HEART OF EUROPE? ARE GREEKS EVEN EUROPEAN?

With the rhetoric flying during crunch time in the Greek Bonds Crisis, one phrase struck me — "Greece is at the heart of Europe." Geographically, I know that isn't true. Depending on method of measurement, the geographical midpoint of Europe is either the village of Purnuškes near Vilnius, Lithuania, or the village of Mõnnuste, on Saaremaa island in western Estonia.

"Heart of Europe European" (left), "Greek" (right)

So thinking further upon that deceptive rhetoric — "Greece is at the heart of Europe" — I began to wonder, are Greeks even European? As well, what does being European even mean?

A site titled Eupedia lists the haplogroups of Y-chromosome DNA for the various people of Europe. A haplogroup consists of haplotypes that have a common ancestor.

Males have Y-chromosomes. Females do not. No amount of cross-dressing or getting breast implants or other surgeries can turn males into females.

Males of the same Y-chromosome DNA haplogroup have a common ancestral father.

Looking at the Eupedia data, there are a few kinds of Greeks — northern, central / Aegean Islander, southern, Cypriot, Cretin. 

The central Greek / Aegean Islander Greek is much the same as an Albanian.

The southern Greek is much the same as a Kosovoan.

Cretins are much the same as Anatolian Turks.

Cypriot males and Cretin males share quite a bit in common with some so-called Middle Easterners — Azerbaijani, Kurds from Iraq, and Lebanese.

What defines a European? Are Moldovians, Slovakians, Slovenians, Ukrainians, Czechs, Poles, Latvians or Russians?

The Moldovians, Slovakians, Slovenians and Ukrainians are much alike. The Belarusans are their close cousins. 

Likewise, the Czechs and the Poles are alike. The Hungarians are their close cousins. 

Though they might not like it, the Latvians and the Russians are much alike. 

The Estonians, Lithuanians and Maris in Russia are the same people. These are the people living in the geographic heart of Europe. Are the Estonians, the Lithuanians and the Maris the heart of Europe?

The Bosnian Serbs and the Serbs from Serbia are the same people.

Both Serbs are much alike to the Macedonians and the Montenegrans.

The Bosniaks, Bosnian Croats, the Croatians, and Romanians are the same people.

Except for the Russians who have big population, none of the aforementioned peoples comprise a big population. And these days, no one living in Europe much like the Russians. So the Russians could not comprise the heart of Europe.

The Danes and the Swedes are more or less the same people.

And their geographical neighbors, the Norwegians are mirror images of them.

There are quite of few so-called Europeans who have a common ancestor.

The French from the - Midi-Pyrénées along with the Italians from Central Italy, South Italy and Sicily as well as the Spaniards from Andalusia are the same people.

The Tuscan Italians and the Spaniards from Castile-La-Mancha are the same people.

The Corsicans, the Aragons from Spain and the Spaniards from Basque country are the same people.

The supposed French from Auvergne and the supposed Spaniards from Asturias and Cantabria are much alike.

The French from IIle-de-France and from Provence are much alike with the Italians from North Italy, the Spaniards from Castile and Leon, Catalonia, Extremadura, Galicia and Valencia along with all of the Portuguese. 

The Belgians, the French from Flanders-Artois, the French from Normandy and the Welsh are the same people.

The Austrians overall, the Deutsch from North Germany and the Deutsch from East Germany are the same people.

The Tyrolians from Austria, the French from the Rhône-Alpes, Deutsch from West Germany, and Deutsch from South Germany are the same people as well as Icelanders, Norwegians and Scots. All of these people share the same ancestor.

Though they might not want to acknowledge it, the English and the Irish are the same people. They're the same people along with the French Bretons, the Dutch and the Swiss.

So does anyone constitute the heart of Europe? Are there Europeans? Maybe these people do.

In short, Greeks are a mash-up of a Balkan people with Middle Eastern people.
Without doubt, the Greeks do not constitute the heart of Europe. The Greeks seem far on the edges of everything these days. 

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GREXIT IS NO EXIT.

For the Greeks, Hell is not other people. Hell is themselves. Yet, many believe the Greeks need to ditch Euro zone Europeans and return to the drachma so Greeks can escape an eternity of poverty hell.

"Greece will continue to endure its long Calvary until somebody has the courage to tell the Greek people – and to keep telling them until the truth sinks in – that the drachma is their best hope of economic renewal." ~ Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph UK, 16 Jul 2015

A popular mainstream media propagandist, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has called for the Greeks to ditch the Euro and exit their monetary union with Europeans. In, Greece should seize Germany's botched offer of a velvet Grexit, Pritchard wrote, "There is not the slightest chance that Greece will be able stabilize its debt and return to viability..." Meanwhile, Pritchard fails to provide any document, say a spreadsheet, which he has worked out the debt rollover requirements over a 10 to 12 year period.

As I have pointed out, Greek law givers never have been asked to pay back €330 billion. Instead, Greek law givers had been working a remedy plan of paying €6.5 billion a year over 10 years, enough to pay down their debt to 110% of GDP, that is until the communists of SYRIZA led by Alexis Tsipras and his game theory, cycle-riding buddy, Yanis Varoufakis fouled up everything.

Before anyone accepts propaganda from jokers like Pritchard, all must ask themselves who will want the drachma? Who will take drachma for oil, natural gas, cars, trucks, semiconductors, precision machinery, pharmaceuticals and millions of products Greeks don't make and lack the capacity — mostly brains — to make?

For those who take drachma, what will they buy? Will they buy feta cheese, olive oil, belly dances, hotel room rentals? How much supply of olive oil does it take to pay for a bulldozer?

What would happen to Greeks if only they stiffed their creditors, subverted the European project and fired up the printing presses so their banks could run on drachma? What would happen to the €7.5 billion they receive in EU subsidies each year? How could Greeks pay for exports they now receive?

Let's compare Greeks to the Nigerians.

• Greek exports: Exports €27.2 billion (-1.3%; 2014 est.)
• Nigerian exports: $93.01 billion (2014 est.) = €84.45 billion.
• Nigerians import US$52.79 billion (2014 est.), which is €47.94 billion
• Greeks import US$39.45 (€35.82).

Nigerians export 3.1 times much as Greeks but only import 1.34 times as much as the Greeks. Nigerians earn much more from foreigners than Greeks earn, but buy much less from foreigners than Greeks buy.

Now let's see where the Nigerian Naira stacks up to the US dollar. One USD buys 198.95 Nigerian Naira.

So how do the Nigerians live? The average yearly salary in Nigeria is $3,308.99 (658,324 NGN).

And what about the Greeks? The average yearly salary in Greece is $13,265.45 (€12,048).

Greeks income on average is four times that of the Nigerians yet the Nigerians export three times as much.

So what would happen to the Greeks should they revert to the drachma? Greek incomes would fall and fall hard. Greek incomes would approach incomes of Nigerians. In short, Greeks would impose real austerity upon themselves.

Many believe that with a cheap drachma, tourists will flock to Greece, presumably even more than now because exchange rates will favor foreigners under a drachma.

And yet, it can be shown where there is great favor in exchange rates for foreigners relative to many places, tourists don't flock to those places. How many European tourists flock to Sudan every holiday?

The problem for the Greeks is the same problem everywhere. The Greeks don't live by capitalism.

As I have shown in CAPITALISM. BECAUSE WITHOUT IT, YOU WOULD BE LIVING AS A BARE SUBSISTENCE SAVAGE and SOPHIE'S CHOICE OF CAPITAL OR LABOR. A FREE-MARKETS LIBERTARIAN BECOMES AN ANTI-CAPITALIST AND PERPETUATES AN ECONOMICS MYTH. Wages and capital are interlinked.

Wages come from returns to capital. Without capital there can be no wages. Without positive returns to capital, no one would put property to use as capital.

Greeks have been living on ever-greater largess of Greek law givers as well as EU law givers since joining the European Union and later, the Euro zone. In turn, Greek law givers have relied on floating ever more bonds to pay for their largess.

Spending doesn't bring return to capital. Realizing on expected profits in the future does.

Always, the problem for Greeks has been spending, spending that comes from borrowing and a lack of production from capital.

Wages come from returns to capital. Without capital there can be no wages. Without positive returns to capital, no one would put property to use as capital.

Giving government workers wages paid by borrowed funds is a kind of welfare. Those wages aren't really wages at all. Those wages haven't come from returns to capital.

Politicians, socialists and the greedy never will understand this and thus they will never understand reality. They will go cradle to grave in earthly hell. Who knows what will happen beyond. For sure, there is no exit from reality.

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GREEKS ARE SET TO VOTE TO SEND JINGLE MAIL TO THE IMF, EFSM AND THE EU

When someone can't pay his or her monthly mortgage payment owed the lender (mortgagee) and walks way from that obligation by mailing the house keys to the mortgagee, that someone has pulled a jingle mail trick. In short, the borrower has said to the lender, Here is the pledged collateral, the house. It's yours now. I refuse to pay you.

Why did many so-called homeowners do this during the Banking Crisis in 2008? First, many couldn't pay their mortgage payments from their incomes, though many could. Second, many couldn't refinance their mortgage deals precisely because the likely re-sale price of the house given the current market had fallen below the amount owed on the loan. In banking parlance, that's known as being underwater or being upside-down.

Many Americans who were greedy and nervous, but had the means to pay their mortgages walked away from having property in their improved parcels, turning over those parcels to the original lenders. They didn't like being underwater and paying on a loss. To them, never could they see a future where the economy would recover, house prices would recover and they might at least break even.

So rather than uphold their obligation, many stuffed their house keys into envelopes, called the Midnight Moving Company and dropped off those envelopes in the nearest mailbox as they skipped town. Apologists, mostly anti-capitalists and those jealous of anyone else richer by $50, stepped in and began calling such unscrupulous misdeeds, strategic defaults.

For those Americans with non-recourse mortgages, they faced few consequences from sending off their jingle mail. Lenders were stuck with many houses they couldn't sell. For those houses they could sell, lenders were stuck with losses on the differences between what they lent and what the they could gain in sales on much lower street prices.

The story was different for Americans with recourse mortgages. Those who tried to walk away from their mortgages discovered that lenders had legal standing to sue to have wages garnished and other assets seized.

Many non-recourse jingle mailers claimed that even though they knew they agreed to the terms of their contracts, they believed they had the right to walk away from what they claimed were bad deals. To win the war for supporting minds, these jingle mailers compared their plights to big corporations that write-down billions of dollars of debt and incur losses for shareholders.

An individual agreeing to the terms of the mortgage to gain the funds to buy a house in which to sleep is not the same as enterprisers who have sold bonds to gain funds to buy capital in quest of producing property which they hope to trade a profit.

More so, none were walking away from bad deals. All of the deals were good deals.

In every case, luckily, each borrower found a lender who put forth actual credit in large sums in exchange for mere promises. All of those borrowing gleefully became homeowners and likely many bragged to their friends about their new digs.

In each deal, borrowers received actual funds, typically in the form of bank credits, in trade for promises to pay. None of the deals were contingent upon changing street prices based on the sales of other houses.

To claim bad deals as justification to stiff creditors is mere twisted rhetoric to cover for misdeeds. As well, all those who stuck creditors with jingle mail, walked away from houses upon which they put wear and tear, which of course, is a kind of loss. Of course, those who believed in that way tortured reality to justify their misdeeds. Not surprisingly, noted lefty Keynesian economist Paul Krugman championed jingle mail, at least according to writers of Wikipedia.

Greeks go to the polls on July 5, 2015, to vote on a referendum asking whether their legislators should continue to pay on debts owed to the IMF and the European Financial Stability Mechanism or should legislators stick the keys in the mail and send those running the IMF and EFSM jingle mail.

Since every election is a referendum of sorts, for decades, the majority of Greeks voted yes on referendums approving of their legislators borrowing excessively so legislators could pay for high-paying, make-work government jobs and pensions. All of that borrowing led to legislators spending more than 50% of GDP in many years. Worst of all, all of that borrowing and spending led Greeks to believe they were rich even though that borrowing and spending would cripple the Greek legislators and bring them to their current state, near bankruptcy.

Greeks are much like those underhanded Americans with non-recourse mortgages and incomes to pay their mortgages but who found themselves underwater.

Right now Greeks find themselves underwater. The street price of everything Greeks sell is falling. Yet, Greeks have the income to pay debts. However, Greek legislators don't feel like paying their debts. So, Greeks are being encouraged by their unscrupulous leaders to send jingle mail.

Unlike most Americans who found themselves underwater and who could not renegotiate their deals after the Housing Bubble burst, a bubble caused by the Greenspan-Bernanke Great Inflation, the biggest credit bubble in the history of mankind, Greek law givers can renegotiate their deal. However, those Greek law givers don't want to renegotiate.

As I explain in TSIPRAS AND VAROUFAKIS, THE GREEK DUMB AND DUMBER SEEK TO FORCE GREEKS TO DRINK HEMLOCK, what Greek law givers need to do is cut their per capita spending. That is what they have been asked to do. If Greek law givers do so, they will get their deal reworked. But, Greek law givers still want to live in a bubble.

The Greeks borrowed from lenders to buy a McMansion. And then for decades, Greeks piled on HELOC after HELOC to pay for ongoing parties as they swilled ouzo, munched on baklava and danced to Zorba. And now the Greeks want to run out the back door, stiffing the owners of the catering hall while mailing in the keys.

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