Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Down to the Wire for Greece

Alexis Tsipras today called an emergency meeting of his cabinet after a week of failed negotiations with Greece’s greedy creditors, as the Greek people continued to demonstrate for him to do the impossible: remain in the Euro while enabling them to continue to survive.
A week ago a group of thirty-five eminent European, Russian and American economists and analysts spent four days together in Delphi, Greece, to discuss the Greek crisis.  They drafted the Delphi Declaration (a reference to the Greek oracle thought to predict the future), calling on European politicians to ‘do the right thing’ vis a vis the country that invented democracy. 
Among the Greek participants were Gerasimos Arsenis, Εconomist,  former minister of Economy, of Finance, of National Defense and of Education, ex-UN official and ex-director of UNCTAD:The two faces of the Greek crisis”, Dimosthenis Georgopoulos Economist, sociologist, political scientist, Secretariat on Industrial Policy, SYRIZA:  “Greece, Ukraine, wider Middle East; Alternative Paths-Transitions from Neoliberalism to Disastrous Capitalism”. 
Among the participants whose names will be familiar to OEN readers, were Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, former Treasury Secretary in the Reagan administration: “Propaganda Reigns in the West”, James K. Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin and Michael Hudson,Professor of economics, University of Missouri (Kansas City), President, Institute for the Study of Long-term Economic Trends: “The Needed Reforms. or, Recovering the Socialist Policy Agenda. Taxing away economic rent-seeking”.
Other participants included Samir Amin, Economist, President of the World Forum for Alternatives, Giulietta Chiesa, President of the Alternative Association, which campaigns for the EU to exit NATO, Adriano Campos, Member of the national leadership of the Portuguese Left Bloc: “Portugal , Five years of austerity. What alternatives?”, Steffen Stierle Εconomist, ATTAC Germany, assistant to the parliamentary group “Der Linke”: “The European Union – A field to fight for social rights and justice?”  Boris Kagarlitsky Director of the Institute for Globalization Studies and Social Movements: “How the struggle around Ukraine determines the development of the European crisis” 
(Sergei Glaziev Academician, senior advisor to the President of the Russian Federation on Eurasian integration, was prevented from attending by EU sanctions, but was present via Skype).
 As this partial roster shows, the Greek crisis has engaged the minds of major economists and social scientists, and no matter how it ends, it will effect the future of Europe and of the world.



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