IMF
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Between Berlin and a Hard Place: Greece and the German Strategy to Dominate Europe By Andrew Gavin Marshall
As the United States and the rest of the world would learn, the European strategy for the debt crisis that began in Greece and spread across the eurozone would be dictated by Germany, “the undisputed dominant power in Europe.” More than five years later, the Americans are still pressuring the Europeans to resolve their debt… Continue reading
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GREECE’D: We Voted ‘No’ to Slavery, but ‘Yes’ to Our Chains By Yves Smith
As this article describes, the cheerleaders over the Greek referendum last weekend has badly misread the game in play. Tsipras is now working on a coalition basis with all parties save Golden Dawn, which means firmly pro-Eurozone parties such as To Potami and New Democracy. And as he and other party leaders promised in the… Continue reading
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Greece Rejects the Troika By Michael Hudson
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker threatened to expel Greece from Europe, despite no law permitting this to occur. Let us see now whether he still tries to carry out his bluff, which has been echoed by right-wing leaders throughout Europe. Continue reading
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We Interrupt This Referendum, Part 2 By S. Artesian
Tearing away, just for the moment, from Thunderdome on the Aegean–“Break a deal; face the wheel”– there’s the island commonwealth, Puerto Rico, part of the United States when that’s convenient and lucrative for the Federal government; and not part of the United States when it’s not convenient. Like now. When it has $72 billion in… Continue reading
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We Interrupt This Referendum, Part 1 By S. Artesian
Here’s all we need to know about the difference between voting “???” or “???” on the referendum in Greece: a “no” vote means, in the words of the current prime minister, “I can assure you that the next day, I will be in Brussels and there will be a deal;” a “yes” vote means that… Continue reading
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The Radical Reconfiguration of Southern European Politics: The Rise of the Non Leftist Left By Prof. James Petras
New political movements, purportedly on the left, no longer are based on class conscious workers nor are they embedded in the class struggle. Likewise on the right, greater attention is paid to escalating the repressive capacity of the state instead of state intervention in pursuit of economic markets. Continue reading
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What Stinks about Varoufakis and the Whole Greek Mess? By F. William Engdahl
What we have witnessed…is what can only be called a clown show, one in which the laugh is on the Greek people and EU citizens as a whole. The ones laughing, as often is so, are the mega banks and Troika–ECB, IMF and EU. Behind the Troika, almost invisible, are the Greek oligarchs who have… Continue reading
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The political fraud of Syriza’s referendum on EU austerity in Greece By Alex Lantier
On the eve of the referendum, the Syriza government is in full-scale retreat. If the “yes” vote carries, the Tsipras government is preparing to resign and give way to a more openly right-wing regime, dedicated to implementing whatever the EU demands. In his speech Monday calling for a “no” vote, Tsipras signaled that his government… Continue reading
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Tsipras’s Surrender Rejected As Berlin Pushes For Regime-Change In Greece By Chris Marsden
Just how far Tsipras was prepared to go was made clear in a letter sent Tuesday to the heads of the EU, ECB and International Monetary Fund. In return for a two-year €30 billion loan from the European Stability Mechanism, he was prepared to accept all of the institutions’ basic demands. He only requested a… Continue reading
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More than Twice, Less than Zero By S. Artesian
Back in January, Syriza convinced the Greek voters that it could win a write-off of the Greek sovereign debt from the Troika; that it could obtain a “significant grace period in debt servicing;” exclude public investment from the restrictions of previous agreements; rebuild the welfare state; lead the country to productive reconstruction and recovery; increase… Continue reading
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Now Playing, Limited Engagement, at the Odeon: Slick Alexis in “Illegal Illegitimate Odious”
Alexis Tsipras, one time star of student government and summer stock before graduating to bourgeois government and dinner theater, has pulled off what one of his predecessors could only dream of doing: posing the demands of the EU for the impoverishment of current and future generations as a referendum for the “people” to vote upon. Continue reading
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Reasons To Be Uncheerful By S. Artesian
The truth is that the debt represents the compressed whole of capitalism. More specifically, Greece’s public debt cannot be separated from its membership in the EU, from its adherence to the monetary union, from its condition of capitalism within the larger network of capitalism, all the PhDs, political economists, Marxist economists, in the world to… Continue reading
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From the horse's mouth: U.S. Dollar Strategic Backfire On U.S. Government Policy
It is very difficult to find a foreign policy deployed by the United States Govt that has been successful in recent years. In fact, almost all aggressive foreign policy initiatives have resulted in profound losses either in financial strategic position or in alliances with previous staid allied nations. They have almost uniformly backfired, while bravado… Continue reading
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Dollar Imperialism, 2015 Edition By MICHÈLE BRAND and RÉMY HERRERA
The Fed effectively acts as the world’s central bank, but sets monetary policy only in its own interest. Under the pressure and the orders of financial oligopolies, it fixes interest rates and prints money to suit itself, sending economies across the globe into tailspins. When the Fed wanted to halt the decade-long decline in the… Continue reading
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The Anti-Empire Report #137 By William Blum: A Greek Tragedy
In 1964, the liberal George Papandreou came to power, but in April 1967 a military coup took place, just before elections which appeared certain to bring Papandreou back as prime minister. The coup had been a joint effort of the Royal Court, the Greek military, the KYP, the CIA, and the American military stationed in… Continue reading
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IMF Loans to Ukraine: Deadly “Economic Medicine” Aimed at Total Destabilization By Ernst Wolff
On February 12, Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, announced that the IMF had reached an agreement with the Ukrainian government on a new economic reform program. Ms Lagarde’s statement, made in Brussels, came only minutes after peace negotiations between the heads of the German, French, Russian und Ukrainian governments in Minsk,… Continue reading
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The War in East Ukraine: US-NATO’s Paranoid Falsification of Reality By Carla Stea
More than twenty emergency United Nations Security Council meetings have been called since January, 2014, the majority of them currently demonizing Russian President Putin for destabilizing Eastern Ukraine. With the exception of China, the stark failure to acknowledge and confront the authors of the current tragic bloodshed and slaughter in Ukraine reveals paranoid ideation by… Continue reading
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Ukraine in Turmoil: War May Come at Any Time as It Came Twice during the Last Century By Israel Shamir
It is not much fun to be in Kiev these days. The revolutionary excitement is over, and hopes for new faces, the end of corruption and economic improvement have withered. The Maidan street revolt and the subsequent coup just reshuffled the same marked deck of cards, forever rotating in power. Continue reading
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Michael Hudson: The New Cold War’s Ukraine Gambit
Finance in today’s world has become war by non-military means. Its object is the same as that of military conquest: appropriation of land and basic infrastructure, and the rents that can be extracted as tribute. In today’s world this is taken mainly in the form of debt service and privatization. That is how neoliberalism works,… Continue reading
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The IMF goes to war in Ukraine By Pepe Escobar
The IMF has approved a $17 billion loan to Ukraine. The first $3,2 billion tranche has been received today. It’s essential to identify the conditions attached to this Mafia-style “loan.” Nothing remotely similar to reviving the Ukrainian economy is in play. The scheme is inextricably linked to the IMF’s notorious, one-size-fits-all “structural adjustment” policy, known… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 