Also, this is not a postwar situation in Greece.
And Greek corruption, and the fact that the 1% in Greece doesn't pay their taxes--this is the crux of Greece's problems.

So does Greece's corruption and the citizens not paying taxes mean that Greece shouldn't have to pay back the loans they took out? And the working class taxpayer in Germany has to continue to pay for Greece's loans?

Greece to buy and equip their military from them is another factor. How much does Greece spend on the military and do they really need to? Greece cannot buy any weapon from any other country but Germany!!!

How exactly are they "forcing" this? Link pls

"This meant those countries that were owed debt had to buy West German exports in order to be paid."
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/feb/27/greece-spain-helped-germany-recover


"Greece's deputy prime minister, Theodore Pangalos, said during an Athens visit in May by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that he felt "forced to buy weapons we do not need," and that the deals made him feel "national shame."

Other European officials have charged France and Germany with making their military dealings with Greece a condition of their participation in the country's huge financial rescue. French and German officials deny the accusations."
http://www.lepointinternational.com/it/politica/europa/550-the-submarine-deals-that-helped-sink-greece-.html

"Speculation is rife that international aid was dependent on Greece following through on agreements to buy military hardware from Germany and France."
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/apr/19/greece-military-spending-debt-crisis

"The conditions of the next €130bn rescue package will be severe, yet there is an elephant in the room: the extent to which the German but also the French military industries rely on Greece.

The small, crisis-hit nation, whose prime minister, George Papandreou, narrowly survived a vote of confidence on Friday, buys more German weapons than any other country. Some Greeks want to know why it is that France and Germany are demanding cuts in pensions, salaries and public services, but the buying of arms is allowed to continue unabated.

Yanis Varoufakis, professor of economics at Athens University, says: "When Greek hospitals are running out of bandages, the only bit of the budget not being attacked by the EU and IMF is military expenditure." "
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/less-healthcare-but-greece-is-still-buying-guns-6257753.html

If the Germany and France are playing that game, it's really messed up. The sanctity of military spending is an abomination. Still some of these quotes are not definitive--"felt forced" etc. But we know that it is not a far-fetched proposition, right?

Sometimes people accuse me of being conservative just because I oppose some of the wacky and irresponsible far left governments in the world. But this kind of story reveals the other side--the cold imposition of military spending that is common both in the USA and in France and Germany.

I hadn't heard of this.

And learning from the mistakes of the past. It is widely acknowledged that the austerity Germany experienced after WWI was a causal agent of WWII.

Simply put, grinding the masses into the dust to punish the wealthy and powerful is a deeply fucking stupid idea, one that leads to social upheaval, sometimes cataclysmic. And Germany, of all nations, should know that. They have experienced both the punitive and constructive approaches firsthand and are fully cognizant of the consequences of their actions.

Actions that are, like those of many cowardly politicos, based not on the long-term good of all concerned, but rather focused solely on the re-election of the politicians currently in power.

It's part of the plan they presented when requesting a bridge loan and renegotiation of their debts.

Starving the elderly and destroying any future for the Greek youth is not a fair or reasonable way to fix the problems, and in fact is guaranteed to fail.

As we should know by our own experience here in the US, it's not an easy task to rein in the 1%.

They're already compromising.

I've read that hundreds of times here on DU.

first steps in a 4 year plan.

Germany had been completely devastated by a war and had a chunk of their country appropriated by the USSR...

Modern-day Spain and Greece mostly brought this economic mess on themselves with widespread graft, corruption, and shitty long-term fiscal policy...

Wasn't it Germany that was responsible for its own wartime devastation?

Christ on a Mauser.

The impossibly harsh terms imposed by the WWI allies on the defeated empire of Kaiser Wilhelm I gave the NSDAP all the nourishment they needed to get a third of the people to vote for them in 1933, and the left was so busy arguing with itself that it was caught completely by surprise. If Wilson, Clemenceau and LLoyd George had had just a tiny bit of foresight in 1919, they would have seen this coming. Instead, they were so busy seeing Bolsheviks under their mattresses that they figured they'd keep Germany under their thumb by saddling them with debt they'd be forever paying. Oops.

The difference is that sixty years ago the rest of the western countries realized that continuing to burden the German populace with crushing debt and a bleak outlook for the foreseeable future was a recipe for disaster and banded together to change that course.

What we have now, in both Europe and the US, is a plutocracy that has taken over the reigns of power and is wielding that power to consolidate wealth into the hands of a select few. They have no regard for the condition of their fellow citizens, and because of that they have no foresight except the depths of their greed. I'm sure it will come as quite a shock to them when the world economy finally collapses under it's own inverted pyramid weight and all the horror that will precipitate.

But you are correct, shocked they will be. Eedjits.

Seriously? Just in case you were not paying attention, GERMANY started invading countries: the Sudetenland, Austria, then Poland. They kind of started WWII....

They kind of started WWI too after ArchDuke Ferdinand was assassinated.


What the heck are you writing about "Germany was devastated by a war and had a chunk of their country appropriated by the USSR"... Germany is lucky the Allies let it exist after 35 years of shit it stirred up.

Greece should NEVER have joined the Euro, which is the cause of all this mess. Had they stuck with their drachma, which they were constantly devaluing, they would never been here. But in a country where corruption and lax enforcement are a tradition, looking to blame the bogey man when the cookie jar is found empty doesn't cut it. The Germany have bailed Greece out several times already. Now the Greeks are saying they'll pay back the debt in 2030 if the Germany will only pour ANOTHER 60 billion euros (or whatever it is this week) down the black hole--after multiples of the Greek GNP have already been sent down there. NO ONE believe this debt will EVER be repaid. Not the Greeks, Not the Germans. Not ANYBODY. It's as much as a fiction as the repayment of the Argentine debt.

The Greeks cooked their own books to join the Euro, but you can't collect 15% of the taxes you should, offer full pension retirement at age 55, and let your own billionaires stash a substantial percentage of the country's wealth abroad, untaxed, and untouchable, and STILL remain solvent as a country unless you have bigger oil reserves than Saudi Arabia. Greek olive oil reserves won't fill the gap. None of this is Germany's fault. Neither Duisenberg, Trichet nor Draghi were/are German, either.

My wife, a retired German social worker, gets all of 875 euros a month for her pension. Without me, she'd be eating cat food and living with her 87 year old mom. Greek government ministers live a lot better, even if their people do not. Now that I'm a full time German resident, it's MY taxes that are going down the black hole of the Greek Myth. The money is NOT being put to good use, and will never be repaid. This is money that German social system and infrastructure needs to spend on itself and the people here in Germany.

I am saying that Germany is pursuing an idiotic, shortsighted, punish-the-people-for-the-sins-of-their-leaders approach that will end badly.

And they know better.

and they should never have forgiven 50% of German debt, or done business with the Germans again after what the Germans did to the Greeks in WW2.

Half my family is Greek. They should have left the Germans in the rubble of their own making.

this was famously done after World War II for this nation called Germany, and it was done for Poland in 1991, where more than half of the debts were written off, many of them owed to Germany. And then, eventually, 100 percent of the debts were written off for a large number of African nations. And debts were written off in the range of 50 percent to nearly 100 percent for a number of Latin American nations. But in the case of the Greeks, the Germans are now insisting that they pay 100 cents on the dollar when--or euro, in this case--when that is not possible and it will cause a catastrophe.

And the real remarkable thing is, of course, we've seen this pattern before in the 1990s when the Washington Consensus and its insistence on austerity caused the lost decade in Latin America, financial crises in many nations in Latin America, very weak growth, rolling recessions and such. And it led to the election of now over a dozen controlling officials through democratic processes in Latin America who were elected on platforms saying that they were going to oppose austerity. And we've been saying this has got to break out in Europe eventually, and Greece is the first place that has done so. And that's what's really scaring--.

PERIES: That it'll have a ripple effect in Europe, and more and more progressive governments might get elected, as in Spain polls are showing that Podemos is, like SYRIZA, taking a lead in the polls.

BLACK: Yes. And it was only created about a year ago. So that is an astonishing surge in popularity, and the Spanish will be greatly encouraged by what they've seen in Greece. And there's also the possibility in Portugal to get similar results. Italy is more complex, but you're going to see parties that strongly oppose austerity, and you're going to see it in France as well.

Now, Europe's more complicated than Latin America, in that many of the strong opponents to austerity in Europe are actually right-wing parties.

PERIES: Explain that.

BLACK: Well, they don't like, basically, the fact that their governments have been turned over that to the Germans. Of course, what you have to remember is that most of the nations of Europe were occupied by Germany. And they do not have good memories of being occupied by Germany. And now Germany doesn't have to send an army; it just used the bond vigilantes as its shock troops, the Schwerpunkt, to produce a disaster in much of Europe. And now German diktats have ruled most of Europe for roughly five to six years. But that looks like it's going to continue unless there is a break led by folks like Syria that the German hegemony over the European Union seems to be unshakable, absent that kind of resistance.

PERIES: And what do you think of the SYRIZA government's collision course with Europe right now? How do you think it's going to play out?

BLACK: Well, first, nobody knows, and we shouldn't pretend that we know. The Europeans have to find a way to climb down, because what they've established will produce what it has already produced: a disaster that will grow.

So, as I said, there are many, many precedents where European nations, including Germany, have both been the beneficiaries of debt write-downs and people that have made huge debt write-downs. So it's time for them to find a way. Politically, of course, they're saying they're not going to do it, and that's exactly what you would expect going into negotiations. SYRIZA is, I think, doing exactly the right thing. It's being, basically, calm and saying, well, this is what we're going to attempt to achieve. And we'll see whether Europe basically recovers its spine and says to the Germans, no, sorry, you're one nation, you don't get to dictate everything that happens in Europe.

PERIES: Bill, thank you so much for joining us today.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=13093

BLACK: Thank you. And /greɪtbluː/.