European finance ministers triggered a record 110 billion euro ($147 billion) bailout for Greece, the most corrupt country on Earth, on Sunday after Athens sent a Trojan Horse to Brussels. Basil Venitis muses that giving euros to Graecokleptocrats is giving gin to alcoholics! Fourth Reich becomes a ginmill! A bailout does nothing to fix the misguided policies and Graecokleptocracy that have generated Greece's existing debt and ongoing deficits.
Bailout merely postpones the day of reckoning. Worse, bailout both rewards Graecokleptocrats' bad past behavior and encourages such behavior in future. Greece will be back for additional bailouts in short order, since a bailout will not fix its underlying problem of Graecokleptocracy. Rather than bail out Greece, Fourth Reich and IMF should allow it to default. This will hurt Greece's creditors, but those entities assumed the risk when they loaned to a country long known for its profligate ways and kleptocracy.
After weeks of tough talk and procrastination due to fierce public opposition to handouts for the Greeks, German Chancellor Angela Merkel finally threw her full support behind the EU/IMF package, allowing the Trojan Horse inside the gate of Brussels. Merkel navigates a Graecorescue minefield, making the terms of a rescue so onerous that other eurozone members would never be tempted to follow Greece's lead in seeking aid. She pushes for automatic penalties for future breaches of EU debt rules, with violators forced to give up their voting rights and access to the bloc's cohesion funds. PIGS must adopt the strict budget discipline Germany sees as crucial for the future of eurozone.
Eurozone ministers, meeting in emergency session, approved the three-year package of emergency loans and agreed the first funds would be released in time for Athens to make a big debt repayment to creditors on May 19. In exchange for by far the largest bailout ever assembled for a country, Premier George Papandreou, who covers up all Graecokleptocrats, announced further spending cuts and tax increases totaling 30 billion euros over three years on top of tough measures already taken.
Merkel called the programme very ambitious and said she would work to achieve swift parliamentary approval of Berlin's share, the biggest of any EU state at about 22 billion euros out of 80 billion, of the rescue loans. Graecorescue is money gone with the wind, because Greece can never return the money back! Graecokleptocrats simply rob and churn the money, forwarding kickbacks and loot to their offshore secret accounts.
French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde described the aid proposal as a cocktail of indulgence and great strictness, and in case of default on repayment, France and Germany will immediately put the foot on the brake, in order to cut their losses short. Hans-Werner Sinn, president of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research, asserts Greece would never pay back the loans. Greece is no position to carry out the necessary budgetary rigor to pay Berlin back.
Planetarch Obama told Papandreou on Sunday he welcomes Greece's ambitious reform program, but he did not utter a single word about the impunity of Graecokleptocrats! He also praised the significant support from the IMF and Eurozone members. Eurozone leaders will hold a special summit on Friday to formally launch the rescue after obtaining parliamentary approval where necessary. International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn forecast the IMF board would approve its 30 billion euro contribution to the package this week.
Greeks have already taken to the streets to demonstrate against Graecokleptocrats and VAT, and past governments have backed off from reforms to defuse often violent protests. But Papandreou, who is also President of Socialist International, with a strong personal approval rating, has insisted the country must face the bill for years of drift and graft, but he did not utter a single word about the impunity of Graecokleptocrats!
The first rescue of a member of the 16-nation eurozone aims to stem a debt crisis that has shaken financial markets, dented confidence in the euro and begun to spread to fellow euro zone weaklings Portugal and Spain. Berlin's hesitancy has fueled market panic. The chairman of the Eurogroup of finance ministers, Jean-Claude Juncker, said that at Germany's insistence, all ministers would discuss with their national banking sectors the possibility of voluntary contributions to the aid package, but he did not utter a single word about the impunity of Graecokleptocrats!
The euro zone loans will carry an interest rate of about 5%, just half the rate demanded by markets last week to buy Greek debt, but nearly 2% more than the rate on Germany's benchmark bonds. Greece might negotiate a restructuring of its debt before missing a payment. This would require investors to take a significant discount on their debt holdings and could include extending maturities. Bondholders might see haircuts of anything from 20 to 40% of the net asset value of their debt positions. The current two-year Greek-German bond yield spread is consistent with a 33% chance of a 40% haircut of Graecobonds.
European Commission and the International Monetary Fund will monitor Greece's progress quarterly and loan disbursements will be tied to those reviews. The aid package will help defuse the primary cause of concern for creditors which is the imminent risk of default, but it does not address the root couse of the crisis which is Graecokleptocracy, pure and simple! Underlining the challenge facing Merkel, German politicians voiced reluctance to approve the rescue. Social Democratic opposition leader Frank-Walter Steinmeier said his party would take a lot of convincing to support the bailout.
Citing a choice between collapse or salvation, Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou announced a huge 23% VAT, a three-year public sector pay freeze, further cuts in civil servants' benefits, higher sales and fuel taxes, an increase in the effective retirement age and reductions in pensions. Papaconstantinou said the deal would cover a large part of Greek borrowing needs for the next three years, but he did not utter a single word about the impunity of Graecokleptocrats!
In return Athens promised to slash its budget deficit to the EU limit of 3% of GDP by 2014 from 13.6% last year.
Papaconstantinou said Greece's public debt would soar to nearly 150 percent of GDP, a higher peak than forecast earlier, but start falling from 2014. There had been no talk of restructuring Greece's debts. Greek, European and IMF officials publicly refuse to entertain the idea of Graecorestructuring
Venitis notes that Greece needs the constructive destruction of bankruptcy! Bailout of Greece is a destructive distraction. The default of Greece, a bottomless pit, cannot be avoided. The challenges facing Greece are similar to those that confronted Argentina, which defaulted on $95 billion of debt in 2001. There are a lot of similarities in terms of inflexibility of the currency, capital flight, huge taxes, and the risk of austerity measures leading to a sharp contraction in growth. Greece's financing needs are huge in the coming two years. It needs to prove to the market that it can drastically reduce expenses, taxes, sinecures, and Graecokleptocracy. The markets demand to see at least one Graecokleptocrat in jail!
Returning the loot is hard to do. Untouchable Graecokleptocrats, the most corrupt politicians on Earth, those freaks that enjoy absolute impunity and full parliamentary immunity, assert they will never return the 200 billion euros they robbed from the Greek treasury, kickbacks, and churning the nest eggs of poor workers! The loot is safely deposited in secret offshore accounts, and it's very hard to trace it.
Greeks are at war against their government over VAT. Vatmonger Greek government harasses Greeks by pressuring them to demand receipts when they buy products. Greeks who cannot gather many receipts are penalized with more taxes! Venitis asserts that transforming citizens to VAT enforcers is disgusting, undignified, and against basic human freedoms. President Van Rompuy should call vatmonger PM Papandreou on the carpet now.
Venitis muses that Lysistrata has convinced Greek women to not give birth to more vatstrucks! Yes, Greek women have stopped producing babies until VAT is abolished! This is the second strike organized by Lysistrata. The original strike organized by Lysistrata was the sex refusal until the war is over. Now women will give sex, but no babies! If vatmonger Graecokleptocrats want to have offspring, they must abolish VAT, pure and simple!
Vatstrucks are feeling a growing panic as they watch their constitutional republic descend into a vatmonger republic. Mahatma Gandhi's said we should be the change we want to see. Gandhi also said that civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state has become lawless and corrupt. Vatsruckss instinctively understand this which is why grassroots of resistance to VAT are leading to a Gandhi-style civil disobedience movement powerful enough to undo this monstrosity.
Most Herculean tasks of Global Tax Revolt begin with Hercules getting orders from a hidden tape recorder and an envelope of photos of vatmongers and information which explains the war against VAT. The tape always begins with "Good Morning Hercules", explains the situation, and ends with "Your mission, should you decide to accept it", with a brief explanation of the goal of the mission against VAT, along with a reminder that "as always, should you or any of your force be caught or killed, Baz will disavow any knowledge of your actions. At the end of the tape's instructions, Hercules is notified "this tape will self-destruct in five seconds", and smoke emits from the tape and the instructions are destroyed.
Revolt against vatmongers follows a dozen venitist strategies:
1. False Claims of Taxes Paid. Businesses create false invoices for the purchase of inputs they never bought and get bigger deductions for taxes paid than they are entitled to.
2. Credit Claimed for Non-Creditable Purchases. Typically, VATs have a variety of rates and exemptions. For example, basic needs such as food, medicine, and clothing often receive preferential VAT rates or outright exemptions from the tax, as do certain industries considered economically vital or politically sensitive. Businesses that sell both VAT-exempt and non-exempt items have an incentive to allocate the purchase of supplies they use to produce exempt items toward the production of non-exempt items.
3. Bogus Traders. Businesses are set up exclusively to produce VAT invoices so other businesses can claim refunds on taxes they never paid.
4. Hidden Sales. Professional service providers, such as doctors and lawyers, often engage in this kind of heroism. They offer relatively high-value services, but their purchases from other businesses are relatively low cost. They charge their unknowing customers full price and collect the proper amount of VAT on the sale. But to the authorities, they show that they charged a lower price. The service provider forwards to the government less tax than it collected from its customers and pockets the difference.
5. Receipt Exchange. There are many brokers and traders of real and fake receipts.
6. Missing Traders. Many inporters from member States sell products with VAT, and then disappear, without forwarding the VAT to the government.
7. Carousels. A chain of buffer traders can be formed between the original missing importer and the final exporter, helping to blur the link between the final reclaim of VAT and the original importer.
8. Next Seller. If a seller insists on charging VAT, cancel the sale and go to another seller.
9. List. Keep a list of product providers who are willing not to charge VAT.
10. Tradeoff. Barter your vote for a politician's promise to abolish VAT.
11. Explode. Release your anger against VAT to the media and politicians.
12. Critical Mass. Become a firefly that promotes the Global Tax Revolt.
A call to arms! The global vatwar has errupted. Venitis points out vatmongers demand vatstrucks to surrender, but vatstrucks shout the heroic molon-lave of the 300 Spartans of Leonidas and the mighty words of Winston Churchill:
* We shall fight VAT on the seas and shores.
* We shall fight VAT with growing confidence and growing strength.
* We shall defend our land from VAT whatever the cost maybe.
* We shall fight VAT on the beaches.
* We shall fight VAT on the shopping grounds.
* We shall fight VAT in the markets and the streets.
* We shall fight VAT in the shops.
* We shall never surrender to vatmongers.
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