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Greece - Rage Against the Dying of the Light

“Greek democracy today chose to stop going gently into the night. Greek democracy resolved to rage against the dying of the light.”  Yanis Varoufakis is quoted as blogging in the guardian. 

The full blog:

"Today, the people of Greece gave a vote of confidence to hope. They used the ballot box, in this splendid celebration of democracy, to put an end to a self-reinforcing crisis that produces indignity in Greece and feeds Europe’s darkest forces.

The people of Greece today sent a message of solidarity to the North, to the South, to the East and to the West of our continent. The simple message is that the time for crisis-denial, retribution and finger-pointing is over. That the time for the reinvigoration of the ideals of freedom, rationality, democratic process and justice has come in the continent that invented them.

Greek democracy today chose to stop going gently into the night.

Greek democracy resolved to rage against the dying of the light.

Fresh from receiving our democratic mandate, we call upon the people of Europe and, indeed, the world over, to join us in a realm of shared, sustainable prosperity."

From a blog post back in 2010 we learn that greed apparently is not the cause of the 2008 financial crisis:

"

So allow me to contradict the majority opinion by arguing that greed and loose ethics caused neither the Crash of 2008 nor the current eurozone crisis.

Lest I be misunderstood, let me make four things abundantly clear:

• Sometime after 1979 Greed did acquire a veneer of moral acceptability
• The financial sector did grow fat on insidious voracity, on criminal practices and on financial products that a decent society ought to have banned.
• The Greek government, along with a few others did allow borrowing to run riot and acquiesced to tax dodgers, pilfers of the public purse, vested interests and the like
• Governments worldwide did fall asleep on their watch, deregulating without rhyme or reason the very markets that ought to have been kept on a short leash

All this is self-evidently true. But none of it caused the Crisis in the US or in Europe.

But if it was not Greed and Profligacy, loose Morals and even looser Regulation, that caused the Crisis, then what was it?

To answer this question, we need to start at the very beginning. When the war ended, the United States understood well that to win the Peace, it was incumbent upon it to put in place immediately two mechanisms:

• A stable exchange rate system that would kick start world trade. Bretton Woods, in short. And,
• A Surplus Recycling Mechanism for recycling American surpluses abroad. For re-exporting (in the form of capital transfers) some of the American trade surplus back to Europe and Asia in order to maintain both the health of America’s key allies and, importantly, their demand for American exports.

"

“Fresh from receiving our democratic mandate, we call upon the people of Europe and, indeed, the world over, to join us in a realm of shared, sustainable prosperity,” 

Photo Credit:

By Robert Crc (Subversive festival media) [FAL], via Wikimedia Commons