Greek crisis: discussion

I've heard from a friend, who has spoken with her family there, that they have shut down all the pharmacies and that this is creating a whole other level of panic for those who need medications. 

I haven't been following this story too closely but I heard last night that the IMF will be running Greece's economy as a condition for the bailout. The shape of things to come? So much for democracy.

"7. a very critical note: describing the period of the 1930's as an era, above all, of great "social prosperity" in the former Soviet Union without making reference to the Stalinist excesses and crimes and show trials, etc. , casts a dark cloud over this overwise interesting piece. We all know that capitalism was undergoing a profound crisis at the time but this hardly merits sweeping such crimes under the rug. Gah."

-from the earlier babble thread on Greek Austerity, a comment i was greatful for in a critique of a KKE article.

I find it very difficult to take the KKE seriously when they are so false regarding the USSR. 

Perhaps if the KKE hear criticism in this regard they can reexamine evidence from the region.

Otherwise they and their other messages are just written off.

thanks wrote:

"7. a very critical note: describing the period of the 1930's as an era, above all, of great "social prosperity" in the former Soviet Union without making reference to the Stalinist excesses and crimes and show trials, etc. , casts a dark cloud over this overwise interesting piece. We all know that capitalism was undergoing a profound crisis at the time but this hardly merits sweeping such crimes under the rug. Gah."

-from the earlier babble thread on Greek Austerity, a comment i was greatful for in a critique of a KKE article.

I find it very difficult to take the KKE seriously when they are so false regarding the USSR. 

Perhaps if the KKE hear criticism in this regard they can reexamine evidence from the region.

Otherwise they and their other messages are just written off.

Communists get tired of having to repudiate Stalin every time they open their mouths - it can be a distraction from the point they're trying to make. I promise you the KKE has done that on other occasions. I often talk about Christianity without bothering to mention and repudiate the many crimes committed in its name. I certainly do that sometimes but not every time because it can get in the way of what I'm trying to say. I imagine you sometimes talk about Ukraine without including a strong condemnation of anti-semitism and murder of Jews. 

about the Greek crisis,

actually, its not just the Greek crisis.

Harper has just given thirty billion to private bankers. 

This on top of the 200 billion he gave financiers in 2008 through the Bank of Canada.

as many have said, once this public money enters the markets, private bankers game with it.

"The U.S. Federal Reserve and other central banks including the Bank of Canada opened a program to ship U.S. dollars to Europe to further help head off the crisis.

Known as a dollar swap, the program provides funds to foreign private-sector banks to ensure they have enough funds to lend out to customers.

The Bank of Canada arranged for as much as $30 billion from the U.S. central bank if needed, reviving a swap arrangement with the Fed that had been allowed to expire at the start of February."

http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2010/05/10/markets-euro-greece.html#ixzz0neHZg76m

The current trillion dollar public bailout fund is leveraged into thirty trillion or more by global derivatives players, inflating the global money supply.

then interest rates are raised.

the public has to deal with inreased prices for everything, while good jobs are replaced by low wages and instability.

Public services are cut and privatized, crown corporations and resources sold off, to be picked up by private financiers, giving them more to game with in the casino. 

the earth is ruined.  even just a day later, fossil fuel projects go full steam ahead again in the north.

The financial parasites cannot survive without ongoing and increasing public transfusions, and each whimper sends politicians to shovel more to the trough. 

Harper, Obama and the EU don't actually want to rein in global finance.

Another thirty billion !!! i still can't believe it...and no increased transfer payments for health, education, a housing strategy, Indigenous nations...

and Harper lets the Canada Pension Plan sink money into Rockefellers' real estate, to let that corp gamble more in derivatives.

Why doesn't the CPP invest in public bonds for funding fully public services here?  recycle public money and avoid derivatives inflation.

crazy.

thanks wrote:

'great social prosperity' in the USSR !!??  that's not just omitting mention, its rewriting history as the bolsheviks always have.

Stalin was a criminal. That doesn't mean there was nothing good about the economy of the time. And it's the economy they're talking about - not purges and gulags. 

thanks wrote:

um, what part of purges and gulags don't have to do with economy? who does the work? [gulag residents, peasants terrorized by purges] who gets the benefits?  [Party hierarchy].

There was more to the economy than that. I could say more (a lot more) but, based on past experience, I can't see this going anywhere useful so, with respect, I'm out of this one. I'll just say - for the 200,000,000th time - that Stalin committed atrocities. If there was some act of penance I could do, I'd do it but I really don't know what to do except try to be part of making a better world. So can we drop this? 

"Drop Dead Economics": The Financial Crisis in Greece and the European Union

The Wealthy Won’t Pay Their Taxes, So Labor Must Do So

by Michael Hudson

quote:
Financial lobbyists are using the Greek crisis as an object lesson to warn about the need to cut back public spending on Social Security and Medicare. This is the opposite of what the Greek demonstrators are demanding: to reverse the global tax shift off property and finance onto labor, and to give labor’s financial claims for retirement pensions priority over claims by the banks to get fully paid on hundreds of billions of dollars of recklessly bad loans recently reduced to junk status.

The Greek bailout should be thought of as a TARP for German and other European bankers and global currency speculators. Almost $1 trillion is being provided by governments (mainly Germany, at the cost of its own domestic spending) into a kind of escrow account for the Greek government to pay foreign bondholders who bought up these securities at plunging prices over the past few weeks. They will make a killing, as will buyers of hundreds of billions of dollars of credit-default swaps on the Greek government bonds, speculators in euro-swaps and other casino-capitalist gamblers. (Parties on the losing side of these swaps now will need to be bailed out as well, and so on ad infinitum.).....

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19107

mention of the oil reminded me of the Icelandic situation; there were some Norwegian and UK banks involved in speculating in Icelandic currency and interest rates, ruining its economy, while there was new oil to be had in the offshore trench where their oil industries were hoping to operate.

I wonder who the financiers are behind BP and how they or others manipulate exchanges to force governments to approve their exploitations.

maybe pipeline interests were speculating in Greece too.

..the implications of the "drop dead" article alarmed me. i would expect that canadians would come together and fight valiantly as the greek workers do today. but i'm not sure. i believe i know where my mp, libby davies is at but i'm not sure where the ndp stands. so i sent an email to libby and jack asking the question. i also sent a link, with quotes, of the "drop dead" piece. this is what i wrote. 

greetings...
..sooner or later what is happening in greece is coming to canada. the position so far of the social democratic governments in europe has supported shifting the debt created by the financial crisis onto people that had nothing to do with that creation.
..i know where the libs and the cons stand on this matter so i don't need to be educated on that. what i would like to know is where the federal ndp is on these matters. it would be good to have people in parliament that said no, in a strong way, to shifting this debt.
..i thank you in advance for your time.

thanks wrote:

mention of the oil reminded me of the Icelandic situation; there were some Norwegian and UK banks involved in speculating in Icelandic currency and interest rates, ruining its economy, while there was new oil to be had in the offshore trench where their oil industries were hoping to operate.

I wonder who the financiers are behind BP and how they or others manipulate exchanges to force governments to approve their exploitations.

maybe pipeline interests were speculating in Greece too.

Capitalists were speculating in both oil and Greece. Capitalism is a predatory ideology that reduces humans to mere commodities to be traded and disposed of like a Tim Hortons cup. Capitalism is responsible for crimes against humanity still being tabulated as it kills a half million children every single day. From its concentration camps in the mid-east, to its torture chambers spread throughout the globe, to the gulags it funds and maintains wherever humans resist, capitalism and its adherents make Stalin look a weak competitor for the title of monster. The genius of capitalism is that it represents a continuous and unbroken line of monsters to which the crimes can't be easily personally assigned leaving weak minded folk to place the evils of the ideology into memory holes whereas Stalin takes personal responsibiliy for his atrocities. I suppose that makes Stalin a good conservative. In any case capitalism is succeeding where Stalin never did dare to tread in placing the financial interests of a cabal of "investors" before all life on the planet. If Christians believe God created life, then surely that which systematically extinguishes life is the opposite of God--the antischrist. And that would be capitalism.

writer wrote:

Amen.

Yeah, that was good, Frustrated Mess. 

The People of Greece are Fighting For the Whole of Europe

http://democracynow.org/2010/5/11/the_people_of_greece_are_fighting

"Tariq Ali and Mark Weisbrot discuss Greece's economic crisis and Popular Uprising"

and regarding FMs note, I see Stalin as one of the monsters in the unbroken line; he traded in existing currencies with existing western powers, using stolen resources and mass terror. 

_______

regarding the rest of the Democracy Now link, Weisbrot had some useful observations, but i disagree that derivatives gaming in national debt is not a large problem.  perhaps he was negating only a focus on Goldman Sachs.  all the players are a problem, and the system itself.

Quote:

Answer: Both reject government being taken over by the financial oligarchy to shift the tax burden onto labor.

Funny that the tea partiers only did so when a black man got elected. A few years ago, they were more than happy to support governments that shifted taxes onto the little guy and gave breaks to the big guy.

Similarly, I don't recall the Greeks rioting in the streets when the government and this "financial oligarchy" were helping Greece find new prosperity. Only when things crashed did it really seem to be a big problem. Heck, I doubt many current "tea partiers" were all that upset when they could suddenly buy a house or a speculation property with no money down, at unbelieveably low rates. Everything was EXCELLENT then.

thanks wrote:

and regarding FMs note, I see Stalin as one of the monsters in the unbroken line; he traded in existing currencies with existing western powers, using stolen resources and mass terror.

What if Stalin had not used slave labour and cheap labour? Would it have given Nazi Germany an unfair advantage in preparations for the war of annihilation against Soviet communism? The Soviets didn't have the same economic edge in the decade long preparations for western aggression against the revolution part II. None of IBM, or Standard oil of New Jersey, INCO, IG Farben, Ford, Studebaker, GM, Wall Street bankers and German industrialists were on the Soviet or Spanish Republican or Maoist side of things then.

Michael Hudson says a number of former Soviet countries have maintained their sovereign currencies and will decide what to do about the debt crises over the summer and autumn. Perhaps they will choose wisely.

There have been good points brought up on the nature of the austerity package. Maybe corporate profits could be taxed more (Greece is already increasing taxes on corporate profits, by the way), certainly that country could do something about going after wealthy tax dodgers. But in principle, I agree with Sven and Snert. Greece didn't lose their fiscal sovereignty because of the predatory nature of capitalism, or whatever. They lost their fiscal sovereignty because the governments they elected were incompetent, dishonest, and corrupt. If it comforts you, these governments were mostly conservative.

The KKE says that the peoples of Europe should rise up. They won't. They get it. They've witnessed the communist experiment, its repressiveness, its failures, and its ungodly apartment complexes first hand. They know that you don't have to get into the kind of hole Greece is in if you deal with your balance books competently and honestly.

The truth is that they wanted Soviet socialism democratizing in a number of those countries not western style capitalism, and especially not US style capitalism. Western world oligarchs, HIID, USAID, etc helped their crooks in government and nomenklatura to steal the public good from under their feet. Perestroika was the largest theft of the commons(Marxian primitive accumulation) since enclosure era England.

[url=http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/more-woes-for-greek-ec... woes for Greek economy[/url]

Quote:

Images of flaming buildings and riots in Athens during last week's protests in debt-ridden Greece have taken an early toll on the country's vital tourism industry, hotel owners said Thursday.

West Coast Greeny wrote:

the immediate issue is their sovereign debt - or to put it in simpler terms - where the fuck do I get $70Billion so I can pay public servants at all.

From the Democracy Now interview above:

Quote:

MARK WEISBROT: [...] The economic theory which they’re using is called an internal devaluation, because they’re keeping the euro, and they want to keep the euro, and so what they’re trying to do is create enough unemployment so that wages and prices will fall, and then Greece can become competitive, even keeping the same nominal exchange rate with the euro. So this is a process that goes on quite a long time, and it’s very brutal, and it doesn’t usually work. In fact, the projections from the Greek government say that, you know, their debt is now 115 percent of GDP, and if they go through the program and it works, then two-and-a-half years from now they have a debt of 149 percent of GDP.

[...]

a lot of people have written about the fundamental problem of having these countries like Greece in the euro, because it’s an overvalued currency for them. And that is a problem. And, you know, that’s why, you know, they should really consider getting out of the euro as one option.

If the European Union and the IMF and the European Central Bank, which are the parties that they’re negotiating with, if they’re not willing to give them a program that allows them to grow out of it, but instead they’re telling them they have to shrink until some day the rest of the world economy will rescue them by, you know, providing demand for their exports or by a huge inflow of capital, which is not on the horizon, by the way—I mean, the European Union is only projected to grow by one percent over this year—so if, in fact, you know, they’re not willing to allow them to grow out of the recession, then the Greek government should just not accept it, and they could devalue their currency and renegotiate their debt, which is what Argentina did, for example, at the end of 2001, and it was very successful for them. The economy shrank for only one quarter, and then it grew by 63 percent over the next six years. So...there are alternatives

When you borrow foreign money and get into a position where borrowing more isn't optional anymore, this is what happens.

West Coast Greeny wrote:

Second, if Greece left the Euro (a process that could take years), you could bet that the New Drachma would be quickly devalued. This would really have the same effect on the Greek people as these austerity measures, maybe a worse one.

Which is exactly why Greece cannot escape dealing with this problem.

The Greeks can't simply say, "We're not going to play this game anymore!" and then pretend that the problems will go away.  All alternatives present significant pain for the Greeks...and the Socialist PM and his party have concluded that the EU/IMF loans are the least painful of the various alternatives.

..as soon as you default everything becomes negotiable. not so if you accept what the bankers and speculators want. the issue is control.