Tuesday, February 7th., 2017
Άρθρα σαν το ακόλουθο φωτίζουν τους πολίτες ως προς τις κατευθύνσεις προς τις οποίες πρέπει να στραφούν και ψύχραιμα να ερευνήσουν και να εμβαθύνουν. Στ' αλήθεια, ελάχιστη σημασία έχει πιά η ανάλυση της ποσοστιαίας πτώσης των συντάξεων, των μισθών, της ιατρικής κι εκπαιδευτικής μέριμνας.
Τί αξία έχει να αναμασάμε την πίκρα γιά την προδοσία των ιθυνόντων, την κακοήθεια των διεθνών δυνάμεων που ανενδοίαστα μας συντρίβουν, χειραγωγούν, διαφθείρουν κι εκμεταλλεύονται και την προϊούσα πτωχοποίησή μας, προσωπική κι εθνική; Καμμιά ! Απονεκρωτική αδρανοποίηση και καταθλιπτική επιδείνωση.
Τί αξία έχει να αναμασάμε την πίκρα γιά την προδοσία των ιθυνόντων, την κακοήθεια των διεθνών δυνάμεων που ανενδοίαστα μας συντρίβουν, χειραγωγούν, διαφθείρουν κι εκμεταλλεύονται και την προϊούσα πτωχοποίησή μας, προσωπική κι εθνική; Καμμιά ! Απονεκρωτική αδρανοποίηση και καταθλιπτική επιδείνωση.
Όμως ανεπηρέαστη από συμφέροντα, φοβίες και χειραγωγήσεις πληροφόρηση, οικονομο-πολιτική ανάλυση κι αλήθεια, μπορεί να αφυπνίσει την συνειδητότητα των πολλών. Μακάρι ακόμα και αυτών των συστημικών μέσων ενημέρωσης , αν και δύσκολο.
Με την αφύπνιση που προσφέρει ή κατά μέτωπο, χωρίς υποκρισία και χρωματικές παρεμβολές αντίληψη της πραγματικότητας , το βαρύ πέπλο της ανικανότητας προς δράση , του αποπνικτικού συναισθήματος της ανημπόριας, πέφτει, αυτοκαταργείται.
Ποιός είπε πως δεν μπορούν ομάδες-ομάδες ανέργων πολιτών, υποαπασχολούμενων , υγιέστατων συνταξιούχων , χρήσιμων καθ΄όλα ανθρώπων όλων των ηλικιών , να αναλαμβάνουν τα ξεχασμένα τους χωράφια αλληλοβοηθούμενοι , να ανταλλάσσουν εργασίες , υπηρεσίες , γνώσεις , αλληλοσυνεργαζόμενοι, στηρίζοντας προσωπικά ακόμη και την σχολική λειτουργία, γιά χάρη των παιδιών κι εγγονιών τους; Συμπαραστεκόμενοι στους άρρωστους κι αδύναμους με την αγάπη, αλλά και όποτε αυτή υπάρχει και με την γνώση κι εξειδίκευσή του ο καθένας;
Με την αφύπνιση που προσφέρει ή κατά μέτωπο, χωρίς υποκρισία και χρωματικές παρεμβολές αντίληψη της πραγματικότητας , το βαρύ πέπλο της ανικανότητας προς δράση , του αποπνικτικού συναισθήματος της ανημπόριας, πέφτει, αυτοκαταργείται.
Ποιός είπε πως δεν μπορούν ομάδες-ομάδες ανέργων πολιτών, υποαπασχολούμενων , υγιέστατων συνταξιούχων , χρήσιμων καθ΄όλα ανθρώπων όλων των ηλικιών , να αναλαμβάνουν τα ξεχασμένα τους χωράφια αλληλοβοηθούμενοι , να ανταλλάσσουν εργασίες , υπηρεσίες , γνώσεις , αλληλοσυνεργαζόμενοι, στηρίζοντας προσωπικά ακόμη και την σχολική λειτουργία, γιά χάρη των παιδιών κι εγγονιών τους; Συμπαραστεκόμενοι στους άρρωστους κι αδύναμους με την αγάπη, αλλά και όποτε αυτή υπάρχει και με την γνώση κι εξειδίκευσή του ο καθένας;
Ποιός θα μπορούσε ποτέ να εμποδίσει ομάδες πολιτών όταν ήσυχα, καλοπροαίρετα, ειρηνικά και φιλικά συνεργάζονται μεταξύ τους αυτοδιαχειριζόμενοι τις υποθέσεις τους, σε όποιο βαθμό αυτό είναι εφικτό; Απολύτως κανείς! Και είθε τότε η όποια κυβερνώσα ομάδα, να αφυπνίζεται κι αυτή και να ενεργοποιεί ανάλογα τις εναπομείνασες πολιτειακές δυνάμεις, συμπαραστεκόμενη στην βούληση των πολιτών.
Ούτως ή άλλως, όλες οι χώρες καλλιεργούν κι ενθαρρύνουν τις χορηγικές προσφορές, τις εθελοντικές υπηρεσίες , προσπαθούν να σαγηνεύουν τους σπόνσορες και να ευχαριστούν τους ολίγους 'αλληλέγγυους'. Γιατί λοιπόν να μήν υποστηρίξουν και την ενεργοποίηση καρδιάς του μέσου πολίτη και γιατί ο μέσος πολίτης να άρνηθεί την προφανή ανάγκη άμεσης δραστηριοποίησης γιά την επιβίωσή του, την ώρα που τα παλιοκαιρίτικα αποτυχημένα συστήματα διακυβέρνησης καταρρέουν;
Μαρία Λ. Πελεκανάκη
Μαρία Λ. Πελεκανάκη
Expropriation And Impoverishment:
"Capitalist" Greece & "Socialist" Venezuela
"Capitalist" Greece & "Socialist" Venezuela
Neocolonial "capitalist paradise" or crony "socialist paradise": the net result is the same: expropriation and impoverishment.
Yesterday I noted that not all assets will make it through the inevitable financial re-set. ( Which Assets Are Most Likely to Survive the Inevitable "System Re-Set"?)
Those that are easy to expropriate will be expropriated, and those assets vulnerable to soaring taxes, inflation and currency devaluation will also be hollowed out.
I hope it won't be too great a shock that crony-capitalism and crony-socialism function in much the same fashion and generate the same result: the wealth of the nation is funneled (or expropriated) into the ruling Elites, impoverishing the non-elites.
The mechanisms differ in appearance but they produce the same results: expropriation and impoverishment. In Greece, two Ruling Elites stripmined the nation: the big European banks and the domestic oligarchs and their functionaries in the state.
Having flooded Greece with "cheap" credit denominated in euros, the EU's big banks demanded "austerity" so the Greek government could continue servicing its massive debt. The Greek oligarchs dodged "austerity" in the usual way: by buying political influence.
Very little of the so-called "bail-outs" actually reached the Greek citizenry, and much of what did enter the Greek economy flowed into the hands of the oligarchy.
This is what I call the Neocolonial-Financialization Model (May 24, 2012), which substitutes the economic power of financialization (debt, leverage and speculation) for the raw power of political conquest and control.
The main strategy of financialization is: extend cheap credit to nations with limited access to capital. Nations with limited access to capital will swallow the bait of cheap credit whole, and willingly agree to penalties, high interest rates, etc.
Then, when the credit expansion reaches levels that cannot be supported, the lenders demand collateral and/or favorable trade and financial concessions.
The global financial powers developed the Neocolonial Model, which turns these same techniques on one's home region. Thus Greece and other capital-poor European nations were recognized as the periphery that could be exploited by the core, and the euro was the ideal tool to financialize the economies of nations which could never have generated credit/housing bubbles without the wide-open spigots of cheap credit flooding their economies.
In Neocolonialism, the forces of financialization are used to indenture the populace to the financial core: the peripheral "colonials" borrow money to buy the finished goods manufactured in the core economies, enriching the regional Elites with A) the profits made selling goods to the debtors B) interest on credit extended to the peripheral colonies to buy the core economies' goods and "live large", and C) the transactional skim of financializing peripheral assets such as real estate and State debt.
In essence, the core banks of the EU colonized the peripheral nations via the financializing euro, which enabled a massive expansion of debt and consumption in the periphery. The banks and exporters of the core (Germany) extracted enormous profits from this expansion of debt and consumption.
Now that the financialization scheme of the euro has run its course, the periphery's neocolonial standing is starkly revealed: the assets and income of the periphery are flowing to the core as interest on the private and sovereign debts that are owed to the core's central bank and its money-center banks.
Neocolonialism benefits both the core's financial Aristocracy and the domestic oligarchies/ kleptocracies. This is ably demonstrated in the recent essay Misrule of the Few: How the Oligarchs Ruined Greece.
I've covered these dynamics for many years:
Greece Is a Kleptocracy (June 28, 2011)
Is Greece a Template for U.S. State & Local Government Debt Crises? (July 11, 2015)
The only way the banks and domestic oligarchy can retain their grip is by stripping non-Elites of their income and wealth. As I discussed in When Assets (Such as Real Estate) Become Liabilities (December 27, 2016), raising property taxes and transaction fees is one way of accomplishing this: as taxes rise to fund "austerity" payments to the EU's banking Elite, the costs of owning property soar.
Meanwhile, incomes stagnate as taxes increase and the economy is crushed by the euro's asymmetry (good for Germany, bad for Greece) and the debt-serfdom of paying interest on the staggering debt.
Households have no choice but to surrender property they can no longer afford-- even when they own it free and clear. That is also what happened in the late stages of the Roman Empire: taxes soared to the point that farmers could no longer feed their families and pay taxes, so they abandoned their farms and became serfs on the protected Elites' vast estates.
The "crony-socialist" model is to centrally manage the economy to benefit the oligarchy and its cronies--a fatal mismanagement of the nation's productive resources that exploits and stripmines the non-Elites. Venezuela is imploding not because of hyper-inflation, but as a result of policies that led to hyper-inflation: policies that generate perverse incentives while protecting the Elites, disincentives to produce goods and services and incentives to depend on government subsidies.
Venezuela has been effectively de-industrialized by its crony-socialist oligarchy. Capital that should have been invested in the electrical grid and the oil industry has been diverted to the pockets of cronies and state apparatchiks. There's no food in the markets because government-set prices don't make it worthwhile to grow anything. Farmers take their produce to neighboring countries if they can, where they can actually get paid for producing food.
Outlaw markets and the free flow of fact-based information, and the only possible result is The Disaster of De-industrialization (June 15, 2016), which generates a self-reinforcing feedback of high inflation and declining production.
This dynamic eventually hollows out the nation's currency, as the currency is effectively an asset based on the collateral of the nation's output. As output stagnates or implodes while the money being issued expands, the only possible result is a severe devaluation of the currency, a.k.a. hyper-inflation.
This is how you end up with a currency that is officially 10 to the U.S. dollar (USD) but on the black market is 3,200 to the USD. The Trajectory of Venezuelan Hyperinflation Looks Frighteningly Familiar.
Venezuela Live Economic Data
Meet the Venezuelan rebel whose crime is publishing exchange rates: ( dolartoday)
You see the two stripmining mechanisms at work here: either expropriate the non-Elites' income and property with soaring taxes, or mismanage the economy so severely that the resulting de-industrialization destroys the value of the currency, impoverishing the citizens who have no choice but to value their labor and assets in the near-worthless currency.
Neocolonial "capitalist paradise" or crony "socialist paradise": the net result is the same: expropriation and impoverishment.
Yesterday I noted that not all assets will make it through the inevitable financial re-set. ( Which Assets Are Most Likely to Survive the Inevitable "System Re-Set"?)
Those that are easy to expropriate will be expropriated, and those assets vulnerable to soaring taxes, inflation and currency devaluation will also be hollowed out.
There are two real-time examples of these dynamics we can profitably study: "capitalist" Greece and "socialist" Venezuela. Both nations have impoverished their citizenry to preserve an oligarchy and its cronies.
The mechanisms differ in appearance but they produce the same results: expropriation and impoverishment. In Greece, two Ruling Elites stripmined the nation: the big European banks and the domestic oligarchs and their functionaries in the state.
Having flooded Greece with "cheap" credit denominated in euros, the EU's big banks demanded "austerity" so the Greek government could continue servicing its massive debt. The Greek oligarchs dodged "austerity" in the usual way: by buying political influence.
Very little of the so-called "bail-outs" actually reached the Greek citizenry, and much of what did enter the Greek economy flowed into the hands of the oligarchy.
This is what I call the Neocolonial-Financialization Model (May 24, 2012), which substitutes the economic power of financialization (debt, leverage and speculation) for the raw power of political conquest and control.
The main strategy of financialization is: extend cheap credit to nations with limited access to capital. Nations with limited access to capital will swallow the bait of cheap credit whole, and willingly agree to penalties, high interest rates, etc.
Then, when the credit expansion reaches levels that cannot be supported, the lenders demand collateral and/or favorable trade and financial concessions.
The global financial powers developed the Neocolonial Model, which turns these same techniques on one's home region. Thus Greece and other capital-poor European nations were recognized as the periphery that could be exploited by the core, and the euro was the ideal tool to financialize the economies of nations which could never have generated credit/housing bubbles without the wide-open spigots of cheap credit flooding their economies.
In Neocolonialism, the forces of financialization are used to indenture the populace to the financial core: the peripheral "colonials" borrow money to buy the finished goods manufactured in the core economies, enriching the regional Elites with A) the profits made selling goods to the debtors B) interest on credit extended to the peripheral colonies to buy the core economies' goods and "live large", and C) the transactional skim of financializing peripheral assets such as real estate and State debt.
In essence, the core banks of the EU colonized the peripheral nations via the financializing euro, which enabled a massive expansion of debt and consumption in the periphery. The banks and exporters of the core (Germany) extracted enormous profits from this expansion of debt and consumption.
Now that the financialization scheme of the euro has run its course, the periphery's neocolonial standing is starkly revealed: the assets and income of the periphery are flowing to the core as interest on the private and sovereign debts that are owed to the core's central bank and its money-center banks.
Neocolonialism benefits both the core's financial Aristocracy and the domestic oligarchies/ kleptocracies. This is ably demonstrated in the recent essay Misrule of the Few: How the Oligarchs Ruined Greece.
I've covered these dynamics for many years:
Greece Is a Kleptocracy (June 28, 2011)
Is Greece a Template for U.S. State & Local Government Debt Crises? (July 11, 2015)
The only way the banks and domestic oligarchy can retain their grip is by stripping non-Elites of their income and wealth. As I discussed in When Assets (Such as Real Estate) Become Liabilities (December 27, 2016), raising property taxes and transaction fees is one way of accomplishing this: as taxes rise to fund "austerity" payments to the EU's banking Elite, the costs of owning property soar.
Meanwhile, incomes stagnate as taxes increase and the economy is crushed by the euro's asymmetry (good for Germany, bad for Greece) and the debt-serfdom of paying interest on the staggering debt.
Households have no choice but to surrender property they can no longer afford-- even when they own it free and clear. That is also what happened in the late stages of the Roman Empire: taxes soared to the point that farmers could no longer feed their families and pay taxes, so they abandoned their farms and became serfs on the protected Elites' vast estates.
The "crony-socialist" model is to centrally manage the economy to benefit the oligarchy and its cronies--a fatal mismanagement of the nation's productive resources that exploits and stripmines the non-Elites. Venezuela is imploding not because of hyper-inflation, but as a result of policies that led to hyper-inflation: policies that generate perverse incentives while protecting the Elites, disincentives to produce goods and services and incentives to depend on government subsidies.
Venezuela has been effectively de-industrialized by its crony-socialist oligarchy. Capital that should have been invested in the electrical grid and the oil industry has been diverted to the pockets of cronies and state apparatchiks. There's no food in the markets because government-set prices don't make it worthwhile to grow anything. Farmers take their produce to neighboring countries if they can, where they can actually get paid for producing food.
Outlaw markets and the free flow of fact-based information, and the only possible result is The Disaster of De-industrialization (June 15, 2016), which generates a self-reinforcing feedback of high inflation and declining production.
This dynamic eventually hollows out the nation's currency, as the currency is effectively an asset based on the collateral of the nation's output. As output stagnates or implodes while the money being issued expands, the only possible result is a severe devaluation of the currency, a.k.a. hyper-inflation.
This is how you end up with a currency that is officially 10 to the U.S. dollar (USD) but on the black market is 3,200 to the USD. The Trajectory of Venezuelan Hyperinflation Looks Frighteningly Familiar.
Venezuela Live Economic Data
Meet the Venezuelan rebel whose crime is publishing exchange rates: ( dolartoday)
You see the two stripmining mechanisms at work here: either expropriate the non-Elites' income and property with soaring taxes, or mismanage the economy so severely that the resulting de-industrialization destroys the value of the currency, impoverishing the citizens who have no choice but to value their labor and assets in the near-worthless currency.
Neocolonial "capitalist paradise" or crony "socialist paradise": the net result is the same: expropriation and impoverishment.