Schäuble and the Spaniards wanted to smash Greece down immediately and publicly. The IMF doesn't care as long as the working class is crushed and the looting continues

Michael Hudson agrees:

Greek Finance Minister Varoufakis Wants Austerity ... for the Rich - Truthdig

Remember a few years ago when Europe said, Greece owes 50 billion euros in foreign debt? Well, it turned out that the central bank had given to the Greek parties a list called the Lagarde list (for Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF) of all of the tax dodgers, Greek tax dodgers who had Swiss bank accounts. Well, the Swiss bank accounts that the tax dodgers had ended up to about 50 billion euros. So Greece could pay off the debt that it's borrowed simply by moving against the tax dodgers.

But, of course, this would be at the expense of the Swiss banks and the other banks. So in effect the banks would be paying themselves. And they don't want to pay themselves. They want to squeeze it out of labor and let the tax dodgers and the Greek tycoons succeed in stealing the money from the government. So, in effect, the troika--not the troika, the finance ministers, really, are backing the tax dodgers and the crooks in Greece that SYRIZA is trying to move against, whereas the IMF is actually, for once, taking a softer position towards the whole thing. And even President Obama has chimed in by apparently calling German Prime Minister Merkel and saying, look, you can't just push austerity beyond the point, because you're going to push them out of the euro, and you'll push them out of the euro on SYRIZA's terms, where SYRIZA can then turn to the Greek population and say, wait a minute, we did what we promised here. We stopped the austerity. We didn't withdraw from the euro; we were driven out as part of the class war.

PERIES: Michael, earlier you were also making an analogy between what's going on in Greece and what happened to Cuba [crosstalk]

HUDSON: Cuba under Castro had an alternative social system. He wanted to spread the wealth around (it was a Marxist system) in his way. He wanted to get rid of really the crooks around Batista who were running the country, the rich who didn't pay taxes, and he wanted to have a social revolution there. So the American government said, wait a minute, if Cuba succeeds, then they're going to be a revolution all throughout Latin America. Latin Americans can realize, wait a minute, we can take over the American sugar companies there, we can take over the American banana companies there, we can make the rich pay the taxes and the corporations pay the taxes and the exporters pay the taxes, not simply the labor. We can unionize labor, we can educate it, and if Cuba can educate labor, that would be a disaster for the neoliberal plan, because if labor's educated and has a program, then it'll realize that there is an alternative to Thatcherism.