The New York Times Urges the Troika to “Make an Example of Greece”
By William K. Black
Quito: July 7, 2015
It is often the moral and economic blindness of New York Times articles about the EU crisis that is most striking. The newest entry in this field is entitled Now Europe Must Decide Whether to Make an Example of Greece. That is a chilling phrase most associated in our popular culture with a Consigliere and his Don deciding whether to order a mob hit. It is, therefore, fitting (albeit over the top) as a criticism of the troikas economic, political, and propaganda war against the Greek people. Except that the article is actually another salvo in that war.
Lets start with the obvious except to the NYT. Europe isnt decid[ing] anything. The troika is making the decisions. More precisely, it is the CEOs of the elite German corporations and banks that direct the troikas policies that are making the decisions. The troika simply implements those decisions. The troika consists of the ECB, the IMF, and the European Commission. None of these three entities represents Europe. None of them will hold a democratic referendum of the peoples of Europe to determine policies. Indeed, they are apoplectic that the Greek government dared to ask the people of Greece through a democratic process whether to give in to the troikas latest efforts to extort the Greek government to inflict ever more destructive and economically illiterate malpractice on the Greek people.
Second, the troika has been mak[ing] an example of Greece for at least five years. It extorted Greece to inflict the economic malpractice of austerity in response to a Great Recession. The result was just what economists warned Greece was forced, gratuitously, into worse-than-Great Depression levels of unemployment that persist today seven years after Lehmans collapse. In this process, the troika blocked a prior referendum proposed by Greeces Socialist Prime Minister George Papandreou in late 2011 and forced him to resign for daring to propose democratic decision-making. Read the Guardians risible account of the 2010 coup that the troika engineered in Greece for an unintended insight as to how the UKs New Labour Party has become an anti-labor party of austerity and aspirational hostility to efforts to contain the City of Londons criminal culture.
Third, the troika and a host of heads of state that have caused grave harm to workers in their nations responded immediately to the election of the anti-austerity Syriza party in Greece in January 2015 by shouting their increased eagerness to make an example of Greece for daring to elect Syriza. The government of Spain, for example, is desperate for the troika to double-down and make an example of Greece by crushing its economy in order to stave off the newly created and surging Podemos anti-austerity party that won key municipal elections in Spain. Prominent German elected officials have made explicit their desire to force Syriza (and Greece) to fail because they oppose its politics.
in full: http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2015/07/the-new-york-times-urges-the-troika-to-make-an-example-of-greece.html
PSPS
(13,601 posts)And if you don't believe DU, there's no shortage of corporate/state media running similar nonsense on a continuous loop.
Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)Can't say I understand that position at all..makes no sense if you look at
all the players involved.