{"id":11656,"date":"2015-08-31T09:13:19","date_gmt":"2015-08-31T14:13:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=11656"},"modified":"2015-08-31T09:13:19","modified_gmt":"2015-08-31T14:13:19","slug":"whitewashing-the-imfs-destructive-role-in-greece","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=11656","title":{"rendered":"Whitewashing the IMF\u2019s Destructive Role in Greece"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"headline\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2015\/08\/31\/whitewashing-the-imfs-destructive-role-in-greece\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">Whitewashing the IMF\u2019s Destructive Role in Greece<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>This autumn may see anti-austerity coalitions gain power in Portugal, Spain and Italy, while Marine le Pen\u2019s National Front in France presses for outright withdrawal from the eurozone. These countries face a common problem: how to resist the economic devastation that the European Central Bank (ECB), European Council and IMF \u201ctroika\u201d has inflicted on Greece and is now intending to do the same to southern Europe.<\/p>\n<p>To resist the depression and debt deflation that the troika seeks to deepen, one needs to bear in mind the dynamics that make the IMF un-reformable. Its destructive role in Greece provides an object lesson for how southern Europe must shun its horde of ideologues, as Third World countries learned to avoid it by May 2013, the year that Turkey capped the world\u2019s extrication from IMF \u201cadvice.\u201d Already in 2008, Turkey\u2019s prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced: \u201cWe cannot darken our future by bowing to the wishes of the IMF.\u201d<a href=\"http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2015\/08\/31\/whitewashing-the-imfs-destructive-role-in-greece\/#_ftn1\" name=\"_ftnref1\">[1]<\/a>Greek voters have now said the same thing.<\/p>\n<p>To soften resistance to the IMF\u2019s austerity demands, a public relations drive is being mounted to rehabilitate the myth that the Fund can act as an honest broker mediating between anti-labor finance ministers and the PIIGS \u2013 Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain. On Friday, August 28, three Reuters reporters published a long \u201cthink piece\u201d trying to show that the IMF is changing and that its head, Christine Lagarde, has seen the light and seeks to promote real debt relief.<a href=\"http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2015\/08\/31\/whitewashing-the-imfs-destructive-role-in-greece\/#_ftn2\" name=\"_ftnref2\">[2]<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"Apple-style-span\">The timing of this report seems significant. The IMF got \u201cback in business\u201d in 2010 when its head, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, overrode its staff and many Board members in order to join the troika and shift the country\u2019s bad debt from French and German bankers onto the Greek people. That is the story I tell in\u00a0<em><a href=\"http:\/\/store.counterpunch.org\/product\/killing-the-host-digital-book\/\">Killing the Host<\/a><\/em>, which<em>CounterPunch<\/em>\u00a0published in an e-version last week. (The\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/3981484282\/counterpunchmaga\">hard-print<\/a>and\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/B014IAV9MK\/counterpunchmaga\">Kindle<\/a>\u00a0versions are now available on Amazon.)<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Whitewashing the IMF\u2019s Destructive Role in Greece This autumn may see anti-austerity coalitions gain power in Portugal, Spain and Italy, while Marine le Pen\u2019s National Front in France presses for outright withdrawal from the eurozone. These countries face a common problem: how to resist the economic devastation that the European Central Bank (ECB), European Council [&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],"tags":[2872,40,5493,233,282,3592,1167,418,434,784,2868,818],"class_list":["post-11656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-alexis-tsipras","tag-austerity","tag-counterpunch","tag-ecb","tag-european-central-bank","tag-european-council","tag-greece","tag-imf","tag-international-monetary-fund","tag-tayyip-erdogan","tag-troika","tag-turkey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11656","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=11656"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11657,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11656\/revisions\/11657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}