GREEKS HAVE BEEN SERVED A BIG CUP OF ELLINIKOS KAFES FOR THEIR COLD AUSTERITY WINTER AHEAD

Donald Tusk, the European Commission president has served a big cup of Ellinikos Kafes to Greeks (video). While handing them their big mug of Greek coffee to sober up Greeks after years of swilling free-to-them ouzo, Tusk said, "...five days left...the final deadline ends this week."


It has been laughable to read when pitchfork populist bloggers have claimed the Greek Dumb and Dumber, Prime Minister Tsipras and Finance Minster Varoufakis had the upper hand. They never ever had it.

Their stupidest move was to hold that referendum. While ordinary Greeks were misled by Tsipras and Varoufakis to believe they were sending jingle mail to IMF, EFSM and the EU, in fact, they were voting for their own Grecocide.

An especially popular pitchfork populist blogger hailed the referendum as a genius move. He strengthened his silliness with a mantra he has gotten his neophyte readers to parrot — what can't be paid back, won't.

Right from the start, reality has been different — what must be paid back will be paid back. For Greek law givers to remain in the Euro, Greek law givers had to pay their debts.

The winning No-Vote has given the leaders of the Eurogroup the smokescreen they need to squeeze Greeks out of the Euro.

“Party time at the expense of others in Greece has come to an end. Europe and the euro area are surely unprepared to pay for the irresponsible behavior of the new Greek government...You can’t have one country enjoying a feast, overspending and having everyone else pay for it, including our citizens with much lower pensions and wages.” ~ Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite

 “We have a Grexit scenario prepared in detail.” ~ Jean-Claude Juncker, European Commission President

It should have been clear that Greeks needed support from leaders of other small Euro zone economies, the ones who threw off the shackles of the old Soviet system. Yet, it should have been clearer they would never get that support since the peoples of those countries sucked it up for a long time to get themselves in order to be competitive members of the Euro zone and the EU.

Greek law givers caused their own crisis. And Greek law givers couldn't have done so without Greek voters election after election approving of their law givers. Years of borrowing and rolling over debt with new borrowing led Greek law givers beyond the tipping point.

Financially and mathematically, Greeks were in position to pay back enough of their cumulative debt to whittle that debt down to 110% of GDP over ten years. To do so Greek law givers were supposed to declare badly needed so-called structural reforms — cutting spending significantly and by doing, pushing down prices.

In exchange for generous help, Greek law givers had been asked to pay down a mere €6.36 billion a year of debt, which, each year would have been 1.9% of total debt owed and 2.6% of GDP. However, the socialist-communist SYRIZA who came to power as Greek law givers wanted to pay nothing.

Like winter is coming for the fictional world of Game of Thrones, real austerity is coming at last to the Greeks. Whether it's tough austerity through the Euro or extreme austerity through the Drachma, austerity is coming.

The ECB can keep closed their banks forever. So likely, Greeks will be forced into the Drachma. In short, Tsipras (interestingly, Tusk pronounces his name as cheap-ass) and the quitter Varoufakis have misled their Greeks into what will be third world Drachma-austerity.

Right now, Greeks lack the means to pay for oil or natural gas priced on world markets. Greeks lack the means to pay for pharmaceuticals, engineered machinery, engineered materials and of all kinds, cars and trucks, airplanes and well, mostly everything produced by mankind today. Reverting to the Drachma will fail to give Greeks the means.

Winter 2015-2016 is going to be one to be remembered for Greeks. At least they can think fondly upon their no-vote referendum as they burn the last of their furniture to keep warm. They can think of all their Internet supporters in America and elsewhere as the humanitarian aid ship docks in Athens on its way to other third world countries.

In life, for adults who can decide, they don't get what they want always, but always, they get what they deserve.

Kalí týchi!

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TSIPRAS AND VAROUFAKIS, THE GREEK DUMB AND DUMBER SEEK TO FORCE GREEKS TO DRINK HEMLOCK

According to The Telegraph UK, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras walked out of talks with leaders of the creditors of the Greek legislature, the IMF and the European Financial Stability Facility, in a scant 45 minutes. It appears as if the Greeks want to default on their debts.

First, here is some perspective. The population of Greece runs a bit more than 11 million Greeks. The population of New York City and the city of Chicago combined run to 11.125 million.

The combined spending of the city councils of New York and Chicago runs to $82.2 billion. The last four quarters of spending by the Greek legislature runs to $45.184 billion.

Spending for each resident for a combined New York and Chicago is $7,388.76. Spending for each Greek comes to $4,092.54.

And now, here is the kicker. While spending per capita for a combined New York and Chicago is 1.81 times spending per capita by the Greek legislature, the GDP of a combined New York and Chicago is 8.12 times bigger than the GDP of Greece.

Compared to a combined New York and Chicago, Greek legislature spending ought to be closer to $909.95 each Greek or $10.037 billion in total. So what does that mean?

Greek legislature spending needs to fall -77.8% for their spending to fall within reasonable ratio to world class cities like New York and Chicago! 

As it is, neither city is known as being cities where politicians exercise fiscal restraint.

For even more perspective, there are about as many Czechs living in the Czech Republic and Portuguese living Portugal as there are Greeks living in Greece, 10.538 million and 10.478 million respectively. Yet, Czech legislature spending per capita of $3,188.76 is only 77.9% of that by the Greeks. Portuguese legislature spending per capita of $3,510.49 is only 85.8% of that by the Greeks. Said another way, Greek legislators spend 1.17 times more than Portuguese legislators and 1.28 times more than Czech legislators.

At $242.26 billion, Greece GDP is slightly larger (1.066 times) than Portugal GDP at $227.3 billion and 1.16 times larger Czech Republic GDP at $208.8 billion. However, for Greek spending to get in line with the Portuguese legislature spending relative to Portuguese GDP, Greek legislature spending per capita would need to be cut -8.6% to $3,742.18. To get in line with the Czech legislature spending relative to Czech GDP, Greek legislature spending per capita would need to be cut -9.6% to $3,698.96. 

Seriously, the representatives of the IMF have asked the Greek legislature to cut pensions by $2.02 billion and raise taxes by $2.02 billion. The spending cut would drop per capita spending a paltry 4.4% down to $3,913.33 and yet Greek negotiators believe the request is unreasonable!

Should Tsipras and Varoufakis lead Greek legislators to default, Tsipras and Varoufakis will go down in history known forever as Dumb and Dumber. The Greeks will be far poorer in Europe within a decade, much so.

Greeks have been living under a delusion, a delusion of legislators' credit flowing into the economy, which elevated prices and created a phony, unsustainable living standard. The European Financial Stability Facility has kept the charade going since 2008.

For Greeks, prices need to fall at least 220% maybe and that includes wages as wage rates are merely prices. Yet, Tsipras and Varoufakis don't want to let prices fall.

That is what those who side with the Greeks don't get. The Greeks have been living by the largest credit bubble in history of Greeks, albeit a public finance bubble. Tsipras and Varoufakis refuse a controlled-deflation of that bubble.

Printing what would be near-worthless Drachma won't let Greeks buy anything from anyone of the world. With near-worthless Drachma, Greeks will be lucky to buy from other Greeks.

How will Greeks pay for high-end, precision German-made machinery? What will a handful of German factory owners get for all of the Drachma presented to them as payment, 100 years worth of ouzo, 1,000 years worth of belly dances?

How will Greeks pay for oil? How will Greeks pay for natural gas? How will Greeks pay for pharmaceuticals? How will Greeks pay for steel? How will Greeks pay for semiconductors?

Greek law givers overspend relative to their private-sector economy. Their overspending cannot be maintained.

Greeks need to realize they're much poorer than they believe. Spending by Greek law givers needs to get in line more with the Portuguese or the Czechs.

SYRIZA, Tsipras and Varoufakis are the wrong Greeks in power. They are leading Greeks into disaster. What is being asked of Greeks isn't unreasonable, a -4.4% cut in spending that pushes Greeks closer to legislator spending in line with what the economy can sustain.

Those who champion a default by Greek legislators will be on the wrong side of history. Ask the Venezuelans how life is working out for them and their phony banking system's cash.

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SYRIZA GREEKS ARE THE FIRST PARLIAMENTARIANS EVER TO COMMIT AN ACT OF GODWIN'S LAW

By Internet rules, the Greeks have lost. They have committed an act of Godwin's Law.


































Also known as Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies, Godwin's Law states,

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.

Well, it is here. Today, the Telegraph (UK) reported that Greek PM Alexis Tsipras has demanded the Germans pay more than US$168.83 billion (€160bn) for war action NAZI Germany took against Greece 74 years ago in Operation Marita. In April 1941, the NAZI Germans helped the Mussolini-led Fascist Italians invade Greece. This led to occupation of Greece by the Germans and Italians until October 1944. Before the April 1941 invasion, the Italians failed in their October 1940 invasion.

Interestingly, PM Tsipras has failed to demand Italians pay up for World War 2.

Suffice to say, likely, Greeks are at a low in their history, perhaps not an all-time low, but without doubt, a serious low. Sadly, many Greeks, weakened from decades of coddling by legislators, will accept such desperate political rhetoric from Tsipras and his cronies of SYRIZA.

Greek legislators borrowed billions and made it rain. They doled out cash and credit as welfare and government "work" to Greeks like Ouzo.

As long as Greek legislators could increase borrowing every year, they could put more Greeks on the government payroll giving them make work as government employees, and they could give ever more welfare as government medicine.

Yet, once the ability of the phony Greek economy to generate taxes to service the interest payments on their cumulative debt failed, prudent investors stopped buying Greek bond issuance. In short, Greek legislators squeezed all they could from shopkeepers and restaurateurs to pay for their past extravagance.

Long-ago, famed Greek stage play critic Aristotle explained how to write a tragedy. All good tragedies are mimesis (imitation of action) that adhere to the Law of Cause to Effect all told within a story that goes from beginning through middle to end and in which all of the needed facts of the story get revealed through action of the story.

The brilliance of the tragedy is the anagnorisis, which is that ah ha! moment when the mind's eye of the story's main agent opens to see his ignorance, which has led to his downfall and hence destiny of destruction. Aristotle said that following straight after the anagnorisis, we, the audience must see the story's main agent in a scene of suffering for the tragedy to satisfy us.

Greeks are experiencing a death spiral. Greeks do not make enough of anything that others want to buy and thus Greek legislators can't tax Greeks fast enough or collect high enough sums to pay interest on borrowed credit, which Greek legislators use to pay wages for Greek government workers and pay generous welfare to able-bodied Greek citizens.

Greek legislators have borrowed excessively and have passed the tipping point, having established and perpetuated a phony economy to the point where no longer can such an economy be sustained. Greek legislators have run out of new lenders from which to roll over and pay off existing debt.

Many individuals find themselves in alike situation when they take on many credit cards, using each successive one to pay off the previous one while charging a bit more to enjoy living, until the day comes when no longer is there a credit card issuer willing to give yet another card.

At that point, the credit card dead beat who lived beyond his or her means, lacking a suitably high enough income to pay the monthly monster of interest, gives up. The last card issuers get stiffed. That's the whole of it.

The best bet for Greeks is to dissolve their parliament and split up into smaller countries, each with fewer law (rights and duties) and more freedom (lack of law in the presence of legislators), which would better let each Greek discover himself and put each Greek on the path to virtue, which is another way of saying manhood.

Likely, Socrates would agree with me.

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EUROPE IS THE SICKMAN OF EUROPE. EUROPE HAS BEEN SHRINKING SINCE 2008.

Nicholas I of Russia once referred to Ottoman Empire as the "sick man of Europe" because the Ottoman leaders had let themselves become beholden to Europeans.

Today, all of Europe is the sick man of Europe precisely because the 500 million individuals living in their respective countries have turned over their sovereignty to a mishmash consisting of the European Union and the Eurozone banking system.



Of late, economic commentators everywhere ponder what could happen if Germany, France and the like fall into recession. It's all rather silly to read.

The Eurozone countries have been in permanent recession  since Q1 2008. Yet, unquestioning reports of news media continue to report that economies of European countries are growing as measured by GDP.



Far too many don't stop and start to think about much of anything. Governments don't experience crisis when True GDP is growing. When True GDP rises, ceteris paribus, true tax receipts rise, workers' incomes rise and so forth.

How could anyone believe True GDP is growing if European governments are having problems collecting taxes to pay interest on bonds? To believe otherwise is to reject reality right before one's eyes.

If you wonder why Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians and Frenchmen can't pay their bills, well they can't because their economies are shrinking and not growing.

Far too many are so indoctrinated, their minds so easily manipulated. Even when reality stares into their faces, they reject their own common sense because "an expert" with a Ph.D. or a TV teleprompter reader or a politician hasn't told them what to believe.

Here is the growth between Q1 2002 and Q1 2008.



And here is the decline between Q1 2008 and Q3 2014.

.

And here is a forecast from 2007 through the full year of 2014.

Methodology

GDP data comes from the Federal Reserve, which gets the data from the OECD. Using OECD data, the Federal Reserve reports GDP for the individual countries in euros.

For each period, the quarterly GDP in euros gets converted to U.S. dollars using the published cash exchange rate for the end of that quarterly period.

The conversion of quarterly GDP expressed in dollars then gets normalized, removing the effects of monetary accretion by converting dollars of that period into True Dollars™ using a proprietary deflator.

Academicians use an erroneous method when deflating GDP from current GDP to so-called real GDP. To learn more about their amazing error, read INFLATION REVEALED! "REAL GDP" AND FEDERAL RESERVE BANK UNITS, right here on Bizarro Theater.

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21st CENTURY CRIMEAN WAR. OH, AND SARAH PALIN IS WRONG STILL

In what looks like a simmering, could-be civil war in Ukraine, Putin has sent more Russian troops to protect Crimeans. RT reports that thousands of pro-Russian demonstrators across eastern Ukraine and Crimea are protesting against the new government, with administration buildings being seized in several cities.

Crimeans mostly see themselves Russians and not Ukrainians precisely because they are Russians and not merely Russian speakers. Crimea is an autonomous republic. It's name is Autonomous Republic of Crimea. The people of the Crimea ought to decide their own fate. It's a solid bet the people of Crimea aren't borderland (Ukraine) people and want to rule themselves.

Contrary to the ongoing psy op waged against Americans by media workers supporting the E.U. and U.S. political establishments, Russian troops under Putin have not invaded Crimea. Russians already had an active military base in the Crimean city of Sevastopol. To say the Russians have invaded Crimea would be to say Americans invade Deutschland anytime the U.S. Army sends additional troops to Germany.

As to the rest of Ukraine, the country needs to break up in an orderly manner without shots being fired, in two, at least, by oblasts. West Ukraine should consist of oblasts of the north and west. South Ukraine should consist of the oblasts of the east and south.

Of the 44.6 million now living in Ukraine, it's a fair bet that 47.75% of people living in the whole of the current Ukraine want their own country. That's 19.3 million in the oblasts of the south and east and almost 2 million living in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea.

Totalitarian Big Government supporters in the USA, this time, Republicans, have crowed that Sarah Palin has been proven right because in 2008, Palin claimed Putin would have Russians invade Ukraine, a prediction for which many mocked her. Of course, increasing troop strength at a welcomed Russian base hardly could be construed by any straight thinker as an invasion.

However, Ms. Palin seemed spot on when she said, "After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama’s reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence." What should Americans expect from the college school teacher and small-time community organizer, Obama.

Interestingly, people of the once-existing  Ukrainian People's Republic (1917–1920) embraced national personal autonomy whereby citizens who identified with their respective ethnic group joined their representative cultural assembly, which had financial powers such as taxation, spending and budgeting for their respective ethnicities.

Like most lands of Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, many contested for the land between the Baltic Sea to the north and the Black Sea to the south, the lands that today constitute Poland, Lithuania, Lativa, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova and Romania. Kievan Rus at its greatest extent in the mid-11th century stretched from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south.  After the Kievan Rus, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania arose, incorporating parts of the former Kievan Rus and grew to become the  largest state in Europe by the 1400s.

After the Grand Duchy came the dualistic state of Poland and Lithuania, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth ruled by one monarch to rule the region. At its height, Poland-Lithuania was one of the largest and one of the most populous countries of 16th- and 17th-century Europe consisting of 11 million and spanning 390,000 square miles (1,000,000 km2) at its peak in the early 1600s.

After the commies came to power in Russia during Red October, two governments arose in Ukraine,  the Ukrainian People's Republic run from Kiev and the Ukrainian People's Republic of Soviets run from Kharkiv. Leaders from each pushed ordinary Ukrainians into civil war.

In WE WANT TO BE FREE. UKRAINIANS WANT WHAT IS RIGHT. FREEDOM, I explained how politicians don't care so much about territory as  they do about people. Always, it's about people. The political establishment hates losing people because they hate losing the ability to control property of others and thus the ability to scoop up taxes, which are an unearned share of profits taken by force if necessary.

The story of Ukrainians on both sides, the pro-Europe Ukrainians and the pro-Russia Ukrainians is the story of everyone, be them Catalonians, Basque, Flemish, Bretons, South Tyrolians. Millions of people living in Europe want to be free from arbitrary borders imposed upon them from treaties imposed after world wars.

The Independent from the UK reports on separatists gaining ground throughout Europe as people everywhere grow fed up with politicians, their mismanagement of finances, their excessive taxation and their excessive regulation — all signs of totalitarianism. Chief hot spots of likely separatist successes include Scotland in the UK, Basque and Catalonia in Spain, Flanders in Belgium. 

European countries need to break up. The European Union needs to break up. Most of all, the Eurozone needs to break up. 

Breaking up concentrated power is the best way for individuals to gain liberty and thus freedom. 

The more banking systems Europeans can have, each with its own cash, the more conservative these systems shall be. The more conservative the banking systems, the more banking serves short-term commercial interests and the less banking serves politics. 

All you need to do is compare how well those of German-speaking South Tyrol manage their governmental affairs within the borders of Italy versus Italian-speaking Italians and how they mismanage their financial affairs. Italians of Rome have needed their seventh bailout in seven years.

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