Greece: Test Case For The Kleptocracy (Update)

Delusional Economics is onto something:

What makes the situation completely surreal are the numbers. Greek debt in 2008 was approximately 260bn Euro. The first bailout was 110bn, the current one, that appears to be tearing the country apart, is 130bn. Add in the PSI+ haircut of approximately 100bn ( after sweetener deduction ) and you realized that Europe could have simply paid the entire bill in 2008 and saved itself 80bn Euro. Ok, that is an oversimplification of the problem but you can see my point…However now, after 340bn Euros, Greece is still has an unmanageable debt, is in a far worse position than it was 3 years ago and it appears the country itself is coming apart at the seams….So basically the Greek politicians and the other Eurocrats took a quarter of a billion euro problem and turned it into a existential trillion Euro one.

All this is about – all anything going on in economics and government worldwide is about at this point – is preserving the decrepit fiat-debt system.  The rulers have no other concern.  They are the system’s operators and chief beneficiaries.  It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just something they know in their bones:  where their bread is buttered.

The author is so right.  It’s the same worldwide.

The best estimate of the money the Federal Reserve has thrown at the “crisis” since it started really rolling in 2008 (can it be almost 4 years?) is upwards of $12 trillion.  This is enough to wipe out just about every private debt in the US.

Why not just do that?

The reason – the only possible reason, since it makes no economic sense at all – is to keep the rulers where they are and the ruled where they are.  The wealth and power shift involved is anathema.  Better in their minds to throw trillions around and accomplish nothing of any substance except this:  maintain the status quo, or as much of it as is possible for as long as is possible.

To sane people, this looks like reckless squandering on an unimaginably massive scale.  To the rulers, it is money well spent.

The divide could not be much deeper, or more irreconcilable.  No wonder things are beginning to sizzle.

(H/T Lambert Strether)

Update:  A comment over at NC purportedly from an eyewitness to the demonstrations in Athens yesterday named Aris Velouchiotis who estimates crowd sizes well over what the MSM is reporting:

Greetings from Greece
First some informations from yesterday’s demonstration:
The Syntagma square (the square you see infront of the parliament) can take well over 200,000 people. Demonstration started at 17:00 and by 17:30 the roads that leads at syntagma were all packed. Police attack started at full strength around 18:00(before the people’s gathering reaches its peak)so at 19:30 were running out of tear gas bombs after using over 1500. The duration of the struggle was supported also from new people arriving from all around Athens. So if you want to calculate how many were yesterday on the streets of Athens you can only compare with last year demonstrations, two or three of the had 500,000 people, many say that were more. I heard of a estimation of 1,2 to 1,7 million people demonstrate yesterday.
(Latest info 100 woonded cops, about 150 arrests and prosecutions and hundreds of woonded citizens)
Now that I try to describe what happened yesterday it seems almost unbelievable but it was more or less expected.
About the debt:
A quarter billion was the debt created by the corrupted politicians, if you add to that the cost of the olympics and the cost of supporting banks during 2008 economic crisis you get the 340 billions. That was the starting point of greece collapse. The situation now is simple, you can’t live until 2020 with Bulgary’s salaries and Germany’s prices, so revolution as matter of survival? maybe it will be better this time, we will see…
P.S. Forgive my english