IMF tegen Grieken: sorry we gaan jullie land vernietigen…………..

Op 11 april jl. berichtte ik al over de nieuwe maatregelen die Griekenland moet treffen, onder druk van de trojka, bestaande uit de Europese Centrale Bank (ECB), de Europese Commissie en het IMF.

Griekenland heeft de zeggenschap over haar staatseigendommen, die het nog in bezit had, af moeten staan aan het Europees Stabiliteitsmechanisme (ESM). Dit niet democratisch gekozen orgaan kan desgewenst deze eigendommen voor een appel en een ei verkopen, zoals Griekenland al eigendommen zwaar onder de prijs heeft moeten verkopen…..

De pensioenen worden verder gekort, terwijl het grootste deel van de ouderen in Griekenland daar amper of niet van rond kan komen…… Daarnaast worden de lonen verder verlaagd, ook hier geldt, dat veel Grieken al onder het minimumloon verdienen, althans als ze regelmatig betaald worden, ook daar wil het nog wel eens aan ontbreken…… Zelfs terminale patiënten kunnen in Griekenland veelal niet aan medicijnben komen, daar ze het geld ontbreekt……..

Zoals Michael Hudson in het Information Clearing House artikel hieronder betoogt: de gewone Griek had part nog deel aan de leningen die Griekenland, totaal onverantwoord werden verstrekt, o.a. door banken en andere financiële instellingen in het NW van Europa (plus Frankrijk). Ook het IMF, onderdeel van de trojka schijnt Griekenland enorme bedragen op de pof te hebben geleend. Terwijl het IMF, maar ook de ECB hadden moeten toezien op verantwoorde kredietverlening. trekken ze nu het mis is gegaan, de gewone burger het vel over de oren….

PvdA hufter Dijsselbloem, de plaag van de Grieken, is mede verantwoordelijk voor de enorme ellende waarin Griekenland zich bevindt. Nog steeds betaalt Griekenland zich helemaal scheel aan rentebetalingen, terwijl de rente bijna op nul staat…… Voorts vindt Dijsselbloem het normaal dat grote Griekse bedrijven de belasting in eigen land ontduiken in……. Nederland!!!

De Griekse regering had volgens Hudson geen andere optie dan akkoord te gaan met de breidel van de vermaledijde trojka, dit daar men anders het Griekse bankensysteem zou hebben laten ploffen……

Overigens is het niet ondenkbaar, dat de regering van Griekenland de wacht is aangezegd, niet in zee te gaan met de Russen, waar even sprake van was, daar het Griekse leger dan met behulp van NAVO troepen een coup zou hebben gepleegd…….

Eén ding is zeker, zonder de EU had Griekenland niet zo in de stront gezeten…..

Mensen het kan nog veel erger en smeriger (wat betreft o.a. het IMF), lees het volgende artikel, een verslag van de video die u hieronder ziet (onder de geschreven versie, kan u klikken voor een ‘Dutch vertaling’):

IMF to
Greece: Sorry We’ll Destroy You

Bond
holders, banks, and IMF bear responsibility for having made
irresponsible loans to Greece, so it is not right for them to force
yet more austerity on Greece, says Michael Hudson.

By
Michael Hudson

May
10, 2017 “Information
Clearing House” – Sharmini Peries: It’s the Real News
Network. I am Sharmini Peries coming to you from Baltimore. The
European Commission announced on May 2, that an agreement on Greek
pension and income tax reforms would pave the way for further
discussions on debt release for Greece. The European Commission
described this as good news for Greece. The Greek government
described the situation in similar terms. However, little attention
has been given as to how the wider Greek population are experiencing
the consequences of the policies of the Troika. On May Day thousands
of Greeks marked International Workers Day with anti-austerity
protests. One of the protester’s a 32-year-old lawyer perhaps
summed the mood, the best when he said …

Speaker
2: “The current Greek government, like all the ones before it, have
implemented measures that has only one goal, the crushing of the
workers, the working class and everyone who works themselves to the
bone. We are fighting for the survival of the poorest who need help
the most.”

Sharmini
Peries: To discuss the most recent negotiations underway between
Greece and the TROIKA, which is a European Central Bank, the EU and
the IMF, here’s Michael Hudson. Michael is a distinguished research
professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He
is the author of many books including, “Killing the Host: How
Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage the Global Economy” and most
recently “J is for Junk Economics: A Survivor’s Guide to Economic
Vocabulary in the Age of Deception”. Michael it’s been a while,
good to have you back.

Michael
Hudson: Good to be here.

Sharmini
Peries: Michael, let’s start with what’s being negotiated at the
moment.

Michael
Hudson: I wouldn’t call it a negotiation. Greece is simply being
dictated to. There is no negotiation at all. It’s been told that
its economy has shrunk so far by 20%, but has to shrink another 5%
making it even worse than the depression. Its wages have fallen and
must be cut by another 10%. Its pensions have to be cut back.
Probably 5 to 10% of its population of working age will have to
immigrate.

The
intention is to cut the domestic tax revenues (not raise them),
because labor won’t be paying taxes and businesses are going out of
business. So we have to assume that the deliberate intention is to
lower the government’s revenues by so much that Greece will have to
sell off even more of its public domain to foreign creditors.
Basically it’s a smash and grab exercise, and the role of Tsipras
is not to represent the Greeks because the Troika have said, “The
election doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what the people vote
for. Either you do what we say or we will smash your banking system.”
Tsipras’s job is to say, “Yes I will do

whatever you want. I want
to stay in power rather than falling in election.”

Sharmini
Peries: Right. Michael you dedicated almost three chapters in your
book “Killing the Host” to how the IMF economists actually knew
that Greece will not be able to pay back its foreign debt, but yet it
went ahead and made these huge loans to Greece. It’s starting to
sound like the mortgage fraud scandal where banks were lending people
money to buy houses when they knew they couldn’t pay it back. Is it
similar?

Michael
Hudson: The basic principle is indeed the same. If a creditor makes a
loan to a country or a home buyer knowing that there’s no way in
which the person can pay, who should bear the responsibility for
this? Should the bad lender or irresponsible bondholder have to pay,
or should the Greek people have to pay?

IMF
economists said that Greece can’t pay, and under the IMF rules it
is not allowed to make loans to countries that have no chance of
repaying in the foreseeable future. The then-head of the IMF,
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, introduced a new rule – the “systemic
problem” rule. It said that if Greece doesn’t repay, this will
cause problems for the economic system – defined as the
international bankers, bondholder’s and European Union budget –
then the IMF can make the loan.

This
poses a question on international law. If the problem is systemic,
not Greek, and if it’s the system that’s being rescued, why
should Greek workers have to dismantle their economy? Why should
Greece, a sovereign nation, have to dismantle its economy in order to
rescue a banking system that is guaranteed to continue to cause more
and more austerity, guaranteed to turn the Eurozone into a dead zone?
Why should Greece be blamed for the bad malstructured European rules?
That’s the moral principle that’s at stake in all this.

Sharmini
Peries: Michael, The New York Times has recently published an article
titled, “IMF torn over whether to bail out Greece again.” It
essentially describes the IMF as being sympathetic towards Greece in
spite of the fact as you say, they knew that Greece could not pay
back this money when it first lent it the money with the Troika.
Right now, the IMF sounds rational and thoughtful about the Greek
people. Is this the case?

Michael
Hudson: Well, Yanis Varoufakis, the finance minister under Syriza,
said that every time he talked to the IMF’s Christine Lagarde and
others two years ago, they were sympathetic. They said, “I am
terribly sorry we have to destroy your economy. I feel your pain, but
we are indeed going to destroy your economy. There is nothing we can
do about it. We are only following orders.” The orders were coming
from Wall Street, from the Eurozone and from investors who bought or
guaranteed Greek bonds.

Being
sympathetic, feeling their pain doesn’t really mean anything if the
IMF says, “Oh, we know it is a disaster. We are going to screw you
anyway, because that’s our job. We are the IMF, after all. Our job
is to impose austerity. Our job is to shrink economies, not help them
grow. Our constituency is the bondholders and banks.”

Somebody’s
going to suffer. Should it the wealthy billionaires and the bankers,
or should it be the Greek workers? Well, the Greek workers are not
the IMF’s constituency. It says: “We feel your pain, but we’d
rather you suffer than our constituency.”

So
what you read is simply the usual New York Times hypocrisy,
pretending that the IMF really is feeling bad about what it’s
doing. If its economists felt bad, they would have done what the IMF
European staff did a few years ago after the first loan: They
resigned in protest. They would write about it and go public and say,
“This system is corrupt. The IMF is working for the bankers against
the interest of its member countries.” If they don’t do that,
they are not really sympathetic at all. They are just hypocritical.

Sharmini
Peries: Right. I know that the European Commission is holding up
Greece as an example in order to discourage other member nations in
the periphery of Europe so that they won’t default on their loans.
Explain to me why Greece is being held up as an example.

Michael
Hudson: It’s being made an example for the same reason the United
States went into Libya and bombed Syria: It’s to show that we can
destroy you if you don’t do what we say. If Spain or Italy or
Portugal seeks not to pay its debts, it will meet the same fate. Its
banking system will be destroyed, and its currency system will be
destroyed.

The
basic principle at work is that finance is the new form of warfare.
You can now destroy a country’s economy not merely by invading it.
You don’t even have to bomb it, as you’ve done in the Near East.
All you have to do is withdraw all credit to the banking system,
isolate it economically from making payments to foreign countries so
that you essentially put sanctions on it. You’ll treat Greece like
they’ve treated Iran or other countries.

“We
have life and death power over you.” The demonstration effect is
not only to stop Greece, but to stop countries from doing what Marine
Le Pen is trying to do in France: withdraw from the Eurozone.

The
class war is back in business – the class war of finance against
labor, imposing austerity and shrinking living standards, lowering
wages and cutting back social spending. It’s demonstrating who’s
the winner in this economic warfare that’s taking place.

Sharmini
Peries: Then why is the Greek population still supportive of Syriza
in spite of all of this? I mean, literally not only have they, as a
population, been cut to no social safety net, no social security, yet
the Syriza government keeps getting supported, elected in
referendums, and they seem to be able to maintain power in spite of
these austerity measures. Why is that happening?

Michael
Hudson: Well, that’s the great tragedy. They initially supported
Syriza because it promised not to surrender in this economic war.
They said they would fight back. The plan was not pay the debts even
if this led Europe to force Greece out of the European Union.

In
order to do this however, what Yanis Varoufakis and his advisors such
as James Galbraith wanted to do was say, “If we are going not to
pay the debt, we are going to be expelled from the Euro Zone. We have
to have our own currency. We have to have our own banking system.”
But it takes almost a year to put in place your own physical
currency, your own means of reprogramming the ATM machines so that
people can use it, and reprogramming the banking system.

You
also need a contingency plan for when the European Union wrecks the
Greek banks, which basically have been the tool of the oligarchy in
Greece. The government is going to have to take over these banks and
socialize them, and use them for public purposes. Unfortunately,
Tsipras never gave Varoufakis and his staff the go ahead. In effect,
he ended up double crossing them after the referendum two years ago
that said not to surrender. That lead to Varoufakis resigning from
the government.

Tsipras
decided that he wanted to be reelected, and turned out to be just a
politician, realizing that in order to he had to represent the
invader and act as a client politician. His clientele is now the
European Union, the IMF and the bondholders, not the Greeks. What
that means is that if there is an election in Greece, people are not
going to vote for him again. He knows that. He is trying to prevent
an election. But later this month the Greek parliament is going to
have to vote on whether or not to shrink the economy further and cut
pensions even more.

If
there are defections from Tsipras’s Syriza party, there will be an
election and he will be voted out of office. I won’t say out of
power, because he has no power except to surrender to the Troika. But
he’d be out of office. There will probably have to be a new party
created if there’s going to be hope of withstanding the threats
that the European Union is making to destroy Greece’s economy if it
doesn’t succumb to the austerity program and step up its
privatization and sell off even more assets to the bondholders.

Sharmini
Peries: Finally, Michael, why did the Greek government remove the
option of Grexit from the table in order to move forward?

Michael
Hudson: In order to accept the Eurozone. You’re using its currency,
but Greece needs to have its own currency. The reason it
agreed to stay in was
that it had made no preparation for withdrawing. Imagine if you are a
state in the United States and you want to withdraw: you have to have
your own currency. You have to have your own banking system. You have
to have your own constitution. There was no attempt to put real
thought behind what their political program was.

They
were not prepared and still have not taken steps to prepare for what
they are doing. They haven’t made any attempt to justify
non-payment of the debt under International Law: the law of odious
debt, or give a reason why they are not paying.

The
Greek government has not said that no country should be obliged to
disregard its democratic voting, dismantle its public sector and give
up its sovereignty to bondholders. No country should be obliged to
pay foreign creditors if the price of that is shrinking and self
destruction of that economy.

They
haven’t translated this political program of not paying into what
this means in practice to cede sovereignty to the Brussels
bureaucracy, meaning the European Central Bank on behalf of its
bondholders.

Sharmini
Peries: All right Michael, we will keep an eye on this. It looks like
it’s going to get more heated in Greece. At least the people and
the movements are planning to protest this new deal. I thank you so
much for joining us and I hope you can join us again. I understand
you are on your way to Greece in a few weeks and we’ll be expecting
a report back from you about what you find there. Thank You.

Michael
Hudson: Thanks for having me on.

Sharmini
Peries: Thank you for joining us here on the Real News Network.

Note:
Wikipedia defines Odious
debt:

“In
international law, odious debt, also known as illegitimate debt, is a
legal doctrine that holds that the national debt incurred by a regime
for purposes that do not serve the best interests of the nation,
should not be enforceable.”

Michael
Hudson is President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term
Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst,
Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of
Missouri, Kansas City and author of J
is Junk Economics (2017), Killing
the Host (2015), The
Bubble and Beyond (2012) http://michael-hudson.com