Meet the New Boss. Same as the Old Boss. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Alexis Tsipras, and we do get fooled again. If you will forgive me I should like to crow a little about the accuracy of my predictions on Greece in the last week or so. Now comes the bit where they stay in the Euro there is another fudge, the bankers get hold of more cash and more state assets, and nothing much changes.
We have to find what enjoyment we can in life, and I was writing yesterday about stuffing a duck. I give you another evocative little snippet from Sikunder Burnes which I rather enjoyed writing.
The next morning Burnes slept in late, hungover. Argoud woke up, and passed Percival Lord, who was sitting in the hall performing taxidermy on a duck. Argoud, still not sober, then crashed into Burnes’ room:
“That officer was not yet dressed, on which M. Argoud called out: “Why sare, the battle of Wagram was fought before this hour, and you are still in deshabille? Will you take wine with me?” “No,” said Captain Burnes, “I never take wine before breakfast.” “Then sare,” said Argoud, “You insult me and I demand satisfaction.” He ran out and soon reappeared with his small sword and asked Burnes to send for his rapier.”
If Russia had not been so keen to unsheathe its claws over Crimea and Ukraine, and if we had not been ever since wooing the Balkans as a possible buffer, it’s quite possible Greece would now be Russian sphere-of-influence (approaches were indeed made). I think there’s a geostrategic subtext to this. And the US is standing on the edge of the field, whistling innocently.
@ RD
Churchill and genocide.
Here is some historical knowledge that rarely gets a mentioned,I wonder why.
Check this out. http://www.countercurrents.org/polya230109.htm
Ba’al; I wonder what kind of terms would enable Greece to adopt the ruble as currency? Creating new currency from scratch is a loser.
@Dave Hansell
11 Jul, 2015 – 4:26 pm
I leave others to comment on the gist of your lengthy post. I’ll just comment on what you say about facilities in Germany. It’s much the same in France (where I live). For instance, just about every town and village has a parking area (usually by the Marie) with toilets and free hook-ups to water and electricity. Many places are also now bringing in free wi-fi.
As the old saying goes (with regard to taxation), it all depends on what kind of society you want to live in.
History corner:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2672301/Now-Albania-sets-sights-EU-membership-helped-Tony-Blair-former-spin-chief-Alastair-Campbell.html
Greece was a busted flush before it even joined the EU. Albania? Stop laughing. Yet Blair wants to add it to the tally of disasters in which he was complicit. Why (apart from the cash)? Note that Blair often rushes in where HMG fears to tread, though any direct connection is deniable. Note also that Blair is a US-facing neocon. Dave Hansell may have a point (above)
“….. and what’s the point of having a general election if people just ignore the result.”
Nicola got the royal box at Wimbledon what more did you want?
http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/leader-of-the-scottish-national-party-nicola-sturgeon-and-news-photo/480358798
Ba’al; I wonder what kind of terms would enable Greece to adopt the ruble as currency? Creating new currency from scratch is a loser.
My suggestion was pure speculation, Ben. But I would think that a drachma tied to the rouble might have worked given the conditions pre-Crimea. There is a very powerful sympathy between Russian and Greek Orthos – the church is still influential in both countries – and even a raw rouble might have been acceptable. However, events coincided rather catastrophically for Greece, and I’m certainly not suggesting that would be their way out now.
“I think there’s a geostrategic subtext to this.”
Yup. The Med is becoming a bit of a hotspot. The whole way round.
Gateway to Africa, by land.
From Salford Lad’s post:
“As its name does not inform you, the Union was not created in order to unify the European continent, but to divide it, and to definitively invalidate Russia. This is what Charles De Gaulle denounced when he plead for a Europe which would stretch from « Brest to Vladivostock ».”
And China too, of course.
http://www.voltairenet.org/article188082.html
Gloating doesn’t do you any credit, Craig. Tsipiras has fought hard and long, and credit to him for that. But the forces ranged against him are overwhelming. He is caught between a rock and a hard place, and they are squeezing him mercilessly – no doubt with some plan to get him replaced. Leaving the euro was never an option, even if he tried to use it as a tactic, and for that I respect him. The vultures would have dismembered Greece if they had left.
O/T Craig but you may be interested to know, if you don’t already know, that Ivan McKee is running to be a SNP MSP.
https://m.facebook.com/IvanMcKeeSNP?refsrc=http%3A%2F%2Ft.co%2FW3CBOekqyo&_rdr
Watching Mr McKee debate during the Scottish indy referendum, I found him to be informative, intelligent and amiable, Mr McKee also put forward a compelling and believable case, as to why Scotland should’ve become independent.
Like you Craig l also wish Mr McKee the best of luck, I hope both of you are successful in your attempts to become SNP MSP’s.
“The vultures would have dismembered Greece if they had left”
The vultures are dismembering Greece now because they haven’t left.
“Who wins again, of course – it’s the bankers. It is they who rule the world!
The question I would be asking now – “who exactly are they”?
They are in the main Zionists – disproportionately Jewish:
“Drawing on C. Wright Mills’ seminal work on The Power Elite, recent power structure research suggests an ideal-type model of four concentric circles: In the inner circle, we find the global money trust, the richest individuals, families or clans, all with fortunes well above one billion Euros.
The CEOs of big transnational corporations and biggest international financial players make up the second circle. They are mostly concerned with increasing the wealth of the inner circle, and with it their own. Top international politicians, some active in governments and international institutions, some more in the background as advisors, plus the top military, compose the third circle.
This political class has assignments: organize the distribution of the social product in such a way as to transfer as much as the actual power balance allows into the pockets of the inner and second circles, and secure the legitimacy of government by organizing the political circus of an allegedly pluralistic structure.
The fourth ring will be composed of top academics, media moguls, lawyers, and may sometimes include prominent authors, film and music stars, artists, NGO representatives, few religious leaders, few top criminals and others useful for decorating the inner circles. They enjoy the privilege of close access to those in power, they are well paid and will make sure not to lose such benefits (Hamm, B. 2010:1008-9; see also Phillips, P., Osborne, B. 2013).
It appears that the degree of internationalization of the powerful correlates with their status on the ring hierarchy. The two inner circles have always been international. The third and fourth rings, however, tend to be much more nationally bound (by ownership, by elections) than the first and the second.
The inner circle is not static but relatively solid. It builds on financial and social capital often accumulated by former generations, the steel, banking, weapons, or oil barons. The major source of power is being borne to a family of the inner circle. The Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, the Morgans, the DuPonts, the Vanderbilts, the Agnellis, the Thyssens or the Krupps would provide illustrative examples (see, e.g., Holbrook, 1953; or more recently Landes, 2006; Marshall, A.G. 2013).
There are also the nouveaux riches. Names like George Soros, William Gates, Warren Buffet, Marc Zuckerberg, Sheldon Adelson, or the Koch brothers come to mind (Smith, Y. 2013); Russian or Eastern European oligarchs like Alisher Usmanov, Mikhail Chodorkowski, Boris Beresowski, Mikhail Fridman, Rinat Ahmetov, Leonid Mikhelson, Viktor Vekselberg, Andrej Melnichenko, Roman Abramovich; as well as Carlos Slim Helu, Lakshmi Mittal, Mukesh Ambani, Jorge Paulo Lemann, Iris Fontbona or Aliko Dangote from the so-called less developed countries.
These parvenus tend to be politically more active, at least on the front stage, than the old rich families: George Soros with his Open Society Foundation and his permanent warnings of the evils of unregulated capitalism is the best known for his liberal leanings, while the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson or Robert Murdoch are aggressively right-wing (Heath, T. 2014; Snyder, M. 2013; Webster, S.C. 2013).
The oligarchs of the former Soviet block have almost all grabbed their fortunes during the presidency of Boris Yeltzin who, pathological alcoholic as he was, made room for large scale privatization of state corporations and raw materials after the collapse of the socialist regime. Shock therapy was pushed through under the influence of Western advisors, especially the Harvard privatization program with Jeffrey Sachs as the leading figure, as well the International Monetary Fund.
Jegor Gajdar, Anatoli Tschubais, an oligarch himself, and Alfred Koch [1] were their local executives in Russia, Vaclav Klaus in Czecholovakia, Leszek Balcerowicz in Poland. The method how to create oligarchs, and social polarization, is easy to understand and has been practiced by the IMF time and again to this very day as part of their structural adjustment policy (later cynically called poverty reduction strategy): Abolish all prize control and public subventions, lay-off civil servants, limit wages, devalue the currency, and privatize public corporations and infrastructure, i.e. the Washington Consensus. Widespread poverty is the immediate result and the other side of the coin of extremely concentrated wealth in few hands.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article38441.htm
Anon1 at 3:02 recites the creed of his secular religion, adopted by syncretism from US state religion, that parties lose by advocating “left” solutions, and not by betraying the electors. Anon1 has no grounds for this assertion except immersive statist indoctrination. He cannot reconcile it with the comparative results of SNP and labor. He regurgitates his propaganda with the droll Dunning-Kruger confidence of all outer-party apparatchiks.
“I find it incomprehensible that Alex Tsipiras has succumbed to the Eurocrats and is to subject his people to more austerity.”
Personally, I don’t find it incomprehensible at all:
“Due to the close knit ‘revolving door’ culture that exists between leading parliamentarians’ taking their places on the boards of financial companies’ following their “retirement”, and the fact that the irresponsible actions of bankers continue to be underwritten by the tax payer, there is no incentive for either the politicians or the the bankers to change their destructive course. The continued suffering of the Greek people resulting from austerity in which their government is implicated, cannot be divorced from this kind of close knit relationship.
It was, for example, no accident that Greece didn’t do the rational thing by defaulting on its debt but has instead decided to continue with the ‘negotiation process’ predicated on further bail-outs. As Craig Murray succinctly put it, “the ‘Troika’ [of creditors comprising the EU, ECB and IMF] is very keen that there will be another bail-out because of course the money goes to the bankers to whom the political elite are beholden” (7).
https://danielmargrain.wordpress.com/2015/07/06/the-lesson-of-greece-stuff-your-money-under-the-mattress/
Gateway to Africa by land.
Look who’s got the keys:
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@30.5826796,33.2635559,9z
Classic 19th century imperialism.
We all need a laugh now and again. The following was recently posted on Benjamin Netanyahu’s YouTube channel. It’s a 30 second cartoon about ISIS and Iran (you need to be signed in to YouTube to be able to watch it)…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxOwi96Vr_c
“He [Corbyn] is opposed because he will make the Labour Party completely unelectable.”
But that’s predicated on the notion that political parties’ cannot win over a hitherto disengaged electorate with left-wing policies. The success of the SNP puts the lie that theory:
“On issues including austerity, nuclear weapons, welfare and Palestine both Sturgeon and Corbyn are really very similar. They have huge areas of agreement that stand equally outside the establishment consensus. Indeed Nicola is more radical than Jeremy, who wants to keep the United Kingdom”.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2015/06/nicola-corbyn-and-the-myth-of-the-unelectable-left/
It therefore follows that the idea you have to be right-wing to win elections only applies if you are looking at this in purely tribal terms. I place in the electorate an ability to be far more nuanced and discerning than apparently you do.
It ought not to be a question of being unprincipled by sticking with your team at any price come what may, but helping to shape their policies to meet the needs of the disenfranchised in order to mobilize them to becoming politically active and apoplectic as opposed to being passive and apathetic.
It is a completely futile exercise in being elected on a mandate adopted by your opponents just so you can further your advance on the greasy pole. What those on the left want to vote for is a candidate that offers a genuine alternative to neoliberalism and austerity not simply a set of Tory-lite politicians’.
The Truth about the EU was quite simple,but many were blind,we knew it was a scam years ago C.Gordon Tether wrote about the scam and for doing so lost his job after twenty years as writer of the Lombard column in the Financial Times.After which his writings were blacklisted.
Here is a piece.
“There is element of starry-eyed idealism in a pro-Market lobby – People
who genuinely believe that the true interests of the peoples of Western Europe would be advanced by welding them into a European Super State ruled by a European Super Government. But it derives its formidable fire-power in the main from international Big Business interests–giant
multi-national,industrial and financial conglomerates who have a considerable vested interest in
removal of national boundaries and the emergence of a ‘one-world’ political and economic system.”
… and you’re still wrong on this Craig. You initally mischaracterised Syriza so of course they didn’t in such a way that you said they would have to, if the wanted to prove their worth.
As a former diplomat I’m surprised at you’ve ignored the process of negotiation. In your fantastic second book, “The Catholic Orangemen of Togo: And Other Conflicts I Have Known”, I remember you describing sitting around the negotiating with “African Warlords” some of whom you described the truly despicable acts that they had been involved with, yet you were involved with the ‘give and take’ to try and find a solution. How come Syriza isn’t granted that?
I wanted Syriza to simply ignore the debt, but it was never about that.
When Scots independence comes about – something I hopes happens sooner rather than later – you’re going to be looking at ‘fudge galore’!
Lwtc247,
Why do you assume that leading Greek politicians’ are less corruptible than their European counterparts?
Dave Hansell
I just spent 3 weeks in the UK and agree with much of what you wrote but I do not think that the average German citizen knows much about the ‘disposition’ of the UK citizenry nor the state of that nation and I have lived in Germany 26 years.
The problem as I see it with the UK is the exponential rate at which the wealth gap is growing and most of the population do not realize that they are being exploited and ripped off by the corporations and banks and that their resources have been stolen from under their noses by utility companies and that their land is being polluted by energy companies and industrial farming practices and that much of the land is in the ownership of the wealthiest 1%. This factor alone makes a critical difference to the quality of life and well-being of the citizenry. For example, I am able to walk anywhere I like with no fences no ‘keep off private land’ signs in the Stadtwald next to my house which commercial forestry belonging to the town …and to me. There are deer, wild boar, foxes, squirrels, and all kinds of birds and its not under threat from onshore wind development like the wild land in Scotland (a fair bit already under turbines) or the development of a potash mine like the North York Moors Nation Park and its not being bought up in a land grab by the MD of Persimmon Homes like much of the Northumerland National Park at least those areas not already owned by the Duke of Northumberland and nobody up there seems to think that this is out of the ordinary, just business as usual.
Hacklyut Among The Primitive Peoples
11/07/2015 5:38pm
You sure you’re spelling your name correctly?
Kind regards,
John
“They are in the main Zionists – disproportionately Jewish:”
Daniel is singing the old Nazi song I’m afraid.
“No sympathy for the plight of the Greek people Craig? I wouldn’t crow too much.”
________________
With great respect, the above comment is like the cry of a jilted, disappointed lover. Similar cries were heard whenever Craig posted on President Putin and his Russia, I recall.
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Mais revenons a’ nos moutons.
Craig is not crowing but merely stating a fact if he was and is saying, inter alia, that Mr Tsipras and his SYRIZA party won the Greek general election earlier this year on a false prospectus – and what is more important, on a prospectus he knew to be false – and that Mr Tsipras, far from being the new Messiah so enthusiastically hailed both by a large part of the Greek electorate and many of the Excellences on this blog, is therefore just the latest in a long line of incompetent, twisting, irresponsible and mendacious Greek politicians.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I’ve already said, on a previous thread, that I do not intend to post on this theme because there is no point in someone with my expertise and knowledge of the contemporary Greek reality (and in particular the Greek reality since the coming to power of the first PASOK govt) attempting to engage with commenters whose knowledge would scarcely fill a demi-tasse. I shall maintain that intention.
Daniel, 11 Jul, 2015 – 7:16 pm
“Why do you assume that leading Greek politicians’ are less corruptible than their European counterparts?”
– I don’t assume that. I’m not saying he [Tsipras] is not corruptable or corrupt. Are you saying he is? And if so, what’s your basis for saying so?
John,
Ah, a case of mistaken identity. Hakluyt tried to civilize the savages of the new world. I, on the other hand, endeavor to civilize the party hacks and the credulous partisan yut’ of today.
Sincerely,
@Dave Lawton
And how does Churchill justify Putin’s actions? You really are a ignoramus when it comes to morality.
Hacklyut
11/07/2015 7:29pm
I did wonder if that was a reference to Richard Hakluyt.
Kind regards,
John
Lwtc47, see my comment at 5.49.
Daniel. There is absolutely no evidence of Tsipras being corrupt – yet. I’ll be perfectly happy to admit you are right when actual evidence (and not just speculation) surfaces (which I very much doubt it would).
Syriza was elected to stop the wholesale rape of Greece by the Troika. It was never about walking away from the debt and having absolutely zero austerity measures put upon the people of Greece. You, like Craig, are mischaracterising Syriza. If he was advocating total abandonment of the debt, he’d be six feet under bow with the international bankers doing funny dances.
If he was a traitor to Greece, when why hold a referendum and campaign for “NO” when his intention was to betray it. Don’t you think that alone shows that those casting aspersions upon him and Varoufakis.
I must say, some of the voices here remind me of those who were handing AC Milan the trophy on 25 May, 2005….. at half time.