Meeting late into Sunday night, euro zone heads of government issued new ultimatums to Greece that would effectively strip the country of its sovereignty and turn it into an economic colony of the German banks.
The German government has been the most aggressive in insisting that either the Greek parliament pass a series of laws by Wednesday night imposing a series of onerous measures or Greece will be expelled from the common European currency. That would likely precipitate an immediate collapse of the Greek economy.
A draft statement by euro zone officials listing their conditions for initiating talks on a new bailout includes: higher budget surplus targets and automatic spending cuts if these targets are missed; more sweeping cuts in pensions; higher regressive sales taxes; more extensive privatizations of public institutions; the gutting of protections against layoffs; the imposition of restrictions on collective bargaining and the right to strike; and the scrapping of laws passed since Syriza came to power that “have not been agreed with the institutions [the European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund] and run counter to the program commitments.”
Another demand discussed at the meeting was for the Greek government to place €50 billion in public assets in a fund controlled by an outside firm, to be used to pay down the country’s debt. That sum is approximately equal to the size of the loan Greece is requesting from the EU’s European Stability Mechanism.