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Greece is about to be completely dismantled and fed to profit-hungry corporations

The latest bailout has nothing to do with debt, but an experiment in capitalism so extreme that no other EU state would even dare try it

by Nick Dearden

Greece is heading towards its third "bailout". This time €86 billion is on the table, which will be packaged up by international lenders with a bundle of austerity and sent off to Greece, only to return to those same lenders in the very near future.

We all know the spiralling debt cannot and will not be repaid. We all know the austerity to which it is tied will make Greece’s depression worse. Yet it continues.

If we look deeper, however, we find that Europe is not led by the terminally confused. By taking those leaders at their word, we’re missing what’s really going on in Europe. In a nutshell, Greece is up for sale, and its workers, farmers and small businesses will have to be cleared out of the way.

Under the eye-watering privatisation programme, Greece is expected to hand over its €50 billion of its “valuable state assets” to an independent body under the control of the European institutions, who will proceed to sell them off. Airports, seaports, energy systems, land and property – everything must go. Sell your assets, their contrived argument goes, and you’ll be able to repay your debt.

But even in the narrow terms of the debate, selling off profitable or potentially profitable assets leaves a country less able to repay its debts. Unsurprisingly the most profitable assets are going under the hammer first. The country’s national lottery has already been bought up. Airports serving Greece’s holiday islands look likely to be sold onlong-term lease to a German airport operator.

The port of Pireus looks likely to be sold to a Chinese shipping company. Meanwhile, 490,000 square meters of Corfu beachfront have been snapped up by a US private equity fund. It has a 99-year lease for the bargain price of €23million. According to reporters, the privatisation fund is examining another 40 uninhabited islands as well as a massive project on Rhodes which includes an obligatory golf course.

Side-by-side with the privatisation is a very broad programme of deregulation which declares war on workers, farmers and small businesses. Greece's many laws that protect small business such as pharmacies, bakeries, and bookshops from competition with supermarkets and big businesses are to be swept away. These reforms are so specific that the EU is writing laws on bread measurements and milk expiry dates. Incredibly, Greece is even being told to make its Sunday opening laws more liberal than Germany's. Truly a free market experiment is being put into place.

On labour, pensions are to suffer rapid cuts, minimum wages are to be reduced and collective bargaining is to be severely curtailed while it is to become easier to sack staff. All of this is far more extreme that many of Greece's "creditor" countries have implemented themselves. Changes to tax includes a massive hike to that most regressive of taxes VAT, on a wide range of products.

Of course, reforms in some areas of Greece's economy might be a good idea, and indeed Syriza came to power promising to make serious reforms in, for instance, taxation and pensions. But what is being imposed by the lending institutions is not a series of sensible "reforms", but the establishment and micromanagement of radical 'free market' economics.

The privatisation and deregulation bonanza opens vast new swathes of Greek society to areas where big business has never been able to set foot before. The hope is that this will generate big profits to keep big business growing, as well as providing an extreme model of what might be possible throughout Europe. Although what's even more distasteful than the hypocrisy of European leaders forcing policies onto Greece that they themselves have not dared to argue for in their own countries, is the cynicism of those same leaders imposing policies that will benefit their own country's corporations.

The intensity of the restructuring programme currently being agreed for Greece should dispel any lingering notion that this is a well intentioned but misguided attempt to deal with a debt crisis. It is a cynical attempt to set up a corporate paradise in the Mediterranean, and must be resisted at all costs.

Source:


At the end of July, WikiLeaks released a secret letter from the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP or TPPA) Ministerial Meeting in December 2013, along with a comprehensive expert analysis of the document.

[...]

The revelation shows that big private corporations attack on states. The ruthless neoliberalism seeks to destroy the nation-states and the small-medium businesses, to declare the final victory of multinational big banks and monopolies.

It also shows that the indebted countries are used as a pretext for mass privatizations. The debt is not the problem, it is only the tool through which neoliberalism is attacking to the workers and people's rights, privatizing everything for the big capital. This letter shows clearly that the war on state enterprises and structures was planned methodically by the lobbyists who influence anyone who holds a key position in the EU and the US.

The latest "agreement" between Greece and the creditors aims to dissolve what is left from labor rights, and privatize key state enterprises for pennies.


... poor Mr. Schäuble, who recently surpassed Mrs. Merkel in popularity in Germany, is under extreme pressure, mostly by the German capital, to "restructure" the eurozone through the Greek experiment. The German oligarchy is now in a cruel competition mostly with the US companies to hyper-automate production. It sends continuous signals that human labor will be unnecessary for its big companies and presses the German leadership to finish the experiment in Greece.

Poor Mr. Schäuble must give "earth and water" to the German oligarchs. He must organize a new Treuhand for the whole Europe to sell-off public property, he must completely dissolve labor rights, bring down pensions and wages, destroy the social state. He must end quickly with Greece and pass all the "Greek achievements" to the whole eurozone.

Comments

  1. I do so hope the historically proud and feisty Greek people rise up en masse in revolt against deeper measures of crippling austerity and privatization of their state assets agreed to recently by their newly elected Syriza government. After all, it was to prevent these very measures that Syriza was elected in the first place. I hope other anti-austerity left groups in southern Europe particularly and elsewhere have the Greeks back. For the EU generally, and Germany specifically to make these unsustainable demands is outrageous and highly hypocritical considering Germany’s history and their previous war debt forgiveness. The cannibalizing of the world’s wealth and resources by the most powerful elite is sickening and indicative of the disease of capitalism.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you friend. European people must react massively. It has been proved that SYRIZA and Greece can't do much alone. There is a need for a pan-European movement against catastrophic neoliberalism. What happens in Greece is the dark future for the Europeans which they must prevent.

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