Meanwhile in Greece, The Shock Doctrine Plays Out

Naomi Klein talks to Lynn Edmonds about Greece, austerity, and the shock doctrine. Lots to unpack, read the whole thing, but here are four crucial thoughts:

1. Those Grecian beaches are gonna get tore up.

What I’ve been following recently is the sell-off of natural resources for mining and drilling. That’s the next frontier of how this is going to play out — the scramble for oil and gas in the Aegean. And it’s going to affect Cyprus as well. This is a whole other level of using austerity and debt to force countries to sell off their mining and drilling rights for fire sale prices.

2. This keeps happening.

But the part of this that I find so culpable, and so deeply immoral, is that the rise of fascism in this context is entirely predictable. We know that this is what happens. And this is supposedly the lesson of the Second World War: If you impose punishing and humiliating sanctions on a country, it creates the right breeding grounds for fascism. That’s what Keynes warned about when he wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace, regarding the Treaty of Versailles. To me it’s so incredible that we continue to allow history to repeat in this way.”

3. Your debt is not the same as the country’s debt and don’t let anyone tell you it is.

There is a concerted attempt to create the false equivalency between an individual who went into a little bit of consumer debt, and a bank who leveraged themselves 33–1. It’s an outrageous comparison.

4. We need to make debtors’ cartels happen.

(So the countries of southern Europe should come together negotiations with the troika?) I would think so, yes. It’s called a debtors’ cartel. But it never happens. As far as I know it hasn’t been tried.

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