"Savage austerity measures" in Greece

from the real news network with paul jay and michael hudson...

Paul Jay: In Greece, the financial elites of Europe have gotten agreement from the Greek government to another round of what some people are calling savage austerity measures, for example, lowering the minimum wage by 22 percent, a new round of privatizations, and cuts to pensions and many other social programs.

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Michael Hudson: Finance today achieves what military invasion used to do in times past. So the new mode of warfare is financial, not military. It's much cheaper and it's much safer for the country doing the attack.

[...]

And in this morning's newspaper, when it turned out that Greece's GDP fell at 7 percent annual rate, not the 5 percent expected, as usual the newspaper said, to everyone's surprise, the situation is worse than projected. Well, of course it wasn't really to our surprise, because we know that when you're strangling an economy, of course it can't cope very well. And they're strangling the Greeks economy. And they're using it, I think, as a laboratory experiment to say, what's going to happen when we really just squeeze labor and squeeze labor? It's like trying to feed a horse less and less and see whether it's really going to be more efficient until it keels over dead.

yes, let's beat that dead horse... by all means...

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