Greece - What You Are Not Being Told by the Media

[Tony Gosling]

Greece - What You Are Not Being Told by the Media
According to mainstream media, the current 
economic crisis in Greece is due to the 
government spending too much money on its people 
that it went broke. This claim however, is a lie. 
It was the banks that wrecked the country so 
oligarchs and international corporations could benefit.
http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/greece-what-you-are-not-being-told-by-the-media/

By Chris Kanthan / nationofchange.org
http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=170299#170299

Every single mainstream media has the following 
narrative for the economic crisis in Greece: the 
government spent too much money and went broke; 
the generous banks gave them money, but Greece 
still can’t pay the bills because it mismanaged 
the money that was given. It sounds quite reasonable, right?

Except that it is a big fat lie 
 not only about 
Greece, but about other European countries such 
as Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland who are all 
experiencing various degrees of austerity. It was 
also the same big, fat lie that was used by banks 
and corporations to exploit many Latin American, 
Asian and African countries for many decades.

Greece did not fail on its own. It was made to fail.

In summary, the banks wrecked the Greek 
government and deliberately pushed it into 
unsustainable debt so that oligarchs and 
international corporations can profit from the ensuing chaos and misery.

If you are a fan of mafia movies, you know how 
the mafia would take over a popular restaurant. 
First, they would do something to disrupt the 
business – stage a murder at the restaurant or 
start a fire. When the business starts to suffer, 
the Godfather would generously offer some money 
as a token of friendship. In return, Greasy Thumb 
takes over the restaurant’s accounting, Big Joey 
is put in charge of procurement, and so on. 
Needless to say, it’s a journey down a spiral of 
misery for the owner who will soon be broke and, if lucky, alive.

Now, let’s map the mafia story to international finance in four stages.

Stage 1: The first and foremost reason that 
Greece got into trouble was the “Great Financial 
Crisis” of 2008 that was the brainchild of Wall 
Street and international bankers. If you 
remember, banks came up with an awesome idea of 
giving subprime mortgages to anyone who can fog a 
mirror. They then packaged up all these ticking 
financial bombs and sold them as “mortgage-backed 
securities” at a huge profit to various financial 
entities in countries around the world.

A big enabler of this criminal activity was 
another branch of the banking system, the group 
of rating agencies – S&P, Fitch and Moody’s – who 
gave stellar ratings to these destined-to-fail 
financial products. Unscrupulous politicians such 
as Tony Blair got paid by Big Banks to peddle 
these dangerous securities to pension funds and 
municipalities and countries around Europe. Banks 
and Wall Street gurus made hundreds of billions of dollars in this scheme.

But this was just Stage 1 of their enormous scam. 
There was much more profit to be made in the next three stages!

Stage 2 is when the financial time bombs 
exploded. Commercial and investment banks around 
the world started collapsing in a matter of 
weeks. Governments at local and regional level 
saw their investments and assets evaporate. Chaos everywhere!

Vultures like Goldman Sachs and other big banks 
profited enormously in three ways: one, they 
could buy other banks such as Lehman brothers and 
Washington Mutual for pennies on the dollar. 
Second, more heinously, Goldman Sachs and 
insiders such as John Paulson (who recently 
donated $400 million to Harvard) had made bets 
that these securities would blow up. Paulson made 
billions, and the media celebrated his acumen. 
(For an analogy, imagine the terrorists betting 
on 9/11 and profiting from it.) Third, to scrub 
salt in the wound, the big banks demanded a 
bailout from the very citizens whose lives the 
bankers had ruined! Bankers have chutzpah. In the 
U.S., they got hundreds of billions of dollars 
from the taxpayers and trillions from the Federal 
Reserve Bank which is nothing but a front group for the bankers.

In Greece, the domestic banks got more than $30 
billion of bailout from the Greek people. Let 
that sink in for a moment – the supposedly 
irresponsible Greek government had to bail out the hardcore capitalist bankers.

Stage 3 is when the banks force the government to 
accept massive debts. For a biology metaphor, 
consider a virus or a bacteria. All of them have 
unique strategies to weaken the immune system of 
the host. One of the proven techniques used by 
the parasitic international bankers is to 
downgrade the bonds of a country. And that’s 
exactly what the bankers did, starting at the end 
of 2009. This immediately makes the interest 
rates (“yields”) on the bonds go up, making it 
more and more expensive for the country to borrow 
money or even just roll over the existing bonds.

 From 2009 to mid-2010, the yields on 10-year 
Greek bonds almost tripled! This cruel financial 
assault brought the Greek government to its 
knees, and the banksters won their first debt 
deal of a whopping 110 billion Euros.

The banks also control the politics of nations. 
In 2011, when the Greek prime minister refused to 
accept a second massive bailout, the banks forced 
him out of the office and immediately replaced 
him with the Vice President of ECB (European 
Central Bank)! No elections needed. Screw 
democracy. And what would this new guy do? Sign 
on the dotted line of every paperwork that the bankers bring in.

(By the way, the very next day, the exact same 
thing happened in Italy where the Prime Minister 
resigned, only to be replaced by a 
banker/economist puppet. Ten days later, Spain 
had a premature election where a banker puppet won the election).

The puppet masters had the best month ever in November 2011.

Few months later, in 2012, the exact bond market 
manipulation was used when the banksters turned 
up the Greek bonds’ yields to 50%!!! This 
financial terrorism immediately had the desired 
effect: The Greek parliament agreed to a second 
massive bailout, even larger than the first one.

Now, here is another fact that most people don’t 
understand. The loans are not just simple loans 
like you would get from a credit card or a bank. 
These are loans come with very special strings 
attached that demand privatization of a country’s 
assets. If you have seen Godfather III, you would 
remember Hyman Roth, the investor who was carving 
up Cuba among his friends. Replace Hyman Roth 
with Goldman Sachs or IMF (International Monetary 
Fund) or ECB, and you get the picture.

Stage 4: Now, the rape and humiliation of a 
nation begin under the name of “austerity” or 
“structural reforms.” For the debt that was 
forced upon it, Greece had to sell many of its 
profitable assets to oligarchs and international 
corporations. And privatizations are ruthless, 
involving everything and anything that is 
profitable. In Greece, privatization included 
water, electricity, post offices, airport 
services, national banks, telecommunication, port 
authorities (which is huge in a country that is a 
world leader in shipping) etc. Of course, the 
ever-manipulative bankers always demand immediate 
privatization of all media which means that the 
country gets photogenic TV anchors who spew 
establishment propaganda every day and tell the 
people that crooked and greedy banksters are 
saviors; and slavery under austerity is so much better than the alternative.

In addition to that, the banker tyrants also get 
to dictate every single line item in the 
government’s budget. Want to cut military 
spending? NO! Want to raise tax on the oligarchs 
or big corporations? NO! Such micro-management is 
non-existent in any other creditor-debtor relationship.

So what happens after privatization and despotism 
under bankers? Of course, the government’s 
revenue goes down and the debt increases further. 
How do you “fix” that? Of course, cut spending! 
Lay off public workers, cut minimum wage, cut 
pensions (same as our social security), cut 
public services, and raise taxes on things that 
would affect the 99% but not the 1%. For example, 
pension has been cut in half and sales tax 
increase to more than 20%. All these measures 
have resulted in Greece going through a financial 
calamity that is worse than the Great Depression of the U.S. in the 1930s.

After all this, what is the solution proposed by 
the heartless bankers? Higher taxes! More cuts to 
the pension! It takes a special kind of a 
psychopath to put a country through austerity, an economic holocaust.

If every Greek person had known the truth about 
austerity, they wouldn’t have fallen for this. 
Same goes for Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland and 
other countries going through austerity. The sad 
aspect of all this is that these are not unique 
strategies. Since World War II, these predatory 
practices have been used countless times by the 
IMF and the World Bank in Latin America, Asia, and Africa.

This is the essence of the New World Order — a 
world owned by a handful of corporations and 
banks; a world that is full of obedient, powerless debt serfs.

So, it’s time for the proud people of Greece to 
rise up like Zeus and say NO (“OXI” in Greece) to 
the greedy puppet masters, unpatriotic oligarchs, 
parasitic bankers and corrupt politicians.

Dear Greece, know that the world is praying for 
you and rooting for you. This weekend, vote NO to 
austerity. Say YES to freedom, independence, 
self-government, sovereignty, and democracy. Go 
to the polls this weekend and give a resounding, 
clear victory for the 99% in Greece, Europe, and the entire western world.
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