That austerity is not the way out of economic difficulty has
been capitalist economic orthodoxy since at least the time of Keynes, a century
ago. Only those who pride themselves on their ‘Common sense’ and imagine that
running a country is like running a house but bigger believe otherwise.
So why are Angela Merkel and her government — because make
no mistake, they are, as Greeks have been saying, the real villains here —
still trying to force austerity on Greece? I’m afraid it’s now painfully clear:
vindictiveness. They are punishing Greece — that is to say, the Greek people,
who are suffering as they haven’t since the German occupation during the Second
World War — for fooling the EEC into letting her in. (Never mind that Europe,
for its own reasons, was eager to be ‘fooled’.) Some are going so far as to say
that what Germany couldn’t do with tanks it is now doing with banks.
This vindictiveness rose to fury when the Greek people
elected a left-wing government which, by popular vote, rejected the conditions
Europe — in particular Germany, which had persuaded a reluctant IMF onto its
side — wants to impose. Tsipras was summoned, and bullied into accepting even
more severe austerity. Unsurprisingly, his own parliament said ‘No; we promised
the Greek people we weren’t having this.’
And now, at last, the IMF has come clean and admitted that
it too considers the European (mostly German) ‘Final Solution’ to the Greek ‘Crisis’
to be quite unworkable.
The timing of the IMF’s recantation looks suspicious — would
it be unduly paranoid to think that this is a deliberate attempt to undermine
and discredit Alexis Tsipras?
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