{"id":61200,"date":"2015-07-20T12:00:15","date_gmt":"2015-07-20T11:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=61200"},"modified":"2015-07-19T18:01:40","modified_gmt":"2015-07-19T17:01:40","slug":"agency-to-enslave-greeks-is-established","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/07\/agency-to-enslave-greeks-is-established\/","title":{"rendered":"Agency to Enslave Greeks Is Established"},"content":{"rendered":"

Late on Thursday, July 16th, German Economic News<\/em> headlined \u201cGreece: Debt Restructuring Through the Back Door,\u201d<\/a> and reported that, \u201cThe majority of Greece\u2019s national debt is to be moved in the next three years gradually to the euro bailout fund ESM [European Stability Mechanism], so that the IMF will continue to remain as a lender. The euro zone countries will thereby provide Athens a longer grace period [a temporary postponement of payments, while the 18% annual interest-rate soars Greece\u2019s debt even higher], and longer repayment periods.\u201d<\/p>\n

The super-secretive European Stability Mechanism was set up in 2012, in order to handle Greece\u2019s anticipated virtual receivership, which it now will do.<\/p>\n

As I reported on July 16th<\/a>, the treaty<\/a> that in 2012 established the ESM, as being the ultimate lending-fund, for what the EU now officially considers to be a permanent economic crisis in Europe \u2014 of Greece and other member-nations that are experiencing \u201csevere financing problems\u201d \u2014 establishes the ESM as being so secretive, that a precondition of employment there is \u201cProfessional secrecy,\u201d which will apply \u201ceven after their duties have ceased\u201d (i.e., they\u2019ve retired). In other words: the goal is that the public will never be able to know anything that goes on there, except what the top management issue in their speeches and press releases (if any). Furthermore, the ESM is above and beyond any democratic process, and is immune to any nation\u2019s laws. Everyone in its employ \u201cshall be immune from legal proceedings with respect to acts performed by them in their official capacity and shall enjoy inviolability in\u00a0respect of their official papers and documents.\u201d (That\u2019s necessary in order to ensure that no information can ever be released by the employees \u2014 only the ESM\u2019s public statements will be.) There will be no democratic accountability, whatsoever. Moreover, \u201cthe ESM, its assets, income, property and its operations and transactions authorised by this Treaty shall be exempt from all\u00a0direct taxes.\u201d (This is because to tax a collection-agency that\u2019s collecting for the aristocracy would be to impose a tax upon<\/em> the aristocracy \u2014 it would reduce their take.)<\/p>\n

German Economic News<\/em> goes on to report that:<\/p>\n

\u201cBy the gradual restructuring of the Greek ECB and IMF liabilities to the ESM, Athens is to be largely isolated for years from principal and interest payments. Meanwhile, Merkel can continue to say that a classic haircut did not take place [meaning that all of the principal and interest will continue to be due \u2014 they\u2019re merely being postponed while the debt is still growing], but at the same time the oppressive principal and interest payments by Greece will be moved into the distant future [and then collected by ESM]. In fact, it is the principal and interest payments to the ECB and the IMF, which recently brought Athens especially into trouble [for example, by growing Greek debt from 110B euros in 2010, to 323B euros in 2015<\/a>], while there will be applied to the direct and indirect (via the euro rescue package) loans of euro-zone countries to Greece, elongated repayment and repayment periods. This temporary neutralizing of the Greek debt mountain gets Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras through the back door that he so vehemently demanded: he will have air to breathe.\u201d In other words: until he is re-elected, Greeks won\u2019t yet have experienced the full ferocity of what had hit them with. And: the longer they don\u2019t experience it, the worse it will become when it does hit.<\/p>\n

Here is what has hit the Greeks, that is known about currently:<\/p>\n

As my July 16th report also had noted, a confidential document, dated 11 June 2013,\u00a0\u201cReal Estate Based Asset Financing for the Hellenic Republic,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0describes one portion (the real estate sales) of the planned privatization of the Greek government, Greece\u2019s transfer away from any semblance of democracy, to ownership by international investors. (This can be compared, in some ways, to Obama\u2019s proposed TPP, TTIP, and TISA, international \u2018trade\u2019 deals.<\/a> It, too, is a huge assault against, even a killer of, democracy.) The document says, \u201cThe sale of state-owned assets is a one-off opportunity to raise capital for the Hellenic Republic.\u201d These sales will be occurring while principal and interest on the debt will be postponed and growing. The idea here is that the trap of the Greek public, by the aristocracy, must not snap until there is no way for the victim (the Greek public) to escape from it. Their taxes will soar, while their formerly free government services, including roads, health care, education, pensions, etc, will henceforth be provided by profit-making corporations, at profit-producing prices. The taxes they pay will be going instead to the bondholders.<\/p>\n

One thing that I did not, on July 16th, quote from the document, and which is particularly pertinent here, is the following:<\/p>\n

\u201cSince it will be impossible for the Holding Company to assume any powers now vested in the Hellenic Republic\u2019s legislative, executive and administrative bodies, the Troika [IMF, European Central Bank, and European Commission] will need to continue to play its role with the evolving list of actions required for the appropriate administrative and legislative actions to continue to be taken.\u201d In other words: some way must be found so that the Greek government will continue to do the Troika\u2019s will. \u201cHowever, the monitoring of these actions and the determination of any new ones could be transferred to the Supervisory Board who could perform such monitoring and determination better in the context of the Holding Company\u2019s business plan and the MoU\u2019s long term goals.\u201d The MoU, or\u00a0Memorandum of Understanding,<\/a>\u00a0was reached between \u201cthe Hellenic Republic\u201d or Greece, and the European Commission, in February 2012, shortly before the European Stability Mechanism was instituted later that year, as the planned agency to carry out the enslavement of Greece\u2019s public. This was an agreement saying that the welfare of the people of Greece played second fiddle to\u00a0the interests of the people who had lent money to Greece by purchasing Greek government bonds. Here is how\u00a0Steven Alfonso Panageotou in 2012 described the start of the crisis:<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThe ostensible start of the current financial crisis in Greece can be traced back to November 5, 2009. On this day, the newly elected socialist Prime Minister George Papandreu announced that the previous government, the conservative party of New Democracy under the leadership of Kostas Karamanlis, had lied and concealed the actual size of Greece\u2019s deficit \u2026 . Papandreou revealed that the true size of the Greek deficit for 2009 would be 12.7 percent of GDP, not the 6 percent of GDP that the Karamanlis government had forecasted months earlier. \u2026 On December 7, 2009, the credit ratings agency Standard and Poor\u2019s announced it would place Greece\u2019s \u2018A-minus\u2019 long-term sovereign credit rating on \u2018Credit Watch\u2019 with negative implications. \u2026 This act can be seen as the defining moment that set in motion the \u2026 crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n

On 8 February 2010, Germany\u2019s Spiegel<\/em> bannered, \u201cHow Goldman\u00a0Sachs Helped\u00a0Greece to Mask\u00a0its True Debt,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0and reported that, \u201cGoldman Sachs helped the Greek\u00a0government to mask the true extent of its\u00a0deficit with the help of a derivatives deal\u00a0that legally circumvented the EU\u00a0Maastricht deficit rules. At some point the\u00a0so-called cross currency swaps will\u00a0mature, and swell the country\u2019s already\u00a0bloated deficit. \u2026 The US bankers devised a special kind of swap with fictional exchange rates. \u2026 \u2018The Maastricht rules can be circumvented quite legally through swaps,\u2019 says a German derivatives dealer. In previous years, Italy used a similar trick to mask its true debt with the help of a different US bank.\u201d<\/p>\n

Who were the beneficiaries of this fraud upon international investors, by the Greek aristocracy?<\/p>\n

The September 2010 International Socialist Review<\/em>\u00a0bannered\u00a0\u201cCrisis, Austerity, and Class Struggle in Greece,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0and Antonis Davanellos wrote:<\/p>\n

The banks <\/em>[bailed out by EU and U.S. taxpayers] that were the champions of neoliberalism <\/em>[U.S. \u2018libertarianism\u2019] in the\u00a0Balkans are now in debt, and their future is very uncertain.\u00a0Also, big Greek construction companies were taking jobs\u00a0inside Greece, the Balkans and Turkey, and in other\u00a0places like Dubai\u2014and you know what happened with\u00a0construction in Dubai (the Gulf state that needed a bailout\u00a0from neighboring Abu Dhabi). Then there were the Greek\u00a0commercial capitalists, who were dominant in the Balkans.<\/em><\/p>\n

These three strong elements have been destroyed by the\u00a0economic crisis. That is the basis of the economic\u00a0problems of Greece.<\/em><\/p>\n

The second factor in the economic crisis is the cost of the\u00a0Greek state\u2019s huge intervention to save the banks\u2014a bailout, as you say here. In one night, Karamanlis gave\u00a0the banks 28 billion euros. That\u2019s not so much, in\u00a0international terms. But in an economy like Greece\u2019s, it is\u00a0huge. Compare that to the 25 billion euros that the finance\u00a0minister <\/em>[in the successor, socialist, government] wants to collect with his bitter program of\u00a0austerity. It\u2019s less than what they have given to the banks\u00a0in one night. And Papandreou is continuing this bailout.<\/em><\/p>\n

A third factor in the crisis is the cost of twenty years of\u00a0neoliberalism <\/em>[the ideology that in the United States is called \u2018libertarianism\u2019]. At the beginning of the 1990s, the profits of\u00a0capitalists were taxed at 45 percent. Now they have 20\u00a0percent for industry and 12 percent for the banks. This is a\u00a0huge decline, but the problem is not just that.<\/em><\/p>\n

The last few years\u2014during all the years of Karamanlis\u2019s\u00a0government\u2014rich people, the capitalists, the big\u00a0enterprises, and the banks weren\u2019t paying taxes at all.\u00a0They were keeping the money\u2014and not only from their\u00a0taxes, but also the taxes they were collecting from workers\u00a0in their enterprises. So you can see that the public\u00a0finances of Greece depend only on taxes on salaries <\/em>[i.e., workers],\u00a0which <\/em>[especially if a large proportion of that take isn\u2019t even going to the government] isn\u2019t enough<\/em> [to avoid huge government deficits].<\/em><\/p>\n

A fourth element in the economic crisis is international\u00a0speculation. I will give you two examples: Goldman Sachs\u00a0was the adviser to all the Greek governments about how\u00a0to deal with government debt\u2014and all the governments\u00a0did what Goldman Sachs said.<\/em> [That\u2019s deceptive: the principal there was actually the Greek President; Goldman Sachs had been hired, as his agent.] At the same time, Goldman\u00a0Sachs was advising huge hedge funds to gamble on the\u00a0idea that the Greek state, in the end, would not be able to\u00a0deal with the debt.<\/em> [GS was advising there different principals, not the Greek President.]<\/p>\n

So: Greek workers were having taxes deducted from their paychecks, but their employers weren\u2019t transferring all of those withholdings to the government. It was a conservative government, which believed in trickle-down, and which therefore was determined to please its financial backers, who owned the corporations, which were rampantly evading taxes (like many U.S. corporations also do). Any conservative government serves the power-elite, not the public, and Greece had a conservative government. Conservatism exists to exploit the public, not to serve it. That\u2019s why conservative governments believe in trickle-down, not in percolate-up, economics.<\/p>\n

Throughout, Greece\u2019s aristocrats were the beneficiaries of the loans that kept the Karamanlis government going. The Greek public received little to none of it, but get the blame as if they\u2019d received most or all of it.<\/p>\n

The Greek public are now being condemned as \u2018leaches\u2019 and such, and are being demanded to pay back \u2014 and with junk-bond interest-rates on top \u2014 the billions that Greece\u2019s aristocracy had skimmed off the system, while Wall Street banks had assisted the conservative Greek government to hide from other countries\u2019 aristocrats the skimming that was going on with the money they had lent in the form of Greek bonds.<\/p>\n

U.S. and Greek aristocrats had robbed other aristocrats; and, starting in 2012, all aristocrats have set up a system, the European Stability Mechanism, to extract from the general Greek public, in the future, the wealth that will compensate some aristocrats for money that had been defrauded from those aristocrats by other aristocrats, defrauded until the fraud (never yet punished \u2014 nor even sought to be punished) was made public in late 2009. Moreover, the general Greek public are being blamed for all of this. That blame-shift downward is necessary to do, in order to \u2018justify\u2019 the Greek public\u2019s future enslavement, in a modern form of debt-bondage, of a national kind, for debts in which the public had, actually, played no significant (if any) part, and the proceeds from which had instead gone mainly to Greece\u2019s billionaires and centi-millionaires (and largely stashed by them in Switzerland and other tax-havens, thus now inaccessible, so that the Greek public are the targets instead, by the other aristocrats, the ones who had been victimized by their fellow-aristocrats).<\/p>\n

Instead of security being provided to the public, and risk being taken on by aristocrats (because they can afford it), security is provided to aristocrats, and their risky losing bets are being guaranteed to them by the public, which takes on those aristocrats\u2019 losses, while never having stood to gain anything from those aristocrats\u2019 bets (which are euphemistically called \u2018investments,\u2019 and which were priced fraudulently).<\/p>\n

The Greek public will thus, in an all-too-real sense, be collectively imprisoned to pay for the crimes by some aristocrats, against other aristocrats. This is a reality that Adam Smith\u2019s economic theory, which was designed to please aristocrats, essentially ignored, as being even a possibility (even though the phenomenon of aristocrats cheating aristocrats has always commonly occured, throughout history).<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an hour-long documentary searching for individual suspects behind the now-endless European financial crisis, but none of the investigators in it can dig so deep as to identify even one of the ultimate beneficiaries of the bailouts, beyond the standard generic abstractions, \u201cbanks\u201d and politicians\u201d: https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?t=3169&v=xu5sTyAXyAo<\/a>. The chief interviewer persists in saying (57:20) \u201cwe are sitting in one boat.\u201d But that\u2019s not true, at all. Some people belong in prison, or worse. Obviously, not everyone does. At the end of his many interviews with agents for the international aristocracy, not even a single suspect has been named. However, also obviously, the biggest crooks aren\u2019t found in prisons. (If one of them were, the interviewers would easily have been able to contact one of the recipients.) They\u2019re in one or another of their multitudinous mansions, or in some private jet going from one to another of them, or to meetings with others of them. After all, the \u201cWorld\u2019s Richest 0.7% Own 13.67 Times as Much as World\u2019s Poorest 68.7%.\u201d<\/a> Furthermore, in the United States<\/a>, \u201cthe losses from the Wall Street economic crash went overwhelmingly to the poorer half of the U.S. population (their wealth going down from 2.5% to only 1.1% of America\u2019s total), because of the bailouts to Wall Street,\u201d but the \u201cwealthiest 0.0025% (Forbes 400) own 2.75% (of all trackable privately-held wealth, not including \u2018non-profits\u2019 that are controlled by them),\u201d which 2.75% is more than twice the 1.1% that the bottom 50% of Americans own. The Forbes 400 richest billionaires were probably on the receiving end of America\u2019s bailouts. Or at least they benefited as if they had been.<\/p>\n

If this holding-the-public-hostage-for-aristocrats\u2019-crimes is not a revolutionary situation, at least as bad as in 1776 America, 1789 France, 1848 Europe, and 1917 Russia, then what is? And who should be blamed for it, if the victims, the Greek public, won\u2019t be (such as aristocrats around the world wish the Greek public to be blamed for it)?<\/p>\n

Perhaps the people to blame for it are same the people that are benefiting from it (and from their misdirection of blame downward, to some of their own victims). Perhaps the criminals who are doing this should be punished, instead of served. Many of these criminals own \u2018news\u2019 media that hide, or obscure, the real culprits, in order to receive yet more advertising income from their fellow-aristocratic colleagues. After all, if an advertiser in your magazine had fraudulently sold you an investment, would you rather that the public bail you out from the loss (while they won\u2019t know they did), or that he bail you out from it \u2014 and that he then stop his ads and you lose a crucial customer? Suing a major customer can turn out to have been a very bad business decision, and billionaires tend to pride themselves on making good business decisions.<\/p>\n

How deep and wide does this pervasive, systematic, corruption at the top go? How can it be stopped? What must be done? Or will things just continue on, as they now are, toward and into international fascism<\/a> \u2014 might makes right?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s already almost as if the Axis powers had won WW II. Are the fascists worming their way back, towards an ultimate victory<\/a>, with no more need for weapons of war \u2014 deceit can now do this job just fine? Maybe democracy is already dead<\/a>. Perhaps even revolutions are only past history, curiosities of an earlier age, when people at least hoped for democracy, which they no longer can see any way to achieve.<\/p>\n

Or, if there is still some intelligent and informed hope remaining, then what is it?<\/p>\n

_______________________________<\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 <\/em>They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/a>,<\/em> and of\u00a0<\/em>Christ\u2019s Ventriloquists: The Event that Created Christianity<\/a>, and\u00a0of\u00a0Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 washingtonsblog.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On July 16 2015 \u2018German Economic News\u2019 headlined \u201cGreece: Debt Restructuring Through the Back Door,\u201d and reported that, \u201cThe majority of Greece\u2019s national debt is to be moved in the next three years gradually to the European Stability Mechanism. The super-secretive ESM was set up in 2012, in order to handle Greece\u2019s anticipated virtual receivership, which it now will do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[146],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61200\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}