German reform package

Raise VAT – Reduce services – Cut jobs

BY KYLE ANDREW BROWN

WASHINGTON, July 12 – The financial stakes for Germany and France are high. It is understood that they hold massive Greece debt on their own banks portfolios. We’re talking billions and billions of euros.

How they got there – well everybody knows. The cozy German financial pyramid scheme had the diplomats at the European Union and the IMF sorta co-sign off on loans, er bailout, er aid packages to Greece.

The bankers who booked these billions in loans – those guys in suits – they made out well. So did apparently those well placed Greeks in the oligarch class and the YES neighborhoods.

The common folks in Athens – well not so much. At this point Greece is a land without hope and opportunity.

Imagine – if you are a German – growing up in a country without hope, without a future. 

Bankers at banks and economists at the IMF and Brussels they don’t put together Lego infrastructure projects. The kind of tinkering around within a country’s natural assets and people resources that builds up a more viable sustainable economic engine.

Alexis Tsipras he’s where he is today as Prime Minister because enough every day common people in his country have come around to understand that they should not be held to pay off billions and billions of debt on financial ledger sheets in Germany and France having actually little to do with them and where they happen to find themselves and their families.

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Humanitarian Aid

Oh, hold on. 

At this point Angela Merkel likes to say Greece must reform her pension program. Deal here, tho, is the pension program is all lotsa Greeks have to support a household in a country with – what is it now, Christine Lagarde? – 2 5 percent unemployment.

Angela just wasn’t listening when Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis told her that back in the day.

Angela she just wants to hear about reform.

Just about everyone by now knows that any reform undertaken by national governments is really about more taxes, reduced services  and folks losing jobs.

As the big shots show up at the Brussels summit this last time they do as they always have – splutter out tired one liners about Greece just not having putting anything substantial on the table.

The Germans are particularly good at spinning this notion that Europe has been worn weary by Greece just doing the same old same old.

The German Foreign Minister Wolfgang Schäuble – he’s the guy wants to send Care Packages to Greece – he’s told us all about the weariness.

Well, truth be told, Greece has been doing the same old same old because the facts from the Athens point of view are the same today as they were the day Alexis Tsipras took office six months ago.

The Greece point of view is very simple. It is basic. And it is very clear: Greece does not have the money.

Greece will never have the money.

So giving Greece another round of debt is just as unsustainable for tomorrow as it has proven to be today.

Just as is it unsustainable that Greece do this German Reform Package: Raise – Lower- Cut.

Raise VAT – Lower  services – Cut jobs.

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Points of View

The point of view of Germany and France is:  All we know is our banks are carrying all this billions and billions of debt on our books.

The point of view of Christine Lagarde at the IMF is simple, too: Greece needs to have a write-down of strangle hold debt.

The point of view of the European Union MEPs is in two very vocal camps: The German Axis of Germany, Nederland and Finland, Baltics and Slavs.

The Southern Axis Greece and the member states where the monetary union’s design failure to have regional governing reserved boards has proved favorable only to one member state – Germany.

France being France and having the good natured make-no-waves François Hollande is in there somewheres.

France is the good guy in all this. The French President understands what Germany and Angela Merkel cannot admit to themselves:  German history and what that history did to Europe.

German history has existed in the European public mind since reunification like the euro: No names. No places. No events.

This has allowed the German political apparatus to appear to function within the European Union as though Berlin operates purely as a financial enterprise.

The blank slate of German history as it operates politically within the European Union allows the German Chancellor to feel free not to apply historical memory to the acts Germany undertakes with the European Union’s member states.

It is because the German Chancellor is misunderstood to engage the European Union on purely financial terms that Germany avoids having the calculus of history applied upon Germany’s own decision making and Germany’s own political actions with member states.

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German Diplomacy

An equally powerful tool for Germany in dominating political decision making within the European Union is the sound bite nature of its public diplomacy.

Germany has orchestrated the talks with Greece in terms of the talks being a set of negotiations. Germany has historically been adept in it’s use of negotiation’s tools. The pre-war German diplomats set the framework by which Germany was able to better time the Blitkrieg. 

As well, German diplomacy during war time successfully both engaged neutral countries and exploited the political apparatus of the occupied countries.

The studied German approach to the Greece talks as a negotiation ensures from the German point of view that the framework of talks will consist of short statements constructed with empty principles. And that blame is assessed when the negotiator, Angela Merkel and Wolfgang  Schäuble, deem suitable.

All the talk in the German media this Sunday is the emergence of France appearing to have stepped somewhat back from Chancellor Angela Merkel. Said more directly, that France is a growing power within Europe.

Well, yes and no.

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Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité

To accept that the European Union is more a financial operation than it is  a confederation of member states pretty much leaves Germany as top dog.

Yet do understand that France indeed has her place within the European framework.

She always has. Exemplified in France’s founding principles that guide her diplomacy: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.

France does not go about demanding concessions from nations.

France does not go about the business of state craft issuing summonses to meetings. 

France does not stand up in the European Parliament and scream at a head of state that he is a False Prophet.

France appreciates from her own history the remarkable dream that is the European Union.

France recognizes having a universal coin of the realm – even if it is the German denominated euro – solidifies the unity of the member states.

As well, unspoken perhaps, is France looking back two eras of her own history – the rebellious 1970s. And later when the banks were in big big trouble.

François Hollande keeps his history fresh. That’s what the French do naturally. And what the French do in the way they bring up a history it to attach the narrative of a people in their place and in their time. 

And it is here that François Hollande pushes the pause button on German tactics to bully Greece into a submission that even Angela Merkel does not really know where it’s social consequences.

François Hollande’s memory recalls that it was real French people who were loaded up in box cars by the German SS. And sent to their horrific fates in the gas chambers of Germany.

Recalls that it was the youth of France who were herded up to work as expendable slave labor for Germany’s war effort.

No, François Hollande will pull us aside and say quietly: “We do not just cast Greece off into the ghetto and forget about them. We are Fraternité.

And how enlightening is it to listen to the German foreign minister Wolfgang Schäuble say perhaps Germany should send Greece humanitarian aid.

This German government consideration of humanitarian aid to Greece six months now into negotiations with Finance Minister Yanis Veroufakis where we have come to see that  Germany has proposed nothing and Germany has yielded nothing.

Germany is unyielding and unable to hear. Because for Germany the talks with Greece are a negotiation. Not a diplomacy.

For Germany the Greece talks are a one-side negotiation until Greece collapses into submission.

Germany’s begins the week brandishing a new weapon through the hands of her proxys. As punishment for holding the Greece Referendum a yet more onerous package with an even heavier debt burden and even bigger reforms of – oh let’s guess is it VAT-services-jobs?  

Negotiator’s rationale? You closed the banks. [ because there is no money ]

The Institutions, the Chancellor and the IMF lady – they come to the negotiations with the Greece Finance Minister and they just sit there at a table without any work papers and sip bottled water.

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Fancy Pants Bill Collectors

The Institutions, the Chancellor and the IMF lady – they don’t do any actual work. They just show up for the silly drive by outside the headquarters building and sound self important and brashly concerned for a 30 second headshot for the news reels.

These guys are the classic bill collector. Step outa the shinny new Chyrisler. Collect the Past Due. Drive off to the better side of town.

These guys have huge teams of economists.  And finance people.  And urban planners stashed away. But they come to these so called negotiations with Zilch – Nada.

No planning for the future.

No dreams for the children.

Like Germany doesn’t have a clue how to rebuild a nation.

Like Angela Merkel rebuilt her East Germany with the German Reform Package of Tax -Reduce – Cut.

Give us all a break.

Now once again the Institutions, the Chancellor and the IMF lady have let it be known that well yet again Greece has offered nothing new. Nothing substantial.

Well, Angela Merkel and IMF lady, that’s cause Greece gots nothin left to give.

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