Latest Greece Links

Greek referendum 2015: demonstration for voting NO at Syntagma square, Athens Greece. Wikimedia Commons, author Ggia, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

• Yanis Varoufakis in the Guardian: Germany won’t spare Greek pain – it has an interest in breaking us, unsuprisingly about the best thing out there about the current situation.
• Thomas Piketty interview in Die Zeit: “Germany Has Never Repaid Its Debts; It Has No Right to Lecture Greece,” a hard-hitting piece–too bad Hollande doesn’t have Greece’s back the way Piketty does.
• Ellen Brown in Counterpunch:  “Geurrilla Warfare Against a Hegemonic Power”: The Challenge and Promise of Greece, (this Business Insider piece confirms Brown’s claim about Ireland manufacturing 51 billion euros; and here is a response to the claim that some have made that austerity worked for Ireland).
• Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Europe is blowing itself apart over Greece – and nobody seems able to stop it; the subtitle gets at the juicy part: “Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras never expected to win Sunday’s referendum. He is now trapped and hurtling towards Grexit.”
• Lynne Parramore interviews James K. Galbraith at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website, The Greek Revolt Against Bad Economics Threatens European Elites. Interesting interview, which (as Yves Smith pointed out at Naked Capitalism) confirms Evans-Pritchard’s claim that Syriza leaders expected a “Yes” vote in the referendum.
• Paul Mason of Channel 4 News, What Was the Point of Tsipras Referendum?  I found his summary and analysis of the post-referendum situation helpful.
• Alain Badiou at the Verso website, Eleven Points Inspired by the Situation in Greece.  Worth reading, for a kind of world-historical left perspective.
• Doug Henwood interviews journalist and grad student Natina Vgonzas and then economist Mark Blythe (who is on our list of bloggers at Triple Crisis) for his great radio program Behind the News. Vgonzas has been in Athens, so gives an interesting on-the-scene account of the referendum; Blythe is particularly good on the history of the crisis and why it doesn’t make sense to blame the Greeks (and as usual his accent is awesome). [Added later–I meant to link also to Mark Blyth’s Foreign Affairs piece that is mentioned in the Henwood interview: A Pain in the Athens: Why Greece Isn’t to Blame for the Crisis. On his own website, Blyth calls his piece “an antidote to the ‘it’s all Tsipras’ fault’ meme.” Yves Smith, take note.]
• Marcus Walker in the WSJ (behind a paywall): Greek Debt Crisis: Germany Flexes Its Muscles in Talks With Bailout Ultimatum, asserts that Greece is more worried about a Grexit than Germany is but, also from the WSJ (and also behind paywall): Greece’s Quest for Debt Relief Raises Difficult Political Questions in Ireland and Portugal.