Mark Weisbrot, a co-director with Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), has written an enlightening book that pulls together many of the analyses that CEPR has been producing over the past several decades.
My father made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Luca Brasi held a gun to his head and my father assured him that either his brains, or his signature, would be on the contract.
— The Godfather (1972)
“They just wanted to take a bat to them,” said former U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, referring to the attitude of European leaders towards debt-laden Greece in February of 2010, three months before the country’s first bailout. Mr. Geithner, Treasury Secretary from 2009 until 2013, was attending a meeting of the finance ministers and central bankers of the Group of Seven (G7) nations: the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Canada.
Have the people of Greece been singled out for particularly harsh punishment by its international creditors for daring to elect Syriza? Are they being used as a warning to other countries not to emulate Greece? The economic argument for demanding more cuts and austerity no longer makes any sense.
Given Western civilization’s debt to Greek society, you might think haughty Berlin, itself not long removed from the days of marauding hordes descending on urbane Rome from the thicket of the Black Forest, might have it in them to declare a debt jubilee for the long-suffering Greeks. Sorry, say the neoliberal ideologues that peer down from the commanding heights of the world’s second largest economic zone. We forgave 100 billion euros in 2012 and look where it got us: nowhere.
