Author: Alicia

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko was in Abu Dhabi Tuesday for the IDEX international arms trade show, where he announced a defense deal with the UAE, to obtain weapons. Though the details are as yet unspecified, the deal was reported as a breaking story this morning by Defense News.

This is the latest expression of how Victoria Nuland’s Nazi regime in Kiev is not satisfied with peace in southeast Ukraine, and is going around the world shopping for weapons, probably, in part, to replace the vast amounts of equipment and munitions that it lost in the Debaltsevo cauldron, but in reality, to drag the world into war with nuclear-armed Russia.

Poroshenko also indicated Tuesday, that he hopes for a deal with the US.

“We are in a very practical dialogue, and we hope in the very near future, we have a decision to help us attain defensive weapons,” he said. “I want to stress that the defensive capabilities for the Ukrainian Army are only to defend our territory, to keep our independence, to keep our sovereignty. We do not have any plans to attack anybody.”

All Poroshenko would say about the UAE deal was that the two countries signed “a very important memorandum about military and technical cooperation.” The UAE military is largely, but not exclusively, equipped with American and French-supplied equipment.

It is highly likely that there is far more than meets the eye in this UAE arms deal. Recall that the UAE, along with Qatar, played a key role as a pass-through for the British-Obama policy of sending arms to Libya, and from there on to Syria. The Ukrainian-UAE deal has the distinct odor of something similar— i.e., de facto arming of Ukraine by Obama, with an effort at plausible denial.

Also present at IDEX is US Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Frank Kendall. While there’s no report that Kendall and Poroshenko might be meeting, Kendall was to have met with the Ukrainian arms-buying delegation at the show. “I expect the conversation will be about their needs,” Kendall said yesterday, according to Defense One.

“We’re limited at this point in time in terms of what we’re able to provide them, but where we can be supportive, we want to be.”

Kendall doesn’t have the authority to negotiate arms deals, so he’ll be “primarily in listening mode, trying to understand what their needs are,” he said. Russia has a very large display in the exhibit hall, but it’s on the opposite end from the Ukrainian exhibit.

Andriy Parubiy, a co-founder of the neo-Nazi Svoboda party and of one of the paramilitary groups that became the Right Sector spearhead of the February 2014 coup, is scheduled to be in Washington this week. Parubiy took clear aim at the US in an interview in Ottawa, Monday, announcing that he expected Canada to pressure the US on the question of arms sales to Ukraine. “We’re sure that Canada’s voice is authoritative and carries a lot of weight,” he said.

“So the U.S. has to make this decision [about providing weapons], but Canada is kind of the authoritative voice that can push [for] that. It can influence the U.S. decision.”

While in Ottawa, he met with Foreign Affairs Minister Rob Nicholson and James Bezan, the parliamentary secretary to the defense minister, as well as members of Parliament.

Lyndon LaRouche stated today that the global pattern of British actions indicates that they are acting in a way which can only be attributed to a drive towards early thermonuclear war. The lightning-fast Watergating and resignation of Malcolm Rifkind, the Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament and a heavyweight of the British Establishment, for his opposition to escalating confrontation with Russia, means that the British are readying for war, LaRouche said. They are getting rid of any and all impediments to that war—that is the conclusion to be drawn from the Rifkind ouster.

That British war drive is also evident in developments around Ukraine and Greece—two strategic confrontations where temporary, uneasy ceasefires currently exist, but where the underlying issues have by no means been settled.

For example, in Ukraine, President Petro Poroshenko is actively shopping for arms to be used in their war against Russia. At the IDEX international arms exhibition in Abu Dhabi, he announced that he had signed a defense deal with the UAE, and that he hoped to do the same shortly with the United States:

“We are in a very practical dialogue, and we hope in the very near future, we [will] have a decision to help us attain defensive weapons,”

he stated. Meanwhile Andriy Parubiy, the commander of the Maidan “self-defense” contingent who is now head of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, is in Washington meeting with Pentagon officials and various senators, to get a commitment to send arms to Ukraine. Parubiy, like his controller Victoria Nuland, of Obama’s State Department, are open advocates of Nazi policies, including confrontation with Russia.

We know what Nuland is up to, LaRouche commented today; and we don’t think it’s human. In fact, Obama and his policy allies on the Republican side, are the single greatest source of danger to the continued existence of the United States itself. That is something that has to be stated explicitly, and widely—from the policy center of the LaRouche movement’s organizing in Manhattan, radiating outward to the rest of the country and the world.

In the case of Greece, the European Union is hell-bent on crushing the Tsipras government’s refusal to implement any more Troika austerity policies on the country, and is demanding that they capitulate or be subjected to financial and economic carpet-bombing, and expelled from the Euro zone.

Why should they stay in the Eurozone?, Lyndon LaRouche shot back today. The Greek government should tell the EU:

If you’re going to screw us, why should we be part of that? There is a limit to what any self-respecting nation will submit to, and we’ve reached that limit. What you are demanding is a fraud—and you know it. The British Empire has been bleeding us for years, and they have no right to do that; it is immoral. We have shown that we want to work with you, we have given you that option; but if we don’t get satisfaction, then we are under no obligation whatsoever to continue with the fraud. We cannot submit.

LaRouche specified that not everyone in Europe is aggressively pursuing the British Empire’s scorched earth policy towards Greece, but there are some particularly active people who must be singled out and stopped. That is the case with German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, and Eurogroup Chief Jeroen Dijsselbloem, as well as Spain’s Finance Minister Luis de Guindos—who was the director of Lehman Brothers in Spain and Portugal from 2006 to the bank’s blazing demise in 2008. And now he presumes to lecture Greece on proper financial policies?!

But Greece has options against these hit-men, LaRouche emphasized. If they crush Greece the way they are planning to, they will sink the whole system. So what Greece has to say, LaRouche continued, is that the conditions being demanded of them are fraudulent. The debt is fraudulent; Greece doesn’t actually owe anything. The numbers that are being concocted are just another case of crooked bankers’ arithmetic—a practice that is so fraudulent, that it even gives a bad name to mathematics!

The point is, LaRouche concluded, that Greece doesn’t owe anything, and yet the British Empire, in their drive for war, are out to drown them, to kill them, and to crush them. It is time for Greece to make their move, and let the banks know that they have nothing coming. They are finished.

In conclusion to a discussion with associates Tuesday night, LaRouche said,

Swiss authorities, led by Attorney General Olivier Jornot and prosecutor Yves Bertossa, raided the Geneva offices of HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) SA Wednesday morning, as part of their criminal probe into “aggravated money laundering,” by the bank and by “persons unknown,” according to the London Guardian and Telegraph.

“We are looking for anything and everything we can find, documents and files,” prosecutors said, noting that the action came in response to recent Swiss Leaks revelations on the bank’s illegal activities, facilitating tax evasion by wealthy clients, among other things.

News of the raid spread across the globe, with London’s Evening Standard noting that “the fact that the raid is over allegations of money laundering will send shivers through Europe’s largest bank.”

Those shivers are indeed being felt in London, where Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs agency (HMRC) is scrambling to defend itself against charges that it failed to act on evidence of HSBC’s illegal activities.

HSBC’s illicit reputation is well known, as is the protection from criminal prosecution the bank has enjoyed for decades from the top levels of the U.S. and UK governments. However as the utter bankruptcy of the transatlantic financial system, including the EU itself, becomes more and more difficult to deny, the days of implicit political and financial bailouts banks like HSBC have enjoyed since their inception, may be numbered. And the dismissal of Obama’s Attorney General nominee, Loretta Lynch is a good place to start.

In the U.S. there is now speculation as to whether the Swiss raid and revelations of the extent of HSBC’s illegal behavior might lead to a reopening of the case against HSBC for moving billions of dollars in Mexican drug cartel money through the U.S. financial system. In 2012, Obama’s Attorney General nominee, Loretta Lynch, and the Department of Justice gave HSBC a slap on the wrist for its crimes, in the form of a $1.9 billion fine, and a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA).

In her capacity as Attorney of the Eastern District of New York, Loretta Lynch blatantly protected HSBC from serious prosecution in 2012, after the bank admitted to facilitating money-laundering by Mexican drug cartels, and helping clients evade U.S. taxes and sanctions.

In a WND.com interview with the HSBC whistleblower John Cruz, who had exposed HSBC’s dirty operations, in which Cruz states that Lynch never even contacted him for his information, Cruz said,

“Nobody from the U.S. attorney’s office in New York ever contacted me, despite numerous attempts that I made to get the documentation I had of HSBC illegal money-laundering to federal prosecutors.”

Lynch’s stonewall is even more extreme, given the information Cruz had already provided to Federal agencies. Two years before, in 2010, Cruz’s attorney handed over documentation to a supervisor of the DHS’s Homeland Security Investigators, but in early 2012 DHS even denied that it had met with Cruz’s attorney. Not surprisingly, nothing came of the DHS investigation. In 2012, Cruz got the same runaround from the Internal Revenue Service.

Lynch’s DOJ knew of other HSBC criminal activity going back to 2007. As The New York Times gingerly put it earlier this month:

The documents had been procured by an HSBC whistleblower in 2007. They were shared with authorities in at least France, Spain, Britain, and the United States.

Covering the same record, Matt Taibi, in the Feb. 9 Rolling Stone, states:

As EIR noted in its 2012 coverage of the HSBC money-laundering, EIR’s Dope, Inc. first reported in 1978, that HSBC, then called the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, functioned as the central bank for the opium and heroin trade of the British Empire and its East India Company, dating back to 1865, when the HongShang was founded.

HSBC’s Mexican Dope Cartel Money; How Much of It Went to Obama’s ’08 Campaign?

HSBC: Flagship Bank Of Britain’s Dope, Inc.

LaRouche’s Campaign Vs. Dope, Inc. & HSBC

HSBC Funding Was Behind the Terror in Bangladesh, Mumbai

Swiss authorities, led by Attorney General Olivier Jornot and prosecutor Yves Bertossa, raided the Geneva offices of HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) SA Wednesday morning, as part of their criminal probe into “aggravated money laundering,” by the bank and by “persons unknown,” according to the London Guardian and Telegraph.

“We are looking for anything and everything we can find, documents and files,” prosecutors said, noting that the action came in response to recent Swiss Leaks revelations on the bank’s illegal activities, facilitating tax evasion by wealthy clients, among other things.

News of the raid spread across the globe, with London’s Evening Standard noting that “the fact that the raid is over allegations of money laundering will send shivers through Europe’s largest bank.”

Those shivers are indeed being felt in London, where Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs agency (HMRC) is scrambling to defend itself against charges that it failed to act on evidence of HSBC’s illegal activities.

HSBC’s illicit reputation is well known, as is the protection from criminal prosecution the bank has enjoyed for decades from the top levels of the U.S. and UK governments. However as the utter bankruptcy of the transatlantic financial system, including the EU itself, becomes more and more difficult to deny, the days of implicit political and financial bailouts banks like HSBC have enjoyed since their inception, may be numbered. And the dismissal of Obama’s Attorney General nominee, Loretta Lynch is a good place to start.

In the U.S. there is now speculation as to whether the Swiss raid and revelations of the extent of HSBC’s illegal behavior might lead to a reopening of the case against HSBC for moving billions of dollars in Mexican drug cartel money through the U.S. financial system. In 2012, Obama’s Attorney General nominee, Loretta Lynch, and the Department of Justice gave HSBC a slap on the wrist for its crimes, in the form of a $1.9 billion fine, and a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA).

In her capacity as Attorney of the Eastern District of New York, Loretta Lynch blatantly protected HSBC from serious prosecution in 2012, after the bank admitted to facilitating money-laundering by Mexican drug cartels, and helping clients evade U.S. taxes and sanctions.

In a WND.com interview with the HSBC whistleblower John Cruz, who had exposed HSBC’s dirty operations, in which Cruz states that Lynch never even contacted him for his information, Cruz said,

“Nobody from the U.S. attorney’s office in New York ever contacted me, despite numerous attempts that I made to get the documentation I had of HSBC illegal money-laundering to federal prosecutors.”

Lynch’s stonewall is even more extreme, given the information Cruz had already provided to Federal agencies. Two years before, in 2010, Cruz’s attorney handed over documentation to a supervisor of the DHS’s Homeland Security Investigators, but in early 2012 DHS even denied that it had met with Cruz’s attorney. Not surprisingly, nothing came of the DHS investigation. In 2012, Cruz got the same runaround from the Internal Revenue Service.

Lynch’s DOJ knew of other HSBC criminal activity going back to 2007. As The New York Times gingerly put it earlier this month:

The documents had been procured by an HSBC whistleblower in 2007. They were shared with authorities in at least France, Spain, Britain, and the United States.

Covering the same record, Matt Taibi, in the Feb. 9 Rolling Stone, states:

As EIR noted in its 2012 coverage of the HSBC money-laundering, EIR’s Dope, Inc. first reported in 1978, that HSBC, then called the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, functioned as the central bank for the opium and heroin trade of the British Empire and its East India Company, dating back to 1865, when the HongShang was founded.

HSBC’s Mexican Dope Cartel Money; How Much of It Went to Obama’s ’08 Campaign?

HSBC: Flagship Bank Of Britain’s Dope, Inc.

LaRouche’s Campaign Vs. Dope, Inc. & HSBC

HSBC Funding Was Behind the Terror in Bangladesh, Mumbai

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.”

Germany’s Der Spiegel on Feb. 15 attacked Victoria Nuland, President Obama’s Nazi-loving representative for Europe, as “America’s Riot Diplomat” — the sobriquet can mean both that Nuland acts disruptively, and that she creates riots (as on the Maidan in Ukraine). The “Politics” column states that Nuland poses a threat to America’s allies, and that while she is supposed to solve the crisis of Ukraine and relations with Russia, “In the crisis, Nuland herself has become the problem.”

EIR Founding Editor Lyndon LaRouche has called the immediate firing of Nuland, an indispensable step to avoid a plunge into thermonuclear war with Russia.

Der Spiegel described a closed-door meeting, apparently reported on anonymously both to it and to the Bild newspaper, held by Assistant Secretary of State Nuland at the Munich Security Conference one week ago, with “perhaps two dozen U.S. diplomats and Senators.” There Nuland gave instructions to “fight against the Europeans” on the issue of arming Ukraine to fight Russia. She was described as “bitterly” referring to the German Chancellor’s and French President Hollande’s meeting with Russian President Putin as “Merkel’s Moscow junk,” and “Moscow bullshit,” and she welcomed a Senator’s calling German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen the “Defeatism Minister.”

These reports give the lie to Nuland’s claim on the morning of Feb. 11, when the Minsk Agreement was announced, that “we [the United States] enthusiastically support it.”

Der Spiegel says that Nuland does not stop short of calling for “heavy weapons” to be given by NATO to Ukraine. Wishfully, it says that her policy is quite different than Obama’s, and that he must deal with that. In reality, he is the greater danger still, of thermonuclear war.

Monday’s meeting of the Eurogroup, comprised of the euro area finance ministers, on Greek and European debt ended abruptly and with no result when Greece summarily rejected a “Draft Statement” which would have merely extended the bank bailout and anti-Greece austerity conditions. These conditions have resulted in a Greek GDP drop of more than 20% over the past four years, and drastically impoverished the country’s population. The new government has been proposing that the European Union institutions agree to a debt writedown as was implemented by the 1953 London Debt Conference for German debt, along with measures to restore growth as were successful in Germany at that time.

Greece’s determination, backed by anti-austerity demonstrations across Europe and 80% support for the government in the country, was restated in a New York Times op-ed yesterday by Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis. He wrote that Greece has established “red lines” against austerity and will not cross them even if it is offered no assistance.

“We are determined to clash with mighty vested interests,”

Varoufakis wrote, no doubt referring to Wall Street and European megabanks which dumped their debt on Greek taxpayers via the 2009 and 2011 bailouts.

The Eurogroup’s refusal to discuss the Greek proposals stands in shocking contrast to its pledge of at least $2.1 billion direct aid for the completely bankrupt government in Kiev, Ukraine, and additional indirect participation in a $17.5 billion IMF loan. The total $40 billion package for Ukraine, recommended Feb. 12 by IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, is itself astonishing. Ukraine is bankrupt, publicly states it cannot pay its debts, has an economy contracting at 8%/year, a 28.5% inflation rate and 23% central bank discount loan rate. The fact that the Kiev government and its backers say it is at war with Russia, seemed to be enough for the IMF’s Lagarde.

The euro currency fell by three-quarters of a cent after the breakup of the debt negotiations with Greece, resuming a slide which had paused while they were occurring over the past two weeks.

Potential backing beyond Europe for the Greek government’s fight was again indicated by the invitation to China just received by Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias.

In the United States, three Democratic Members of Congress — Dina Titus of Nevada, Niki Tsongas of Massachusetts and John Sarbanes of Maryland — wrote to President Obama Feb. 16 that “it is important for the United States to stand by Greece’s side and use their influence, where possible, to help Greece create a new path to economic prosperity.” Their letter is reported by the Greek Reporter website.