Socialist Progressives

Do you remember during the mortgage crisis of 2008 and 2009, when certain quarters looked to blame homeowners for the crisis, making the argument that irresponsible people took out loans they couldn't pay back. Therefore, they had to be held to account and to face punishment for their bad decisions. Even though, of course, the banks were the ones who made the bad loans in the first place. Well, right now, we're seeing the exact same thing play out in Europe. Greece borrowed more money from international banking interests than they could afford to pay back and they're being punished because they can't pay back their loans. Even though those banking interests, the northern Europeans, were outright enablers of Greek excess, aggressively sought to provide loans to Greece during the bubble era and here's the thing.

What was true in our own financial crisis is also true in Greece. Every loan is a two-way transaction. A person decides to borrow money and a person decides to lend it and sometimes, you lend out money that doesn't get paid back. That's the risk you take as a lender. In fact, that's why you get interest and when a loan goes bust, you write down your losses and move on. No, no, no, but instead, what we've seen in Europe are demands from the banking interests that have ground Greece into misery and brought it to the brink of outright disaster. Under series of austerity measures and spending cuts demanded by its creditors, Greece has seen a 25 percent decline in GDP, roughly equivalent to our own great depression. A quarter of the country is unemployed.

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