GREECE - Pilger Article - "The problem of Greece is not only a tragedy. It is a lie."

ARTICLE SOURCE http://johnpilger.com/articles/the-problem-of-greece-is-not-only-a-tragedy-it-is-a-lie The problem of Greece is not only a tragedy. It is a lie. 13 July 2015 John Piliger An historic betrayal has consumed Greece. Having set aside the mandate of the Greek electorate, the Syriza government has willfully ignored last week's landslide "No" vote and secretly agreed a raft of repressive, impoverishing measures in return for a "bailout" that means sinister foreign control and a warning to the world. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has pushed through parliament a proposal to cut at least 13 billion euros from the public purse - 4 billion euros more than the "austerity" figure rejected overwhelmingly by the majority of the Greek population in a referendum on 5 July. These reportedly include a 50 per cent increase in the cost of healthcare for pensioners, almost 40 per cent of whom live in poverty; deep cuts in public sector wages; the complete privatization of public facilities such as airports and ports; a rise in value added tax to 23 per cent, now applied to the Greek islands where people struggle to eke out a living. There is more to come. "Anti-austerity party sweeps to stunning victory", declared a Guardian headline on January 25. "Radical leftists" the paper called Tsipras and his impressively-educated comrades. They wore open neck shirts, and the finance minister rode a motorbike and was described as a "rock star of economics". It was a façade. They were not radical in any sense of that cliched label, neither were they "anti austerity". For six months Tsipras and the recently discarded finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, shuttled between Athens and Brussels, Berlin and the other centres of European money power. Instead of social justice for Greece, they achieved a new indebtedness, a deeper impoverishment that would merely replace a systemic rottenness based on the theft of tax revenue by the Greek super-wealthy - in accordance with European "neo-liberal" values - and cheap, highly profitable loans from those now seeking Greece's scalp. Greece's debt, reports an audit by the Greek parliament, "is illegal, illegitimate and odious". Proportionally, it is less than 30 per cent that of the debit of Germany, its major creditor. It is less than the debt of European banks whose "bailout" in 2007-8 was barely controversial and unpunished. For a small country such as Greece, the euro is a colonial currency: a tether to a capitalist ideology so extreme that even the Pope pronounces it "intolerable" and "the dung of the devil". The euro is to Greece what the US dollar is to remote territories in the Pacific, whose poverty and servility is guaranteed by their dependency. In their travels to the court of the mighty in Brussels and Berlin, Tsipras and Varoufakis presented themselves neither as radicals nor "leftists" nor even honest social democrats, but as two slightly upstart supplicants in their pleas and demands. Without underestimating the hostility they faced, it is fair to say they displayed no political courage. More than once, the Greek people found out about their "secret austerity plans" in leaks to the media: such as a 30 June letter published in the Financial Times, in which Tsipras promised the heads of the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF to accept their basic, most vicious demands - which he has now accepted. When the Greek electorate voted "no" on 5 July to this very kind of rotten deal, Tsipras said, "Come Monday and the Greek government will be at the negotiating table after the referendum with better terms for the Greek people". Greeks had not voted for "better terms". They had voted for justice and for sovereignty, as they had done on January 25. The day after the January election a truly democratic and, yes, radical government would have stopped every euro leaving the country, repudiated the "illegal and odious" debt - as Argentina did successfully - and expedited a plan to leave the crippling Eurozone. But there was no plan. There was only a willingness to be "at the table" seeking "better terms". The true nature of Syriza has been seldom examined and explained. To the foreign media it is no more than "leftist" or "far left" or "hardline" - the usual misleading spray. Some of Syriza's international supporters have reached, at times, levels of cheer leading reminiscent of the rise of Barack Obama. Few have asked: Who are these "radicals"? What do they believe in? In 2013, Yanis Varoufakis wrote: "Should we welcome this crisis of European capitalism as an opportunity to replace it with a better system? Or should we be so worried about it as to embark upon a campaign for stabilising capitalism? To me, the answer is clear. Europe's crisis is far less likely to give birth to a better alternative to capitalism... I bow to the criticism that I have campaigned on an agenda founded on the assumption that the left was, and remains, squarely defeated... Yes, I would love to put forward [a] radical agenda. But, no, I am not prepared to commit the [error of the British Labour Party following Thatcher's victory]... What good did we achieve in Britain in the early 1980s by promoting an agenda of socialist change that British society scorned while falling headlong into Thatcher's neoliberal trip? Precisely none. What good will it do today to call for a dismantling of the Eurozone, of the European Union itself...?" Varoufakis omits all mention of the Social Democratic Party that split the Labour vote and led to Blairism. In suggesting people in Britain "scorned socialist change" - when they were given no real opportunity to bring about that change - he echoes Blair. The leaders of Syriza are revolutionaries of a kind - but their revolution is the perverse, familiar appropriation of social democratic and parliamentary movements by liberals groomed to comply with neo-liberal drivel and a social engineering whose authentic face is that of Wolfgang Schauble, Germany's finance minister, an imperial thug. Like the Labour Party in Britain and its equivalents among former social democratic parties such as the Labor Party in Australia, still describing themselves as "liberal" or even "left",  Syriza is the product of an affluent, highly privileged, educated middle class, "schooled in postmodernism", as Alex Lantier wrote. For them, class is the unmentionable, let alone an enduring struggle, regardless of the reality of the lives of most human beings. Syriza's luminaries are well-groomed; they lead not the resistance that ordinary people crave, as the Greek electorate has so bravely demonstrated, but "better terms" of a venal status quo that corrals and punishes the poor. When merged with "identity politics" and its insidious distractions, the consequence is not resistance, but subservience. "Mainstream" political life in Britain exemplifies this. This is not inevitable, a done deal, if we wake up from the long, postmodern coma and reject the myths and deceptions of those who claim to represent us, and fight. Follow John Pilger on twitter @johnpilger SOURCE http://johnpilger.com/articles/the-problem-of-greece-is-not-only-a-tragedy-it-is-a-lie --------------------- COMMENT Another good article re Greece. How inaccurate are the mainstream press articles about these 'radical' lefties?  LOL This mob must be one of those third-way, pretend lefties.  And they've betrayed the electorate making promises they've not kept, & sullied themselves doing secret deals, contrary to the basis upon which they were elected.  Very grubby. Not really sure what postmodernism is: postmodernism, also spelled post-modernism,  in Western philosophy, a late 20th-century movement characterized by broad skepticism, subjectivism, or relativism; a general suspicion of reason; and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power. This article discusses postmodernism in philosophy.  [britannica] Too lazy to get into it the look-ups.  Favourite bits: *theft of tax revenue by the Greek super-wealthy.  *euro is a colonial currency:  a tether to a capitalist ideology. *liberals groomed to comply with neo-liberal drivel and a social engineering whose authentic face is that of Wolfgang Schauble, Germany's finance minister, an imperial thug.

GREECE - Germany reasserts hegemony over the eurozone - Ryan Cooper Article

ARTICLE SOURCE http://theweek.com/articles/566079/how-germany-defeated-syriza--reasserted-hegemony-over-eurozone How Germany defeated Syriza — and reasserted its hegemony over the eurozone Ryan Cooper July 13, 2015 It looks like a deal between Greece and eurozone elites has finally been reached — and it is a horrendous one. Greece's Syriza government has utterly capitulated, agreeing to a tremendous new austerity package with no debt restructuring whatsoever; huge cuts to pensions and worker protections ("labor liberalization"); and selling off €50 billion in unspecified government assets to pay off debt. The deal doesn't even guarantee funding — only after these conditions are met can a new loan package be negotiated. The Financial Times calls it "the most intrusive economic supervision program ever mounted in the EU. " Even to a hardened cynic, the "bargain" is nothing short of staggering in its awfulness. The eyes of even the most sober market analysts are practically bugging out of their heads at the sheer viciousness of it. (To give you a small idea of how badly Syriza caved to Germany and other European powers: The Institution for Growth, which will apparently take possession of the Greek government assets, is part of a fund called KfW, whose chairman is none other than German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble.) If the Greek parliament passes the proposal, Greece will have effectively ceded economic sovereignty to eurozone elites. None of the underlying economic issues have been improved — on the contrary, they will all be made much worse. This means the crisis is certain to recur at some point. The only silver lining is that the true nature of the eurozone has been revealed to all: It is an empire based on force, not the physical kind, but economic. Bend to Germany's will, or see your economy destroyed. It's worth taking a step back to remember how we got here. Before 2008, capital flowed from the eurozone core to the periphery, chasing higher yields. Normally this would be moderated by exchange rate adjustments and monetary policy, but in a common currency the first is impossible and the second was set for the core's needs only. Hot money flowed south, sparking inflationary overheating in the periphery and building up price imbalances. When the crisis came, the lack of exchange rate adjustments and monetary policy once again proved fateful, and cash-strapped nations could not finance fiscal stimulus. After the crisis, the eurozone should have stepped in with stimulus and debt restructuring to restore employment and growth, as the U.S. did with the Recovery Act of 2009. As Steve Randy Waldman writes, "What was required was a Europe-wide solution to a European problem." Instead, economic elites talked themselves into thinking the problem was one-sided, and demanded massive austerity in return for loans to avoid default. The result in many countries has been brutal recession, in some cases rivaling that of the Great Depression. Before the crisis, Greece was dishonest about its finances and made many bad decisions. But the roots of Greece's problems are inherent eurozone defects, not shady accounting. Spain is much more scrupulous and had almost no budget deficit before 2008, and has done nearly as bad as Greece has. Syriza was elected in January on a promise to end austerity, but the party has been totally outmaneuvered. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras apparently did not think euro exit was possible, and rumors are that his party made no contingency plans to introduce a replacement currency. In a riveting interview, former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis explains why. He says that eurozone elites were never negotiating in good faith. Instead they were stringing the Greeks along with pointless busywork (given this bargain, an easy thing to believe). He lost all faith in talks, and after the huge victory in the July 5 referendum, he proposed an aggressive scheme in line with what economist JW Mason has suggested: the introduction of euro-denominated IOUs to ease the liquidity crisis; a unilateral partial default; and greater autonomy for Greece's central bank from the European Central Bank. Unfortunately, it was untested policy territory, and Tsipras chickened out. Bereft of support, Varoufakis resigned. With no backup plan, Syriza had no leverage, and so had to take whatever German Chancellor Angela Merkel was dishing out — in this case, an economic shotgun to both kneecaps. It's an open question whether Tsipras will be able to get this turd through the Greek parliament, and odds are good it will shatter the majority coalition, requiring new elections. As Wolfgang Münchau points out, at least the deal brings some needed clarity to events. The eurozone is now openly "run in the interests of Germany, held together by the threat of absolute destitution for those who challenge the prevailing order." The lessons for those radicals who would challenge Germany, such as Spain's Podemos, are clear. Any nation that won't docilely submit to economic bleeding will receive no quarter. Self-serving claptrap about the rebels' fecklessness will be quickly constructed and propagated. Unemployment in Spain is 24 percent. In Portugal it is 13 percent. In Italy it is 12 percent — a country where there has been virtually no productivity growth since the introduction of the euro in 1999. Should a radical party want to break German hegemony, it would do well to learn from the failures of Syriza. It may sound foolish to risk everything on an aggressive grab for economic sovereignty — but if these countries want their problems fixed in years, rather than in decades, there may be no other option. SOURCE http://theweek.com/articles/566079/how-germany-defeated-syriza--reasserted-hegemony-over-eurozone --------------------- COMMENT Enjoyed this article.  Bit of a catch-up for me, as I haven't kept track of Greece.  Didn't expect to understand ins and outs of the economic dramas in Greece, so I haven't taken time to do reading on the subject. Sounds really bad.  How can they not have an exit plan?  That's just insane.  And it looks as though they're putting off the inevitable, having already put the public through an austerity regime, in the lead up to this.  And for what?  Greece, apparently, still doesn't have restructuring or guarantee of funding. [Weird all over the place highlighting & text colours are for myself.   Can't make up my mind how to highlight, as my browser shows highlights overlapping text when published.]