Public and private media that lied in order to support the bankers and the European political cartel suffered an overwhelming denial. All of them prognosticated a very close vote on the Greek referendum, but last Sunday a 61.3 % of Greeks voted against the financial proposal from the Troika composed of the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission.

That was the final score, regardless of the information terrorism, regardless of a distortion of news, regardless of alteration of images and alarming headlines, with which they intended to inspire panic among those that could be inclined to oppose the financial interest supported by Brussels.

The Greek crisis, as with other European countries, exists because of having paid, with public money, a private debt incurred by large banks, whose balance will remain virtual and precarious until their assets materialize in the real economy. It is because of having paid this alien debt that governments must now squeeze money out of their people. It is to pay an alien debt that they now need a surplus in their budgets at the expense of denying or making public services more expensive and the privatization of public property. It is rather ironic that the process of squeezing people is being called austerity, when the cause of the debt was precisely the lack of austerity of the financial sector and the complicit disregard of their prodigality by a European political class that sublimates itself in a European Commission that no European people elected.

To liberate Europe

It is significant that the tyranny exercised from Brussels by EU officials, who were only appointed and are unrepresentative, is now confronted from Athens, where they invented direct democracy. It is the condensation of a diffuse political and economic conflict that has been brewing. There are growing voices calling for reforms, the most notorious are Syriza in Greece, the National Front in France, Podemos in Spain, the Northern League in Italy and Fidesz in Hungary; whose growing electoral base is evidence of an increasing uneasiness with the anti-European policies imposed from Brussels.

A good summary of the European problem was made in Italy by Beppe Grillo, from the Five Star Movement. He said: "Bankers are neither good nor bad, they want profits. What should never be allowed is to let bankers decide policy options. Then, this is what happens."

European bankers are not the only ones who rule in the European Union, also the great Anglo-Saxon banks rule. The President of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi comes from the US bank Goldman Sachs and it was under his leadership that the ECB, in January 2015, started delivering a "quantitative easing" of € 1.3 trillion (million millions), to relieve the US Federal Reserve, whose quantitative easing was eroding the US dollar value. For those who do not know, quantitative easing is a euphemism for issuing money without funds that is given to banks under the pretext of creating liquidity, but, as is well known, is only used to pump money into the stock markets in order to rise the value of those papers that constitute the banks main assets. The ECB issue also served to devalue the Euro, discourage the abandonment of the dollar, to reduce the real value of all European assets and to facilitate leveraged take overs of European companies by American companies.

It is scandalous that the ECB has € 1.3 trillion for the bankers to keep on betting in the Stock Markets while on the other hand it persists in demanding from the Greek government reforms that will bust its economy and starve millions of Greeks, in order to pay, without any discount, a debt of € 280.8 billion. A debt with very murky origins which should be investigated and that renowned economists like Stiglitz and Krugman believe impossible to repay by an economy the size of Greece's.

Interestingly enough, the beginning of a revolution against the government of and for the bankers has started in Greece, which besides being the cradle of democracy, of economics and of political philosophy, is also the member of the European Union which is physically and culturally furthest from Brussels.

The structure of the Greek debt

The 280.8 billion euros owed by the Greek government are a 160% of Greece's GDP.  82.5% of it is directly or indirectly owed to other governments. The largest creditor is the European Financial Stability Facility - EFSF) with €130.9 billion. Next come bilateral loans from euro area countries, for €52.9 billion. Third is the ECB, with €27 billion of Greek bonds and fourthly the International Monetary Fund, with a credit of €21 billion. The European countries most vulnerable to a Greek bankruptcy, because of their contributions to EFSF and their bilateral loans, are Germany, France and Italy. The nearest maturities foresee payments totaling € 7 billion by the end of July. The other outstanding payments due this year total € 49 billion.

The Greek debt structure perfectly illustrates the transfer to the public sector of a financial risk incurred by private banks. A large part of the Greek debt comes from purchase of financial papers of foreign private banks by Greek private banks. When Greek banks discovered that they had bought worthless securities (derivatives, credit swaps, etc.) they were already in bankruptcy. The Greek government rescued the banks and assumed their debts, paid the debts through institutional loans that were easily granted and those debts are now a national debt. The Greek common people cannot afford to pay it and the losers will be the taxpayer people of other countries; meanwhile it has been forgotten that the origin of it all is the stupidity of avid private bankers on either side.

Another important part of the Greek public debt was incurred because of huge military spending as a NATO member; acquiring airplanes, submarines, warships and missiles that Greece does not produce and does not need, because, up to now, no one is threatening to attack Greece.

The consequences of the referendum

In 2011, when they had already transferred the Greek private debt to the Greek public sector and negotiations with the Troika started, the Papandreou government threatened to call a referendum on the Troika proposals, but did not dare. The Tsipras government has managed to skillfully play that card that exposes the contradiction between the dictates of Brussels and democracy.

The Greek economy was only 2% of the economy of the European Union and after the austerity measures, it is even less. By low economic impact of Greece in the European economy the referendum on the Troika proposals is not so important. The importance is because its strategic position to shake off the prevailing policy.

Firstly, it puts in evidence the conflict between the institutions of the European Union and democracy, at a time when there is electoral growth by those parties that point that out and when sanctions against Russia, which cause losses to the European economy in the tens of billions, show the degree of submission from Brussels to Washington.

Secondly, because if the outcome is that the debt is substantially reduced, as with Argentina, that will have an economic demonstration effect against those advocates of austerity as the only solution, such as Rajoy y Cia. If there is no reduction it is likely that Greece will leave the euro zone, and that may have a political demonstration effect for other European countries undergoing austerity regimes, for similar reasons.

Thirdly, Greece is a member of the European Union and NATO, but with ancient spiritual, economic and cultural ties with Russia. If the people and the Greek government become exasperated, they could accept from Russia the support that the European Union denies them. In that case, Greece could decide to quit the European Union, appealing to the relevant clause in the Treaty of Lisbon and probably request accession to the Eurasian Common Market headed by Moscow. In such event its permanence in NATO would be uncomfortable, due to present NATO members’ military and media harassment of Russia.

Fourthly, the overwhelming result of 61.3% against the proposal from the Troika is the epitaph for the old Greek political class, which was still requesting its approval.

Conclusion

As Homer well said in The Odissey: «Genius is discovered in adverse fortune, in prosperity it hides.»

Geneva, 07/05/2015