News blog: Yanis Varoufakis replaced by ex-University of Kent academic

Early in the morning of Sunday March 30, 1952, Nikos Beloyannis was executed in Athens. One of the three members of the court-martial was Georgios Papadopoulos who later (1967) became the leader of the military dictatorship of 1967-1974. Nikos, also known as the "Man with the Carnation" thanks to Pablo Picasso, authored "Foreign Capital in Greece", a book exposing what the Greek debt was all about. In a nutshell, he showed that it was money granted by London bankers to German aristocrats who were asked to reign over the young Greek state arising from a revolution against the Othoman empire. The revolutionaries died in jail, whereas the foreign kings staged parties and arranged for taxation to pay for the never-ending extortionary interests. I will skip the interim for brevity in this comment, but I should point out a few points that are not of academic, but rather of intense political and economical interest. There is a lot of talk of modern debt. Who received this money? A new airport was built, but Hochtief (a Germany-based company) is the prime beneficiary (earner). A beautiful new bridge was built over the sea joining the northwest of the Peloponnese with the mainland, but it "belongs" to Vinci (a French construction company). Etc., etc. Money was given to European companies to build infrastructure that helped commerce and tourism. At the same money was given to close down (or move to countries with cheaper labour) industries, to kill local agriculture and to oppose any economic activity that could lead to financial independence within my country. More recently, money is being given to pay interests, on money that never reached my people. Today, we heard from Merkel and Hollande. Do they speak in the name of the people of France and the people of Germany? Or are they representing those special interests hinted to above? Others have written about the devastation brought to Greece during the second world war and afterwards. The solutions are unlikely to be found by academic ministers who accept the present order of things. We urgently need the Beloyannis, Kaloumenos, Batsis, Argyriadis of this generation. The political powers in Europe are exposing the union for what it is. The emerging picture is not pretty.