from the "beach" series, 8/12

Digital Studies

see

PHOTO BOOTH

Billy Name’s Factory photographs.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/#ixzz22xdTRjnL

here comes ...

Here They Come: Ireland Demands Renegotiation Of Its Bailout Terms To Match Spain

Well that didn't take long. The ink on the #Spailout is not dry yet (well technically there is no ink, because none of the actual details of the Spanish banking system rescue are even remotely known, and likely won't be because when it comes to answering where the money comes from there simply is no answer) and we already have an answer to one of our questions. Recall thatmere hours ago we asked: "We also wonder how will Ireland feel knowing that it has to suffer under backbreaking austerity in exchange for Troika generosity, while Spain gets away scott free." We now know. From the AFP: "Ireland wants to renegotiate its rescue plan to benefit from the same treatment as Spain, which looks set to win a bailout for its banks without any broader economic reforms in return, European sources said on Saturday." And with Ireland on the renegotiation train, next comes Greece. Only with Greece the wheels for a bailout overhaul are already in motion and are called a "vote of Syriza on June 17." And remember how everyone was threatening the Greeks with the 10th circle of hell if they dare to renegotiate the memorandum? Well, Spain just showed that a condition-free bailout is an option. Which means Syriza will get all the votes it needs and then some with promises of a consequence free bailout renegotiation. In other words Syriza's Tsipras should send a bottle of the finest champagne to de Guindos - he just won him the election.

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από το DOCTV

• 

  Α' ΠΡΟΣΩΠΟ | 08.06.2012

  Αργεντινή χωρίς Εβίτα

θέλω να γυρίσω στη δεκαετία του 50, ΤΩΡΑ

Λούρος, Εκβολές Αχελώου, Αιτωλοακαρνανία

dog default

αφιερωμένο στον Τζήμερο

Athens, now

Αστικό 22

...

The Suicide Machine

The Suicide Machine

The True Costs of Bank Crises

by ROB URIE

In March 2010 Andrew Haldane, Executive Director for Financial Stability at the Bank of England, estimated that the financial crisis that began in 2008 will ultimately cost the world economy between $60 trillion and $200 trillion in lost production (link). The methods he used to reach his conclusions require a number of assumptions, but so would any effort at assessing the broader damage. And to his point, counting the cost of bank crises in terms of costs to the banks alone substantially misrepresents the economic harm that recurrent crises cause.

When J.P. Morgan announced last week that it had lost $2 billion from derivatives transactions gone awry, later revised to $3 billion and rising, the mainstream press reiterated the framing that this is a cost to be borne by the bank and that it indicates what the rest of us might be expected to contribute if another banking crisis erupts. The implication is that future crises are possible, ignoring that we are collectively still paying for the last crisis. And again, to Mr. Haldane’s point, the costs to Wall Street are nearly irrelevant when considering the total costs of banking crises.

This all proceeds from the premise that the broader economic order, of which the banks are a part, is a viable form of economic organization. Given that the current order is radically environmentally unsustainable, it is tempting to imagine that the lost production that Mr. Haldane is counting as a cost of the financial crisis has a silver lining in slowed environmental degradation. Additionally, any careful look at the business of banking finds degrees of predation inversely related to social power—even when they aren’t blowing themselves up, most of the world would be better off without predator banks.

This establishes a paradox—the existing economic (and political) order isn’t working. But, as political leaders on the right and what passes for the left these days claim, failing to sustain it would entail massive human costs in terms of unemployment, bankruptcy, poverty, divorce, suicide and the dissolution of our public institutions. Ironically, add increasing environmental destruction to this list and it well describes current conditions under the existing order. Apparently the best that defenders can offer is that things could be a lot worse

To point to the obvious, even Mr. Haldane’s lower cost estimate of $60 trillion isn’t being borne by the banks. The banks couldn’t pay this if they were forced to—it is more money than they will collectively earn in profits over coming decades. And it isn’t being borne by the large corporations that are earning the highest rate of profits in history. It is in fact a negative, an unmet promise made to the rest of us by the proponents of capitalism over recent decades. Through the prism of social struggle it appears as an absence, not as a more straightforwardly actionable misappropriation. But then, what is the ultimate difference?

Jamie Dimon, J.P. Morgan’s CEO, offered that the bank’s loss reflected a failure of risk models. But the bank’s risk models are necessarily narrowly delineated—what model could propose that transactions that could cost the broader economy $60 trillion if they go wrong balance out in favor of the transactions? Such risk models carry the implicit premise of heads, the banks win; tails, the rest of us lose. Practically speaking, these trades, when they work, are simply a method of converting a rigged game into cash. The assets being traded, reportedly a basket of credit default swaps, are un-funded insurance policies; accounting fictions that when aggregated guarantee bailouts—every bank requires that every other bank meet its obligations or the whole system collapses.

For all of the money that the banks have been allowed to create and pay out to the purported rocket scientists who build their risk models, the particular model under discussion in J.P. Morgan’s case (VAR, value-at-risk) is a work of rare idiocy. The question that it attempts to answer is: how badly can things go for one day, week, month etc. assuming (1) no other banks run into similar problems and (2) everything goes back to normal in the next period. What makes use of this model so questionable is that both of these assumptions are behind every spectacular financial collapse in modern history that didn’t involve outright theft (e.g. Ponzi schemes).

Ultimately the particulars of J.P. Morgan’s losses are so much noise. What they point to is an economic system designed to self-destruct. Add increasing environmental degradation in the face of global warming to structural financial fragility and what capitalism appears to have created is a full-blown suicide machine. And to invert Mr. Haldane’s premise—the $60 trillion in lost production (minimum) was never going to go to us anyway. The trajectory since the 1970s had it going to corporate executives, bankers and machines (automation).

The challenge for reformers and re-regulators is that the system is the problem. Companies pollute because they individually prosper while we collectively pay the costs. Banks take risks that are internally rational while they are systemically catastrophic. Environmental and financial crises cannot be solved with capitalism intact. In fact, when global warming and bank crises are considered, there is little evidence that capitalism ever produced any profits net of externalized costs. And the consolidation of wealth that capitalism produces undermines all attempts at remediation. Capitalism itself is a suicide machine.

What made J.P. Morgan’s loss news is the recognition that the financial crisis hasn’t been resolved. And again, this crisis isn’t from without. It is endemic to the system we are being told we must save. As Mr. Haldane has it, even if the crisis had been resolved, we would still collectively be out more than $60 trillion anyway. And the only way toward those trillions is through increasing environmental catastrophe. By appearances, the current order is in the process of imploding of its own weight. And while dislocations create fear, they also create openings for other possible futures.

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist in New York.

Athens, 2.0

 

Κι εγώ κι εγώ Έφη μου

Η Έφη είναι φίλη μου γι αυτό δεν θέλω κουλά σχόλια

υπέροχη Ελλάδα

We are all Greeks now

May 10, 2012

 

The End of the End of Austerity

We’re All Greeks Now

by ROB URIE

One of the joys of being American is that every new day is a clean slate—no history, no memories, no experiences, a complete blank. This may help explain why our national conversations serve their intended purposes while being entirely content-free. Newsflash to self-described liberal economists: austerity works! If your goal is loot nations while putting their populations into permanent debt servitude, austerity is a real winner.
The IMF (International Monetary Fund) has been implementing “structural adjustment” programs, AKA austerity, for decades. It has usually “worked” for their bank clients in the sense that wealth extraction from victim nations to international banks took place. And given that victim nations tended to have both culpable leaders and “developing” nation status, the economic outcomes were rarely news in New York or Washington. Needless to say, outcomes were better for bankers than for their structurally adjusted victims.
When the ECB (European Central Bank) began discussing structural adjustment policies for Greece in 2009 there was little pretense that they would benefit the Greeks. European banks had loaded themselves to the gills with peripheral sovereign debt, in some measure to game the regulatory capital requirements in much the same way that Wall Street banks did with “AAA” rated garbage in the lead-up to the most recent financial disaster. And like their American counterparts, European banks had cynically lent money under fraudulent terms to people who could not pay it back. And European banks, like their American counterparts, require ongoing bailouts for the current economic order to stand.
Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, leader of Germany’s center-right party and de facto head of the EU, faced rebellion by the German electorate over the proposed bailout of Greece before it became openly punitive. The line that austerity was the economic prescription needed to get Greece back on its feet was cynical apologia put forward by the dullard class of EU propaganda hacks. That American economists (Paul Krugman) debated the issue like it was a serious analytical dispute begs the question of where they have been for the last fifty years?
With only six decades of IMF history to draw from, the template being used in Europe (and in America) is (1) install or corrupt a political elite who will support extractive economic policies for the benefit of bankers, (2) indebt, or cause to become indebted, a naïve, oblivious or otherwise captive population who will accept, grudgingly or otherwise, the institutional convention that the debt is legitimate and must be repaid, (3) under a patina of intellectual legitimacy, implement openly extractive economic policies against entire populations for the benefit of said banks, (4) while the culpable elites retire to large houses behind high walls with their portions of the loot.
In the 1980s major New York banks (Wall Street) made loans to South American and African nations using this template. In some fair proportion the proceeds of these loans were promptly re-deposited into these same banks in the names of specific government officials. When the victim populations rebelled, arguing either that the debt was not legitimate and didn’t need to be repaid, or realized that the debt was a de facto form of slavery and couldn’t be repaid, these New York banks were bailed out by the U.S. government under the veil of “Brady Bonds” and the government took over as creditor to collect the debts.
This is the game now playing out in Europe and, in a less visible sense; the U.S. Wall Street bankers (including European banks) are conspiring with corrupt, naïve, duplicitous or powerless peripheral leaders to implement austerity policies on indebted populations. These populations are indebted because of banker duplicity and/or because of the financial bubbles and their aftermath that Wall Street created. These austerity programs are for the sole benefit of the banks. In the U.S. the Wall Street banks were bailed out without being made to write off the bad loans that never should have been made.  This creates a similar dynamic where some fair proportion of Americans will now live out their remaining days in debt slavery to the banks.
In addition to multi-trillion dollar unconditional and ongoing bailouts the Obama administration recently also gave the banks retroactive and future immunity for straightforwardly criminal behavior through the mortgage “settlement” and has expanded the corrupt and usurious student loan business for the benefit of the banks. Add the looting of state, municipal and private pensions, the corporate takeover of the legislative process and full implementation of neo-liberal austerity economics at the state and local levels and the battle lines in the U.S. are clearly drawn. We are all Greeks now.
The difference between current experience and prior history is that the banks have now effectively eliminated the national borders that previously delineated the core-periphery class struggle. What we are experiencing has a long history and known outcomes. The intellectual masturbation behind the Keynesian- Austerian “debate” hides the class conflict that is driving this process. The Keynesians believe that renewed recession in Europe proves their case. But as the saying goes, tell it to someone who gives a shit. The turmoil in Europe is power politics (class struggle) hiding behind a thin veil of ideological difference.  The bankers and their Austerian apologists know what they are doing. Too bad the same can’t be said for liberal economists.
Rob Urie is an artist and political economist in New York.

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KEEP IT SWEET by Dc Kostas on Mixcloud

ας σύρουμε πρώτοι τον χορό

Roubini: EU To Break Up Once Contagion Hits Italy And Spain

Forbes - ‎15 hours ago‎

Roubini, or Dr. Doom as he's been dubbed by the media, is pessimistic on Europe - NYTimes.com Political uncertainty continues to rise in Europe as Greek politicians fail to build a government and more EU leaders, including German Finance Minister ...

ευτυχώς υπάρχει και ο Krugman

May 6, 2012

Those Revolting Europeans

By PAUL KRUGMAN

The French are revolting. The Greeks, too. And it’s about time.

Both countries held elections Sunday that were in effect referendums on the current European economic strategy, and in both countries voters turned two thumbs down. It’s far from clear how soon the votes will lead to changes in actual policy, but time is clearly running out for the strategy of recovery through austerity — and that’s a good thing.

Needless to say, that’s not what you heard from the usual suspects in the run-up to the elections. It was actually kind of funny to see the apostles of orthodoxy trying to portray the cautious, mild-mannered François Hollande as a figure of menace. He is “rather dangerous,” declared The Economist, which observed that he “genuinely believes in the need to create a fairer society.” Quelle horreur!

What is true is that Mr. Hollande’s victory means the end of “Merkozy,” the Franco-German axis that has enforced the austerity regime of the past two years. This would be a “dangerous” development if that strategy were working, or even had a reasonable chance of working. But it isn’t and doesn’t; it’s time to move on. Europe’s voters, it turns out, are wiser than the Continent’s best and brightest.

What’s wrong with the prescription of spending cuts as the remedy for Europe’s ills? One answer is that the confidence fairy doesn’t exist — that is, claims that slashing government spending would somehow encourage consumers and businesses to spend more have been overwhelmingly refuted by the experience of the past two years. So spending cuts in a depressed economy just make the depression deeper.

Moreover, there seems to be little if any gain in return for the pain. Consider the case of Ireland, which has been a good soldier in this crisis, imposing ever-harsher austerity in an attempt to win back the favor of the bond markets. According to the prevailing orthodoxy, this should work. In fact, the will to believe is so strong that members of Europe’s policy elite keep proclaiming that Irish austerity has indeed worked, that the Irish economy has begun to recover.

But it hasn’t. And although you’d never know it from much of the press coverage, Irish borrowing costs remain much higher than those of Spain or Italy, let alone Germany. So what are the alternatives?

One answer — an answer that makes more sense than almost anyone in Europe is willing to admit — would be to break up the euro, Europe’s common currency. Europe wouldn’t be in this fix if Greece still had its drachma, Spain its peseta, Ireland its punt, and so on, because Greece and Spain would have what they now lack: a quick way to restore cost-competitiveness and boost exports, namely devaluation.

As a counterpoint to Ireland’s sad story, consider the case of Iceland, which was ground zero for the financial crisis but was able to respond by devaluing its currency, the krona (and also had the courage to let its banks fail and default on their debts). Sure enough, Iceland is experiencing the recovery Ireland was supposed to have, but hasn’t.

Yet breaking up the euro would be highly disruptive, and would also represent a huge defeat for the “European project,” the long-run effort to promote peace and democracy through closer integration. Is there another way? Yes, there is — and the Germans have shown how that way can work. Unfortunately, they don’t understand the lessons of their own experience.

Talk to German opinion leaders about the euro crisis, and they like to point out that their own economy was in the doldrums in the early years of the last decade but managed to recover. What they don’t like to acknowledge is that this recovery was driven by the emergence of a huge German trade surplus vis-à-vis other European countries — in particular, vis-à-vis the nations now in crisis — which were booming, and experiencing above-normal inflation, thanks to low interest rates. Europe’s crisis countries might be able to emulate Germany’s success if they faced a comparably favorable environment — that is, if this time it was the rest of Europe, especially Germany, that was experiencing a bit of an inflationary boom.

So Germany’s experience isn’t, as the Germans imagine, an argument for unilateral austerity in Southern Europe; it’s an argument for much more expansionary policies elsewhere, and in particular for the European Central Bank to drop its obsession with inflation and focus on growth.

The Germans, needless to say, don’t like this conclusion, nor does the leadership of the central bank. They will cling to their fantasies of prosperity through pain, and will insist that continuing with their failed strategy is the only responsible thing to do. But it seems that they will no longer have unquestioning support from the Élysée Palace. And that, believe it or not, means that both the euro and the European project now have a better chance of surviving than they did a few days ago.

food for thought

On OWS, Anarchism, Labor, Racism, Corporate Power and the Class War

Talking With Chomsky

by LAURA FLANDERS

A CounterPunch Exclusive

Noam Chomsky has not just been watching the Occupy movement. A veteran of the civil rights, anti-war, and anti-intervention movements of the 1960s through the 1980s, he’s given lectures at Occupy Boston and talked with occupiers across the US.  A new publication from the Occupied Media Pamphlet Series brings together several of those lectures, a speech on “occupying foreign policy” and a brief tribute to his friend and co-agitator Howard Zinn.
From his speeches, and in this conversation, it’s clear that the emeritus MIT professor and author is as impressed by the spontaneous, cooperative communities some Occupy encampments created, as he is by the movement’s political impact.
We’re a nation whose leaders are pursuing policies that amount to economic “suicide” Chomsky says. But there are glimmers of possibility – in worker co-operatives, and other spaces where people get a taste of a different way of living.
We talked in his office, for Free Speech TV on April 24.

LF: Let’s start with the big picture. How do you describe the situation we’re in, historically?

NC: There is either a crisis or a return to the norm of stagnation. One view is the norm is stagnation and occasionally you get out of it. The other is that the norm is growth and occasionally you can get into stagnation. You can debate that but it’s a period of close to global stagnation. In the major state capitalists economies, Europe and the US, it’s low growth and stagnation and a very sharp income differentiation a shift — a striking shift — from production to financialization.
The US and Europe are committing suicide in different ways. In Europe it’s austerity in the midst of recession and that’s guaranteed to be a disaster. There’s some resistance to that now. In the US, it’s essentially off-shoring production and financialization and getting rid of superfluous population through incarceration. It’s a subtext of what happened in Cartagena [Colombia] last week with the conflict over the drug war. Latin America wants to decriminalize at least marijuana (maybe more or course;) the US wants to maintain it.  An interesting story.  There seems to me no easy way out of this….

LF: And politically…?

NC: Again there are differences, In Europe there’s an dangerous growth of ultra xenophobia which is pretty threatening to any one who remembers the history of Europe…  and an attack on the remnants of the welfare state. It’s hard to interpret the austerity-in-the-midst-of-recession policy as anything other than attack on the social contract. In fact, some leaders come right out and say it. Mario Draghi the president of the European Central Bank had an interview with the Wall St Journal in which he said the social contract’s dead; we...

 

CONTINUE READING

fuck fucking austerity

Death of a Fairy Tale

By PAUL KRUGMAN

This was the month the confidence fairy died.

For the past two years most policy makers in Europe and many politicians and pundits in America have been in thrall to a destructive economic doctrine. According to this doctrine, governments should respond to a severely depressed economy not the way the textbooks say they should — by spending more to offset falling private demand — but with fiscal austerity, slashing spending in an effort to balance their budgets.

Critics warned from the beginning that austerity in the face of depression would only make that depression worse. But the “austerians” insisted that the reverse would happen. Why? Confidence! “Confidence-inspiring policies will foster and not hamper economic recovery,” declared Jean-Claude Trichet, the former president of the European Central Bank — a claim echoed by Republicans in Congress here. Or as I put it way back when, the idea was that the confidence fairy would come in and reward policy makers for their fiscal virtue.

The good news is that many influential people are finally admitting that the confidence fairy was a myth. The bad news is that despite this admission there seems to be little prospect of a near-term course change either in Europe or here in America, where we never fully embraced the doctrine, but have, nonetheless, had de facto austerity in the form of huge spending and employment cuts at the state and local level.

So, about that doctrine: appeals to the wonders of confidence are something Herbert Hoover would have found completely familiar — and faith in the confidence fairy has worked out about as well for modern Europe as it did for Hoover’s America. All around Europe’s periphery, from Spain to Latvia, austerity policies have produced Depression-level slumps and Depression-level unemployment; the confidence fairy is nowhere to be seen, not even in Britain, whose turn to austerity two years ago was greeted with loud hosannas by policy elites on both sides of the Atlantic.

Krugman: Austerity Myth

Ο φίλος μου Δ. Μπαρούχος

Είναι ένας από τους πιο ταλαντούχους νέους ζωγράφους και κάνει αριστουργήματα 

super

Back Pocket Money by Dc Kostas on Mixcloud

δεν έχω να πω τίποτα

Στα όρια, acrylic on canvas, Φεβ. 2012

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my own private rose

...

τα δεδομένα παρακαλώ

J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

Just the Facts. Yes, All of Them.

By QUENTIN HARDY

Gilad Elbaz has a mission for Factual, his company: Identify every fact to build the world’s chief reference point. “The world is one big data problem,” he says.

μου λένε ότι αξίζει

τ απομεινάρια

David LaChapelle, Springtime, 2011.
Chromogenic Print.
Courtesy of the artist and Fred Torres Collaborations.

David LaChapelle at Fred Torres Collaborations

David LaChapelle

κι εφέτος άνοιξη

καμμένα λάδια

A Tale of Greek Enterprise and Olive Oil

By SUZANNE DALEY

One man’s effort to sell olive products online shows how complicated it remains to start a business in Greece.

ψιλά γράμματα

Krugman: What Greece Means

And austerity in a slump doesn’t just inflict vast suffering. There is growing evidence that it is self-defeating even in purely fiscal terms, as the combination of falling revenues due to a depressed economy and worsened long-term prospects actually reduces market confidence and makes the future debt burden harder to handle. You have to wonder how countries that are systematically denying a future to their young people — youth unemployment in Ireland, which used to be lower than in the United States, is now almost 30 percent, while it’s near 50 percent in Greece — are supposed to achieve enough growth to service their debt.

ένα χρόνο μετά

PHOTO BOOTH

POSTCARDS FROM TOHOKUBY ELISSA CURTIS

One year later, photographers respond to the devastation of the earthquake and tsunami.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/#ixzz1ontlX2xW

wall art

δυστυχώς ευτυχώς πτωχεύσαμε

Greece Has Defaulted: Here Is Where We Stand

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/09/2012 - 19:33

After reading this, everyone should have a fairly good grasp of what happened not only today, but ever since the great (and quite endless) European financial crisis took center stage, and what to look forward to next...

In a nutshell---okay, a coconut shell---this seems to be where we are:

1) Greece was able to write off 100 billion euros worth of debt in exchange for a 130 billion rescue package of new debt, of which Greece itself will receive 19%, or about 25 billion, so that it can continue to operate as an ongoing concern. Somehow Greece is in a better position than before, with more debt and less sovereignty and still---by virtue of sharing a common currency---trying to compete toe-to-toe with the likes of Germany and the Netherlands, kind of like being the Yemeni National Basketball team in an Olympic bracket that includes the US, Spain and Germany. At least a "within the euro" default prevented bank runs in Portugal, Spain, Italy et al.

2) As a result of the bond haircuts, Greece has many pension plans that can no longer even pretend to be viable, at least according to the original contracted scheme, but pensionholders still working can take heart in the fact that their current wages will be cut, too.

3) CDS buyers will have to sweat bullets, jump through hoops, and be forced to endure every cliche known to man, but they might end up getting something for all their trouble, provided their counterparty is solvent and that counterparty itself is not heavily exposed to an insolvent party or a NTBTF institution, otherwise known as a Lehman Brothers. Expect the legal profession to be the prime beneficiary of this "event", as any new CDS contract will be at least a hundred pages of boilerplate longer in the future.

4) Good luck to any less than AAA rated sovereign who wants to issue debt from now on out. That contracts can now be unilaterally abrogated, as Greece' bonds were with the retro-CACs, bodes ill for attractive pricing from here on out. Peripherals in the EU will suffer most, as they face the added indignity of being subordinated to the ECB at any point the ECB chooses to exercise its divine right of seniority. The thing that used to be called the risk free rate no longer exists. Bill Sharpe take note.

5) One hundred billion euros worth of perceived wealth evaporated. That can not be a good thing for a Eurobanking system already capital short, as it raises leverage (quick back of the envelop calculation) by about 6% across the board. It also will not make the interbank market any more trusting, thus increasing the likelihood of perpetual LTRO. LTRO lll looks to arrive sooner than QE lll.

6) With the drawn-out Greek event and the LTRO, Europe might believe it has firewalled the system for at least three years and limited damage to Greece and Portugal (who will likely undergo a similar default by the 3rd quarter). LTRO-provided liquidity, it is hoped, will lower market rates enough in Spain and Italy so that those countries can meet sovereign bond obligations and both service existing debt and issue new debt. When the LTRO expires in 2015, "hopefully" something called organic growth will have taken over in countries imposing severe austerity measures on their public sectors, so that debt servicing becomes easier. Organic growth obviously is something that comes in a can, a can which has been kicked out to 2015.

7) As Europe now speaks increasingly of greater EU financial integration, Sarkozy's poll numbers will be the victim and a less EU friendly individual will likely win the upcoming election. Since France and Germany fortunately have a long and storied history of being the best of friends, and no one in either country would ever pander to nationalist sentiments, this shouldn't present a problem.

8) Given how much angst was caused by the drawn out Greek affair, the Spanish leader knows he has enormous leverage with EU leadership and he can continue to do what he has been doing with regard to ignoring the deficit targets demanded/suggested by the EU. The EU might well bark at him, but they cannot afford to bite at this time. Muchos gracias, Greece.

να ζει κανείς με τους ναζί

Israel must fight to keep neo-Nazis out of Greece's government

...

As a Jew and an Israeli, I feel it is my duty and obligation to share with you Voridis’ background and political career. A former leading figure in Greece's neo-Nazi youth group, Chrysi Avgi (Golden Dawn), Voridis has a long history of Holocaust denial, anti-Semitism and xenophobia, including physical threats to Jewish families and leading groups of thugs against immigrants and leftists. Over the last couple of weeks he has smoothed over his thuggish past by describing it as "right-wing activism". As a student at the elite Athens College high school, alma mater of current Prime Minister Papadimos, former Prime Minister Papandreou, Samaras and myself, Voridis formed the fascist student group “Free Students” that painted the walls with swastikas and saluted each other with using the Nazi-era greeting "Heil Hitler."

During school elections, Voridis would violently threaten not only the Jewish students who opposed his fascist group, but also their families. After graduation, Voridis formed a fascist group in the Law School of Athens and became active in neo-Nazi youth groups. In the 1990s, following the footsteps of his mentor, Jean Marie LePen, he formed the National Front, an anti-immigrant party. His party's motto was "Red card for immigrants." A few years ago, he joined LAOS and was elected to parliament. He soon became the darling of the Greek media, due to his extensive family connections, his debating skills and his charisma in front of the cameras.

Although less charismatic, the second of the two LAOS MPS, Adonis Georgiadis, also has a long history of anti-Semitism. This includes attacking Jews through his television show and being named as a prosecution witness against the leaders of the Greek Jewish community who are on trial for the defamation of Kostas Plevris, a self-proclaimed Nazi and anti-Semite whose book was described by the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece as a "defamatory, anti-Semitic book in which Jews are called 'subhuman' and are directly threatened with annihilation." Plevris himself went on trial for incitement, but was acquitted, and then he sued the leaders of the Jewish community. Plevris is also the father of Thanassis Plevris, another LAOS member of the parliament.

...

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Greek Economy Suffers Record Collapse In February

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/01/2012 - 09:53

There are those who recall that not ten days ago, according to the IMF's Greek (un)sustainability analysis, worst case scenario no less, Greek GDP would somehow miraculously post just a 1% drop in 2013. Unfortunately this won't happen. According to the overnight PMI update out of Europe (where was saw the jobless rate at the highest since 1997), the Greek economy just imploded at a record pace. This follows the already horrendous budget revenue data from January which came in down 7% on expectations of a 9% rise. Sure enough, as expected the fact that the entire country has taken the rest of 2012 off with no incentive to actually work, will do miracles for Greece. From Reuters: "The Markit Manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) for Greece fell to a survey low of 37.7 points in February from 41.0 in January, staying below the 50 mark that divides growth in activity from contraction for each of the past 30 months. Production and new order volumes fell at the sharpest pace in the near 13 year history of the survey as austerity sapped demand. New export orders fell for a sixth straight month and at the steepest rate since May 2010." Translated: the situation is hopeless and getting worse. Expect the German, pardon Troika, Kommissar to be shocked, shocked, to find out that not only do banks in Greece have no deposits left, but the entire economy picked up and left.

the art of Luke Smalley

---

Frank Auerbach

Head of J. M. II
Posted by Liam at 09:38

John Deakin

John Deakin

έχουμε μπλέξει big time

DEAN BAKER
Greece and Those Wild & Crazy Guys at the ECB

I have been following the European sovereign debt crisis since it first developed more than two years ago. It was evident from the beginning that the conditions on the debtor nations being demanded by the “troika” of the European Central Bank, the European Union, and the International Monetary Fund were both onerous and counterproductive.

This view has been confirmed by the fact that the debtor countries have missed target after target and that growth has consistently come in far below projections. (Actually, the crises countries have been contracting for much of the last two years.) This could leave analysts guessing as to what economic reasoning lies behind the troika’s conditions.

Last week I got the answer when I had occasion to meet with a high-level EU official. There is no economic reasoning behind the troika’s positions. For practical purposes, Greece and the other debt-burdened countries are dealing with crazy people. The pain being imposed is not a route to economic health; rather it is a gruesome bleeding process that will only leave the patient worse off. The economic doctors at the troika are clueless when it comes to understanding a modern economy.

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the humiliation of Greece

MIKE WHITNEY
The Humiliation of Greece

If Greece’s €130 billion loan was going to be used for fiscal stimulus, then it might be worth the commitment. Because that kind of money could put a lot people back to work and kick-start the economy fast. But the loan isn’t going to be used for stimulus. It’s going to be used to recapitalize the banks and pay off creditors, neither of which will do anything to boost activity or create jobs. So, why bother? Why dig an even deeper hole if it achieves nothing? If that’s the case, then Greece should just default now and start rebuilding the economy ASAP. There’s no point in putting it off any longer.

The troika (the European Central Bank, the European Union, and the International Monetary Fund) is demanding another €3 billion in spending cuts even though unemployment is tipping 20 percent and the economy shrank 7 percent in the last quarter. What sense does that make? You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that Greece won’t reach its budget targets if tax revenues continue to fall because everyone’s either been laid off or taking a pay-cut. It will just make a bad situation even worse. But the troika doesn’t worry about these type of things. They don’t care that their lamebrain economic theories have failed miserably so far, or that their austerity measures have been a complete flop. They just keep plugging along making the same mistakes over and over again, impervious to the criticism of reputable economists, oblivious to the abysmal results, they remain steadfast in their commitment to belt tightening, sure that a strict diet of breadcrumbs and water is the best way to nurse an ailing economy back to health. It doesn’t bother them that the facts prove otherwise.

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PHOTO BOOTH

Melanie Willhide’s Tribute to a Burglar

Posted by James Pomerantz

When life give you lemons, make lemonade. When someone breaks into your home and steals your computer, make a collaborative photo project. That’s what Melanie Willhide did.

Willhide dedicates “To Adrian Rodriguez, with Love” to the individual who broke into her home and stole various things. Her computer was recovered by the police, but the hard drive had been wiped clean. Willhide attempted to recover the erased data but found her digital photographs corrupted. Lemons! Rather than delete the images, Willhide considered these corrupted files a collaboration with her machine. She refined them and made additional ones inspired by the mess. Lemonade!

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Postscript: Marie Colvin, 1956-2012

Posted by David Remnick

Last night, after a long day and before a late dinner, I sat down with my wife to watch the news on CNN. Anderson Cooper was broadcasting from a studio in New York, but his tape was from Syria. He rightly demanded that we watch a two-year-old child in the besieged city of Homs die of shrapnel wounds inflicted by the regime of Bashar al-Assad. The camera stayed on the child until the last breath was out of him. His father cradled him and kept asking what his poor son had ever done to anyone to deserve it.

Then Cooper spoke with a reporter—a very great and experienced reporter—who was on the scene, Marie Colvin, of the Sunday Times of London. The image of Colvin on the screen was instantly recognizable to anyone who has spent time reporting, as she had for a generation, from the Middle East, Africa, Chechnya, the Balkans, or South Asia; after losing an eye in the civil war in Sri Lanka, in 2001, she wore an eye patch. For decades, she has been a ubiquitous presence in the war zones of the world and her reports in the Times were admired in the close-knit world of foreign correspondents for their scrupulous and straightforward eloquence.

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η σωτηρία της δραχμής είναι πολύ μεγάλο πράγμα

No, This Is Not Mount Olympus...

...This is a chart of the Greek bank stock index, which has gone from an all out demented euphoria to suicidal depression in 5 days, as the rumor that Greece is "saved" has been replaced with the reality that Greece is still "completely broke" - if you bought on Monday like most momos, on the expectation that the torrid surge higher would continue, you have now lost 24%. We are awaiting the latest January deposit data from the Greek banking system eagerly, as something tells us Greek citizens, who are already congregating at Syntagma square for today's daily riot, did not follow Venizelos' advice to either "WORK, WORK, WORK" or for that matter "DEPOSIT, DEPOSIT, DEPOSIT."

Average:

5

βαζελίνη θα πουλάνε τα φαρμακεία?

"We had to choose between the certainty of disaster and the doubt of salvation. You can't be independent when you have to borrow €20m a day.”

Greece Throws in the Towel, Bows to German Jackboot

by PATRICK COCKBURN

Greeks expect to agree a deal with the Eurozone leaders today, Monday, that will cede much of their country’s independence. Greece will become an economic – and to a large extent a political – colony of Germany and its allies. Berlin will have a say in everything from the choice of prime minister to the types of medicines dispensed by pharmacies.

In return for €230bn, made up of €130bn in fresh loans and €100bn in write-downs on privately held Greek government bonds, Greece is relieved from its immediate debt burden. But the money does not go to the Greek government, still less to the Greek people. It simply leaves them to live off the money they earn.

For all the television pictures of rioting protesters, clouds of tear gas and burning buildings in central Athens over the last week, a striking feature of the political landscape is the lack of resistance to the German terms. The Greek political elite sound and look stunned, grudgingly surrendering to the demands of the Troika (EU, IMF and European Central Bank), but bereft of ideas about what else to do.

ΜΟRE

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oh boy

More Leaked Greece Details: Downside Case Sees Funding Needs Soar From €136 Billion To €245 Billion

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/20/2012 - 18:21 Eurozone Finland Germany Greece Netherlands Recession

The FT's Peter Spiegel has scoped up some additional details from the 10 page debt sustainability analysis that is at the basis of the latest Greek bailout talks. Some of the critical details:

• "even under the most optimistic scenario, the austerity measures being imposed on Athens risk a recession so deep that Greece will not be able to climb out of the debt hole over the course of the new €170bn bail-out."
• A German-led group of creditor countries – including the Netherlands and Finland – has expressed extreme reluctance since they received the report about the advisability of allowing the second rescue to go through.
• A “tailored downside scenario” prepared for eurozone leaders in the report suggests Greek debt could fall far more slowly than hoped, to only 160 per cent of economic output by 2020 – far below the target of 120 per cent set by the International Monetary Fund
  • Under such a scenario, Greece would need about €245bn in bail-out aid, nearly twice the €136bn under the “baseline” projections.
• “Prolonged financial support on appropriate terms by the official sector may be necessary,” the report said, a clear reference to the possibility that bail-out funds may be needed indefinitely.
• Even in best case scenario country will need at least €50 billion on top of €136 billion.
• A recapitalisation of the Greek banking sector, which originally was projected to cost €30bn, will now cost €50bn. A highly touted Greek privatisation plan, which originally hoped to raise €50bn, will now be delayed by five years and bring in only €30bn by the end of the decade.

Translated, this is yet another confirmation of what we have claimed all along - that Germany is no longer playing along.

στερνή μου γνώση

Europe's finance ministers plan to approve a second bailout for Greece on Monday but Hans-Werner Sinn, the head of Ifo, a top German economic think tank, warns that the money will only help international banks -- not the Greeks. He argues that Greece can only solve its crisis if it quits the euro.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The finance ministers of the euro zone want to approve a new bailout for Greece this Monday. Can the additional €130 billion ($172 billion) save Greece?

Sinn: No, and the politicians know it can't. They want to gain time until the next election. I think we're wasting time by doing this.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Why?

Sinn: Because Greece's external debt is rising with every year that passes until it leaves the currency union. We're getting ever further away from solving the problem. The basic problem is that Greece isn't competitive. The cheap loans that the euro brought the country artificially raised prices and wages -- and the country has to come back down from this high level.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: So the euro countries shouldn't approve the aid?

Sinn: They should give them the money to ease their exit from the currency union. The Greek government could use the money to nationalize the country's banks and prevent the state from collapsing. The state and the banks must continue to function through all the turmoil that an exit will entail.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: This turmoil would hit the population hard.

Sinn: Yes, undeniably. But the turmoil would only be temporary, it would last one to two years perhaps. This time would have to be bridged with the financial aid from the international community. But the drachma will immediately depreciate and the situation will stabilize very quickly. After a short thunderstorm, the sun will shine again.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: How would a euro exit help Greece in concrete terms?

Sinn: It would become competitive again. Because Greek products would rapidly become cheaper, demand would be redirected from imports towards domestically produced goods. The Greeks would no longer buy their tomatoes and olive oil from Holland or Italy but from their own farmers. And tourists for whom Greece has been too expensive in recent years would return. In addition, new capital would flow into the country. The rich Greeks who deposited so many billions, possibly hundreds of billions of euros, in Switzerland would see the falling property prices and wages and would have an incentive to start investing in their own country again.

'Restructuring Greece Within the Euro is Illusory'

magic

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