The Banking System, System Collapse: The Big Fat Greek Bank Run Episode 3

""It appears times up for the Greek Trojan Horse that has been parked outside of the European Central Bank for years, slowly but steadily bleeding the euro-zone dry of now in excess of Euro 360 billion (E240 billion bailout + E120 billion banking system support), as the euro-zone bureaucrats and politicians are finally starting to understand what many have understood for the past 5 years that Greece just cannot function within the Euro-zone, it should never have been allowed to join with bogus economic statistics and subsequently should not have been bailed out again and again and again.

BBC Newsnight briefly reports that at a meeting of european finance ministers on Thursday a senior official of the ECB was asked will the Greek banks be able to open tomorrow (Friday), he said yes, but I don't know about Monday.

Greece Bank Run Going Exponential

The Greek banking system has been bleeding deposits all year, having seen at least Euro 40 billion withdrawn this year, leaving behind approx Euro 120 billion. However, as the end game approaches (Varoufakis is apparently an expert on Game Theory) the rate of withdrawal has accelerated to over Euro 1 billion per day, up from approx Euro 200 million a day of a week ago, and could keep doubling every other day, which is despite ECB support on a DAILY basis without which Greece's banking system would have collapsed 5 years ago! Which means Greek banks are paying withdrawing depositors with funds from the ECB that to date totals approx Euro 120 billion because the Greek banks have been bankrupt for some time!

Even Greece's central bank panicked by opening warning the Syriza government that Greece was heading for a catastrophic crash out of the euro-zone.

So the worry for depositors is that one day, perhaps Monday, the ECB fails to provide enough liquidity to prevent a banking system collapse when the Greek banks make the call for more money and as Northern Rock illustrates, for already worried savers it only takes a media report of queues outside of banks to trigger an out of control panic reaction that no matter what the politicians state or promise has no effect on panicking savers, fearing that they will only get back a fraction of the value of their original euro deposits after Greece prints its own devalued currency.

My yesterdays article covered the dynamics of the Greek debt crisis that have their roots in the fact that Greece wants a permanent subsidy from other euro-zone member states to subsidise the Greek life style as illustrated by the fact that Greeks can retire as early as from age 26 with most retiring before age 55. Something that many other eurozone member states such as Germany cannot stomach, especially after having sunk Euro 360 billion already into the Greek black hole (read -GREXIT - Greece Wants to Become Scotland, Seeks Permanent Subsidy from Euro Tax Payers.)

It does look like that Greece is galloping towards a GREXIT, in which case that will put pressure onto the other PIIGS member states as the question will be asked who will be next, as I wrote yesterday :

The Big Problem is PorExit, SpaExit and ItaExit.

Greece in economic terms is a flea on the back of the Euro-zone elephant that could easily survive a GREXIT. But the real problem is who would be next, for soon the pressure would mount on the other PIIGS, with Portugal, Spain and Italy vying for who would be next to EXIT the euro-zone, something which the Euro-zone would not survive. Therefore that remains Greece's 'Ace in the hole', which is why they are still in the eurozone, so probably suggests that some sort of fudge will be arrived at that would only DELAY GREXIT for the fundamental reason Greece is BANKRUPT!

A GrExit would also make a BrExit more probable, whilst Putin would be dancing in the Kremlin.""

Greece to Enter ECB Torture Chamber:

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article51133.html 

Mainstream Media Lies for a Better America, One Nation Under Oligarchy

""The corporate mainstream media with its well-paid journalists and increasing concentration of ownership bows to the concerns of advertisers. It tends to be privately owned and its owners have a vested interest in maintaining an economic system based on private ownership and in manufacturing consent for it. Moreover, such outlets these days are increasingly part of major conglomerates, which may include armaments manufacturers, banking or industrial concerns, and will not therefore adopt stances or report on stories that are harmful to the interests of the wider organisation.

The public is thus given access to a world view that is distorted in favour of state-corporate interests. Such interests have succeeded in getting across the message that, for example, the ‘free market’ is the best way to deliver goods and services to people, state provided welfare is bad and ‘individual responsibility’ is good, ‘austerity’ is necessary, privatisation increases efficiency, an endless ‘war on terror’ must be waged on designated enemies, well-being is measured in terms of a never-ending quest for GDP growth, the US and NATO are the ‘world’s policemen’, giant agribusiness must displace peasant farmers to secure food security and gross inequalities and unregulated corporate power are both necessary and legitimate.

Over the past 15 years, numerous ‘alternative’ news websites have sprung up that challenge these assumptions and the belief that ordinary citizens should be passive consumers of a predetermined news agenda. There are now dozens of popular news sites that inform people of issues the mainstream media has deliberately failed to tell people the truth about. There are also many more sites with global reach that exist to scrutinise specific sectors, hold practices to account and counter corporate propaganda (for example, GMWatch, Corporate Europe Observatory, Food & Water Watch, Campaign Against the Arms Trade, etc.).

The existence of ‘alternative’ independent sites has led the European Union to express concerns about the ‘damaging’ effects of people having access to these sources of information. The EU argues that societal consensus is being eroded as people are being ‘led astray’ by dissenting voices on the internet. In the report ‘A free and pluralistic media to sustain European democracy’, the EU feels there is a danger that people are being misguidedly radicalised. It advocates EU funding for ‘responsible’ journalism, getting the EU’s viewpoint across regularly and prominently in the media and placing controls on the net. The EU perceives this to be ‘pluralism’.

What is ‘responsible journalism’?

An article by Annie Day indicates that as a result of its destabilisations, coups, mass bombings and death squads, the US military and the CIA have been responsible for a figure of an estimated ten million deaths since 1945. Yet the corporate media never describes any of this as constituting a form of mass terror. Through the cynical hijacking of the concept of ‘terror’, the US now attempts to justify its ongoing tyranny through a ‘war on terror’, which goes unquestioned on a daily basis by the mainstream media.

Ukraine is the latest example of a US-backed terror campaign, which the corporate media has consistently failed to question. As the world edges ever closer to nuclear war, the mainstream media merely parrots the official lie coming from Washington that the situation is all due to ‘Russian aggression’.

You can also add to that ten million, countless others whose lives have been sacrificed on the altar of corporate profit, which did not rely on the military to bomb peoples and countries into submission but on the IMF, World Bank and WTO. It begs the question how many lives have been cut short across the world because of the inherent structural violence or silent killing of the everyday functioning of predatory capitalism? 

The appropriation of wealth through a system that funnels it from bottom to top via a process of accumulation by dispossession is celebrated by the corporate media as growth, prosperity, and freedom of choice, despite evidence that, from Greece to Spain and beyond, the reality for the majority has been falling wages, increasing poverty, the stripping away of choice and misery.

So where is the ‘responsible journalism’ that the EU calls for?

Does it lie with those journalists in the corporate media whose claim to respectability is their rigid professionalism, their accountability, their objectivity?

If you can call professionalism, accountability and objectivity being in the pay of and not wishing to offend advertising interests, officialdom and powerful corporate interests then they are paragons of absolute responsibility.

Peddling their high salaried deceptions, they have failed and continue to fail the public and genuinely hold power to account. By shining their ‘investigative’ light on ‘parliamentary procedures’, personalities, the rubber stamping of policies and the inane machinations of party politics, they merely serve to maintain and perpetuate the status quo and keep the public in the dark as to the unaccountable self-serving nature of power broking and the unity ofinterests that enable Big Oil, Big Finance, Big Pharma, Big Agra and the rest of them via their secretive think tanks and policy initiatives to keep bleeding us all dry. 

But that’s the role of the media: to help reinforce and reproduce the material conditions of a divisive social system on a daily basis. It’s called having a compliant, toothless media. It’s what the corporate media itself calls part of ‘liberal democracy’. And in this type of ‘liberal democracy’, it is people like Edward Snowden or Julian Assange who expose the wrongdoings of the political-corporate elites that are hounded.

It was George Orwell who said that journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed and everything else is public relations. Orwell was correct. Former CIA boss General Petraeus stated in 2006 that his strategy was to wage a war of perceptions conducted continuously through the news media, while John Pilger observes that the role of respectable journalism in western state crimes – from Iraq to Iran, Afghanistan to Libya - remains taboo. Its role has been to serve as first-choice cheerleader for illegal wars.

Intelligence agencies secure media compliance

There are of course some good journalists working in the corporate mainstream media. But if you think this article mounts to little more than a one-sided attack on the ‘mainstream’ media, you may need to think again.

Many readers will be aware of a recent story about the former editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s largest newspapers, who claimed that he accepted news stories written and given to him by the CIA and published them under his own name. 

This revelation came as a shock to many. But it should not have because  in the UK, for example, the British intelligence agencies along with the CIA has for decades strived to ensure that the mainstream press and TV complied with the interests of the Establishment. In addition to making sure that the British left was subverted, infiltrated and made toothless, the mainstream media was molded by the intelligence agencies to parrot the Establishment’s viewpoints and aims.

How this was achieved is described in the article ‘The Psyops War: British Intelligence and the Covert Propaganda Front and the CIA’s Interference in British Politics.’ ""

http://www.globalresearch.ca/countering-the-lies-of-the-mainstream-media/5441427