15 juli 2015 – Jayati Ghosh is professor of Economics at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, in New Delhi, India. She is specialised in globalization, international finance, employment patterns in developing countries and macroeconomic policy. In this article she delivers a scathing critique of the German role in the negotiations about a debt-deal for Greece.
According to Ghosh: ” The EU response to ignore completely the will of the Greek people as expressed in the referendum, and then to pushing even worse conditions on them for their resistance. These may be the most appalling and humiliating terms that have been seen in a non-war situation for any European nation, for the increasingly dubious advantage of staying within the eurozone.
Greece would become an economic protectorate, little more than a colony of Germany within the Eurozone. It will have no control over its fiscal policies, forced to sell valuable public assets just to keep trying to pay its creditors. It will have to reverse decisions to preserve some public employment (such as cleaning workers and security guards, whom it will now have to fire again). It will have to further cut pensions of elderly people who have already seen their incomes fall by 40 per cent. It will have to increase indirect taxes hitting the poor most. It will have to accept the constant presence of the external rulers, in the form of an IMF team that will monitor the budget and the activities of the Greek government. And the result of all this austerity will be more depression, in an economy that has been spiralling downwards for more than five years, encouraging the rise of rightwing zenophobic movements. This is a really prolonged Greek tragedy, with no clear end in sight.”
Read the complete article at: www.networkideas.org
©Y. Gosh, 15.07.2015, BRON
Photo: Credit by Azim Premji University, APU-INET Workshop