This evening's music features Memphis blues singer and harmonica player Herman "Little Junior" Parker.

Here are some stories from tonight's posting:

Joseph E. Stiglitz: The U.S. Must Save Greece

As the Greek saga continues, many have marveled at Germany’s chutzpah. It received, in real terms, one of the largest bailout and debt reduction in history and unconditional aid from the U.S. in the Marshall Plan. And yet it refuses even to discuss debt relief. Many, too, have marveled at how Germany has done so well in the propaganda game, selling an image of a long-failed state that refuses to go along with the minimal conditions demanded in return for generous aid.

The facts prove otherwise: From the mid-90’s to the beginning of the crisis, the Greek economy was growing at a faster rate than the EU average (3.9% vs 2.4%). The Greeks took austerity to heart, slashing expenditures and increasing taxes. They even achieved a primary surplus (that is, tax revenues exceeded expenditures excluding interest payments), and their fiscal position would have been truly impressive had they not gone into depression. Their depression—25% decline in GDP and 25% unemployment, with youth unemployment twice that—is because they did what was demanded of them, not because of their failure to do so. It was the predictable and predicted response to the austerity. ...

The question now is: What’s next, assuming (as seems ever more likely) they are effectively thrown out of the euro? It’s likely that the European Central Bank will refuse to do its job—as the Central Bank for Greece, it should do what every central bank is supposed to do, act as a lender of last resort. And if it refuses to do that, Greece will have no option but to create a parallel currency. The ECB has already begun tightening the screws, making access to funds more and more difficult.

Greece can easily survive without the funds from the IMF and the eurozone. Greece has done such a good job of adjusting its economy that, apart from what it’s paying to service the debt, it has a surplus. It isn’t even dependent on the IMF and the eurozone for foreign exchange: At least before the most recent stranglehold that Greece’s creditors had imposed, it was running a current account surplus of 1%—5% if we exclude oil exports.

The U.S. was generous with Germany as we defeated it. Now, it is time for the U.S. to be generous with our friends in Greece in their time of need, as they have been crushed for the second time in a century by Germany, this time with the support of the troika. At a technical level, the Federal Reserve needs to create a swap line with Greece’s central bank, which—as a result of the default of the ECB in fulfilling its responsibilities—will have to take on once again the role of lender of last resort. Greece needs unconditional humanitarian aid; it needs Americans to buy its products, take vacations there, and show a solidarity with Greece and a humanity that its European partners were not able to display.

Greece extends bank closures as reform proposal due

Greece has extended bank closures and a $66 limit on ATM withdrawals until Monday, as the deadline for the country to submit detailed economic reform proposals looms.

The debt-strapped country has until the end of Thursday to present the plans in exchange for a bailout.

On Wednesday, Greece submitted a request for a three-year bailout from the European Stability Mechanism — a European Union agency that provides loans.

‘Leave Euro, retake democracy!’ Far-left & eurosceptic MEPs bash eurozone over Greece

Greece finally admits €2bn gas pipeline deal with Russia

Closer ties between Athens and Moscow is likely to worry the US, which has stepped up its involvement in Greece's debt crisis

Greece has admitted for the first time it is planning a €2bn gas pipeline with Russia.

The move is likely to worry the US, which has stepped up its involvement in Greece's debt talks with international creditors over fears the cash-strapped country could drop out of the single currency and come under the influence of its Cold War rival.

Panayotis Lafazanis, Greece's energy minister, said the move would be a key part of the country's "multi-faceted" foreign policy and would create 20,000 jobs, the Financial Times reported.

China bans major shareholders from selling their stakes for next six months

China’s securities regulator took the drastic step of banning shareholders with stakes of more than 5% from selling shares for the next six months in a bid to halt a plunge in stock prices that is starting to roil global financial markets. ...

China’s stock markets opened down again Thursday morning before making up some ground. Shanghai Composite Index fell more than 3% in the first half hour of trading before reversing course and rising 1.4%, while the Shenzhen Component Index opened down just over 1%. ...

Iron ore prices plunged to fresh six-year lows on Thursday as the contagion hurt commodity markets, with resource-heavy economies such as Australia bearing the brunt.

The spot price of the commodity used to make steel took its biggest one-day hit ever overnight, falling 10% to $44.59 a tonne, analysts said, as demand in key market China continues to shrink.

An IG Markets strategist, Evan Lucas, said: “Iron ore has just logged its worst trading day on record. The steel price in China is now cheaper per tonne than cabbage.”

Chinese Economy Running Off the Cliff and There is Nothing Beneath It

Former Dictator of Guatemala Ruled Mentally Unfit to Face Retrial for War Crimes

Efrain Rios Montt, the aging former dictator of Guatemala, is mentally incompetent and unable to stand trial once more for charges of genocide during Guatemala's decades-long civil war, government forensic scientists have ruled. ...

The news dredging up wounds from Guatemala's painful civil war comes amid a current period of political turmoil reaching the highest office in the country.

Tens of thousands of demonstrators in recent weeks have rallied and called on President Otto Perez Molina to step down over a fiscal corruption scandal that has already toppled vice president Roxana Baldetti, who resigned in early May. Perez Molina, himself a former general who still faces lingering allegations of abuses during his time in the civil war, has said he won't resign. ...

Guatemala's Commission for Historical Clarification has estimated that 10,000 mostly indigenous civilians were killed by armed forces in the 17 months Rios Montt was president, and 448 villages were literally wiped off the map. At least 200,000 people were killed overall in the government's US-backed war against guerrillas and paramilitaries between 1960 and 1996, in unrest that was rooted back to the 1940s.

This article makes for some harrowing reading, but the facts within it ought to be brought up to illuminate the discussion the next time some humanitarian interventionist mad bomber mouths the name Srebernica to justify their next round of death-dealing, hellfire demockery from above:

How Britain and the US decided to abandon Srebrenica to its fate

New research reveals that Britain and the US knew six weeks before massacre that enclave would fall – but they decided to sacrifice it in their efforts for peace

They will fill the VIP stands at Srebrenica next weekend to mark the 20th anniversary of the worst massacre on European soil since the Third Reich; heads of state, politicians, the great and good.

There will be speeches and tributes at the town’s memorial site, Potocari, but the least likely homily would be one that answered the question: how did Srebrenica happen? Why were Bosnian Serb death squads able, unfettered, to murder more than 8,000 men and boys in a few days, under the noses of United Nations troops legally bound to protect the victims? Who delivered the UN-declared “safe area” of Srebrenica to the death squads, and why? ...

Until now, it has always been asserted that the so-called “endgame strategy” that forged a peace settlement for – and postwar map of – Bosnia followed the “reality on the ground” after the fall, and ceding, of Srebrenica. What can now be revealed is that the “endgame” preceded that fall, and was – as it turned out – conditional upon it.

The western powers whose negotiations led to Srebrenica’s downfall cannot be said to have known the extent of the massacre that would follow, but the evidence demonstrates they were aware – or should have been – of Mladic’s declared intention to have the Bosniak Muslim population of the entire region “vanish completely”. In the history of eastern Bosnia over the three years that preceded the massacre, that can only have meant one thing.