by John Ward
Until it gave him the problem of a split Party he couldn’t control, Jeremy Corbyn had been a lifelong opponent of first the EEC, the EC and then the EU. He felt it was a rich neoliberals’ club designed to crush the rights and aspirations of workers. The EU’s actions in Greece have proved him right.
Baron Adonis has the genetic history of Cypriot Greeks running through his veins. Day after day he keeps insisting that the EU is a force for good. His own homeland has been raped by the ECB, and the Greece from which Cypriots came is now officially a debt slave-camp until 2060.
There is absolutely no moral, economic or socially democratic justification whatsoever for their position….but the one they affect is allied to the same dastardly power-fuelled sociopathy as David Cameron, Theresa May, Jeremy Hunt, Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell.
There is no major split among the majority in any established Party at Westminster: they merely contain a malodorous mélange of ideological idiots and soulless cowards.
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The following piece draws much of its inspiration and content from an article published last week by William Engdahl. You can read that piece here.
Despite endless promises of debt forgiveness since 2014, there is to be no such thing for the Greek people still left eking out an impossible existence in Hellas. Over three million have left since 2012, the greatest diaspora since the Irish potato famine. After eight years of “help” from 1920s German thinking, IMF robbery, and ECB eurozone bank salvation at the expense of Greece, it has the highest unemployment in the Union at 20% (youth unemployment is 40%) and the economy has contracted by 25%.
Most disgracefully of all, Pensions and social welfare programs have been cut by a staggering 70%. In its dealings with Greece, the spiteful Troika of Eurogroupe, ECB and Commission make UK Tory austerity look like Lady Bountiful suffering a bout of financial incontinence.
But there is to be no mercy, and no pity – despite the fact that the guilty parties to the original Greek debt scam got away scot-free: Trichet of the ECB, Goldman Sachs from Wall Street, the Political Right carried on under rebranded Nia Demokrita, thousands of embezzling bureaucrats….and a European Commission as always asleep at the wheel.
Even as Greece becomes officially a sovereign death camp – on a scale far greater than Palestine-cum-Gaza – the same stone-cold flat screen faces in Brussels can’t resist yet more hypocritical dishonesty. At the close of June 2018, the 19 EU Eurozone finance ministers announced the “end” of the Greek debt crisis.
Those of us watching this macabre destruction of culture’s cradle at first hand during 2012-13 insisted time and time again that the debt was mathematically unrepayable. Greeks of the Right assured me that making an effort to get that debt under control would attract a degree of debt forgiveness. But the Troika and its chocolate robots of the FiskalUnion have refused to write off any Greek sovereign debt. The loan write-off promises of the IMF’s Christine Lagarde have been taken off the table. Despite all the cutbacks and tax increases and rock-bottom fire sales of Greek assets, under the post-crisis “new scheme”, the due date for loan repayments will be extended by 10 years, on a public debt still at 180% of GDP – €340 billion.
For good measure in the millstone stakes, the ECB has loaned (not given) a further €15 billion to “ease” the exit. It is in fact easing in the sense of jello being liberally applied to a yardbrush handle inserted up the back passage of what’s left of Greece. Only if it maintains a deficit surplus until 2060 (a feat never achieved in 20th century history by any Western nation) can Athens hope to repay the debt. If you have an eight year-old granddaughter now, she will be 50 years old by then.
An end to the Greek crisis? Poppycock: it is the end of just one crisis for the ill-fated euro and the clowns in Brussels who sat around being complacent. For the Greeks, it is the end of the beginning of official vassal State status. As a part of this post-crisis “agreement”, the IMF and and its fellow bloodsuckers in the Commission are demanding more taxes and more pension cuts by year end.
In 2011, Greece had a nominal debt of €210 billion. I say “nominal”, because 75% of it was arms and submarines bought from Germany and the US as part of NATO arm-twisting. Without that, the debt would’ve been €60 billion.
The Greek sovereign debt today is over €300 billion.
But the slavery of Greece goes well beyond the crooked capitalisation of debt thinly disguised as ‘bale-out’. At the behest of the IMF (aka the US) and the EC (aka, Washington’s whore Germany) the Greek government has passed anti-union laws suspending comprehensive collective bargaining, and all but banned industrial strike action….while enabling mass dismissals. Greek assets such as airports, harbours, and social weal services like hospitals, schools and public transport have been sold off.
The EC’s final backstop Brexit negotiator Guy Verhofstadt is corruptly involved in this slavering mob of carpetbaggers, advising as he does several concerns who stood to gain from, for example, the privatisation of energy supply.
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While wittering on endlessly about Arab causes, the evils of Israel, the huge advantages of EU investment, FGM in Africa, 68 Windrush victims of crass Home Office vigour, LGBT injustices, Leaver “lies”, blow-up Trump dolls and Islamophobia, the British Labour Party in all its various iterations since Brown, Miliband and now Corbyn has not raised any protest or lifted a finger to help or raise awareness of what has been done to a Greece ruled by the Left Wing coalition created by Alexis Tsipras.
Workers of the World unite, eh? Tsipras has sold out Greece because he too is a SuperState Socialist beleeeever. Corbyn has recanted from his past position as implacable enemy of Brussels because he wants power in Britain. And throughout the eurozone crisis – a never-ending mess until the euro is finally declared dead – the Germans, Belgians and French have dedicated their actions to the service of Washington in particular, and the neoliberal economics plus neoconservative foreign policies prosecuted by the Alt States of the military, the banks, the oil barons and the multinational globalists.
And our own Government – the one so viscerally hated by the Left Remainers – desperately wants to remain in the European Union of Financialising Corporate Fascists; but of course, the Corbynistas and Momentum are not allies of the Hunts, Fallons, Hammonds and Raabs….because you see, they know that the EU is really on their side: and they, the naifs and cynics, will bend Brussels to their view until the entire European continent is one big happy-clappy Socialist family of peace and goodwill, but with its own army just to be on the safe side.
Yes folks, the British Left is anti the May Government that bombed Syria, and pro the Macron Government that, um, bombed Syria, but hates the Trump Government that, er, bombed Syria. It is anti the May Government that inflicted austerity on the working people, but pro the Brussels Government that inflicted austerity on Club Med, and pro its negotiating commission led by Guy Verhofstadt, who enriched himself at the expense of innocent Greek working people. And its radical wing is pro the incorruptible Corbyn and for the EU, although Corbyn was anti the EU but has now corrupted himself by changing his mind…and violently opposed to the fat, bourgeois Blairite wing of the Party which is, um, er, just as keen on the EU as they are…and equally happy to subvert democracy in order to prove it.
Confused? No, it’s not you: it’s the well-meaning end of the Remain camp that is so obviously muddled beyond hope, their sole resort on social media is to repeat gibberish and then, like the children they are, hurl insults at anyone in possession of reality.