Europe at all costs? Against the new Greek Bailout

Following from previous statements on this blog regarding the efforts by the European Commission and other actors to prevent a Greek exit from the Eurozone, the negotiated bailout extended to save the Greek banking system from insolvency is a bad deal for all parties involved, especially for Greece.  The fundamental problem here remains the same: the inclusion of Greece and other weak, peripheral national economies in a unified currency zone with Germany and other relatively strong national economies generates conditions in which the stronger economies enjoy excess, uncompensated export benefits from implicit currency devaluation at the expense of rendering weaker economies at a permanent disadvantage from implicitly overvalued nominal exchange rates.  The only thing that a new injection of borrowed funds from the ECB, IMF, and other Eurozone creditors, in exchange for a new round of austerity measures, will generate is the need for more injections in the future as a struggling Greek economy struggles more with no perceptible means of permanent relief.  The Greek economy will never actually begin to turn around until the country dispenses with the Euro, reintroducing a new national currency or undertaking the creation of a new interregional currency consolidating national economies more complementary to Greece.  If, in certain respects, the package of austerity measures that the Eurogroup is now imposing on Greece may be ultimately necessary and, perhaps, salutary to long term development of the Greek economy (something that is highly doubtful in regard to the imposed selloff of capital assets), then the resolution still leaves Greece with the biggest of all possible disadvantages, the inability to devalue its currency in order to realign the strength of Greek currency in relation to the country's export performance and the international marketability of its debt.  Only an exit from the Eurozone can achieve this end! 
          The capitulation of Greek Prime Minister Tsipras to an austerity package at least as bad as the one the Greek electorate cast its consensus against is nothing short of stunning!  Is it really possible that the international financial sector has this much power to threaten a national government with the incontrovertible demolition of its banking sector if it does not concede to measures guaranteed to inflict abject pain on the most vulnerable individuals in the country (i.e. pensioners who will be subject to significant cuts in benefits as one condition for the extension of new loans to Greece)?  Tsipras should voluntarily step down from power for having surrendered Greek political and economic sovereignty to financial blackmail!  More importantly, his government, from the point that it was initially elected, should have committed far more time, energy, and creativity to planning for the eventuality that Greece would be leaving the Eurozone and returning to an independent national currency.  Its apparent failure to do so is manifestly inexcusable.     
         Again, an overarching problem in the engagement of Greece with the European Union as a whole is that the partial and unsatisfactory institutions of monetary union without a complementary union of centralized fiscal redistributive mechanisms and a banking union have revealed just how superficial the impetus for political unity in the place of national chauvinism actually is in Europe.  To place the issue in an historical context more familiar in view of my American background, instead of creating a United States of Europe, the European Union has settled for something closer to an Articles of Confederation, in which the Germans remain free to abdicate their responsibilities for the failure of Greece to adequately adjust to a permanent appreciation in purchasing power and permanent inflation in the cost of Greek exports in the face of relatively competitive international commodity markets for Greek export sectors.  A more robust union, including international fiscal redistributions from the strong to the weak national economies, has not been and will not become politically feasible - not at a time in which the Euroskeptics have grown so strong across multiple EU member states.  Rather, it might be time for Europe to take a step back, scrap the single unified currency and, maybe (if policy makers continue to exercise some degree of creativity), restructure the Eurozone to incorporate multiple tiers with different consolidated currencies reflecting complementary macroeconomic performance among currency partners.  More fundamentally, the political motivations that prompted currency consolidation in the first place (alignment of all member states to peaceful, interdependent economic development in place of destructive economic competition promoting militaristic nationalism) need to survive the breakup of the currency, which, for the sake of Europe's future, should now be inevitable!  This, however, is a matter of ideological commitment between the various nations of Europe, militating against any resurgence of Twentieth century zero-sum political calculations.