"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.

[...]

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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The will of the population is quite different from the policy of our ruling elites

paul jay of real news talks with noam chomsky about the utter and total negation of the will of the people in favor of agendas defined by our super-rich elites...

real news via common dreams...



once again, chomsky can help us to see through the propaganda and manipulation that inundates our daily consciousness...

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Some thoughts on Afghanistan from Qall e-Fatullah

take a look at this... real news editor paul jay talks with former cia analyst ray mcgovern about the u.s. machinations that led up to the mess that characterizes our current involvement in afghanistan... it seems that we - the u.s. - have this annoying proclivity for repeatedly shooting ourselves in the foot (or, more accurately, shooting ourselves AND everyone else involved as well) in our geopolitical power games...



i can't tell you how much fun it is to sit here in the qall e-fatullah neighborhood of the northwest quadrant of kabul and be able to absorb these kinds of perspectives from a ground level, and i'm not being snarky here... i indeed feel privileged to get to see some of this stuff first-hand...

i have to add that, for those of you who might think all is totally horrible here, it's not... there's a bunch of neighborhood kids playing a pick-up soccer game in the street right below my window... life has this interesting way of going on, no matter how badly some of us might try to totally screw it up...

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