Chris Hedges, Pulitzer prize-winning American journalist, writes a damning piece about the role of bankers and international financial institutions in the Greek crisis. He points to the similarities between the American lower class working people and the Greeks in an article in Truthdig. The left-wing activist, author and pastor, argues the Greeks and US working class are under assault by the same system of corporate capitalism.

The two peoples, he says know the despair of underemployment and unemployment, life without a pension, the inability to grow because of crippling debt. “They, like the Greeks know what it is to be abandoned”. Hedges says that all the powerful political institutions are essentially an extension of economic power and do their bidding, indifferent of democratic processes and human suffering.

He compares the Greek left government of Syriza with the Chilean government of Salvatore Allende in 1973, as it too had to beg for mercy to the European bankers so that it would not leave the Eurozone.