The Financial Invasion of Greece — Sharmini Peries interviews Michael Hudson

HUDSON: The IMF says it will not reduce Greece's debt by a single penny. It will keep the debt in place. The problem is the way that the European central banks keep their balance sheets, if it breaks down Greece's debt owed to the IMF then the countries Germany, France, and other countries whose banks are bailed out will have to take a loss and they refuse to lose a single penny. So the IMF has not made a creative proposal. It has repeated what it said a year ago without changing a single word. It says okay, we're going to keep every penny of debt in place but we're going to give you a fudging number.…

There's only one kicker. You're going to have to cancel your pensions, write them down, impose austerity, privatize your government, and you're going to have to shrink your economy so that it will shrink by about 1, 2, 3% a year so that the 1.5% interest that we're charging as little as it is, is going to absorb all the income growth you have. Every penny of growth of have from the next 25 years you'll have to end up paying the German banks. Now we know you can't do it. We know that when you cancel the pensions you're going to shrink. We know your labor's on strike. We know they're going to immigrate. But there's a way out. You can sell your ports, your land, your public utilities, your railroads, your airports, anything you have you can sell to the Germans and at the end of this time you won't have a single thing and all we ask is that all you Greeks get out of our country, now that we own you. That's what the IMF is saying. It's not creative, it's absolutely brutal. That's why the Greeks are out on strike.… 

Neoliberalism taken to its logical conclusion — we own everything.

There is a war going on in Europe but it's not a military war anymore. They're now using finance instead of war and they're using finance to say, we can grab your country.…

Real News Network The Financial Invasion of Greece