I am a fan of Fintan O'Toole. His book The Ship of Fools was a classic. His writing for the Irish Times is exceptional. He had an op-ed out yesterday that is a classic on the Irish politician's ability to lie to maintain a fictional view of Ireland's special place in modern history. It is also precise and wholly accurate on Greece, about which he says:
When the crisis hit in 2008, there might have been a moment of truth. Instead ... [a] new fiction was invented — that Greece could simultaneously have its economy shrunk by relentless austerity and pay back hundreds of billions of euro.
The startling thing about the current debacle is that no one really believes this story any more. The IMF has long since admitted that its calculations about the economic effects of austerity were wildly wrong. No objective analyst believes that Greece can pay back its debts.
And yet the story must be maintained: Greece must keep punishing its people to pay back the money being borrowed to make the payments on the unpayable loans. In the upside-down world we inhabit, Syriza, which has called a halt to this fiction, is a bunch of mad fantasists, while the troika that goes on acting as if the fictions were real is the voice of hard-headed realism.
Everything - from the lives of ordinary Greeks to the foundations of the European Union - must be sacrificed to the story.
That is so true.
Please read the rest.
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Just read it. Superb.
Richard, at least now there are many influential people in various countries who understand the depths of these manipulations and are not prepared to accept the whitewash churned out by the usual controlled media channels.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/26/the-delphi-declaration/#.VZOqaZKXyuo.email
The IMF has been doing this for decades. Remember the “Latin American Debt Crisis” of the 80s? Africa, likewise? Paying more in interest each year than they started off owing. Eventually, debts were partly written off. By then the damage had already been done.
Disaster follows the IMF wherever it treads. And, as an inducement to its destructive intervention, usually precedes it.
Brilliant article.
Great minds…..a weekly must read, some articles are Irish based but even they show a healthy scepticism. Met him recently at a session on the Murdoch hack thing, good session and good discussion. Pity is he is seen as a pinko lefty by those in power here, viz. Finance Minister Noonan’s attitude to Greece. Biggest fear is they’ll be blamed for not getting debt relief, as Fintan points out.
Richard, I seem to have subscribed to lots of sites expressing the same views as Finton O’Tool – albeit less eloquently. What I’d like to have explained,since it seems ultimately unsustainable, is just in whose interests this farce is played out.
The 0.1%s