Something that is lacking in all the debate about the Greek debt is the actual suffering of the Greek people. We get long academic out pourings on all the minute detail in economic parlance. We get varitions on the possible effects on this country's banking system and that country's banking system. We are given %'s of debt to GDP, interest rates on the bond markets. We can have the first 20 minutes or so of the evening news on the miriad of statements from the various finance ministers across Europe, telling us banks will have to increase their capital, or banks will have to lend more. However what we don't get is the increase in suicides, the increase in mental health problems, the break down in social relationships, the increase in malnutrition, the increase in drug and alcohol abuse. We are not told that deprivation among the ordinary greek people has gone stratosheric, nor are we told that there are now more than 20,000 homeless in Athens, an ever increasing number of soup kitchens are handing out a bowl of food too an ever increasing army of hungry. There are counties in other parts of the world where these conditions would have aid pouring into them from the West.
This is the price in human suffering that the Greek people are expected to pay, and pay for at least a couple of generations in an endeavour to save the billionaire bond markets from taking a loss. The financial markets played a dangerous game of throwing cheap magic unearned money at everybody and everything and now they want it all back and it's the people that are expected to pay. We have a system where debt and profit are away more valuable than people, that surely is unacceptable, but don't expect the 1% billionaires to want in any way to change that relationship. Any change will have to come from the 99%, those at the receiving and of this financial corporate fascism's plunder of the public purse. The following is from Two Minds.
The potential for loss and actually bearing the consequences from irresponsible extensions of credit was unacceptable to the banking cartel, so they rewrote the laws. Now student loans in America cannot be discharged in bankruptcy court; they are permanent and must be carried and serviced until death. This is the acme of debt-serfdom.The global banking cartel has declared Greece's debts to be permanent and its people debt-serfs. More precisely, some privately held debt will be written down, but certainly not all of it, and the debt owed to the European Central Bank cannot be written down a single euro: Greece must pay the interest on the full debt, whatever the costs to its people.We might ask why the fully-financialized Status Quo of financial and political Elites so carefully insures no shadow of ethics passes over the Greek debt crisis: If they did, it would become obvious that when debt becomes more important than people, the system is evil and should be dismantled.
