One of the recurring concerns involving Europe’s seemingly perpetual economic, financial and social crises, is that these have been largely predetermined, “scripted” and deliberate acts.
This is something the former head of the Bank of England admitted one month ago when Mervyn King said that Europe’s economic depression “is the result of “deliberate” policy choices made by EU elites. It is also what AIG Banque strategist Bernard Connolly said back in 2008 when laying out “What Europe Wants”
To use global issues as excuses to extend its power:
environmental issues: increase control over member countries; advance idea of global governance
terrorism: use excuse for greater control over police and judicial issues; increase extent of surveillance
global financial crisis: kill two birds (free market; Anglo-Saxon economies) with one stone (Europe-wide regulator; attempts at global financial governance)
EMU: create a crisis to force introduction of “European economic government”Continue reading →
Athens (AFP) – Greek stocks tumbled on Monday to close nearly eight percent lower, with bank shares losing almost a quarter of their market value amid concerns over the future of government reforms.
The general index on the Athens stock exchange closed down 7.9 percent at 464.23 points — a 25-year-low — while banks suffered a 24.3-percent average drop.
Top companies such as the Public Power Corporation, the Piraeus Port Authority and prominent construction firms lost between four and and 12.5 percent. Continue reading →
The reason The Fourth Reich category has been created is because it’s here. This article is further proof of many that the push for European dominance is not over and the continent is once again anchored to Germany.
Non-compliant member states of the EU get labeled ‘fascist’ or, as in this case, authoritarian. From there the economic penalties roll in to achieve the goal of subjugating countries. You saw it first with Cyprus, then with Greece which are now vassal states of Berlin. They are to be broken in order to reshape the continent into a synchronized United States of Europe — the hegemonic dream that never died.
“You have not anchored Germany to Europe,… You have anchored Europe to a newly dominant, unified Germany. In the end, my friends, you’ll find it will not work.“
– Margaret Thatcher
“Only fools think that politicians in Berlin and Brussels are actually worried about the Polish Constitutional Court or national media outlets,” writes Mariusz Staniszewski in Wprost. The front page of the Polish weekly newspaper compares EU leaders Guy Verhofstadt, Martin Schulz, Angela Merkel, Jean-Claude Juncker and Günther Oettinger to the Axis powers. For the columnist, EU pressure on the Polish government apparently regarding its slide towards authoritarianismis really about “the billions of euros that will now stay in Poland or continue to flow towards Germany or France.”
Sotiris Alexopoulos has been helping the desperate and destitute spawned by Greece’s economic free fall since he lost his job in 2010. This year, he began catering to a new group of stricken people: the thousands of refugees arriving at the port of Piraeus.
“We are like them, we had the same needs,” Alexopoulos, 65, said as he helped distribute food and clothing to some of the 1,400 who had traveled overnight on a ferry from the island of Lesvos, [sic] their entry point to Europe. “We are the poor people doing something to help ourselves.” Continue reading →
The deadline to dispense further rescue loans to debt-stricken Greece was extended by eurozone countries once again on Sunday amid continuing deadlock between Athens and its creditors.
With negotiations still bogged down over failure to agree on a new foreclosure law – legislation the leftist-led government says would push austerity-hit Greeks over the edge – lenders postponed a critical Eurogroup Working Group until Tuesday. Continue reading →
The Greek crisis is still far from being solved with Athens struggling to implement the reforms it promised in order to receive the latest round of bailouts from the European Union. So far, Greece has only followed through on 14 out of the 48 reforms needed to receive the €86 billion (us$95 billion) promised in the third bailout agreement made in August. Süddeutsche Zeitung reported on Tuesday that European creditors are planning to delay the October payment of $3.3 billion, with the planned $27.6 billion bailout payment to recapitalize Greece’s banks also in jeopardy.
Greece has agreed to sell the operating rights of over a dozen of its airports to a German company in a bid to qualify for bailout loans. The $1.37 billion concession is one of Greece’s biggest privatization deals since the start of the debt crisis.
The decision will hand over 14 of Greece’s airports to Frankfurt airport operator Fraport AG. Fraport expects to close its agreement with Athens in October. The deal will be in effect for the next 40 years.
And more infrastructure gets plundered in the raid of Greek national sovereignty. Soon we’ll find out who gets what in this case — and it could be Germany once again, which just days ago, took over the Greek airport infrastructure. The Fourth Reich has pulled off the greatest heist of all time.
Greek privatisations under the EU bailout are set to include water companies, leading energy firms, and swathes of infrastructure.
The list, compiled by the Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund, and agreed with creditors on 30 July, was published on Wednesday (19 August) by German Green MEP Sven Giegold.
He said the Greek public “hardly knows” what will be sold off and has “the right” to more “transparency”.
ATHENS/BERLIN (Own report) – The Greek government does not exclude the eventuality of indictments of German companies on charges of corruption, according to recent reports, on a contingency plan Athens has prepared for the event that Berlin forces it into state bankruptcy (“Grexit”). According to this plan, Athens would try to bring German companies to court – who have not or have only partially been subject of bribery investigations – to have them pay at least part of the restitution for damages caused by the alleged corruption, officially estimated in the billions. Siemens is the most famous example. A Greek parliamentary investigating committee estimated that, through systematic bribery, this Munich-based company has caused damages of two billion Euros in Greece. However, Siemens got off cheap in an out-of-court settlement and had to pay only 270 million Euros – hardly one fifth of its current quarterly profit. A court in Munich gave a Siemens manager a suspended sentence – significantly less than what he could have expected from a trial in Athens. Already in the fall of 2014, new legal proceedings had been opened in Athens to comprehensively investigate this systematic corruption.
Back in May we outlined the cost to the Greek economy of each day without a deal between Athens and creditors.
At the time, a report from the Hellenic Confederation of Commerce and Enterprises showed that 60 businesses closed and 613 jobs were lost for each business day that the crisis persisted without a resolution.
Since then, things have deteriorated further and indeed, with the imposition of capital controls, businesses found that supplier credit was difficult to come by, leading to the very real possibility that Greece would soon face a shortage of imported goods, something many Greeks clearly anticipated in the wake of the referendum call as evidenced by the lines at gas stations and empty shelves at grocery stores. Continue reading →
From an outsider perspective, it looks like the new addition is because the IMF is headed by Christine Lagarde. Lagarde is an ally of the Obama administration and placed within the IMF by it. Wolfgang Schäuble probably couldn’t get the job done with 1/3 of the Troika being compromised by the IMF’s continued sympathy for Greece and now Berlin’s Fourth Reich has found a way around it. It’s unclear what role the ESM will exactly be playing, but time will tell.
With creditors’ motorcades having officially returned to the streets of Athens in the wake of Greek lawmakers’ approval of the second set of bailout prior actions last Wednesday, tensions are understandably high.
After all, these are the same “institutions” which Yanis Varoufakis famously booted from Greece after Syriza swept to power in January, and they’ve come to represent the oppression of the Greek people and are now a symbol of the country’s debt servitude. Continue reading →
Colonel Richard Kemp, who has worked for the Government’s Joint Intelligence Committee, said: ‘This is an extremely attractive route for the IS to move people from Syria into Europe’
Islamic State terrorists are sneaking into Europe by mingling with boatloads of desperate refugees.
Asylum seekers who risk their lives on sea crossings are unwittingly shielding the very evil they are fleeing from.
The IS killers are among the surge of 1,000 migrants a day braving the perilous five-mile trip from the Turkish coast to the Greek holiday isle of Lesbos.
“The letter has been sent,” a Greek government official told MNI on Friday, referring to a formal (if begrudging) invite from Athens delivered to the IMF and the rest of the dreaded troika.
The trio – comprised of the IMF, the ECB, and the European Commission – was famously booted from Greece in late January by a rambunctious Yanis Varoufakis who proclaimed that Syriza, which had just swept to power on an anti-austerity platform, didn’t “plan to cooperate with that committee.” Continue reading →
My ‘job’ here is by no means done, anyway. Because of the general strike today, another Solidarity Clinic that I wanted to donate some of your AE for Athens Fund money to, is closed (update on the Fund tomorrow). Parliament is debating the latest Troika strangle plan as we speak, and who knows what tomorrow will bring? An entire economy is being deliberately suffocated, and all in all it’s just total madness. Quiet madness, though (update: and then the riots broke out..).Two things I’ve been repeatedly asked to convey to you are that:
1) you can’t trust any Greek poll or media, because the media are so skewed to one side of the political spectrum, and that side is not SYRIZA (can you imagine any other country where almost all the media are against the government, tell outright lies, use any trick in and outside the book, and the government still gets massive public support?!),
and:
2) Athens is the safest city on the planet. I can fully attest to that. Not one single moment of even a hint of a threat, and that in a city that feels very much under siege (don’t underestimate that). And people should come here, and thereby support the country’s economy. Don’t go to Spain or France this year, go to Greece. Europe is trying to blow this country up; don’t allow them to. Continue reading →
There are only losers in the agreement clinched on Monday at dawn by Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras and his eurozone partners. First and foremost the Greek people and the German and European leaders, believes the European press.
After a deal between Greek and eurozone leaders was hammered out following 17 hours of arduous negotiations, there is really nothing to cheer about, writes Michał Sutowski in Krytyka Polityczna. “With PM Tsipras’ back against the wall, the German government has pushed through nearly all its conditions; it’s a minor consolation for the Greeks that a ‘temporary Grexit’ turned out to be a negotiation stunt rather than a real proposal and that the restructuring fund will be located in Athens instead of Luxembourg”, writes Sutowski. He stresses that the negotiations have clearly shown the EU leaders’ goal was “to crush the Greeks’ resistance and not to reach a compromise” –
Angela Merkel had a chance to join the pantheon of the great, in a way, of “progressive” European conservatives. Had she forced through, against the German press and her own finance minister, a civilized reform package in exchange for a partial debt restructuring, she would have been on the same footing with Otto von Bismarck and Benjamin Disraeli. It seems though that she decided to become a ‘thrifty housewife’ instead.Continue reading →
Global Geopolitics 