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Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras seems to have folded precipitously, after apparently having taken all other options off the table including a Grexit, a movement toward the burgeoning China Development Bank, an impasse.
His strategy seemed a bit out of joint. I have heard that Victoria Nuland made him an offer he could not refuse, and he did not wish to offer a 'principled resignation' as did Varoufakis, preferring to remain in a relative position of 'power.'
It could be that he was then taken aback and surprised by the sheer ferocity of the European (German) proposal, which was to essentially make Greek into a protectorate, and to visit a looting of national assets, given that the loans being granted are completely unpayable and the collateral will be forfeit.
He certainly is not the first Western leader to have capitulated when a 'gun' has been held to their head. There is a certain rhyme, and a sense of déjà vu in all this. We must do these things, because of the imperative of (pick one: destiny, our blood, they have given us no choice, it is in their nature to be ruled, to safeguard our freedom, and/or the logic of the market)
There was intraday commentary along these lines here.
There is certainly room for criticizing Syriza in this. I admit I was supportive of their efforts, and still am. I will try not to judge their efforts too harshly until all the facts are revealed. Since I am not eager to be a martyr, I rarely find it appropriate to insist on that path for anyone else. But I did think this characterization from John Pilger bears some merit.
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.
But this is mere speculation and second guessing, and we have to focus on what is next. Certainly the Greek people will be foolish to accept the terms to which their Prime Minister has agreed. But what they will do about it, if anything, is another matter. One hopes that they will make a stand, if only to break the momentum of what James Galbraith has called 'the neoliberal project' in which the US in involved despite all its dissembling about it.
Those who complain about the abuse of power and financial repression in their own cases, as those in the precious metals are sometimes known to do, are foolish if they think that what is happening in Greece means nothing for them. The cause of freedom makes all free people brothers and sisters, and those who see themselves as standing proudly alone will fall, miserably and alone.
The global financial class is pleased that any pain to be visited from the bad behavior of, wait for it, the global financial class including some of the usual and almost omnipresent suspects, will be presumably visited upon the Greek public alone.
And there will be a feast of sorts for the vulture class.
This is the continuation of a financial strategy being pursued by the Western developed economies for some years now. It is not 'ordoliberal', which is a nice historical diversion, so much as neo-liberal, a fashion of political management that has swept the West thanks in great part to the economic and political influence of the US and the UK.
What makes it different in this case of Greece is that it is being done, not to a Third World country, but to a long established Western nation and a member of the European community. If there is any good to come out of this, at least the neo-liberal financial class has been revealed for who and what they truly are. And so we can no longer claim any illusions, no plausible excuse in our believing them once again.
And so we see Hillary the populist railing about wages and Wall Street today, while riding on a tidal wave of big money, insider dealings, and soft payoffs from the moneyed interests. But it is all in the patter, the words, the quality of the performance, the identity politics, don't ya know. This is a spectacle, a play on the national stage, and an act of political fiction. And so facts don't matter, just the entertainment factor. How else could one account for at least half of the Republican candidates?
We are seeing the same thing being done on a much more local scale in the UK and the US surely, with certain locales being turned into virtual protectorates after being caught up in a web of corruption, financial fraud, and unpayable debts by officially sanctioned Banks.
Consider this not an anomaly, but an experiment in progress, with more to follow.
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