Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt

Description

ABOUT THE BOOK

2015 will be a landmark in the history of Greece, Europe and the Left. This book can be used as a guide for readers who are content neither with the mainstream narrative spun by major media and creditors, nor with former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis’s version in his book Adults in the Room. Eric Toussaint shows that when they agreed to the Troika Troika Troika: IMF, European Commission and European Central Bank, which together impose austerity measures through the conditions tied to loans to countries in difficulty.

IMF : https://www.ecb.europa.eu/home/html/index.en.html extending the second Memorandum of Understanding at the end of February 2015, Yanis Varoufakis and the few Syriza leaders around Tsipras never considered taking action if creditors did not yield Yield The income return on an investment. This refers to the interest or dividends received from a security and is usually expressed annually as a percentage based on the investment’s cost, its current market value or its face value. anything. Instead of calling upon the people’s support and exposing the blackmail they were faced with, Varoufakis and Tsipras spent far too much time in lengthy negotiation meetings abroad which only resulted in more concessions to the Troika, bent on destroying the hopes of the Greek people. One of the book’s major objectives is to show that at each stage of the harrowing path the government walked from February to July 2015, there were possible alternatives. The author discusses the political implications of the Greek experience for the European left and for a potential radical government that works for the people.

CONTENTS

• Proposals doomed to fail
• A questionable account of the origins of the Greek crisis
• How Tsipras and Varoufakis’s turned their backs on Syriza’s platform
• The Finance Minister’s Advisers
• A Negotiation Strategy Doomed to Fail
• Towards the disastrous 20 February 2015 agreement with the Eurogroup
• February 2015: the first capitulation of Tsipras and Varoufakis
• Secret negotiations and dashed hopes
• Towards the final capitulation
• There was a viable alternative
• Chronology from January 2015 to August 2019
• Non exhaustive list of persons mentioned
• Bibliography

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eric Toussaint, who coordinated the work of the audit committee set up by the president of the Hellenic Parliament in 2015, lived at the heart of events that shook Europe. Eric Toussaint is an economist and political scientist, and is the international spokesperson of the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (CADTM), and sits on the Scientific Council of ATTAC France. His most recent books are Debt System, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019;Bankocracy, London: Resistance Books / IIRE / CADTM, 2015; The Life and Crimes of an Exemplary Man, Liège: CADTM, 2014; Glance in the Rear-View Mirror: Neoliberal Ideology from its Origins to the Present, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012; A Diagnosis of Emerging Global Crisis and Alternatives, Mumbai: Vikas Adhyayan Kendra [VAK], 2009