This is shameful.
"Timothy" Geithner is running around Europe meeting with members of the economic and political elite. Europe is falling apart at the seams. The meetings were secret, but we can kind of tell what conclusions were drawn in them by Geithner's comments afterwards:
For Europe, Geithner predicted “years and years of difficult financial pressure on those governments that were just living way beyond their means for a long period of time and have terrible growth prospects.”
“That’s just going to be a long challenge,” he said. “But they need this broader firewall in place to make sure Europe is protected from that inevitable set of pressures.”
Oh, yeah?
Let's back up here a bit and consider what we know.
The global financial community bought up some billions of dollars of Greek debt. The debt came with a premium, which is the amount that these banks effectively charged Greece in order to make the money available. Greece isn't Germany or the U.S., so they had to pay handsomely for the privilege of borrowing from the banks -- and the banks happily took the cash and made themselves richer with it.
So now that Greece can't pay back its loans on time ...
The Banks have gone whining to the governments of Europe and the U.S. saying that they will destroy the global financial system if Greece doesn't make their payments on the debts.
Seems a bit extreme, doesn't it?
I mean -- they will blow up the whole world because some tiny country with a tiny economy (in global terms) won't pay back 100% of their loans on time?
Ridiculous!
Yet, here we are.
And instead of telling the banks to go fuck themselves, Geithner plays right along with it. Even more than that, he has decided -- out of apparent kindness of his heart -- to play a heavy for the banks and, speaking as a representative of our government, declare that Greece must suffer to pay off the banks for years and years.
Years and years of suffering? Why? Because Greeks are bad people? Because a few German and French banks made bad loans?
And get this:
He says that Greece has "terrible growth prospects."
Well, there is only one reason that is true: the euro.
The euro prevents Greece from making its labor competitive at global market prices. It can abuse its population with Geithner's beloved austerity measures all day long, but that simple fact won't change. The euro makes Greek workers too expensive in the global marketplace.
And this leads back to the central premise here:
Geithner and his banker friends can punish Greece for "years and years," terrorizing them by forcing its government into a condition ever more precariously starved by austerity ... But it still won't get the banks' money back. Greece still will not be able to pay.
All the same, it's the suffering that is important to Geithner.
It's important that people suffer. Greeks and ...
Americans.
And I think that that says a lot about what the Obama administration chose not to do for the American people during this crisis. The administration didn't help out every day Americans because Geithner and people like him in the White House wanted Americans to suffer.
For "years and years."
Presumable for our "crimes" -- wake me or roll me over when someone can explain exactly what these crimes were.