NOVANEWS
Christine Lagarde, the Queen of Troika and the Head Honcho of the IMF, on May 6th, threatened to pull the IMF out of the Greek rescue plan, with a straight face, calling it a “rescue plan.” Oh, please!
Yet, it is extremely doubtful the IMF would ever entirely pull out since the plan really bails out its own constituency of banks at an unfathomable expense to the Greek people.
Meantime in Greece, transportation and civic services throughout the country grind to a screeching halt, full stop, as the people hit the streets.
Queen Christine’s backroom stratagem, described in a Wikileaks’ leaked confidential letter exclusive to Troika members, preceded the three-day nationwide strike in very strong protest against more and more, infinitely more, austerity measures burying the Greek people as quid pro quo for bailout money, which almost exclusively (95%) serves to service creditors. This is insanity of the highest order. How can Greeks at all accede to a measly 5%?
Anyway, the Troika bailout ruse is finally hitting the proverbial “ you can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip” stage, which is when citizens go berserk, ballistic, fighting mad, screaming, kicking and scratching, all kinds of turmoil and hubbub, maybe carnage. Who knows?
The ugly sequence of events started on May 6th when Greece’s shipping, public transport, and civil service departments included the days Friday and Saturday to their planned nationwide strike for Sunday, May 8th, the day when Greece’s Parliament votes on tax changes, as imposed by Troika, meaning higher taxes and lower pensions. Robotically, this is all the Brussels bureaucrats know.
“Greece’s largest labour union, the private sector GSEE, said the changes, were the ‘last nail on [sic] the coffin’ for workers and pensioners. A spokesman said: ‘They are trying to prove to the Eurogroup that they are good students but they are destroying Greece’s social security system,” Greece Hit by General Strike Over Pension and Tax Change, BBC News, May 6, 2016.
“’They are the worst so far,’ said Odysseus Trivalas, president of the public sector union ADEDY. ‘At some point, Greeks won’t be able to take anymore and there will be a social explosion,” IMF Threatens to Pull Out of Greek Rescue, The Guardian, May 6, 2016.
Hark! The Greek bailout is the epitome, the essence of neoliberal practices, i.e., slash and burn social welfare, grind people into the ground, hammer‘em, to save capital. But, then again, that’s how the neoliberal brand of capitalism functions the world over, and it sucks!
The Greek rescue plan, in real time, is equivalent to stepping inside the pages of The Shock Doctrine, similar to The Truman Show, experiencing life in a reality TV program.
The Shock Doctrine–The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, the title of Naomi Klein’s wonderful 2008 New York Times’ bestseller says it all, laying out for everybody the hideous details behind capitalism’s newest wrinkle circa 1980s, neoliberalism, a destructive heat-seeking-missile aimed at unions, social welfare programs, and governmental regulations, let the free market reign supreme!
