Greece has become a test case for draconian attacks on the living standards of broad sections of the population throughout Europe...
At their February 16 meeting, the EU finance ministers virtually disenfranchised the Greek government and placed the country’s budget under EU scrutiny. Such treatement of a member state has never occurred before in the history of the European Union. Every transaction of the Athens government will now be meticulously examined in Brussels, every vote in the national parliament closely monitored. The non-elected officials of the Brussels Commission and the European Central Bank (ECB) are taking control of an entire country, dictating their conditions to its government and parliament.
The cuts are being driven by the interests of the powerful financial institutions that determine the policies of the EU, as well as Europe’s largest economy, Germany. While most EU members wanted to give the Greek government time to implement the austerity measures it had already adopted, Germany, Austria and Sweden were insisting on the immediate tightening up of spending cuts. The state secretary in the German Finance Ministry, Jörg Asmussen, cited the examples of Latvia and Ireland, where public sector pay has been reduced by 20 and 15 percent, resepctively.
The measures are aimed at drastically cutting the living standards of broad layers of the population. According to the head of the German Ifo Institute, Hans-Werner Sinn, “The Greeks have become accustomed to the good life.” Now they need “to be prescribed a course of thrift: however difficult it is for the Greeks, they have to lower real wages.” And this, even though the national average wage is only half as high as in Germany, while prices are almost the same.
..For a long time, Germany was regarded as Europe’s “paymaster,” because it paid relatively large sums into the EU budget to compensate for regional differences. These served to expand and strengthen the EU, and the German economy, in turn, benefited the most. The corruption of the Greek elite, which now serves as a pretext for imposing brutal attacks on the working class, was tacitly condoned by Brussels and Berlin because it allowed the big corporations and banks to take over the Greek market.
But now Berlin is no longer willing to play the role of “paymaster.” The Merkel government has opposed any proposal to help the Greek government financially. The German media is full of propaganda about the Greek crisis being “home-made,” because the Greeks had been “living beyond their means.” For the German bourgeoisie, the issue is not so much the Greek debt, but the principle that the crisis should be paid for by the working class...
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/feb2010/pers-f18.shtml
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