Re: Franco Berardi 'Bifo': I refuse to visit Germany [two
Am 26.07.2015 um 21:09 schrieb Heiko Recktenwald : > Dear all, > > Am 24/07/15 um 12:50 schrieb nettime's msg collector: > > << > The heirs of the Hitlerian regime think they have the right to demand > the punishment and impoverishment of Greek people (and of Italian > Spanish Portuguese, Irish and French people) for the sake of the > principle that rules cannot be transgressed. >>> > > So what?? > > Why do you want the EURO and what do you want to do for it? > > This is basically what "Germany" asks. Schaeuble and V. could be a dream > team. The comunists have allways been the dream of "Western experts" to > reform the Greek state in the was the British did "civilise" Cyprus by > colonisation. > > And if you are honest there might be some element of class struggle in it. > > If you dont need the EURO everything could be fine. If you are rich, you > dont mind. If you are not so rich things could become more difficult in > certain cases. Lets discuss those cases. Are they worth the accusations? > Are they justified? Is there any rhythm to this? Is there any rhyme? If you don?t need any prescription drug everything could be fine. If you are martian, you don?t mind. If you?re not enriched things could stay stable in usual cases. Let?s leave them chicken wings aside. Are they blue? Are they mine? rest assured, accusations are always in the mouths of the beholder, chr. <...> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Fwd: ZNet Commentary: Joe Emersberger: Europe's Democratic Deficit
-- Forwarded message -- From: ZCommunications Date: Sat, Jul 25, 2015 at 3:08 PM Subject: ZNet Commentary: Joe Emersberger: Europe's Democratic Deficit Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. Joe Emersberger: Europe's Democratic Deficit Z Communications Daily Commentary A July 10 Yougov poll found very solid public support in Germany for the Merkel government's leading role in the destruction of the Greek economy. Only 9% of Germans blame the Troika - the European Union, European Central Bank (ECB) and IMF - for the state of the Greek economy. The level of ignorance is even worse in Sweden and Denmark. Only 6% and 4% in those countries, respectively, blame the Troika for the crisis in Greece. In Germany, 59% exclusively blame past and present Greek governments for the crisis. In Sweden and Denmark, 65% and 70%, respectively, exclusively blame Greek governments. These numbers are a grim reminder of how effectively the media undermines democracy. Consider how Der Spiegel, a German media outlet, summed things up for its readers: "Greece is little more than a failed state governed by clientelism and nepotism, a country whose economy has little to offer aside from olive oil and beach barsThat was true already five years ago when the government in Athens admitted to having taken on three times as much debt as previously disclosed, an admission that triggered the start of the euro crisis." Putting aside the condescension and near bigotry in the passage above, the "euro crisis" was actually triggered by a global recession that struck in 2009. It devastated countries like Spain which, unlike Greece, had been running budget surpluses and whose governments had not lied about their finances. Moreover, absolving Greece's creditors by saying they were successfully bamboozled until 2010 is outrageous. Lenders are supposed to identify fraud and bad investment risks. It's the socially useful function they supposedly perform. It gets worse for the story Der Spiegel sells its readers. Dangerous trade imbalances within the Eurozone - especially in Greece, Ireland and Spain - had been building for several years before the global recession. Dean Baker points out that the ECB was too incompetent to take action. Baker remarked that "Since it is apparently possible to take away the pensions that Greek people spent their life working for, some people may want to know if it's possible to take back the much higher pensions earned by top officials at the ECB." ECB officials need not worry provided they remain shielded by Der Spiegel and countless similar European outlets. Greek pensioners, on the other hand, have plenty to endure and worry about. Absolving creditors for what happened in Greece up to 2010 is ridiculous, but ignoring their overwhelming culpability for what has happened since then is on a whole other level of absurdity. According to Der Spiegel, "Much had improved before Tsipras took over the government, to the point that national revenues had finally exceeded spending. But the Tsipras government loosened up the austerity regime, unsettled the business sector and consumers with contradictory announcements, and refused to privatize state-run enterprises." The cynicism of this passage would have impressed Goebbels. It is best exposed by a single chart that Paul Krugman pointed out. You can literally draw a straight line between the amount of austerity (budget slashing) the Greek government has imposed over the past five years (as commanded by the Troika) and its brutal economic collapse. Greece's public debt and the cost of public pensions both increased dramatically relative to GDP as the economy shrunk. A slow recovery had just begun when Tsipras took office, but that recovery was supposed to happen years earlier according to the Troika. Quite simply, the Troika's orders were very closely followed and it led to a disaster comparable to the Great Depression. The polls I cited above show what a fine job the media in Europe has done to hide this simple truth from its audience, but there is more. The long overdue recovery in Greece was undone by the malevolence of the ECB, and not, as Der Spiegel claimed, by Tsipras who has only been in power several months and, it should not even need saying, could never operate with very much autonomy from his European overlords. As Mark Weisbrot explained, "Just 10 days after the election, the ECB cut off its main line of credit to Greek banks, even though there was no obvious reason to do so. Shortly thereafter, the ECB put a limit on how much Greek banks could lend to the government - a limit that the previous government did not have." When the Tsipras government called a July 5 referend
Re: Franco Berardi 'Bifo': I refuse to visit Germany [two
Dear all, Am 24/07/15 um 12:50 schrieb nettime's msg collector: << The heirs of the Hitlerian regime think they have the right to demand the punishment and impoverishment of Greek people (and of Italian Spanish Portuguese, Irish and French people) for the sake of the principle that rules cannot be transgressed. >> So what?? Why do you want the EURO and what do you want to do for it? This is basically what "Germany" asks. Schaeuble and V. could be a dream team. The comunists have allways been the dream of "Western experts" to reform the Greek state in the was the British did "civilise" Cyprus by colonisation. And if you are honest there might be some element of class struggle in it. If you dont need the EURO everything could be fine. If you are rich, you dont mind. If you are not so rich things could become more difficult in certain cases. Lets discuss those cases. Are they worth the accusations? Are they justified? Best, H. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Ekathimerini: Varoufakis claims had approval to plan parallel banking system
http://www.ekathimerini.com/199945/article/ekathimerini/news/varoufakis-claims-had-approval-to-plan-parallel-banking-system Varoufakis claims had approval to plan parallel banking system XENIA KOUNALAKI Former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis has claimed that he was authorized by Alexis Tsipras last December to look into a parallel payment system that would operate using wiretapped tax registration numbers (AFMs) and could eventually work as a parallel banking system, Kathimerini has learned. In a teleconference call with members of international hedge funds that was allegedly coordinated by former British Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont, Varoufakis claimed to have been given the okay by Tsipras last December - a month before general elections that brought SYRIZA to power - to plan a payment system that could operate in euros but which could be changed into drachmas "overnight" if necessary, Kathimerini understands. Varoufakis worked with a small team to prepare the plan, which would have required a staff of 1,000 to implement but did not get the final go-ahead from Tsipras to proceed, he said. The call took place on July 16, more than a week after Varoufakis left his post as finance minister. The plan would involve hijacking the AFMs of taxpayers and corporations by hacking into General Secretariat of Public Revenues website, Varoufakis told his interlocutors. This would allow the creation of a parallel system that could operate if banks were forced to close and which would allow payments to be made between third parties and the state and could eventually lead to the creation of a parallel banking system, he said. As the general secretariat is a system that is monitored by Greece's creditors and is therefore difficult to access, Varoufakis said he assigned a childhood friend of his, an information technology expert who became a professor at Columbia University, to hack into the system. A week after Varouakis took over the ministry, he said the friend telephoned him and said he had "control" of the hardware but not the software "which belongs to the troika." Recorded call You can find extracts from the conversation below. Varoufakis was advised that the call was being recorded when it began. Varoufakis: "I have to admit we did not have a mandate for bringing Greece out of the euro. What we had a mandate to do was to negotiate for a kind of arrangement with the Eurogroup and the ECB that would render Greece sustainable within the eurozone. The mandate went a bit further, at least in my estimation. I think the Greek people had authorised us to pursue energetically and vigorously that negotiation to the point of saying that if we can't have a viable agreement, then we should consider getting out." "We don't have a currency which we can devalue vis a vis the euro, we have the euro" "[Wolfgang] Schaeuble, the finance minister of Germany, is hell-bent on effecting a Grexit so nothing is over. But let me be very specific and very precise on this. The prime minister before he became PM, before we won the election in January, had given me the green light to come up with a Plan B. And I assembled a very able team, a small team as it had to be because that had to be kept completely under wraps for obvious reasons. And we had been working since the end of December or beginning of January on creating one. But let me give you if you are interested some of the political and the institutional impediments that made it hard for us to complete the work and indeed to activate it. The work was more or less complete: We did have a Plan B but the difficulty was to go from the five people who were planning it to the 1,000 people that would have to implement it. For that I would have to receive another authorisation which never came." "But let me give you an example. We were planning along a number fronts. I will just mention one. Take the case of the first few moments when the banks are shut, the ATMs don't function and there has to be some parallel payment system by which to keep the economy going for a little while, to give the population the feel that the state is in control and that there is a plan." "What we planned to do was the following. There is the website of the tax office like there is in Britain and everywhere else, where citizens, taxpayers go into the website they use their tax file number and they transfer through web banking monies from the bank account to their tax file number so as to make payments on VAT, income tax and so on and so forth." "We were planning to create, surreptitiously, reserve accounts attached to every tax file number, without telling anyone, just to have this system in a function under wraps. And, at the touch of a button, to allow us to give PIN numbers to tax file number holders, to taxpayers. So let's take for instance the case the state owed 1 million euros to some pharmaceutical company for drugs purchased on behalf of the National Health Service. We could imme
