What Stinks about Varoufakis and the Whole Greek Mess? by F. William Engdahl . . . we actually hear TALK now of HATE on the part of the cabal!!! ~J
Thanks to E.
Something
stinks very bad about Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis and the
entire Greek mess that has been playing out since the election victory
of the nominally pro-Greek Syriza Party in January. I am coming to the
reluctant conclusion that far from being the champion of the hapless
Greek people, Varoufakis is part of a far larger and very dirty game.
The brilliant psychologist Eric Berne,
author of the seminal book Games People Play, would likely call the game
of Varoufakis and the Troika, “Rapo,” as in the rape of the Greek
people and, ultimately of all the EU, Germany included. How do I come to
this surprising conclusion?
When the left-right coalition was elected
by a Greek population desperate for change from the several years of
austerity, pension cuts, health and education cuts demanded by the IMF
in order to insure that Greek creditors be repaid their pound of flesh
in terms of state debt, I was among many who held out hope that finally a
government that stood for the interests of her people was in office in
Athens.
What we have witnessed since is
what can only be called a clown show, one in which the laugh is on the
Greek people and EU citizens as a whole. The ones laughing, as often is
so, are the mega banks and Troika–ECB, IMF and EU. Behind the Troika,
almost invisible, are the Greek oligarchs who have robbed the state
coffers of hundreds of billions over the years, tucking it away in
numbered Swiss and Lichtenstein secret bank accounts, avoiding paying a
single penny tax to support their nation. And it is looking more and
more as though the “leftist” economist, Varoufakis’s role is that of a
Trojan Horse for the destruction of the entire Eurozone by the bankers
and those Greek oligarchs. Next after Greece Italy looks poised to
become victim, and that will put the entire Euro in a crisis that is
today unimaginable.
Suspicious friends
A man is known by the company he keeps,
so goes the adage. By this measure Yanis Varoufakis keeps very bad
company for a finance minister who claims to be defending the living
standards of his people. Before becoming Greek Finance Minister in the
January coalition government of Alexis Tsipras, Varoufakis spent time in
the United States working for the Bellevue Washington video game
company, Valve Corporation, whose founders came from Bill Gates’
Microsoft. In the late 1980’s he studied economics and game theory in
the UK at University of Essex and East Anglia and taught at Cambridge.
Then he spent the next eleven years in Australia teaching and even
taking Australian citizenship.
As an Australian citizen Varoufakis
returned in 2000 to teach at the University of Athens. Then from January
2013 until his appointment as Finance Minister of Greece, Varoufakis
taught at the University of Texas where he became close with James K.
Galbraith, son of deceased Harvard economist, John Kenneth Galbraith,
also with the Washington establishment think-tank, Brookings Institution. In
short Varoufakis is an Australian citizen who has spent most of the
past three decades in Britain, USA and Australia and little of that in
his native Greece.
That of course per se does not disqualify
him at all from being an honest and effective finance minister of his
native Greece. But to date he has done more to increase the misery of
the Greek people in six short months than almost anyone else, even
Wolfgang Schäuble or the IMF’s Christine Lagarde.
He pretends to be against austerity but his record shows the opposite. Varoufakis
was the adviser to Prime Minister George Papandreou and PASOK when
Papandreou made the disastrous draconian austerity deal with the EU on
behalf of Greece so that French and German banks could be bailed out.
Varoufakis also has at various times heaped praise on Mario Draghi and
the ECB, suggesting solutions for how to keep Greece in the EU, a track
that pre-programs Greece for self-destruction under the current Troika regime of austerity.
In Varoufakis’ book on the EU financial
crisis titled “A Modest Proposal,” he invited former French Prime
Minister Michael Rocard to write the forward. Rocard has called for the
EU to appoint a European “strongman”–read dictator–and Rocard’s choice
is European Parliament president Martin Schulz, the very same man who
warned the new SYRIZA government to abide by the austerity agreements
concluded by the past PASOK and conservative governments. Varoufakis has
repeatedly argued that Greece must “grin and bear” the measures imposed
on it by the bankers and the German government as a member of the
Eurozone. He has insisted that a Greek Euro exit is not going to take place.
With official Greek unemployment over 30%
of the workforce and economic losses because of Troika-imposed budget
austerity the government’s tax-revenue shortfall in January alone was
23% below its €4.5bn target for the month. The government in Athens has
levied crippling taxes on the middle class and made sharp cuts to
government salaries, pensions, and health-care coverage. While
ordinary citizens suffer under the weight of austerity, now Banks are
closed at least until the July 5 referendum on more austerity. Greece is
a human catastrophe.
Strange acts
Were Varoufakis the man he pretends to be before his Greek countrymen, he would have set forth a strategy of Greek exit from the Euro and a strategy akin to that of Iceland to declare a debt moratorium, freeze all debt repayments to the Troika–IMF, ECB and EU. Then he would put Greece on a national currency, impose capital controls and seek strong economic ties with Russia, China and the BRICS countries.
Indeed,
when Greek Prime Minister Tsipras was in St. Petersburg in mid-June to
meet with Russian President Putin, Putin extended a very generous offer
of prepayment of $5 billion towards the Greek participation in the
Turkish Stream Gazprom pipeline.
That would
have given Greece breathing room to service debt repayments to the IMF.
Brussels and Washington of course were not at all happy with that.
Putin then offered Greece membership in the new BRICS development bank
which would allow Greece to borrow to get out of the worst of the crisis
without more savage austerity. That of course would bring Greece closer
to Russia and also to China, something Washington and Brussels oppose
with all their might. But rather than accept, Greece and Varoufakis
walked away from a solution that would have avoided catastrophe as it is
now unfolding.
At this point it indeed looks as if
Varoufakis’ role has been to act as the Western bankers’ Trojan Horse
inside the Greek government, to prepare Greece and the Greek people for
the slaughter, all the while posing as the tire-less fighter for Greek
interests, all without a neck tie, of course.
As the former US Assistant Treasury and
critic of the US foreign economic policies of recent years, Paul Craig
Roberts recently described it, “Greece’s creditors, the EU and the
European Central Bank…are determined to establish the principle that
they can over-lend to a country and force the country to pay by selling
public assets and cutting pensions and social services of citizens. The
creditor banks then profit by financing the privatization of public
assets to favored customers.The
agenda of the EU and the central bank is to terminate the fiscal
independence of EU member states by turning tax and budget policy over
to the EU itself.”
Roberts goes on to state that the Greek
“sovereign debt crisis” is being used to create a precedent that will
apply to every EU member government. The member states will cease to
exist as sovereign states. Sovereignty will rest in the EU. The measures
that Germany and France are supporting will in the end terminate their
own sovereignty. “
How did Greece and the European Union’s Eurozone countries get in such a crisis? The energy that vibrates through all of Europe right now is not of love for fellow human beings, but of hate. There is hate from the Germans against what they are convinced are lazy and tax-cheating ordinary Greeks. They have been fed that image by controlled mainstream media itself in turn controlled by the American oligarchs and their think-tanks. There is hate from the EU Commission and the EU leadership against Greece for creating what they see as the existential crisis of the EU. There is hate from German Chancellor Merkel for ruining her legacy, perhaps.
Above all, there is hate towards the Greek people from their own Greek oligarchs. The
Greek oligarchy—shipping magnates, oil refinery owners, telecoms
owners, media magnates, billionaires many times over—since the early
1990s, has dominated Greek politics. Greeks call them
“diaplekomenoi”–the entangled ones. These elites have preserved their
positions through control of the media and through old-fashioned
favoritism, buying politicians like Yanis Varoufakis.
The
Greek oligarchs, with their untaxed billions hidden in foreign bank
accounts, are willing to see their own nation destroyed to hold on to
their billions. That’s real hate. Those oligarchs are deeply ashamed of
being Greek. That shame likely goes way way back, perhaps some 700
years, to the defeat and subjugation of Greece by the Ottoman Empire
beginning in the 1360s. Maybe it’s time to move on from such childish
feelings of hate.
F. William Engdahl is strategic
risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from
Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and
geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.