DEBT AS A WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION

The New Year 2012 arrived with more grim news for Greece. Our “rescuers” demand more austerity to be imposed upon an exhausted populace that has already suffered, on the average, a 50 percent cut in real personal income in a country where expanding poverty co-exists with some of the highest consumer prices in Europe. Our “rescue” so far has moved the overwhelming number of pensioners and the low paid into the endangered species category, with millions of people faced with the specter of extinction thanks to a combination of collapsing social and health services and the constant downward pressure on salaries and pensions that they were already nothing to write home about. (You won’t be surprised of course to hear that the entire “streamlining” required, plus the constant austerity measures supposedly ordained to buttress the process, are decided upon by medium-rank accountants without the slightest clue of what happens to real people on the other end of the numerical keypad). At this point, with both the ousted Papandreou regime and the successor Papademos “unity government” failing disastrously to protect even the most basic rights of the Greek people against the “rescue” invasion, prospects of relief are non-existent. Indeed, 2012 is already recognized as a “critical” and “especially difficult” year -- a year during which the 9 percent deficit of GDP must reach below 5 percent, a level unachievable under the circumstances save the mass destruction of whole swaths of Greek society (Note: our ‘rescue’ so far has exclusively concentrated on slashing incomes and devaluing private assets, not harnessing wanton waste by the public sector). Greece possesses the unenviable record of being the first formally insolvent country of the European “union” and one of the first globally. Her “rescue” continues being a grotesque puppet show of bankers and politicians haggling over piling debt on debt as the way to “salvation.” The world surrounding Greece is in no better state, with many sovereign debt snowballs already rolling beyond control. But Greece was “lucky” in having a numerous kleptocratic class in charge that outperformed similar criminally-minded governors, “system paragons” and banks elsewhere. The net result was the complete destruction of the country’s credibility, and what was left of her economy, and her cut-off from the “markets” with no prospect of returning to “healthy” borrowing for a long, long time. The certainty about this deluge is that Greece’s bankruptcy and the pending insolvency of so many other countries cannot and will not be solved via economic measures. And it will not be solved via the devious conventional wisdom of defending financial institutions at the cost of trillions of taxpayer’s money, so cozy for “investors” who assumed there will be no loss for them, ever. Catch phrases like “too big to fail” should be stricken from the list -- and banks, even very big ones, should be allowed to fail. Little pity should be forthcoming for “investors” suffering the results of their “investing” as it has developed in recent years around junk “instruments.” Paying the price of the incessant re-packaging and re-sale of essentially plain hot air “solutions,” concocted by the various “geniuses” of the remorseless and often plainly criminal investment banking sector, should be included in the main risks of “investing” to be suffered by those in pursuit of disproportionate profit. Greece’s and the globe’s sovereign debt crisis needs a far-fetching political solution. Without it, debt as a weapon of mass destruction can and will destroy us all in a swift conclusion of the Age of (Financial) Madness we are currently experiencing.