do you “fix”
that? Of course, cut spending! Lay off public workers, cut minimum wage, cut
pensions (same as our social security), cut public services, and raise taxes on
things that would affect the 99% but not the 1%. For example, pension has been
cut in half and sales tax increase to more than 20%. All these measures have
resulted in Greece going through a financial calamity that is worse than the
Great Depression of the U.S. in the 1930s.
After
all this, what is the solution proposed by the heartless bankers? Higher taxes!
More cuts to the pension! It takes a special kind of a psychopath to put a
country through austerity, an economic holocaust.
If
every Greek person had known the truth about austerity, they wouldn’t have
fallen for this. Same goes for Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland and other
countries going through austerity. The sad aspect of all this is that these are
not unique strategies. Since World War II, these predatory practices have been
used countless times by the IMF and the World Bank in Latin America, Asia, and
Africa.
This
is the essence of the New World Order — a world owned by a handful of corporations
and banks; a world that is full of obedient, powerless debt serfs.
So,
it’s time for the proud people of Greece to rise up like Zeus and say NO (“OXI”
in Greece) to the greedy puppet masters, unpatriotic oligarchs, parasitic
bankers and corrupt politicians.

Dear
Greece, know that the world is praying for you and rooting for you. This
weekend, vote NO to austerity. Say YES to freedom, independence,
self-government, sovereignty, and democracy. Go to the polls this weekend and
give a resounding, clear victory for the 99% in Greece, Europe, and the entire
western world. 

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Tony Greenstein

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