Economist Paul Craig Roberts: Greece Must Leave the Eurozone to Regain Its Sovereignty

[marmar]

Economist Paul Craig Roberts: Greece Must Leave the Eurozone to Regain Its Sovereignty

Wednesday, 04 May 2016 00:00
By Michael Nevradakis, Truthout | Interview


In Greece, the Syriza-led coalition government is now set to agree to new rounds of cuts and privatizations demanded by the country's lenders. Prior to its initial election in January 2015, Syriza had promised to abolish the country's loan agreements and austerity policies. Now, unemployment remains at record levels, and the young and educated continue to leave the country, while recent large-scale privatizations such as the sell-off of the port of Piraeus have been pushed through.

Paul Craig Roberts, a former undersecretary of the US Treasury and former Wall Street Journal editor, agreed to share his thoughts on the recent developments in Greece. The author of over a dozen books and numerous journal articles, Roberts regularly analyzes global economic conditions and geopolitics in his writing. In this interview, which has been lightly edited, he discusses how countries are indebted and forced to accept austerity, as well as current US economic conditions and the presidential election.

Michael Nevradakis: You have written that Greece is under foreign occupation. Explain why you believe this is the case.

Paul Craig Roberts: Greece is being looted like a colony of the private banks, which is what it is. Previous Greek governments accepted bribes to indebt Greece to private banks. For example, someone would come from Germany and say, "Let us make you this nice loan so you can buy German submarines, and here's a bag full of money for agreeing." This is the way much of the Greek debt was built up.

Normally in the past, when governments had excessive debt that they couldn't service, the debt was written down to an amount that could be serviced. For example, when Mexico couldn't pay in the 1980s, the debt was written down, and the US government came up with Brady bonds, which was a way of writing down the debt. But now that looting is completely unleashed; the rule is that if a government can't pay, the people have to pay, and the way they have to pay is to accept cuts in their pensions, cuts in employment, lower wages, cuts in social services. And they have to sell off their municipal water companies, their ports, the state lottery. This money is then used to pay the private bankers that lent the governments money that did not really benefit the people very much, but benefited the foreign recipients of the loans.

This is a looting process; it's the way that the colonialists looted the colonies in Africa and Asia, and now what we see is that the West is looting itself, and this all happens because the people accept it. Even when they protest, they don't go far enough. We have here a situation where the Greek people don't even understand what they have to do to save themselves and to be independent ... (They accept) EU domination, which means you have no national sovereignty. If you're a member of the EU and you use the euro, you have no financial independence. ..............(more)

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35883-economist-paul-craig-roberts-greece-must-leave-the-eurozone-to-regain-its-sovereignty

[Dr Hobbitstein]

1. Economist Paul Craig Roberts?

I'm pretty sure it's White Supremacist Paul Craig Roberts.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/VDARE
https://cafeintifada.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/867/
http://www.interpretermag.com/paul-craig-roberts-truther-as-patriot/

I don't believe a DAMN thing that comes out of his mouth.