The Greek Thing Continued

Though you wouldn't know it in this country, the media not working weekends and all, there will be a do-over Greek election tomorrow in which the radical left might eke out a victory -- yes, it really is a radical left over there, whereas in the United States, what passes for the "left" is composed of merely slightly less overtly radical rightists. It is widely assumed that no matter what the results of the Greek election are, some sort of jiggering of the enforced economic terms dictated on Athens from Berlin and Brussels will take place.

The fact that the Greek People are in extremis has not escaped notice either in Europe or in the rest of creation. That even greater levels of hardship are being demanded of the EuroPeriphery by the Core is widely recognized as self-defeating, and yet, there they go. As if it is the only thing they know. No matter what, the Greek -- and other Peripheral Peoples -- must be made to pay for the gambling losses of the major banks.

Bluntly put, this is how the colonial powers behaved toward their targets of opportunity back in the day. Much of the expansion of European colonial power was driven by very similar economic extortion. When the peoples to be subjected to colonial rule balked at the extortionate demands of the colonial powers -- demands that were made whether or not the to-be-colonized peoples were in debt to the colonial powers -- the colonial gunboats would commence shelling ports, the governmental palace (if there was one) was put to the torch, and members of the elite were rounded up and executed; a puppet of the colonists was put on the throne or in charge of the colonized sector, and the Europeans flocked in (though never in great numbers) to extract labor and resources from the cowed and terrorized People while piously nattering about Civilizing the Natives. Natives who were subject to extreme cruelty, brutality, sometimes genocide (let's talk about the Belgian Congo one day) famine, disease and massacre until they were "pacified" in service to their masters.

So now Frau Merkel and her assistants are trying to do it to Greece. That the Hellenes balk is of no account to her or to Mme Lagrand over at the IMF or to any of the other Core leaders. Hell no. Let them balk,  they can't do anything about the looting, plunder and pillage that is under way, let alone what is to come. They are as powerless as any other subject people. They have lost and they must pay.

Reversion.

It's the new "Forward!"

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Of course what's striking about this video documentary of the Greek healthcare system in mortal crisis is that these are the approximate conditions that millions upon tens of millions of Americans face all the time, indeed, which many more Americans can identify with even if they (still) have health care coverage.

Restricting access -- whether or not the patient has coverage -- has become the mantra of the field.