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Must See: Greece Explained In One Picture
We were going to do a caption contest out of this image, but unfortunately this is not funny. It is tragic. Many people will lose all their money, savings, livelihood, and more because of this...
What is it? It is a picture taken at the Athens ministry of finance.
It is part of a full documentary (go to 24 minutes in for the lack of money shot) released a few days ago by German TV station ZDF called The Greek Lie. It is self-explanatory, and shows where 2 years of bailout funds went, or rather didn't, and why 2 years to the day after the first bailout, not only is Greece not fixed, but is days away from leaving the Eurozone, but at a cost to taxpayers of nearly half a trillion.
We urge anyone, even non-German speakers, to set aside 45 minutes and view the clip below. It is unsettling at best.
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EU "Hope and Change", or This is the Finance Ministry, and we are here to help you (save you / bail you out) ...
It looks like Fuhrer bunker!
It looks like my college dorm during finals week.
Someone should keep in mind that all revealed scandals in Greece have German companies involved... Siemens, MAN, Ferrostal, etc, this is what the big fat blue filles hide inside ....
Sigh.
And in two or three years time we will be watching a similar Chinese documentary about the ECB.
It has a fair good chance.
Btw the Chinese have a dedicated 24H DOCUMENTARY Channel, conducted in English and aired to worldwide via satellite, it's called 'CCTV Documentary'
You can blame Greece as long as you like but then take a minute and thing what this quote means in 2012
"Worldwide it is accepted the richest 2% of the global population own at least 50% of global wealth"
New era or Medieval times?
miltiadis,
i believe most of ZHers do not blame the Greek people ALONE, at least not blaming them 100% for all the messes today
just reread these two comments here that IMHO BEST describe the Greek crisis in short-form notions:
#1: Bring the Gold at here
'...to ream the good German working people out of their tax money and use Greece as scapegoat and a flow through valve for money to the banks who aided the sovereign in running up the debt...'
#2: Lednbrass at here
'While financial and political chicanery is certainly half of the problem the other half is a stupid, complacent population of cud chewers too busy chasing entertainment and sensation...'
As ParaZite put in here:
"When great theft occurs, the real criminals are no where in sight."
tHE pARTY iS oVER, nOW tHE pAYBACK tIME
~matrix
"Yeah, I thought I saw Democracy in here somewhere. Bankers didn't want it any longer so we were to toss it. You might check in some of those bags. If you find The Greek Backbone, you're probably close..."
"Danny, I've sent boys younger than you to the electric chair. Didn't want to do it, but felt I owed it to them"
is there an english version? my german is not strong enough to comprehend
HOTMESS!!!
Today's Der Spiegel:
Greece Can No Longer Delay Euro Zone Exit http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/why-greece-needs-to-leave-the-euro-zone-a-832968.html"REHYPOTHEDEFECATIONEXPIALADOCIOUS"
I can't remember who came up with it, but it isn't mine. This is what I imagine it would look like though.
Those are called Junk bonds.
More proof that the rich suck from the bottom. The only salvation lies in taxing the rich like US did during its triumphant era 1940-1980 BR(Before Reagan)
But wait, there's more!
Met an Albanian-Greek last year in Saranda. He had just returned after 15 years in Saloniki. Asked him about organized resistance to the regime. Said the only organizing was for ripping off the EU. Opa!
Who the hell cares about this? I couldn't care less, or even better: was kümmert mich mein Geschwätz von gestern? Never forget those famous words by Konrad Adenauer. Remember, always "cum grano salis"!
It would be particularly ironic if the stolen supermarket carts in the Finance Ministry's basement were from Aldi, Netto or Lidl.
Having said that, ZDF's estimate that the German Federal Government liabilities in Greece may amount to EUR 70 Billion seems wildly optimistic at best, and deliberately misleading at worse. All too curious was also the screeming silence on Commerzbank's exposure and the mildly critical stance on CDU + FDP and SPD + Greens, the real culprits of this debacle.
You can't spend your whole life worrying about your mistakes. You fucked up, you trusted us.
How is this any worse than Rumsfeld admitting 2.3 trillion is missing?
Well, he didn't allow any photos, and then he blew it up with a large airplane...so +10 for being a smarter criminal?
The caption should read...
"When great theft occurs, the real criminals are no where in sight."
you can't eat it.
Hey Munger sew that up your ass you dimented fruit cake.
Coming soon! Steve Forbes dungeon of penis scientific exam.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IqoYu5Ji7k&feature=related
Just watched it then with my German sufficient to understand it with the help of the German subtitles. Unfortunately I don't have the German to translate it quickly, nor the time to translate it slowly. I'm sure some network like SBS Australia or the BBC will pick it up and English subtitle it soon.
For those who haven't seen it, it's a very good, but not necessarily objective documentary.
From the ZH perspective, it was a more European take: the markets barely featured, bit things like political failure and wealth inequality featured heavily. It does put everything into perspective when a documentary shows you those who are really suffering and aren't just a tiny little bit poorer on paper for a day because of a margin hike or pump and dump.
The most concerning thing about this documentary is that it ends by painting Greece as another East Germany that Germany will have to pay for and seems to assume that Greece is the only Eurozone member Germany will have to pay for. The problem is that the rest of the doco points to structural problems that countries like Portugal, Spain, Italy and even France also have to a lesser degree. And we all know that Germany can't possibly bail them out as if they were East germany of 1990.
This is *****ng madness if they try to portray Greece as East Germany. Like you said - no way Germany can "bail out" Portugal, Spain, Italy and now France. The whole EUSSR facism has to go. I am so sick of the term bail out. Propaganda speak.
Anyone who thinks hope & Change is better is delusional. We will probably lose the dollar as reserve currency by the end of this year. Then we are ****ed.
Eh, they'll pump the Germans for every pfennig of war guilt they have left, bailouts aren't over - not even close.
fuck it, ill take the chair
I went to Scotiabank today to see if sales taxes were added on to maples and they quoted me $31.80 plus 5 dollars plus 50 cents per ounce in fording fees. I said "I'll be back". I don't think the banks want us to buy PM.
Greece is heading down the slippery slope faster than greased lightning.
Slip-slidin' away - from the euro.
G-Pap said move his apartment in here..
We are so lucky we own our printing presses or else we would have to suffer immediately like Greece instead of the gradual erosion of prosperity that we are seeing.
@manny, yeah you may feel lucky for having the 24H HUGE PRINTING MACHINES installed and in operation BUT the REST of the world may NOT share the same views, observing the high inflation of those essential stuffs!!!
For most people, their livelihoods are just being robbed!
Isn't this just an average day at the federal reserve?
That''s not junk! Those are prime assets (at least by ECB standards).
Guest: Michael Chiotinis, blogger of Athens, Greece
The Syriza radical left bloc led by Alexis Tsipras, the biggest winner in last Sunday’s Greek vote, has advanced a highly effective program of class-based demands including: the rollback of wage, pension, and public employee austerity cuts; the rescinding of anti-union and anti-worker measures; democracy and social justice; investigations and indictments for financial crimes; and a debt freeze on onerous payment obligations of the Greek state. This winning program of resistance against the infamous troika of IMF-European Central Bank-European Commission contrasts with the programmatic impotence of the anarchist-dominated Occupy Wall Street, and should be carefully studied by every serious opponent of 1% rule worldwide.Greece urgently needs a debt freeze within the euro. Last week’s elections open the perspective of a European anti-austerity bloc capable of defeating the neo-Bruening policies of Merkel, who may already be on her way out, and of seizing control of the European Central Bank for a policy of credit creation for job creation based on European-wide infrastructure.
Since neither zombie banks nor national budgets can finance a European economic recovery, the ECB must be forced to issue a series of trillion-euro tranches of 0%, 100-year credit to buy bonds devoted exclusively to great projects of infrastructure modernization. In this way, the required 40 million productive jobs at union wages can be created.
If Greece holds another round of early elections within a month or two, the latest polls indicate that Syriza can attain the majority needed to form the next government. Threats to expel Greece from the euro are scare tactics designed simply to intimidate Greek voters.
The crisis of the world finance oligarchy has started a new downwar lurch with the exhaustion of the €1 trillion of 1%, 3-year loans wasted by ECB boss Draghi of Goldman Sachs on the hopelessly insolvent Eurozombie banks. Banksters are apoplectic about the prospect of a Greek moratorium.
Two years after the New York Stock Exchange flash crash of May 6, 2010, Jamie Dimon of J. P. Morgan Chase has announced huge losses generated by the London proprietary trading desk of his bank. As usual, the losses come from bad bets on derivatives, in this case synthetic indices (CDX) based on credit default swaps, the ultra-toxic derivatives which destroyed AIG in 2008. Dimon has been raving against excessive regulation, but this latest debacle shows that Dodd-Frank and the diluted Volcker rule are so weak as to be worthless. To banish the specter of a new panic followed by more banker demands for bailouts, it will be necessary to outlaw credit default swaps and synthetic indices based on credit default swaps. A 1% across-the-board Eurotobin transfer tax must be levied on all financial transactions. A strengthened Glass-Steagall regime of separating commercial banking, proprietary trading/investment banking, and insurance should also be established to prevent future crises of this type.
The UN observer mission in Syria has now been attacked twice in the past week by NATO-backed terrorist death squads, who have also killed scores in Damascus with coordinated suicide bombs on government agencies. The killers are obviously al Qaeda fanatics in the service of NATO, but Norwegian NATO General Robert Mood of the observer mission refuses to pin the responsbility where it belongs – on his fellow NATO officers. The purpose of observers must be to observe and report, but the UN reporters have reported virtually nothing — because they are acting as tools of NATO.
Syrian UN ambassador Jafari has exposed the role of Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar in deploying terrorist fighters from Libya and Turkey into Syria. Jafari called attention to a CD prepared by the Syrian government showing the confessions of some of these foreign fanatics.
As for Kofi Annan, his Geneva press conference was another whitewash of NATO. If Annan wants to start reconciliation talks, he should announce a date certain for the convening of a national dialogue at the peace table in Geneva. The Syrian government is sure to attend. The congeries of fanatics, dupes, and foreign fighters calling itself variously Syrian National Council or Free Syrian Army is not likely to appear. If they do appear, they are likely to start killing each other before they enter the conference room. NATO, like Hitler before he swallowed Czechoslovakia in 1938, does not want a peaceful solution to the Syrian troubles, but rather wants to keep internal conflict alive sp it can be used as the pretext for invasion, regime chaange, and partition.
Ban Ki Moon, Kofi Annan, Navi Pillay, Valerie Amos, and Gen. Mood are thus imperialist operatives, not international civil servants. With corrupt personnel like this, the United Nations risks extinction on the model of the League of Nations, which perished because it refused to oppose fascist aggression in the 1930s. We are today witnessing the transition away from any concept of collective security in favor of naked appeasement and complicity with the US-UK-NATO aggressor coalition.
The situation is very serious Greece and the rest of Europe is serious (for now). I havethe impression that the European economy will get worse before it gets better. This decline will have a negative effect on America and the rest of the world. The most convenient is to prepare for the next crisis and make it convenient to leave it as soon as possible and in good shape.
negative effect on America
How much more negative can things in America get with Mugabe 2 in the White Hut? The Chicago gang is far worse than the Greeks. The honest Greek guy on the yacht talked about the Greeks and mentioned former Chicago resident - Al Capone. The US is far more ****'ed'ed than Europe.
Please investigate if their property assessor's offices work the same way. Just in case you want to buy an island there.
Opening scene of "Banksta' Hoarders: Greece Buried Alive"
If you use Fabreeze everything will be ok along with Glade scented Candles the Ministry of Finance will be a ok.
Heh who took a picture of my barn???
Foreclosophobia
.
"Released by a german TV station" .... I wonder if the invisible hands of the troika are there ?
Will the troika now have an excuse or try to justify to the rest of the world that they need to inflict a bunch of bureaucrats with dictatorial powers to run Greece..?
Will Nigel Farage be proven to be correct in his assessment of the situation?
Texting While Walking Banned in New Jersey Town
http://gma.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blogs/texting-while-walking-banned-jersey...
U must be fucking kidding me.
Hope & Change. Deal with it - NJ voted for it.
a shredding party that didn't get started?
"Attempts to form a new government in Athens have been thwarted for the past nine days, although the country’s president will meet all major parties this afternoon to discuss the forming of a “technocratic” administration rather than a coalition"- The Telegraph
WTF.
Is this the preview of what's going to take place in USSA?
Although "Finanzamt" in German rather means local tax collecting office, not ministry of finance.
Sad and simple....politics mixing with economics. Absolutely nothing more needs to be said. Everyone wants the miracle of the markets, but politicians act without regard to real consequences. The state of Illinois has 9 billion in unpaid bills......and the sky does not fall. Greece, like Illinois and the United States run giant Pretent Accounts.....where is the end of the line? Greece is not really in trouble, we could just give them a check for the whole fucking amount. In my opinion, the real dilemma is not that Greece is upside down but rather how to keep the rest of the world from seeing that it is all a silly game and there is no store of value in paper money.
...still working with enterpreter, but so far, oh there was trouble seen in 97 but in 2000 the German Finance Minister claimed those Greek plastic bags are OK. Lol.
...OK, enterpreter is back, will add more, maybe, later.
...lol, eyebrows.
Breaking News: Gpap's used hooker repository discovered
re: the German documentary on Greece
I sat down and watched the show.
Mind-boggling to the extreme - providing pause to remark on the irony of the Greek debacle falling on the bicentenary of Charles Dickens' birth!
The most moving scene was the mother who could only visit her children once every five weeks because she could not afford to feed them. She is "lucky" to have a job that pays her 20 Euros a day two months a year, as she knows others who have to settle for just 13 Euros a day. Given her inability to provide for her children, they are placed in a “Kinderkorf” (“Children’s villiage”) - a new word I never heard before - that is struggling given the new austerity measures are cutting back on funding for this new essential service.
The real problem according to the documentary is the simple fact that the economy is seized up... willing entrepreneurs (few as they are) have no access to capital as Greek banks no longer lend... meanwhile, foreign investors won't touch Greeece with a Balkan barge pole.
Meanwhile - the govenment is impotent as it has no revenues. Officials reckon the typical owner of just one of those yachts at the beggining of the show would provide the tax revenue of one tyical Greek village - if only the yacht owner would in fact pay his fair share of taxes which he won't given the money would be thrown down a black hole of courruption.
Given historic precedent of the Greek civil war post WW II provides even further pause to ponder! This story will end in blood and tears.
Who Is Crashing The System? (2012-05-15)
With continued volatility in many of the key global markets, 40 year veteran, Robert Fitzwilson wrote this exclusive piece for King World News. Fitzwilson is founder of The Portola Group, one of the premier boutique firms in the United States. Here are Fitzwilson’s observations: “We know that the world’s debt-based, fiat money system can only be revived and sustained by the combination of more debt creation and consumption. We have arrived at a critical point in history.”
Robert Fitzwilson continues:
“It has been a common belief, ours included, that there are two alternatives, print more fiat money or risk a catastrophic global depression. A sane person will only choose the ‘print’ option that leads to the avoidance of an economic Armageddon, even if the effect is just temporary.
But, what if this is a flawed scenario and set of assumptions? What if there is another path, and that path is to effectively crash the system? We all know that the accumulated and accrued obligations cannot be repaid and paid, respectively.
We are in a destructive feedback loop in which new fiat money is created to pay for current and growing expenses, effectively creating even more obligations for future taxpayers. Individuals are told that other people will be taxed to pay for their entitlements when the reality is that they are creating future obligations for themselves.
While not a prediction, it is wise to consider another alternative....
READ THE REST AT KWN BELOW
http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2012/5/15_Wh...