Tsipras Deals Another Hand to EU Leaders Before Summit on Greece

Ukraine gets debt reduction and additional loans from IMF while Greece gets further squeezed, in a despicable demonstration of the geo-strategic games being played - June 22, 2015

Bio

Leo Panitch is the Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy and a distinguished research professor of political science at York University in Toronto. He is the author of many books, the most recent of which include UK Deutscher Memorial Prize winner The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire and In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives. He is also a co-editor of the Socialist Register, whose 2013 volume is entitled The Question of Strategy.

Transcript

Tsipras Deals Another Hand to EU Leaders Before Summit on GreeceSHARMINI PERIES, EXEC. PRODUCER, TRNN: This is The Real News Network. I'm Sharmini Peries coming to you from Baltimore, and welcome to this edition of the Leo Panitch report.

Last week the Group of 7 met in Bavaria, and the main items on the agenda was the Greek debt crisis, Ukraine, and how to rein in Russia. This week the Russians are having their own economic summit in St. Petersburg, and Alexis Tsipras is among the leaders speaking at it. He arrived at the meeting following the failed talks with the European finance ministers to address the current Greek banking crisis.

Here to discuss the meaning of all of this is our regular guest, Leo Panitch. Leo is a distinguished research professor of political science at York University in Toronto, and he's the author of the UK Deutsche Book Prize winner for The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire.

Leo, thanks for joining us on The Real News Network.

LEO PANITCH, PROF. OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, YORK UNIVERSITY: Hi, Sharmini.

PERIES: So Leo, give us a sense of your take on all these new developments, starting with Greece.

PANITCH: Well, it certainly is heating up and getting interesting in all kinds of ways. I've said previously in interviews with you that when I was in Greece in mid-May it felt like it was a state of suspended animation. The movement seemed immobilized, to quote the minister of education, when I talked to him. And what's happened in the last few days is that people are in the streets. You've seen the demonstration first by the communist militants, then the last days by the anti-communist militants. We don't want a Stalinist state, was some of the placards I saw. And then most recently by the Syriza Youth, saying, with placards saying, better chaos than continued austerity.

And I think all of that is obviously a product of the way things are coming to a head, and the way in which the Greek leadership, the Syriza leadership, has called out publicly the IMF in particular, but generally the interlocutors in Europe as well, for their appalling intransigence. They've done that publicly, and I think that has had the effect of dispelling this state of immobilization inside the country.

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