Greece Is a Kleptocracy

Charles Hugh Smith |  Of Two Minds

Cover Photo: A giant banner protesting Greece’s austerity measures hangs near the Parthenon on Acropolis hill in Athens early May 4, 2010.PASCAL ROSSIGNOL/REUTERS

Strip away the bailouts and the bogus austerity plans, and the truth is revealed: Greece is a kleptocracy, and the banks and the ECB Eurocrats are both complicit.

Despite a veritable flood of financial and political analysis about Greece, nobody seems to have noticed the obvious: Greece is a kleptocracy. Just as a refresher, here is the definition of kleptocracy. Ask yourself is this doesn’t fit Greece like a supple leather glove:

Kleptocracy, alternatively cleptocracy or kleptarchy, from the Ancient Greek for “thief” and “rule,” is a term applied to a government subject to control fraud that takes advantage of governmental corruption to extend the personal wealth and political power of government officials and the ruling class (collectively, kleptocrats), via the embezzlement of state funds at the expense of the wider population, sometimes without even the pretense of honest service. The term means “rule by thieves”.

Here is a quote from a first-person report (via Zero Hedge) titled The Ugly Truth:

What angers me and most hard working Greeks is that the common workers are bearing the brunt of the austerity measures while the rich get off scott-free.

In Greece, if you want to strike it rich, become a specialist dealing with critical life and death decisions, tax collector or a high profile minister in the government. The scandalous stories that are coming out now of doctors, tax collectors, and ministers with millions of euros in their bank accounts and villas in Santorini and Mykonos are no surprise to regular hard-working Greeks.

This is a classic description of a kleptocracy: a financial and political Elite which skims and concentrates the wealth of the nation via corruption and embezzlement while being protected by the winking complicity of their fellow plunderers who hold civil and financial authority.

Here’s the real dynamic in Greece: The Kleptocracy–broadly, the political and financial Elites of the nation–saw a stupendous opportunity to embezzle hundreds of billions of euros from greed-blinded European banks at super-low rates of interest.

Being kleptocrats, they sniffed out the basics of the bezzle right away, and have been playing it ever since: we’re not paying any of these loans back, so go get the money from the European Central Bank (ECB) and the German taxpayers, or declare bankruptcy. Your choice.

The Greek kleptocrats knew all along that the German, Dutch, French and Finnish taxpayers were easy marks, just as they knew the European Union Power Elites would fall all over themselves to “save the euro” which was the centerpiece of their “one Europe” strategy of domination.

Full Article:  OF TWO MINDS – Charles Hugh Smith

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