California is renowned for all the obvious reasons. As the most populous state in the United States, California holds unprecedented power: often estimated as roughly the eighth largest economy in the world, the region is the second largest national subentity on the globe, behind Sao Paulo, Brazil. Californians mostly dwell on the concrete islands that constitute the Los Angeles-San Diego and San Francisco-San Jose agglomerations, artificial human constructs which are products predominantly of last century. With an economy roughly the size of Italy's, California makes up one of the U.S.'s "FnCOMA" states (Florida, Nevada, California, Oregon, Michigan and Arizona). Between two ages, California today sits at distinct crossroads. Will the 59th largest political entity in the world work for a fairer world or will its superlative-filled ecology—the state boasts the largest, tallest and oldest trees—have its destiny dictated by the most efficient paths to profit by an increasingly consolidated state-enterprise, working as a rule out of New York, City of London, France, and Germany?
That, as of 2005, 57.59 per cent of California residents age five and older spoke English as a first language at home, while 28.21 per cent spoke Spanish, indicates the degree to which the modern keystone border doesn't divide nation-states and citizens of nations. The world's true borders divide the generations living at one time, families and, of course, entire people's based on something as shallow as the color of one's skin, which is an illusion basically conjured by the sun, melanin and time. Nation-states are units of control, influenced as a rule by transnational entities, such as corporations, foundations and think tanks. Today, nearly all of the premiere conglomerations and their subsidiaries—from banking and finance, military and security, to agriculture and medicine—all act as if they're one, influencing the markets and therefore everyday commerce. The current poster-child for such "market making" corporations has been Goldman Sachs, and for considerably good reason. In California, the news is no different: all three leading candidates in the race do business with G-Sachs; they are, Meg Whitman (R), Scott Poizner (D), and Jerry Brown (D). We'll begin with the multi-billionaire CEO, Meg Whitman.
Of her long record of involvement with Goldman Sachs, Whitman says she "regrets" doing business with the investment and securities firm. Whitman, former CEO of eBay, served on Goldman's board from October 2001 to December 2002. The position paid $475,000 in cash and stock options. Still earlier in 1998, she had hired Goldman to advise eBay's Initial Public Offering. The firm advised a second eBay stock offering and also helped the takeover of online biller PayPal in 2002. Meanwhile, Whitman was also a personal banking client of Goldman and engaged in "spinning," a now-illegal practice in which the bank enabled her some of the first shares in companies going public. Once the shares were made widely available, their prices soared. Thus, stock belonging to preferred clients such as Whitman was sold for a quick profit. Whilst spinning was legal, Whitman made $1.78 million through it. [1]
In the LA Times, Michael Hiltzik ponders Whitman's involvement with Goldman Sachs:
Eight years ago, it came out that Whitman was among an elite group of favored executives who had accepted preferential stock deals from Goldman Sachs while it was seeking business from their companies.
In spinning, executives would typically get shares in coveted initial public stock offerings, which they would "spin," or resell, into a soaring market, usually within days and sometimes within hours. Their quick and almost entirely risk-free profits were effectively gifts, and the investment banks the givers.
Whitman attempted to dodge responsibility for her actions by claiming that there was "nothing illegal" about them at the time.
"Such investment opportunities were common at the time," Whitman wrote in her autobiography released this year. "And I had never seen anyone in the government, the media, or anywhere else raise the idea that this practice was a conflict of interest."
In 2002, Congress looked into spinning, and, a year later, the Securities and Exchange Commission banned it. "I supported those changes," she insisted in her book. The day she left the Goldman Sachs board, the government announced a $1.4 billion settlement with Goldman and nine other firms that included a ban on stock spinning. EBay shareholders sued Whitman for conflict of interest. She maintained that she received insider information only through her personal banking relationship with Goldman. Whitman and two other eBay executives settled the suit in 2005, having admitted no wrongdoing.
Seventy-three percent of Americans believe it to be "somewhat likely" that Goldman is guilty of fraud in the home mortgage market after hearing of the Securities and Exchange Commission's lawsuit against the firm last week, says a Rasmussen poll. 75% also don't oppose the auditing of the Federal Reserve, in which Goldman holds stock, according Bob Chapman of the International Forecaster. [2]
Whitman has publicly received $110,500 in campaign contributions last year from Goldman contacts, among whom are two former executives who are members of Whitman's campaign finance committee, according to her website. Investment adviser Brad DeFoor, a Goldman Sachs managing director in San Francisco, gave her campaign $24,900 and Gene Sykes, who co-chairs Goldman's global mergers and acquisitions group in Los Angeles, donated $25,900.
Further, records detail that Whitman's family foundation is managed by a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs, the Ayco Company out of New York,that manages money for wealthy families, according to the description on its website. The Griffith R. Harsh and Margaret C. Whitman Charitable Foundation had $48 million in assets at the time of its 2008 tax filing.
"It is highly disingenuous and hypocritical for Team Brown to make accusations surrounding Meg's service on a board for only 15 months nearly 10 years ago, when Jerry Brown's own sister oversees Goldman Sachs' dealings with the state of California," said Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for Whitman. Brown's sister, Kathleen Brown, has led the West Coast region of municipal finance for Goldman Sachs since 2003.
"Unsurprisingly, Meg Whitman and her campaign is once again trying to avoid her taking responsibility for her actions. Jerry's sister is an adult who needs no one's permission to take a job," said Jerry Brown's campaign spokesman, Sterling Clifford.
His sister oversaw a deal with the city of Oakland, where he "served" as mayor for eight years. The deal, known as an "interest rate swap," was advertised as guaranteeing Oakland stability in its debt payments, but now costs the cash-strapped city $5 million a year. The agreement goes until 2021, with an estimated cancellation cost of $19 million. The city is trying to renegotiate it, and union officials representing government employees are calling on Goldman to let Oakland and other municipalities free of such agreements.
The swap, like those of many governments, began in 1998, one year before Brown assumed office. City officials renegotiated it in 2003, just before his sister, who was also a former state treasurer, began working for Goldman as the West Coast head of municipal finance. In 2005, when the city paid off the debt Goldman had packaged, it left the interest rate swap in place. Municipal servants argued the decision made sense because they would have had to pay $15 million to cancel the deal. In doing so, a major revenue stream for Goldman Sachs remained in place, benefiting them further during the Downturn, while hurting the city.
Bounds called the agreement "a big-money deal for Wall Street that is costing California taxpayers millions of dollar a year...no matter how you look at it, Jerry and his sister were on both ends of a bad deal for taxpayers, and Goldman Sachs pocketed millions." Not only was Brown mayor, responsible for appointments to city administrator and finance officials who oversaw the city borrowing, Brown was president of the Oakland Joint Powers Financing Authority, though in a non-voting capacity, as it renegotiated the deal and repaid Goldman's debt in 2005. Sterling Clifford, Brown's campaign spokesman, claimed he was not involved.
Poizner borrowed $500,000 to finance his 2004 state assembly race with the help of Goldman Sachs, and state financial records detail his history of investments with the firm. "Attacking a candidate for flimsy ties to a private company is exactly what you would expect from a desperate liberal - and I guess that includes Steve Poisner, too," said Whitman's spokesman, Bounds.
Looming in the shadows of campaign rhetoric, is the continued collapse of California. Almost one year ago, the state government was so deeply indebted that it began to issue IOUs instead of wages. It's current unemployment rate nudges 30 per cent. Unannounced and generally ill-perceived austerity measures and structural adjustments have commenced, with spending for education and healthcare slashed, mass layoffs and forced unpaid leave. An epicenter of suburban living, the housing bubble collapse has impoverished millions and forced tens of thousands of families out of their homes. The political system "is locked in paralysis" and the two-term rule of former movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger seen as a disaster. Professor Kevin Starr, who wrote an acclaimed history of the state, recently stated that "California is on the verge of becoming the first failed state in America."
Starr has a history of mulling over the future of the golden state. In 1988, following three years of debate, a who's who of corporate and civic celebrities handed to then Mayor Bradley a detailed plan for the future of Southern California. L.A. 2000: A City for the Future devotes itself to hyperbolic rhetoric about Los Angeles's certain destiny as a "world crossroads" a la imperial Rome or LaGuardian New York. In a section of the epilogue, Starr, showing his colors as a devotee of totalitarian measures, considered what might happen if the city failed to create a new "dominant establishment" to manage the city and regions diverse peoples. He wrote, "there is, of course, the Blade Runner scenario: the fusion of individual cultures into a demotic polyglotism ominous with unresolved hostilities."
At LittleSis.org, there is a list of Goldman Sachs cronies who have worked as U.S. government officials. To be sure, an international version of the list would show connections with key players in countries such as Germany and Greece, as a small example. U.S. connections from LittleSis: [3]
NAME
POSITION
Gary D Cohn
President and COO of Goldman Sachs
Pete Coneway
Investment Banker, Goldman Sachs & Co
Diana Farrell
Deputy director of Obama's National Economic...
Jose Fourquet
Investor, Goldman Sachs & Co.
Stephen Friedman
Chairman of Stone Point Capital; director of...
Gary Gensler
ex-Goldman Sachs executive, Chairman of Commodity...
Dick Gephardt
US Representative from Missouri
Bob Hormats
Under Secretary of State for Economic, Energy,...
Robert J Hurst
Reuben Jeffery III
Undersecretary of State for Economic, Energy, and...
James A Johnson
Vice Chair of Perseus and Goldman director;...
Neel Kashkari
Treasury official in charge of TARP; former...
James C Langdon Jr
Senior Executive Partner at Akin Gump and Bush...
Philip D Murphy
Ambassador to Germany-Designate
Mark Patterson
Chief of Staff to Tim Geithner
Henry M Paulson Jr
Secretary of Treasury under George W Bush; former...
Karthik Ramanathan
Domestic Finance: Acting Assistant Secretary for...
Robert E Rubin
Former Treasury Secretary and senior advisor at...
Faryar Shirzad
Global Head of Government Affairs at Goldman...
Robert K Steel
CEO of Wachovia; Under Secretary of Treasury...
Adam Storch
SEC Chief Operating Officer; former Goldman Sachs...
Larry Summers
Director of the National Economic Council ...
John Whitehead
Banker and public official (ex-Goldman Sachs)
Robert Zoellick
US Trade Representative and World Bank president...
The allegations against Whitman and her ties to G-Sachs have received the most press. For that reason, desperation is setting in at her campaign headquarters. In Roseville on Monday, she told a small audience that she would appoint a grand jury to eliminate the more than $7.5 billion in fraud she claims occurs every year in programs for the poor, seniors, and people with disabilities. Many claim, however, those numbers have little or no basis in reality. [5]
Greg Lucas analyzed her claim from California's Capitol:
Logic suggests hospitals, case workers, emergency room physicians, state administrators, nurses, drug companies, employment training facilities, childcare providers, in-home care workers and the myriad other participants in the three programs would have to work serious overtime to do their jobs and bilk the state 60 cents on the dollar.
SEIU State Council Communications Director Mary Gutierrez:
If Meg Whitman were truly committed to protecting taxpayer dollars, she'd be fighting to protect home care services that fare more cost-effective and compassionate than the alternative -- forcing people with disabilities and our elderly into nursing homes at five times the cost.
In 2008, Goldman Sachs was criticized for proposing ways for investment clients to profit from California's financial Downturn. It urged some of its biggest clients to place investment bets against California bonds despite having collected millions of dollars in fees to help the state sell some of those same bonds. Goldman Sachs financial transactions in Greece reveal that such trades are a uniform policy in Goldman Sachs’s international business model.
1. Jamison, Jane. Meg Whitman's Troubling Connection to Goldman Sachs. Red County, 30 April 2010
Accessible at:
http://www.redcounty.com/meg-whitmans-troubling-connection-goldman-sachs/39291
2. Marinucci, Carla; Williams, Lance. Whitman feels heat as Goldman's image tarnishes. SFGate, 22 April 2010.
Accessible at: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/04/22/BA6C1D2B0H.DTL#ixzz0oP7be0UP
3. O’Connell, Justin. Profiling the Power-That-Be. DissidentVoice,
Accessible at:
3. Rothfeld, Michael. Whitman, Brown have ties to Goldman Sachs. Los Angeles Times, 24 April 2010.
Accessible at:
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/24/local/la-me-jerry-brown-20100424
4. Harris, Paul. Will California Become America's First Failed State? Guardian UK, 4 October 2009.
Accessible at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/04/california-failing-state-debt
5. Smith, Steve. Whitman Uses Bogus Claims of Fraud to Attack Workers, Seniors and People with Disabilities. California Progress Report, 18 May 2010.
6. ______. Firm urged to hedge against state bonds it helped sell. Los Angeles Times, 11 November 2008.
7. Liberto, Jennifer. Fed probing Goldman trades with Greece. CNNMoney, 25 February 2010.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
IMF and World Bank Plan Austerity For All
Below is posted an article on protests in Greece.
The measures being implemented by the central bank of Greece, the government, at the benefit of large international financial institutions, must, due to systemic contradictions, be implemented all over the world.
That is the logic of The Downturn.
The IMF and World Bank plan on downgrading credit scores of major first world nations, such as the United States and Britain, as well as countries across the E.U.
Greece is a protectorate, without sovereignty.
The United States can expect a further collapse of the economy due to crippling debt and mal-investment. There is no sane debate regarding ways to redirect technology and capital in order to become the pre-eminent producer of any ideal good. As Buffet said, we can expect to become a nation of sharecroppers. This will, effectively, take away US economic sovereignty.
Considering Canada produces most of our weaponry, can we argue that we have sovereignty now? Even without the ability of weapon production??
Restructuring and austerity by IMF and World Bank are well-documented. They are headed for the US, and that is why American's are being blamed for acts of terrorism. Resistance is expected, as should be a police state.
The measures being implemented by the central bank of Greece, the government, at the benefit of large international financial institutions, must, due to systemic contradictions, be implemented all over the world.
That is the logic of The Downturn.
The IMF and World Bank plan on downgrading credit scores of major first world nations, such as the United States and Britain, as well as countries across the E.U.
Greece is a protectorate, without sovereignty.
The United States can expect a further collapse of the economy due to crippling debt and mal-investment. There is no sane debate regarding ways to redirect technology and capital in order to become the pre-eminent producer of any ideal good. As Buffet said, we can expect to become a nation of sharecroppers. This will, effectively, take away US economic sovereignty.
Considering Canada produces most of our weaponry, can we argue that we have sovereignty now? Even without the ability of weapon production??
Restructuring and austerity by IMF and World Bank are well-documented. They are headed for the US, and that is why American's are being blamed for acts of terrorism. Resistance is expected, as should be a police state.
Greece Erupts As Men From IMF Prepare Axe
Mathew Campbell in Athens
MAY DAY protests in Greece turned violent yesterday as youths in gas masks and hoods set fire to vehicles, smashed shop fronts and threw molotov cocktails and rocks at police in an explosion of fury over austerity measures they claim will hurt only the poor.
Tourists were cut off from their hotels as thousands of communists, civil servants and private-sector workers converged on a main square in Athens to vent their rage at the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
“No to the IMF’s junta,” they chanted as a youth in a black hood produced a hammer to try to smash windows of the luxury Grande Bretagne hotel.
Another painted anti-capitalist slogans on the facade, and demonstrators intervened to prevent him from spraying an Australian woman with paint as she tried to get back into the hotel. Japanese tourists stood taking photographs of the mayhem with mobile phones before being forced to retreat, coughing and sneezing, under a cloud of tear gas.
RELATED LINKS
Spain downgrade sparks European sell-off
Cost of covering Greek debt heads higher
The violence came as negotiations were concluding between the socialist government of George Papandreou, the IMF and the EU over a multi-billion-euro rescue package for Greece.
Anger has grown against the EU for insisting on tough austerity measures in return for a bailout worth an estimated €45 billion (£39 billion) this year alone, and up to €120 billion (£104 billion) over three years.
Some young Greeks prefer to blame their elders for the mountain of debt that has resulted in Greece, like a wayward child, being placed under the tutelage of the men from the IMF.
“I cannot help but blame my parents a little for what’s happened,” said Achilles Zacharoulis, a 36-year-old cardiologist. “They were here all that time,” he added, referring to the past three decades of mismanagement and fiscal insanity. “But what did they do to stop it?”
Vaggelis Gettos, 24, is just as alarmed at the burden being heaped on the young by austerity measures expected to be announced today, and has pledged to resist them in more protests this week against what he sees as a plot to impoverish Greece.
“We will live much worse than our parents,” he said. “Why should we be made to pay for their mistakes?”
The question of who was to blame and who should pay for the greatest crisis to afflict the single currency was a subject of heated debate, particularly after a leading credit rating agency put the cradle of civilisation in the same category as Azerbaijan by reducing its government bonds to “junk” status.
Economists regard the bloated civil service with its jobs for life and generous pensions as a cancer consuming the country’s resources. The older generation, the experts grimly concur, turned the state into a giant cash machine to be plundered at will.
Today the party is over, however, and that makes some experts optimistic: Greece now has no choice but to implement much-needed reforms that will bring swift results. “It’s like a dentist putting a child in braces,” said one observer. “It’s not nice, but necessary for growth in the right direction.”
Even before it was announced, the rescue package had provoked angry outbursts. On Thursday, Gettos and friends tried to break through a police cordon outside the finance ministry only to be forced back by tear gas.
They were in the thick of things again yesterday when police used tear gas to prevent protesters from marching on the American embassy.
Even greater social unrest is expected as resentment simmers among poorer families at being told to tighten their belts when wealthy Greeks can protect their fortunes by moving their money abroad, some of it into property bargains in London.
“It’s always the poor people who pay,” complained Katerina Ioannou, 20, in the cafeteria of the Athens University law faculty, a hotbed of student activism. “If I get a job as a trainee lawyer I’ll only earn €300 [£260] a month,” said Thanos Petrou, 21. “How can anyone survive on that?”
Some are already referring to a “lost generation” who will never find jobs or security, but the students, proud of their university’s reputation for being at the forefront of the uprising against the military dictatorship in 1973, are not the only ones planning resistance.
Mikis Theodorakis, the 84-year-old musician who composed the score for the film Zorba the Greek, calls for revolt against what he sees as an American plot to turn Greece into a “protectorate”. Bureaucrats will raise their fists at the barricades in a general strike and protests on Wednesday to protect their considerable perks from the IMF.
They and other public sector workers are virtually unsackable, can retire as early as 45 and get bonuses for using a computer, speaking a foreign language and arriving at work on time.
Some of them get as many as four extra months’ salary a year, compared with the 14 months that are paid to other Greek workers. One of the most generous bonuses is paid to unmarried daughters of dead employees in state-controlled banks: they can inherit their parents’ pensions.
Stefanos, 49, seems to embody the Greek good life. He retired as an army captain last year on a full pension and says he is quite happy planting his garden. He worries, though, about how to protect his savings from the crisis. “What about banks in Germany?” he asked friends around a dinner table in Athens.
“There’s an awful lot of fat to cut from the system,” says Yannis Stournaras, a former government financial adviser, in what sounded like understatement. He is considered one of the architects of Greece’s entry into the euro zone in 2001 but dismisses as “utter nonsense” allegations that Greece fudged its figures in order to be admitted.
Today the country’s budget deficit is 13.6% of GDP and the overall debt stands at €300 billion (£260 billion). Unemployment among 16- to 24-year-olds has risen to 30%, according to government figures. Crime, too, is increasing in Athens.
“I feel like a prisoner here,” says Ilias Iliopoulos, head of the powerful civil servants’ union, gesturing to new bars on his windows after two recent burglaries of his office.
“People are stealing so they can live, so they can eat,” he said. “And it will only get worse. These [IMF] measures will drag hundreds of thousands of Greek citizens into a life of poverty.”
Resentment among Greeks at being singled out as lazy and corrupt has hardened into outrage at Germany, whose leaders complain that the Mediterranean country should never have been allowed into Europe. Greeks were particularly hurt by German suggestions that they sell their islands to pay off the debt.
Yannis Criticos, who works for an international ferry operator, said that one of his secretaries had written an angry letter to a German tour operator client to complain about “bloody Germans” being jealous of Greece’s sun-drenched Mediterranean lifestyle.
“He was very upset about it,” said Criticos, who was attending the launch of a tourism fair in Athens last week. “It took a while for him to calm down.”
Vitriol is also being heaped on Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, by Giorgos Trangas, a popular radio talk show host.
“She looks like an apple strudel that’s been squashed by a Wehrmacht lorry,” he said on his programme.
In an evocation of Greece’s wartime suffering, Trangas has taken to introducing the show with a rendition of Deutschland Uber Alles and the sound of goose-stepping soldiers. This is to highlight what he describes as “another German occupation”.
As if in the path of an advancing army, Greeks are hiding their money. In the end, Stefanos, the retired captain, opted like his friends for a safety deposit box. The super rich, for their part, have shifted an estimated €11 billion to Cyprus and other havens since the start of the year, according to Konstantinos Michalos, president of the Athens chamber of commerce.
“I try to be optimistic,” he sighed. But things had got to “a tragic level”.
There was hope, he believed, if the government lifted numerous restrictions on business. It costs more to transport a sack of potatoes from northern Greece to Athens than from Athens to Dusseldorf, because haulage, like many other sectors of the Greek economy, is an impenetrable cartel.
When Michalos started a commodities trading business in London in the 1980s, the paperwork took him 48 hours, he said. In Greece’s “Soviet-style” economy he had to go through 117 bureaucratic procedures to get the right government permits. A wealthy friend of his had taken 10 years to win permission to put up a hotel.
“It would have taken him another 10 years or a large payment under the table if he wasn’t a friend of very important politicians,” said Michalos. Stournaras, an Oxford-educated economist, who believes that lifting these restrictions and trimming fat from the public sector will have an extraordinary effect on the Greek economy.
“I’m sorry because poor people will suffer, but this could get us back on our feet within three to five years,” he predicted.
Others believe the country is in for a much longer haul.
Zacharoulis, the cardiologist, is far from being alone in thinking that it may be time to leave in search of a more secure future, perhaps in America or Britain. Gettos, the radical, would also like to get out.
“I’ve always wanted to see the world,” he said. “But you need money for that and I don’t have any.”
That is likely to become a Greek chorus.
MAY DAY protests in Greece turned violent yesterday as youths in gas masks and hoods set fire to vehicles, smashed shop fronts and threw molotov cocktails and rocks at police in an explosion of fury over austerity measures they claim will hurt only the poor.
Tourists were cut off from their hotels as thousands of communists, civil servants and private-sector workers converged on a main square in Athens to vent their rage at the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
“No to the IMF’s junta,” they chanted as a youth in a black hood produced a hammer to try to smash windows of the luxury Grande Bretagne hotel.
Another painted anti-capitalist slogans on the facade, and demonstrators intervened to prevent him from spraying an Australian woman with paint as she tried to get back into the hotel. Japanese tourists stood taking photographs of the mayhem with mobile phones before being forced to retreat, coughing and sneezing, under a cloud of tear gas.
RELATED LINKS
Spain downgrade sparks European sell-off
Cost of covering Greek debt heads higher
The violence came as negotiations were concluding between the socialist government of George Papandreou, the IMF and the EU over a multi-billion-euro rescue package for Greece.
Anger has grown against the EU for insisting on tough austerity measures in return for a bailout worth an estimated €45 billion (£39 billion) this year alone, and up to €120 billion (£104 billion) over three years.
Some young Greeks prefer to blame their elders for the mountain of debt that has resulted in Greece, like a wayward child, being placed under the tutelage of the men from the IMF.
“I cannot help but blame my parents a little for what’s happened,” said Achilles Zacharoulis, a 36-year-old cardiologist. “They were here all that time,” he added, referring to the past three decades of mismanagement and fiscal insanity. “But what did they do to stop it?”
Vaggelis Gettos, 24, is just as alarmed at the burden being heaped on the young by austerity measures expected to be announced today, and has pledged to resist them in more protests this week against what he sees as a plot to impoverish Greece.
“We will live much worse than our parents,” he said. “Why should we be made to pay for their mistakes?”
The question of who was to blame and who should pay for the greatest crisis to afflict the single currency was a subject of heated debate, particularly after a leading credit rating agency put the cradle of civilisation in the same category as Azerbaijan by reducing its government bonds to “junk” status.
Economists regard the bloated civil service with its jobs for life and generous pensions as a cancer consuming the country’s resources. The older generation, the experts grimly concur, turned the state into a giant cash machine to be plundered at will.
Today the party is over, however, and that makes some experts optimistic: Greece now has no choice but to implement much-needed reforms that will bring swift results. “It’s like a dentist putting a child in braces,” said one observer. “It’s not nice, but necessary for growth in the right direction.”
Even before it was announced, the rescue package had provoked angry outbursts. On Thursday, Gettos and friends tried to break through a police cordon outside the finance ministry only to be forced back by tear gas.
They were in the thick of things again yesterday when police used tear gas to prevent protesters from marching on the American embassy.
Even greater social unrest is expected as resentment simmers among poorer families at being told to tighten their belts when wealthy Greeks can protect their fortunes by moving their money abroad, some of it into property bargains in London.
“It’s always the poor people who pay,” complained Katerina Ioannou, 20, in the cafeteria of the Athens University law faculty, a hotbed of student activism. “If I get a job as a trainee lawyer I’ll only earn €300 [£260] a month,” said Thanos Petrou, 21. “How can anyone survive on that?”
Some are already referring to a “lost generation” who will never find jobs or security, but the students, proud of their university’s reputation for being at the forefront of the uprising against the military dictatorship in 1973, are not the only ones planning resistance.
Mikis Theodorakis, the 84-year-old musician who composed the score for the film Zorba the Greek, calls for revolt against what he sees as an American plot to turn Greece into a “protectorate”. Bureaucrats will raise their fists at the barricades in a general strike and protests on Wednesday to protect their considerable perks from the IMF.
They and other public sector workers are virtually unsackable, can retire as early as 45 and get bonuses for using a computer, speaking a foreign language and arriving at work on time.
Some of them get as many as four extra months’ salary a year, compared with the 14 months that are paid to other Greek workers. One of the most generous bonuses is paid to unmarried daughters of dead employees in state-controlled banks: they can inherit their parents’ pensions.
Stefanos, 49, seems to embody the Greek good life. He retired as an army captain last year on a full pension and says he is quite happy planting his garden. He worries, though, about how to protect his savings from the crisis. “What about banks in Germany?” he asked friends around a dinner table in Athens.
“There’s an awful lot of fat to cut from the system,” says Yannis Stournaras, a former government financial adviser, in what sounded like understatement. He is considered one of the architects of Greece’s entry into the euro zone in 2001 but dismisses as “utter nonsense” allegations that Greece fudged its figures in order to be admitted.
Today the country’s budget deficit is 13.6% of GDP and the overall debt stands at €300 billion (£260 billion). Unemployment among 16- to 24-year-olds has risen to 30%, according to government figures. Crime, too, is increasing in Athens.
“I feel like a prisoner here,” says Ilias Iliopoulos, head of the powerful civil servants’ union, gesturing to new bars on his windows after two recent burglaries of his office.
“People are stealing so they can live, so they can eat,” he said. “And it will only get worse. These [IMF] measures will drag hundreds of thousands of Greek citizens into a life of poverty.”
Resentment among Greeks at being singled out as lazy and corrupt has hardened into outrage at Germany, whose leaders complain that the Mediterranean country should never have been allowed into Europe. Greeks were particularly hurt by German suggestions that they sell their islands to pay off the debt.
Yannis Criticos, who works for an international ferry operator, said that one of his secretaries had written an angry letter to a German tour operator client to complain about “bloody Germans” being jealous of Greece’s sun-drenched Mediterranean lifestyle.
“He was very upset about it,” said Criticos, who was attending the launch of a tourism fair in Athens last week. “It took a while for him to calm down.”
Vitriol is also being heaped on Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, by Giorgos Trangas, a popular radio talk show host.
“She looks like an apple strudel that’s been squashed by a Wehrmacht lorry,” he said on his programme.
In an evocation of Greece’s wartime suffering, Trangas has taken to introducing the show with a rendition of Deutschland Uber Alles and the sound of goose-stepping soldiers. This is to highlight what he describes as “another German occupation”.
As if in the path of an advancing army, Greeks are hiding their money. In the end, Stefanos, the retired captain, opted like his friends for a safety deposit box. The super rich, for their part, have shifted an estimated €11 billion to Cyprus and other havens since the start of the year, according to Konstantinos Michalos, president of the Athens chamber of commerce.
“I try to be optimistic,” he sighed. But things had got to “a tragic level”.
There was hope, he believed, if the government lifted numerous restrictions on business. It costs more to transport a sack of potatoes from northern Greece to Athens than from Athens to Dusseldorf, because haulage, like many other sectors of the Greek economy, is an impenetrable cartel.
When Michalos started a commodities trading business in London in the 1980s, the paperwork took him 48 hours, he said. In Greece’s “Soviet-style” economy he had to go through 117 bureaucratic procedures to get the right government permits. A wealthy friend of his had taken 10 years to win permission to put up a hotel.
“It would have taken him another 10 years or a large payment under the table if he wasn’t a friend of very important politicians,” said Michalos. Stournaras, an Oxford-educated economist, who believes that lifting these restrictions and trimming fat from the public sector will have an extraordinary effect on the Greek economy.
“I’m sorry because poor people will suffer, but this could get us back on our feet within three to five years,” he predicted.
Others believe the country is in for a much longer haul.
Zacharoulis, the cardiologist, is far from being alone in thinking that it may be time to leave in search of a more secure future, perhaps in America or Britain. Gettos, the radical, would also like to get out.
“I’ve always wanted to see the world,” he said. “But you need money for that and I don’t have any.”
That is likely to become a Greek chorus.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Cutting Through Book 1 Alan Watt: The Androygynous
Buy the Book: http://www.alanwattsentientsentinel.eu/english/booksEnglish.html
Cutting Through Book 1 by Alan Watt
The Androgynous (Hermaphroditic) Agenda
SAMPLE PAGE FROM BOOK 1
Page 5
To form is to Shape. People are shaped by IN-Forming. Information is neutral, like law, neither true nor false. Masters of Gnosis dispence the sequences of directives which, in scientifically designed order, form the ideas, opinions and life, the beliefs, reality AND DESTINY of the receiver YOU. When IN-DOCTRINATION is complete you have been MASTERED. To "doctor" means "to fix" by a science or Discipline. YOU ARE NOW A MASTER-COPY, not original but ABORIGINAL. Original people saw things in entirety. Pythagorus taught a science of controlling the mind, by reducing all thought down to mathematical formulae. The REAL priesthood call this THE TRINITY. It's as easy as A1B2C3
The Greek philosophers taught the method in story form. An imaginary Dialogue would occur between two or more people. By "logic" every societal problem was reduced to the BINARY CODE. EITHER-OR. We know it better as the Dialectic Process. By how LOGOS(the WORD) is used, those following the conversation are brought to a conclusion. The conclusion BEE-comes their own. They are now INFORMED. The purpose is to usurp power from the individual and have him slave willingly towards "the betterment of humanity." The beehive has always been the symbol of the perfect society in ancient Egypt, the Minoan culture and Freemasonry. Behave is from Beehive. Plato discussed the types of bees in relation to classes of people. The majority were workers who brought home the nectar. The drone priests sorted it into grades of honey. The best is Royal Jelly for themselves and the "Queen" while the workers are given denaturalised refuse.
Unlike modern freemasonry where the initiate must say "I AM" pre-Jaques- Pierrian English had no Am. The candidate said "I BEE". The number of masonry is Four. "To bee or not to bee=2xb(2)=4. Jaques is French for Jacob, Pierre is Peter, Rock etc.. This is typical masonic "allegory" for Jacob's Pillow (foundation) on which he had his "dream". This is a re-hash from the Egyptian Book of the Dead story of Ascended Masters to-day known as M ITREAS. The nobility ruling Egypt and their empire were called Hamites. The priesthoods taught their own race the doctrine of REINCARNATION. Those who ruled were "spirits" which had completed many cycles with such perfection, they only returned to "help rule" the "poor masses" which "could not rule themselves". Elitists Murderers, Thieves and liars, a Brotherhood which hi-jacked reality and gave illu(light)si(spirit of)on. Every Lodge has its picture of Jacob's ladder(rungs are degrees) symbolizing the ascention of the novice, returning as angels(angles) to earth, perfected.
Cutting Through Book 1 by Alan Watt
The Androgynous (Hermaphroditic) Agenda
SAMPLE PAGE FROM BOOK 1
Page 5
To form is to Shape. People are shaped by IN-Forming. Information is neutral, like law, neither true nor false. Masters of Gnosis dispence the sequences of directives which, in scientifically designed order, form the ideas, opinions and life, the beliefs, reality AND DESTINY of the receiver YOU. When IN-DOCTRINATION is complete you have been MASTERED. To "doctor" means "to fix" by a science or Discipline. YOU ARE NOW A MASTER-COPY, not original but ABORIGINAL. Original people saw things in entirety. Pythagorus taught a science of controlling the mind, by reducing all thought down to mathematical formulae. The REAL priesthood call this THE TRINITY. It's as easy as A1B2C3
The Greek philosophers taught the method in story form. An imaginary Dialogue would occur between two or more people. By "logic" every societal problem was reduced to the BINARY CODE. EITHER-OR. We know it better as the Dialectic Process. By how LOGOS(the WORD) is used, those following the conversation are brought to a conclusion. The conclusion BEE-comes their own. They are now INFORMED. The purpose is to usurp power from the individual and have him slave willingly towards "the betterment of humanity." The beehive has always been the symbol of the perfect society in ancient Egypt, the Minoan culture and Freemasonry. Behave is from Beehive. Plato discussed the types of bees in relation to classes of people. The majority were workers who brought home the nectar. The drone priests sorted it into grades of honey. The best is Royal Jelly for themselves and the "Queen" while the workers are given denaturalised refuse.
Unlike modern freemasonry where the initiate must say "I AM" pre-Jaques- Pierrian English had no Am. The candidate said "I BEE". The number of masonry is Four. "To bee or not to bee=2xb(2)=4. Jaques is French for Jacob, Pierre is Peter, Rock etc.. This is typical masonic "allegory" for Jacob's Pillow (foundation) on which he had his "dream". This is a re-hash from the Egyptian Book of the Dead story of Ascended Masters to-day known as M ITREAS. The nobility ruling Egypt and their empire were called Hamites. The priesthoods taught their own race the doctrine of REINCARNATION. Those who ruled were "spirits" which had completed many cycles with such perfection, they only returned to "help rule" the "poor masses" which "could not rule themselves". Elitists Murderers, Thieves and liars, a Brotherhood which hi-jacked reality and gave illu(light)si(spirit of)on. Every Lodge has its picture of Jacob's ladder(rungs are degrees) symbolizing the ascention of the novice, returning as angels(angles) to earth, perfected.
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