University of Athens' Creston Davis argues that the Syriza party platform looks more like the Democratic Party in the '60s rather than a leftist party - July 13, 2015
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to the Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay.
In the wee hours of Monday morning Greece's Prime Minister Tsipras struck a deal with the leaders of the Eurozone. Amongst the things that was agreed to, the Greek parliament must immediately adopt laws to reform key parts of its economy. Of course, they use the word reform. By Wednesday the reforms must be approved by the Greek parliament. These reforms include streamlining the pension system, boosting tax revenue, especially from VAT. That means the consumer tax, not income tax or corporate tax. Liberalizing the labor market, we'll get into a minute what all that means, and privatizing the electricity network. Extending shop opening hours, we'll explain why that seems to matter.
The eurozone agrees in principle to start negotiations on a loan package for Greece worth about $82-86 billion. That's maybe somewhere in the range of $91-96 billion US. The loan will come mainly from the European Stability Mechanism, ESM, the Eurozone bailout fund. But the International Monetary Fund will also be asked to make a contribution from March 2016. That's something that Mr. Tsipras had said he didn't want to agree to. I guess there's a whole list of things he said he didn't want to agree to, and wound up having to agree to.
One of the most controversial things that had been proposed, according to all the rumors coming out of the negotiations, was a dealbreaker, in fact is in the deal. A new trust fund will be set up, managed by Greece. That's a difference. Originally this trust fund I think was supposed to be managed by Europe. In fact, managed in the end by a company that was controlled by the German finance minister. Now it seems according to the language we're hearing, Greece will manage this fund. It's $50 billion of Greek national assets. That means things that's public property. This property is either going to be privatized in some way, or they're saying this fund will manage these resources in order to create income. Half the fund will be used to fund the debt, the other half is supposed to go towards investment.
But this fund which was originally, as I say, supposed to be managed by Europe, perhaps this is a significant compromise or maybe a small victory by Tsipras that it looks like it will be Greece and not Germany that manages this.
At any rate, to help us unpack all of this and joining us from Athens is Creston Davis. Creston is the founding director of the Global Center for Advanced Studies. And he's co-author with Slavoj Zizek of Paul's New Moment. That's Saint Paul, not this one.
Thanks very much for joining us.
CRESTON DAVIS, GLOBAL CENTER FOR ADVANCED STUDIES: Hey Paul, how are you doing.
JAY: Very well. Let's start unpacking. Well, first give me your overall impression of the deal and how it's going to be received in Athens, and then maybe we can dig into some of the difference.
DAVIS: Sure. The overall impression is defeat, honestly. Straightforward defeat. Syriza looks ridiculous. They're contradictory, given how they brand their campaign. And ultimately they folded a week after the oxhi celebratory referendum that really brought together the populace of the Greek people.
So in light of this kind of bipolar, schizophrenic moment of the high of the oxhi to a very, a very demoralized atmosphere here in Athens.
JAY: So that's the no vote, oxhi, where the Greek people were asked to vote yes or no on a proposal that Europe had given, and something like 61 percent of Greeks said no. And it seems to me that proposal was not even as onerous as this one. Is that true?
DAVIS: That's right. The first--the referendum that the no vote won a week ago was far less in terms of austerity measures and far less sinister than what was just agreed upon a week later by Tsipras and the Greek government.
JAY: Now, what else could he do in this particular moment? It seems to me you can go back to errors that were made from the beginning. But you said something to me off-camera maybe we should talk about first before we get into this, which is just the kind of party Syriza is. Because I think a lot of people outside think of Syriza as a very left-wing party. And you're saying it's actually far more complicated than that.
DAVIS: Yeah. I mean, to put it in American terms--and I grew up right near Baltimore, where you are. But to put it in American terms basically the platform of Syriza looks very similar, very similar, 90 percent the same as the basic JFK platform in America in the 1960s. The difference is that we live in a new era, an era that began in the 1970s called neoliberalism.
And that neoliberalism really came to fruition, started in Chile in the '70s under military regime actually backed by professors like Milton Friedman from the University of Chicago. And they installed neoliberal policies in the dictatorship of Pinochet in the '70s. And then you have Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher adopt these same basic premises of the neoliberal outlook that, it must be understood in contrast to a Keynesian outlook where you have a much more democratic way in which you can regulate exchange and commerce and markets.
So what you have here is you have Syriza looks very much like a Democratic party in the '60s in the United States that in today's terms, in hyper-neoliberalized capitalist terms, looks radical. But in fact it's not radical at all. It simply calls for basic social services and a democratic process by which to regulate economic [inaud.]
JAY: So the leadership of Syriza was never prepared for or wanted a more radical solution, which a lot of people argue was the only alternative to what's transpired. But let's dig into the deal a little bit and then we'll go big picture again. So is this deal any better than what would have been signed at the very beginning of this whole process?
DAVIS: This feels much worse, actually, than anything that's been put on the table since Syriza came to power. And that's the humiliating part. Paul Krugman in the New York Times just wrote about how humiliating this deal is to the Greek people and also to Syriza.
Basically what you have here is the Troika, the European Union, really putting Syriza under their boot, and making a statement kind of like Truman making a statement when he bombed Hiroshima, let's say, to the Russians if one wants to follow that thesis. It's a statement. What we have here is an example of how other countries in the EU who might, like Spain let's say, or Portugal, or Italy, Ireland, who might want to think about activating and energizing the populace, you better not do that. That's the signal here.
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