Europe’s shell game preys upon Greece

By KYLE ANDREW BROWN

Washington, June 2 – From the latest dispatches from Greece it is apparent that the nation has already moved into bankruptcy.

If not by a final closing of the credit window of the IMF and Eurozone bankers – but surely by the complete brake on economic activity. The social institutions that secure everyday life have already endured crippling layoffs and drastic wage reductions.

Overnight Monday into Tuesday morning the Europe 5 have been negotiating a set of reform ultimatums to unlock €7.2 billion in remaining bailout funds. On Friday the Greek treasury must repay €300 million to the IMF.

The offer is for Greece to scrape up from the Greek vault the cash that would keep funding social services – hospitals, schools, that sort of thing – and put it into a digital wire transfer to the bankers’ coffers.

And then the Greeks are to suck it all up and stop spending any money.

It is all part of the shell game to keep the creditors’ spreadsheets sorta current by showing as an asset the – what is it now 324.2 billion? – balance that Greece owes and everybody knows will never ever pay.

Everyone has lived smartly on the revolving cycle of debt that has pushed Greece off the cliff. Greece having a population that cannot be supported by olive orchards and wandering sun searching tourists. The European bankers have been the only natural resource on offer to the Greeks.

And the bankers weren’t interested in securing an economic future as collateral for Greece.

Just yielding quick bankers’ profits by booking billions of euro loans onto their bulging corporate balance sheets. It’s not like the geniuses that call themselves the political leaders of Europe are actually figuring out how to build an economic engine in Greece.

No, they will leave that to the empty promises of Vladimir Putin in Soviet Russia to build this fantasy pipeline across Greece to suck up more Euros for Moscow.

International banking is a finite resource. The auditors always show up. Flip through the books. And people get fired.Sometimes the doors get shuttered.

The Greek people shoulder an enormous psychological burden. Europe is smugly telling them how awful they have been. For living.

We read last week about the hospital administrator working without half the required staff. There’s no money for salaries. His young adult son committed suicide – the son saw only calamity where there should have been a bright future ahead of him. He didn’t join the wandering unemployed underclass of Europe that show up in Britain looking for work.

The European flag it wants to suggest a sort of common nationality for the member states. French presidents like to give telly speeches with the blue and gold planted behind their desk.

But nationality is not a suggestion. Europe walks a dangerous slope as it prepares to jettison Greece. The unfolding Greek collapse is destined to be a cancer that eats away at the fabric of social justice the Europeans so proudly profess.

The Ukraine prime minister he too fancies himself part of the European protectorate. He’s got one of those flags by his desk too. It’s all very curious. The nation states of Europe well understand that Ukraine is all that keeps the festering ambitions of Soviet Russia at bay.

And yet Angela Merkel handed the Donbas and Crimea over to Vladimir Putin. She spoke for a European community that has neither the will nor an army capable of defending the border.

The Europeans figure the slight of hand that transferred sovereign Ukraine territory to Soviet Russia in exchange for a 13 point peace plan stopped the Soviet contagion that threatened Europe’s winter gas supply.

Vladimir Putin – he just calls up the troops from Siberia in the East to take a slice of whatever coal mine in Europe he just happens to want.

Some nations when they put the stars on the flag they understand it is the formation of eternal union – one worth defending in both the heart and on the battle field. Sustained upon a social fabric of interdependency and institutional cohesion. In jettisoning Greece Europe is about to unfurl her flag’s true colors –

It’s all just about collecting the money, stupid!

June 2, 2015