Alexis Tsipras, the newly elected anti-austerity President,
has called a referendum to allow the people of Greece to decide their fate
inducing massive howling at the EU, IMF and European Central Bank. The EU rolled the dice and lost. Greece has been placed in the same untenable
position that Puerto Rico finds itself in, only on a much, much larger scale,
and Greece won’t go down alone.
So here’s a quick synopsis of the howls emanating from the
EU:
From The Guardian:
Alexis Tsipras must be stopped: the underlying message of Europe's
leaders
One day before Greece’s bailout
ends and the country’s financial lifeline melts away, Europe’s big guns have lined up one after another to tell the Greeks
unequivocally that voting no in Sunday’s
referendum means saying goodbye to the euro.
Oh, boohoo, maybe they can join the BRIC’s bank.
There was no mistaking the gravity
of the situation now facing both Greece and Europe on Monday. Leaders were by turns ashen-faced,
resigned, desperate and pleading with Athens to think again and pull back
from the abyss.
Whose abyss you ask?
Good question.
There were also bitter attacks on
Alexis Tsipras, the young Greek prime minister whose brinkmanship has gone
further than anyone believed possible and left the eurozone’s leaders
reeling.
Damned kids. But you
know something, economists applaud Tsipras for doing the right thing, and
refusing to be blackmailed into handing over their natural resources, people’s
pensions and birthright over to Wall Street Hedgefunds for a bag of magic
Monsanto beans.
Here’s what Joseph Stiglitz had to say in Fortune:
Excerpt:
Joseph Stiglitz to Greece’s Creditors: Abandon Austerity or Face Global
Fallout
Nobel laureate tells TIME that the
institutions and countries that have enforced cost-cutting on Greece "have
criminal responsibility"
A few years ago, when Greece was
still at the start of its slide into an economic depression, the Nobel
prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz remembers discussing the crisis with
Greek officials. What they wanted was a stimulus package to boost growth and
create jobs……
Instead, Greece’s foreign creditors
imposed a strict program of austerity. The Greek economy has shrunk by about
25% since 2010. The cost-cutting was an enormous mistake, Stiglitz says, and
it’s time for the creditors to admit it.
“They have criminal responsibility,” he says of the so-called
troika of financial institutions that bailed out the Greek economy in 2010, namely the International Monetary Fund,
the European Commission and the European
Central Bank. “It’s a kind of criminal responsibility for causing a major
recession,” Stiglitz tells TIME in a phone interview.
Then there’s this from Paul Krugman in Business Insider:
Excerpt:
Now that the Greece situation looks
like it might finally be nearing resolution,
there's lots of handwringing about what will happen next….
Amid this tension, everyone's
pointing fingers, and a lot of the fingers are being pointed at Greece's
leaders, who some people say are acting irresponsibly by not just, once again,
caving to Europe's demands….
In the past, every time the situation has come to a head, Greece has caved. And, in the
process, it has transformed itself into
little more than a financial slave state mired in an economic depression…
Krugman further notes that Greece's
leader, Alexis Tsipras, is doing
something else smart. Namely, he's not making the decision single-handedly.
Rather, he is forcing his own government
and people to make the decision with him, via a referendum.
You know what the American Revolutionaries said? “Hang together or hang alone.” That has to be scarier for the EU than
anything else, people power. And boy
does the EU know it, just look at what they’re saying, they are asking the
Greek people to vote for their own death sentence:
From EuroNews:
Excerpt:
EU chief Juncker pleads with Greeks to defy their government and vote
for EU aid package
EU chief executive Jean-Claude Juncker urged Greeks on Monday to back a
cash-for-reform package rejected by their government, saying a ‘no’ vote in
Sunday’s referendum would mean Greece was turning its back on the European
Union…
“The whole planet would consider a
Greek ‘no’ to the question posed… as meaning that Greece wants to distance
itself from the euro zone and from Europe.” he told a news conference.
“I will say to the Greeks who I love deeply: you mustn’t commit suicide
because you are afraid of death…. You must vote yes, independently of the
question asked.”
Ha, ha ha. Juncker
“loves the Greeks deeply” and warns them not to “commit suicide because you are
afraid of death”, that doesn’t even make sense.
Smells of desperation. Why it
seems like just yesterday I was reading Gregory Palast’s article on the recent Greek
election, why yes it was……
Excerpt:
Trojan Hearse: Greek Elections and the Euro Leper Colony
Europe is stunned, and bankers
aghast, that the new party of the Left, Syriza, won Sunday's parliamentary
elections in Greece.
Syriza won on the promise that it
will cure Greece of leprosy.
Oddly, Syriza also promises that it
will remain in the leper colony. That
is, Syriza wants to rid Greece of the cruelty of austerity imposed by the
European Central Bank but insists on staying in the euro zone.
The problem is, austerity run wild
is merely a symptom of an illness. The underlying disease is the euro itself.
For the last five years, Greeks
have been told that, if you cure your disease—that is, if you dump the euro—the
sky will fall. I guess Greeks haven’t
noticed, the sky has fallen already. With unemployment at 25%, with doctors and
teachers eating out of garbage cans, there is no further to fall….
I wonder how many garbage cans Juncker has had to eat out of
as head of the EU.
…..I was in Brazil when its President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva told the IMF to go to hell—and rejected privatization of the state
banks and the state oil company, rejected cutting pensions and thumbed his nose
at the rest of the austerity nonsense.
Instead, Lula created the bolsa familia, a massive pay-out to the
nation’s poor. The result: Brazil
not only survived but thrived during the 2008-10 world financial crisis.
Despite pressure, Brazil never
ceded control of its currency. (It is a sad irony that Brazil is only now
faltering. That’s the fault entirely of
Lula’s successor, President Dilma Rousseff, who is beginning to dance the
austerity samba.)
The euro is simply the deutschmark with little stars on it. Greece cannot adopt Germany’s currency
without adopting Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, as its own….
It is argued that Greece owes Germany, the IMF and the European Central
Bank for bail-out-billions. Nonsense. None of the billions in bail-out funds went
into Greek pockets. It all went to bail out Deutsche
Bank and other foreign creditors.
The EU treasuries swallowed 90%
of its private bankers’ bonds. Germany
bailed out Germany, not Greece.
Boy, with all that money Germany extorted from Greece, the
German people must be living high off the fatted hog. But wait, what’s this? Nein you say?
Excerpt:
FRANKFURT — Protesters set cars on
fire and clashed with police officers on Wednesday as they marched toward the
European Central Bank’s new headquarters in a demonstration against austerity
and capitalism that took on a markedly more heated tone than past protests.
The rally, organized by a group called Blockupy and German workers’
unions, drew thousands of people as
the central bank inaugurated its new tower….
Blockupy is a left-wing alliance of dozens of activist groups from
across Europe. Its members include one of the largest German labor unions, the
United Service Union, known as Ver.di, and Syriza, the left-wing,
anti-austerity Greek political party that is now leading the government in
Athens….
Employees
of the central bank began moving into the new headquarters, which cost about
$1.27 billion, near the end of last year. Away from downtown Frankfurt on a
park-like site overlooking the Main River, the 600-foot-high tinted-glass tower
is a more potent symbol of the central bank’s power than the generic gray
high-rise in central Frankfurt that it previously occupied.
Austerity for the people and the Tower of Babel for the ECB,
how apt. But the Tower of Babel cannot stand, so looks like Greece, the cradle
of civilization will save the world from the EU crypt of civilization. Let’s all stand with the Greeks for they are
us.
By Patricia Baeten
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