EU Throws Cash Down A Greek Commode

When is Germany and the other major EU countries going to wake up to the fact that they’re never going to get their money back.

Didn't this sort of thing already happen during the post WWI era with U.S. Stock investment in Germany that lead to the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and triggered the first Great Depression? Does this ring a bell with anybody?

As the story goes, the stock investments were supposed to build factories and office buildings in Germany to restore the nation and deliver a return on investment. Like in the old Broken Window theory of economics, Germany needed everything. But little did the investors know that the money instead went to paying France the formidable war reparations it was awarded in the Armistice. 

In this fashion, none of the money that was pouring into Greece is going to where it is supposed to go either.

The smokescreen being thrown up by the latest Greek government is not unlike the smokescreen that was thrown up by the last Greek government. It’s a Dog and Pony Show, just a put-on for the rubes meant to keep the status quo when everyone knows it can’t go on.

Nobody wants to throw in the towel on the EU when its intrinsic flaws were evident from the very beginning. The EU can’t strangle the shit out of another EU country by taxing them back to the Stone Age like our government in theses United States can do and has been doing.  Also if an EU country goes into debt and like Greece, MASSIVE debt, in a currency they can’t print, then there is no economic force, like inflating the currency, that can be pulled without effecting the rest of the EU nations.They’re just stuck with the debt and THAT effects the other EU nations. 

So Germany ends up doing what the U.S. did in the 1980s with its stupid loans to South America: They start lending MORE money to the debtor nations so that they can pay the interest on the U.S. loan debt. But instead of banks laying out case, Germany and France are going to the taxpayer well and that is a BAD HABIT.

At least the U.S. banks did this to buy time to eventually write down and charge off the losses but they still had to take the loss. Drawing out the write off only softened the blow to investors. What is the EU going to do? It doesn’t look like this is their plan.

Hello, EU, Greece has NO INTENTION of paying back the money! 

They are still in some weird War Mentality with Germany where they are trying to justify their non-compliance with their EU monetary responsibilities as an act of defiance for being flattened by Germany in WWII. As if the EU put a gun to the heads of Greek politicians when they signed their ridiculous retirement and pension agreements, giving their massive and massively wasteful Public Sector the right to a job and a right to retire from that job at, what, 55 to 58 years old? And come on, they only SAY they are going to start collecting property taxes, they aren't actually going to DO IT!

And in this case it’s the German taxpayer who really suffers and the working class of France and the people who bust their asses at real jobs who see their tax money being funneled to the unworthy, the unmutable and the unwilling to cooperate with the plan. Is this the result of a long simmering dislike based on the past or is this merely an excuse by a desperate nation that is living the Ant and the Cricket Aesop Fable? It looks like the later but the result will be the same.

So why should the EU throw any more money at Greece? Greece is going to just waste it and laugh. Of course they will only laugh long enough til they realize they aren’t going to get any more.

But that is Nationalism for you. People are very protective of their system. Even if it’s shit, it’s still THEIR shit system and they aren’t going to let France or Germany dictate the terms even if it was they themselves that Screwed the Pooch on their finances. What do they care? The sun and ocean is still warm and the olives are in season. The tourists will still come and at least they’ll make SOMETHING. Hell, they’re not paying any taxes so the overhead is low.

It used to be that the U.S. had a sense of Nationalism and pride like that. Right now there are too many American Citizens who think the U.S. is the problem nation of the world. As a percentage there seems to be fewer people who believe in the old American ideals of self-sufficiency, self-reliance and the advantages of hard work in a Meritocracy. They feel the people who have should give all to those that don’t  regardless of the circumstances and that if you have something, then you must have taken it from someone else and so corrections must be implemented. Any this is how a nation ends up when too many people feel that way. This sort of Wrong Thinking can destroy everything. And here we are.  

But that’s what you get when a nation lets in millions of undocumented and therefore illegal foreign nationals. They walked right in without going through the rigors of a legal naturalized citizen. They did not have to learn about what it means to be an American Citizen. They didn't have to do anything but climb a fence or crawl through a tunnel and they get what the people who struggled to follow the rules get so becoming an American Citizen no longer carries any weight. It’s really not that important to anybody, especially our government. What difference does it make at this point? And those not vested in the process will only choose to ignore it. They already have.

So the experiment that is the EU, much like the experiment that was the CCCP, will yield to the reality of Market Forces and come apart at the seams. Either that they’ll just limp on into the future and collapse later. Hopefully it won’t take 79 years of misery like the Soviet Union.

Perhaps these things just have to run their course.