The Cloudland Collective is hosting a discussion on the current situation in Greece featuring well known Queensland economist John Quiggin.
The Cloudland Collective presents:
A discussion about Greece today with economist John Quiggin
7pm Tuesday June 9th
upstairs @ the Boundary Hotel, West End
In January this year SYRIZA formed government in Greece. Around the world people celebrated the electoral victory as a defeat for austerity and a promise of a more equal and just society.
SYRIZA had campaigned for example to halt privatisation, reinstate sacked public servants, provide free health benefits to those on low incomes and withdraw Greek troops from all foreign countries.
The European Central Bank and IMF have since sought to derail SYRIZA’s radical program.
For more details email: Cloudland_Collective.
Corruption is a fact of civilisation, and most certainly of modernity, it is everywhere – in every layer of society, in every boardroom, in every Government decision, in every Court.
Laws, tenets are merely pitiful or at most desperate attempts for some sort of almost beggary like check and balance. Chasing down corruption is an endless pursuit, impossible to clean up – you chase down one transgressor and their transgression and this is merely a straw in the bale.
Two-thirds of all the income produced in the world rests in tax havens.
That says it all.
Greece today is the product of competing factors – its buy in to a small and simple tourist mecca economy till the Drachma was sold out and Europe (capitalism) surged as the be all end all sell. Mittel Europa reborn and stretched into Greater Europe but with the Scandinavians savvy enough to do some distancing.
Greece today is still young and in many ways immature. It could not compete with the corrupting influences of the western dominated so-called neoliberal political world. Greece endured four centuries of internment within the Ottoman Empire.
The only hope for Greece and many heading to Greece’s plight is to break from cartel economics. The cartels that hold hostage what we believe to be are democratic economies and their assets barter and sell country assets and deliver ruinous financial deals. Cartelisation of the political landscape was vicious in Greece because of Greece’s fiscal limitations but it’s rife everywhere. The American political landscape is cartelised like no other and its whole political language is monetized. This is the death of democracy and birth vicious privilege and menaced underclasses.