by Sean Jobst
May 24, 2015
In our emerging global reality, governments are revealing themselves more and more to be the service industries of big banks. Greece was the testing ground for the new austerity cuts, and from looking at the background of the Greek tragedy we can see how it occurred through the collusion between local corrupt politicians and the global currency speculators/usurers, and extrapolating from this, we can then see the collusion between these same speculators and political elites within EU countries whose policies further exacerbated the Greek tragedy.
As with other articles and researches, this story too was prompted by the field journalist in me. Last summer, I had the pleasure of visiting Thessaloniki and traveling through the beautiful northern part of Greece. Very soon, early June in fact, I will be visiting the capital and heartland: Athens. This span of barely a year has nevertheless seen remarkable changes and transitions within Greece, as a new government was elected on January 26, 2015 that expressed the Greek people's anger and frustration with what international bankers had forced upon the country and wrecked its economy.
Banking Foreign to Greek Traditions
Our story starts with ancient Greece and the Greek language, which can give us better insights into the modern era. Aristotle considered the nature of money as "barren," meaning it cannot yield more of itself. Any assumption that it could is merely a fiction perpetuated by force of law, not existing naturally. He referred to usury as the cruelest fiction of all, a perspective one can better appreciate from the Greek word τόκος (tokos) which means "breed" or "offspring," but was also used by usurers to describe "interest":
"The most hated sort (of wealth getting) and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange but not to increase at interest. And this term interest [τόκος], which means the birth of money from money is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth, this is the most unnatural." (Aristotle, Politics, Book 1, section 1258b)
After modern Greece became an independent nation in 1832, it adopted the ancient term Δραχμή (Drachma) for the new currency. Despite the richness of the Greek language, there was no term for the modern concept of a bank. Ian Dallas cites an anecdote that when banking was introduced in post-Ottoman Greece, to describe this new concept of banking, a comparison was made for how a husband would return home and place all his money on the table, and the wife would then divide and distribute the money. Hence, the word τράπεζα (trapeza) meaning "table," was applied to the bank. (Ian Dallas, The Time of the Bedouin, on the politics of power, Cape Town: Budgate Press, 2006, pp. 59-60)
Greece was barely an independent nation when outside powers, chiefly Britain and Russia, were meddling in its internal affairs. After Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou expressed his wish to keep Greece neutral during the Cold War and questioned remaining in NATO, the CIA supported a coup that overthrew him in April 1967. The reason given at the time, as with CIA support of other coups that toppled democratically-elected leaders, was the specter of Communism.
Yet, like Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala or Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, Papandreou was an anti-Communist but neutralist in the Cold War, who put the national interests of their nation over the dictates of corporate greed and profits. This sets the stage for the involvement in foreign players within Greece, financial interests that drive politics not just at the national level but also globally.
Simitis and Papademos sell out Greece
In 2002, the Greek government of Prime Minister Konstantinos Simitis and Lucas Papademos, Governor of the Bank of Greece, made a deal with the infamous New York-based investment firm Goldman Sachs. A crucial link is the personality of Papademos, who played a major role in the 2012 austerity measures as Prime Minister. More on him later, since he used the ten years between that time to deepen his Globalist links. Looking at the personality of Simitis sheds some light on how easy it was for him to sell-out his country to a cabal of private international bankers and "investment" firms.
A leader of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), Simitis served as Prime Minister from 1996 to 2004. There were rumors that Simitis had a Jewish grandfather named Aaron Avouris, and that Simitis himself frequented the Athens synagogue. News leaked out that his daughter married a Jew in a synagogue wedding. These are rumors and I haven't found concrete evidence to back it up, but certainly if true they would make sense of his close connections with the mostly-Jewish bankers of Goldman Sachs and another incident under his government that was puzzling.
I am referring to when Simitis sought to take off the religion category from the Tavtotites (ID cards), removing the "Orthodox Christian" designation and thus allowing Jews to better "hide" within Greek society. I mention this because the issue of the ID cards was used to claim that Jews were being "discriminated" against within Greek society. But this is most hypocritical, when we look at how Israel not only itself abides strictly by categories in its ID cards over who is a Jew or not a Jew, but also that it went further than Greece ever did, by instituting DNA tests to prove the "Jewishness" of its residents:
"The Israeli Interior Ministry was subjecting some immigrants from the former USSR to DNA testing in order to check their Jewish ancestry. The well respected Israeli daily Ha'aretz said dozens of new immigrants had already been asked to take the test, and that those who had declined risked deportation." (Jewish Chronicle, London, July 10, 1998, p. 3)
Real nature of the 2002 deal
The deal involved a currency swap in which €10 billion in debt issued in dollars and yen to Greece, was then swapped for Euro-debt to be paid in euros, based around a fictional exchange rate. This rate was determined by the very low level of the euro at the time, which then stood at around 85 U.S. cents. This led the Greeks into believing they made a great deal. Meanwhile, other European nations were cheated because this extended additional credit was never reported to Brussels.
However, the reality was very different - leading to immense profits for Goldman Sachs' investors and plunging Greece into the disaster from which it has yet to fully recover. As managers of the loan, Goldman Sachs charged Greece $300 million, later selling the swap to a Greek bank in 2005. The artificially-high exchange rate did not accurately denote the market value of the euro.
The result was that Greece was advanced a €2.8 billion loan, yet on the books €10 billion remained the principal upon which the Greek government agreed to repay with interest. The dollar soon dropped to far lower than the euro, which left Greece in even worse shape while Goldman Sachs investors enjoyed a further $24 million return on the transaction. The deal lost Greece EU voting rights, while Goldman Sachs soon experienced massive taxpayer subsidies, political influence and inflated CEO bonuses in the U.S.
Enter the Globalist Papademos phase
Under Simitis, Lucas Papademos served as Governor of the Bank of Greece. Then, from 2002 to 2010 he served as Vice President of the European Central Bank. He first cut his teeth in the banking world as former senior economist of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. This is a very significant fact for both Americans and Greeks, and shows the globalist nature of the big banks, which are not tied to one single national entity and thus accountable to only themselves, even while looting the wealth of a nation and being protected by its government.
Papademos was the chief economic advisor to Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou between 2009 and 2011. Papademos is a member of the globalist Trilateral Commission, whose meetings are clouded in secrecy even while the leading political and economic figures of different countries are attendees. Papademos then served as Greek Prime Minister from 11 November 2011 to 16 May 2012, during which the initial financial crisis was further exacerbated.
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