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Report: Greek aid likely conditioned on arms deals

Press TV – April 20, 2012

Financial aid to cash-strapped Greece is suspected to have been conditioned on the country’s managing to clinch arms deals with Germany and France, a report reveals.

“Speculation is rife that international aid for the country was contingent on Greece following through on agreements to purchase military hardware from Germany and France,” The Guardian said on Thursday.

Germany’s biggest arms market in Europe is Greece with around 15 percent of its total arms sales heading there.

Earlier in January, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a joint news conference with French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Berlin, “We must see progress on the voluntary restructuring of Greek debt.”

Merkel and Sarkozy both insisted to press ahead with a greater “fiscal compact” in Europe, and tougher penalties for the countries that violated the eurozone’s budget rules.

Greece’s Deputy Prime Minister Theodore Pangalos regretted during a May 2010 visit by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that Athens was spending so much money on arms.

He said the country was being “forced to buy weapons” and that the deals made him feel “national shame.”

Thanos Dokos, a leading Greek defense expert, said the country had 1,300 tanks, more than twice the number in the UK and far beyond its needs.

Greece has the highest debt burden in proportion to the size of its economy in the 17-nation eurozone. Despite austerity cuts and bailout funds, the country has been in recession since 2009.

In order to secure an EUR-130-billion bailout package funded mostly by the eurozone member states and the International Monetary Fund, the country had to adopt harsh austerity measures, including massive cuts to its private and public sector wages, pensions, as well as health and defense spending, which have worsened the economic recession, leading to thousands of job losses.

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April 20, 2012 Posted by | Corruption, Economics, Militarism | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Iran oil sanctions bad idea if they work’

Press TV – December 25, 2011

Any sanctions on Iran’s oil sector imposed over the country’s nuclear program will backfire on the United States, regardless of their outcome, says an energy economist and columnist.

“Oil sanctions are a bad idea if they work, and a bad idea if they fail,” wrote Robin M. Mills.

If the sanctions work, American allies will be punished and some economically vulnerable countries, such as Greece, will suffer a cutoff of oil just at the time they can least afford it, he explained.

Or, if they “succeed” more dramatically, and Iran’s exports are really interrupted, oil prices will soar, “plunging the world back into renewed recession,” Mills added.

“But most likely, oil sanctions would fail, and a great deal of diplomatic capital will have been expended to no avail,” the energy economist asserted.

He cited the examples of Japan and South Korea as evidence of the failure of the sanctions, saying both countries rely on Iran for 10 percent of their crude imports, and have waived oil sanctions.

The columnist further mentioned the case of Turkey which renewed its long-standing crude contract with Iran on December 21.

“Iran should be able to find ways round tightened oil sanctions,” Mills stressed.

Mills further reiterated the repeated assertions of Iranian officials that the sanctions have served as opportunities for the country.

“The United States’ last secret weapon — embargoing gasoline shipments to Iran — inspired Tehran to make its long-overdue subsidy reform and step up domestic refining capacity,” he said.

Mills who has authored The Myth of the Oil Crisis said domestic Iranian oil and gas companies have also been encouraged to develop shared fields with production potential of 1.1 million barrels per day.

“In a way, the US Congress did Iran a favor,” Mills said.

The economist said the proposed sanctions “make even less sense” on a geopolitical level as the embargoes are a gift on a plate to two US rivals, China and Russia.

“The lengths to which the United States will go to shoot itself in the foot are sometimes astounding,” Mills said.

He went on to draw attention to the deliberately concealed cost of the sanctions on the US economy, saying decades of sanctions resulting in expensive oil have set the United States back half a trillion dollars.

“Still unanswered is the rather important question of how the U.S. plans to turn any tactical gains from sanctions into strategic success — or, indeed, even to define what realistic “success” looks like.”

Mills also touched upon the resolve of the Iranian nation in overcoming the sanctions, saying they “have seen their country survive even tougher times than today, and emerge … with revolutionary fervor strengthened.”

“For them to bow to sanctions by making significant concessions on the nuclear issue would be political suicide.”

As an alternative to sanctions, Mills proposed the “acknowledgement of Iran’s legitimate interests, with removal of some sanctions as carrots for cooperation.”

“My advice? Ignore all the crowing coming from Washington,” he concluded.

April 19, 2012 Posted by | Economics, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Greece’s unions to hold two-day strike over cuts

Press TV – February 9, 2012

Greece’s two largest unions have announced a 48-hour strike over the new austerity measures endorsed by the government in return for bailout loans.

The unions, General confederation of Workers of Greece (GSEE) and Civil Servants Supreme Administrative Council (ADEDY), announced on Thursday that their members will go on a two-day strike from Friday in protest at the controversial decision.

“We will hold a general strike on Friday and Saturday along with the civil servants’ union,” said a spokeswoman with GSEE which represents the private sector.

ADEDY’s Secretary General Ilias Iliopoulos described the measures as “painful” which will “create misery for youths, unemployed and pensioners do not leave us much room.”

“We are moving to a social uprising,” said Iliopoulos.

Greece has been the scene of repeated strikes since the country first resorted to bailouts from international lenders in 2010.

Leaders of the three parties backing Greece’s coalition government approved new austerity measures on Wednesday but failed to agree to creditors’ demands to make 300 million euros ($398 million) in pension cuts.

The country’s Prime Minister Lucas Papademos still hopes that the coalition leaders will strike a comprehensive deal by Thursday evening, his office said on Wednesday.

To secure a bailout package of 130 billion euros, Athens must first persuade the troika — the European Union (EU), International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the European Central Bank (ECB) — that it will implement long-delayed reforms and make further spending cuts.

Greece’s current debt stands at 340 billion euros ($440 billion) — a sum that equals around 31,000 euros debt per person in the country of 11 million people.

The country has, accordingly, the biggest debt burden in proportion to the size of its economy in the entire 17-nation eurozone.

February 9, 2012 Posted by | Economics, Solidarity and Activism | , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Orderly Default” – Liars lexicon

By David Malone | Golem XIV | June 16, 2011

What is meant by this phrase “orderly default” which is all over the news this morning? It sounds so sensible. I think it is another entry in the liars lexicon.

When the banks and pundits say orderly, they mean orderly for the banks. Not orderly for Greece or the Greeks or the Portuguese or Irish.

Greece is going to default. Everyone finally admits this after denying it vehemently. The simple fact is that the Greek economy is not growing fast enough to have any hope of even keeping pace with their debts and the interest on them. Their debts are accumulating faster than their economy is growing. In fact the Greek economy is hardly growing at all – less than 1% at best.

So the ‘orderly’ plan is to give Greece loans to extend the time before the mathematics of compound interest and a contracting economy catch up with them. In this time the plan is to pay off lumps of the principle by selling organs. Organs of the state; a port here, a phone system there. The fisherman sells his boat and his net to clear his debts. And then what? Well then he is fodder for the wage pool and the loan shark.

But ‘putting off’ the inevitable begs the question – why put it off? Who is benefiting by putting it off? If Greece is going to default why not do it sooner, because in the mean time the Greeks are suffering massive violence to the fabric of their society and for what? Certainly not to avoid default. We already know they are going to. It’s just a question of sooner or later. So why later? Who benefits?

The answer is, the banks. Particularly the banks of France and Germany. They would like default put off in the hope that as time goes by their broader financial circumstances improve so that they would be better able to deal with whatever losses come from an eventual Greek default. Put if off long enough and maybe there won’t be any losses. Which sounds sensible – for the banks. But while the delay buys time, literally, for the Banks to improve their broader situation the exact opposite happens to Greece and the Greek people. The longer they wait to default, the longer they struggle to pay off debts that are crushing them and which they will have to default on eventually, the worse their broader situation gets. So the wait and do it slowly scenario is anything but orderly for the Greek people.

So again, why is this slow, ‘orderly’ torture of Greece being advocated?

I think the answer is that for as long as the ‘orderly default’ plan can be enforced upon the Greeks it provides the banks with the delicious prospect of asset stripping an entire nation.

Because that is exaclty what is going on in Greece . What the ‘orderly’ default provides is a window of opportunity when predatory financial players can strip Greece and in future maybe Portugal and Ireland as well, of everything the banks could never get their hands on in any other circumstance.

If you are a business and you get in trouble you file for bankruptcy protection. That is, you protect your assets from predators while you sort out your debts, defaulting on those you cannot pay, cutting deals to pay some small percentage of each debt and then emerge as a chastened but going concern at the other end. This is precisely what Greece and the Greeks are being denied by their own government. The ‘orderly default’ plan is to keep Greece out of bankruptcy protection, keep them paying, keep the nation in a state of semi-anarchy and panic with seemingly no way out of the mess – except by selling off at fire sale prices whatever their creditors fancy – for as long as possible.

This is very orderly if you are one of the banks. You lose nothing. The tax payers in Greece and in your own nations lose because they pick up the tab of keeping the torture going through endless bail outs. The tax payers are like the torturer’s assistant whose job is to revive the victim with a glass of water, so they can be tortured some more. Bail outs solve nothing for Greece, but do serve admirably for keeping the present ‘open for pillaging’ situation going.

In this defenseless state you can then asset strip the nation for as long as the local government can keep the lid on all-out uprising.

And best of all, at the end of this process, you will have a ruined economy, with impoverished people who will work for nothing, without any labour laws left to protect them – since those pesky things will have been swept aside in the austerity measures – and you will also be the new owners of all the assets the people and their nation once owned.

Not only does that give you a compliant nation and workforce, but having such a cowed and defeated place close to hand will serve wonderfully as a crow bar for uprooting any ‘restrictive’ and ‘inflexible’ labour laws and practices in neighbouring countries. And since that is explicitly what the IMF talked about in their blue print for Europe’s future, it is hard not to see this as at least part of the intention of the ‘orderly default’.

June 16, 2011 Posted by | Deception, Economics, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

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