Greece's Syriza Party: The Antidote to Europe's Austerity Disease - 26:56

Greece’s Syriza Party: The Antidote to Europe’s Austerity Disease
with
Kostis Karpozilos, Dept. of History, Columbia University
and
Eric Poulos, Greek-American activist

Greece's parliament has failed to elect a president, which means it must hold a new election a little over two years since the last, which will take  place Jan. 25, with the prospect of a victory for the Syriza party, a political party formed of a coalition of hundreds of left groups, which has emerged as the country's second largest political party.   An upsurge of support for Syriza flows from the economic       turmoil in bankrupt Greece, which received emergency loans from the Troika: The European Union (EU), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – and under the terms of the bailout loans the Greek government has cut back on its public spending, which had propped up much of its economy.  Greece now has an unemployment rate that has surpassed 27 percent, with youth unemployment hovering at around 60 percent, and hundreds of thousands of Greeks have been forced to migrate abroad to survive.  The social state is in shambles, and the government is in the process of selling off key state industries, public lands and utilities.  Kostis Karpozilos , the leading light of a nonsectarian left-wing Greek web site, was interestingly a featured commentator in a recent movie on the 100th anniversary of the Ludlow massacre and the writer and commentator in a movie about the history of Greek American radicals and Eric Poulos, Greek-American activist joins us to talk about the destruction of the Greek economy, the Eurozone and alternative examples of economic development, with an eye towards the Greek anti-austerity Syriza party winning the upcoming general election

Plus
An update with Alexis Tsipras, leader of the left-wing Syriza party in an interview with ch 4 reporter Paul Mason. Tspiras says he wants to renegotiate the Greek bailout and might even be prepared to pull the country out of the eurozone if push comes to shove - so usual terms of politics may not apply.

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