The most optimistic scenario shows that Greece would face an unsustainable debt in 2030 even if it agreed to the package of tax increases and spending cuts proposed by the European commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF in exchange for a five-month €15.5bn loan from its creditors.
Greece has a unique opportunity to exit the Eurozone gracefully, head high, telling the troika, especially the fratricidal Brussels gang, that honoring the election commitment to the Greek people is a priority – no more austerity, no more pension cuts, no more privatization of public services and public assets, no more closing of hospitals – for these honorable reasons Greece will exit the Eurozone – not surrender, never surrender. This is not surrender; this is a wise move that will lead Greece into a new and prosperous future.
What people forget is that those who’ve merely been charged with crimes aren’t officially guilty yet. And not-yet-guilty people aren’t supposed to go to the hole, except under very narrowly defined sets of circumstances – for flight risks or for threats to the community. It’s certainly not supposed to be a punishment for not having $500.
Clearly, our creditors’ demand for more austerity has nothing to do with concerns about genuine reform or moving Greece onto a sustainable fiscal path. Their true motivation is a question best left to future historians – who, I have no doubt, will take much of the contemporary media coverage with a grain of salt.
Under the TPP, could the US government be sued and be held liable if it decided to stop issuing Treasury debt and financed deficit spending in some other way (perhaps by quantitative easing or by issuing trillion dollar coins)? Why not, since some private companies would lose profits as a result?
And the political fare on offer is all manufactured and presented to placate big business, to court corporate approval and to ensure that the ways in which we vent our dissatisfaction is safely-boundaried by QuestionTime-type ‘participation’.
When the banking system becomes too big to bail, the moral hazard trade that started it all becomes systemic “immoral hazard”—an extortion racket aided and abetted by the very politicians elected to serve our interests. When that trade takes place in a set of institutions that is incapable of resolving the crisis it faces, the result is permanent austerity.
Sawant believes that because of the presidency of Barack Obama—who has served corporate power, expanded imperial wars, carried out a massive assault on civil liberties and failed to address the needs of the mounting numbers who are unemployed or underemployed—many people, especially young people, are hungry for political alternatives to “the two big business parties.”
The main culprit in the debt crisis was a fall in tax revenues resulting from massive tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. According to Razmig Keucheyan, sociologist and author of “The Left Hemisphere,” this “neoliberal mantra” that was supposed to increase investment and employment did the opposite.
Does Varoufakis really think he can pull this off? Does he really think he can out-fox the slimy, authoritarian brigands and leg-breakers who run these extortionist institutions and who will use every means possible to extract the last drop of blood from their victim be he an aspiring, but penniless student at the university or a destitute pensioner huddling homeless and frozen in an abandoned doorway in downtown Athens?
a slow motion bank run has been underway in Greece for more than a month draining roughly 40 billion euros from the Greek banking system. If a deal hadn’t been struck on Friday, the ECB would have pulled the plug on its liquidity assistance program and blown the whole system to kingdom come. That’s how the Eurocrats planned to say goodbye to their long-struggling member, Greece, by giving them a sharp jolt to the groin before razing their economy to the ground
I believe Syriza is sincere, and I’m rooting for them, but they may have overestimated their own strength, while forgetting how the Mafia came to occupy its position; it didn’t derive from a lot of compromise with left-wing upstarts. Greece may have no choice, eventually, but to default on its debts and leave the Eurozone. The hunger and unemployment of the Greek people may leave them no alternative.
