Blackout on Greek Debt Report

The Greek Debt Commission report declaring all the bailout debt “odious” and “unpayable,” has been virtually blacked out of the major English-language international media. Even Greece’s English-language dailies have blacked it out. Kathimerini, the leading neoliberal daily, included one line on it buried in an article on another subject. But, the Debt Commission report is all over the blogosphere on countless websites, and is covered widely in Spanish-language media, both in Spain and Ibero-America. Several websites, such as the Center for Research on Globalization, among others, published the Executive Summary or short summaries of each chapter.

International media are filled with reports on the fact that Bank of Greece Governor Yannis Stournaras inserted in the bank’s official report, the warning that if Greece defaults it would be thrown out of the Eurozone and the European Union. His report was rejected by the Parliament as soon as it was submitted, by Speaker Zoe Konstantopoulou, as being “unacceptable” and an “undemocratic” attempt to “create a fait accompli and prevent a challenge for debt relief.”

Stournaras was appointed by the previous government, as a reward for kissing the asses of the EU Commission/ECB/IMF Troika every day as finance minister in 2012-2014. He is considered an idiot, and a lackey of the European oligarchy, and is thoroughly discredited. Even Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in his Daily Telegraph column yesterday calls Stournaras’s assertions “fatuous” and says that the EU would not dare throw Greece out. Evans-Pritchard said that Stournaras’s action, when he is supposed to be a “neutral” figure “tells us much about the institutional rot.”

Wednesday night thousands of Greek demonstrators gathered in Syntagma Square carrying banners accusing EU leaders of being “loan sharks” and “blackmailers,” to send a message to the Athens government that their mandate is to take a tough stand against the creditors.