Author Topic: Here we go again!  (Read 3080 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline Jolly Roger

  • Global Moderator
  • Forum Deity
  • *****
  • Posts: 879
Here we go again!
« on: Friday, 20 May, 2016 @ 09:17:24 »
Quote
Here we are again. Once again, Greece is facing a default in July without an additional European Union bailout. Once again, large cuts in wages and pensions, plus tax increases, have been demanded as a precondition of receiving it. Once again, Greece’s Parliament has yielded to the demands of its so-called creditors.

It needs to be remembered, once again, that Greece’s debt crisis was deliberately imposed on it by Germany, which arbitrarily declared its debt-to-GDP ratio unacceptable, although no international standard for such an action exists and no legislative enactment authorized it. Remember, too, that almost none of the funds from previous bailouts have actually reached Greece. They have simply been an accounting gimmick by which private creditors—the same banks and speculators who brought on the international financial crisis eight years ago—have been recapitalized out of EU funds, which in turn have been recouped from countries whose economies have been targeted to take the hit.

This time around, there has been a dance between the International Monetary Fund, whose staff declared last summer that Greece’s economic situation had become “highly unsustainable,” and the German government of Chancellor Angela Merkel, which refuses to ease the terms it has imposed. It’s a dance because the IMF itself is controlled by Germany and its European Union satellites, plus the United States. What the IMF’s economists think, therefore, has nothing to do with what its governing board actually decides. The idea of a rift between the IMF and Germany, therefore, is simply a sham. It’s business as usual in pulverizing Greece.

https://hellenicnews.com/greece-brexit-professor-robert-zaller/

And from the same article...............

Quote
A Grexit last year would have been of no great economic consequence to the European Union, of whose GDP it now represents less than 2%. Politically, however, it could have been unpredictably destabilizing. But nothing Greece could have done approaches the magnitude of the effect that the British vote on whether or not to remain within the European Union itself will have when it takes place on June 23. Britain has never been a member of the eurozone, and so has been spared some of the fiscal bullying inflicted on other states. But the British feel they have endured enough from the Brussels bureaucrats and their masters in Berlin. Various concessions have been offered them, but a good half of the British public doesn’t want better terms from the EU: it wants separation from it. Whether it will actually vote that way remains to be seen.

I don’t think it’s possible to overestimate the damage to the EU that a Brexit would pose. It’s been a very long time since the EU seemed to herald Europe’s bright future. It’s understood now to represent German hegemony. London’s former mayor, Boris Johnson, one of the most prominent figures in Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party and a man known for speaking his mind, let the rhetorical cat of the bag when he said the other day that the EU had accomplished for Germany what Hitler had been unable to: to reduce the entire continent, Britain included, to German overlordship.