The bankruptcy of current policy is measured not only by its destructive effects but also by its complete incapacity to deal with Greece’s public debt, the starting point for the so-called ‘bailout’ plans. These have benefited only the country’s creditors, Greek and European banks and the EU institutions that have taken charge. Standing at 120 per cent of GDP in 2010, when Greece completed the work of the first Memorandum, public debt has risen by half, to 180 per cent, notwithstanding a partial cleaning of the slate in 2012—to the considerable advantage of a majority of creditors. This is the heart of the contradiction: although the rationale of the ‘European consolidation state’ consists in giving debt service priority over every other political obligation, thus making the state entirely responsive to financial-market pressures and immune to citizen control and popular demands, its Troika-led Greek version ends up in an endless spiral of state indebtedness, amplifying the very problem of the ‘debt state’ it was supposed to solve. Pronounced ‘highly unsustainable’ by the IMF itself, this increased debt burden has come to symbolize the complete failure of this policy of unchecked subjugation and pillage of the last decade.