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In reply to the discussion: EU Tells Tsipras the Party’s Over as Euro Exit Door Swings Open [View all]dharmamarx
(58 posts)Greek citizens have already done the work they needed to do in terms of cleaning up Greece's finances: they replaced their previous corrupt political parties that refused to collect taxes (and thus contributed to the problem but did not entirely cause it, as Germany was also cheating on their inflation targets) with Syriza, which is clearly committed to raising taxes on rich Greeks.
Here is the economist John Quiggin on the IMF and austerity:
"After the Asian financial crises, everyone agreed that the IMF had learned its lesson, and would handle things differently in future. As the Great Financial Crises has shown, the truth is that the IMF has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. The institutional failure is made worse by the fact that the IMFs Research Department, arguably the strongest group of macroeconomic policy researchers anywhere, got their analysis right almost from the start.... In the same year, the IMF World Economic Outlook presented a refutation of the idea of expansionary austerity, based on the now-discredited work of Alesina and Ardagna. Subsequent IMF research has reconfirmed the Keynesian view that contractionary fiscal policy will worsen a depression." In short, one section of the IMF (the research branch) knows that austerity does not work and another section of the IMF (the policy branch) keeps on calling for austerity. The interesting question is why our elites keep demanding economic policies with a demonstrated track record of failure.
The real tragedy is that northern European and American workers are not right now in the streets supporting Greek and Spanish workers call to end these austerity policies. What the Troika has done to Greece is exactly what they want to do to the rest of the European working class and what rich Americans want to do to the American working class.