The Greek Deal From Germany - Reading Between the Lines and Arnulf Baring

They will say that we are subsidizing scroungers, lounging in cafés on the Mediterranean beaches. Monetary union, in the end, will result in a gigantic blackmailing operation. When we Germans demand monetary discipline, other countries will blame their financial woes on that same discipline, and by extension, on us. More, they will perceive us as a kind of economic policeman. We risk once again becoming the most hated in Europe. 

Arnulf Baring

via JESSY'S  CAFÉ AMÉRICAIN

The Greek Deal From Germany - Reading Between the Lines - Darkness Over the Earth

Perhaps the Greeks made a mistake, and relied too much on rationality, on a belief in a Eurozone in which good sense and reason would prevail.   As it was, the Germans were willing to ruthlessly crush the Greek banking system, while the ECB and IMF stood idly by, fomenting a financial panic and humanitarian disaster in order to displace a sovereign government and put an entire nation 'in its place.'   We certainly have seen this kind of example made before.

This was an exercise in raw power.  It was a financial blitzkrieg, an act of economic warfare and reckless destruction on a people that ought to be condemned by the free world.  But this kind of ruthless abuse of financial systems seems to be the accepted thing now amongst the developed economies.  And we might view Greece as a sort of an experiment in a new form of warfare and ruthlessness, as were Guernica, Warsaw, and Lidice.

It is a shame if the Greeks have not prepared for Grexit, although there are still clearly options despite the naysayers who see only difficulties in everything.   Freedom is rarely the easier way.

The lesson that the countries of the Eurozone cannot trust Germany to act with wisdom and goodwill was known, but now we also see that restraint is also not in their repetoire.  If one can read between the lines, it would be a pity if the rest of the European countries do not start planning now for their own active exit from such an failed concept as the European Monetary Union.

And it would be a tragedy if the rest of the world does not now see plainly where a single currency for the world would also take them, where it is already taking them.   Modern theories about its benign utility to do only good aside, money is raw power.  And one must be exceptionally careful of granting that power to create and distribute and manage money into the hands of vain and corruptible people without stringent  transparency, checks and balances, and provisions for justice and individual freedom.

Are the lights going out all over Europe?   Not yet, but there is a darkness casting its shadow over the earth.   I fear that Greece is only the beginning of a new phase in the degradation of the human condition by the power of insatiable greed, and spiritual wickedness in high places.

"The earth, entire peoples and individual persons are being brutally punished. And behind all this pain, death and destruction there is the stench of what Basil of Caesarea called 'the dung of the devil'.  An unfettered pursuit of money rules.  The service of the common good is left behind. 

Once capital becomes an idol and guides people’s decisions, once greed for money presides over the entire socioeconomic system, it ruins society, it condemns and enslaves men and women, it destroys human fraternity, it sets people against one another and, as we clearly see, it even puts at risk our common home."

Francis I