Thomas Piketty on Germany's hypocrisy

[ManaMan]

From Huffington Post:

“Look at the history of national debt: Great Britain, Germany, and France were all once in the situation of today’s Greece, and in fact had been far more indebted,” Piketty said. “The first lesson that we can take from the history of government debt is that we are not facing a brand new problem.”

Germany, Piketty continued, has “no standing” to lecture other nations about debt repayment, having never paid back its own debts after both World Wars.

“However, it has frequently made other nations pay up, such as after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when it demanded massive reparations from France and indeed received them,” Piketty said. “The French state suffered for decades under this debt. The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.”

Piketty criticized the “infantile” moral uprightness of Germany, whose economic success upon reunification has led it to rebuke nations like Greece for being in similarly weakened financial states as Germany itself was in decades ago.

Piketty argued that the same debt relief accorded to Germany after World War II should be granted to Greece today.

“After large crises that created huge debt loads, at some point people need to look toward the future. We cannot demand that new generations must pay for decades for the mistakes of their parents,” Piketty said. “The Greeks have, without a doubt, made big mistakes. Until 2009, the government in Athens forged its books. But despite this, the younger generation of Greeks carries no more responsibility for the mistakes of its elders than the younger generation of Germans did in the 1950s and 1960s. We need to look ahead. Europe was founded on debt forgiveness and investment in the future. Not on the idea of endless penance. We need to remember this.”

[Shrinweck]

The austerity measures don't really seem to be of any use for the countries that don't have established, powerful economies. The entire point of being in the EU for less established countries should be protection against being put into so much debt it's basically usury. Seriously, fuck them, Greece looks to be choosing correctly.

Germany, at the very least, should know what happens when you economically punish a country.

[Julius Seeker]

Bad arguments, gross generalizations, and false equivalences. Completely ignoring context and history. He speaks about Germany like they are the Borg collective.

If he wants to evoke problems of Germany during the world war era, he can bring up the increasing rate of white supremacy and nationalism in Greece. The Golden Dawn Party is rising very steadily in the polls.

[Shrinweck]

German banks own most of the debt so they have the most invested in getting them to pay up, but without job creation the Greek economy isn't going to get to a place where the debt gets paid off. And austerity measures seem more like a great way to get things to stay the same for the countries at the top while the middle and working classes of all the countries involved slowly get strangled for all they're worth in a stagnant job market that if anything is dwindling.

Violent extremism/bigotry is easily linked to how shitty you make life for people. They'll turn to drugs and crime and sooner or later that'll boil over into the ridiculous nationalism and scapegoating that brings along things like race hate. People who have careers to build and happy families to turn to don't give the time of day to extremism as often as the down-trodden.

But, yeah, fuck austerity. It's like trickle down economics in that it's just hocus pocus bullshit. Just another way for the rich to rig the game.

[Replay]

I wish people would actually listen about the devil's deal between Goldman and the old Greek government that destroyed the Greek economy...

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2010/10/ ... nds-201010

[Replay]

Also, Varoufakis wrote a great letter on Merkel's rather ugly attitude on Greece. He resigned to give his boss more leverage, and now they're not even going to give Tsipiras that.

Syriza really got screwed by the old Greek government and Goldman. The non-prosecution of Goldman for collecting $300m to deliberately forge the books on the old loans is the saddest tale about the whole thing.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... ism-europe

[ManaMan]

I guess it all points to: AVOID GOING INTO DEBT or your democracy will be overthrown by bankers looking to get their money back.

[Replay]

Yup. Basically.

The way the hustle works is:

1) The banks bribe politicians to take out unsustainable loans from the banks on behalf of the country.
2) The politicians spend out, thereby forcing actual assets to be used in the repayment of the loan - which was, of course, fiat money printed by the world's central banks out of thin air. That creates a real transfer of wealth in exchange for nothing but fiat money, like what is happening with the calls to repossess Greek real estate on behalf of foreign interests right now.
3) Eventually the deal is discovered - but usually too late to do anything about it, and after all the principals can claim a statute of limitations on prosecution, and after they've bribed the new government not to prosecute the criminality - and you get Wolfgang Schaeuble, finance minister of Germany, going "Elections don't matter, because there are rules." (Translation: Fuck you, pay us, or Germany will break Greece's legs.)

Greece happens to be small, weak, and rife with internal tax fraud and distrust, so they were the perfect target for this kind of tactic. I had hoped they would Grexit and floor the price of the drachma while printing money to create new businesses, but they're terrified of the 10% GDP hit or so that will come from leaving the Euro on top of their already 30% contraction.

Much as I know this community supports Obama - and I was once soundly in the Obama tent, and certainly haven't left it for the GOP - Goldman's $1m donation to Obama comes to mind, and his decision to quietly give Goldman what is essentially immunity to prosecution over Greece will be the biggest single black mark on his financial legacy.

Sad part is, America isn't obeying the rule either. We have it in us to bear up under our debt burdens for probably at least a decade or two, easily - IF China and the Fed don't call it in; and they have no reason to at present, making plenty of money off the interest. But our debt is SKYROCKETING; and Fox News has it all blamed soundly on the wrong people as usual, pointing fingers at the poor and the needy while their own Defense connections make hundreds of billions off the War on Terror.