theDrahos

Lyndon LaRouche today launched an international initiative, centered in Manhattan, to expose the utter fraud of the debt which is being attributed to Greece by the European Union and the British Empire’s banks. That debt is being used as blackmail to try to bludgeon Greece—and after them, all of Europe—into committing suicide by imposing genocidal bankers’ austerity, yet again.

“The Greek debt, as such, is mostly not Greek debt,” LaRouche stated. “The debt which Germany and other nations are demanding that they pay for, is money that the Greeks never got! So the Greeks don’t owe that money. This was a swindle, because the Greeks didn’t incur that debt.”

The whole thing was foisted on Greece by a series of frauds, LaRouche said, but in fact it only went to pay Greece’s international banking creditors, to cover up a Ponzi scheme run by Goldman Sachs and other predatory financiers, and to grease the skids of corrupt arms deals negotiated by previous Greek governments—as members of the current Greek government have documented.

But the Greek case is not an anomaly on the world scene. It is a classic example of what LaRouche and EIR have long described as “bankers’ arithmetic,” a fraud under which the majority of the nations of the planet have been saddled with debts they never actually incurred, built up by a pyramid of derivatives speculation and related financial swindles. That is how we got $2 quadrillion in derivatives and other financial assets on the books today, with no conceivable way of paying that debt.

The case of Greece is the same fraud that the vulture funds are trying to perpetrate against Argentina. And it is the same swindle run worldwide by the drug-running, tax-evading bankrupt banks that are at the core of the British Empire today. One such case, that of HSBC—formerly Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, aka the central bank of Dope, Inc.—has recently gained notoriety for organizing planet-wide tax-evasion schemes for their wealthy clients. That, on top of the earlier demonstration at U.S. Senate hearings that HSBC was at the heart of laundering tens of billions of dollars of blood money from the Mexican drug cartels.

But HSBC is just one case among dozens. A whistleblower at UBS (Union Bank of Switzerland), former head of protocol Stephanie Gibaud, has just stated that “the information on HSBC is a copy/paste of what I experienced at UBS.” She added, with scientific precision:

“We have to understand that we are dealing with a criminal industry.”

That is exactly what Wall Street, the City of London, and the entire trans-Atlantic financial system are. It is a criminal enterprise that would maintain the illusion of the solvency of $2 quadrillion in financial assets, by killing off entire nations and populations, such as they are attempting in Greece. It is the bankruptcy of their financial system which is also driving them to threaten thermonuclear confrontation with Russia and China, using Ukraine as an excuse, in order to impose their will globally.

The British Empire’s only hope of victory, is if nations such as Greece and Russia, capitulate to the blackmail and threats, and agree to play by the rigged rules of the game that the British Empire insists is the only game in town. But if they refuse—as the BRICS nations are doing, as well as allied nations such a Greece, Argentina, and Egypt—and instead fight to create an entirely new system based on credit issued for development, rather than speculation, then the financial empire can be brought to its knees.

“We have to spill this thing as a leading issue in the U.S.,” LaRouche stated. “You can sink Wall Street on this one. If you sink the Greek swindle, you’re going to start a chain- reaction explosion of the international trans-Atlantic system, like the Wall Street system and similar things, the British and others. They are the ones who owe the debt, not the Greeks.”

“This thing has got to be put loud and clear on every doorstep inside the United States,” LaRouche said. “If you want to avoid World War III, that’s what you do. And if you don’t do that, you’re not serious about World War III.”

This is an international and a national campaign, LaRouche concluded, and it is centered in New York City. We are taking Manhattan back from Wall Street, and returning it to the policies of Alexander Hamilton.

The European Central Bank seems to fear that the new Greek government is preparing to implement Glass-Steagall reorganization of the Greek banks. Since Glass-Steagall is in the party programs of the Independent Greeks and Syriza, the fear is not an unreasonable one on the part of the financier oligarchy.

Since coming to power, Deputy Prime Minister Yannis Dragasakis has been reorganizing Greece’s largest systemic banks. The government holds the majority shares in these banks through the bank bailout fund set up under the bailout agreement. Up until now, it has not exercised any management rights that a majority share would entitle it to. Dragasakis is changing that. Through discussions with board members and other shareholders, he has orchestrated changes in the chairmen and CEOs of the four major banks. Although details are not available, the purpose is to deal with the non-performing loans and to get the banks lending to the real economy. According to Greek financial sources, his actions are in line with the government’s promise that the banks will be run for the benefit of the country, and especially the citizens, since the banks were bailed out at the expense of the citizens.

On the eve of a board meeting of the National Bank of Greece, the country’s largest private “systemic” bank, which is to elect a new chairman, the European Central Bank (ECB) issued a letter to Athens and the banks, through the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) which oversees banks of the 19 euro area countries, warning that it must approve all changes in bank management.

The new chairperson at National Bank is expected to be former Economics Minister Louka Katseli.

“The ECB is said to have certain objections toward Katseli,”

reported the daily Kathimerini.

A look at Katseli would easily explain why the ECB had “certain objections.” She is a highly acclaimed economist and political figure. She was a leading member of the Pasok party but was thrown out of it, because she refused to support the Memorandum. In a paper she delivered at the 20th anniversary conference of the Center for Policy Dialogue in Bangladesh on Nov. 18, 2014, titled, “Recent Fiscal and Labor Market Adjustment Experience in Europe — Lessons for the Low Income Countries,” she makes a scathing attack on the repeal of Glass-Steagall, saying,

American economist Paul Krugman has made a useful observation in the New York Times, where he denounced the Europeans for having a “Carthaginian” policy for Greece. He charged that

“they don’t understand that Greece 2015 is not Ireland 2010, and that this kind of bullying won’t work,” and that “they prefer to see Greece forced into default and probably out of the euro, with the presumed economic wreckage as an object lesson to anyone else thinking of asking for relief.”

Comparing the EU to the Roman Empire, he said the EU is seeking

“the economic equivalent of the ‘Carthaginian peace’ France sought to impose on Germany after World War I,” before he concluded that the EU “lack of wisdom is astonishing and appalling.”

Similarly, in Germany, former European Commissioner from Germany Günter Verheugen gave an interview to SWR radio, reprising his longstanding criticism of the EU Commission practices. He cite the Greek argument that the Troika Memorandum approach has failed because the austerity dictates prognosticated an economic growth in Greece that was not realistic. But those very dictates, he continued, are

“a main reason for driving Greece deeper into poverty, with no improvement in sight.”

Ultimata like those issued by Brussels, and also by Athens, are ill-considered; both sides have to talk about an alternative approach which improves the situation in Greece, Verheugen said. A “showdown” would help neither side in this conflict.

Despite an ultimatum from the silly Dutchman, Eurogroup President Jeroen Dijsselbloem, demanding that Greece sign its soul over to the eurodevils, Greece continues to say no.

After talks with the Eurogroup collapsed Monday, Independent Greeks’ leader and Defense Minister Panos Kammenos tweeted:

Tuesday, during an address to the Syriza parliamentary group, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said,

According to Protothema, in response to statements by German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble that he felt sorry for the Greeks and their irresponsible government, Tsipras said,

Despite the ultimata and demands that Greece keep to the Memorandum without any changes, Athens will submit to the Greek parliament its social reform bills for a vote on Feb. 20, the same day as the deadline declared by the silly Dutchman. “We will not succumb to psychological blackmail,” Tsipras said. The social bills will tackle the

Stephanie Gibaud, former Chief of Protocol at Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) in France is collaborating with Argentina’s federal tax agency, AFIP, to reveal the name of hundreds of Argentines who held unregistered accounts in UBS, just as did 4,040 more in Dope, Inc.’s HSBC, as part of a vast tax-evasion and capital-flight scheme directed against the Argentine government.

In an exclusive interview published Tuesday in Tiempo Argentino, Gibaud warned that “hundreds” of banks do exactly what HSBC did, facilitating the setting up of thousands of unregistered accounts. “It’s a dirty business,” she said. “We have to understand that we are dealing with a criminal industry.”

Gibaud works with HSBC whistleblower Herve Falciani, whose information on that bank’s illegal operations was the basis for the recent Swiss Leaks revelations.

What HSBC did “is a copy/paste of what I experienced at UBS,” Gibaud told the Argentine daily.

“The opacity is what allows these banks to work with ‘unacceptable’ clients and turn them into highly profitable ones.”

Setting up unregistered accounts in banks like HSBC, UBS, and JPMorgan, to name a few, is highly profitable, she emphasized.

“Hundreds of banks have done the same—there are many more illegal accounts,” many Argentines among them, she said. “You have to understand that this is the primary business of offshore banking.”

Gibaud explained that in 2008, she began to smell a rat after UBS told her to destroy the contents of her computer’s hard drive and all of her files, which included names of clients and their managers in France, Switzerland, Luxemburg, Belgium, and Monaco. She also became familiar with the case of Bradley Birkenfeld, an employee of UBS in the U.S. who has also exposed the bank’s illegal operations.

Efforts by top bank executives to blame or scapegoat lower-level employees for illegal acts, is “disgusting,” Gibaud told Tiempo Argentino. These executives “are the ones behind the banks’ strategies. They are the heavyweights.” There is only one place for them, she said: “jail.”