Reply #23: Greece is not a business. Businesses are not valid metaphors for nations.

[JackRiddler]

Your examples in no way correspond to the actual Greek case.

Businesses can lose their value entirely. Nations never do. What Greece is worth is what can be pulled out of the nation and its labor, forevermore. A business gets to declare bankruptcy and the owners are then cleared of debt. Liability is limited. If a Slurpee's franchise fails, the owner gets to default and start over, and more importantly: The workers are NOT forced to work at half the wages and pay half of that to the store's creditors, forever more. This is what is being done to the Greek people. This is why full default, exit from the euro and a hard new beginning are necessary, rather than the generations of debt slavery now being enforced.

THIS IS NOT HOW IRELAND GOT IN "TROUBLE," BY THE WAY.

Ireland was the neoliberal poster child. They did everything the bankster ideology required: government surpluses, low taxes, subsidies to corporations, incentives for people to take out debt and buy houses, etc. Ireland got screwed overnight because their OWNED government very, very bizarrely committed to covering private bank losses when they failed in their private business scams. Private debt became public debt, and even though Ireland did everything the Wall Street Journal could have ever wanted, overnight it was transformed from a model capitalist nation to a delinquent. Now the bankster-owned media pretend that Ireland actually spent its way into a mess. It did not. It adopted the banksters mess, so that they can now blame the Irish people.