We reported a month ago how Greece has one of the best funded militaries in Europe, where they have a military budget of 4.3% of GDP. In this piece Darryl Schoon outlines how for all the talk of bailouts, cuts and austerity, Greece has not been allowed to reduce its military expenditure.
He also believes Greece is merely one of the early dominoes to fall in what will be a wave of sovereign defaults across the planet as futurist Buckminster Fuller foresaw decades ago. But how this will be the “door to a better tomorrow”…
GREECE, GUNS, BANKERS & GOLD
..there was an element of hypocrisy..being leveled at Greece by France and Germany. It’s hypocritical to ignore the fact that a not insignificant amount was spent on buying [expensive] weapon systems from EU members Germany and France.
Helena Smith, TheGuardian, April 19, 2012
EU bankers have framed the Greek crisis as that of a spendthrift nation whose profligate pensions are the primary reason for its bankruptcy. There’s another reason, however, i.e. Greece’s bloated military budget—a budget which primarily benefits its EU and NATO allies.
As a proportion of GDP, now-bankrupt Greece spends twice as much as any other EU member on defense. On June 15, 2015, The Financial Times noted: One of the oddities of Greece’s bailout programme has been that, despite five years of punishing austerity, its military budget remains amongst the highest in the EU…as of 2013 Greece was still spending more as a percentage of gross domestic product than any other NATO ally save the US or Britain…
NATO spending requirements mean that it is required to invest more than 2 percent of GDP in its armed forces. Greece, Britain, the US and Estonia were the only NATO members to meet this commitment last year…
http://www.macropolis.gr/?i=portal.en.the-agora.2645
Greek efforts to reduce military spending in the face of impending bankruptcy have met with intractable resistance from the defense industry, its NATO allies and the bankers themselves. In January 2015, when Alex Tsipras’ Syriza Party took power, DefenseNews.com wrote:
Experts have warned Greece’s new, radical left wing government not to make further cuts to the country’s defense budget.
On June 30th as Greece moved closer towards default, Reuters reported: NATO head says Greece should not make cuts in defense. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg was not the only one opposed to cutting Greece’s military spending. The IMF was opposed as well
On June 15th, Frankfuter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. a German newspaper, reported European Commission President Jean-Claude Junker had proposed allowing Greece to defer 400 million euros in pension cuts as long as it cut an equivalent amount from its military budget—but Junker’s proposal was vetoed by the IMF.
Bankers use social welfare and military warfare spending as their primary means to indebt sovereign states. In the end, taxpayers are left holding the bag. Greece is not the exception. It’s the rule.
SOVEREIGN STATES AND THE BANKERS’ GREASE/ GREECE TRAP
The bankers’ indebting of sovereign states is as lucrative as it is purposive. In capitalist economies, ‘money’ is issued as credit by central banks by which bankers indebt consumers, businesses and governments, extracting profits from the constantly compounding interest attendant to those debts.
In this highly profitable ponzi-scheme of credit and debt, social and military spending by sovereign states are the bankers’ main profit centers. The interest from these ever increasing sovereign debts is the primary source of the bankers’ ill-gotten gains.
EXPLANATION: When kitchen wastewater [credit] flows through a grease trap [banking system], the grease and oils [profits] rise [through economic activity: goods, services, military and social spending, etc.] to the surface inside the trap [capital markets] and are trapped using a system of baffles [capital gains, dividends, tax loopholes, tax exemptions and avoidance, etc].
THE BANKERS’ GREASE TRAP IS NOW PERMANENTLY BROKEN
In 1944, the US possessed the greatest amount of gold in history. Because of the Bretton-Woods Agreement, America’s gold anchored the US dollar and the international monetary system. Soon, however, excessive US overseas military spending would cost America its historic hoard of gold.
When President Nixon cut the ties between the US dollar and gold, the gold obligations of the US were far greater than its ability to convert US dollars held by foreign countries to gold. To prevent the loss of its remaining gold, the US unilaterally ended the convertibility of the US dollar to gold in 1971.
By 1971, US gold holdings were actually negative—the US owed 38,879 tons of gold.
With the end of Bretton-Woods, gold reserves no longer limited the amount of dollars the US could print; and, soon, the levels of money and credit increased exponentially; and because money in capitalist economies is issued in the form of credit, the excessive printing of money soon resulted in excessive amounts of debt.
With gold no longer limiting the printing of money, aggregate levels of debt increased far beyond the ability of sovereign states to pay. Today, the insolvency of Greece is the beginning of a global tsunami of defaulting debt that will end in the bankruptcies of sovereign states.
SOVEREIGN STATE BANKRUPTCIES: THE DOOR TO A BETTER TOMORROW
Greece represents only a very tiny fraction of an unprecedented global debt bomb…there are 24 nations that are currently facing a full-blown debt crisis, and there are 14 more that are rapidly heading toward one. – Michael Snyder, Economic Collapse blog, July 16, 2015
The significance of a Greek default is not merely the insolvency of a peripheral southern European nation. According to Buckminster Fuller, the bankruptcy of sovereign states is more importantly the pre-requisite for a radical and unprecedented shift that will transform the planet Earth and humanity itself.
In 1981, Buckminster Fuller said the world was on the verge of a universally-intended crisis, a crisis which would transform our world—presently captive to greedy bankers, politicians, lawyers and transnational corporations—into a world of unprecedented cooperation and abundance. This revolutionary change, Fuller said, would occur through the bankruptcy of sovereign states.
Very soon the nation-state sovereignities will have to be eliminated, or humanity will perish.
Buckminster Fuller, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, May 22, 1975
Class-one evolution is about to put the USA out of business through international bankruptcy.
Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path, 1981
… bankruptcy need not be the end. It is simply nature’s way of ridding the planet of the most powerful of yesterday’s sovereignties and thereby setting off a chain of 149 additional desovereignizations, altogether removing the most stubborn barrier [sovereign states] to the free circulation of the Earth’s world around metals, foods, and income energy supplies and people…
Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path, 1981
The problems that forced Greece into bankruptcy—excessive debt and excessive military spending—will do the same to the US. The bankruptcy of the US, however, will be far more consequential and catastrophic. Size matters.
The cost of military spending cannot be measured in just dollars. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, President 1953-1961, Five-star US General and 1st Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, addressed the significance of military spending in his speech, Chance For Peace:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
The bankruptcy of sovereign states is the beginning of the end of the present world of state terrorism, corporate oligarchy and debt slavery. The bankruptcies have begun. Be thankful this is so.
THE GREEK CRISIS, THE PRICE OF GOLD AND THE BANKERS’ END GAME
Monetary instability does not occur during normal cycles of economic expansion and contraction. Monetary instability occurs only in periods of severe systemic distress. Gold, being the monetary opposite of paper currencies, reacts whenever monetary disequilibrium occurs for any reason, whether inflation, deflation, runaway inflation or deflationary depression.
p. 128, Time of the Vulture, 3rd ed. 2012,
The Greek debt crisis is the biggest threat yet to the bankers’ ponzi-scheme of credit and debt and the bankers are prepared to do their utmost to force gold and silver prices lower, to insure the Greek crisis does not cause investors to flee paper assets, e.g. stock, bonds, etc. and instead seek the safety and upside of precious metals.
As the Greek crisis unfolded, on July 8, 2015, Paul Craig Roberts and Dave Kranzler wrote: Are Big Banks Using Derivatives to Suppress Bullion Prices?
…During 2015 the attack on bullion prices has intensified, driving the prices lower than they have been for years. During the first quarter of this year there was a huge upward spike in the quantity of precious metal derivatives.
…evidence of manipulation comes from the continuing fall in the prices of gold and silver as set in paper future markets, although demand for the physical metals continues to rise even to the point that the US Mint has run out of silver coins to sell. Uncertainties arising from the Greek No vote increase systemic uncertainty. The normal response would be rising, not falling, bullion prices.
… seven years of bailing out the big banks that control the Federal Reserve and US Treasury at the expense of the US economy has threatened the US dollar to the extent that the dollar must be protected at all cost, including US regulatory tolerance of illegal activity to suppress gold and silver prices
As we move deeper into the bankers’ end game, the bankers’ downward pressure on the price of gold is increasing. Gold’s present (low) price of $1,088 is an indication the bankers fear the next crisis could be their last.
ΕΊΜΑΣΤΕ ΌΛΟΙ ΈΛΛΗΝΕΣ
WE ARE ALL GREEKS
In my new Youtube video series, Moving Through the Maelstrom, Episode 1, https://youtu.be/mICmFQEqtXo, I answer a reader’s/viewer’s question on how to prepare for the collapse of the bankers’ ponzi-scheme.
Buy gold, buy silver, have faith.
Darryl Robert Schoon