News / Brèves Back to previous selection / Retour à la sélection précédente Greece Skips IMF Payment; ’Write It Off,’ Says Lyndon LaRouche 5 June 2015 Come take them! [moˈlon laˈve] Leonidas of Sparta to Xerxes of Persia The showdown between Greece and the financial oligarchy escalated Thursday, with Greece telling the IMF that it would not make the 300-million-euro payment due today, and would instead bundle it with all the payments due this month. That means that 1.5 billion Euros are now due on June 30th. The move is expected to be approved by the IMF, whose rules allow the consolidations of multiple payments in a month, but it came as a surprise to IMF managing director Christine Lagarde. According to the Guardian, "Greece’s finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, told Sky News that "at some point" Greece would be unable to continue making repayments. "We will continue to attempt to extract from the fibre of the state the last ounce of liquidity to meet those payments, but at some point, and I’m not going to say when that point is, there will be super-seniority afforded to wages and pensions." He insisted that the cash crisis, which has already seen Greece raid the coffers of pension funds and struggle to meet public sector wage repayments, was "politically engineered by our creditors to try to squeeze us into effectively perpetuating this debt-deflationary crisis." He said he believed that, ultimately, Europe would "do the right thing". This latest development comes as the so-called troika is demanding brutal austerity that Greece cannot and will not accept. The latest demands were made by European Commission President Jean-Claude Junker, who insisted, among other things, that Greece make cuts in pensions that would throw off no fewer than 250,000 people who have no other source of income. Meanwhile, DefenceNet gave an unconfirmed report that there was a White House meeting Wednesday night that included Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, to discuss, or monitor, the Greek situation. Greece’s Deputy Shipping Minister Thodoris Dritsas said Athens would not "surrender" to demands by its international creditors in the negotiations, according to the Kathimerini daily. He told Greek TV: "What appears to have been discussed and to have been proposed by Mr. Juncker during his meeting with the Greek prime minister is beneath [our] expectations in every way...If reports are confirmed, obviously we cannot accept them." Lyndon LaRouche reiterated that the Greek debt to the IMF is illegitimate, and Greece should simply write it off. There will be bankruptcies in Germany, in Paris, in London and Wall Street,— but so what? They richly deserve it, and anyway,— Greece owes them nothing in actuality.