As we move closer to the 5 July referendum, it becomes clearer every day – Brussels, Washington and Berlin are waging an open “class war” against Greece, because the Greek people, the citizens of a sovereign country – the first democracy in Europe, the country that gave Europe her name – these people have had the audacity to democratically elect a socialist government. Now they have to suffer. They do not conform to the self-imposed rules of the neoliberal empire of unrestricted globalized privatization of public services and public properties from which the elite is maximizing profits – for themselves, of course – it is outright theft of public property.
The weapon is finance; the instruments are the mega-banksters of Europe and Washington. They are like dehumanized missiles. The fight is no-holds-barred – all out, no scruples. The savages of Brussels have the audacity to call for Mr. Tsipras’ resignation in case the Greek referendum rejects the austerity package. – Can you imagine!
Madame Lagarde, the heartless Iron Lady of the IMF, keeps referring to the Greek government as ‘children’. She keeps asking to talk to ‘adults’ – inferring that what Greece suggests and proposes as an alternative to the killer plan of the troika is mere child’s talk. – What an abject arrogance.
And that in the face of senior IMF economists who have already months ago declared that austerity doesn’t work in the case of Greece – and, in fact, in no case. To revive the economy of a country, the economy needs oxygen to breathe, to recover – just the contrary of an austerity program. Austerity is strangulation by debt and suffocation by complete annihilation of a nation’s social safety net.
In the early 2000’s the independent Evaluation Department of the World Bank issued an analysis of structural adjustment and so-called budget support loans of the 1990s around the world. The report was negative throughout. It was an internal report and, as far as I know, never hit the road, i.e. the media. Even as an internal report it disappeared quickly form the Bank’s intranet. A ‘structural adjustment’ loan is exactly that – a blank check against severe austerity. Austerity doesn’t work. And less so with a heavy debt burden at 6% or 7% interest, money that the ECB generates electronically (as all banks do), lends it to European predator banks in Germany, France – you name it – for 1% or less – which in turn onlend the money at usurious rates of up to 7% to Greece and other which are in the crosshairs of the troika.