Just two days before the Eurogroup, Christine Lagarde forwarded a group mail to all the Finance Ministers of the Eurozone in “order to clarify the position of the fund”. In that letter, the chief of the IMF claimed that an annual fiscal surplus beyond 1,5% of Greece's GNP would be an irrational expectation due to financial and social reasons while the Eurozone request for a 3.5% surplus from 2018 onwards is, plainly, impossible. The IMF suggests that the whole austerity policy should change and the Greek public debt should get a heavy haircut…but only the Eurozone side, not the Fund's. 

Unfortunately, one more time the IMF has been found somewhat selective with the truth; the letter has inadvertently demonstrated that its analysts have been producing extravagantly doctored reports, based on knowingly false proof so that the “rescue” program would continue running as it has for all the past years. The regular payments to the IMF coffers are, of course, part of the program. It goes without saying that the previous surplus that C.Lagarde had accepted as feasible two years ago, 4.5% over the GNP, was just as, in fact one percentage point more unrealistic as the surplus she now finds unacceptable.

In any case the International Monetary Fund was not brought into Greece as a humanitarian organization. Reports from the OECD prove beyond doubt that whenever the IMF participates in a financially stranded country's “rescue” program, its economy becomes liberalized while all the standardized social indexes show significant decline-even the citizen's life expectations show change for the worse. 

Listening to the, leaked by WikiLeaks, private conversation between P.Thomsen and D.Velculescu easily demonstrates that none of these two prominent IMF officials have any concern for the social impact of their decisions-yet every public IMF document proclaims the fund's social sensibilities. It follows that they also don't care what people think about them. The hatred of the affected citizens is just an element, a variable which has to be taken into account and manipulated towards the achievement of their goals. 

The second part of the Monday show was held by the European Commission, essentially a misnomer for the German Finance Ministry. Germany, under the direction of its Finance Minister W.Schauble decided, orchestrated and realized all the austerity programs which were forced on the heavily indebted countries of the European periphery; the aptly named PIGS. In the beginning of the crisis it was Germany which was faced with the gravest danger, due to the exposition of its greatest banks to the debt of those nations and it is also Germany which gained the most from the manipulation of the common currency in order to serve its commercial superiority. For the past two years, the international media keep feeding the European public with rumours and indications of the “tension” between A.Merkel and W.Schauble. They do alternate but it seems that Dr.Schauble likes to play worst cop to A.Merkel's bad cop. 

Germany claims that a Greek debt haircut is out of the question since that would go against the European codes, still the ESM was also not included in the European laws while any program that creates humanitarian crises is not allowed by the Greek constitution, and all the loans that have been issued to Greece in the past years are against the Greek legal code and the European rules. 
It appears that legal obligations and rules are a malleable tool and one could be excused for thinking that perhaps, just for a change, it could be used in order to offer some relief to the poorest devils of our societies. 

The latest episode shows that the two main protagonists, the IMF and the Eurozone are at a point where there perception of what would be the right course concerning the Greek drama differ greatly. It seems that for now, the Greek government has decided to side with the Commission. The reason is not immediately obvious. The IMF is proposing a 1,5% surplus rather than 3,5% while it also pushes for a significant haircut. The Greek prime minister stated that the IMF “is asking us to jump from the 5th story”.  The only possible clue that we can gather lies on the fact that the IMF questions the numbers that the Greek side presented during this latest negotiation and is asking for talks based on other financial scales.

This is in no way a spoiler alert, merely an introduction. It would be nice to know that the people who direct our lives know what they are doing and are going to round everything up in the end. But this is not a “happy end” movie. It's a boring, tiring soap opera where the lesser players, the Greek people, are only used  to promote a scenario which doesn't really take their wellbeing into account.