Moods rule the world. When the mood was tolerant upon making fortunes from overseas slavery, fortunes were made in Europe and the USA.
George Washington inherited ten slaves at the age of ten, when his dad passed away. When he died he and his wife had hundreds of slaves. Washington spent a last few weeks of his life making great efforts to catch a slave of his wife, the 22 year old Ms. Judge, who had escaped to the north. Washington never freed one slave, in spite of the huge pressure from his friend Lafayette.
Lafayette to whom, after all, Washington owed his presidency: Lafayette persuaded Louis XVI to go to all-out war to create the USA; on the way, he disobeyed the King’s orders, and the monarch sent him to prison.
Enough Games With High Finance, Time For War
At Thermopylae, 300 Spartans blocked an army of several hundred thousand savage slaves of plutocracy for days, before being literally stabbed in the back. However, the Spartan delaying action allowed the Athenians to evacuate Athens and prepare for the battle of Salamis, where the giant Persian fleet (composed in great part of captive nations), was sent to the bottom of the sea.
That was in 480 BCE. A time when the Greek invented, and defended a new civilization, Direct Democracy. That time is with us again. The despicable suspects of the Eurogroup are the new savages. They have to be fought, and for that, the mood has to change. Enough tolerance for High Finance.
Lafayette was a mood changer. Later, given the order to fire on We The People, as commander of the National Guard, he refused, and made the Revolution of 1789 possible.
Slavery was a mood. A satanic mood.
What are today’s satanic moods?
Moods depend upon moods. Putin’s mood depends upon the fact he has seen Western plutocrats getting away with murder and ridiculous assertions.
The mood, in the world, is that those who create, and get to play with, money, rule the universe.
Unbelievably, the “Eurogroup” (all the finance ministers of the governments of the Eurozone) sent Greece an ultimatum.
“The Greek authorities committed to ensure appropriate primary fiscal surpluses and financing in order to guarantee debt sustainability in line with the targets agreed in the November 2012 Eurogroup statement. Moreover, any new measures should be funded, and not endanger financial stability.”
As Paul Krugman puts it: “Translation (if you look back at that Eurogroup statement): no give whatsoever on the primary surplus of 4.5 percent of GDP.
There was absolutely no way Tsipras and company could sign on to such a statement, which makes you wonder what the Eurogroup ministers think they’re doing.”
Krugman is right on that one.
What the Eurogroup ministers are thinking is that, if they want their careers and retirements to advance nicely, they better abide by the mood of High Finance.
Varoufakis replied with: ”No Time For Games In Europe.”
He starts this way: “ATHENS — I am writing this piece on the margins of a crucial negotiation with my country’s creditors — a negotiation the result of which may mark a generation, and even prove a turning point for Europe’s unfolding experiment with monetary union.
Game theorists analyze negotiations as if they were split-a-pie games involving selfish players. Because I spent many years during my previous life as an academic researching game theory, some commentators rushed to presume that as Greece’s new finance minister I was busily devising bluffs, stratagems and outside options, struggling to improve upon a weak hand.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
If anything, my game-theory background convinced me that it would be pure folly to think of the current deliberations between Greece and our partners as a bargaining game to be won or lost via bluffs and tactical subterfuge.
The trouble with game theory, as I used to tell my students, is that it takes for granted the players’ motives. In poker or blackjack this assumption is unproblematic. But in the current deliberations between our European partners and Greece’s new government, the whole point is to forge new motives. To fashion a fresh mind-set that transcends national divides, dissolves the creditor-debtor distinction in favor of a pan-European perspective, and places the common European good above petty politics, dogma that proves toxic if universalized, and an us-versus-them mind-set.”
I sent this letter to Varoufakis (the New York Times published an abridge version):
Dear Mr. Varoufakis, Finance Minister of Greece. Civilization is not a game, indeed. Game theory assumes selfish players (as you, an academic with a career in Game Theory says). Civilization is not about selfish players exclusively. High Finance is, though.
Civilization is just the amplification of human nature as it is meant to be, at its best, inside a tribe. However the peaceful life of a tribe depends upon the fundament of humanity, and that is love.
Without love, no human baby would ever survive more than a few days. We are born out of love. So is civilization. Sustainable civilization, that is.
In the past century, Germany had a pattern of atrocities that rested on the meta-principle of obeying orders from authority, no matter what.
That is in Kant, as Eichmann pointed out for his “defense”. Anything else was “Schuld” (debt, fault).
So Germany had a pattern of finding “right” only what fit its leadership. So far the banking crisis in Europe has brought Germany 40 billion Euros in profits it would not otherwise have made (as investors flocked to German sovereign debt). Something similar has happened with France (making lots of money from the crisis).
What authorities are German authorities now evoking, to act as robots anxious to keep Greece as a “debt colony”?
Obviously those who escaped after extending the loans that could not be repaid, private bankers from such nations as Britain, France and Germany.
The world is still under the order of High Finance. For High Finance, Greece is an example that needs to be made. For those who want to break High Finance, the new Greek government shows the way.
Because “right” has to be defined according to the Greek people, not a world of High Finance, which has long gone completely mad.
To check for madness, see the $800 trillions of financial “derivatives”, more than ten times world GDP. Contemplate also France, which has four banks that, should any of them fail, would bring down the world financial system.
You suggest to target “large-scale corruption” instead of the Greek middle-class with its privately owned pharmacies. However, the largest-scale corruption in this world is High Finance itself, the authorities German authorities abide to.
Greece saw worse, at Thermopylae and Salamis. Sometimes, it is right to fight, just because it’s right, no matter what.
If one is to die, one better die, standing up in defense of the right principles.
Patrice Ayme’
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 