Saturday, June 16, 2012

Greece

I don't have many readers for this blog. But I am a worthy human being.

To give evidence of my worthiness, here I offer my spontaneous, unique thought stream. Well probably that doesn't work. Not as good as I think it will, but some thoughts on matters I am not an expert about, matters German and Greek but with the emphasis on the latter, might do. I like Greece. But what do I know?
     So, to illustrate my worthiness as a thinker, here's my take on everything Gweek. I'm just going to cross my fingers and hope this makes sense.

The problem seems to be (about) what would happen if Greece goes off the Euro, and thereby out of common currency. I thought Greece was out of common currency anyway... I can get the hang of it through the newspapers, which are our source for propaganda and lies, a.k.a. ideology. But this is also reality since it is where we get our information. Sooooo..., it is like the language that we must use when interfacing with reality. Anyway, based on the newspapers I am picking up a kind of fear thing about what would happen, if Greece refuses to go along with certain wealthy individuals in, say, Germany. I think something like that they must accept the terms offered. Apparently, there are people to whom money is owed, none of whom live in Greece. So, Greece is a country. The country would be failing to pay what the bankers say they owe. OK, this is a fairly familiar situation to me. In my opinion, not paying the loans in general is not really all that bad, since it is all a kind of a game anyways, right? It is not anything so bad. So there. Anyways, Give me a break, OK? (Thanks, I'll pay you back, later...) It's all a big game, you big dummy. Oh, bankers!!!!
     In fact, there will be something good if Greece refuses to meet the lenders' demands, because then we will learn about alternatives that exist to the same old thing we are doing, and people seem very narrow-minded about money and banking. That is a very naive view, I am sure. I am certain that I am terribly impractical. I guess that's just how my mind works.
     Persons of status like businessmen, or those "media pundits" who don't know what they are talking about, and other establishment puppet wonders seem to be utterly closed-minded human individuals. If Greece did something a bit different, they could be pushed off the stage and we could have all of our minds opened.
     Instead of bored stiff. I do not understand why it is such a tragedy if Greece thinks for itself. Borrowing and making money and repaying is all a big scam anyways, isn't it? Yeah, I know about that.
     The real problem is the smallmindedness of the elites. 
     What is wrong with using a debt situation to start over? I thought that was the whole idea of bankruptcy and so forth. So a bunch of slime bankers tried to make money off of Greece and it didn't work. So what? I don't see anything wrong with Greece's going for greater independence. And why? Because, after all, they can still grow food, can't they?
     They can still trade whatever products they have in Greece (olives?) for other products. It is called "free trade." But we do not want this.
     We only have to listen to these few bankers and these few rich folks. All that matters is what they want. All that matters is what the controllers of the money want. It just doesn't sound right to me. There has been opposition to the bankers since the early 19th century, in this country. But the opposition never got anywhere. At one time, these people elected Senators. They had a meeting with Andrew Jackson and Jackson scared them off. Bankers should always be suspect. You can read plenty of books about it.
     And, if they refuse to pay their debts and go off on their own, the Greeks could work on developing their own society, instead of relying on helpful advice from Germans. The ability of Germans to do harm in the world is enormous, and ought to be limited. So, I do not see what the big deal is. maybe we need Krugman on this. http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/83-83/11980-greece-as-victim
     I don't see what is so bad there in Greece. Who in Greece approved those loans? They should be punished. But it was not the Greeks, the people, who approved those loans. So I say, simply: screw the banks. And you too, Geithner. (He does not want to see anyone taking that kind of attitude, according to something I read awhile back. He calls such an attitude of a distaste for bankers "biblical.") But there is no nuclear meltdown, no tsunami. Maybe Greece should go indie now before there is a meltdown of the world capitalistic system. Not a single person has died because of the Greeks not paying what they owe, but, some persons might, if the "austerity" is imposed. And I totally do not understand how austerity helps the Greeks pay their loans. Apparently there is no better idea than austerity, so it must be that the Greeks just cannot pay, and never will, until we get a different economic system. But no one is doing anything to pursue fundamental reforms of the world system, so there is no hope.

     We need to actually see some new alternatives, and one of the ways to do that would be for Greece to default or not pay or whatever the right concept is (no one knows). There are things that are called economically "impossible." Because they aren't impossible. They are possibilities of human beings. There are possibilities that human beings have, only we do not remember them. We no longer remember that we are humans. If is is time for the economic system to fail, let it fail. What we need to for the earth to sprout food, and the oceans to contain back supplies of fish. Money is just paper; the elements of the universe are earth, air, water, and fire. Money is not there. Money is just a figment of the imagination in the mind. The human race is obviously utterly without ideas. If there is not a crisis now, there will only be a bigger one in the future. A crisis is the final frontier, the last to get the small-minded to accept change.

     Here's a real gem, I hope, from Krugman's article, which I read AFTER writing my piece. I don't want to become prejudiced: "...Greece joined the euro, and a terrible thing happened: people started believing that it was a safe place to invest. Foreign money poured into Greece, some but not all of it financing government deficits; the economy boomed; ..."

     It is "gem" not because of what it says about Greece of about the particulars of the Greek case but what it says about economics, i.e. capitalism, in general. In capitalism, people do make money. As soon as anyone sees anyone else making money, they all want some. If all you need to do is invest, and there are no constraints on that, then theoretically unlimited amounts of money would rush into whatever is seen as a nearly sure bet. (This sounds like where the concept of "greed" might make sense.) If capitalism is growing, persons will expect interest on their loans. It is a bet on the future, not reality. No one can say when capitalism will stop working, or stop making money. Still today, all  they want, all the business classes or German bankers or European capitalist class wants --- is for "growth" to resume as soon as possible. Never mind that it is causing global warming, that investing in "green" things should take priority, etc. Never mind any of that. Just let these persons make money in the same old system they have always used so successfully. Of course, the problem is that the system has got to fail at some point. We just do not know when.

     Nobody knows why capitalism works in the first place (this I know something about). No one knows when it will fail, either. But it will definitely fail, at some point. The wealthy investor class, as Chomsky called them in a letter to me, is showing that they do not know (anything) and they do not care. They will kill themselves, obviously, but also everyone else. Get ready to die.

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