- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

I think the Internet's ability to increase global frustration by informing people what is available, and what they do not have, is underrated.

you can definitely make that point, but how else can a head of steam big enough to change anything fundamental build up?

history shows the printing press and its effects on peoples' desire to overthrow oppression, the internet can do orders of magnitude more, it's barely begun.

maybe frustration is just the beginning of empowerment, certainly it beats apathy and ignorance, which have been the meat and potatoes of european public economic/political awareness since? WW2?

i had never connected the dots before, but the wave of rage and yearning in these latest uprisings in n. africa and the middle east may well be the thread that will unravel the plunderers' plans to keep milking us europeans all'americana, captured governments, finance 'riding bareback', institutionalised ponzi pyramids et al.

certainly any major interruption/price rise of the oil supply will accelerate the pace of change, hopefully educating many hitherto untroubled by serious crises, just how we are all in similar -if not identical- lifeboats.

frustration is the first twitch in the moribund, learned-helpless, shock-doctrined populace. even as we are introduced to the sting of the IMF lash here, we can relate better to what is happening in the arab world, whose corruption has much -if not all- connection to our greedy meddling and peddling too long.

we are fortunate indeed that the mass of the arab street is not directly blaming us for their plight, and hope this continues, it seems like only the rabid irani theocrats have a hate-on for the west, and that's not even their people, the other maghreb and ME countries want to join with our youth and have a life not that different than the youth here or anywhere else they can have a FB page and chat away...

the internet makes it all seem so tantalisingly just out of reach, it must be infuriating.

as we see...

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

Finally, it may be that Greek banks are repatriating Greek debt by having the ECB back them in their purchases of Greek bonds, thereby paying off outside creditors while the EU and Greek banks take on more EU debt. In other words, the longer these austerity measures continue, then we come to the point when the totality of the debt has moved from private hands to EU taxpayers and Greek banks.

I could live with that. Then all you have to do is shaft the Greek banks and the ECB, which is if nothing else politically easier than shafting German pension funds.

But unless the ECB is moving massively in this market, it's mostly cosmetic anyway, because these buybacks will be matched by Greek interbank debt to the rest of the €-zone. So shafting the Greek banks will still shaft the creditor countries.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.