So, the case is not that Greeks are fighting cuts. There is nothing left to cut. The IMF filleting knife has gotten to pure, white, arthritis-afflicted bone. The Greeks understand that a second bail-out is simply “kicking the can down the road”. Greece’s primary budget deficit is, in fact, under 5bn Euros. The other 48bn Euros are servicing the debt, including that of the first bail-out, with one third being purely interest. The EU, ECB and IMF now wish to add another pile of debt on top of that, which will be used to satisfy interest payments for another year. And the Greeks have called their bluff. They have said “Enough is enough. Keep your money.”Every time I've read about the terms being "negotiated" for another round of financing for Greece, this is just what it sounds like. It's as though someone were asking, as part of a package to finance our federal government's deficit, that we give them the Washington Monument and the Florida Keys, plus some more stuff to be named later.
Democracy vs Mythology: The Battle in Syntagma Square
That's why the Greeks are in an uproar - they're being told to sell their country off, and accept a standard of living that's far lower, because their government and the banks it was supposed to be regulating couldn't get their shit together.
Sound like anyone else we know? Hell, it sounds like just about every Western country, including the U.S. The only difference I see is that the Greeks aren't going to take it anymore, and we're going to go right on electing the same people who have been screwing our economy up.
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