Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, whose socialist administration has been a staunch supporter of the radical leftist anti-austerity parties rising to prominence in Greece and Spain, claimed on a national broadcast last week that Greek PM ‘Comrade Alexis’ Tsipras has agreed to visit Venezuela and several other socialist Latin American nations.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at a press conference on Wednesday that Russia would consider financial aid to Greece should the circumstances allow, with the caveat that Russia’s economy is not in the greatest state it could be to help bail out anyone else. Lavrov’s comments echo those of the nation’s Finance Minister in January following the election of new Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.
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Diana Choyleva of Lombard Street Research, who produces an “unmassaged” calculation of China’s true economic growth, just reported that China’s fourth quarter GDP growth plummeted to 1.7 percent, versus the official 7.4 percent rate.
Over the weekend, former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan predicted that Greece will end up leaving the eurozone and that the euro will not long survive its departure.
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The newly elected Greek government is quite correct to eschew austerity and seek reductions in what it owes northern European governments. The Euro is punishing the South, and solving Mediterranean states’ chronic financial problems would require moving some industry from the North to the South. More austerity would only bleed the patient further.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin took another step to disturb ties between Russia and Europe when he invited new Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to Moscow on May 9.
Spain’s new radical leftist party, Podemos (Spanish for “We Can”), is embroiled in a new corruption scandal, this time accused in a complaint by the attorney coalition Clean Hands (“Manos Limpias”) funding itself with “undeclared” Venezuelan money acquired during “diplomatic” trips to the socialist nation.
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Spanish Budget Minister Cristobal Montoro has categorically rejected any attempts to “change the rules” regarding austerity measures imposed on Greece by European Union regulations. “Europe is a club of democracies, and entering is voluntary,” he stated, implying that, should Greece’s new government refuse to impose austerity measures, they can leave the EU.
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European finance ministers worried that Greece’s new far-left government would renege on the terms of previous bailout packages, while demanding even more debt to finance wild new spending programs, were given fresh reason for concern when the new Greek finance minister announced his government would not negotiate bailout terms with the European Union or International Monetary Fund.
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This week, Palestine’s Islamist Hamas movement congratulated the head of Greece’s newly-elected, far-left Syriza coalition on his party’s victory and hailed him for his staunch opposition to “Israeli crimes, aggression, and siege on Gaza.”
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A recent article by the Pew Research Center delves into the question of how different European states view themselves and their neighbors and the results are almost comical. Among the eight EU nations surveyed, the Greeks have an overwhelmingly higher opinion of themselves than other countries do, while the Italians are the most self-effacing.
In what has become the first major foreign policy move by the far-left newly elected government of Greece, new Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’ office has denied that his country assented to a European Union statement released this week condemning Russia’s further meddling in Ukraine.
Americans who haven’t been paying much attention to the collapse of Greek socialism have been missing a very instructive lesson in where their own country may be heading, for Greece is the end stage of Obama-style debt-fueled dependency politics. It could happen in America, too, most likely beginning with demands for huge federal bailouts by bankrupt Democrat-run basket case state governments.
The European left is in party mode. After the decisive victory of Greece’s Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza) in parliamentary elections last night, Greek leftists took to the streets and their analogs in Spain and the UK warned that their nations would be next. But while the hard left has much to celebrate, “moderate” socialists on the continent should take the news with a grain of salt, as the leftist party that ruled Greece as recently as 2011 appears to have lost almost all support.
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The left wing anti-austerity party Syriza has won this weekend’s general election in Greece, securing 149 of the 300 Parliamentary seats available, leaving it just two short of an overall majority. The party has formed a coalition with the Independent Greeks
