Just watching the feed on the BBC regarding the Greece vote on the 'austerity package'.
I am perhaps oversimplyfying this ... but in a nutshell it appears that the idea is to completely privatise Greece....
Now, would I be right in thinking that this is mass privatisation will largely benefit the banks, who had no small input in the meltdown in the first place?
Yes, it seems that as we slip over the gentle slope that leads to the financial cliff of oblivion, there is a mad scramble to concentrate wealth into the hands of the few, the rich maintaining their position temporarily by shoving the poor down faster.
maudibe wrote:Now, would I be right in thinking that this is mass privatisation will largely benefit the banks, who had no small input in the meltdown in the first place?
"And complaining that bankers are obsessed with making money is like saying lions are obsessed with eating gazelles."
I experience pleasure and pains, and pursue goals in service of them, so I cannot reasonably deny the right of other sentient agents to do the same - Steven Pinker
It's a repeat of the Asian Tiger collapses in the 90s. Privitise everything with a promise of a bail out, then let the the country go down anyway, once the major international banks have covered their options.
Shock doctrine pure and simple. Greece should follow the Argentine example and default now. It will hurt us, but at least some of the *ankers will lose out too.
Collapse is inevitable. No need to allow the *ankers to squeeze us dry first.
The time to default is now before the debt gets any bigger.
I experience pleasure and pains, and pursue goals in service of them, so I cannot reasonably deny the right of other sentient agents to do the same - Steven Pinker
That's absolutely the plan - you can see the full breakdown of the austerity measures on Zero Hedge and they're pretty horrifying and widespread e.g. cutting the public sector by over 90% over 4 years.
For their sake the absolute best thing to do would be to default now - they're fubared in the short term either way but could recover to an extent and have the benefits of their own currency back rather than getting raped for everything worthwhile and driven to destruction when they will guaranteed to default eventually. It's blatant disaster capitalism.
Check out the documentary "The Corporation", in particular the section about the bail-out of Bolivia. Following privatisation of water privision (along with everything else), the impoverished people were banned from collecting water in their own yards. Popular unrest ensued, and the IMF (for once) was forced to back down.
"We're just waiting, looking skyward as the days go down / Someone promised there'd be answers if we stayed around."
He added, we could try communism, but then Bob Diamond would earn millions from being in the Politburo, only you;d know nothing about it because the newspaper has just the one story and its about how f***ing great your community tractor is.
I wonder what sort of financial impact in real terms all this will have on Mr and Mrs Joe Greek - pretty devestating by the look of it.
Heres a comment from the live feed, which sums it up....
Kalle Hunsaker comments on the BBC World Service Facebook page: Here's the formula: Get loans, build projects that benefit you and your friends. When it all finally falls apart, force everyone else to pay the bill. Rinse and repeat.
maudibe wrote:
Heres a comment from the live feed, which sums it up....
Kalle Hunsaker comments on the BBC World Service Facebook page: Here's the formula: Get loans, build projects that benefit you and your friends. When it all finally falls apart, force everyone else to pay the bill. Rinse and repeat.
Along the same lines, Charles Hugh Smith wrote an interesting article stating that Greece is a Kleptocracy:
Despite a veritable flood of financial and political analysis about Greece, nobody seems to have noticed the obvious: Greece is a kleptocracy. Just as a refresher, here is the definition of kleptocracy. Ask yourself is this doesn't fit Greece like a supple leather glove:
Kleptocracy, alternatively cleptocracy or kleptarchy, from the Ancient Greek for "thief" and "rule," is a term applied to a government subject to control fraud that takes advantage of governmental corruption to extend the personal wealth and political power of government officials and the ruling class (collectively, kleptocrats), via the embezzlement of state funds at the expense of the wider population, sometimes without even the pretense of honest service. The term means "rule by thieves". More
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools - Douglas Adams.
RalphW wrote:It's a repeat of the Asian Tiger collapses in the 90s.
Except that in the 90s there was scope for global oil production to increase, allowing economies that fell over to pick themselves up again. Now the situation is utterly different.
