Greek opposition leader Alexis Tsipras, head of Syriza party, addresses MPs. He has called for a 1950s-style debt conference. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian
Only weeks after the EU and IMF announced a third plan in as many years to rescue Greece from insolvency, the country’s most popular party – its radical left opposition – has called for a European debt conference to “finally” settle a crisis it claims is no nearer to being solved.
In an exclusive interview, Alexis Tsipras, who heads the stridently anti-austerity Syriza, insisted that with the debt drama spreading it was vital that foreign lenders take a leaf out of the history books by dealing with the eurozone’s crisis-hit southern periphery in much the same way that Germany had been treated after the second world war. Read the rest of this entry »
You may recall that on Greek election day I issued a missive to the BBC, suggesting that they recover forthwith the journalistic standards which they seemed to have dropped in the run up to the Greek election. That missive, might I add, came from a long standing friend and contributor to the BBC. Indeed, I hold the Beeb in the highest regard and always sided with it in the face of BBC-bashing (especially in the UK). So, it was with great relief that I received a call from their TV News Dept offering me a chance to make my point on camera. But as I was coming to that point, the link surreptitiously caved in. Now, I have no doubt that it was, most probably, a genuine technical failure. Having said that, the fact that I was not given a chance to complete my point at a later stage raises questions. Questions that some in Greece have put in the form of this video. (Nb. the text that someone pasted on the screen below the moment of the ‘technical glitch’ says: “The weather in Germany probably cause the link to fail; to be followed by a recapitulation of the German narrative”)
My final message to the Beeb, on this issue, is: Greek election day was not your finest hour.
Varoufakis reply to Mr Nowack, Deutsche Bank exec, who argued in favour of expelling Greece from the euro (On CBC Radio)
By Eli Jelly-Schapiro on September 13, 2011 . First published at http://www.socialtextjournal.org
How does debt act as a tool of labor discipline? As a catalyst of capitalist accumulation? As a method of labor degradation? I want to approach these questions by imagining a series of three lives, working lives, working lives in debt. Though nominally fictional, this inter-generational story is rooted in actual places, and in actual historical moments–spaces and times of significant import to the twentieth-century history of debt and credit in particular, and capitalism in general. Our first fictional life–let’s give it a name: Davis Johnson–begins in the Caribbean, in the Bahamas, around the turn of the century. Read the rest of this entry »
We are living a debt crisis in Europe; some states are presently unable to finance themselves on the regular credit markets. This state of things has provide fertile ground to question the Social State and force on these ailing states a new socio-economic paradigm. This has been achieved by masking the real problems Europe is living and falsely characterizing the economic difficulties of the weakest states. Some days ago I was sent a link to an article by Der Spiegel on Portugal that oincluded this paragraph:
On the way there, a two-lane bike path hugs the coastline for several kilometers between Cascais and Guincho. Special streetlights spaced only 50 meters apart illuminate the brownish-red special asphalt at night. But cyclists are rarely to be found along this route, even during the day, because the wind is simply too strong. Read the rest of this entry »
#glrsi Special issue
The inherent Crisis: Markets, Democracy and the Left
