Graffiti at Corinth Harbor. Photo: Kenneth Surin.
I am in Greece, attending a conference to mark the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. I was here in 2016, taking part in a conference on the island of Lesvos, at the height of the refugee crisis/humanitarian disaster that was afflicting the EU’s Mediterranean members, as well as 2015, participating in a conference at the Athens University School of Law on the Greek debt crisis.
Greece, then as now, was, and is, reeling from the punitive fiscal regimen imposed on it by the “troika” (the IMF, European Central Bank (ECB), and the EU) when Greece tried to withdraw from the eurozone. The regimen was not designed to “rescue” the Greek economy, but to punish Greece for wanting to bail on the eurozone, to deter any eurozone members who might be tempted to follow the path Greece was starting to take, and above all, to safeguard the interests of the German and French banks which had lent irresponsibly to the Greek 1%, knowing full-well these loans would never be repaid, and which faced severe losses in the event of a Greek default. 90% of the bailout money has been used to absorb the bad debt of the reckless French and German (and some Greek) private banks which lent to the Greek oligarchs with a joyous abandon under the previous right-wing Greek government. The reckless “too big to fail” banks knew European Monetary Union taxpayers would be stiffed to cover their losses, and of course they were…