{"id":10388,"date":"2015-07-26T07:40:10","date_gmt":"2015-07-26T12:40:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=10388"},"modified":"2015-07-26T07:40:10","modified_gmt":"2015-07-26T12:40:10","slug":"capitalism-engineered-dependencies-and-the-eurozone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=10388","title":{"rendered":"Capitalism, Engineered Dependencies and the Eurozone"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"headline\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2015\/07\/24\/capitalism-engineered-dependencies-and-the-eurozone\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">Capitalism, Engineered Dependencies and the Eurozone<\/a><\/h3>\n<p><strong>Greece<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>As fact and metaphor the ongoing crisis in Greece is the vanguard of broad social disintegration across the capitalist West. IMF Director Christine Lagarde is being put forward as the voice of reason calling for writing down Greece\u2019s debt to manageable levels. But her actual public statements have paid deference to German Chancellor Angela Merkel\u2019s suggestion, a slight variation on Barack Obama\u2019s mortgage \u2018rescue\u2019 packages, that maturities be extended but that people be left with debts far greater than they can reasonably pay. As attractive as permanent debt servitude might appear to those demanding it, it is a form of economic extraction, a transfer of economic production from nominal borrowers to banks and bankers.<\/p>\n<p>Current IMF tactics are being placed in a neo-Cold War frame with the U.S. trying to maintain European political stability on the side of the U.S. against Russia and China. But the broader tendency is toward collective suicide through imperialist revival economics, a global race to replicate Western consumption through increasingly \u2018managed\u2019 capitalism and through renewed competition for resources that led to the catastrophic wars of the twentieth century. The geopolitical frame understates the crudeness of the economic logic that gives banker \/ creditor \u2018workouts\u2019 the appearance of geopolitical machinations. The economic relations in play are \u2018political,\u2019 but they derive from economic ideology that preceded the Cold War by a half-century or more.<\/p>\n<p>The practical problem with the neo-Cold War frame is that it takes the underlying economic relations as given when they are in fact causal. The euphemistically-called \u2018trade\u2019 agreements being pushed by the \u2018developed\u2019 West grant broad authority over civil governance to multi-national corporations, the point being that the ideology that drives corporate actions is economic, not \u2018political\u2019 in the Western liberal sense of the term.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Capitalism, Engineered Dependencies and the Eurozone Greece As fact and metaphor the ongoing crisis in Greece is the vanguard of broad social disintegration across the capitalist West. IMF Director Christine Lagarde is being put forward as the voice of reason calling for writing down Greece\u2019s debt to manageable levels. But her actual public statements have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[1890,3172,63,3306,111,130,6177,149,1471,5493,279,285,359,1167,418,694,834],"class_list":["post-10388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-geopolitics","tag-angela-merkel","tag-bankers","tag-banks","tag-barack-obama","tag-capitalism","tag-china","tag-christine-lagarde","tag-cold-war","tag-corporatism","tag-counterpunch","tag-eu","tag-eurozone","tag-germany","tag-greece","tag-imf","tag-russia","tag-us"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10388"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10389,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10388\/revisions\/10389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}