The collapse of social Europe

Greece in the maw of the market.

Several weeks after Greece’s Syriza government struck a deal with the EU to restructure its debt and gain a third bailout, giving away much of what it had promised its people to retain, a slow rumbling started in Greece to arrest and charge with treason…Yanis Varoufakis, the flamboyant former finance minister. Varoufakis? He had resigned before the final negotiations, at the request of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, due to his tendency to drive EU finance heads to spitting fury. He played no part in the final deal, seen by many as a sell-out, so why the treason accusations? He had given an interview to the UK Telegraph revealing the existence of a secret unit, established by himself under Tsipras’ direction, to create a parallel payment system-outside the euro, but not a new currency in itself-that could be swung into place quickly should a complete collapse of liquidity occur. Varoufakis noted that much of the highly technical information required to establish such a thing was sequestered within the government’s own websites by the EU, and so it became necessary to hack into the websites. The payment system itself, Varoufakis noted, would not have been so difficult to implement-part of calling the EU’s bluff. But, ultimately, he said, Tsipras had ‘succumbed to terror’ put into him by the EU during eighteen hours of negotiations, and had given it almost everything it had wanted. Audacious plans to remove the EU’s capacity to threaten Europe had come to naught.