02-20-2012, 05:44 AM
HOW GREECE COULD TAKE DOWN WALL STREET
Ellen Brown
www.webofdebt.com/articles/greece.php
In an article titled “Still No End to ‘Too Big to Fail,’” William Greider wrote in The Nation on February 15th:
Financial market cynics have assumed all along that Dodd-Frank did not end “too big to fail” but instead created a charmed circle of protected banks labeled “systemically important” that will not be allowed to fail, no matter how badly they behave.
That may be, but there is one bit of bad behavior that Uncle Sam himself does not have the funds to underwrite: the $32 trillion market in credit default swaps (CDS). Thirty-two trillion dollars is more than twice the U.S. GDP and more than twice the national debt.
CDS are a form of derivative taken out by investors as insurance against default. According to the Comptroller of the Currency, nearly 95% of the banking industry’s total exposure to derivatives contracts is held by the nation’s five largest banks: JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, HSBC, and Goldman Sachs. The CDS market is unregulated, and there is no requirement that the “insurer” actually have the funds to pay up. CDS are more like bets, and a massive loss at the casino could bring the house down.
It could, at least, unless the casino is rigged. Whether a “credit event” is a “default” triggering a payout is determined by the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA), and it seems that the ISDA is owned by the world’s largest banks and hedge funds. That means the house determines whether the house has to pay.
The Houses of Morgan, Goldman and the other Big Five are justifiably worried right now, because an “event of default” declared on European sovereign debt could jeopardize their $32 trillion derivatives scheme. According to Rudy Avizius in an article on The Market Oracle (UK) on February 15th, that explains what happened at MF Global, and why the 50% Greek bond write-down was not declared an event of default.
If you paid only 50% of your mortgage every month, these same banks would quickly declare you in default. But the rules are quite different when the banks are the insurers underwriting the deal.
MF Global: Canary in the Coal Mine?
MF Global was a major global financial derivatives broker until it met its unseemly demise on October 30, 2011, when it filed the eighth-largest U.S. bankruptcy after reporting a “material shortfall” of hundreds of millions of dollars in segregated customer funds. The brokerage used a large number of complex and controversial repurchase agreements, or “repos,” for funding and for leveraging profit. Among its losing bets was something described as a wrong-way $6.3 billion trade the brokerage made on its own behalf on bonds of some of Europe’s most indebted nations.
Avizius writes:
[A]n agreement was reached in Europe that investors would have to take a write-down of 50% on Greek Bond debt. Now MF Global was leveraged anywhere from 40 to 1, to 80 to 1 depending on whose figures you believe. Let’s assume that MF Global was leveraged 40 to 1, this means that they could not even absorb a small 3% loss, so when the “haircut” of 50% was agreed to, MF Global was finished. It tried to stem its losses by criminally dipping into segregated client accounts, and we all know how that ended with clients losing their money. . . .
However, MF Global thought that they had risk-free speculation because they had bought these CDS from these big banks to protect themselves in case their bets on European Debt went bad. MF Global should have been protected by its CDS, but since the ISDA would not declare the Greek “credit event” to be a default, MF Global could not cover its losses, causing its collapse.
The house won because it was able to define what “ winning” was. But what happens when Greece or another country simply walks away and refuses to pay? That is hardly a “haircut.” It is a decapitation. The asset is in rigor mortis. By no dictionary definition could it not qualify as a “default.”
That sort of definitive Greek default is thought by some analysts to be quite likely, and to be coming soon. Dr. Irwin Stelzer, a senior fellow and director of Hudson Institute’s economic policy studies group, was quoted in Saturday’s Yorkshire Post (UK) as saying:
It’s only a matter of time before they go bankrupt. They are bankrupt now, it’s only a question of how you recognise it and what you call it.
Certainly they will default . . . maybe as early as March. If I were them I’d get out [of the euro].
The Midas Touch Gone Bad
In an article in The Observer (UK) on February 11th titled “The Mathematical Equation That Caused the Banks to Crash,” Ian Stewart wrote of the Black-Scholes equation that opened up the world of derivatives:
The financial sector called it the Midas Formula and saw it as a recipe for making everything turn to gold. But the markets forgot how the story of King Midas ended.
As Aristotle told this ancient Greek tale, Midas died of hunger as a result of his vain prayer for the golden touch. Today, the Greek people are going hungry to protect a rigged $32 trillion Wall Street casino. Avizius writes:
The money made by selling these derivatives is directly responsible for the huge profits and bonuses we now see on Wall Street. The money masters have reaped obscene profits from this scheme, but now they live in fear that it will all unravel and the gravy train will end. What these banks have done is to leverage the system to such an extreme, that the entire house of cards is threatened by a small country of only 11 million people. Greece could bring the entire world economy down. If a default was declared, the resulting payouts would start a chain reaction that would cause widespread worldwide bank failures, making the Lehman collapse look small by comparison.
Some observers question whether a Greek default would be that bad. According to a comment on Forbes on October 10, 2011:
[T]he gross notional value of Greek CDS contracts as of last week was €54.34 billion, according to the latest report from data repository Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC). DTCC is able to undertake internal netting analysis due to having data on essentially all of the CDS market. And it reported that the net losses would be an order of magnitude lower, with the maximum amount of funds that would move from one bank to another in connection with the settlement of CDS claims in a default being just €2.68 billion, total. If DTCC’s analysis is correct, the CDS market for Greek debt would not much magnify the consequences of a Greek default—unless it stimulated contagion that affected other European countries.
It is the “contagion,” however, that seems to be the concern. Players who have hedged their bets by betting both ways cannot collect on their winning bets; and that means they cannot afford to pay their losing bets, causing other players to also default on their bets. The dominos go down in a cascade of cross-defaults that infects the whole banking industry and jeopardizes the global pyramid scheme. The potential for this sort of nuclear reaction was what prompted billionaire investor Warren Buffett to call derivatives “weapons of financial mass destruction.” It is also why the banking system cannot let a major derivatives player—such as Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers—go down. What is in jeopardy is the derivatives scheme itself. According to an article in The Wall Street Journal on January 20th:
Hanging in the balance is the reputation of CDS as an instrument for hedgers and speculators—a $32.4 trillion market as of June last year; the value that may be assigned to sovereign debt, and $2.9 trillion of sovereign CDS, if the protection isn’t seen as reliable in eliciting payouts; as well as the impact a messy Greek default could have on the global banking system.
Players in the future may simply refuse to play. When the house is so obviously rigged, the legitimacy of the whole CDS scheme is called into question. As MF Global found out the hard way, there is no such thing as “risk-free speculation” protected with derivatives.
ARGENTINE ADVICE FOR GREECE : DEFAULT NOW
http://rt.com/news/argentina-advice-gree...033/print/
Here in Argentina, when we watch the terrible things that are happening today in Greece, we can only exclaim, “Hey!! That’s exactly what happened in Argentina in 2001 and 2002…!”
A decade ago, Argentina too went through a systemic Sovereign Public Debt collapse resulting in social turmoil, worker hardship, rioting and street fights with the police.
Some months before Argentina exploded, then-President Fernando de la Rúa – forced to resign at the height of the 2001 crisis – had called back as finance minister the notorious pro-banker, Trilateral Commission member and Rockefeller/Soros/Rhodes protégée Domingo Cavallo.
Cavallo was the gruesome architect of Argentina’s political and economic capitulation to the US and UK when he was President Carlos Menem’s foreign minister and economy minister in the ’90s.
Menem and Cavallo are primarily responsible for Argentina’s signing of a formal Treaty of Capitulation with the UK/US after the 1982 Falklands War, opening up our economy to unrestricted privatization, deregulation and grossly excessive US Dollar-indebtedness, almost tripling our sovereign debt in a few short years (see my February 11, 2012 article British Laughter in the Falklands).
The Plan? Prepare Argentina for planned weakening, bankster take-over and collapse, so that a new weakening-takeover-collapse cycle could begin. In 2001, Cavallo was back to finish his work…
During that very hot summer in December 2001, true to its Latin temperament, Argentina even had four (yes, 4!) presidents in just one week. One of them, Adolfo Rodriguez Sáa, who only lasted three days, at least did one thing right, even if he did it the wrong way: he declared Argentina’s default on its sovereign debt.
All hell broke loose! The international bankers and IMF did everything they could to break Argentina’s back; global media pundits predicted all kinds of impending catastrophes. Debt default meant Argentina would have to weather the pain and agony alone, being cast out by the “international financial community”.
‘You’re not the boss of me!’
But no matter how bad it got, it would always be better to do that without the bankers, without the IMF’s, European Central Bank’s, US Fed’s and US Treasury’s “help”. Better to sort out your mess on your own, than to have parasitic banker vultures carving out their pound of flesh from your nation’s decaying social and economic body.
And how bad did it get in 2002? A 40 per cent drop in GDP; 30 per cent unemployment; 50 per cent of the population fell below the poverty line; dramatic, almost overnight, devaluation against the US Dollar from 1 peso per dollar to 4 pesos per dollar (then it tapered down to 3 pesos per dollar); if you had a US dollar Bank account, the government forced you to change it into pesos at the rate of 1.40 pesos per dollar.
What did Argentina’s government do wrong? In the months leading to collapse it bowed to all the bankers and IMF-mandated measures and “recipes”, which were actually the very cause of collapse: Argentina was loaned far more than it could pay back…. And the banker knew it! This was described in our December 19, 2011 article, Argentina: Tango Lessons.
Successive governments since then have continued to be functional to banker interests by rolling over debt 30 to 40 years, aggregating huge interest and in 2006 paying the full debt to the IMF – almost US$10 billion in full, cash and in US dollars (sole entity given most-favoured creditor status).
Same vultures circling Greece
Today, Greece is confronted with a similarly tough decision. Either it keeps its sovereignty, or it capitulates to the “Vulture Troika” – the European Central Bank, European Commission and International Monetary Fund – who work for the Bankers, not the People.
Not surprisingly, today we find that Greece too has a Trilateral Commission Rockefeller/Rothschild man at the helm: Lucas Papademos who is doing the same things Argentina did in 2001/2.
Argentina not only suffered Cavallo, but President De la Rúa himself was co-founder of the local Global Power Masters lobby, CARI – Argentine International Relations Council – local branch of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, networking with the Trilateral Commission / Bilderberg mafia.
Greece today should do what Argentina did a decade ago: better to endure pain and hardship, and sort out the mess made by your politicians in connivance with international bankers on your own, wielding whatever shred of sovereignty you still have than allowing the Banker Vultures sitting in Frankfurt, New York and London decide your future.
It’s the Neocolonial Private Power Domination Model, stupid!
Or do you think it’s just bad luck, bad judgment and coincidence that countries – Greece, Argentina, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Brazil, Mexico, Iceland, Ireland, Russia, Malaysia, Ukraine, Indonesia, South Korea, Thailand, France, even the US and UK – always borrow too much from the bankers and then “discover” that they cannot pay it back and that, symmetrically, the same bankers – CitiCorp, HSBC, Deutsche, Commerz, BNP, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, JPMorganChase, BBVA lend too much to countries and then “discover” they cannot collect?
No! That is the very yellow-brick road that leads to the Emerald City of “debt restructuring”, “debt refinancing”, and “sovereign debt bond mega-swaps” that snowball sovereign debt, spreading it over 20, 40 or more years into the future. That guarantees unimaginably colossal interest profits for the Mega-Bankers and for all those nice politicians, media players, traders and brokers, without whom that would not be possible.
This is a Model. It must keep rolling and rolling and rolling… As this Monster Machine steams forwards, it completely tramples on, overruns, destroys, flattens and obliterates people, jobs, workers, health services, pensions, education, national security and just about everything human on its path. Run by parasitic usurer technocrats, it does not care what it destroys because it has no ethics; no Christian, Muslim or Buddhist morals. It only worships a greedy golden idol of money, money and more money. This is 21st-century Money Power Slavery.
Three generations of Argentines saw hopes dashed and dreams thwarted by this Monster Machine, suffering the hardship, woes and humiliations that come when countries give up sovereignty.
Bring back the drach!
So, Greece: Just default on your “sovereign debt”! Just revert to the drachma! Just say “No, thanks!” to the German bankers and the Troika Vultures.
Please, Greece: just say “No!” to your Trilateral Commission president!
You will be setting a strong precedent for your European neighbours. Like Spain, which is hurting so badly right now for similar reasons. Like Italy, with its Trilateral Commission Prime Minister Mario Monti (also Trilateral’s European Chairman!).
Greece, the Cradle of Democracy, can teach the world a lesson in True Democracy by kicking these parasites out of the country, which will hopefully trigger kicking them out of Europe and one day, kicking them out of the global economy.
Because what Greece and Argentina and Italy and Spain suffer today is not True Democracy, but rather a distorted bastard imitation that systematically yields control to the Global Power Masters at the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg and Mega-Banking Overworld. They run the whole “democracy show”, whereby all countries end up having “the best democracy that money can buy”… which is no democracy at all…
The Money Power juggernaut is steaming full speed towards us all. If Greece falls, who’ll be next? Spain? Italy? Portugal? Argentina (yet again!!!)?
So what if Greece’s reverting to the drachma marks the beginning of the end for the euro? Let Italy revert to the lira, Spain to the peseta, Portugal to the escudo…! A National Currency is a key National Sovereignty factor.
All governments should understand that you either govern for the people and against the bankers; or you govern for the bankers and against the people.
GREECE SHOWS US HOW TO PROTEST AGAINST A FAILED SYSTEM
John Holloway
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/...led-system
I do not like violence. I do not think that very much is gained by burning banks and smashing windows. And yet I feel a surge of pleasure when I see the reaction in Athens and the other cities in Greece to the acceptance by the Greek parliament of the measures imposed by the European Union. More: if there had not been an explosion of anger, I would have felt adrift in a sea of depression. The joy is the joy of seeing the much-trodden worm turn and roar. The joy of seeing those whose cheeks have been slapped a thousand times slapping back. How can we ask of people that they accept meekly the ferocious cuts in living standards that the austerity measures imply? Do we want them to just agree that the massive creative potential of so many young people should be just eliminated, their talents trapped in a life of long-term unemployment? All that just so that the banks can be repaid, the rich made richer? All that, just to maintain a capitalist system that has long since passed its sell-by date, that now offers the world nothing but destruction. For the Greeks to accept the measures meekly would be to multiply depression by depression, the depression of a failed system compounded by the depression of lost dignity.
The violence of the reaction in Greece is a cry that goes out to the world. How long will we sit still and see the world torn apart by these barbarians, the rich, the banks? How long will we stand by and watch the injustices increase, see the health service dismantled, education reduced to uncritical nonsense, the water resources of the world privatised, communities wiped out and the earth torn up for the profits of mining companies?
The attack that is so acute in Greece is taking place all over the world. Everywhere money is subjecting human and non-human life to its logic, the logic of profit. This is not new, but the intensity and breadth of the attack is new, and new too is the general awareness that the current dynamic is a dynamic of death, that it is likely that we are all heading towards the annihilation of human life on earth. When the learned commentators explain the details of the latest negotiations between the governments on the future of the eurozone, they forget to mention that what is being negotiated so blithely is the future of humanity.
We are all Greeks. We are all subjects whose subjectivity is simply being flattened by the steamroller of a history determined by the movement of the money markets. Or so it seems and so they would have it. Millions of Italians protested over and over again against Silvio Berlusconi but it was the money markets that brought him down. The same in Greece: demonstration after demonstration against George Papandreou, but in the end it was the money markets that dismissed him. In both cases, loyal and proven servants of money were appointed to take the place of the fallen politicians, without even a pretence of popular consultation. This is not even history made by the rich and powerful, though certainly they profit from it: it is history made by a dynamic that nobody controls, a dynamic that is destroying the world, if we let it.
The flames in Athens are flames of rage, and we rejoice in them. And yet, rage is dangerous. If it is personalised or turned against particular groups of people (the Germans, in this case), it can so easily become purely destructive. It is no coincidence that the first minister to resign in protest against the latest round of austerity measures in Greece was a leader of the extreme right party, Laos. Rage can so easily become a nationalist, even fascist rage; a rage that does nothing to make the world better. It is important, then, to be clear that our rage is not a rage against the Germans, not even a rage against Angela Merkel or David Cameron or Nicolas Sarkozy. These politicians are just arrogant and pitiful symbols of the real object of our rage – the rule of money, the subjection of all life to the logic of profit.
Love and rage, rage and love. Love has been an important theme in the struggles that have redefined the meaning of politics over the last year, a constant theme of the Occupy movements, a profound feeling even at the heart of the violent clashes in many parts of the world. Yet love walks hand in hand with rage, the rage of "how dare they take our lives away from us, how dare they treat us like objects". The rage of a different world forcing its way through the obscenity of the world that surrounds us. Perhaps.
That pushing through of a different world is not just a question of rage, although rage is part of it. It necessarily involves the patient construction of a different way of doing things, the creation of different forms of social cohesion and mutual support. Behind the spectacle of the burning banks in Greece lies a deeper process, a quieter movement of people refusing to pay bus fares, electricity bills, motorway tolls, bank debts; a movement, born of necessity and conviction, of people organising their lives in a different way, creating communities of mutual support and food networks, squatting empty buildings and land, creating community gardens, returning to the countryside, turning their backs on the politicians (who are now afraid to show themselves in the streets) and creating directly democratic forms of taking social decisions. Still insufficient perhaps, still experimental, but crucial. Behind the spectacular flames, it is this searching for and creation of a different way of living that will determine the future of Greece, and of the world.
For this coming Saturday action throughout the world has been called for in support of the revolt in Greece. We are all Greeks.
Ellen Brown
www.webofdebt.com/articles/greece.php
In an article titled “Still No End to ‘Too Big to Fail,’” William Greider wrote in The Nation on February 15th:
Financial market cynics have assumed all along that Dodd-Frank did not end “too big to fail” but instead created a charmed circle of protected banks labeled “systemically important” that will not be allowed to fail, no matter how badly they behave.
That may be, but there is one bit of bad behavior that Uncle Sam himself does not have the funds to underwrite: the $32 trillion market in credit default swaps (CDS). Thirty-two trillion dollars is more than twice the U.S. GDP and more than twice the national debt.
CDS are a form of derivative taken out by investors as insurance against default. According to the Comptroller of the Currency, nearly 95% of the banking industry’s total exposure to derivatives contracts is held by the nation’s five largest banks: JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, HSBC, and Goldman Sachs. The CDS market is unregulated, and there is no requirement that the “insurer” actually have the funds to pay up. CDS are more like bets, and a massive loss at the casino could bring the house down.
It could, at least, unless the casino is rigged. Whether a “credit event” is a “default” triggering a payout is determined by the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA), and it seems that the ISDA is owned by the world’s largest banks and hedge funds. That means the house determines whether the house has to pay.
The Houses of Morgan, Goldman and the other Big Five are justifiably worried right now, because an “event of default” declared on European sovereign debt could jeopardize their $32 trillion derivatives scheme. According to Rudy Avizius in an article on The Market Oracle (UK) on February 15th, that explains what happened at MF Global, and why the 50% Greek bond write-down was not declared an event of default.
If you paid only 50% of your mortgage every month, these same banks would quickly declare you in default. But the rules are quite different when the banks are the insurers underwriting the deal.
MF Global: Canary in the Coal Mine?
MF Global was a major global financial derivatives broker until it met its unseemly demise on October 30, 2011, when it filed the eighth-largest U.S. bankruptcy after reporting a “material shortfall” of hundreds of millions of dollars in segregated customer funds. The brokerage used a large number of complex and controversial repurchase agreements, or “repos,” for funding and for leveraging profit. Among its losing bets was something described as a wrong-way $6.3 billion trade the brokerage made on its own behalf on bonds of some of Europe’s most indebted nations.
Avizius writes:
[A]n agreement was reached in Europe that investors would have to take a write-down of 50% on Greek Bond debt. Now MF Global was leveraged anywhere from 40 to 1, to 80 to 1 depending on whose figures you believe. Let’s assume that MF Global was leveraged 40 to 1, this means that they could not even absorb a small 3% loss, so when the “haircut” of 50% was agreed to, MF Global was finished. It tried to stem its losses by criminally dipping into segregated client accounts, and we all know how that ended with clients losing their money. . . .
However, MF Global thought that they had risk-free speculation because they had bought these CDS from these big banks to protect themselves in case their bets on European Debt went bad. MF Global should have been protected by its CDS, but since the ISDA would not declare the Greek “credit event” to be a default, MF Global could not cover its losses, causing its collapse.
The house won because it was able to define what “ winning” was. But what happens when Greece or another country simply walks away and refuses to pay? That is hardly a “haircut.” It is a decapitation. The asset is in rigor mortis. By no dictionary definition could it not qualify as a “default.”
That sort of definitive Greek default is thought by some analysts to be quite likely, and to be coming soon. Dr. Irwin Stelzer, a senior fellow and director of Hudson Institute’s economic policy studies group, was quoted in Saturday’s Yorkshire Post (UK) as saying:
It’s only a matter of time before they go bankrupt. They are bankrupt now, it’s only a question of how you recognise it and what you call it.
Certainly they will default . . . maybe as early as March. If I were them I’d get out [of the euro].
The Midas Touch Gone Bad
In an article in The Observer (UK) on February 11th titled “The Mathematical Equation That Caused the Banks to Crash,” Ian Stewart wrote of the Black-Scholes equation that opened up the world of derivatives:
The financial sector called it the Midas Formula and saw it as a recipe for making everything turn to gold. But the markets forgot how the story of King Midas ended.
As Aristotle told this ancient Greek tale, Midas died of hunger as a result of his vain prayer for the golden touch. Today, the Greek people are going hungry to protect a rigged $32 trillion Wall Street casino. Avizius writes:
The money made by selling these derivatives is directly responsible for the huge profits and bonuses we now see on Wall Street. The money masters have reaped obscene profits from this scheme, but now they live in fear that it will all unravel and the gravy train will end. What these banks have done is to leverage the system to such an extreme, that the entire house of cards is threatened by a small country of only 11 million people. Greece could bring the entire world economy down. If a default was declared, the resulting payouts would start a chain reaction that would cause widespread worldwide bank failures, making the Lehman collapse look small by comparison.
Some observers question whether a Greek default would be that bad. According to a comment on Forbes on October 10, 2011:
[T]he gross notional value of Greek CDS contracts as of last week was €54.34 billion, according to the latest report from data repository Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC). DTCC is able to undertake internal netting analysis due to having data on essentially all of the CDS market. And it reported that the net losses would be an order of magnitude lower, with the maximum amount of funds that would move from one bank to another in connection with the settlement of CDS claims in a default being just €2.68 billion, total. If DTCC’s analysis is correct, the CDS market for Greek debt would not much magnify the consequences of a Greek default—unless it stimulated contagion that affected other European countries.
It is the “contagion,” however, that seems to be the concern. Players who have hedged their bets by betting both ways cannot collect on their winning bets; and that means they cannot afford to pay their losing bets, causing other players to also default on their bets. The dominos go down in a cascade of cross-defaults that infects the whole banking industry and jeopardizes the global pyramid scheme. The potential for this sort of nuclear reaction was what prompted billionaire investor Warren Buffett to call derivatives “weapons of financial mass destruction.” It is also why the banking system cannot let a major derivatives player—such as Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers—go down. What is in jeopardy is the derivatives scheme itself. According to an article in The Wall Street Journal on January 20th:
Hanging in the balance is the reputation of CDS as an instrument for hedgers and speculators—a $32.4 trillion market as of June last year; the value that may be assigned to sovereign debt, and $2.9 trillion of sovereign CDS, if the protection isn’t seen as reliable in eliciting payouts; as well as the impact a messy Greek default could have on the global banking system.
Players in the future may simply refuse to play. When the house is so obviously rigged, the legitimacy of the whole CDS scheme is called into question. As MF Global found out the hard way, there is no such thing as “risk-free speculation” protected with derivatives.
ARGENTINE ADVICE FOR GREECE : DEFAULT NOW
http://rt.com/news/argentina-advice-gree...033/print/
Here in Argentina, when we watch the terrible things that are happening today in Greece, we can only exclaim, “Hey!! That’s exactly what happened in Argentina in 2001 and 2002…!”
A decade ago, Argentina too went through a systemic Sovereign Public Debt collapse resulting in social turmoil, worker hardship, rioting and street fights with the police.
Some months before Argentina exploded, then-President Fernando de la Rúa – forced to resign at the height of the 2001 crisis – had called back as finance minister the notorious pro-banker, Trilateral Commission member and Rockefeller/Soros/Rhodes protégée Domingo Cavallo.
Cavallo was the gruesome architect of Argentina’s political and economic capitulation to the US and UK when he was President Carlos Menem’s foreign minister and economy minister in the ’90s.
Menem and Cavallo are primarily responsible for Argentina’s signing of a formal Treaty of Capitulation with the UK/US after the 1982 Falklands War, opening up our economy to unrestricted privatization, deregulation and grossly excessive US Dollar-indebtedness, almost tripling our sovereign debt in a few short years (see my February 11, 2012 article British Laughter in the Falklands).
The Plan? Prepare Argentina for planned weakening, bankster take-over and collapse, so that a new weakening-takeover-collapse cycle could begin. In 2001, Cavallo was back to finish his work…
During that very hot summer in December 2001, true to its Latin temperament, Argentina even had four (yes, 4!) presidents in just one week. One of them, Adolfo Rodriguez Sáa, who only lasted three days, at least did one thing right, even if he did it the wrong way: he declared Argentina’s default on its sovereign debt.
All hell broke loose! The international bankers and IMF did everything they could to break Argentina’s back; global media pundits predicted all kinds of impending catastrophes. Debt default meant Argentina would have to weather the pain and agony alone, being cast out by the “international financial community”.
‘You’re not the boss of me!’
But no matter how bad it got, it would always be better to do that without the bankers, without the IMF’s, European Central Bank’s, US Fed’s and US Treasury’s “help”. Better to sort out your mess on your own, than to have parasitic banker vultures carving out their pound of flesh from your nation’s decaying social and economic body.
And how bad did it get in 2002? A 40 per cent drop in GDP; 30 per cent unemployment; 50 per cent of the population fell below the poverty line; dramatic, almost overnight, devaluation against the US Dollar from 1 peso per dollar to 4 pesos per dollar (then it tapered down to 3 pesos per dollar); if you had a US dollar Bank account, the government forced you to change it into pesos at the rate of 1.40 pesos per dollar.
What did Argentina’s government do wrong? In the months leading to collapse it bowed to all the bankers and IMF-mandated measures and “recipes”, which were actually the very cause of collapse: Argentina was loaned far more than it could pay back…. And the banker knew it! This was described in our December 19, 2011 article, Argentina: Tango Lessons.
Successive governments since then have continued to be functional to banker interests by rolling over debt 30 to 40 years, aggregating huge interest and in 2006 paying the full debt to the IMF – almost US$10 billion in full, cash and in US dollars (sole entity given most-favoured creditor status).
Same vultures circling Greece
Today, Greece is confronted with a similarly tough decision. Either it keeps its sovereignty, or it capitulates to the “Vulture Troika” – the European Central Bank, European Commission and International Monetary Fund – who work for the Bankers, not the People.
Not surprisingly, today we find that Greece too has a Trilateral Commission Rockefeller/Rothschild man at the helm: Lucas Papademos who is doing the same things Argentina did in 2001/2.
Argentina not only suffered Cavallo, but President De la Rúa himself was co-founder of the local Global Power Masters lobby, CARI – Argentine International Relations Council – local branch of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, networking with the Trilateral Commission / Bilderberg mafia.
Greece today should do what Argentina did a decade ago: better to endure pain and hardship, and sort out the mess made by your politicians in connivance with international bankers on your own, wielding whatever shred of sovereignty you still have than allowing the Banker Vultures sitting in Frankfurt, New York and London decide your future.
It’s the Neocolonial Private Power Domination Model, stupid!
Or do you think it’s just bad luck, bad judgment and coincidence that countries – Greece, Argentina, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Brazil, Mexico, Iceland, Ireland, Russia, Malaysia, Ukraine, Indonesia, South Korea, Thailand, France, even the US and UK – always borrow too much from the bankers and then “discover” that they cannot pay it back and that, symmetrically, the same bankers – CitiCorp, HSBC, Deutsche, Commerz, BNP, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, JPMorganChase, BBVA lend too much to countries and then “discover” they cannot collect?
No! That is the very yellow-brick road that leads to the Emerald City of “debt restructuring”, “debt refinancing”, and “sovereign debt bond mega-swaps” that snowball sovereign debt, spreading it over 20, 40 or more years into the future. That guarantees unimaginably colossal interest profits for the Mega-Bankers and for all those nice politicians, media players, traders and brokers, without whom that would not be possible.
This is a Model. It must keep rolling and rolling and rolling… As this Monster Machine steams forwards, it completely tramples on, overruns, destroys, flattens and obliterates people, jobs, workers, health services, pensions, education, national security and just about everything human on its path. Run by parasitic usurer technocrats, it does not care what it destroys because it has no ethics; no Christian, Muslim or Buddhist morals. It only worships a greedy golden idol of money, money and more money. This is 21st-century Money Power Slavery.
Three generations of Argentines saw hopes dashed and dreams thwarted by this Monster Machine, suffering the hardship, woes and humiliations that come when countries give up sovereignty.
Bring back the drach!
So, Greece: Just default on your “sovereign debt”! Just revert to the drachma! Just say “No, thanks!” to the German bankers and the Troika Vultures.
Please, Greece: just say “No!” to your Trilateral Commission president!
You will be setting a strong precedent for your European neighbours. Like Spain, which is hurting so badly right now for similar reasons. Like Italy, with its Trilateral Commission Prime Minister Mario Monti (also Trilateral’s European Chairman!).
Greece, the Cradle of Democracy, can teach the world a lesson in True Democracy by kicking these parasites out of the country, which will hopefully trigger kicking them out of Europe and one day, kicking them out of the global economy.
Because what Greece and Argentina and Italy and Spain suffer today is not True Democracy, but rather a distorted bastard imitation that systematically yields control to the Global Power Masters at the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg and Mega-Banking Overworld. They run the whole “democracy show”, whereby all countries end up having “the best democracy that money can buy”… which is no democracy at all…
The Money Power juggernaut is steaming full speed towards us all. If Greece falls, who’ll be next? Spain? Italy? Portugal? Argentina (yet again!!!)?
So what if Greece’s reverting to the drachma marks the beginning of the end for the euro? Let Italy revert to the lira, Spain to the peseta, Portugal to the escudo…! A National Currency is a key National Sovereignty factor.
All governments should understand that you either govern for the people and against the bankers; or you govern for the bankers and against the people.
GREECE SHOWS US HOW TO PROTEST AGAINST A FAILED SYSTEM
John Holloway
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/...led-system
I do not like violence. I do not think that very much is gained by burning banks and smashing windows. And yet I feel a surge of pleasure when I see the reaction in Athens and the other cities in Greece to the acceptance by the Greek parliament of the measures imposed by the European Union. More: if there had not been an explosion of anger, I would have felt adrift in a sea of depression. The joy is the joy of seeing the much-trodden worm turn and roar. The joy of seeing those whose cheeks have been slapped a thousand times slapping back. How can we ask of people that they accept meekly the ferocious cuts in living standards that the austerity measures imply? Do we want them to just agree that the massive creative potential of so many young people should be just eliminated, their talents trapped in a life of long-term unemployment? All that just so that the banks can be repaid, the rich made richer? All that, just to maintain a capitalist system that has long since passed its sell-by date, that now offers the world nothing but destruction. For the Greeks to accept the measures meekly would be to multiply depression by depression, the depression of a failed system compounded by the depression of lost dignity.
The violence of the reaction in Greece is a cry that goes out to the world. How long will we sit still and see the world torn apart by these barbarians, the rich, the banks? How long will we stand by and watch the injustices increase, see the health service dismantled, education reduced to uncritical nonsense, the water resources of the world privatised, communities wiped out and the earth torn up for the profits of mining companies?
The attack that is so acute in Greece is taking place all over the world. Everywhere money is subjecting human and non-human life to its logic, the logic of profit. This is not new, but the intensity and breadth of the attack is new, and new too is the general awareness that the current dynamic is a dynamic of death, that it is likely that we are all heading towards the annihilation of human life on earth. When the learned commentators explain the details of the latest negotiations between the governments on the future of the eurozone, they forget to mention that what is being negotiated so blithely is the future of humanity.
We are all Greeks. We are all subjects whose subjectivity is simply being flattened by the steamroller of a history determined by the movement of the money markets. Or so it seems and so they would have it. Millions of Italians protested over and over again against Silvio Berlusconi but it was the money markets that brought him down. The same in Greece: demonstration after demonstration against George Papandreou, but in the end it was the money markets that dismissed him. In both cases, loyal and proven servants of money were appointed to take the place of the fallen politicians, without even a pretence of popular consultation. This is not even history made by the rich and powerful, though certainly they profit from it: it is history made by a dynamic that nobody controls, a dynamic that is destroying the world, if we let it.
The flames in Athens are flames of rage, and we rejoice in them. And yet, rage is dangerous. If it is personalised or turned against particular groups of people (the Germans, in this case), it can so easily become purely destructive. It is no coincidence that the first minister to resign in protest against the latest round of austerity measures in Greece was a leader of the extreme right party, Laos. Rage can so easily become a nationalist, even fascist rage; a rage that does nothing to make the world better. It is important, then, to be clear that our rage is not a rage against the Germans, not even a rage against Angela Merkel or David Cameron or Nicolas Sarkozy. These politicians are just arrogant and pitiful symbols of the real object of our rage – the rule of money, the subjection of all life to the logic of profit.
Love and rage, rage and love. Love has been an important theme in the struggles that have redefined the meaning of politics over the last year, a constant theme of the Occupy movements, a profound feeling even at the heart of the violent clashes in many parts of the world. Yet love walks hand in hand with rage, the rage of "how dare they take our lives away from us, how dare they treat us like objects". The rage of a different world forcing its way through the obscenity of the world that surrounds us. Perhaps.
That pushing through of a different world is not just a question of rage, although rage is part of it. It necessarily involves the patient construction of a different way of doing things, the creation of different forms of social cohesion and mutual support. Behind the spectacle of the burning banks in Greece lies a deeper process, a quieter movement of people refusing to pay bus fares, electricity bills, motorway tolls, bank debts; a movement, born of necessity and conviction, of people organising their lives in a different way, creating communities of mutual support and food networks, squatting empty buildings and land, creating community gardens, returning to the countryside, turning their backs on the politicians (who are now afraid to show themselves in the streets) and creating directly democratic forms of taking social decisions. Still insufficient perhaps, still experimental, but crucial. Behind the spectacular flames, it is this searching for and creation of a different way of living that will determine the future of Greece, and of the world.
For this coming Saturday action throughout the world has been called for in support of the revolt in Greece. We are all Greeks.