Wednesday, May 20, 2015
altnews11#1ab
"...Has Syriza just become the most powerful political entity in the Western world?
Greece's vast debts to international institutions and zombiebanks mean
that the Syriza government in Athens is now more powerful than the IMF,
the ECB & the G7 banking cartel put together.
Debt or credit which cannot be paid back is never an asset; it is always
a liability. And when much of that debt has been fraudulently imposed,
debt forgiveness is the logical and only remedy.
The Nazi-continuum money laundries at the ECB and the US Fed, and the
puppet-politicians they control, all know that one false move on their
part, in dealing with the Syriza leaders, will bring the whole Western
fiat finance system down like a sharpster's house of cards. ...."
"...The White Spiritual Boy
issue, concerning the fraudulent start-up funding of the Euro currency
from off-ledger, black screen accounts in the late 1990s, has been
referenced elsewhere on this blog. It has to do with putative titles to
Asian gold and the Nazi-continuum Committee of 300's
Black Book of banking codes. This is a powerful piece on the board. It
is only a pawn, still. But it is on the seventh rank and is
well-defended. More here...."
"....On the World War II reparations issue, a further development was
articulated inside Germany. On Saturday 16th May 2015, in a piece in Der
Spiegel magazine, Dieter Deiseroth, a senior judge at Germany’s Supreme
Administrative Court, offered a legal perspective.
He said that Greece’s demand that Germany pays back a loan the country
was forced to give under Nazi occupation during WW2, is just. The loan
in question is now worth €11 billion. Greece should appeal to the
International Court of Justice at The Hague, if it wants to claim the
loan. This would require the agreement of Berlin or, alternatively, the
agreement of the OSCE’s Court of Conciliation and Arbitration.
Deiseroth went on to say that the request for individual war
compensation for Greek victims could also be granted. There cannot be a
limitation period for Greece's claims as a result of the Two Plus Four
Agreement. 2+4 is a classic example of an agreement against a third
party.
“Greece has not waived its demands.” Just because the claim(s) have
never been expressed in writing, does not negate Greece's case. "There’s
no waver through silence.” More here and here....."
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Picture: EuroZone breakup? New Drachma notes. Old Deutsche Mark notes.
Picture: Greece: Until 2015, an unholy alliance between oligarchs & politicians?
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Blue for you: Athens and the power of weakness
Has Syriza just become the most powerful political entity in the Western world?
Greece's vast debts to international institutions and zombiebanks mean that the Syriza government in Athens is now more powerful than the IMF, the ECB & the G7 banking cartel put together.
Debt or credit which cannot be paid back is never an asset; it is always a liability. And when much of that debt has been fraudulently imposed, debt forgiveness is the logical and only remedy.
The Nazi-continuum money laundries at the ECB and the US Fed, and the puppet-politicians they control, all know that one false move on their part, in dealing with the Syriza leaders, will bring the whole Western fiat finance system down like a sharpster's house of cards.
The house of cards is currently kept standing by covert rigging of the Western financial markets into a counterintuitive bull mode. Any major, unmanageable, surprise shock to do with sovereign debt or default, given the transparent oxygen of publicity, will turn bull into bear. The bond bubble will burst. It's all about the bonds. When that bubble bursts, the old world ends.
One of the reasons Germany is so nervous about Greece is that Frankfurt's Deutsche Bank is staring down the last abyss. Insiders say it has a massive overhang of out-of-the-money, cross-collateralised derivatives hiding on its books, off-ledger. Any sharp word from Athens about non-payment of a strategically positioned visible debt might bring the bank down. The UK financial community knows the risk. Deutsche Bank was kicked out of the London Gold Fix syndicate in May 2014.
Notwithstanding 2008 and all that, several US & EU banks are still quietly using mortgage-backed securities as collateral in derivatives trades.
In the G7 fiat finance system, about $100 trillion of bonds are in play. Most of these are also pledged as collateral for derivatives. So, at a conservative estimate, because of the leveraging involved, the downside risk attached to the G7's bonds is about $555 trillion. This is ten times greater than the downside risk in the CDS market in 2008. And, according to the story told, a single bank failure brought that lot down very quickly.
The G7 bankers' worst nightmare is on the cusp of manifesting. How many Western banks hold Greek sovereign bonds as collateral for out-of-the-money, cross-collateralised derivatives? Quite a few, it would appear. Why else has the G7 banking cartel been so eager to hedge their books with stolen pension funds used as collateral?
In Greece, Syriza knows all this. The Syriza economics people may be useless at, and impatient with, vested-interest oligarch politics, but in terms of pure pragmatic economics they are brighter, brainier and freer than the frightened people across the table from them in Europe. And they have nothing to lose. Anything of value which Greece once had has already been lost to externally-imposed, everlasting austerity.
Syriza has also been talking to Vladimir Putin. He has told them how the world works. They have learned that it is a game of chess. And in a game of chess, sometimes it's the waiting move which kills. Slow the clock down and threaten stalemate.
On a chessboard, sometimes you win, not by piling energy into a dynamic situation faster than your opponent can think, but by withdrawing energy to the point of excruciating boredom. Your apparent inactivity obliges your opponent to kick the can down the road yet again. The clock ticks. Stuff happens. Jam tomorrow.
On other occasions, however, a gambit may gain a telling advantage. Several quite big gambits are prepared in Athens.
The White Spiritual Boy issue, concerning the fraudulent start-up funding of the Euro currency from off-ledger, black screen accounts in the late 1990s, has been referenced elsewhere on this blog. It has to do with putative titles to Asian gold and the Nazi-continuum Committee of 300's Black Book of banking codes. This is a powerful piece on the board. It is only a pawn, still. But it is on the seventh rank and is well-defended. More here.
On Thursday 7th May 2015, the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, had a telephone conversation with Alexis Tsipras, the Prime Minister of Greece. Putin said that Moscow was willing to provide financing to Greek companies involved in constructing the GreekStream link to the TurkStream gas pipeline. This will carry Russian gas into Europe.
On Friday 8th May 2015, an American DC corporation apparatchik called Amos J. Hochstein (US State Department) arrived in Athens to talk to Panagiotis Lafazanis, the Greek Energy Minister. But he was a day late. The board had changed. More here and here.
Also in play on the same board is a knight, enthusiastic about German World War II reparations due to Greece. The idea here is simple: the total amount of reasonably audited war reparations as yet unpaid by Germany to Greece is several tens of billions of Euros more than Greece's total national debt. Athens can therefore quite reasonably say to its creditors: "OK, we'll pay off all our debts to you, but not until Germany has paid off all its war reparations to us. Deal?"
Until recently, this potential move was being reported as a baseless fantasy by the Western mainstream media. But then two things happened. First, Russia got on the phone again. Moscow could help Greece in its investigation into possible Second World War reparations from Germany by providing access to previously unused archives. A list of the relevant Russian records, including documents, photographs and documentary footage was duly passed to Athens. More here.
Second, something much more public happened within the Greek capital itself. Large screens all across the Athens metro, usually reserved for weather forecasts, began to loop video footage of the Nazi occupation of Greece in World War Two. It was a government-backed video demanding German war reparations. More here.
A day or two later, on Sunday 10th May 2015, the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, was in Russia to lay a wreath at the Grave of the Unknown Soldier in Moscow, and to talk with Vladimir Putin. She wasn't a happy bunny. She wasn't supposed to be. Look at the official Kremlin-circulated picture of the meeting. A man's got to do what a man's got to do. And these days, in Northern Hemisphere geopolitics outside China, most of the real men are in Moscow, Tehran and Athens.
On Thursday 14th May 2015, in Athens, the place to be was the Athenaeum InterContinental Hotel. The Greek Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis, was speaking at an Economist Conference called the 19th Roundtable with the Government of Greece. Varoufakis was straightforward and honest: “I wish we (still) had the Drachma; I wish we had never entered this (European) monetary union. And I think that deep down all member states with the EuroZone would agree with that now. Because it was very badly constructed. But once you are in, you don’t get out without a catastrophe.”
During his address, Varoufakis referred to the idea that the ECB’s SMP-program Greek government (pre-2012) bonds (face value €27B) could be repaid through the ESM, with a parallel swap between new Greek government bonds and the ESM. But he warned that such a bond swap, designed to ease Athens’ cash-crunch, was likely to be rejected, because it struck "fear into the soul" of the European Central Bank president, Mario Draghi. However, Varoufakis stressed that whatever other stratagem might be proposed by Europe and the IMF, the Greek government would not sign up to any bailout plan that would send Greece into a “death spiral”. More here and here.
As if on cue, later that afternoon, Moscow reported a pertinent development in the Russian media. On the previous Monday, the 11th May 2015, Greece's ruling party, Syriza, had published a statement saying that Russia had invited Greece to become the sixth member of the BRICS New Development Bank, joining Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa in that initiative.
The invitation was made by the Russian Deputy Finance Minister, Sergei Storchak, during a telephone conversation with the Greek Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras. According to the Syriza statement, Tsipras received the proposal with interest and promised to consider it thoroughly. Subsequently, an unnamed Greek government source told Sputnik News (Moscow) that Tsipras would have an opportunity to discuss potential Greek accession to the bank with the leaders of the BRICS group in Saint Petersburg next month, where he is scheduled to participate in a high-level Economic Forum on the 18th to 20th June.
"It was a pleasant surprise," the Greek source said, noting that Greece’s foreign policy is very diversified. "We are members of the European Union and of the EuroZone, but at the same time we acknowledge that there are also other powers in the world, and we will make our decisions taking into account our own interests, while fulfilling the commitments we have in other international organisations we are part of." More here.
On the World War II reparations issue, a further development was articulated inside Germany. On Saturday 16th May 2015, in a piece in Der Spiegel magazine, Dieter Deiseroth, a senior judge at Germany’s Supreme Administrative Court, offered a legal perspective.
He said that Greece’s demand that Germany pays back a loan the country was forced to give under Nazi occupation during WW2, is just. The loan in question is now worth €11 billion. Greece should appeal to the International Court of Justice at The Hague, if it wants to claim the loan. This would require the agreement of Berlin or, alternatively, the agreement of the OSCE’s Court of Conciliation and Arbitration.
Deiseroth went on to say that the request for individual war compensation for Greek victims could also be granted. There cannot be a limitation period for Greece's claims as a result of the Two Plus Four Agreement. 2+4 is a classic example of an agreement against a third party.
“Greece has not waived its demands.” Just because the claim(s) have never been expressed in writing, does not negate Greece's case. "There’s no waver through silence.” More here and here.
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