It's official: The Germans will not allow debt relief for Greece. Instead, Berlin wants to send in the repo man.

The untold story of the Greek "bailouts" is that it wasn't a "bailout" — it was an auction of Greek assets. Real, tangible things with real, tangible value were seized in exchange for pieces of paper that guarantee Athens will be chained to Berlin and Brussels for the foreseeable future.

Conquered by the Neoliberal Reich.

It's your basic extortion racket. As one rather gloomy (but intriguing) analysis puts it:

The debt problem continues to erode the European Union from within – it is already impossible to hide, and Greek tragedy, for example, is growing. Against this background, Germany seems to have a consensus about how to get rid of Greece with its debts and inefficient economy. The scheme of this careless schoolboy by the ear from the class, it seems, differs only in details: either to expel or allow suffering - to provoke the Maidan in Athens, and then to expel in any case. Bavaria’s 50-year-old finance minister and CSU politician Markus Soeder became the declarant of this ‘plan B’, who stated about the necessity of ‘a plan B’. “New billions should only flow when Athens implemented all the reforms. Even then, however, aid should only be given against a pledge "in the form of cash, gold or real estate",” Soeder stated. In his own way, he’s right – all conditions have been created for Maidan in Athens. Previously, the EU and the European Central Bank assessed all the Greece’s public property at 50 billion euro that does not even cover the necessary new loans on debt payments of this country (80-90 billion euro). Therefore, the collateral should be gathered from private funds through the expropriation of gold and real estate. Implementation of reforms will lead to the final death of the Greek small and medium businesses after bringing the taxation to "European standards", and namely such steps of the Ukrainian government have led to the Maidan in Kiev in 2013 with the collapse of the ruling regime in February 2014.

A bit too melodramatic? We forgot — we are supposed to use the friendly neoliberal term for this policy of national enslavement and communal suicide: "voluntary privatization."

Yes, we know. The poor, altruist Germans had to save irresponsible Greece. They did a fine job of it too. Fire sales always have the best bargains:

Behind the stories of a Greek economic recovery is the sad reality that everything of value in Greece has been auctioned off to the Germans and their partners in crime. Privatization is being sold as the remedy to all financial woes, while the snake oil salesmen do the exact opposite:

Oh, we're sure that Greece will get the money it "needs". Just after it surrenders everything of value that isn't nailed down. Once it's all packed up and shipped off to Berlin — thanks, "have some euros".

Even if the Germans are acting out of kindness (they're not), this is not a sustainable or long-term solution. It's the exact opposite: flat-out robbery.

As Eleni Portaliou, professor emeritus at the National Technical University of Athens, wrote back in September:

Privatization — the seizure of public property by private capital — is a central element of neoliberal globalization, routinely imposed not only by national governments but by supranational organizations like the International Monetary Fund, OECD, World Bank, European Central Bank (ECB), and European Commission. Today, Greece is the epicenter of privatization. The third memorandum, signed by the Tsipras government in 2015, enabled the property of the Greek state to be given away through scandalous methods to multinational companies and other states. The theft is not unusual. Privatization is one of the ironclad principles of neoliberal economic thinking, along with balanced budgets, independence of the ECB, prohibition of monetary financing of deficits, and close bonds with the financial markets. These principles have been constitutionally incorporated into the European edifice, codifying the appropriation and waste of public wealth, destroying human labor, and undermining the survival of our planet.

A perfect crime. After all, Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs helped cook the books so Greece could join the eurozone.

This really is a golden age for international criminal cabals. Al Capone was a chump.