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By Chris Hedges
May 24, 2010 "TruthDig" -- Here's to the Greeks. They know what
to do when corporations pillage and loot their country. They know what
to do when Goldman Sachs and international bankers collude with their
power elite to falsify economic data and then make billions betting that
the Greek economy will collapse. They know what to do when they are
told their pensions, benefits and jobs have to be cut to pay corporate
banks, which screwed them in the first place. Call a general strike. Riot.
Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out. Do not be afraid of
the language of class warfare-the rich versus the poor, the oligarchs
versus the citizens, the capitalists versus the proletariat. The Greeks,
unlike most of us, get it.
The former right-wing government of Greece lied about the size of the
country's budget deficit. It was not 3.7 percent of gross domestic
product but 13.6 percent. And it now looks like the economies of Spain,
Ireland, Italy and Portugal are as bad as Greece's, which is why the euro
has lost 20 percent of its value in the last few months. The few hundred
billion in bailouts for other faltering European states, like our own
bailouts, have only forestalled disaster. This is why the U.S. stock
exchange is in free fall and gold is rocketing upward. American banks do
not have heavy exposure in Greece, but Greece, as most economists
concede, is only the start. Wall Street is deeply invested in other
European states, and when the unraveling begins the foundations of our
own economy will rumble and crack as loudly as the collapse in Athens.
The corporate overlords will demand that we too impose draconian
controls and cuts or see credit evaporate. They have the money and the
power to hurt us. There will be more unemployment, more personal and
commercial bankruptcies, more foreclosures and more human misery.
And the corporate state, despite this suffering, will continue to plunge us
deeper into debt to make war. It will use fear to keep us passive. We
are being consumed from the inside out. Our economy is as rotten as
the economy in Greece. We too borrow billions a day to stay afloat. We
too have staggering deficits, which can never be repaid. Heed the dire
rhetoric of European leaders.
We have seen these austerity measures before. Latin Americans, like the
Russians, were forced by the International Monetary Fund and the
World Bank to gut social services, end subsidies on basic goods and
food, and decimate the income levels of the middle class-the foundation
of democracy-in the name of fiscal responsibility. Small entrepreneurs,
especially farmers, were wiped out. State industries were sold off by
corrupt government officials to capitalists for a fraction of their value.
Utilities and state services were privatized.
We are facing the collapse of the world's financial system. It is the end
of globalization. And in these final moments the rich are trying to get all
they can while there is still time. The fusion of corporatism, militarism
and internal and external intelligence agencies-much of their work done
by private contractors-has given these corporations terrifying
mechanisms of control. Think of it, as the Greeks do, as a species of
foreign occupation. Think of the Greek riots as a struggle for liberation.
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