From documentary filmmaker David Malone, writing at Golem XIV about the institutional looting mandated by the Troika as bailout conditions:
Privatization targets utilities because they are monopoly businesses whose services people cannot do without. If you sell water you are the only supplier and no one can say no. Same with electricity (the grid that is) and the roads, the trains, the ports etc. All built up over decades with tax payers money. Now those assets and the profits they can generate will be privatized. Of course it is quite true that in the case of Spain and Greece much of the rot was not only in private banks, but in regional and even national government. But does that make the looting of a nation somehow better? So the ordinary people were betrayed by a small subset of wealthy and powerful people who ran local banks and local government. Certainly the ordinary people are guilty of laziness and a willingness to believe the vapid blather of the bankers and the politicians. But even so, does that justify stripping the assets owned and paid for by the citizens of a nation and selling them at recessionary prices to the wealthy few, in order to better bail out those same wealthy few?
The whole rationale for the bail-outs is that the banks need cash but should not , must not be forced to sell-off their own ‘assets’ to raise that cash. And why not? Because in a recession they would not get a good price for them. But the assets of the people, apparently, MUST be sold now, right now, in the recession at recessionary prices. And who advises this so adamantly? The banks.
