On Wikileaks' Revelations - IMF - Merkel Syriza: Triumvirate of the Absurd

On Wikileaks’ Revelations – IMF- Merkel - Syriza: Triumvirate of the Absurd

We have Paul Mason raising the ‘bad’ IMF vs. the ‘good’ Ms Merkel when he pretends the IMF is interested in ‘debt relief’ for Greece (which Germany opposes).

04 April 2016

Recent Wikileaks revelations, allegedly exposing a conversation between Poul Tomsen (head of IMF’s European Department) and Delia Velkoulescu (IMF Mission Chief for Greece, or Draculescu, as she is known in Greece) about wanting a credit event in Greece prior to the Brexit referendum is so absurd that one finds difficulty in working out what is being played out right before our eyes.  Supposedly, the need to create a credit event was due to unbridgeable differences regarding Greece’s future fiscal position vis a vis IMF loans and debts - due to the constant postponement of the ‘review’ of the 3^rd Bailout.

If Thomsen did say “Look, you are Ms Merkel. You face a question, and you have to think about what is more costly: to go ahead without the IMF (would the Bundestag complain that ‘The IMF is not on board’?), or to pick debt relief that we think that Greece needs in order to keep us on board?’, then in that case,  the IMF is once more threatening a fake pullout to officially default Greece. This circus has been going on for so long in the last six years that one needs to ask, when will the act actually change?

We have Paul Mason raising the ‘bad’ IMF vs. the ‘good’ Ms Merkel when he pretends the IMF is interested in ‘debt relief’ for Greece (which Germany opposes). In reality, the stumbling block has been pensions and tax changes alongside the demand by creditors for wide scale repossessions for ‘bad’ loans. In other words, they can’t jointly finance the 3^rd bailout other than with new deadly austerity measures. They are therefore separately finding a scapegoat to justify the indefensible.

Having abandoned their so-called ‘alternative programme’ of Thessaloniki, Syriza alongside all the parties in parliament bar Golden Dawn (GD) and the Communist Party (KKE) voted for a 3^rd Bailout which could only realistically be financed by squeezing even more taxes from the crippled Greek economy. In the meantime other issues took priority, for example, the mass importation of labour for the German Fourth Reich. This issue could have been previously agreed on and allowed for Syriza’s forced rise to power (after the refusal to vote for President at the end of 2014 which brought down the previous government).

When certain details emerged of the 3^rd Bailout, such as the taxing of farmers out of existence, a constant round of pension cuts on top of the seven inaugurated by Syriza, and the forced repossession of business and mortgage loans, Greek society started mass resistance with farmers’ blockades, pensioner protests and court blockades against repossessions. We then had postponement after postponement of the new wide-ranging austerity measures (first October, then December, then late January, and now end of April) as Syriza acted fully by Merkel’s dictated and ensured over a million migrants arrived in Greece. On top of this Syriza was told to build an endless amount of Hotspot migrant camps primarily in military bases (so staged terror events could occur easily) and the militarisation of societies with permanent state of emergencies could be used against the native population under whatever guise those that ruled saw fit.

Syriza’s electoral prospects have tanked on latest polling and it is going back to where it originally started from (less than 5%). It has achieved nothing other than turning Greece into a new laughing stock of the planet, pretending open borders is the new status quo and pushing through the destruction of its last remaining industries, tourism and farming via new taxation.  By turning successful tourist islands into migrant squatter camps (e.g. Kos) Syriza requires something to sell the public, so a departure of the IMF may be it. It’s too soon to tell what is behind these ‘revelations’ and what can politically be gained from them, but when it comes to Greece nothing is what it appears at first hand and whether default will be allowed to occur which would affect the existence of the Eurozone is another matter altogether. If IMF does pull out of the bailout, Germany would have to take on the IMF ‘loans’ and force Greeks to pay for them. By allowing such vast numbers of migrants to arrive they may have decided they have enough numbers on the ground to achieve their aims of destroying the Greeks once and for all.

The foreign creditors wanted a broad-based coalition last time round but the Greek electorate didn’t give them the pleasure. By pushing for new elections here and now perhaps hoping New Democracy’s Mitsotakis (after his recent visit to Brussels) will win, the ‘credit event’ may be the incentive to force them onto the Greek Government. What they are expected to achieve is anybody’s guess.