The Golden Dawn Murder Case
Larry Summers and the New Fascism
By Greg Palast for Truthout
Monday, 7 October 2013
On September 18, hip-hop artist Pavlos Fyssas, a.k.a. Killah P, was stabbed outside a bar in Keratsini, Greece.
Larry Summers has an air-tight alibi. But I don't believe it.
Larry didn’t hold the knife: The confessed killer is some twisted
member of Golden Dawn, a political party made up of skin-head freaks,
anti-immigrant fear-mongers, anti-Muslim/ anti-Semitic/ anti-Albanian
sociopaths and ultra-patriot fruitcakes. Think of it as the Tea Party
goes Greek.
Following Fyssas’ killing, other groups of dangerous psychopathic
misfits, namely the European Union and Greece’s governing coalition,
moved to ban Golden Dawn.
Over the weekend, Greece’s rulers arrested six members of Parliament who
belong to Golden Dawn. Apparently, Greece’s political leaders prefer
democracy as defined by Egypt’s General Sisi to the precepts of
Aristotle and Thomas Jefferson.
To my friends on the Greek Left: It’s sickening to watch you cheer the arrest of Golden Dawn parliamentarians.
Mark my words:
You are next.
Listen up:
My investigation reveals that behind the banning of Golden Dawn, besides
the usual European distaste for democracy, is something far more
sinister: the ruling parties are distracting the public from their own
involvement in the crime.
The rise in violence and hate-crimes is no surprise. The official
unemployment rate in Greece is 28%, and over 60% among young men. No
wonder desperate youths are wrapping batons in Greek flags and beating
immigrants: When people are pressed to the wall, they hunt for their
tormentors –– and too often find their fellow victims to blame.
Economic devastation breeds fascism. In the 1930s, the hungry and angry
sought relief in hyper-patriotism, racism and pogroms. In the 1980s
Reagan Recession in the USA, when factories shut down in the Midwest,
the hopeless unemployed joined right-wing skinhead cults and went on a
killing rampage –– beginning with the murder of Jewish journalist Alan
Berg and ending with the bombing of a government building in Oklahoma,
killing 168 people.
Vultures Over Athens
Golden Dawn is a symptom of the nation's illness, not its cause.
Unfortunately, the Brown-shirts go after easy targets –– Pakistanis,
Gypsies, Africans, whoever is different and easy to whack. It's a lot
easier to stab a hip-hop rapper than it is to go after a hedge-fund
shark.
The
real culprits behind the suffering are well camouflaged. So let me
name some: In Greece, we begin with billionaires Kenneth Dart and Paul
“The Vulture” Singer.
Dart and Singer bought up Greek government bonds for pennies on the
dollar. While the holders of 97% of Greek bonds agreed to accept a loss
of 75% of their value, Dart and Singer demanded several hundred percent
more than they paid. Then Dart and Singer threatened the
dead-broke Greek government. If Greece did not pay this ransom, Dart and
Singer would declare Greek bonds in default. Every bank in Europe
holding these government debts as reserve funds would face technical
bankruptcy; the value of government bonds worldwide would implode in
value and the entire hemisphere would face a new financial collapse.
It was financial terrorism, and the Greek government gave in. It paid
the full ransom demanded. Dart grabbed over half a billion dollars
($513 million) from the Greek treasury –– and only the gods know how
much Singer has pocketed.
[Get the full story on Singer the Vulture, read
Billionaires & Ballot Bandits and
Vultures' Picnic.]
How was this vulture food paid for? With “austerity” — tightening a
belt that’s already not much bigger than its buckle. To pay Singer and
Dart, the Greek government announced it would fire 15,000 workers.
What’s sick is that the ruling coalition (or
misruling
coalition) does not say this is to cover the payoffs to the vultures.
Rather, the government says it is the just punishment Greeks deserve
for their "laziness and greed." The victims’ punishment is called,
“austerity.”
The Austerity Fairy Tale
My children often ask me, “Daddy, where does ‘austerity’ come from?” And I tell them:
Once upon a time, there was a good fairy named John Maynard Keynes.
He wanted to stop depressions, financial crises and suffering, so he
conceived of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. He
said, When a nation’s foreign exchange earnings drop (say, if the price
of oil rises or Greek tourism falls because its currency is
over-valued), the countries taking the poor nations’ money, rich
countries like Germany and the USA, would lend it back via the IMF.
By this rule, the rich lending to the poor, the world prospered and
lived happily ever after … until the 1980s, when a wicked witch, known
as the Iron Lady, and America’s gaga grandpa, Reagan of the Rich,
insisted that the IMF and the World Bank beat poor nations with a stick
called, “structural adjustment.”
Nations facing destitution because of higher oil costs, currency
imbalance or predatory interest rate demands were “structurally
adjusted.” Structural adjustment is a cruel and debilitating potion of
mass firings of public employees, cheap sell-offs of national assets and
deregulation of corporate profiteering. This ripping the wings off the
better angels of government is called, “austerity.”
The good fairy Keynes had warned about this evil potion, this snake
oil called “austerity.” Cutting government spending during a recession,
he said, will only make things worse.
And that’s what happened: In every single case, the “adjusted” nations’ economies were devastated.
Structural adjustment reached its cruel apotheosis in the early 1990s
under the guidance of the World Bank’s Chief Economist, one Larry
Summers.
But then, in 1997, Summers’ post was taken by Prof. Joseph Stiglitz.
In 2001,
I met Stiglitz
whom I’d heard was quietly expressing grave doubts about austerity and
structural adjustment à la Summers. He agreed to go public. Over
several hours of discussion, which
I recorded for BBC TV,
Stiglitz charged that IMF-imposed austerity was “ a little like the
Middle Ages, when the patient died they would say well, we stopped the
bloodletting too soon, he still had a little blood in him.”
Stiglitz detailed for me the ill effects of the “structural adjustment”
demands, including “free” trade, which he likened to the Opium Wars;
bank deregulation, which he found ludicrously dangerous; privatization,
which Stiglitz called “briberization”; and budget-cutting austerity.
The budget cuts and free-market nostrums, Stiglitz told me, were as
cruel as they were stupid. And he said of those who profited off these
IMF
diktats, “
They don’t care if people live or die.”
Stiglitz went on to win the Nobel Prize in economics for his skepticism of
Markets über Alles.
So how, a decade after austerity, briberization and all their cruelties
exposed and discredited, did Greece (and Spain and Portugal and too many
others) end up under austerity’s bloody grip?
To begin with, in 2000, Larry Summers, as US Treasury Secretary,
successfully demanded the World Bank fire Stiglitz and purged the Bank
and IMF of austerity apostasy.
Why? Austerity may fail the public, but it’s damn profitable for those on the inside.
All you need is a riot and a few dead bodies.
The IMF Riots
Among Stiglitz’ stunning revelations to me was his description of “the
IMF riot.” I showed him confidential World Bank and IMF plans for the
nation of Ecuador. These included what seemed to be a warning to that
nation’s finance minister that austerity could lead to violence in the
streets, “social unrest” — which the World Bank recommended be crushed
with “resolve”. In Ecuador, “resolve” meant tanks.
Did the IMF really write the riots into the plans?
Yes, Stiglitz said, matter-of-factly. “We had a name for it ‘The IMF Riot’”.
When a nation is “down and out, [the IMF] takes advantage and squeezes
the last pound of blood out of them. They turn up the heat until,
finally, the whole caldron blows up”.
And that’s what we’re seeing in Greece. It began in May 2010, when some
sick, misguided berserker set fire to a bank in Athens and killed four
bank employees. The killings did the trick: the Left’s protests
against insane austerity and banker gangsterism came to a halt.
Still, people could see that the austerity medicine was making Greece
ill. So, they put their hopes in a new party, Syriza, which, from
nowhere, became the second highest vote-getter in Greece by promising to
oppose austerity. Once in office, the faux-Left Syriza completely sold
out its positions.
That leaves Golden Dawn, although diseased by racism and violently bent,
it is the only one of Greece’s top four parties to stand firm against
rabid austerity and the economy being chained like a beaten dog to
Germany’s currency.
In 2010, the bank burning was used to discredit protests by the Left.
Today, once again, the Greek government, dancing on its hind legs,
begging for a biscuit from German bankers, has used a murder as an
excuse to outlaw the only major party dissenting from the austerity
suicide pact.
I wish I could say that the reason Golden Dawn is being banned is
because of the violent bend of its racist followers. But that’s just
not what’s going on here.
Dimitris Kazakis, the leader of Greece’s true progressive party, the
United People’s Front (EPAM), has spoken out against Golden Dawn’s
racist violence — and
the greater danger of the bogus charges created to arrest members of Parliament. He scolds Greeks, reminding them that this is how the military dictatorship seized power in 1967.
So, who are the
real Fascists?
Fascism, as defined since the days of
Il Duce, is the official combine of government and big business. By that definition, Golden Dawn is the only
non-Fascist party among Greece’s top four. And that is why Golden Dawn has been targeted for elimination.
I hope my fellow progressives will excuse me for not applauding.
* * * * *
For more by Greg Palast, click
here.
