ex-Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis attacked in central Athens, (broken nose, cuts & bruises), famously took on Obama & European establishment

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from the article:

The only colour piercing the dimness of the hotel bar was the amber liquid flickering in the glass before him. As I approached, he raised his eyes to greet me with a nod before staring back down into his tumbler of whiskey. I sank onto the plush sofa, exhausted. On cue, his familiar voice sounded imposingly morose. ‘Yanis,’ he said, ‘you made a big mistake.’

All that changed with his acerbic opening statement, made more chilling by the dim light and shifting shadows. Faking steeliness, I replied, ‘And what mistake was that, Larry?’ ‘You won the election!’ came his answer.

It was 16 April 2015, the very middle of my brief tenure as finance minister of Greece. Less than six months earlier I had been living the life of an academic, teaching at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin while on leave from the University of Athens. But in January my life had changed utterly when I was elected a member of the Greek parliament. I had made only one campaign promise: that I would do everything I could to rescue my country from the debt bondage and crushing austerity being imposed on it by its European neighbours and the IMF. It was that promise that had brought me to this city and – with the assistance of my close team member Elena Paraniti, who had brokered the meeting and accompanied me that night – to this bar.

Smiling at his dry humour and to hide my trepidation, my immediate thought was, Is this how he intends to stiffen my resolve against an empire of foes? I took solace from the recollection that the seventy-first secretary of the United States Treasury and twenty-seventh president of Harvard is not known for his soothing style.

Determined to delay the serious business ahead of us a few moments more, I signalled to the bartender for a whiskey of my own and said, ‘Before you tell me about my “mistake”, let me say, Larry, how important your messages of support and advice have been in the past weeks. I am truly grateful. Especially as for years I have been referring to you as the Prince of Darkness.’

Unperturbed, Larry Summers replied, ‘At least you called me a prince. I have been called worse.’

For the next couple of hours the conversation turned serious. We talked about technical issues: debt swaps, fiscal policy, market reforms, ‘bad’ banks. On the political front he warned me that I was losing the propaganda war and that the ‘Europeans’, as he called Europe’s powers that be, were out to get me. He suggested, and I agreed, that any new deal for my long-suffering country should be one that Germany’s chancellor could present to her voters as her idea, her personal legacy.

Things were proceeding better than I had hoped, with broad agreement on everything that mattered. It was no mean feat to secure the support of the formidable Larry Summers in the struggle against the powerful institutions, governments and media conglomerates demanding my government’s surrender and my head on a silver platter. Finally, after agreeing our next steps, and before the combined effects of fatigue and alcohol forced us to call it a night, Summers looked at me intensely and asked a question so well rehearsed that I suspected he had used it to test others before me.

‘There are two kinds of politicians,’ he said: ‘insiders and outsiders. The outsiders prioritize their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price of their freedom is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions. The insiders, for their part, follow a sacrosanct rule: never turn against other insiders and never talk to outsiders about what insiders say or do. Their reward? Access to inside information and a chance, though no guarantee, of influencing powerful people and outcomes.’

With that Summers arrived at his question. ‘So, Yanis,’ he said, ‘which of the two are you?’

Instinct urged me to respond with a single word; instead I used quite a few.

‘By character I am a natural outsider,’ I began, ‘but,’ I hastened to add, ‘I am prepared to strangle my character if it would help strike a new deal for Greece that gets our people out of debt prison. Have no doubt about this, Larry: I shall behave like a natural insider for as long as it takes to get a viable agreement on the table – for Greece, indeed for Europe. But if the insiders I am dealing with prove unwilling to release Greece from its eternal debt bondage, I will not hesitate to turn whistle-blower on them – to return to the outside, which is my natural habitat anyway.’

‘Fair enough,’ he said after a thoughtful pause.


Powering through the watery curtain in pristine solitude, I took stock of the encounter. Summers was an ally, albeit a reluctant one. He had no time for my government’s left-wing politics, but he understood that our defeat was not in America’s interest. He knew that the eurozone’s economic policies were not just atrocious for Greece but terrible for Europe and, by extension, for the United States too. And he knew that Greece was merely the laboratory where these failed policies were being tested and developed before their implementation everywhere across Europe. This is why Summers offered a helping hand. We spoke the same economic language, despite different political ideologies, and had no difficulty reaching a quick agreement on what our aims and tactics ought to be. Nevertheless, my answer had clearly bothered him, even if he did not show it. He would have got into his taxi a much happier man, I felt, had I demonstrated some interest in becoming an insider. As this book’s publication confirms, that was never likely to happen.

Back at my hotel, I pondered a great anxiety: how would my comrades back home, the inner circle of our government, answer Summers’s question in their hearts? On that night I was determined to believe that they would answer it as I had done.

Less than two weeks later I began to have my first real doubts
 
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from the NYT:

THE Swabian housewife made her debut on the world stage in 2008, when Angela Merkel, neither Swabian nor a housewife but the chancellor of Germany, mentioned her at an event in (Swabian) Stuttgart. The American banks which were failing, she said, should have consulted a Swabian housewife because she could have told them how to deal with money.

“Yes, she’s a cliché, but much more than a cliché,” says Winfried Kretschmann with some pride, because “the Swabian housewife represents the starting point” in German thinking on the euro and fiscal management. As the (Green) premier of the rich south-western state of Baden-Württemberg, Mr Kretschmann should know.
 
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Meathead said:
FFS troll, the center-right took control over SYRIZA and their idiotic finance ministers and catastrophe averted.

en.wikipedia.org

Kyriakos Mitsotakis - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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So you support the violence against Yanis? either you support the policies of Yanis, or you support the violence against him! those are the only 2 options available! pick a side, we're at war! WAAAAAAAAR!
 
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Francis Fukuyama calls the end of the Soviet Union the end of communism and the end of history

Yanis calls the '08 financial crisis The End Of Capitalism
 
Meathead said:
Believe me fag, I picked a side a long time ago. I am a Greek citizen with property in Greece and the last thing I want to do is own that property in a new Greek drachma.

Still, I've little doubt this is all above your head.
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i respect greeks from both ALL sides of the political spectrum, something YOU fail to do!
 
Meathead said:
Your respect cannot be for Greeks only. I respect only those worthy of it, regardless of ethnicity.

You?
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every human being has a right to his opinion whether you're from Athens, Greece or Athens, Georgia WITHOUT getting beaten up physically
 
"Today … we are threatened by the bubble in American real estate and in the derivatives market … If this bubble bursts, and it is certain it will, no reduction in interest rates is going to energize investment in this country to take up the slack, and so none of this budget’s figures will have a leg to stand on … The question is not whether this will happen but how quickly it will result in our next Great Depression." - Yanis in 2006, he was branded a "national traitor" for saying this, among other comments
 
Even after Lehman Brothers went belly up, Wall Street crumpled, the credit crunch hit and a great recession engulfed the West, Greece’s elites were living in a bubble of self-deluded bliss. At dinner parties, in academic seminars, at art galleries they would harp on about Greece’s invulnerability to the ‘Anglo disease’, secure in the conviction that our banks were sufficiently conservative and the Greek economy fully insulated from the storm.
 
Greece’s double misfortune was that income growth in the country had hitherto been fuelled by further debt provided to corporations (often via the Greek state) by the same French and German banks that were lending to the state. The moment these banks panicked and stopped lending to Greece’s public and private sector simultaneously, the game would be up.
 
Yanis writes:


In January 2010 in a radio interview I warned the prime minister, whom I knew personally and with whom I was on rather friendly terms, ‘Whatever you do, do not seek state loans from our European partners in a futile bid to avert our bankruptcy.’ At the time the Greek state was making a superhuman effort to do precisely that. Within seconds government sources were chastising me as a traitor – a fool who failed to understand that such prognoses are self-confirming: retaining market confidence in the state’s financial health was the only way to keep the loans coming, Convinced that our bankruptcy was assured whatever calming noises we emitted, I ploughed on. The fact that I had once written speeches for Prime Minister Papandreou caught the eye of the BBC and other foreign news outlets. Headlines such as FORMER GREEK PM ADVISER SAYS GREECE IS BANKRUPT titillated the media and cemented my reputation as the worst enemy of the Greek establishment.
 
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