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The Greek bailout is the latest exercise in a geopolitical ploy to expand European business interests and reinforce North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) doctrines.
The last of the troika’s worries – that is, the worries of the European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – include ensuring the economic stability of Greece.
This is obvious because this third Greek bailout in five years is following in the footsteps of past failed IMF bailouts.
This exercise of piling one loan after another on top of an already bankrupt economy can only work for so long before the inevitable happens – the inevitability being a major debt write-down, if not an all-out default.
Just look at the IMF’s work in Latin America that began in 1982. That was when Mexico declared itself insolvent. It touched off a flurry of sovereign defaults on the continent.
The case of Brazil was particularly telling, where the IMF and major banks attempted to do what the troika is doing with Greece.
“The plan set a fateful precedent of ‘curing’ the debt crisis by heaping on more debt,” author Ron Chernow details in his book, “The House of Morgan.” “In this charade, bankers would lend more to Brazil with one hand, then take it back with the other.”
The Latin American debt crisis ended when U.S. Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady orchestrated a resolution that allowed the conversion of third-world debt into so-called “Brady bonds.”
Creative debt restructuring aside, the Latin American debt crisis was illustrative of the futility of international debt resolutions that fall short of a major write-down or default. Unsustainable debt can’t be repaid with more debt. It only helped to cripple South American economies like Brazil.
Now similar efforts have continued to impoverish Greece.
So if the IMF and the some of the nation’s largest banks are already well acquainted with the hazards of repeated sovereign bailouts, why are they continuing the madness with Greece?
There’s only one logical conclusion…
Greek Bailout Unites NATO and EU Interests
The Greek bailout and the two preceding it were never about helping Greece.
The IMF, which has already voiced its discontent with this Greek bailout and has done so behind closed doors since 2010 regarding past bailouts, isn’t being afforded the luxury of its Latin American experience in resolving the Greek debt crisis.
It’s working at the behest of European institutions and the U.S. Department of State, both of which are using the Greek debt crisis as an opportunity to assert expansionist European Union (EU) and NATO agendas.
There is certainly tension between NATO and the EU. The goals of both international organizations don’t always mesh.
There’s a transatlantic, Anglo-American bias coloring the agenda of NATO expansion, while the EU is growing out of primarily Franco-German desires. But the Greek debt crisis has both ideologies working in tandem.
The EU has always been an attempt to unify Europe politically and economically, with roots dating back to the 1951 creation of a common European steel market, the European Coal and Steel Community.
The EU seeks to build a coalition of member states adhering to certain enlightened western European values and strict German-authored budget discipline so as to maintain a political union within a strong currency bloc.
What the EU can’t do is extend its borders on these principals ad infinitum, because swallowing up every country in its orbit and assigning them membership status would bring unstable countries like Algeria and Azerbaijan into the currency zone, threatening the broader euro project.
To preserve a strong European currency and political union while also satisfying its own expansionist desires, the EU employs a number of economic programs to reach out to its near-abroad.
Integral to this expansion is the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP), which provides incentives to participating countries who restructure their economies along the European playbook. Countries include Algeria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Egypt, Georgia, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Moldova, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Tunisia, and Ukraine.
These countries are not viable as economic players in the European currency bloc. And while Europe can’t bring them into the fold, they can bring on a sort of EU expansion by coaxing them into privatizing public assets and auctioning them off to European business interests.
It’s this privatization drive that defines the current endgame for Greece.
Greece has proven itself unworthy of membership status in the eyes of the troika. The only recourse now for the EU is to pile more loans on top of a bankrupt Greece and set up a privatization regime that opens Greece’s public assets up to EU corporatization.
The current Greek bailout calls for a privatization scheme totaling 50 billion euros ($55.3 billion) in public assets. This is a figure that, with repeated bailouts, has the potential to force Greece to privatize the state-owned gas firm DEPA.
This is a firm that Russia’s Gazprom made overtures toward in 2013.
That’s where NATO comes in.
NATO bills itself as an international security alliance that was first created to confront Russia’s Warsaw Pact countries, but after the end of the Cold War, it became a vehicle to secure global energy interests.
The Greek debt crisis right now is turning into a grab for energy assets. It’s about keeping NATO’s biggest adversary, Russia, from challenging the energy security of the Atlantic alliance should it make another bid for Greece’s DEPA.
“The European Central Bank wants Greece to privatize the gas resources, but to Europeans, not to Russia,” Michael Hudson, distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, told Money Morning. “So it’s part of the Cold War, and they’re really following the U.S. Defense Department almost entirely. It’s all a part of NATO.”
In the interim, the troika is more than happy to keep Greece a debt colony. All economic activity in the Hellenic Republic serves merely to keep Greece afloat before it seeks another bailout and another round of privatizations to European corporate interests ensues.
It’s all about hollowing out the Greek state. Greece’s labor force has shrunk by 975,300 workers, or 22%.
“Twenty percent of Greece labor has emigrated,” Hudson said. “They insist that 40% have to emigrate, wages have to be lowered another 30%, and basically the country has to be emptied out. Essentially they’ve said to Greece, ‘We want your raw materials, your gas – get out of the country.'”
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The post Greek Bailout Will Feed the Joint EU-NATO Energy Empire appeared first on Money Morning. Reposted with permission.
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