The EU's disgraceful treatment of Greece

[Grimer]

Whatever happens on Monday, Greece the country will survive this crisis – and the Greeks know it. The same can’t be said of the euro project – and we know it.
Could it be the case that in order to save the euro, the European elite destroys the EU? What is happening – and we are deeply involved – is quite shocking.

Last Thursday, by telling the world that he and others are preparing for a Greek exit from the euro, Michael Noonan – for some reason the most vocal finance minister on this issue – made certain that the Greek banks would experience a massive run on Friday.

Why is the rest of Europe trying to destroy the Greek banking system, which has already been made fragile by successive pro-European governments borrowing hand over fist and hoping to use the subsequent IOUs as collateral for the Greek banking system?

Why are we jumping on the bandwagon set in motion by the German media which relentlessly pursues the line that feckless lazy Greeks are only looking for debt forgiveness to make legitimate their idleness?

Are we so craven in our willingness to do someone else’s bidding that we forget historical facts?

I can understand that the German politicians looked their people in the eye and told them we will get all your money back from Greece, but why is Ireland faithfully being Germany’s greatest cheerleader?

Have we forgotten about Germany’s own history as the greatest European beneficiary of debt forgiveness? Or do our guys simply not know?

German memory – and that of its Irish supplicants – is very selective. There is no mention of the 1953 London Debt Agreement in their debates on Greece.

Why doesn’t someone remind Germany that in 1948 the introduction of the Deutsche Mark (backstopped by American capital) wiped out most of Germany’s domestic debt?

Or what about the fact that in 1953 half of Germany’s external debts, including their interest payments, were wiped out at the behest of a bankrupt Britain?

And furthermore, are we not aware that the Americans insisted the remaining debt payments could be spread out over a term of three decades?

Why doesn’t someone remind the Germans – and those in Ireland who want to be the best boys in the Teutonic class – that in the 1950s Germany’s debt was less than 20 per cent of their GDP, while much of the rest of western Europe in the 1950s struggled with debts of about 200 per cent of GDP?

How else do you think Germany could have rebuilt itself?

Albrecht Ritschl, an economic historian at the London School of Economics, estimated that the total debt forgiveness West Germany received from 1947 to 1953 was more than 280 per cent of Germany’s 1950 GDP.

This compares to 100 per cent of GDP that Greece has been pledged in aid since 2010. So the frugal Germans – who destroyed Europe, in case you had forgotten – got almost three times more debt forgiveness than the Greeks, who didn’t kill anyone!

Why doesn’t someone also point out that a clause in the London Agreement of 1953, which wiped out half of Germany’s debts determined that West Germany should only pay for the debts out of its trade surplus? This is exactly what the Greeks have put on the table, but they are rebuked by the likes of Christine Lagarde for not being credible.

Do our Department of Finance legates (who are playing a sleeveen role in this shameful piece of political theatre) not know that Germany’s debt repayment was limited in any one year to 3 per cent of West Germany’s export revenues?

What did this mean?

It meant that Germany’s creditors had to buy West German exports in order to be paid. Therefore, Germany did not have to resort to the Ponzi scheme of issuing new debt to pay for old debt.

Imagine if Greece asked that a certain percentage of Germans were obliged for the next ten years to take their holiday in Greece in order to give Greece the hard currency to pay back German banks?

It sounds strange, but that’s exactly the type of deal that Germany was given after World War II.

These are the overlooked facts. They have been replaced by the usual stereotypes that the Greeks – and by extension Italians, Spanish, Portuguese – are lazy Mediterraneans who want a German lifestyle but aren’t prepared to work for it.

We are witnessing a pathetic and shameful reinvention of history going on. Tomorrow there will be a Versailles Treaty-style conference, where the rest of Europe will dictate terms to the Greeks. By talking about the Greek exit from the euro on Thursday, the mainstream of Europe, who are supposed to do everything to make the euro an irrevocable system, have enfeebled the Greeks by forcing a bank run.

The Greeks are on their knees now – all the better to bully.

If the ECB turns off the taps, the banks in Athens will fold. Rather than protect the Greek banking system, the European Union has done everything in its power to crush it.

The Greeks are not innocent in this drama, but the crucial aspect to understand is that Syriza is the consequence not the cause of the crisis. The crisis was caused by German banks (and others) lending money to successive corrupt Greek governments.

None of these governments were ever described as radical when they were being feted in Berlin and Brussels, yet they were radically reckless.

Now the government that is charged with trying to sort everything out is labelled radical! How does that make you feel?

History is on the side of the Greeks. Whatever happens, Greece will survive, but if the euro system is based on selective interpretations of economic history, what hope has it in the next crisis?

Thank God we still have the pound sterling.

[rasselasss]

Although all the countries in this link have differing healthcare etc., it does give an idea to the demonising of the Greek economy at the moment and which European countries have the better pensions.

[rasselasss]

http://conversation.which.co.uk/money/u ... son-serps/

[terry5732]

Greece is broken

Only failure has a chance of waking up it's residents to reality

Sometimes education is difficult

[gravitationallychallenged]

Greece is a perfect example of the 'order out of chaos' method used by the World Bank and IMF. They forced Greece to sign on to the bank bailout of 2008.

This unpayable debt burden is used to justify 'austerity measures' and currency controls which creates social upheaval among the dependent and lower classes. The resulting chaos is used to instill fear in the other social classes which will compel them to accept whatever solutions the 'authorities' implement. Since the sovereign debt of each government and the corresponding derivative contracts have been sold worldwide and their globalized economies are interdependent, there will be a global financial crises when the governments begin failing. This global crisis will be used to justify an omnipotent centralized world government and military force to restore stability.

A solution to the financial crisis will be offered by the United Nations, IMF and World Bank which will replace the current governments and financial institutions of the earth. They will create a digital cyber currency that will require everyone to be electronically identified. They will have absolute dominion over world wide commerce and taxation. Since physical currency will have been eliminated, there will be no more bank runs as is happening in Greece.

What we're witnessing is the prelude to the creation of the 'mark of the beast' system foretold in Revelation 13:6-7.

http://www.hangthebankers.com/how-greec ... e-bankers/

[Grimer]

You could well be right.

[iacob alex]

Hi !
Remember an old,very old Roman saying: "Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes"/"Temi i greci,anche quando portano doni".
So,old news...
Al_ex

[MrTim]

^^ Sorry, that's all Greek to me... ;-)

Anyone who thinks chronic debt-skippers are going to get serious about paying back loans after a huge and generous forgiveness, please raise your hands, and then slap yourselves in the faces with them.

[Grimer]

"Did you know that the Marshall Plan for Germany after the Second World War was only introduced after the first plan (the Morgenthau plan) was abandoned because it was deemed unworkable? The first plan called The Post-Surrender Program for Germany was the one that the US and Britain wanted to implement and it centered on the complete “pastoralisation� of defeated Germany.
Once the country was divided, the Allies wanted to turn the industrial western part of the country into a giant meadow. In fact, the Nazis were aware of the plan from 1943 and Goebbels used it to try to exalt the jaded German population in the west into one last desperate feat of resistance.

The plan, implemented from the end of 1945, involved dismantling large parts of German industry and shipping it to France and the UK. The idea was that Germany should never again have the industrial power to wage war because these people couldn’t ever be trusted again.

The main areas that were to be reduced to pasture were the industrial Ruhr Valley and manufacturing cities and towns such as Freiburg im Breisga in the state of Baden-Württemberg, which in 1945 was home to the three-year-old Wolfgang Schäuble. Imagine that little boy’s later life and career had the Allies stuck to this plan?

However in 1947, Harry Truman, the US President, surveyed the wasteland of Europe and concluded that the only way this plan could work would be to remove 25 million Germans – like the Schäuble family – from Germany because otherwise these idle people wouldn’t make model peaceful citizens and these people had to do something if the world was to be kept safe from the Germans.

His enlightened vision led to the Marshall plan, which involved the Americans actually supporting and rebuilding the very German industry which produced the weapons that killed hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers a few years earlier.

In 1948, the Americans underpinned the creation of the Deutschmark, which eliminated all German domestic debt. The Americans facilitated the set up of the Bundesbank and then, in 1953, the Americans and the British oversaw the forgiveness of 50 per cent of all German external debt.

What’s more, the Allies deemed that German debt repayments could only be paid out of the German trade surplus, could never exceed 3 per cent of GDP and, in an inspired move, American contractors in Europe were obliged to buy a certain amount of industrial goods from German manufacturers to make sure that German industry recovered and that Germany had the hard currency to pay this much reduced national debt.

Ironically, the people who benefited most from these measures were Germany’s war generation who were given the chance of a clean slate. These people, like Wolfgang Schäuble, were not lumbered with the sins of their fathers and were given a chance.

Contrast this enlightened and ultimately highly successful approach to Germany’s debts and its economy with the German treatment of Greece.

The reaction to the Greek referendum last week was not to sit up and maybe listen to the Greeks but it was to engineer a run on the Greek banks. The chief baiter of Greece has been Wolfgang Schäuble, the little German boy whose life in 1947 was saved and prospects underpinned by enlightened Americans!

The Germans and their other vacuous pom-pom cheerleaders threatened the Greeks with being forced out of the euro. People panic if their savings are threatened. Threatening your nest egg is a form of aggressive financial warfare. It is a form of psychological terror because the real fear of a bank run is that you will be the last person in the queue at the ATM and every time someone takes money out, there will be a bigger chance that when you put your card in the ATM there will be nothing left. The panic is terrifying.

Contrast this nasty abuse of the average Greek via currency threats with the fact that Americans introduced and financed a stable currency for the Germans in 1947, thus eliminating a source of anxiety for the defeated German people. These were people like Wolfgang Schäuble’s mother with her three infants.

Remember this is the euro that was supposed to be irrevocable. Now it is a conditional currency. We should remember that, and that it is conditional on a set of rules that change when Germany wants them to.

The ECB acted as the executioner in chief here by strangling the Greek banks’ access to funding. As the Greek people panicked and tried to take their savings out of the banks, the ECB refused to replace the exiting money, ensuring that the banks couldn’t re-open.

Just consider this for a minute: have you ever heard of a group of peacetime countries actively trying to wreck another country’s banking system?

Have you ever heard of a central bank actively trying to make a banking system weaker not stronger?

The key mandate of a central bank is to protect the payments system of the currency it prints and the banks in that system. But here we have the ECB, in our name, destroying the average Greek business’ ability to trade. It is doing all this in an effort to turn Europe into a “creditors paradise� where all loans are made good irrespective of whether or not the loans were made responsibly or not.

No one is saying that successive Greek governments are not responsible for this mess. Countries go bankrupt slowly after years of mismanagement, but when we have bankruptcy, both the lender and borrower should pay. The latest austerity terms that the Greeks have been forced to accept today or face being ejected from the Euro will not help Greece grow. Everyone knows this.

So what is the point?

To answer this we have to consider what a crisis should be used for. You can use a crisis to do two things. The first is to identify the problems and solve them so that they don’t happen again. The second thing you can do is use the crisis to teach someone a lesson.

Germany is using this crisis to teach the Greeks a lesson. Germany knows the money is gone and will never be paid back, so it has to look tough to its electorate in order to be seen as in control. The entire Euro project has now being reduced to the politics of the next German election.

Imagine what sort of life Wolfgang Schäuble would have had if Harry Truman had taken that approach to Germany in 1947?"

[terry5732]

Sorry, there is no similarity in the two