It’s Not The Greeks Who Failed, It’s The EU

 

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  • #18684

    Matson Aircraft refueling at Semakh, British Mandate Palestine 1931 In what universe is it a good thing to have over half of the young people in entir
    [See the full post at: It’s Not The Greeks Who Failed, It’s The EU]

    #18685
    Greenpa
    Participant

    The other very interesting bit just in the news; is the statement from the President of Argentina that she will “dissolve” the state intelligence agency; and replace it with a new one.

    I have long thought that such a step might be the ONLY way to deal with embedded corruption, and simple age, in state institutions. Fire everybody. Start over. My fingers are crossed that she succeeds in her experiment.

    #18686
    Ken Barrows
    Participant

    What should the birth rate in Greece be anyway? I am serious.

    #18690
    John Day
    Participant

    What about that “not South Stream” gas pipeline going from Russia to Turkey to the Greek border?
    There is a lot of restructuring about t happen.
    There are reasons for ongoing partnership and cooperation all through Europe, but the overhanging debt of a system based on exponentially-growth, now in contraction must be written off, globally, and the financial elites need to take complete losses first.
    Can the Eurasian Union help with this restructuring?
    I can’t see anything but a return to the gold standard, and transfers of physical gold, putting a floor under this fully rational collapse of trust.

    #18691
    TheTrivium4TW
    Participant

    The root cause is Debt Money Tyranny where one person’s monetary asset is another person’s INEXTINGUISHABLE monetary liability. Any other spin is misinformation that will lead to non solutions to the ultimate root cause. “Supra-national” equates, 100%, with Debt Money Monopoly financed institutions and operatives. There are NO exceptions.

    The concept that the most powerful entity within a society will control the money of said society is common sense. Since a private international banking cartel controls most of the world’s money, THEY are the most powerful entity within society. When you rub a couple brain cells together independent of the Debt Money Monopoly financed media narratives, you’ll see how easy it is for the Debt Money Monopoly to control government WHEN THEY FINANCE AND PROMOTE THE POLITICIANS WHO WILL DO THEIR BIDDING AND THE GOVERNMENT ITSELF.

    Greece is not a failed experiment, rather, it is an astounding success of how to use debt money to create the feudal system Carroll Quigley said was the goal of the “Money Power.”

    “The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the systems was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank…sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.”
    ~Carroll Quigley, CFR Historian, President Clinton Mentor

    Oh, you thought the Council on Foreign Relations historian and Bill Clinton mentor was kidding? NOT!

    Expect Greece, and the rest of the world outside the Debt Money Monopoly and their servant class, to trend worse and worse over time. Machiavelli said the feudal lords should not let the serfs have too much power so they would be easier to control, right?

    #18694
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    If Syriza becomes too effective, meaning too independent, it will likely be crushed.
    The oligarchs will be obeyed…
    The EU is too unstable to allow anyone to go rogue; it might set a good example.
    Can’t have that now, can we…

    #18698
    John Day
    Participant

    The question is that of how to balance the inevitable “anticipated losses”, while maintaining the overall structure of the financial system.
    “Anticipated losses” is used to denote loss of anticipated-future-production, the promise of which is the foundation of our current monetary system.
    Many “promises” must be broken going forward, which will destroy faith in “promissory notes”. There is a loss of faith in the system gestating now.
    The ability to provide necessities of life, and the ability to enforce lies through violence are the foundations of “political economy”.
    Let’s assume that the power to enforce lies through violence is the stouter of these two pillars now.
    Those in power would rather enforce lies through violence than provide necessities of life for the proletariat when times get tough. That ends up killing the elites by crashing the system, as in French, Russian and Chinese (fairly) recent history.
    Assuming some degree of pragmatic rational self interest, of a sort seen in Soros and (shudder) Kissinger, there will have to be damage-control at all levels.
    Roosevelt did such damage-control with the “new deal”.
    The austerity has lowered birth rates in Greece, and the creeping austerity since 1976 has lowered birth rates in the industrialized world with access to birth control, since then. That’s necessary in a no-growth world. Japan, China, Germany and many others are well into birth rates below replacement, and so is the US, but there’s immigration here.
    The monetary system fails before the production system, based on the structure of things.
    The failure this time goes all the way from the farthest promises ever of future production, back to the historical position of money representing existing, real, productive assets.
    What percentage collapse is that? 80%? You tell me.
    It depends on whether a strip club in Reno is such an asset or not, doesn’t it?
    Farmland which produces without chemical inputs or irrigation is the gold standard, I think. The more temperate the clime, the better.
    Russia, Iran and China are close enough to their recent resets to hold stability-options dear. They all hold precious metals, and commodities like oil, coal, food, factories, with a back-up financial system waiting in the wings. They are developing alternatives openly.
    We have to assume that alternatives are developing secretly in western finance.
    Western finance gets to design the social experiments like Arab Spring, color revolutions, Libyan civil war, breakup of Yugoslavia and now the Greek experiment. Iceland was an odd outlier, as I see it.
    How can haircuts be applied without crashing the system, while maintaining the power structure and avoiding overt and violent regime-change?

    #18699
    E. Swanson
    Participant

    Whether one is a neoconservative or neoliberal or some other version of economic persuasion, all the words spewed in the media tend to ignore the real problem. That is, our notion of economic growth requires energy, which has up to now been provided almost entirely by fossil fuels. Our industrial societies have grown so large that the remaining stocks of such fuels are becoming ever more expensive to extract and the renewable alternatives are not likely to provide anywhere near the same rate of energy supply which our industrial economies require. Indeed, the rapid rise in the price of oil in 2008, briefly hitting $148 a barrel, surely was a major factor in the resulting economic crisis. The recent glut due to fracking and demand decline has not changed the fundamental problem. That our economic dogma has led to massive increases in the debts of nations means that we have mortgaged the future consumption of these resources, assuming that the energy will be available in the coming decades, when the fundamental facts of physics and geology tell us that these resources are finite and decline with each passing year. The oil glut is likely to be only a temporary respite in the long term increase in energy costs as the easy to extract, cheaper resources have been extracted first, with ever more difficult and expensive oil still to be gathered.

    Economics also fails to consider the other side of the energy problem, that of climate change. So far, attempts to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases have only scratched the surface of the problem. It’s been estimated that emissions from developed nations, which includes the US and the EU, must be reduced by 80% if there’s any hope to minimize the warming at only 2C. The first reductions were the easy ones and some of the recent reductions were due to the the decline in production after the Great Recession. Attempts to return to a path of growth in real GNP will likely also result in a return to increasing CO2 emissions. All the while, world population continues to grow and there are still several billions living on a few dollars a day. With all this in mind, I see little hope for the future…

    #18716
    TheTrivium4TW
    Participant

    <<The question is that of how to balance the inevitable “anticipated losses”, while maintaining the overall structure of the financial system.<<

    No. The debt based structure of the financial system has to go. It can’t be maintained if the common person is to avoid serfdom. Anything else is rearranging chairs of the Debt Money Tyranny Titanic.

    >>That is, our notion of economic growth requires energy, which has up to now been provided almost entirely by fossil fuels.<<

    You’ve missed a step. Debt Money Tyranny drives the growth. Without growth, most people go bankrupt. That’s why the Fed targets inflation. I’ll share the mechanism that does this in my next post.

    Debt Money injections drive growth. That’s a KEY root cause factor in play here.

    #18721
    John Day
    Participant

    @TheTrivium4TW
    By “overal structure of the financial system”, I did not mean structure of debt based money, which I specifically said has to be given up and replaced with money which reflects goods already produced, as was the historical situation. The illusion of paying-back-with-interest in a declining global energy scenario is doomed.
    I simply meant that there are institutions and channels of finance, which would cause much greater devastation if broken. Banks and e-commerce are quite useful to our survival.

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