So the deal is this: the EU and the IMF have demanded that Greece put in place austerity measures in return for a 130 billion euro bailout. That\’s £110 billion and $170 billion by the way.

As the austerity measures in Greece have tightened, so the rate of suicides in the country have escalated, and so has, unsurprisingly, the violence from on-street protesters. Last night (Sunday 15th) tens of thousands violently protested in Athens and there were many more violent protests in other cities across the country. According to Nick Malkoutzis, a poster on Twitter, 45 buildings were set on fire with at least 67 people detained by police.

Max Keiser\’s take on the situation sounds somewhat hysterical, but I trust Keiser even though I know almost nothing about economics. To put it bluntly, he sounds very convincing and he is widely respected throughout the world for his economic analysis. I also trust him because he is not afraid to say things that most other economists wouldn\’t dare to mention. This is what Keiser had to say on Russia Today recently:

\”Germany is prowling around Europe looting assets from countries like Greece. This is a financial holocaust perpetrated by Germany. They’ve been force feeding toxic debt for ten years going back to the creation of the Euro.

We now know that Goldmann Sachs on Wall Street force fed accounting fraud so that Greece could be included in the Euro. This is all planned ahead of time because Germany knows that eventually it will all fall apart. Germany is there to pick up the pieces. Germany is storming into Greece, they’ll be storming into Portugal, they’ll be storming into Spain. This is the Fourth Reich. This has all been baked into the cake. As I’ve been saying on this show for some time, Germany holds all the cards and they’re playing them brilliantly.

The debt in Greece did not originate in Greece, it originated in these other countries, they’ve used Greece as a toxic debt dump, to dump their debt, now they want the Greeks to pay their debt.

The government in Greece was put there by the bankers, the previous government was put there by the bankers, the Greeks have not had representational government in quite some time. They need to take a page out of the Arab Spring. They need to regain their sovereignty again by staging some kind of coup. There’s no rule of law in banking anymore, its open season, its just looting. Germany knows it, they love it, they’re going to take all of Greece’s assets, Portugal, Spain…\”

So is Keiser right on this? Could Greek citizens stage some kind of revolution? Anyone watching the growing violence on tv and on Youtube could certainly believe that such an event is possible if the frustration and anger of Greek citizens continues to grow, and we all know what that level of anger led to into Tunisia and Egypt last year.

Calmer voices also cast blame on Germany. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writing in The Telegraph today argued that by demanding a \”budget viceroy for Greece and now an escrow account to seize Greek revenues at source\” the German government has essentially \’brutalised\’ EU politics.

Gavin Hewett writing on the BBC News website in June last year asked whether indeed a revolution is in the offing. He certainly didn\’t reject the idea in the concluding paragraphs of his article. \”Greeks have lost faith in the plan\” he commented \”All they see is debt piling on debt. This is where the danger lies. A creeping despair. Injured national pride. Ten years of austerity. Even so the bet must be that the Greeks reluctantly, sullenly, will go along with new austerity but I have sensed a despair that last year just wasn\’t there and no-one knows where that will lead.\”

Greece is not the only country in Europe that is in a dire financial situation. Portugal and Spain have seen protests on the streets in response to austerity measures and there has even been talk of France\’s economy starting to go down the pan.

Which leads to the question – if Greece goes, who is next?