Neoliberal Authoritarian Greece: A Nation for Sale & Death of Democracy

According to Henry A. Giroux (2005/6), 'neoliberal authoritarianism' is the process by which upper capitalist class interests reinvent the past, present, & future in the image of a crude exercise of power that unleashes unimaginable human suffering, in order to maximize wealth and influence in social, political & economic affairs at whatever social costs. From Truthout:

When the European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) came to Greece's rescue in May 2010 with a 110 billion euro bailout loan in order to avoid the default of a euro-zone member state (a second bailout loan worth 130 billion euros was activated in March 2012), the intentions of the rescue plan were mult-ifold. First, the EU-IMF duo (with the IMF in the role of junior partner) wanted to protect the interests of the foreign banks and the financial institutions that had loaned Greece billions of euros. Greece's gross foreign debt amounted to over 410 billion euros by the end of 2009, so a default would have led to substantial losses for foreign banks and bondholders, but also to the collapse of the Greek banking system itself as the European Central Bank (ECB) would be obliged in such an event to refuse to fund Greek banks.

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Giroux, Henry A. 2005. “The Terror of Neoliberalism: Rethinking the Significance of Cultural Politics.” College Literature 32(1):1-19.

Giroux, Henry A., and Susan Searls Giroux. 2006. “Challenging Neoliberalism’s New World Order: The Promise of Critical Pedagogy.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 6(1):21–32.

Mark Blyth on What's So Dangerous About Austerity?

 

From Truthout

Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, a book written by Brown University Professor of International Political Economy Mark Blyth and published last year by Oxford University Press, is one of the most important works to have emerged in recent years on the religion of austerity, the new dogma in neoliberal economics that is so perniciously enforced today in the peripheral countries of the Eurozone (Greece, Italy, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain) and loved by Republicans and all sorts of right-wingers in the United States. In his book, Blyth exposes how dangerous the policy of austerity has been in the past and explains why it resurfaced in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis. With his critical analysis of austerity, Professor Blythe also provides a damning critique of orthodox economics and shows that class politics is very much alive in the actions of today's governments and the rich.

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