The Delphi Conference on the European/Russian crisis created by Washington (my address to the conference is here: http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2015/06/19/paul-craig-roberts-address-international-conference-europeanrussian-crisis-created-washington/ ) issued a declaration repudiating the EU attack on the Greek nation.
By Paul Craig Roberts
The Delphi Declaration asks the European peoples, especially the Germans, to do the right thing and object to the plunder of Greece by the One Percent. This appeal to good will is likely to fall on deaf ears even though the pillage of Greece will create a precedent that can then be applied to Italy, Spain, France, and even Germany.
The financial sector in the West no longer funds real investments in plant and equipment. So much of the US manufacturing economy has been moved offshore, and the lack of consumer income growth means that investment opportunities in the US are very limited. With the derivatives, leveraged financial speculation seems to have reached its limits. All of this suggests that looting countries in the name of settling their sovereign debt is the new road to riches.
The financial sector has turned to the looting of the public sector in the Western countries themselves. By destroying Western social welfare systems, as has happened in Greece, public revenues are freed that the One Percent can capture. In the US Obamacare is a mechanism that allows private insurance companies to loot the public funds assigned to health care. The examples are numerous, and privatizations will result in the demise of public goods, from health care, to education, to pensions.
The Delphi Declaration recognizes this and correctly warns the Italians, Spanish, French, and Germans that they are next on the list of countries whose public sectors will be plundered.
The leaders of Russia and China must be amused to watch Western countries consume themselves.
THE DELPHI DECLARATION
On Greece and Europe
By The Conference Participants
European governments, European institutions and the IMF, acting in close alliance, if not under direct control of big international banks and other financial institutions, are now exercising a maximum of pressure, including open threats, blackmailing and a slander and terror communication campaign against the recently elected Greek government and against the Greek people.
They are asking from the elected government of Greece to continue the “bail-out” program and the supposed “reforms” imposed on this country in May 2010, in theory to “help” and “save” it.
As a result of this program, Greece has experienced by far the biggest economic, social and political catastrophe in the history of Western Europe since 1945.It has lost 27% of its GDP, more than the material losses of France or Germany during the 1st World War. The living standards have fallen sharply, the social welfare system all but destroyed, Greeks have seen social rights won during one century of struggles taken back. Whole social strata were completely destroyed, more and more Greeks are falling from their balconies to end a life of misery and desperation, every talented person who can leaves from the country. Democracy, under the rule of a “Troika”, acting as collective economic assassin, a kind of Kafka’s “Court”, has been transformed into a sheer formality in the very same country where it was born! Greeks are experiencing now the same feeling of insecurity about all basic conditions of its life, that French have experienced in 1940, Germans in 1945, Soviets in 1991. In the same time, the two problems which this program was supposed to address, the Greek sovereign debt and competitiveness of the Greek economy have, both, sharply deteriorated.
Now, European institutions and governments are refusing even the most reasonable, elementary, minor concession to the Athens government, they refuse even the slightest face-saving formula, if it could be. They want a total surrender of SYRIZA, they want its humiliation, its destruction. By denying to the Greek people any peaceful and democratic way out of its social and national tragedy, they are pushing Greece into chaos, if not civil war. By the way, even now, an undeclared social civil war of “low intensity” is waged inside this country, especially against the unprotected, the ill, the young and the very old, the weaker and the unlucky. Is this the Europe we want our children to live?
We want to express our total, unconditional solidarity with the struggle of the Greek people for its dignity, its national and social salvation, for its liberation from the unacceptable neocolonial rule “Troika” is trying to impose on a European country. We denounce the illegal and unacceptable agreements successive Greek governments have been obliged, under threat and blackmail, to sign, in violation of all European treaties, of the Charter of UN and of the Greek constitution. We ask European governments and institutions to stop now their irresponsible and/or criminal policy towards Greece. We call them to adopt immediately a generous emergency program of support to redress the Greek economic situation and face the humanitarian disaster already unfolding in this country.
We appeal also to all European peoples to realize that what is at stake in Greece it is not only Greek salaries and pensions, Greek schools and hospitals, the fate even of a historic nation, where the very notion of “Europe” was born. What is at stake in Greece are the Spanish, Italian, even the German salaries, pensions, welfare, the very fate of the European welfare state, of European democracy, of Europe as such. Stop believing your media, who tell you the facts, only to distort their meaning, check independently what your politicians and your media are saying. They try to create, and they have created an illusion of stability. You may live in Lisbon or in Paris, in Frankfurt or in Stockholm, you may think that you are living in relative security. Do not keep such illusions. You should look to Greece, to see there the future your elites are preparing for you, for all of us and for our children. It is much easier and intelligent to stop them now, than it will be later. Not only Greeks, but all of us and our children will pay an enormous price, if we permit to our governments to complete the social slaughter of a whole European nation.
We appeal in particular to the German people. We do not belong to those who are always reminding to the Germans the past, in order to keep them in an “inferior”, second-class position, or in order to use the “guilty factor” for their dubious goals. We appreciate much the organizational and technological skills of the German people, its proven democratic and especially ecological and peace sensitivities. We want and we need the German people as one of the main champions in the building of another Europe, of a prosperous, independent, democratic Europe, of a multipolar world.
Germans know better than anybody else in Europe, where blind obedience to irresponsible leaders can lead and has indeed led in the past. It is not up to us to teach them any such lesson. They know better than anybody else how easy is to begin a campaign with triumphalist rhetoric, only to end up with ruins everywhere around you. We do not invite them to follow our opinion. We demand simply from them to think thoroughly the opinion of such distinguished leaders of them like Helmut Schmitt for instance, we demand them to hear the voice of the greatest among modern German poet, of Günter Grass, the terrible prophecy he has emitted about Greece and Europe some years before his loss.
We call upon you, the German people, to stop such a “Faust” alliance between German political elites and international Finance. We call upon the German people not to permit to its government to continue doing to the Greeks, exactly what the Allies did to Germans after their victory in the 1st World War. Do not let your elites and leaders to transform all the continent, finally including Germany, into a dominion of Finance.
More than ever we are in urgent need of a radical restructuring of European debt, of serious measures to control the activities of the financial sector, of a “Marshal Plan” for the European periphery, of a courageous rethinking and re-launching of a European project which, in its present form, has proven to be unsustainable. We need to find now the courage to do this, if we want to let a better Europe to our children, not a Europe in ruins, in continuous financial or even openly military conflicts among its nations.
See article on the Paul Craig Robert’s website at:
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2015/06/23/delphi-declaration/
