Basil Venitis muses that Papandreou is a Don Quixote who is tilting at the windmills of speculators. Papaconstantinou is a Sancho Panza who helps Papandreou to attack imaginary kallikantzaroi. The quixotic adventures of Papandreou lead nowhere, because he is surrounded by Pasokleptocrats who play farces on him. The cruel practical jokes eventually will lead Don Quixote to a great melancholy.
I accuse Prime Minister George Papandreou of deceiving the electorate, and warn that a lie has short legs, as our people say. Today we were all informed by Peer Steinbrueck, the former finance minister of Germany, that Papandreou, who promised everything to win the elections, had been very well aware, as early as January 2009, of the state of the economy. When therefore, Papandreou was saying that money exists, he was lying purposely.
From this alone one can realise the responsibility and credibility of Pasokleptocrats and draw one's conclusions as to what will follow if Papandreou considers the election result of November a good one. For this reason we shall send to Pasokleptocrats our message clearly in the upcoming local administration elections.
Venitis muses Greece is full of bamboccioni, grown-up babies, thirty-something singles still living with their parents, in order to enjoy a carefree and comfortable life. Brussels slaves cannot live on Brussels sprouts! Well, I do not consider Papandreou bamboccioni, but mamakias, a person tied up to his mother's apron strings!
Venitis points out Pasokleptocrats continue to spend like there is no tomorrow. Premier George Papandreou is the neplusultra of spending! He is a junket junky, staying at the presidential suites of the most expensive hotels that cost 10,000 euros per day. He has a cabinet of fifty ministers, and has thirty personal consultants. For such a small country, Papandreou does not need more than five ministers and one personal consultant. He definitely does not care about the taxpayers' hard-earned money.
Venitis muses that Greek Ministry of Economy is George Orwells' Ministry of Plenty or Miniplenty in Newspeak. Miniplenty imposes heavy taxation, especially VAT, overregualtion, heavy antitrust, and controls prices, salaries, and domestic production. Miniplenty publishes false claims of having raised the standard of living in dystopia, when it has, in fact, reduced production and increased misery. Miniplenty's concocted-statistics are Trojan horses sent to Brussels, in order to get bailouts and avoid penalties.
Venitis points out two roommates at Amherst College of Massachusetts, I, Anthony Samaras, and George Papandreou, lead the two most corrupt political mafias on Earth, Nea Democratia and Pasok. Papandreou is the premier of Greece, and I am the leader of opposition. Papandreou participated in the kleptocratic government of Simitis, and I participated in the kleptocratic government of Caramanlis. We are very good friends, but in public it's our job to accuse each other. Love in private, hate in public, and omerta galore!
Josef Ackermann, CEO of Deutsche Bank, asserts that Greece cannot repay its debt. When this happen, Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker thinks the euro will go belly up. Bank of England Governor Mervyn King, former U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow, and former U.K. finance minister Norman Lamont agree the eurozone needs a common fiscal policy to survive.
Greece will spend more than it saves from austerity measures on arms deals with Germany, France, and the US as a potential condition of receiving bailout funds. It is certainly not unprecedented for the global military industrial complex to benefit from deals made by their friends in the central banking community. After all, war is the health of the state. The last thing big government proponents want is for peace to break out in the world.
Whenever Greeks ask Theodore Pangalos of Pasok, the second most corrupt party on Earth, what happened to their money, Pangalos replies: We ate them together! Greece has more than five times as many civil servants per capital than the United Kingdom, just for kleptocrats to get votes. The country's inflated government apparatus consumes tens of billions of euros a year. But Pangalos never mentions the 80 billion euros deposited in the secret offshore accounts of Graecokleptocrats.
In approving the Greek bailout plan, the international community is more intent on saving its own banks than rescuing Greece itself. The Greek government owes €162 billion to foreign banks and private industry worldwide. German banks hold €33 billion in Greek government bonds. Creditors must surely realize that the loans are no longer collectable. The verdict on Greece is already in, Geece is going belly up. After the end of the bailout program, the Greek deficit will still comprise at least 125 percent of GDP. And no one has a clue as to how the country will ever pay off its mountain of debt.
Greece might negotiate a restructuring of its debt before missing a payment. This would require investors to take a significant discount on their debt holdings and could include extending maturities. Bondholders might see haircuts of anything from 20 to 40% of the net asset value of their debt positions. The current two-year Greek-German bond yield spread is consistent with a 33% chance of a 40% haircut of Graecobonds.
Greek, European, and IMF officials publicly refuse to entertain the idea of Graecorestructuring, Basil Venitis asserts that €110 billion aid to Greece postpones default for a year. It tries to fix the symptoms, not the causes. The cause of Greek debt is Graecokleptocracy, pure and simple! Greece isn't just illiquid, but insolvent. And providing an insolvent country with money and forcing it to raise taxes isn't going to do it. On the contrary, output might fall, unemployment might rise and market share will be lost. Greece's problem is not spending, but robbing by Graecokleptocras. Greece has to drastically cut taxes, regulation, licensure, public sector, and abolish impunity of Graecokleptocras. Moreover EU has to abolish VAT now.
Venitis points out more than €300 billion of Greece's public debt is held by non-residents, mostly financial institutions from Germany, France, and Switzerland. They will have to forego a part of that. If Greece collapses in a disorderly way, then the domino effect hitting Spain, Portugal and other parts of the eurozone could be very rapid and dangerous, a real tsunami. Eventually, this could lead to a destruction of euro.
Venitis muses that giving euros to Pasokleptocrats is giving gin to alcoholics! Fourth Reich becomes a ginmill! A bailout does nothing to fix the misguided policies and Graecokleptocracy that have generated Greece's existing debt and ongoing deficits. Bailout merely postpones the day of reckoning. Worse, bailout both rewards Pasokleptocrats' bad past behavior and encourages such behavior in future. Greece will be back for additional bailouts in short order, since a bailout will not fix its underlying problem of Graecokleptocracy. Rather than bail out Greece, Fourth Reich and IMF should allow it to default. This will hurt Greece's creditors, but those entities assumed the risk when they loaned to a country long known for its kleptocracy. Let it be.
The economic tragedy unfolding in Greece is the welfare state taken to its logical conclusion. When groups of people use the state to live at the expense of others, the feedback loop about the costs of those transfers is attenuated, often by design. The welfare state therefore makes commitments that it cannot honor. By the time creditors or taxpayers say Enough, the welfare state has created a clash between expectations and means that leads to unrest and hardship, a clash that never had to occur.
Greece and much of Western Europe have generally followed the Galbraithan economy model centered on big labor, big unions, big government and big firms. Pasokleptocrats apply state-guided capitalism, where governments enlist the helping hand of the state to guide resources to industries and firms that are believed to have the best chance of copying and out-competing firms on the bottom rungs of the economic ladders elsewhere. In other words, the government picks winners and losers.
Every Greek is turning out to be a loser as Greece faces a sovereign debt default brought about by too much spending over too many years by a long series of socialist governments. The people angriest about it, the public-sector unions whose members have been enjoying the taxpayer-subsidized and debt-subsidized free ride to their retirements at age 53 with full benefits and inflation-protected pensions, are the ones rioting in the streets to demand that they not be forced to sacrifice for the good of the country.
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