Greece, what's up?

Over the past nine months some half drunk reporters really lorded it over the callamity that befel Greece with rivers of rigamarole, enough to obliterate the stench of the Cenral Station urinals. Many blamed the demonstrators for the unfortunate death of the bank employes without bothering to see the role of the police in this case. Well dear reader, the police is responsible for the tragedy at the bank, as it has been notoriously lenient with hooded elements that are present in demos who in many cases they have been proven to be "agents provocateurs".
It is a worn out standard to blame the (rather ficticious) happy go lucky attitude of the Greeks for the crisis. Well, it is a fact that the Greeks were living beyond their mean, but who in the western world did not in the past decade. Both in Greece and everywhere in the western world the banks were literally prodding people to borrow. You know that!
Then there is this babbling about the unreliability of the Greek statistics. Well here too Greece has not been alone in adulterating the figures. Italy, France and even Germany have occasionally resorted to the sport. In the case of Germany in the late 90's they followed the practice of "lease back" agreements for hospitals and other public properties to hide part of their ballooning debt. As to the surprise expressed by Germany and others that they were not aware that the Greek deficits were so high, it is a straight lie. The Commission, the Members of the European Union and the European Central Bank knew exactly the quality of the statistics.
As to the contribution to the "public purse", tax evasion is a fact in every country under the present system of barbaric capitalism. Here in Greece, however, I admit you, it was facilitated by the PASOK and ND governments that relaxed the collecting machanisms far beyond the internationally accepted limits of this practice on the basis of the "election cycle". The big fish never paid taxes and government officials (ministers etc) had their cut for facilitating matters.
With the risk of being falacious because of brevity, here are some points about the true nature of the problem.

1st-To begin with, in a union such as the Eurogroup the member that benefits the most from this unification is the member which is more developed and more efficient. And of course, Germany, according to the statistical data, has been the primay beneficiary of this Union.
2nd-Greece is unique in having a problem with one of its neighbours, which all the half drunk reporters purposely ommit, that obliges her to be continuously on a war alert. The problem is deviously exacerbated by underhanded machinations of the state/industrialists of the USA, Germany and France. As a member of the Board of Directors of Olympic Airways in the 90's I have personal experienve of how they blackmail the Greek government. As an example let me mention that Greece was forced to buy a security system worth over 2 bilion Euros for the Olympics of 2004 because the US and the UK threatened to withdraw their participation in the Games if Greece did not buy it. And that system was known to be non-functional and it never functioned before, during, or after the Games.Back to the defense expenditures. Over the past 15 years they amounted to about 3% to 6% of G.D.P. Besides being ineffective they are also irrelevant to the country's needs. You must have heard of the submarine that the Germans blackmailed us to pay for, which during repeated trials floated with a marked list on one side, which Merkel never accepted, as if it were an illusion of the Greeks. There are dozens of similar stories abou the F16, the Mirages and radars that cannot scan over expanses of sea water.

3rd-Be it as it is, we are still at the start of a long process of streightening up, that will have very interesting turns. The central problem of this Country is that the two major political parties are totally corrupt. With the exception of Venizelos at the start of the 20th century, the leaders of the two major parties never had the bals to assert Greece as a state being equal among equals. So we are on the look out for a leader with bals! Kind of a hopeless task given that to be a politician these days you have to be a "castrado"!...

Dismissal of Peter Galbraith

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 07, 2009
Dismissal of Peter Galbraith
The following reporting is from Reuters. It shows that Obama's policy on Afghanistan is non existent and that he has been actually dragged to continue the perilous policy of the previous regime. A policy that will inevitably lead the U.S. and NATO forces that are engaged in the Afghanistan adventure into a quagmire that will not be very different from the one that dragged the USSR to its catastrophic collapse.
Keeping Karzai in place after the documented ballot box stuffing (the adulteration is estimated at over 30%) means the death of all hopes for a short or long term solution to the problem.


Reuters: The United Nations on Wednesday dismissed the top U.S. diplomat at the U.N. mission in Afghanistan after he quarreled with his European boss over the Afghan presidential election.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had decided to "recall" Peter Galbraith, deputy to U.N. special envoy Kai Eide, and end his appointment, said a statement issued by Ban's press office.
Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador to Croatia and ally of Richard Holbrooke, the outspoken U.S. point man for Afghanistan and Pakistan, angered his Norwegian boss with an aggressive and outspoken line on charges of fraud in the August 20 election.
Ban thanked Galbraith "for his hard work and professional dedication" and recognized his "important contributions to the work of the (U.N.) mission" but made the decision in the best interest of the mission, the statement said.
Galbraith left Kabul two weeks ago after he and Eide quarreled. U.N. officials acknowledged the dispute at the time but played it down as a difference over "style," and said they expected Galbraith to return.
Speaking from his home in Vermont, Galbraith told Reuters that while he had expected to have to go, he was only formally notified on Wednesday when he called the United Nations after seeing it reported in the media.
"I find it extraordinary that the United Nations would dismiss an official because he was concerned about fraud in an election funded by the United Nations," Galbraith said.
"(The Afghan people) deserved to have their votes honestly counted and that is at the heart of this dispute," he said. "In the end, I felt I could not be complicit in the cover-up or downplay of fraud.”

Who writes history!

There is a peculiarity in the case of Greece. In all other cases history is written by the victors. However in the case of Greece without a single doubt the nation's accepted history since the fratricidal war of 1947-1949 was writen by historians and intellectuals that fought on the side of the looser, who in this case was the left. As a matter of fact in many cases, as is the case of Svoronos, they had a death sentence chasing them abroad where they had managed to escape.

In my opinion this peculiarity is due to a great number of factors, many of them peculiar to Greece and its long history. Here is a preliminary list of possible factors that had an influence on the matter.

-Resistance to the occupation of Greece was conducted by the left leaning forces, under the guidance of the Communist Party of Greece. The crushing majority of the Greek inteligencia considered socialism as the only rational way of running a state and in those dark years joined the ranks of EAM.

-The conservative forces were awed by the might of the Axis and either remained idle or corraborated with the occupation forces. A great number of them made a fortune in the black market. The extent of corraboration of conservatives with the occupying forces was so extensive that immedialely after the war in many provinces the right could not find a single acceptable candidate for the national elections. In Heraklion for examlpe they had to import a member of the Kefalogiannis family from Rethymnon who was somewhat passable as a candidate.

I will come back on his subject in the next days. Right now I am reading Svoronos.

Managing Greek Debt

This suspense about a decision to give Greece a helping hand to counter the current speculative attack is a particularly bad omen for the prospects of the Greek economy. Valuable time is being lost in going around on public relations tours and in waiting for a decision to aid Greece, while it is obvious now that no such aid will come. We are faced with the possibility of the current huge spread from the German borrowing rate (300 basis points) becoming a permanent feature for Greece's borrowing for many years to come.

For the past five an a half months the Government has been acting in good faith, naively believing that there is some sort of a spirit of solidarity among the members of the Eurogroup. A very romantic view this was as the German government and the European Central Bank openly expressed their indifference to the country's problems and with their statements caused material damage to the country by reinforcing the negative attitude of the markets. It is very possible that Germany and its servant, the European Central Bank, consciously push Greece down the cliff so as to warn other countries, such as Portugal and Spain, to mend their ways before they see their financial problems ballooning to the dimensions that Greece now faces.
Greece has now taken the necessary measures that will reduce drastically the budget deficit. However, Germany is still stalling and no decision on intervening in the bond market to bring down the rates has been taken. The matter will be discussed again next Thursday at a summit meeting of the European Union, a most unlikely place for a decision to be taken as, besides Germany that will be against, those states that have not adopted the Euro and particularly the United Kingdom, will be indifferent to the matter or even hostile to any form of intervention.
So what should Greece do under these circumstances.
In my opinion we should politely state that because we believe that we shall not be in a position to meet our foreign obligations we are starting a dialogue for the renegotiation of the terms of our foreign debt. At the same time we make known that we are considering getting out of the Euro and readopting the Drachma so that we can manage any form of attacks by speculators.
This is a form of attack on Germany. If it does not bring a positive reaction on the part of Germany, then we proceed with the renegotiation of our debt and get out of the Euro!
We should accept taking a loan from the I.M.F. only on the proviso that its proceeds will not be used to repay old debt that has not been renegotiated. At the same time we should send out scouts for loans that are not being brokered by the mafia of Wall Street, principally in China but also in Russia. I mention in passing that the previous attempt to get a loan from China was rejected by the Chinese banks because it was brokered by Goldman Sachs!

Greece's sinking and last year's bank bail out

Strange, but no matter how hard you try you won't find a single reference to the 25 billion euros of bail out money that the Greek government dished out to the Greek banks about a year ago. The country in rapidly drifting to bankruptcy thanks to the actions of the American and British stock brokers, the inertia of a chaotic European Monetary Union and an inept and bamboozled government.

The state has to secure about 25 billion Euros in loans from the international markets this or next month, but not a single commentator mentions that that's exactly the cost of the Greek bank bailout of last year. And bear in mind that not a single penny of this money stayed in Greece, it was all funneled out to bail out subsidiaries in Eastern Europe.

The government of New Democracy just monkeyed the actions of the U.S.A., and Britain that dished out tremendous amounts to bail out their banks, but with some specific conditions of a rapid repayment or the taking of an equity interest in those banks. In some cases they even let some big ones to just sink in the quagmire they had created for themselves. But in the case of Greece the money was given without any strings attached.

The new government of PASOK has just ignored the matter, as if it is a totally irrelevant matter to the big issue of the accumulated state debt.

The attached cartoon is from "The Cynical Economist".

Getting to the moon, at a fraction of the real cost!

NASA claims that back in 1969 it managed to land two astronauts on the moon and bring them back to earth intact.
Well let's see if this feat was actually achieved back then.
To begin with the total weight of the vehicle was 6,501,733 lb that includes the Apollo 11 three stage rocket and the space craft that weighed 109,646 lb on which the Lunar Module was loaded. About 6,336,043 lb was the weight of the fuel carried by the Apollo rocket. These figures provided by NASA (see the relevant article in the Wikipedia) imply a ratio of 59 lb of total weight to 1 lb of payload and a ratio of fuel to payload of 58 to 1.

Now we come to the lunar lift off where in the pictures provided it is almost impossible to identify something capable of generating the necessary thrust for a lift-off and a return of the Lunar Module to an orbit around the moon. The information provided by NASA confirms the impression that the Lunar Module hardly had an adequate fuel supply. An adequate fuel supply in this case would be equal to 1/6th of the fuel required for a lift-off in the case of the earth, as the moon's gravity pull is 1/6th of that of the earth. The NASA figures tell us that at the moment of the lunar lift-off the weight of the Lunar Module was 10,777 lb and when it docked in orbit its weight was 5,462 lb. Taking the latter as being the payload we have a ratio of 1,97 lb of total weight to 1 lb of payload.
However given that the gravity of the moon is 1/6 in relation to earth's gravity the required ratio of total weight to pay load is (59/ 6=)9.8 lb to 1lb. So for a payload of 5,462 lb the total weight at lift-off should have been (5,462*9.8=) 53,528 lb. And as in the case of the Earth lift-off about 97.45%, or 52,163 lb of that weight would be fuel.

Or, let's do it the other way using the ratio of fuel weight to the paylod that reached the orbiting rocket. This payload was, according to NASA 5462 lb. This payload requires fuel only 1/6 of the ratio of fuel to payload in the case of the earth lift off (58/6=) 9,68. So the required fuel for a lift off the lunar surface is (5462*9,68=) 52,872. Either way the required fuel is over 52,000 lb.
NASA did it with a little over a 1/10th of that, or 5,315 lb of fuel.

Wow! I take my hat off to NASA for saving the American taxpayer the cost of 48,213 lb of additional fuel!
There followed more manned NASA missions to the moon all with "equal success" and judging by the photos made available and the relevant statistics, with the same if not greater savings for the American taxpayer!
Well pals, someone at some point should let the cat out of the bag: In 1969 NASA could not send a manned craft to the moon and bring it back. Fourty years have passed since then and NASA , despite the tremendous technical progress, is still unable to do it.

Should China worry about its dollar holdings?

Wen Jiabao, China's Premier called today on the USA to honour its word and remain a credible nation. It is estimated that China at the end of last December had about $696 billion of its $2 trillion foreign currency reserves in US Treasuries, making China the largest holder of US debt. Given that a number of factors could affect the value of this huge placement, China keeps a close watch over what is happening in the American economy. The escalation of borrowing that is concomitant with the efforts to break away from the current crisis that the US is experiencing is certainly a thing for the Chinese to worry about, as it may eventually lead to a rise in the borrowing rates of the US Government and cause a corresponding drop in the value of the treasuries held by China. The following example will help to see why China is so worried: If the yield of the 5-year treasury bills increases from a current level of 1.50% to 2.50% then China's holdings of treasury bills that mature in five years will drop from a level of 100 to 60. A DISASTER! Isn't it? Bear in mind that the above hypothesis of an increase in the yield by one percentage point is a conservative one since only back in August 2007 the 5-year treasuries were yielding 4.20%. Similar losses will be incurred and in the other maturities and cHina's loss may reach 40% or more of the $696 billion holdings.
A second and more serious source of worry for China, which under the present state of things is rather improbable, is the nightmarish eventuality that the US administration finding itself with its back against the wall may opt for the, catastrophic for its creditors, path of super inflation. An option of desperation that reduces all holders of cash or debt to paupers. There is the precedent of the German super inflation through the unlimited issue of money to cover the deficits of the state in the early 20's that allowed Germany to pay off its huge internal debt from World War I with plane worthless paper. Note that Germany was pardoned for the greatest part of its foreign debt which was to be paid in gold because of the depression of the 30's. In the case of the US however, with the dollar being a currency of international payments, its foreign debt is in its national currency. So in the event of a super inflation in the US all government debt, internal and external will be paid with worthless paper. And anyone left holding dollars can only use them to cover some walls.
Of course such a super inflation will first hit the moneyed Americans that will not be prudent enough to have exchanged their money for real estate, other currencies or shares in companies with some credible prospects such as those of natural resources. Let's not forget that the elite of capitalist Germany was not shaken by the super inflation stint. Krupp, Thussen and Krauss Maffei were the main players before and after the super inflation period. Of course there was an uprising that caused big concern, but at the end the state repression forces held sway. Now if the ruling forces deem that for reasons of culture and education the great majority of the Americans will just remain placid and also that the surveillance and repression means that the government has at its disposal are adequate enough to keep things under control, then the super inflation scenario may be a tempting proposition.
As for China do not think for a moment that the Chinese were hoodwinked into accepting the dollars and the treasury bills in exchange for their hard work. They accepted to be paid in that currency being fully aware of all the dangers in exchange for the golden opportunity to realize Lenin's dream of industrializing the country with the labour of the country and the precious know how of the greatest industrial nation. Their plan was an absolute success. A success for which is surely worth more than any loss of any amount of their foreign reserves. devaluation