"I was being called to surrender the very citadel of my self. I was completely in the dark. I did not really know what repentance was or what I was required to repent of. It was indeed the turning point of my life. God had brought me to my knees and made me acknowledge my own nothingness, and out of that knowledge I had been reborn. I was no longer the centre of my life, and therefore I could see God in everything." Bede Griffiths
"The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty."
Abraham Lincoln
The US Federal Reserve and Congress remind me very much of the Troika.
All of them are caught in a credibility trap of self-serving constraints and things-which-we-cannot-discuss-openly. And all of them are sowing the wind, to reap the whirlwind sometime later this year, maybe earlier next year. The timing of such sea change is difficult.
But no matter when it does come, they will not see it coming.
It is important to remember that there is a difference, especially in these days of upper classes and ruling elites, between the people of a nation and their governments.
So when I am hitting the criticism button hard on Germany or the US or the UK for example, I am referring to those who are 'running the show' so to speak. Oh I know very well that they will deny that they are running things, are just humble servants to the people, and so forth when any consequences or blame shows up. But moreso now than ever the ruling classes are running the show with much less reference to their own people than one might expect in normal times, which might be small enough at that.
And a people are diverse, and broadly so, except in crude stereotypes that crush out individuality. There are some cultural markers, some customs that tend to adhere perhaps, but even these can vary widely within a people. Southern Germans are not the same as northern Germans, anymore more than someone from New Mexico is like someone from Brooklyn, or someone from Manchester is like someone from the West End of London.
If anything, I think we are vastly underestimating the rise of the class system once again, with the historic gulf in economic equality. People still tend to remark 'tribal' lines more than they do socio-economic differences, but the class lines are clearly there now. The upper class knows and notes them, and will go to great lengths to get their children in the 'right schools' and with the 'right crowd.'
The US economic numbers this morning sucked out loud. The Fed will still raise rates, because they have stopped caring about the real economy sometime ago. It enters into their calculation primarily as a potential food source for the Banks. There is no recovery, and most economists know it but will pretend otherwise until 'something happens.'
Gold and silver are being capped, by the folks I have noted and for the reasons that are obvious. It is a competing currency that some jokers have decided is 'bad' for them. Oh yes they will make up rationales and stories, but at the end of the day they are being self-serving and corrupt.
There are some people who think that the system belongs to them and should serve their interests. And you are not one of them. You may like to think that you are, and a lot of people who are not do. They can point to someone 'lower' on the ladder and exult in their position. Let me assure you, to the real ruling class you are just working a different section of the fields.
It is almost funny sometimes, what people will do and say when they think they can get in with the in-crowd. Oh to be invited up into the big house! But if you show up on the doorstep of real power, it had better be with a serving towel over your arm, and a proper sense of your place. When it comes to sitting down to dinner you and yours are there, on the menu.
And they will continue to distort economic and public policy to serve their own narrow interests until someone finally stops them. They will not stop it by themselves. After all, they are winning...
I figure we have about 15 or so more points of upside potential in the SP 500, barring exogenous events, and then it turns into a slower slog higher with the usual wash and rinse cycles to keep the HFT and predator trading desks happy.
"Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
Frederick Douglass
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras seems to have folded precipitously, after apparently having taken all other options off the table including a Grexit, a movement toward the burgeoning China Development Bank, an impasse.
His strategy seemed a bit out of joint. I have heard that Victoria Nuland made him an offer he could not refuse, and he did not wish or did not have the option to offer a 'principled resignation' as did Varoufakis.
It could be that he was then taken aback and surprised by the sheer ferocity of the European (German) proposal, which was to essentially make Greek into a protectorate, and to visit a looting of national assets, given that the loans being granted are completely unpayable and the collateral will be forfeit.
He certainly is not the first Western leader to have capitulated when a 'gun' has been held to their head. There is a certain rhyme, and a sense of déjà vu in all this. We must do these things, because of the imperative of (pick one: destiny, our blood, they have given us no choice, it is in their nature to be ruled, to safeguard our freedom, and/or the logic of the market)
There was intraday commentary along these lines here.
There is certainly room for criticizing Syriza in this. I admit I was supportive of their efforts, and still am. I will try not to judge their efforts too harshly until all the facts are revealed. Since I am not eager to be a martyr, I rarely find it appropriate to insist on that path for anyone else. But I did think this characterization from John Pilger bears some merit.
The leaders of Syriza are revolutionaries of a kind – but their revolution is the perverse, familiar appropriation of social democratic and parliamentary movements by liberals groomed to comply with neo-liberal drivel and a social engineering whose authentic face is that of Wolfgang Schauble, Germany’s finance minister, an imperial thug.
Like the Labour Party in Britain and its equivalents among former social democratic parties such as the Labor Party in Australia, still describing themselves as 'liberal' or even 'left', Syriza is the product of an affluent, highly privileged, educated middle class, “schooled in postmodernism”, as Alex Lantier wrote.
For them, class is the unmentionable, let alone an enduring struggle, regardless of the reality of the lives of most human beings. Syriza’s luminaries are well-groomed; they lead not the resistance that ordinary people crave, as the Greek electorate has so bravely demonstrated, but “better terms” of a venal status quo that corrals and punishes the poor. When merged with “identity politics” and its insidious distractions, the consequence is not resistance, but subservience. “Mainstream” political life in Britain exemplifies this.
I wonder how much of Anglo-American political realities that Pilger is projecting on the Greeks. It is hard to me to judge.
But this is mere speculation and second guessing, and we have to focus on what is next. Certainly the Greek people will be foolish to accept the terms to which their Prime Minister has agreed. But what they will do about it, if anything, is another matter. One hopes that they will make a stand, if only to break the momentum of what James Galbraith has called 'the neoliberal project' in which the US in involved despite all its dissembling about it.
Those who complain about the abuse of power and financial repression in their own cases, as those in the precious metals are sometimes known to do, are foolish if they think that what is happening in Greece means nothing for them. The cause of freedom makes all free people brothers and sisters, and those who see themselves as standing proudly alone will fall, miserably and alone.
The global financial class is pleased that any pain to be visited from the bad behavior of, wait for it, the global financial class including some of the usual and almost omnipresent suspects, will be presumably visited upon the Greek public alone.
And there will be a feast of sorts for the vulture class.
This is the continuation of a financial strategy being pursued by the Western developed economies for some years now. It is not 'ordoliberal', which is a nice historical diversion, so much as neo-liberal, a fashion of political management that has swept the West thanks in great part to the economic and political influence of the US and the UK.
What makes it different in this case of Greece is that it is being done, not to a Third World country, but to a long established Western nation and a member of the European community. If there is any good to come out of this, at least the neo-liberal financial class has been revealed for who and what they truly are. And so we can no longer claim any illusions, no plausible excuse in our believing them once again.
‘In the [1967] coup d’état the choice of weapon used in order to bring down democracy then was the tanks. Well, this time it was the banks. The banks were used by foreign powers to take over the government. The difference is that this time they’re taking over all public property.’
Yanis Varoufakis
And so we see Hillary the populist railing about wages and Wall Street today, while riding on a tidal wave of big money, insider dealings, and soft payoffs from the moneyed interests. But it is all in the patter, the words, the quality of the performance, the identity politics, don't ya know. This is a spectacle, a play on the national stage, and an act of political fiction. And so facts don't matter, just the entertainment factor. How else could one account for at least half of the Republican candidates?
We are seeing the same thing being done on a much more local scale in the UK and the US surely, with certain locales being turned into virtual protectorates after being caught up in a web of corruption, financial fraud, and unpayable debts by officially sanctioned Banks.
Consider this not an anomaly, but an experiment in progress, with more to follow.
Perhaps the Greeks made a mistake, and relied too much on rationality, on a belief in a Eurozone in which good sense and reason would prevail. As it was, the Germans were willing to ruthlessly crush the Greek banking system, while the ECB and IMF stood idly by, fomenting a financial panic and humanitarian disaster in order to displace a sovereign government and put an entire nation 'in its place.' We certainly have seen this kind of example made before.
This was an exercise in raw power. It was a financial blitzkrieg, an act of economic warfare and reckless destruction on a people that ought to be condemned by the free world. But this kind of ruthless abuse of financial systems seems to be the accepted thing now amongst the developed economies. And we might view Greece as a sort of an experiment in a new form of warfare and ruthlessness, as were Guernica, Warsaw, and Lidice.
It is a shame if the Greeks have not prepared for Grexit, although there are still clearly options despite the naysayers who see only difficulties in everything. Freedom is rarely the easier way.
The lesson that the countries of the Eurozone cannot trust Germany to act with wisdom and goodwill was known, but now we also see that restraint is also not in their repetoire. If one can read between the lines, it would be a pity if the rest of the European countries do not start planning now for their own active exit from such an failed concept as the European Monetary Union.
And it would be a tragedy if the rest of the world does not now see plainly where a single currency for the world would also take them, where it is already taking them. Modern theories about its benign utility to do only good aside, money is raw power. And one must be exceptionally careful of granting that power to create and distribute and manage money into the hands of vain and corruptible people without stringent transparency, checks and balances, and provisions for justice and individual freedom.
Are the lights going out all over Europe? Not yet, but there is a darkness casting its shadow over the earth. I fear that Greece is only the beginning of a new phase in the degradation of the human condition by the power of insatiable greed, and spiritual wickedness in high places.
"The earth, entire peoples and individual persons are being brutally punished. And behind all this pain, death and destruction there is the stench of what Basil of Caesarea called 'the dung of the devil'. An unfettered pursuit of money rules. The service of the common good is left behind.
Once capital becomes an idol and guides people’s decisions, once greed for money presides over the entire socioeconomic system, it ruins society, it condemns and enslaves men and women, it destroys human fraternity, it sets people against one another and, as we clearly see, it even puts at risk our common home."
"What is at stake is a rather heroic rebellion by a very beleaguered people against a doctrine which has been destroying their lives — the austerity doctrine and the whole neoliberal project. For the rest of us, what is at stake is whether we have the moral courage in the sense of ethical responsibility to stand up to it."
It is probably less an issue of ethical responsibility and more an act of self-interest for most. Having taken their fill of the Third World, and now working their way into the developed nations, why would anyone assume that Greece would be sufficient for the maw of neoliberal greed.
The above interview with Galbraith is worth reading. For one thing it contains the seed of the current spin that Tsipras called the referendum in order to lose it, and to somehow save himself and betray the Greeks. And for another you will be able to read what Jamie Galbraith really thinks, the parts that the friends of the financial establishment have carefully excluded from their versions of the story.
The calling of the referendum was politically brilliant, because it defused the notion of an extremist government standing irrationally against the Troika. This derailed the path towards a 'color revolution' backed by the oligarchs, to take out these mad leftists who were not speaking for the people.
Remember the economic decision involving Europe which provoked the recent coup d'état in the Ukraine? In that case the government did not have the backing of the people, and it took hold, at least in the Western portions of the country. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Of course the Greek referendum was famously too close to predict when first called by Syriza, and surprisingly late in the game for most everyone else as you may recall And Tsipras called it to lose? How soon some choose to forget. But it changed the course of events in a dramatic way. As it was it did not help their bargaining position, but as Galbraith says they did not expect it to improve their bargaining position because their counterparts were implacable and not negotiating in good faith.
But it put the field of play into better terms if your goal is playing for survival, and time. Syriza is knocking down all the rationales and excuses to visit harsh terms on Greece that the Troika and their enablers are using. They are exposing the Eurocrats for what they really are.
Empires set on unsustainable foundations are like financial bubbles and Ponzi schemes. They are inherently non-productive and consuming, so they must continue to grow, or choke on their own detritus. Transferring wealth as your major economic policy requires a steady source of new supply.
Most of the American media has fallen into line with the neoliberal agenda. It might seem surprising, but power has its attraction under corporatism, even for people who would ordinarily consider themselves to be 'liberal.'
There are concerning things happening in the Western world, and a lack of traction towards individual freedom amongst 'the great democracies.'
We look with a sense of foreboding at Germany's growing desire to bring their version of order and efficient management of lands and people to the rest of Europe.
The growing militancy in Japan, and Abe's aggressive pushing aside of constitutional restraints, is undernoted in the West, but of great concern to those in Asia.
Greece would look to the US for assistance in vain, given that Obama's representative to the continent is Victoria Nuland, the bearer of color revolutions and the reaping of ancient lands and cultures for profit.
No, even the developed nations of the West have been caught up in the will to power.
What is good? All that enhances the feeling of power, the Will to Power, and the power itself in man. What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is increasing--that resistance has been overcome. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but competence.
The first principle of our humanism is that the weak and the failures shall perish. And they ought to be helped to perish. What is more harmful than any vice? Active pity for all failure and weakness--- Christianity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
At least in this latest incarnation of the will to power some, including the Pope thank God, are speaking out early, publicly, and strongly against the rising tide of injustice, the senseless abuse and indifference towards people, especially the vulnerable and the weakest, and the impulse towards dehumanizing bureaucratic rule and neo-totalitarianism.
How many human lives, how much misery, how much of the richness of the land, are we willing to sacrifice to the indifferent god of the markets and its insatiable Banks.
As always silence is complicity, and apathy is a comfort to something as old as Babylon, and evil as sin.
Behind Germany’s refusal to grant Greece debt relief
Posted on by yanisv
Tomorrow’s EU Summit will seal Greece’s fate in the Eurozone. As these lines are being written, Euclid Tsakalotos, my great friend, comrade and successor as Greece’s Finance Ministry is heading for a Eurogroup meeting that will determine whether a last ditch agreement between Greece and our creditors is reached and whether this agreement contains the degree of debt relief that could render the Greek economy viable within the Euro Area.
Euclid is taking with him a moderate, well-thought out debt restructuring plan that is undoubtedly in the interests both of Greece and its creditors. (Details of it I intend to publish here on Monday, once the dust has settled.) If these modest debt restructuring proposals are turned down, as the German finance minister has foreshadowed, Sunday’s EU Summit will be deciding between kicking Greece out of the Eurozone now or keeping it in for a little while longer, in a state of deepening destitution, until it leaves some time in the future.
The question is: Why is the German finance Minister, Dr Wolfgang Schäuble, resisting a sensible, mild, mutually beneficial debt restructure? The following op-ed just published in today’s The Guardian offers my answer. [Please note that the Guardian’s title was not of my choosing. Mine read, as above: Behind Germany’s refusal to grant Greece debt relief ). Click here for the op-ed or…
Greece’s financial drama has dominated the headlines for five years for one reason: the stubborn refusal of our creditors to offer essential debt relief. Why, against common sense, against the IMF’s verdict and against the everyday practices of bankers facing stressed debtors, do they resist a debt restructure? The answer cannot be found in economics because it resides deep in Europe’s labyrinthine politics.
In 2010, the Greek state became insolvent. Two options consistent with continuing membership of the eurozone presented themselves: the sensible one, that any decent banker would recommend – restructuring the debt and reforming the economy; and the toxic option – extending new loans to a bankrupt entity while pretending that it remains solvent.
Official Europe chose the second option, putting the bailing out of French and German banks exposed to Greek public debt above Greece’s socioeconomic viability. A debt restructure would have implied losses for the bankers on their Greek debt holdings.Keen to avoid confessing to parliaments that taxpayers would have to pay again for the banks by means of unsustainable new loans, EU officials presented the Greek state’s insolvency as a problem of illiquidity, and justified the “bailout” as a case of “solidarity” with the Greeks.
To frame the cynical transfer of irretrievable private losses on to the shoulders of taxpayers as an exercise in “tough love”, record austerity was imposed on Greece, whose national income, in turn – from which new and old debts had to be repaid – diminished by more than a quarter. It takes the mathematical expertise of a smart eight-year-old to know that this process could not end well.
Once the sordid operation was complete, Europe had automatically acquired another reason for refusing to discuss debt restructuring: it would now hit the pockets of European citizens! And so increasing doses of austerity were administered while the debt grew larger, forcing creditors to extend more loans in exchange for even more austerity.
Our government was elected on a mandate to end this doom loop; to demand debt restructuring and an end to crippling austerity. Negotiations have reached their much publicised impasse for a simple reason: our creditors continue to rule out any tangible debt restructuring while insisting that our unpayable debt be repaid “parametrically” by the weakest of Greeks, their children and their grandchildren.
In my first week as minister for finance I was visited by Jeroen Dijsselbloem, president of the Eurogroup (the eurozone finance ministers), who put a stark choice to me: accept the bailout’s “logic” and drop any demands for debt restructuring or your loan agreement will “crash” – the unsaid repercussion being that Greece’s banks would be boarded up.
Five months of negotiations ensued under conditions of monetary asphyxiation and an induced bank-run supervised and administered by the European Central Bank. The writing was on the wall: unless we capitulated, we would soon be facing capital controls, quasi-functioning cash machines, a prolonged bank holiday and, ultimately, Grexit.
The threat of Grexit has had a brief rollercoaster of a history. In 2010 it put the fear of God in financiers’ hearts and minds as their banks were replete with Greek debt. Even in 2012, when Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, decided that Grexit’s costs were a worthwhile “investment” as a way of disciplining France et al, the prospect continued to scare the living daylights out of almost everyone else.
By the time Syriza won power last January, and as if to confirm our claim that the “bailouts” had nothing to do with rescuing Greece (and everything to do with ringfencing northern Europe), a large majority within the Eurogroup – under the tutelage of Schäuble – had adopted Grexit either as their preferred outcome or weapon of choice against our government.
Greeks, rightly, shiver at the thought of amputation from monetary union. Exiting a common currency is nothing like severing a peg, as Britain did in 1992, when Norman Lamont famously sang in the shower the morning sterling quit the European exchange rate mechanism (ERM). Alas, Greece does not have a currency whose peg with the euro can be cut. It has the euro – a foreign currency fully administered by a creditor inimical to restructuring our nation’s unsustainable debt.
To exit, we would have to create a new currency from scratch. In occupied Iraq, the introduction of new paper money took almost a year, 20 or so Boeing 747s, the mobilisation of the US military’s might, three printing firms and hundreds of trucks. In the absence of such support, Grexit would be the equivalent of announcing a large devaluation more than 18 months in advance: a recipe for liquidating all Greek capital stock and transferring it abroad by any means available.
With Grexit reinforcing the ECB-induced bank run, our attempts to put debt restructuring back on the negotiating table fell on deaf ears. Time and again we were told that this was a matter for an unspecified future that would follow the “programme’s successful completion” – a stupendous Catch-22 since the “programme” could never succeed without a debt restructure.
This weekend brings the climax of the talks as Euclid Tsakalotos, my successor, strives, again, to put the horse before the cart – to convince a hostile Eurogroup that debt restructuring is a prerequisite of success for reforming Greece, not an ex-post reward for it. Why is this so hard to get across? I see three reasons.
One is that institutional inertia is hard to beat. A second, that unsustainable debt gives creditors immense power over debtors – and power, as we know, corrupts even the finest. But it is the third which seems to me more pertinent and, indeed, more interesting.
The euro is a hybrid of a fixed exchange-rate regime, like the 1980s ERM, or the 1930s gold standard, and a state currency. The former relies on the fear of expulsion to hold together, while state money involves mechanisms for recycling surpluses between member states (for instance, a federal budget, common bonds). The eurozone falls between these stools – it is more than an exchange-rate regime and less than a state.
And there’s the rub. After the crisis of 2008/9, Europe didn’t know how to respond. Should it prepare the ground for at least one expulsion (that is, Grexit) to strengthen discipline? Or move to a federation? So far it has done neither, its existentialist angst forever rising. Schäuble is convinced that as things stand, he needs a Grexit to clear the air, one way or another. Suddenly, a permanently unsustainable Greek public debt, without which the risk of Grexit would fade, has acquired a new usefulness for Schauble.
What do I mean by that? Based on months of negotiation, my conviction is that the German finance minister wants Greece to be pushed out of the single currency to put the fear of God into the French and have them accept his model of a disciplinarian eurozone.
Let us pray for those whose hearts are hardened against His grace and loving kindness by greed, fear, and pride, and the seductive illusion and crushing isolation of evil.
We pray that we all may experience the three great gifts of our Lord's suffering and triumph: repentance, forgiveness, and thankfulness. And in so doing, may we obtain abundant life, and with it the peace that surpasses all understanding.
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