Greece Exposes The Global Economy’s Achilles Heel, Countries That Can’t Repay Their Debt — Won’t

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Greece Exposes The Global Economy’s Achilles Heel, Countries That Can’t Repay Their Debt — Won’t

by Chris Martenson

The new Greek political party, known as Syriza, the Coalition of the Radical Left, has done the unthinkable: they’ve dared to speak the truth.

In this case, the truth is perfectly captured by the blunt assessment by the new Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, who recently declared “I’m the finance minister of a bankrupt country.”

Such honest assessments are not supposed to be uttered in politics, no matter how true they may be. And so, as you can imagine, the machinery of the defenders of the status quo is in quite a lather over the whole affair. And it’s doing everything it can to minimize and marginalize the new Greek government.

One editorial in the Financial Times summed up the establishment view quite well, I thought, putting its contempt for those who dare to simply state what is true right on the table:

Athens plots a daring escape from the troika

Feb 2, 2015

Syriza is as radical as any party to take power within the eurozone. Hardly any of Greece’s new cabinet have experience of government; predictably, its first week was studded with chaotic interventions, including a clumsy blunder into EU-Russian relations. Syriza’s rhetoric is still more suited to a university seminar than a serious programme of government.

(Source)

To summarize, the European establishment considers Syriza to consist of radicals with no experience in government who are acting chaotically as they blunder about brandishing immature rhetoric more suited to young students than the serious business of governing.

And that was just the opening paragraph.

As I said, the new Greece administration has got the powers that be in quite a lather. Why is that?

I think it’s because the new Greek rulers have dared to call a spade a spade. They’ve spoken the unspeakable. They’ve said that the vast quantities of debt

accumulated by Greece, enabled by central bank money-printing programs, are simply unpayable under current terms.

Of course, this is no different than the situations of Italy, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, the UK, France, Japan — or even the US — which is precisely why it’s being considered such a horrendous foul for Greece to publicly speak as it is now. Such honesty does not have a welcome place in modern politics, and more dangerously, it threatens confidence in the entire system.

Who Is Syriza Exactly & Why Are They In Power?
Since the Syriza party is causing such a stir, I suppose we should take a closer look, especially since so many other ‘anti-austerity’ groups exist in Europe that might become emboldened and try a similar path.

In Wikipedia we find this description:

The coalition originally comprised a broad array of groups (thirteen in total) and independent politicians, including social democrats, democratic socialists, left-wing populist and green left groups, as well as Maoist,Trotskyist, eurocommunist but also eurosceptic components. Additionally, despite its secular ideology, many members
are Christians who, like their atheistic fellow members, are opposed to the privileges of the state-sponsored Orthodox Church of Greece.

In 2012 Syriza became the second largest party in the Greek parliament and the main opposition party. It came in first in the 2014 European Parliament election. In mid-2014, polls showed it had become the country’s most popular party. In 2015, in the snap polls held on 25 January, Syriza defeated the ruling coalition and went on to become the winning coalition getting 36.3% of the popular vote and 149 out of 300 seats in the Hellenic Parliament.

Syriza has been characterized as an anti-establishment party, whose success has sent “shock-waves across the EU”. Although it has abandoned its old identity, that of a hard-left protest voice, becoming more populist in character, and stating that it will not abandon the eurozone, its leader Alexis Tsipras has declared that the “euro is not my fetish”.

The party has grown in power over the same time frame that the people of Greece have been living under what most consider to be punishing austerity.

Under the austerity conditions imposed by the European bureaucrats upon the Greek nation, suicides have risen by 35%, unemployment is nearly 30% overall — nearly 60% for those under the age of 25, having fully doubled from 2010 levels — while wages have fallen by nearly 40%…..more here

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Greece Exposes The Global Economy’s Achilles Heel, Countries That Can’t Repay Their Debt — Won’t