Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Since the left cannot necessarily advance its larger agenda of social justice, fairness and human rights through the state – subservient as it is to neoliberal circuits of global power – it should entertain how the commons might open up some new solution-sets.
As Greece enters its seventh consecutive year of deep recession, the country’s debt crisis looks more and more like an unsolvable riddle.
People everywhere need to stand in solidarity with the people on the front lines, and right now the front lines are in Greece.
Austerity and "Grexits" are only going to result in more and more people getting triaged from the industrial economy and, no less, from such basics as food. The alternative? Gretaway!
Days after Syriza’s capitulation to the Troika, radicals from across the world gathered in Athens for a historic conference on the future of democracy.
In the modern global banking system, all banks need a credit line with the central bank in order to be part of the payments system. Choking off that credit line was a form of blackmail the Greek government couldn’t refuse.
Whatever failings Syriza has had in its “negotiations” with the EU, and whatever the particularities of the Greek history and situation, it has shown clearly that the EU as constituted is not willing to entertain any form of oppositional view that does not accept the broad principles of both austerity and neoliberalism/neomercantilism, even when this is both bad politics and bad economics.
A recent crowdfunding campaign to bail out Greece does little more than obfuscate the role that energy shortages play in Greece’s systemic collapse.
If you kick the can down the road repeatedly you eventually run out of road.
If they had truly cared, the creditors could have easily prevented a default. Sadly, they found it more important to punish Greece and set an example.
Those who accuse the Greeks of “recklessness” are mistaken: the creditors’ utter contempt for democracy left them with no other choice but a rupture.
But, could it be that all the financial circus that we are seeing dancing in and around Greece be just the effect of much deeper causes?
