July 14, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - "TeleSur" - " If one lifts the lid ever so slightly, they will find that what Germany and the Troika are doing to Greece is consistent with the entire "Washington Consensus" that turned institutions like the IMF into instruments of the neoliberal project at the end of the 60's.

It's what these forces have been doing across the Global South since then.

Masked as a 'debt-crisis,' what we are seeing in Greece is globalized capitalism functioning specifically as it always has. Crisis is a cyclical, predictable part of it, and it's function is necessary for the existence of financial capitalism. The global-lenders know this, in fact, their entire strategy is based around it.

That the Troika and the IMF promote a so-called "free market" is also a thinly-disguised farce. Stressing that other smaller players "deregulate" their economies to suit the interests multinationals and their financiers, the big banks and investors are completely backed by the power of wealthy states who insure them on their risks while also dedicating their political instruments to make sure that, in the event of the "unexpected" crisis, people in debtor-nations take the hit.

In reality, the systems left in place by these bodies are highly-regulated.

A playlist of selected folk songs from around the world against neoliberalism

THE SONGS:

   1. Fund - El Manawahly (Egypt)

   2. Call It Democracy - Bruce Cockburn (Canada)

   3. Suffer From Privatization - The Messenger Band (Cambodia)

   4. Global Economy - Ryan Harvey (United States)

   5. Days Like These - Billy Bragg (England)

   6. Ahora Que el Petroleo es Nuestro - Ali Primera (Venezuela)

   7. Organized Crime - Ethan Miller & Kate Boverman (United States)

   8. The Ballad of 84 - Dick Gaughan (Scotland)

   9. A Deselembrar - Daniel Viglietti (Uruguay)

In places like Greece, investors and their partners in the economic think-tanks tell a story of righteous bankers and multi-billion dollar funds loaning money to a country in need as an act of charity, or worse, as part of their pseudo-religious economic crusade to spread the one unalterable way of doing business to the world. "Poison in Honey," Egyptian singer El Manahawly calls it.

The rules of capitalism, they argue, are simply facts of life. To oppose them would be intervening in nature. "There is no other pill to take," Rage Against the Machine wrote at the start of the alter-globalization movement. "So swallow the one that made you ill."

In their narrative, the story rarely ends in an increase in poverty, a growth in the wealth-gap, rising unemployment, or full-out economic and political destabilization. That's because their primary measurement is the GDP, which can rise even alongside those previously mentioned conditions. A "strong economy" does not always, and in fact rarely, signifies a better life for the people laboring under it.

If a country ends up owing three-times or twenty-times more than they originally owed as a result of accumulated interest and/or the failure of austerity or "structural adjustment" policies to increase actual economic power, that's on their people to pay; regardless of whether or not the previous government cooked the books or was even democratically elected, and regardless if paying that debt means subjecting 80 million people living in that country to decades of poverty.

Then there's the success stories like Chile and South Korea, long the model-examples of the neoliberals. But behind the curtains of these "miracles" are the tortured bodies tens of thousands of student activists and government critics, of union members and poets who were shot in stadiums, disappeared, or thrown into the sea from helicopters. Their bodies lined rivers in Indonesia and were found on the banks of the Tigris. Alongside them are the stories of dictators like Pinochet and Mubarak who used brutal force to do, ironically, specifically what the neoliberals claimed to be opposing; intervene in the forces of the "free" market.

Over the last few decades, this specific process has been replayed in Chile, Thailand, South Africa, Argentina, or Iraq. The list goes on and the story remains quite similar: open your markets to the international financial institutions in exchange for needed assistance. To repay, you will agree to alter the way your economy and labor-market functions in order to produce more money to service your debt. A long line of billion-dollar investors will line up to gamble on your success or failure, and will hopefully move money your way to accumulate interests, which will inadvertently "help" the economy. Then, when the first signs of recession appear, the investors will take the money and run, and the whole charade will collapse like a house of cards.

Then you can figure out how to repay them for anything they lost in the process.

The price? An unwritten consensus that the international financiers needs and demands are placed well above the democratic desires, needs, or basic human rights of your people.

What will you get in exchange? If you are lucky and/or corrupt enough, you can take what you like off the top, being sure to disguise your actions enough so that the IMF can act surprised when it surfaces years later after Wikileaks exposes it or crowds storm through the burning offices of your party headquarters and find the documents.

Another option is to filter it through a chain of corporations and business bodies who you can turn to once you make your big move from the political realm to the private sector. And if you are really lucky you can work your way up to sit at the table with the suited ones and impose these programs onto the next country in line.

This is why the neoliberals, while toting the slogans of democracy, actually rely almost universally on dictatorships, unelected leaders, and corrupt regimes to make the changes needed for such loan-schemes. A democratic government, acting in good faith, would have a very hard time imposing such far-reaching changes on their people. That's why the Greek referendum, while perhaps symbolic, angered Germany so much; neoliberals hate democracy.

See the paid-off local bottom feeders, passing themselves off as leaders
Kiss the ladies shake hands with the fellows, and it's open for business like a cheap bordello
And they call it democracy
- Bruce Cockburn, Call It Democracy

This process of neoliberal expansion at the price of localized governance is what the mass protests in Seattle in 1999 were about and what the miner's strike in the UK was about the decade before. It's what the Zapatistas rose against, and what the uprisings in Southeast Asia centered upon in the 80's. It's what caused bread prices to skyrocket in Burma and Tunisia in the mid 2000's. And it's what brought a movement of textile workers fighting corruption and increased neoliberal restructuring to the streets to help set the ball in motion for the 2011 revolt in Tahrir Square. "Tie me with more loans," El Manawahly sings over the graceful notes of his delicate oud in the post-revolution video for 'Fund.' "Make yourself at home."

It was also a major factor in bringing Iraqis to the streets in 2004 after the IMF oversaw the largest restructuring-by-force of an economy in modern history, and made clear the economic intentions of the war. For the next decade, while Uncle Sam was being shocked and awed by their determination to resist occupation, South America was turning to the Left. The U.S. was too weak and too consumed with their imperial oil crusade to properly respond as they had in the 70's and 80's, and the dominoes fell. A major market is now in the hands of governments that are turning away from the Washington Consensus and embarking on making possible the demands of hundreds of years of social struggle across the continent.

The land is ours, it's yours and it's theirs
It belongs to Pedro and María, to Juan and José
- Daniel Viglietti, A Desalembrar, 1969

The only thing new about what has happened this week at the EU is that the process is now being imposed on an established European state assumed to be above such treatment. The southern European states, as well as places like Ireland and Latvia, are no strangers to austerity. But Greece exposes quite publicly the "visible hand" of the market, the second-phase of the program of economic restructuring. This is the part the Global South knows so well, in which national democratic processes are circumvented and nullified by the representatives of neoliberalism to fit the desires of the international creditors and banksters.

As I wrote a few years ago from Dublin, the chickens are coming home to roost - "Globalization" has returned to the West to consume it's own. Once a definitively "Western" Northern-Southern dynamic, now that the multi-polar world has become more visible and the global hegemony of the Western powers more definitively challenged, the vultures must find prey closer to home. The Northern-Southern divide has become a European reality as well.

In a sense, Greece's "NO" vote aligned them with their southern neighbors and away from Europe, which in turn brought out Germany's real intentions - now they are showing their asses to the world. As Jacobin said so well on Twitter, Germany's strategy has been to "demolish a Left strategy from within - the only solution is popular struggle."

Indeed, what matters most now is that people take what they have seen in these "negotiations" and respond in the streets, like the people of South America did from 1989 to the present. In Greece and Spain yes, but perhaps more importantly, in Germany and in the United States. To win, we must move beyond symbolic protests and organize to fight like the Global South has.