Throw Your Grandma Under The Bus

[Raúl Ilargi Meijer]

Dorothea Lange “Men on ‘Skid Row’, Modesto, California” 1937 Before we get news in a few hours on the new proposals Greece is required to hand to its
[See the full post at: Throw Your Grandma Under The Bus]

[V. Arnold]

Ilargi said;
For those of you who don’t want to wake up one day to find their own grandmas crushed under the same bus the Greek yiayia’s are under as we speak, it would be beneficial to ponder how perverse this all is, not just the isolated events but the entire underlying system that produces them. And you support this perversity. And don’t fool yourself into thinking that the system won’t come for your grandma too. If you think that, you simply don’t understand how it works.

Yes, I saw the perversity long ago, just before I left. Its gotten steadily worse, unrelenting one might say.
My wife and I have discussed this for a few years and have one final debt, our house, actually it’s her house since I can’t own land here. There are no property taxes after the initial purchase, so when we pay it off, in 24 months, it will be free and clear of any and all taxes. One can never own a home in America because one is never free of property taxes, so one pays until death.
Greece is being f**ked in nasty places by despots. I’ve no doubt the desired aim is the imposition of serf like conditions to those not in the capitalist elite (but despotic humans).
Jobs will consist of contracts for a given time and duty. There will be no employed in todays sense of belonging to a company as an employee.
The reason there are so many unemployed is simply because jobs are disappearing permanently. Even if America becomes a manufacturing super power again, via 3-D printing, manufacturing will never be the same again. And 3-D printing is a game changer and is in its infancy.
We humans are past our expire date and unless we can re-purpose our reason to be; we’ll be useless life forms.
Being a useless life form is dangerous to one’s health; ‘useless things”.are usually disposed of…

[V. Arnold]

In my above post I said;
Jobs will consist of contracts for a given time and duty. There will be no employed in todays sense of belonging to a company as an employee.

To be clear, I was speaking to America’s economy. This will also be true for all those under the spell of neo-liberal economics.
Fortunately, some are shedding the spell and seeing reality…

[John Rempel]

A Greek Background
The high stakes imposed on Greece are primarily the result of previous governments borrowing recklessly, knowing full well that their debts would never be paid off but gaining ‘friends’ who supplied them with everything from ‘free’ holidays to luxurious homes.
This goes back to ‘once upon a time’ when Greece was proclaimed by the EU as its poorest country. I had a good friend, a top notch Greek economist who had worked for the OECD and by that time was with the EU. I doubted the ‘poverty’ claim but couldn’t refute it until she said, “You live in Athens and have been to Portugal. Have you seen a single central street in Athens that looks more impoverished than any street in Lisbon?” I hadn’t, but I soon knew why Greece was ‘so poor’.
National wealth is set to the GNP and/or GDP. These are tied to taxable incomes. Greeks have been avoiding taxes since the Romans, through the Byzantine Empire and the Ottoman Empire perhaps because the tax collectors represented foreign powers. By the time of independence (1832) Greeks had been under foreign control since at least as far back as 27 BC. Almost 2 millennia of tax evasion is a hard habit to break. The figures the EU accepted blindly were grotesquely fraudulent and the Greek governments that forged them gained free money and loans. The EU attitude at the time was, “Ask and it shall be given.” Tell any child to pick anything they want and then worry about whether it’s good for them and affordable.
Couple this with local government and civil service corruption and here we are today. An example comes from my time teaching EFL in the National School of Public Administration (Εθνικη Σχολη Δημοσιας Διοικησης). The school at that time (1990-96) was in Athens’ centre. A new one was being built in 1996 far from the centre with poor transport. Before it was finished, my director said, it had cost more than the Onassis Hospital. Most of the money came from the EU, I imagine a little of it was free.
The Greek debt is clearly the fault of stupid European bankers with the same attitude to lending as the IMF who encouraged foolish lending in the USA until 2008.
Our current government is trying to stimulate an economy which could become self-sufficient. To discourage intelligent planning in Greece is typical of both the Euro zone and the IMFers.

[Hotrod]

John Rempel,

Thank you for sharing your personal Greek experience.

I think one horrific aspect of the current banking criminality is the asset strip mining that naturally follows. What an ingenious way to steal physical assets from countries that are under the financial gun.

[V. Arnold]

@ Hotrod

Indeed!

[jal]

Here was my question on 2015-02-16 after this article.
Someone took a look and now we can see the answers.
🙂
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-02-16/german-lawmaker-demands-all-payments-greece-be-immediately-stopped

German Lawmaker Demands All Payments To Greece Be “Immediately Stopped”
As Bloomberg reports,

Hans Michelbach, a senior lawmaker from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Union bloc in parliament, says in e-mailed statement that EU needs to react to Greece’s rejection of euro area’s proposal.
Payments must be immediately stopped and money kept as collateral to secure Greek debt payments
Talks’ breakdown forces ECB to halt any aid
Athens let last deadline lapse, national parliaments now won’t have enough time to approve any solution found at later stage
—–
Can some tell me where those payments to Greece were going?
Was it to a German bank? To the IMF?
Who is getting hurt by stopping those payments?

[Danny B]

It’s not all that easy to demand accountability.

Making Me Pay For My Crimes Would Send “Message of Uncertainty to the Markets”: Bank President to Spanish Judge

[Author]

Posts