IT SAYS IT ALL: Greece and the Blasted Euro

During my images research today for my post on my wishlist for 2013 I came across this quite revealing and quite brilliant photo of graffiti in Athens:


Courtesy of Bloomberg

The euro is indeed nothing less than a bomb threatening to blow up the Greek economy, never mind its society and very dignity as a nation.

Exit the euro in 2013 and save your nation, Greece!

It really does say it all.

IT SAYS IT ALL: Nobel Da Paz?

I came across this terrific cartoon today which effectively and tellingly lampoons the ludicrous recent decision by the Nobel committee to award the Nobel Prize for Peace to the European Union:


Cartoon courtesy of Antero (Portugal), as cited at keeptalkinggreece.com

"Nobel da Paz?" is "Nobel for Peace" in Portuguese, and the bruised nations of Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece are depicted. 

As the blog www.keeptalkingreece.com scathingly commented:

"This must be the joke in the history of Nobel Prize. Crisis-torn European Union won the Nobel Peace Prize for 2012,  ‘for its historic role in uniting the continent’. Unless the Nobel Prize committee members had a sudden attack of a cynicism, KTG would say that Barroso, Van Rompuy & Co deserve to win the prize for a single reason: Living peacefully in their bubbles while many European Citizens, especially those in the South, live in conditions that violate the EU human rights standards and conventions.

In Greece and Portugal, in Spain and Ireland in the North, where social cohesion is breaking apart, the social welfare is collapsing, the needy cannot cover basic needs and the poor with less than 6,000 euro annual income get taxed. But that’s history on the making and ‘social peace’ has nothing to do with the Nobel Prize standards."

Again, it has taken me this many days to finally summon the anger I have with this outrageous award to the EU.

For cartoon and commentary alike, it's a case of enough said.

RANT: The Strain of the Pain in Spain

Photo courtesy of The Sun online

So the streets of Madrid are awash in angry protesters and violent police. The protesters chant against the gross injustices of the austerity measures implemented by the Spanish government due to the ongoing eurozone crisis, whilst the police charge with batons and batter and beat away at the protesters with a viciousness that only neo-fascist police can muster.


The violent protests (made violent by the shocking actions of the police, by the way) on the streets of Madrid are a mirror to the entire financial crisis that has gripped the world in a sickly vice since 2008: the downtrodden, increasingly impoverished masses in supposedly democratic countries are met by police violence and violation that is so massively undemocratic that it makes the entire notion of democracy in those countries nothing but a sham. The actions of these authorities (read: authoritians) on the streets of Madrid, Athens, London, New York, Oakland and countless other Western countries is nothing short of neo-fascism.
The marches and violence of Madrid were inevitable. Gone is the welfare state that protected all with free healthcare, affordable education, generous (and just) unemployment and pension schemes and labour laws that protected those who needed protecting, i.e. the worker. All of that has been slashed due to the Eurozone crisis owing to ‘huge public debts’ due to ‘unlimited public spending’ and other such excuses pontificated by European leaders, the European Commission and other shameless liars. It’s all rubbish – we all know that the entire ‘crisis’ is due to the criminal and amoral actions of traders, speculators financiers and bankers and their political acolytes (read: paid out whores) and, instead of all being put out of business or even hauled off to prison, they’ve all been bailed out with huge amounts of public money. Simple as that, folks.

And someone had to foot the bill. Of course – the unemployed, the working poor, the elderly and the middle classes of Spain, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, the UK and many other countries have had to pay with their hard-earned rights and safety nets so that the rich could get more obscenely rich.

The protests in the streets of Madrid and the violence with which they are being met are analogy to the times in which we live – cynical times in which we the people are being pillaged and our rights imprisoned by those who supposedly represent and protect us.

And it will only get worse if all of us do not keep vigilant. Forewarned is forearmed.

Do you get my point?

RANT: Greece, You Get What You Deserve

Did they blow it!

Greece had a chance - a chance to turn their second election this month into a middle finger at Brussels and the proto-capitalist fascist European Central Bank and to restore a bit of their national pride.

After the fiasco that was the first election, there was much hope that the smaller parties would rise and maybe become the dealmakers and dealbreakers that Greece so desperately needed.

The hope that the sell-outs of the traditional large parties like the centre-right New Democracy or play-play 'socialist' PASOK could no longer call the shots and sell Greece furthert down the river with more senseless 'bail-outs' and obscene 'austerity' measures.

Hope that all those mass demonstrations and encoraching despair and impoverishment of the Greek middle class would ferment enough anger to sweep anti-euro parties into power.

But, no, the Greeks screwed up their golden opportunity to really make a difference for themselves and for all of Europe.
So, knowing that their choice was this:


And instead of opting for this:



They instead opted for this:



They could have gone for the leftwing (and fervently anti-euro/ anti-bailout/ anti-austerity/ anti-kowtowing to the likes of Brussels and Merkel) Syriza party, but instead opted for the rightwing (and vehemently pro-euro/ pro-bail-out/ pro-austerity/ masochistic kowtowing to the likes of Brussels and Merkel) NDP.

As socialistrevolution.com put it: "Euro blackmail wins right-wing victory in Greece – what next?"

What next indeed.

And blackmail by the EU, ECB and Frankfurt financiers indeed.

The NDP will no doubt try to form some sort of pathetic 'national unity' coalition with PASOK, or the like, and back Greece will go, whimpering and cap in hand, willing whipping boy to the biggest financial Euro-Dominatrix of them all, Angela Merkel.

After all this time of me supporting the Greeks in their struggle against the decrepit and amoral euro juggernaut, it's time to say enough. After all that the likes of the NDP and PASOK have done to the Greeks, this is what they do when given a golden opportunity to shake up their own political and economic system, not to mention all of Europe?

All in the name of this delusion called 'stability' and this phantasmic 'dream' (really a nightmare) called the euro?

Pish.

I've said it many times before, and I'll say it again :

a people gets the government it deserves.

Do you get my point?

RANT: EUR Not Serious About Greece

First, this terrific image from The Telegraph for an article about the ongoing euro crisis:

I read a very interesting article online by the The Telegraph, and dated May 10th. The headline itself piqued my interest:

"It's too late for Germany to save the euro"

Oh, for that to indeed be true...

I was never a Telegraph reader when I lived in the UK, and it's certainly not the most liberal of British papers, but I found myself agreeing with much of what this article stated, and it's therefore worth quoting the said article here (with bold or underlined bold added by me for emphasis):

"Greece’s motorcycling Marxist, Alexis Tsipras, makes an unlikely champion, with his commuter leathers and largely unrealistic Left-wing views, but he seems to be about the best of a bad bunch right now. As far as I can see, he’s the only member of the Greek political class who makes any kind of sense, albeit only marginally so and with one rather important deficiency.

Rightly, he’s rejected Berlin’s austerity programme as “barbaric” and counter-productive (though, incongruously, he rides to parliament on a German-made BMW), but he’s not yet managed to reconcile himself to the logical corollary of this analysis – that Greece must take back control of its own destiny by leaving the euro. As it is, the economy is condemned only to permanent depression.

Youth unemployment in Greece was yesterday revealed to have overtaken even that of Spain, at an almost unbelievable 53.8 per cent. This for an economy which, if it sticks to the programme, has a further 150,000 public sector jobs still to shed. Those who think that, with the requisite degree of structural reform, the private sector will automatically move in and fill the gap can forget it.

The banking system is insolvent, credit is plummeting , the flight of capital continues unabated and businesses are going bust in record numbers."

It continues: "As long as Greece remains in the euro, there is no plausible path back to growth."

Very valid points indeed.

Time will yet be testamant to just how insane and downright ridiculous this entire Greek euro crisis really was.

And that's not even including Italy and Spain and Ireland and Portugal and Belgium and...

Do you get my point? 

RANT: E Doppo...Italia

And next it's Italy, as my title in Italian says.



Forget Greece - at least for a nanosecond. Now all the talk on the Internet news wires is that it's increasingly looking like Italy may too enter into its own debt crisis. And Italy in trouble will make the debt crises of Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Belgium and even Spain look like a financial walk in the park.

According to Reuters today:

"The main measure of Italy's borrowing costs broke above 6 percent for the first time in 14 years before easing back on Tuesday as the euro zone's third largest economy [my emphasis] was sucked into the bloc's debt crisis. Italian 10-year yields at one stage soared more than 30 basis points on the day to leap above 6 percent -- the highest since 1997 -- getting closer to the 7 percent level most market players see as being unsustainable for Italy's borrowing costs given its huge debt pile."

"Italy is by far the country with the greatest sensitivity to rising debt servicing costs and particularly in terms of rolling over debt. This is not a situation it can afford to have going on for any sustained period of time," said Marc Ostwald, strategist at Monument Securities in London."

Yikes. That's bad, whichever way you slice it.

Reuters continues by adding that, "Italy has one of the world's highest levels of public debt. At around 120 percent of gross domestic product, it is second only to Greece in the euro zone. A total of 176 billion euros ($250 billion) in Italian government paper will come due by the end of the year."

There are signs that the Italian government has been able to steady today the creaking ship that is the Italian bond market - and one simply has to believe that one of the biggest economies in the world will be able to pull through this...

Surely, right?

However Italy is able to pull through this latest debt crisis, it no doubt shows that financial contagion is a speedy, scary and downright unpredictable bastard.

And do we need any more evidence that the euro project is, for all intents and purposes, a failed project?

Do you get my point?

QUESTION: Where's The UK Domino?

I came across this interesting diagram today illustrating the ongoing eurozone crisis/ scandal.

The question is: where is the UK domino? Hell, but for its pound and Its City of London-inflated (bloated) economy, it should be right there as well - on the edge of bankruptcy.

Where is the Belgium domino for that matter?

I know which two dominoes I would LOVE to see standing there some day soon - those of Germany and France, the two big bullies on the euro block who keep strong-arming weaker economies into accepting 'bailout packages' and obscene 'austerity' measures, all to keep their Washington Consensus-inspired, corporatist single currency dream (read: nightmare) alive.

I've heard the French economy is hardly stellar at the moment. I've even heard rumblings that the German economy is not as 'hot' and 'robust' as once suggested...

Oh, can one dream?