Yanis told you so: "How Syriza’s capitulations allowed the Greek right to escape the dustbin of history."

As we've observed here in New Albany at a grassroots level, breaking free from the tentacles of business as usual is a daunting task. As an example, there are too many beak-wetting imperatives to justify local government perpetually spending money on shoddy annual repaving projects rather than examining the realities of car-centrism and alternatives to it -- and if you believe against all prevailing evidence that "leaders" like Bob Caesar have any interest in learning new tricks, think again. They're too busy nuzzling the effete pants legs of oligarchy-drunk entities like One Southern Indiana, hoping they might be tossed a tattered bone.

Where was I?

Oh yes, Greece.

In an essay at New Statesman, Yanis Varoufakis explains the invariable result when the Left, forever unwilling to stand by the veracity of its own political principles, caves to the Right -- itself forever willing to seize opportunity when the vacuum presents it.

How Syriza’s capitulations allowed the Greek right to escape the dustbin of history

The left-wing party’s embrace of austerity created the conditions for a parasitic and cruel oligarchy to return.

 ... What the people of Greece had said to us, their government, in that 2015 referendum, made perfect sense: “We don’t want to leave the euro or to clash with the European Union. But, if the European Union is demanding of you, of our government, the intensification of the austerity-insolvency doom loop that forces our youngsters to emigrate and the expropriation of what is left of our public assets, don’t you dare surrender — even if Grexit is the price we must pay.”

That night, while our people were out on the streets celebrating their remarkable victory, the political representatives of Greece’s oligarchy were in tatters. The leader of New Democracy resigned, the party’s cadres wallowed in deep despair, the oligarchy they represented was in a state of panic. Alas, they worried unnecessarily. For at the same time, a coup against the people was being hatched in the office of my colleague, the prime minister.

Syriza vs. the EU: #ThisIsACoup documentary, episodes 1 - 4.

It makes for somber but necessary watching.

The Nation's text is here; episode one of the video is embedded above, with links to all four parts below.

Field of Vision:

#ThisIsACoup Episode 1 | "Angela, Suck Our Balls"

#ThisIsACoup Episode 2 | To Pay or Not To Pay

#ThisIsACoup: Episode 3 | OXI - The Greek Word for 'No'

#ThisIsACoup Episode 4 | Surrender or Die

Paying attention to what's happening in Greece.

Why is it that amid the discussion of bailouts and debt and money, no one seems willing or able to explain why several million Greeks should be made to pay a price in impoverishment for the misbehavior of international bankers and wretched politicians?

Greek villagers' secret weapon: Grow your own food, by Gregory Katz (AP - The Big Story)

KARITAINA, Greece (AP) — Ilias Mathes has protection against bank closures, capital controls and the slashing of his pension: 10 goats, some hens and a vegetable patch.

If Greece's financial crisis deepens, as many believe it must, he can feed his children and grandchildren with the bounty of the land in this proud village high in the mountains of the Arcadia Peloponnese.

Happily, Bernie Sanders has had something coherent to say about Greece. Our Republicans presumably are busy searching for Bible passages.

“I applaud the people of Greece for saying ‘no’ to more austerity for the poor, the children, the sick and the elderly ... in a world of massive wealth and income inequality Europe must support Greece's efforts to build an economy which creates more jobs and income, not more unemployment and suffering.”

Sanders spots the element that's usually missing as the bankers do their numbers fetish -- you know, the piece about dignity.

Greek Voters to Eurozone: We Can’t and Won’t Do This Anymore, by Maria Margaronis (The Nation)

... “We won’t be saved by Yes or No,” said a gentleman in his 80s. “It’ll be bad either way. But one thing will change: They’ll know they don’t have our agreement for what they’re doing to us. The government may have made mistakes, but the position of the Europeans has been cruel, oppressive, humiliating, shockingly inhuman. They’ll get their money. But they have to realize we need time to recover first.”

I'm looking for lessons wherever I can find them.

Greek referendum: smart response from Tsipras, but triumph may be brief, by Larry Elliott (The Guardian)

... David Marsh, of the thinktank OMFIF, said: “The failure of the creditor countries, led by Germany and the Netherlands, to recognise a central maxim of guerrilla fighting – the enemy will always surprise – provides a key reason for the Oxi win. If you’re outnumbered, practise the unorthodox. Tearing up the rules of Brussels conduct, Tspiras and Varoufakis, his finance minister-cum-field marshal, have outmanoeuvred and divided the surplus states by constantly re-engaging, over five months, from unexpected, demanding and outrageous battle positions.”

Yanis Varoufakis blogged his resignation with these important words.

I consider it my duty to help Alexis Tsipras exploit, as he sees fit, the capital that the Greek people granted us through yesterday’s referendum. And I shall wear the creditors’ loathing with pride. We of the Left know how to act collectively with no care for the privileges of office.

Prior to his resignation, an excerpt from Varoufakis's book provided closing context: Greece this time. Who's next?

Angela Merkel has a red and a yellow button. One ends the crisis. Which does she push?, by Yanis Varoufakis (The Guardian)

Bankruptocracy is as much a European predicament as it is an American “invention”. The difference between the experience of the two continents is that at least Americans did not have to labour under the enormous design faults of the eurozone. Imagine their chagrin if the citizens of hard-hit states (eg Nevada or Ohio) had to worry about a death embrace between the debt of their state and the losses of the banks who happened to operate within the state.

Additionally, Americans were spared the need to contend with a central bank utterly shackled by inner divisions and the German central bank’s penchant for treating the worst-hit parts of the union (the eurozone, that is) as alien lands that had to be fiscally waterboarded until they ceased to obey the laws of macroeconomics.

Varoufakis on Greece: “We’ve lost everything, so we can speak truth to power, and it’s about time we do."

Sovereignty?

Greece will say it as it is: five years on, the medicine prescribed by Germany, Europe’s paymaster, to mend the ills of run-away profligacy hasn’t worked. Instead, the nation has become an echo of its former self; its economy slashed by almost a third, one in four out of work, one in three facing the prospect of living in abject poverty.

“We’ve lost everything,” he says. “So we can speak truth to power, and it’s about time we do.”

Damned book readers.

I wonder if he knows Papa John personally?

Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis: ‘If I weren’t scared, I’d be awfully dangerous’, by Helena Smith (Guardian)

... At 53, Varoufakis is still clear that he “understands the world better” as a result of having read Marx. But he no longer considers himself a diehard leftie, whatever others may think. Rather, he says, he is a libertarian or erratic Marxist, who can marvel at the wondrousness of capitalism but is also painfully aware of its inherent contradictions, just as he is “the awful legacy” of the left. “It is a system that produces massive wealth and massive poverty,” proclaims the economist who taught at the universities of East Anglia, Cambridge, Glasgow and Sydney after gaining his doctoral degree at the University of Essex. “I don’t think you can understand capitalism until and unless you understand those contradictions and ask yourself if capitalism is the natural state. I don’t think it is. That’s why I am a leftwinger.”

More than that, Varoufakis is an iconoclast, a self-styled “contrarian” who is also an idealist, “because if you are not an idealist, you are a cynic”. And he has, he laments, lost a lot of friends on the left who believe that Grexit, Greece’s exit from the currency bloc, would be the country’s best course.

New Albany looks to Greece.

Photo credit: Guardian

Sort of a Salvador Allende moment for the EU, wouldn't you say?

Don't miss this comment, also in The Guardian: Greece shows what can happen when the young revolt against corrupt elites (Paul Mason).

The rise of Syriza can’t just be explained by the crisis in the eurozone: a youthful generation of professionals has had enough of tax-evading oligarchs ... From outside, Greece looks like a giant negative: but what lies beneath the rise of the radical left is the emergence of positive new values – among a layer of young people much wider than Syriza’s natural support base. These are the classic values of the networked generation: self-reliance, creativity, the willingness to treat life as a social experiment, a global outlook.

Negotiating the terms of engagement. Imagine that.

Syriza’s historic win puts Greece on collision course with Europe, by Ian Traynor and Helena Smith (Guardian)

• Voters reject EU austerity for radical alternative of far-left party
• Upstarts fall two seats short of an overall majority
• ‘Greece has turned a page,’ says 40-year-old leader Alexis Tsipras

European politics has been plunged into a volatile new era following a historic victory in Greece’s general election by far-left radicals committed to ending years of austerity.

More than five years into the euro crisis that started in Greece in October 2009 and raised questions about the single currency’s survival, Greek voters roundly rejected the savage spending cuts and tax rises imposed by Europe which reduced the country to penury ...

... The clock is already ticking. When the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, French president François Hollande, British prime minister David Cameron et al assemble for an EU summit in Brussels in just over a fortnight, they will be joined at Europe’s top table by (Alexis) Tsipras, probably the only man there not wearing a tie. The symbolism will be enormous. Europe’s anti-mainstream mavericks and populists are no longer just hammering on the doors.