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Greece Is Just The Beginning: The 21st Century 'Enclosures' Have Begun
Submitted by Paul Craig Roberts,
All of Europe, and insouciant Americans and Canadians as well, are put on notice by Syriza’s surrender to the agents of the One Percent. The message from the collapse of Syriza is that the social welfare system throughout the West will be dismantled.
The Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras has agreed to the One Percent’s looting of the Greek people of the advances in social welfare that the Greeks achieved in the post-World War II 20th century. Pensions and health care for the elderly are on the way out. The One Percent needs the money.
The protected Greek islands, ports, water companies, airports, the entire panoply of national patrimony, is to be sold to the One Percent. At bargain prices, of course, but the subsequent water bills will not be bargains.
This is the third round of austerity imposed on Greece, austerity that has required the complicity of the Greeks’ own governments. The austerity agreements serve as a cover for the looting of the Greek people literally of everything. The IMF is one member of the Troika that is imposing the austerity, despite the fact that the IMF’s economists have said that the austerity measures have proven to be a mistake. The Greek economy has been driven down by the austerity. Therefore, Greece’s indebtedness has increased as a burden. Each round of austerity makes the debt less payable.
But when the One Percent is looting, facts are of no interest. The austerity, that is the looting, has gone forward despite the fact that the IMF’s economists cannot justify it.
Greek democracy has proven itself to be impotent. The looting is going forward despite the vote one week ago by the Greek people rejecting it. So what we observe in Alexis Tsipras is an elected prime minister representing not the Greek people but the One Percent.
The One Percent’s sigh of relief has been heard around the world. The last European leftist party, or what passes as leftist, has been brought to heel, just like Britain’s Labour Party, the French Socialist Party, and all the rest.
Without an ideology to sustain it, the European left is dead, just as is the Democratic Party in the US. With the death of these political parties, the people no longer have any voice. A government in which the people have no voice is not a democracy. We can see this clearly in Greece. One week after the Greek people express themselves decisively in a referendum, their government ignores them and accommodates the One Percent.
The American Democratic Party died with jobs offshoring, which destroyed the party’s financial base in the manufacturing unions. The European left died with the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union was a symbol that there existed a socialist alternative to capitalism. The Soviet collapse and “the end of history” deprived the left of an economic program and left the left-wing, at least in America, with “social issues” such as abortion, homosexual marriage, gender equality, and racism, which undermined the left-wing’s traditional support with the working class. Class warfare disappeared in the warfare between heterosexuals and homosexuals, blacks and whites, men and women.
Today with the Western peoples facing re-enserfment and with the world facing nuclear war as a result of the American neoconservatives’ claim to be History’s chosen people entitled to world hegemony, the American left is busy hating the Confederate battle flag.
The collapse of Europe’s last left-wing party, Syrzia, means that unless more determined parties arise in Portugal, Spain, and Italy, the baton passes to the right-wing parties - to Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party, to Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, and to other right-wing parties who stand for nationalism against national extermination in EU membership.
Syriza could not succeed once it failed to nationalize the Greek banks in response to the EU’s determination to make them fail. The Greek One Percent have the banks and the media, and the Greek military shows no sign of standing with the people. What we see here is the impossibility of peaceful change, as Karl Marx and Lenin explained.
Revolutions and fundamental reforms are frustrated or overturned by the One Percent who are left alive. Marx, frustrated by the defeat of the Revolutions of 1848 and instructed by his materialist conception of history, concluded, as did Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot, that leaving the members of the old order alive meant counter-revolution and the return of the people to serfdom. In Latin America every reformist government is vulnerable to overthrow by US economic interests acting in conjunction with the Spanish elites. We see this process underway today in Venezuela and Ecuador.
Duly instructed, Lenin and Mao eliminated the old order. The class holocaust was many times greater than anything the Jews experienced in the Nazi racial holocaust. But there is no memorial to it.
To this day Westerners do not understand why Pol Pot emptied Cambodia’s urban areas. The West dismisses Pol Pot as a psychopath and mass murderer, a psychiatric case, but Pol Pot was simply acting on the supposition that if he permitted representatives of the old order to remain his revolution would be overthrown. To use a legal concept enshrined by the George W. Bush regime, Pol Pot pre-empted counter-revolution by striking in advance of the act and eliminating the class inclined to counter-revolution. The class genocide associated with Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot are the collateral damage of revolution.
The English conservative Edmund Burke said that the path of progress was reform, not revolution. The English elite, although they dragged their heels, accepted reform in place of revolution, thus vindicating Burke. But today with the left so totally defeated, the One Percent does not have to agree to reforms. Compliance with their power is the only alternative.
Greece is only the beginning. Greeks driven out of their country by the collapsed economy, demise of the social welfare system, and extraordinary rate of unemployment will take their poverty to other EU countries. Members of the EU are not bound by national boundaries and can freely emigrate. Closing down the support system in Greece will drive Greeks into the support systems of other EU countries, which will be closed down in turn by the One Percent’s privatizations.
The 21st century Enclosures have begun.
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Entirely valid. We certainly have arrived at a UniParty through which the 1% derive their riches and give a small share to quiet the masses. I don't what else you would call this except communism.
‘Jewish Lightening’ is striking Greece
https://youtu.be/Fr_LwF6JnKg?t=2069
I am retired. However, if I were still working but out of a job I would find out who buys those Greek islands and offer my services to the wealthiest of them…
Fuck the banks.
The prudent assessment of credit risk is a duty owed at law.
Great! End socialism. Tired of standing behind people from a south american country in the grocery line, who are buying $100+ formula on WIC, $34 steaks on EBT, and then paying $1 from a thick wad of $20 bills.
I agree the FS Army is going to get bigger and bigger....just watch San francisco now...its been advertised as a santuary city...the FS Army will pour into it now....same thing with Kansas City..that mayor thinks its great...but just watch in 5 years how the city falls apart....Greece is falling apart....and a big reset with starvation and death is the only thing to change it now....no one pays taxes...and yes they want it all for free...does not work....at some point they have to start over and start to pay for what they want...or they will get what they need....and that is not much..
Just a couple of points:
1. A few years back (actually, 2010), Paul Craig Roberts, who wrote frequently at Counterpunch, announced that he was quitting, not going to write any more. I actually wrote to him, pleading that he not give up the fight.
Eventually, he relented and started writing again, after maybe six months off, launched his own site, blah, blah, blah, he's controlled opposition. One has to wonder what threats made him first stop writing and criticising the government, and then, made him return to writing.
2. I've made lots of money in the past, blown much of it, am now closing in on 62 and poor, but relatively solvent, thanks largely to the flood of 0% CC and balance transfer offers I've received and taken advantage of. Their money, now my money, for a while, paying them back and the offers continue coming in, recently had one that offered balance transfer at 0% until January of 2017. Call me Short-sighted, but I took the bait.
3. I've gambled (mostly on horses) away more money than most people make in 10 years, gave it up around 2002, since have been living the straight and narrow, bought some land, learned to garden, plus other useful "prepping" skills.
4. I missed the entire run from 2009-present in stocks, buying mostly silver instead.
5. I have now come full circle. I am prepared to BTFD and have begun gambling online (Nothing as sweet as watching horse racing on your own computer, sitting out on the deck, gambling, drinking, having a good time.) again.
6. Since I have the land, grown my own food, learned how to live off the grid to a large extent, I'm willing to join the "dark side."
7. Said the other day, "you either have to be rich or poor; if you're in the middle, you''re screwed." So, I'll either win or lose, but, I won't - I refuse - to be screwed over by the kleptocracy.
8. PCR should re-retire.
9. I am a mook.
Thanks the Lord and the Founding Fathers that Americans are chest-deep in firearms and at least have the tools necessary to right the ship before it capsizes.
Look, Greece has 50% of their population as government workers, then allowed so early retirement, never collected taxes due, and allow the rich to siphon everything off of the top.
They are a bad example to use as the new world template. Between them, Argentina, and Venezuela, more like a cautionary tale on how socialism fails its people, everytime. This is a failure of the Latin model.
just heard max Keiser say on his video a few days ago... the powerful have rid themselves of any fiduciary duty. The ignorant are on their own. Hard to argue either way.
Living in the social welfare system should not be a nice comfortable place to be - the social safety net should not be a hammock.
I am not saying the people that can't find a job should starve - but the mother fuckers should be eating beans and rice not steak and lobster.
It should hurt a little - there should be a time limit on welfare -
People don't have the right to do nothing and expect others to work and pay for their food, shelter, cell phone & internet.
Respectfully recommend PCR be elevated to the status of "Founding Father".
[one of the] few brave visionary patriots remaing in the dying nation-state of the USoA.
The dirty little secret about the Greece crisis that Ron Paul alluded to recently is that, "
quotes from Greek ZH articles since 2012
"Since the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus, Greece has spent an estimated €216bn on armaments, although I am 100% certain that in absolute terms its defence expenditure is much greater than official documents would show due to the so-called secret funds the state has access to, [although]
everything is veiled in secrecy " "Greece was being "forced to buy weapons we do not need ..".
"Germany became Germany partly because for 62 years it did not have to think about military expenditure," said Angelos Philippides, a prominent economist. "For a long time Greece spent 7% of its GDP on defence when other European countries spent an average 2.2%. If you were to add up that compound 5% from 1946 to today, there would be no debt at all,"
"One could argue that with 1,300 tanks, more than twice the number in the UK, Greece has many more than it needs. But no one forced it to spend so much. It happened because of the threat perception from Turkey and the need to balance Turkey militarily,"
Economic "Hit Man" John Perkins says,
"get these countries into massive debt, that money goes in and then goes straight back out."
[to foreign corporations making arms]
"It's a corporate empire, and the big corporations rule. They control the politics of the United States"
"Greece made mistakes, your leaders made some mistakes, but the people didn't really make the mistakes, and now the people are being asked to pay for the mistakes made by their leaders, often in cahoots with the big banks....
So, people make tremendous amounts of money off of these so-called "mistakes," and now, the people who didn't make the mistakes are being asked to pay the price."
This is why it is absolutely critical to have a healthy, intelligent, informed public as an eternally vigilant guardian of the public's money and government.
If corporation's can cheat they will and the only thing they can't buy off or fool are the masses of healthy clear-thinking guardians protecting themselves from the parasites.
Hey Free,
You're kidding yourself if you think you'll be able to BTFD, gamble online and make it through the stuff that's coming our way. You didn't come full circle as you say you have simply relasped. Stock market trading is considered gambling by gambling experts. Take if from someone who has relasped/gotten back on the wagon countless times. Stop it right now and save yourself a great deal of pain (that you will experience if you don't stop). Those 0% balance transfer offers and gambling are the reason I cannot retire now -- I still owe the money no matter what the interest rates. Gambling is an illness and right now there is no way you can win; everything is fixed and everything is tight. For every one big winner there are a hundred losers. This is from a long time gambler that has seen how the operators have lowered winning percentages over the years. You simply cannot win anymore. Find something else; get a playstation or something.
Sorry no collapse of the welfare state has occurred, mass immigration and obliteration of national borders is the ultimate goal of the welfare state, the entire EU is a welfare state, there will be no German or Greek exit as there is no more German or Greek states, just regions full of Muslims.
The IMF, World Bank, BIS, and the European Union Finance Ministers, are doing the same thing that the Treasury Secretary in the USA did when Bear Stearns, AIG, Fannie, Freddie, Sally, and Lehman Bros. went down. In brief, they are collectively leveraging the future of Europe with the population of Europe, and are assuming that it will all end well once the masses settle down into abject poverty, and mass starvation en masse.
Paul Craig Roberts neglects to reason that the indentured into servitude will not rise up as claimed by Professor Emeritus Karl Marx. Roberts is intellectually dishonest IMHO.