CNN published a timeline of the Greek crisis this morning. Here are a few of the takeaways:
1. Greece’s deficits were concealed by a “center-right” government.
2. Building expensive sports arenas on the public dime (sound familiar?) and hosting the 2004 Olympics brought indebtedness, not prosperity.
3. Most of Greece’s debt was incurred beginning in 2010, and most of it is for bailout funding. Greece’s tax collection system collapsed at the same time. In other words, Greece’s deficits came primarily from its wealthy capitalist class evading taxes, and its crushing debts came from a Hatched-In-America global recession, not from spending on wages and pensions.
4. Greece’s European neighbors didn’t lend that money to Greece out of the goodness of their hearts or to help Greeks, but because “the other eurozone countries, fearing contagion — that, if Greece defaulted on its debts, other eurozone countries’ cost of borrowing would rise to unsustainable levels — felt they had no option but to give that help.”
5. Before electing their present socialist government, Greek voters tried a rightwing government that agreed to the EU’s austerity demands — and then watched their country slide into a far deeper depression.
6. Conservative austerity policies have weakened Greece’s economy and undermined its ability to pay its debts.
7. By this summer, “More money was needed — and realistically, debt relief as well,” but the EU instead demanded even more austerity. As a result, “In June, the negotiations broke off, with each side apparently daring the other to be the cause of a Greek exit from the eurozone.”
8. After Greeks refused on Sunday to go along with more austerity, which would literally leave some of them starving, the EU withheld the cash infusion needed to reopen Greek banks and left Greece dangling in the wind.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/06/…..index.html
Roger Rabbit Commentary: It’s absolutely clear who the bad guys in this Greek tragedy are: Europe’s conservative politicians and their idiotic austerity policies. The lesson for Americans from this isn’t what Republicans and the conservative U.S. media would have you believe — that we need balanced budgets and austerity in our country too — but rather that this will happen to us, too, if we listen to Republicans and their policies get sway again. As for Greece, if I were a Greek, what I’d be thinking right now is that with “friends” like the ones I presently have, I could hardly do worse by cozying up to the Russians and/or Chinese. All they want from me is military bases on my numerous Mediterranean islands. And the islands are already there; they don’t even have to be built, like the Chinese are doing in the South China Sea.
Cross-posted from Horsesass.org (with minor editing revisions).