This is a documentary about the late David Rockefeller, billionaire architect of corporate globalization, international free trade treaties (eg TPPA) and most CIA coups and US resource wars of the late 20th century (eg the US war on Iraq). Activists have known for decades that the US is run by billionaire oligarchs – and not Congress and the President. However it’s only with the advent of the Internet and Information Age that we could start to identify who these oligarchs are and how they control our democratic institutions. As in other documentaries, James Corbett does an excellent job exposing these secret levers of power.
According to Corbett, David, the last grandson of oil tycoon J.D. Rockefeller to die (in 2017), principally exerted his influence through foreign leaders he befriended in his role as CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank and World War II military intelligence officer; through his membership in secret round table groups (eg the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group) that craft foreign policy for all so-called western democracies; the insertion of his high level errand boys (eg Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski) into every presidential administration from Lyndon Johnson on; and the the vigorous role played by Rockefeller-funded foundations, universities, think tanks and media outlets in shaping public opinion.
In 1973, Kissinger (under David’s interest) was instrumental in launching the 1973 CIA coup in Chile to protect Rockefeller mining interests. Via David’s leadership role in the Bilderberg Group, he played a principle role in instigating the 1973 oil embargo (which jacked up oil prices and Rockefeller oil profits, the formation of the Eurozone and the euro and the 2003 invasion Iraq.
The Trilateral Commission, which David and Brzezinski co-founded in 1973, has been largely credited for Carter’s selection as the 1976 Democratic candidate – and (thanks to fawning coverage in the corporate media) his ultimate election as president.
With his five billionaire brothers, David also played a key role in founding the United Nations in 1945 (on donated Rockefeller land). The latter was openly designated the “world capitol” in historical newsreels.
This is a five-part miniseries describing how European banks have hijacked the euro monetary union to vastly increase their wealth. The upcoming Brexit vote in Britain makes this a particularly relevant topic.
Part 1 A Bank Crisis a Week
The series begins by describing the history of the European monetary union. Built at the height of neoliberalism it adopted all the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Alan Greenspan promising that globalized capitalism and free markets would end economic crises, increase prosperity and end inequality.
What really happened is that creating the euro massively increased inequality between northern and southern Europe and between workers and the super rich.
In seeking to make European banks as strong and competitive as US and British banks, Eurozone leaders ceased regulating them. Wall Street is often blamed for the EU’s 2008 meltdown. In actuality, deregulated European banks were equally guilty of risky speculation in derivatives and subprime mortgages.
Following the 2008 economic crash, European banks required massive government bailouts to keep European economies from collapsing. Promised banking reforms to prevent a recurrence of 2008 never happened. And according to the IMF, the global banking system is even more unstable today as it was right before the meltdown.
Part 2 Austerity Till the Grave
The bailouts required to keep their banks (and economies) going virtually bankrupted all Eurozone governments. All borrowed deeply (from the global banking system they had just bailed out) to keep their governments going. As a condition of this borrowing, the banks required them to reduce their deficits via deep austerity cuts. To qualify for further loans, they all cut pensions and benefits and laid off public service workers.
This segment focuses on Spain, where workers are organizing to block evictions, and Greece, where unemployed parents are forced to drop their kids off at orphanages because they can’t get welfare benefits to support them.
Part 3 Tax Haven Europe
This segment begins by profiling the Greek shipping magnates who run the largest merchant fleet in the world and pay virtually no tax. Corporations and the super rich pay far less tax than working people in all the EU countries. This massive tax avoidance forces all European governments to acquire major debt to keep from collapsing.
The documentary offers the example of Belgium, where the average tax rate is 12.5% and the most profitable corporations pay only 5% of their earnings in tax.
The filmmakers maintain that workers create wealth, though I doubt most neoliberals would see it that way. In 1981 Europe, 74% of the wealth workers created was returned to them as wages and government benefits. By 2012 only 49% of this wealth was returned to them and the super rich claimed the rest.
Part 4 Bratwurst, Lederhosen and Minijobs.
This was the most eye-open segment for me. It exposes the punitive conditions imposed on German workers from 2000 with the goal of making German export industries more competitive. Under former chancellor Gerhart Schroeder, massive wage reductions were imposed on all German workers – something IMF chief Christine LaGarde likes to call “labor market reform.”
Among other labor “reforms,” were a massive increase in “minijobs” – low wage part-time temporary positions that pay an average of 400 ($US 448) euros a month. Given Germany’s high cost of living, both parents need to work 2-3 “minijobs” (if they can find them) to cover a family’s basic needs.
The result was truckloads of cheap German imports flooding into southern EU countries (Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy), shutting down local industries that couldn’t compete.
In this way, Germany’s vicious attack on their own workers forced wages down in other EU countries. This, in turn, forced countries like Greece and Spain to borrow lots of money from German banks to keep their governments going.
Ironically Germany currently has the highest number of working poor (7 million) of all EU countries.
Part 5 What Kind of Europe Do We Want?
It’s vital for people to understand that the mantra EU governments repeat ad nauseum – that saving the euro is essential to strengthening the EU and restoring prosperity – is pure propaganda. Seven years of austerity is massively increasing deficits and debt by putting so many people out of work.
The truth is that the Eurozone has been hijacked by banks and multinational corporations who are determined to use trade agreements to lock member countries into austerity and statutory destruction of Europe’s proud tradition of democratic socialism.
The only solution is a public takeover of too-big-to fail banks. Continuing to bail them out, while allowing them to privatize all the profits, is simply legalized theft of public monies. And a yes vote on Brexit.
The latest news from Greece is that Prime Minister Tsipras has resigned and called a new election. This follows a rebellion by 1/3 of Syriza MPs, who voted against the IMF bailout Greek voters rejected in the 5 July referendum. According to the The Guardian, 25 Syriza MPs have broken away to form the anti-austerity party Popular Unity, led by former energy minister Panagiotis Lafazanis. Some analysts predict the new party will call for Greece to exit the euro monetary union: see Senior Syriza MP Greece Must Exit Monetary Union
The following documentary lays out some of the economic and social realities that led to the rise of Syriza.
Greece on the Brink
Manuel Reichetseder (2014)
Film Review
Greece on the Brink is a 2014 documentary about brutal living conditions in Greece that led to the rise of the left wing Syriza government. At the time the film was made, 65% of Greek youth age 15-34 were unemployed. Millions of Greeks had no income at all and were scavenging food out of garbage cans. Twenty thousand were homeless and one third had no access to privatized health care.
The film documents that only a tiny proportion of the $206.9 billion bailout Greece received between 2010-2013 went to public services:
48% went to European creditors
28% went to Greek banks
22% went into the national budget (of this 16% went to interest payments, most of the balance went to the Greek military)
In addition to bolstering Syriza’s rise to power, the Greek economic crisis has led to numerous experiments in worker self-organization: solidarity clinics run by health professionals volunteering their services, solidarity networks that provide free food, a journalist cooperative in which journalists run their own newspaper, various worker co-ops which have occupied and taken over shuttered factories, and TV journalists and engineers who took over the state broadcasting service after the Greek government shut it down.
Most of the commentators featured in the film are militant Syriza members who predicted a year ago (based on compromises Tsipras made to propel his party into power) that Syriza wouldn’t solve the problems faced by the Greek working class.
The most interesting section is a Marxist analysis by British economist Allen Woods about the real cause of the 2008 “credit crunch” that triggered Greece’s sudden economic collapse. According to Woods, debt is the mechanism capitalists use to avoid the crisis of overproduction. Marx believed that overproduction was an inevitable structural defect of so-called free market capitalism. By its very nature, capitalist production always overshoots the ability of the market to regulate it.
As Marx noted 150 years ago, capitalism tries to make up for this defect by expanding credit (ie debt). Woods gives the current 30% overcapacity of the global automotive industry as an example. This is illustrated by an article that appeared in Zero Hedge a year ago about new car graveyards – see Where the World’s Unsold Cars Go to Die
Woods predicts that there will be no solution to the current global economic crisis until overproduction (and the debt that supports it) are eliminated.
Historically the IMF and World Bank, like the WTO, have been characterized by “faceless” leadership. Prior to the mid-nineties, only a handful of liberal intellectuals knew these powerful international institutions existed. Even after the 1999 Battle of Seattle effectively launched the antiglobalization movement, the leaders of these august institutions remained anonymous. When the IMF issued warnings against countries with excessive public spending, they originated from the agency itself, rather than IMF officials.
Prior to his June 2011 arrest for alleged sexual assault, no one outside of France had heard of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who ran the IMF between 2007 and 2011.
The Historic Role of the IMF
The IMF was founded at the end of World War II at Bretton Woods. The British delegation, led by economist Maynard Keynes, wanted the IMF to be a cooperative fund member states could draw on to maintain economic activity and employment through the periodic economic crises that are characteristic of capitalist economies. The US delegation saw the IMF as more of a bank serving the needs of private lenders by ensuring borrowing states repaid their debts on time (see IMF History).
The US prevailed, and IMF loans came to be known as “structural adjustment” loans because they forced borrowing governments to adjust the structure of their economic activity. In most cases, this involved extreme austerity measures favorable to multinational corporations seeking access to cheap resources and labor markets. Such measures included privatizing publicly owned assets (airlines, telecoms, railroads, health systems, etc); liberalizing trade and financial markets; increasing incentives (corporate and individual tax cuts and waivers of environmental/labor regulations) for foreign investment; and supporting commercial export crops at the expense of food production.
Developing countries that blindly followed these policies, especially in South America and Africa, found their countries mired in debt and huge social inequalities. Russia was one of the most extreme cases: its economy shrank by 55% before President Vladimir Putin set the country on an alternative path to recovery.
Repackaging the IMF’s Image
Given the historic anonymity of the IMF leadership, you have to wonder about all the publicity being lavished on Christine Lagarde, the current IMF managing director. Although global economics is a low priority in the US media, she receives near daily attention in the British and international media. At sixty, Lagarde is still a strikingly attractive woman. Presumably, however, there is some political agenda behind the decision to promote this “rock star of the economic world,” as several media outlets have branded her
Lagarde’s Mission
Besides her carefully cultivated public persona, Lagarde is also unique in her willingness to lay out the IMF’s economic and political agenda. The policies she advocates include
Stronger economic growth (allegedly to promote global re-employment)
Deeper “integration” of European economies (translation: creation of a centralized fiscal body capable of making budgetary decisions for the entire Eurozone)
Improved “fiscal consolidation” for the US and Japan (translation: less deficit spending)
More domestic consumption and less reliance on foreign investment and exports in emerging economies (especially China)
A stronger firewall against debt contagion (translation: no bailouts) around weaker Eurozone nations like Greece, Italy and Spain
“Structural reform” (translation: anti-union legislation and reduced public spending) to improve the “competitiveness” of the industrial north.
Rebranding Structural Adjustment
Lagarde gives double messages about structural adjustment and austerity cuts. After warning that budget cuts lead to “recessionary tendencies,” she states that some countries (which, like Greece, are on the verge of economic collapse) need to cut their public budgets immediately. She feels others can stretch their cuts out over time.
Among specific “structural reforms” Lagarde favors are pension reform, with an optimal retirement age of 67, “wage restraint” (i.e. abandoning the expectation that wages will keep pace with inflation), and social service reforms in which “recipients of social assistance are expected to improve their situation.”*
The Fox Guarding the Henhouse
LaGarde isn’t without her critics. Former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson refers to her appointment as “the fox guarding the henhouse.” Johnson, like former World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz, has been highly critical of the extreme concentration of financial power and it threat it poses to the global economy. This is the subject of Johnson’s recent book, Thirteen Bankers.
His criticism.of Lagarde centers mainly around her proposal to solve the Eurozone crisis by issuing additional loans to the debt-ridden “peripheral” countries (Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Belgium). He maintains all these countries are looking at a default scenario, no matter how much money she throws at them. He accuses her of allowing EU leaders to use the IMF to conceal flaws in the Eurozone structure from voters.
*A questionable objective in countries with double digit unemployment
The 2011 Greek documentary Debtocracy effectively dispels the media myths about lazy Greek workers and and scofflaw Greek taxpayers being responsible for Greece’s present economic crisis.
The film begins with an overview of what its filmmakers (and I) feel has been a basic goal of both globalization and the creation of a single European currency – namely “labor discipline” and the suppression of wages in heavily unionized countries.
They show how sweeping deregulation in the industrialized world in the 1980s allowed manufacturers to eliminate unions by shutting plants down and reopening them as sweatshops in the third world. The subsequent creation of the Euro as a single currency allowed the central European countries (Germany and France) to use the mechanism of debt to weaken strong unions in peripheral Eurozone countries like Greece, Spain and Italy.
Thanks to relatively weak unions following reunification, Germany imposed a virtual ten year wage freeze. While workers suffered, German companies and banks racked up immense profits and stacks of cash, which they loaned to “peripheral” countries to finance big corporate tax cuts.
The bulk of the film focuses on the concept of “odious” debt and whether the Greek people should be forced to repay fraudulent loans from which they received no direct benefit. As Debtocracy poignantly depicts, Athens and other Greek cities are experiencing a third world humanitarian crisis, with massive homelessness, hunger and untreated illness.
Odious Debt: An American Invention
Odious debt was a principle invented by the US in the early 20th century to avoid repaying Spain’s war debt after the US took possession of Cuba following the Spanish-American War. George Bush invoked it following the US occupation of Iraq. His goal was to avoid repayment of Sadam Hussein’s debts to China, France, Germany and Russia. Since then approximately a dozen countries – most notably Argentina, Ecuador and Iceland – have repudiated so-called “illegitimate” debt incurred by deposed leaders.
The film focuses mainly Argentina’s and Ecuador’s default on their foreign debt. In 2001 the structural adjustments the IMF forced on Argentina bankrupted the country. A popular uprising forced the Argentine president to flee (in a helicopter), and the new government declared the IMF debt illegal and unconstitutional.
When Ecuador experienced a similar economic crisis and uprising in 2007, they, too, sent their president packing in a helicopter. In 2008, their new president Rafael Correa appointed a Debt Audit Commission to study the strong arm tactics (some of which John Perkins describes in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man) that caused Ecuador to borrow billions of dollars to pay for US-built infrastructure that only benefited Ecuador’s wealthy elite. Correa’s Debt Audit Commission ascertained that only 30% of their external debt was legitimately incurred.
CADTM’s Call for a Greek Debt Audit Commission
Iric Toussaint, a French economist who participated in the Ecuadorian Debt Audit Commission, believes a major proportion of Greek debt may have been fraudulently incurred. The following evidence supports this view:
Nearly one billion euros of debt resulted from a risky swap (of yen and dollars for euros) Goldman Sachs persuaded Greece to make in 2001. The transaction netted Goldman Sachs $600 million in profit (see Secret Greek loan).
Major German and French loans were issued on condition that the Greek government incur further indebtedness to purchase hundreds of millions of euros of German and French armaments.
Billions of dollars of Greek debt resulted from major cost overruns on the 2004 Greek Olympics (which cost twice as much as the Sydney Olympics in 2000). These have never been explained nor investigated.
In 2010 a former Goldman Sachs official was hired to manage the Greek public debt authority, with the result that the entire 2010 rescue package (103 million euros) was used to bail out Greek banks.
The film also discusses the March 2011 call by the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt (CADTM) to create an audit commission to examine Greek public debt. It ends with the ominous sound of a helicopter, eerily foreshadowing the forced resignation of Greek prime minister George Papandreou last November, when CNN advised him to get a helicopter to save himself from angry protestors (see Fall of Papandreou).
The Most Revolutionary Act 