[p2p-research] john pilger on the greeks

[Michel Bauwens]

via
http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2010/05/greece-pilger-britain-imf



The crisis that has led to Greece's "rescue" by European banks and the
International Monetary Fund is the product of a grotesque financial system
that itself is in crisis. Greece is a microcosm of a modern class war rarely
reported as such, but waged with all the urgency of panic among the imperial
rich.

What makes Greece different is that it has experienced, within living
memory, invasion, foreign occupation, military dictatorship and popular
resistance. Ordinary people are not cowed by the corrupt corporatism that
dominates the European Union. The right-wing government of Kostas Karamanlis
that preceded the present Pasok (Labour) government of George Papandreou was
described by the sociologist Jean Ziegler as "a machine for systematically
pillaging the country's resources".
Epic theft

The machine had infamous friends. The US Federal Reserve board is
investigating the role of Goldman Sachs, which gambled on the bankruptcy of
Greece as public assets were sold off and its tax-evading rich deposited
€360bn in Swiss banks. This haemorrhaging of capital continues with the
approval of Europe's central banks and governments.

At 11 per cent, Greece's budget deficit is no higher than America's.
However, when the Papandreou government tried to borrow on the international
capital market, it was effectively blocked by the US corporate ratings
agencies, which "downgraded" Greek debt to "junk". These same agencies gave
triple-A ratings to billions of dollars in so-called sub-prime mortgage
securities and so precipitated the economic collapse in 2008.

What has happened in Greece is theft on an epic, though not unfamiliar,
scale. In Britain, the "rescue" of banks such as Northern Rock and the Royal
Bank of Scotland has cost billions of pounds. Thanks to Gordon Brown and his
passion for the avaricious instincts of the City, these gifts of public
money were unconditional, and the bankers have continued to pay each other
the booty they call bonuses and to spirit it away to tax havens. Under
Britain's political monoculture, they can do as they wish. In the US, the
situation is even more remarkable. As the investigative journalist David
DeGraw has reported, the principal Wall Street banks that "destroyed the
economy pay zero in taxes and get $33bn in refunds".

In Greece, as in America and Britain, the ordinary people have been told
they must repay the debts of the rich and powerful who incurred them. Jobs,
pensions and public services are to be slashed and burned, with privateers
put in charge. For the EU and the IMF, the opportunity presents to "change
the culture" and to dismantle the social welfare of Greece, just as the IMF
and the World Bank have "structurally adjusted" (impoverished and
controlled) countries across the developing world.

Greece is hated for the same reason Yugo­slavia had to be destroyed
physically behind a pretence of protecting the people of Kosovo. Most Greeks
are employed by the state, and the young and the trade unions comprise a
popular alliance that has not been pacified; the colonels' tanks on the
campus of Athens University in 1967 remain a political spectre. Such
resistance is anathema to Europe's central bankers and regarded as an
obstruction to German capital's need to capture markets in the aftermath of
Germany's troubled reunification.

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