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"Real, live Germans are not heartless ants, and the Greeks are not broke because they are giddy crickets who sing their summers away. Greece is a grown-up country with grown-up problems: rough, tough politics, and a lot of recent history, not all of it very nice. And it is precisely that recent history, and rough politics, that are at the core of Greece's fiscal woes today. Take the painful question of the huge public sector, and all those civil servants with jobs for life, and unusually generous retirement packages. The existence of those jobs for life is not a cultural quirk, in which Greek officials simply like coffee and backgammon too much to do any work. It is the end result of a brutal, multi-decade power struggle between the left and the right: a struggle that got people killed within living memory."

Beyond the anti-Greek media campaign lies the story of a weary people caught between a corrupt political system and rapacious financiers. Sound familiar?

The Greek default has turned out to be the proverbial dog that didn't bark. The lesson for Europe - and for the US - is clear: it is time to stop listening to what banks say, and start focusing on what they do. We must re-evaluate the distorted political economy of the financial sector, before the excessive power of the few imposes even larger costs on everyone else.

"After all, Germany is now run by a generation with no personal memories of the war. Germany's historical debate is now focused on the fate of Germans who suffered from wartime bombing and postwar deportation, not with the fate of Germany's victims-in Greece or anywhere else. Sooner or later, the Germans will collectively decide that enough sacrifices have been made and that the debt to Europe has been paid. Thanks to the ungrateful Greeks with their island villas and large pensions, that day may arrive more quickly that we thought it would."

Civilizations rise, decay and die. Time, as the ancient Greeks argued, for individuals and for states is cyclical. As societies become more complex they become inevitably more precarious. They become increasingly vulnerable. And as they begin to break down there is a strange retreat by a terrified and confused population from reality, an inability to acknowledge the self-evident fragility and impending collapse. The elites at the end speak in phrases and jargon that do not correlate to reality. They retreat into isolated compounds, whether at the court at Versailles, the Forbidden City or modern palatial estates. The elites indulge in unchecked hedonism, the accumulation of vaster wealth and extravagant consumption. They are deaf to the suffering of the masses who are repressed with greater and greater ferocity. Resources are more ruthlessly depleted until they are exhausted. And then the hollowed-out edifice collapses. The Roman and Sumerian empires fell this way. The Mayan elites, after clearing their forests and polluting their streams with silt and acids, retreated backward into primitivism. As food and water shortages expand across the globe, as mounting poverty and misery trigger street protests in the Middle East, Africa and Europe, the elites do what all elites do. They launch more wars, build grander monuments to themselves, plunge their nations deeper into debt, and as it all unravels they take it out on the backs of workers and the poor. The collapse of the global economy, which wiped out a staggering $40 trillion in wealth, was caused when our elites, after destroying our manufacturing base, sold massive quantities of fraudulent mortgage-backed securities to pension funds, small investors, banks, universities, state and foreign governments and shareholders. The elites, to cover the losses, then looted the public treasury to begin the speculation over again. They also, in the name of austerity, began dismantling basic social services, set out to break th

Greece's crushing debt has exploded into a full-blown crisis, with the country on the precipice of the unthinkable: the default of a sovereign nation. Thanks Goldman Sachs.