Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Coalition of the Radical Left”
During the 1970s-1990s much attention was focused on the rising debt crisis in post-colonial Africa. Continental states after gaining national independence realized that there could be no genuine development while financial obligations to western-based lending institutions were rapidly escalating. With the balkanization of the continent during colonialism, the national independence movements without political integration and economic unification faced formidable challenges in …
As if the Greek tragedy of Syriza’s thrashing by the European Troika wasn’t enough, we’ve just witnessed direct overrule of a popular vote by the President of Portugal who refuses to accept a resounding public vote for governmental change. “The bondholders must be served!” reflects his declaration and the predicament citizens of the world face in reclaiming control of their money and their governments from Supra-national Finance. This week Ellen talks with Dr.Thomas Marois about how public banking is working despite the anti-democratic developments in other nations of the world and how the future of public banking will depend on social and political movements, and she looks at some of the current monetary issues headlining in the US with co-host Walt McRee. Bernie Sander’s support for postal banking is another headline grabber, as reported by Matt Stannard on the Public Banking Report.
The Delphi Initiative of Greece issued yesterday the following statement under the title Tsipras – Kammenos Surrender Greece: The Greek Left is a political force, the supporters of which gave heroic struggles in the past to defend democracy and national independence of Greece, thousands and thousands of them dying, sent into prison and exile or tortured. It is the first …
In a development spurring calls for a new “anti-bailout movement,” the Greek Parliament early Friday approved a controversial €85 billion financial rescue package—the country’s third such bailout from foreign creditors in five years, and one that will require the Greek people to endure further cuts and austerity. “After more than seven hours of often passionate, bad-tempered debate, all through the …
Debt: The Creation of A Global Crisis
The forced, politically engineered bankruptcy of the City of Detroit has been an ongoing discussion on Leid Stories for almost two years. Its historic bankruptcy court filing, to discharge $18 billion in debts, still wreaks havoc with Detroiters, who now must live under the yoke of blistering austerity.
Detroit, however, was a template for almost 60 U.S. cities said to be on the brink of bankruptcy because of debt, as Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, grapples with an onerous debt of $73 billion.
But debt is a geopolitical contrivance, says Yanis Varoufakis, who on July 6 quit as finance minister in Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s government of Greece, opposing European Union, International Monetary Fund and bankers’ demands for drastic cutbacks to service the country’s debt obligations.
In a wide-ranging talk in Seattle three years ago, when he was an economics professor, Varoufakis deconstructs the myth of a global debt crisis.
The headline economic numbers are far better now than in 2008-2009. The unemployment rate, the GDP, the national deficit, the stock market, etc. have all improved. Yet many of us can’t shake the feeling that things are still stuck in 2008. Well, you aren’t crazy. Many areas of the economy have never recovered from the 2008, and some are even …
There’s at least one reason we should be grateful to the Greek people for exposing the European Union’s democratic dysfunction this summer: Their recent referendum showed that majority rule is impossible in a multinational union. Creating the illusion of democratic decisions within the EU, even when there is no clear will among the member states, has returned like a boomerang …
Like many states in crisis before it, Ukraine serves as a perfect opportunity for neoliberal transformation. While a crisis of faith, of sorts, has resounded in western discourse on the economic effectiveness of austerity, this scepticism, rather ironically, dissipates when you cross over into the remnants of the Iron Curtain. Neoliberalism’s flagellants reside east of the Elbe. There, ideological purity …
Over the past few months we have been forced to bear witness to a humiliating farce unfolding in Europe. Greece, which was first accepted into the European Monetary Union under false pretenses, then saddled with excessive levels of debt, then crippled through the imposition of austerity, finally did something: the Greeks elected a government that promised to shake things up. …
The red flags and marching songs of Syriza [3] during the Greek crisis [4], plus the expectation that the banks would be nationalised, revived briefly a 20th-century dream: the forced destruction of the market from above. For much of the 20th century this was how the left conceived the first stage of an economy beyond capitalism. The force would be applied by the …
