GREECE - Germany reasserts hegemony over the eurozone - Ryan Cooper Article

ARTICLE SOURCE http://theweek.com/articles/566079/how-germany-defeated-syriza--reasserted-hegemony-over-eurozone How Germany defeated Syriza — and reasserted its hegemony over the eurozone Ryan Cooper July 13, 2015 It looks like a deal between Greece and eurozone elites has finally been reached — and it is a horrendous one. Greece's Syriza government has utterly capitulated, agreeing to a tremendous new austerity package with no debt restructuring whatsoever; huge cuts to pensions and worker protections ("labor liberalization"); and selling off €50 billion in unspecified government assets to pay off debt. The deal doesn't even guarantee funding — only after these conditions are met can a new loan package be negotiated. The Financial Times calls it "the most intrusive economic supervision program ever mounted in the EU. " Even to a hardened cynic, the "bargain" is nothing short of staggering in its awfulness. The eyes of even the most sober market analysts are practically bugging out of their heads at the sheer viciousness of it. (To give you a small idea of how badly Syriza caved to Germany and other European powers: The Institution for Growth, which will apparently take possession of the Greek government assets, is part of a fund called KfW, whose chairman is none other than German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble.) If the Greek parliament passes the proposal, Greece will have effectively ceded economic sovereignty to eurozone elites. None of the underlying economic issues have been improved — on the contrary, they will all be made much worse. This means the crisis is certain to recur at some point. The only silver lining is that the true nature of the eurozone has been revealed to all: It is an empire based on force, not the physical kind, but economic. Bend to Germany's will, or see your economy destroyed. It's worth taking a step back to remember how we got here. Before 2008, capital flowed from the eurozone core to the periphery, chasing higher yields. Normally this would be moderated by exchange rate adjustments and monetary policy, but in a common currency the first is impossible and the second was set for the core's needs only. Hot money flowed south, sparking inflationary overheating in the periphery and building up price imbalances. When the crisis came, the lack of exchange rate adjustments and monetary policy once again proved fateful, and cash-strapped nations could not finance fiscal stimulus. After the crisis, the eurozone should have stepped in with stimulus and debt restructuring to restore employment and growth, as the U.S. did with the Recovery Act of 2009. As Steve Randy Waldman writes, "What was required was a Europe-wide solution to a European problem." Instead, economic elites talked themselves into thinking the problem was one-sided, and demanded massive austerity in return for loans to avoid default. The result in many countries has been brutal recession, in some cases rivaling that of the Great Depression. Before the crisis, Greece was dishonest about its finances and made many bad decisions. But the roots of Greece's problems are inherent eurozone defects, not shady accounting. Spain is much more scrupulous and had almost no budget deficit before 2008, and has done nearly as bad as Greece has. Syriza was elected in January on a promise to end austerity, but the party has been totally outmaneuvered. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras apparently did not think euro exit was possible, and rumors are that his party made no contingency plans to introduce a replacement currency. In a riveting interview, former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis explains why. He says that eurozone elites were never negotiating in good faith. Instead they were stringing the Greeks along with pointless busywork (given this bargain, an easy thing to believe). He lost all faith in talks, and after the huge victory in the July 5 referendum, he proposed an aggressive scheme in line with what economist JW Mason has suggested: the introduction of euro-denominated IOUs to ease the liquidity crisis; a unilateral partial default; and greater autonomy for Greece's central bank from the European Central Bank. Unfortunately, it was untested policy territory, and Tsipras chickened out. Bereft of support, Varoufakis resigned. With no backup plan, Syriza had no leverage, and so had to take whatever German Chancellor Angela Merkel was dishing out — in this case, an economic shotgun to both kneecaps. It's an open question whether Tsipras will be able to get this turd through the Greek parliament, and odds are good it will shatter the majority coalition, requiring new elections. As Wolfgang Münchau points out, at least the deal brings some needed clarity to events. The eurozone is now openly "run in the interests of Germany, held together by the threat of absolute destitution for those who challenge the prevailing order." The lessons for those radicals who would challenge Germany, such as Spain's Podemos, are clear. Any nation that won't docilely submit to economic bleeding will receive no quarter. Self-serving claptrap about the rebels' fecklessness will be quickly constructed and propagated. Unemployment in Spain is 24 percent. In Portugal it is 13 percent. In Italy it is 12 percent — a country where there has been virtually no productivity growth since the introduction of the euro in 1999. Should a radical party want to break German hegemony, it would do well to learn from the failures of Syriza. It may sound foolish to risk everything on an aggressive grab for economic sovereignty — but if these countries want their problems fixed in years, rather than in decades, there may be no other option. SOURCE http://theweek.com/articles/566079/how-germany-defeated-syriza--reasserted-hegemony-over-eurozone --------------------- COMMENT Enjoyed this article.  Bit of a catch-up for me, as I haven't kept track of Greece.  Didn't expect to understand ins and outs of the economic dramas in Greece, so I haven't taken time to do reading on the subject. Sounds really bad.  How can they not have an exit plan?  That's just insane.  And it looks as though they're putting off the inevitable, having already put the public through an austerity regime, in the lead up to this.  And for what?  Greece, apparently, still doesn't have restructuring or guarantee of funding. [Weird all over the place highlighting & text colours are for myself.   Can't make up my mind how to highlight, as my browser shows highlights overlapping text when published.]

ECB President Mario Draghi Dodges Femen Protester

'SUPER MARIO' MARIO DRAGHI President  European Central Bank (ECB)  DIRECT  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAC3EGnr9hg Normally, I detest girly protests, but this one was quite funny. Mario looks like a cute puppet and he seems a good sport about the surprise sprung on him. Don't know anything about him other than that he's an economist. Judging solely on appearances:  I like him.

Sovereign Debt & Global Mega-Bank Vultures Threat

Sovereign debt for territory: A new global elite swap strategy Adrian Salbuchi is a political analyst, author, speaker and radio/TV commentator in Argentina. Published time: August 12, 2014 13:07 In recent decades, dozens of sovereign nations have fallen into ever-deepening trouble by becoming indebted with the “private megabank over-world” for amounts far, far in excess of what they can ever pay back. [...] Recurrent sovereign debt crises reflect neither “over-lending mistakes” by bankers and investors, nor “innocence” on the part of successive governments in deeply indebted nations. Rather, it all ties in with a global model for domination driven by a system of perpetual national debt which I have called “The Shylock Model”. As with the tango which requires rhythm and bravado, Argentina is again dancing centre-stage to global mega-bankers’ financial tunes after falling into a new “technical default”. Not just because the country is unable to pay off its massive public debt by heeding the “rules of the game” as written and continuously re-vamped by global usurers, but now with added legal immorality and judicial indecency on the part of New York’s Second District Manhattan Court presided by Judge Daniel Griesa. Griesa has shown no qualms in putting US law at the service of immoral parasitic “bankers and investors” such as Paul Singer of the Elliott/NML Fund and Mark Brodsky of the Aurelius Fund. The mainstream media inside and outside Argentina refer to these parasitic money “sloshers” as “vulture funds”; a conceptual mistake because one might then be led to believe that other funds and bankers - Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, George Soros, Rothschild, Warburg - are not “vultures” when, in fact, the very foundations of today’s global banking system lie on parasitic pro-vulture rules and laws coupled with an overpowering lack of moral values. Sovereign debt Sovereign debts are a major problem in just about every country in the world, including the US, UK and EU nations. So much so, those debts have become a Damocles’ Swords threatening the livelihood of untold billions of workers around the world. One often wonders why governments indebt themselves for so much more than they can ever hope to pay… Here, Western economists, bankers, traders, Ivy League academics and professors, Nobel laureates and the mainstream media have a quick and monolithic reply: because all nations need “investment and investors” if they wish to build highways, power plants, schools, airports, hospitals, raise armies, service infrastructures and a long list of et ceteras, economic and national activities are all about. But more and more people are starting to ask a fundamental common-sense question: why should governments indebt themselves in hard currencies, decades into the future with global mega-bankers, when they could just as well finance these projects and needs far more safely by issuing the proper amounts of their own local sovereign currency instead? Here is where all the above “experts” go berserk & ballistic, shouting back: “Issue currency? Are you crazy?? That’s against the “rules & laws” of economics!!! Issuing national sovereign currency to finance the real economy’s monetary needs leads to inflation and lost jobs and chaos and… (puts us nice mega-bankers out of a job…)!!.” That’s when they all gang-up into noisy “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!!” mode. Then you ask them: What happens when countries default on their unpayable sovereign debts - as they invariably and repeatedly do - not just in Argentina, but in Brazil, Spain, Venezuela, France, Costa Rica, Peru, El Salvador, Portugal, Russia, Bolivia, Iceland, Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, Thailand, Nigeria, Mexico, and Indonesia? Again the voice of the “experts”: “Then countries must “restructure” their debts kicking them forwards 20, 40 or more years into the future, so that your great, great, great grandchildren can continue paying them”. Oh, I see! The truth is that countries need public spending to maintain their economies resilient and buoyant, their citizens working, prospering and happy; their nation-states sovereign, strong and secure. OK: happy, secure and working populations cannot be defined as a formula that can be readily integrated into “expert” economists’ spreadsheets. However, there’s a basic truth that should be obvious by now: Finance (which is the virtual world of bankers, investments, speculation and usury) should always be fully subordinated to the Real Economy (which is the world of work, production, buildings, milk & bread and services). All this begs the obvious question: Since governments have a natural tendency to overspend and end up getting themselves into too much debt, which is the better option then: - that their “red numbers” (aka sovereign debt) should be owed to themselves; their own nation-states (debt in local currency that in the last instance can be written off, even if a bad bout of inflation cannot be stopped, countries can always revamp their currencies as Argentina repeatedly did over the past forty years), whereby the whole “debt crisis” basically becomes a short-term internal affair (albeit painful!), or… - to convert those “red numbers” into foreign currency debt (US Dollars or Euro) fully controlled by powerful far-away, well-organized creditor-technocrats and global mega-bankers sitting at the FED and IMF in Washington DC; the European Central Bank in Frankfurt; or perched in eager expectation in their Wall Street vulture nests? [...] Argentina’s recurrent defaults and debt restructuring go back many decades. For brevity’s sake, let’s just point to 1956 right after President Juan Domingo Perón was ousted by a very bloody 1955 US-UK (and mega-banker) sponsored military coup. Perón was hated for his insistence on not indebting Argentina with the mega-bankers: in 1946 he rejected joining the International Monetary Fund (IMF); in 1953 he fully paid off all of Argentina’s sovereign debt. So, once the mega-bankers got rid of him in 1956, they shoved Argentina into the IMF and created the “Paris Club” to engineer decades-worth of sovereign debt for vanquished Argentina, something they’ve been doing until today. But each sovereign-debt crisis cycle became shorter, more virulent and more toxic. By December 2001, Argentina had collapsed financially sinking into the largest sovereign debt default in history. Immediately, the IMF’s deputy manager Anne Krueger proposed some “new and creative ideas” on what to do about Argentina. She published them in 2002 in an article on the IMF’s website: “Should Countries like Argentina be able to declare themselves bankrupt?”, in which she said that “the lesson is clear: we need better incentives to bring debtors and creditors together before manageable problems turn into full-blown crises”, adding that the IMF believes “this could be done by learning from corporate bankruptcy regimes like Chapter 11 in the US”. She pointed this out as “a possible new approach”, adding that “of course many practical and political obstacles to getting such an approach up and running” needed to be overcome, the “key features would need the force of law throughout the world”, creating “a predictable (global) legal framework”. From the stance of global mega-bankers’ geopolitical long-term planners, Ms Krueger’s proposal consisted of first gradually driving countries into receivership, and then sequentially into full-fledged bankruptcy. Then as if nations were private corporations like Enron or WorldCom - they could be broken up into as many “digestible” pieces as possible, to be gobbled up by international creditors in some global vulture-fest banquet. [...] The specialized and mainstream media - Financial Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist - are also recommending Judge Griesa and his vulture chicks to show more restraint because in today’s delicate post-2008 banking system, a new and less controllable sovereign debt crisis could thwart the global elite’s plans for an “orderly transition towards a new global legal architecture” that will allow orderly liquidation of financially-failed states like Argentina. Especially if such debt were to be collateralized by its national territory (what else is left!?) Will yet another sovereign debt bond mega-swap be imposed upon Argentina, this time with large swathes of its national territory – especially Patagonia – being used as collateral guarantee? That would mean that in a few years’ time the Shylocks in Wall Street and London will do everything they can to yet again push Argentina into default, since that would pave the way for them to “legally” take over its territory cashing in on their collateral as “compensation”. [...]  If we tie this all in with what the unfolding of “Act III” in the on-going Israel-Palestine crisis whereby re-settling millions of Israeli civilians into southern Argentina might be on the drawing board, we can then begin to understand how nicely Argentina’s next debt crisis will tie in: The global Rothschild’s, Warburg’s, Lazard’s, Soros, Rockefellers will be able to “legally” take over Patagonia, and then “legally” hand it over to whomever they wish without a single shot being fired! If this is what’s really happening behind-the-curtains regarding Argentina, does anybody believe it will stop there? Beware Greece, Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Mexico, Korea, Japan, Ukraine, Brazil, South Africa – the world government is marching in! EXTRACTS ONLY - FULL @ SOURCE http://rt.com/op-edge/179772-sovereign-debt-for-territory/

 FED - US Federal Reserve System (informal = FED) = central banking system of US.


Thought this article was very interesting.

Had no idea about Peron US-UK mega-banker sponsored coup.

Is Argentina likely to lose territory?

My guess is:  yes.

It lost the Falklands over sovereign debt.

The stuff about Israeli civilian resettlement in southern Argentina is puzzling.

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Something called the 'The Andinia Plan' is probably what the resettlement is about.

This is refuted as anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, or something like that:

http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/The-Dreyfus-revival