Greek Banks Won’t Let Savers Have Their Money

Greece Is Asking For It.
Greece Is Asking For It.

Maybe, just maybe these people are going to learn. This might really do it. The government that the Greeks elected to give them free money is now going to take it all away. When government gets more power, it is always people of good will who work hard, plan ahead and save for that rainy day who get looted. The UK Independent describes how this will work in Greece.

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If Greece defaults, the European Central Bank could cut off its support to the Greek financial system, forcing Athens to impose capital controls, limiting the amount that savers can withdraw from their accounts and curbing transfers of money overseas. When imposed in other countries, such controls have prompted queues outside bank branches as people try to remove as much cash as possible, and wider turmoil in financial markets as foreign investors realize they cannot pull their money out.

Hard working Greeks who didn’t cheat on taxes, who didn’t demand welfare, who didn’t trash Athens because German creditors expected repayment, who didn’t use accounting gimmicks to lie and claim they could repay money they should have never borrowed, are now being dispossessed to pay for all the mountebanks, wag-halters, cheaters, scammers, ne’er-do-wells and other assorted human garbage that did everything that I mentioned above. All of this is happening because The Good Time Charlies have just heard from the IMF that this is last call. The Visigoth Holiday is over and they don’t have enough money to pay for all the beer they consumed and all the furniture they trashed. But if you expect these people to pay up, you, not them, have a criminal responsibility.

You see expecting Greece to actually repay what its government has borrowed is just a plan to humiliate an entire people. It has nothing to do with actually expecting to get paid interest. It has nothing to do with anything crazy like expecting to recover your initial principal. The Communist-elect Greek PM tells us this is not an ideological struggle. He’s 100% correct.

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Dishonesty is not ideological. Jimmy Carter and Dwight Eisenhower were personally scrupulous. Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton; not so much. Dishonesty is about laziness, self-delusion, and convenience. When Lee Siegal wrote his self-congratulatory screed about how he stuck it to the banksters, he was a perfect example of this principle in action.

Having opened a new life to me beyond my modest origins, the education system was now going to call in its chits and prevent me from pursuing that new life, simply because I had the misfortune of coming from modest origins. Am I a deadbeat? In the eyes of the law I am. Indifferent to the claim that repaying student loans is the road to character? Yes. Blind to the reality of countless numbers of people struggling to repay their debts, no matter their circumstances, many worse than mine? My heart goes out to them. To my mind, they have learned to live with a social arrangement that is legal, but not moral. Maybe the problem was that I had reached beyond my lower-middle-class origins and taken out loans to attend a small private college to begin with.

And this is exactly the same crapola we hear from Alexis Tsipris about the people stupid enough to trust the Greeks with a loan.

“The fixation on cuts…is most likely part of a political plan… to humiliate an entire people that has suffered in the past five years through no fault of its own,” he said. “The mandate we have got from the Greek people is to end austerity policy,” he told his leftist Syriza party at a parliament meeting in Athens, Reuters reports. #Tsipras says ECB insists on tactics that strangle Greece; IMF has “criminal responsibility” for what happened in Greece during the crisis.

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It’s all the same racket. We were too poor. They had all the breaks. We are entitled to take what’s ours. They didn’t really get theirs fairly anyway. You’ll hear that same garbage from every dead-beat, every heroin addict, every robber who shoved a gun in some bank teller’s face. It’s the same self-justifying lie. But what Tsipris is currently doing is even one step worse.

The people who line up for the programs are not the ones working to amass funds in a savings account. Those are two different subsets of people. The people who voted in Alex Tsipris to prolong their joyride at someone else’s expense will never have to run a business or meet a payroll. They will never have to grow up and eat the feces sandwich that responsible people in Greece will be forced to chow down on.

PM Tsipris claims this is about Democracy. I agree. It is about Democracy. It is about Democracy at its worst. A plurality of the Greek People have voted to eat their nation’s seed corn and are now about stand aside and let a productive minority lose all the cash and value that they painstakingly acquired and put in banks over the long years.

So is the Greek debt crisis criminal? Yes. Does someone deserve to get made to pay? Awww, Yeah! Will someone get their butts used as an ATM until the creditors get their hands on anything left of Greece that’s worthy of salvage? Probably. The Greeks are one step away from going full-metal Cyprus and officially confiscating any money that Greek citizens were stupid enough to entrust to their national banking institutions.

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So what’s the problem, exactly? Well, the people who ran up the debts, lived the high life and ruined Greece’s finances have nothing in their pockets to pay up. They are the same idiots rioting in Athens to end “austerity.” They are probably among the scumbags that made tax evasion one of Greece’s most popular indoor sports. The people getting hammered and having their wealth embargoed in preparation for its confiscation are the people who did what everyone else in Greece should have been doing. The people who voted in Tsipris have every reason to be happy. They get to deny reality and someone else gets made to pay for it. Tsipris will probably get reelected in perpetuity unless he does something really stupid like develop a sense of shame or honor.

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