Yanis Varoufakis' first interview since resigning

The issue with Greece is that they were given money and they did not change anything, they just kept spending. Giving them more money is just going to delay the inevitable - they will go bankrupt, full stop. They don't produce enough of "what people want", plus they spend more than they can afford to, and that's that. The real problem is that the Eurozone has no mechanism to deal with bankrupt. There should be an easy way out of the Eurozone or an "easy" way to default. Italy will follow Greece, sooner or later, maybe Portugal and who knows, even France. We have to deal with the fact we have broken public spending all around Europe and that will catch up, if not now, in 5, 10, 15 or so years. But markets adapt to this king of stuff, they will soon build default risks in their prices and demand higher interests, on the other end, when a country default, we will be able to leave the loss to the private sector and not to the tax payers, which is the real shame in all this story.

I (genuinely) do not understand: Greece had the choice to not accept the bailout. It was a hard and potentially dangerous choice, but the Greek people made it.

- Why is Tsipras ignoring the people?

- Why do people think the Greek government didn't have the choice (eg '#thisisacoup' on Twitter)? Just because it's a difficult choice doesn't mean the choice didn't exist.

"Varoufakis said that Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister and the architect of the deals Greece signed in 2010 and 2012, was “consistent throughout”. “His view was ‘I’m not discussing the programme – this was accepted by the previous [Greek] government and we can’t possibly allow an election to change anything."

Well, Germany does know a little about bearing the debts of your predecessors on your shoulders.

For better overview of current affair related to Greek crisis, may be read this http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33503955

Above title is not title of the article. Mods please change?

Greetings from Greece,

You have to understand that Greece is a very young country between that west and the east that was never modernized to the core. Renaissance came in Europe when Greece was ruled by the Ottoman empire. Indeed the cultural impact of the Ottoman empire is extremely strong here, although many people don’t realize it. The moment a government different from PASOK and ND came to power, was a pivotal moment in Greece’s “democratic” history (1974 and on). The population was ready for a change and tried to remove from the government everything the two other parties resembled: corruption, clientellism and injustice. A lack of a justice estate is the biggest problem in Greece. There’s not even the hint of justice.

I voted for SYRIZA and I strongly supported the government until last Monday. After Varoufakis resignation I knew what to expect but did not wanted to believe that it was going to actually happen. Well it did in a spectacular way and I can’t stress how disappointed I feel. No matter what Varoufakis says, SYRIZA lost the most important battle the first two months and that battle was with the local oligarchy. I will give you some prominent example of failure where it matters the most:

- Rena Dourou, the SYRIZA MP who turned Mayor of Athens right before SYRIZA came to power, signed a contract with SIEMENS[1]. As far as I’m concerned, she was bribed, exactly the same way PASOK and ND were bribed in the past by SIEMENS.

- Deputy Minister of Finance Nadia Valavani, announces that ship-owners won’t be taxes because if they do, they will change flag(!). That’s a spectacular U-Turn from a “left” government. Of course the statement did not hit the headlines in Greece because we occupy the 99th position at the Freedom press index.

- The first thing Minister Lafazanis did were raise the salary of our national power company called “DEI”. These guys (workers) get paid ~ 1.250 EUR, which is an extremely high salary for public workers. There are DOZENS of underpaid public servants. Hospitals are running out of syringes and cotton and this guy has the nerve to give a raise to an already highly paid group of people!!! The nerve!!!

- All main private TV stations and newspapers in Greece operate with heavy losses. They are subsidized by the state and owned by the oligarchs who effectively keep in the check the government by controlling the (mis)information. Not one of them was taxed in since January. This is something that should had been done in the first week of governance. Right away.

SYRIZA tried to compromise and turn into a new corrupted PASOK with everyone, but apparently everyone kept spitting them in the face: The local oligarchy and the Troika at the same time. But IMHO their major failure was the lack of will to tackle our local oligarchy and bring at least a glimpse of justice and equality to our country. And you can blame Germany all you want abroad, but there’s seriously no excuse for not taking action at home. NONE.

As far as the EU/ECB/IMF is concerned. Well, here Varoufakis is at fault: They SHOULD have prepare a Grexit, as smooth as possible, but they should be ready for a Grexit. They didn’t (both Varoufakis and Tsipras) even ALLOW the public conversation to dig on the topic! It was dismissed as soon as someone hinted the idea. That’s incredibly stupid from someone who is (because I believe he really is) as smart as Varoufakis.

The result is ridiculous, if not plainly tragic: We actually gave away sovereignty after holding a referendum. Tsipras probably expected the ‘YES’ vote to win by a large margin getting him effectively off the hook, but that did not happen and he found himself trapped because it’s crystal clear that at any cost he does not want to manage a GREXIT but he is totally unfit to manage a third ‘memoradum’ which involves selling national assets to the best offerer.

SYRIZA IMHO is politically dead. The entire Greek parliament is totally out of sync with the Greek society. I’m extremely concerned about what the future will bring for my country. If Golden Dawn’s percentages grow, I’ll have to leave the country because I can’t stand those people, but Greece today resemble very much pre-WW-2 Germany and the TROIKA resembles very much the winners of the first WW.

If you take anything from this long post is this: The Greeks, especially the young population, are ready to take any change that will made their life easier in the long term. But the troika has showed time and again that doesn’t care about the population. They need a country to blame, do business with our oligarchs, recycle money through our banks and that’s about it. The local oligarchs are even worse, so we’re caught between the hammer and the anvil and I see no way through.

I don’t know what to vote when the time comes, I don’t even know if I wanna keep following politics at home since everything seems so desperate. Oh, my prediction is that Germany’s obsessions are going to end the european project pretty soon. IMHO they already alienated far too many europeans and created a schism in Europe’s population. Now the European governments are all singing like a chorus but these governments in Portugal, Italy, Spain, Ireland, UK will IMHO soon be brought down.

Sorry for the long-long comment, farewell everyone!

[1] http://ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_wsite1_1_09/03/201...

So how does Germany pull off that control? What gives it it's power?

There seems to be a lot of resentment against Germany lately.

To offer an analogy, I see similar resentment against parents among adult children who are forced to live home. Most often, those adult children got in over their heads on some kind of loan, most often student loans, and they need their parents to "bail" them out. They go back home and the parents then set conditions on them again on how they are to conduct their lives. The condition that gets the most resentment among adult children is control of the adult children's finances.

Germany is the parent, Greece is the adult child, and the rest of Europe are siblings who are turning a blind eye because they are either out in the world making it or because they also require their parent to bail them out.

It's an economic union. Germany's economy dominates the region, so of course it will dominate the union.

Well, let's see. Tax collections in Greece are at a little over 10% what's owed compared to 97.5% in Germany, deficit spending is astronomical, they have hardly any exports except for tomatoes and olives, have been using cheap credit to splurge for over a decade with no means of repaying their debts, and the so-called austerity was a farce in that it failed to achieve any significant improvement in their financial situation, or the goals they were meant to reach.

Greece was ranked the most corrupt nation in the EU. Greece has a thriving black economy which is unofficially at around 35% of the total economy. On top of that, Greece was understating their deficit figures for years. Their national debt stands at €340 billion today, give or take a few billion.

Interest rates for Greece hovered at around 18% before they had the Euro, and not many were willing to lend to them. Later, cheap abundant credit helped them increase state spending on pensions, jobs, and benefits, all with borrowed money, while barely being able to manage to pay the interest on their debts; this brought them great political mileage at the time.

Now that the payments are due, €45 billion has left Greece in Q1 of this year. On June 15 alone, banks saw cash outflows of €400 million - yes, that's in one day. Youth unemployment is at 50% and nearly a quarter of a million people have left Greece for good over the past five years.

Now most of the country is up for sale, right down to their public infrastructure, ports, and so on, with very few buyers.

Austerity amounts to little when the rot is systemic at this scale. Greece should have never been in the EU in the first place, and they would have retained the Drachma if they were truly interested in sustainable long term stability.

I feel for the Greek people, but a cheap bailout is absolutely not the solution to this problem today.

Greece was "set up"? Hardly. They set themselves up.

The current title is not the title of the article, it's a political statement from Yanis Varoufakis.

Could a mod un-editorialize the title of this submission, please?

Plan for Greece :

1) overthrow parliamentary regime 2) set up a democracy ancient athens style 3) round up professional politicians of all stripes, capitalist thieves (pleonasm), media whores and economists and put them at work in labor camps. 4) tell troika that they can shove the debt up their arses 5) ban money (instead create a resource-based economy) 6) epic win