Harry Shearer’s Le Show is broadcast in New Orleans WMNO on Sunday at 8:00 PM and in Los Angeles on KCSN 88.5 FM at 10 AM today, Sunday. You can also listen to it or download it directly (right click and press “save link as” or when the page opens up go to the menu and press “save page as) here or download it from his site here starting mid-day. Be sure to catch it!
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Also broadcast, among many other place: Noon, KALW San Francisco, 10 pm AM 820 WNYC New York, 10 pm WBEZ Chicago, and 11 pm WHYY Philadelphia. Many chances to catch it. Also podcast via iTunes and WWNO.org.
Well done, Yves. Excellent interview. The questions & your answers were very clear. You did an excellent job summarizing and giving examples of the ways in which Syriza played their cards poorly in terms of negotiating strategy and tactics, while being supportive of their underlying economic assessment.
Your overview of all the players was equally enlightening. Your comments were balanced and well-grounded, you weren’t afraid to call a spade a spade (e.g. Merkel & co). You addressed well the questions / memes / misunderstandings that often arise in relation to the Greek crisis.
It will be great if Harry Shearer does some follow-up interviews. His degree of preparation on the issues was also outstanding.
I agree. Excellent interview for the subjects that were covered. A fascinating follow-up would be the political consequences of Syriza’s failures. While there is a small, hard left faction of Syriza, that faction’s influence in the administration was recently defenestrated by Tsipras. Tsipras has exposed himself as Greece’s Obama–willing to say anything to get the job without having the credentials to actually do the job. As you said, Yves, Syriza was never a “radical left” party, although it probably contains more leftists than any other Greek political party apart from the communists. Consequently, it’s much easier for the oligarch-controlled global press to play up Syriza’s failure as a failure for European social democrats generally than simply incompetence by Syriza’s leaders.
That interview was the first cogent, sensible take I’d heard since the Greek crisis began. Thank you! Of course, thanks also to Harry Shearer, that rare media host with the good sense to let you talk through complexities that most hosts might’ve interrupted. Well done all around.
Yves:
I’m not one to toss praise frivolously, but that was really well done. Just reducing the morass of jargon-filled, misleading, spurious propaganda that that pretends to be economic analysis to rational and comprehensible terms is a major accomplishment in this fetid environment. If only there were a hundred more taking apart TPP, privatization, the MIC, the PIC and so forth in public forums.
Political economy is not so complicated that the general public cannot comprehend the major points at issue; only the gliberati working night and day to render them incomprehensible and opaque make it seem the public is too stupid to participate in the debate and the governance.
I might add, for those who remember, that Felix Rohatyn’s Municipal Assistance Corporation in 1970’s New York City set the template for usurping sovereignty–that is, democracy–bankers seizing control of the city’s finances; a pattern we can see from Detroit to Greece, Argentina and Latvia, played out in various ways.
In a classic 1976 New York Times op-ed piece, L.D. Solomon, then publisher of New York Affairs, wrote: “Whether or not the promises…of the 1960’s can be rolled back…without violent social upheaval is being tested in New York City…. If New York is able to offer reduced social services without civil disorder, it will prove that it can be done in the most difficult environment in the nation.” Thankfully, Solomon concluded, “the poor have a great capacity for hardship” (quoted in Henwood 1991).
Indeed.
I put this on my “to-do” list and have just done it. Glad I did. Reminds me that radio is such a better medium than TV for some types of information. Doesn’t need to worry itself about trying to do visuals when there aren’t really any visuals to put up. And I, for one, find listening so much more immersive, ironically, than watching or even reading.
Agree, sent to quite a few w/ diverse backgrounds and was well received.
Yes, I agree. Plus Harry was smart enough to be able to interview Yves and let her do the explaining. My download cut out and I missed the term they referred to as even worse than neoliberalism. German-style neoliberalism. It sounded like ordoliberalism. Merkelism. Anybody?
I think they said Ordoliberalism or Ordo-liberalism. Agree with all the positive comments here.
Is there any (easy) way for this interview to be transcribed so it can be printed and distributed to friends who read better than they listen to radio or podcasts? Great interview as usual and thanks also to Harry Shearer for this and other important stories he shines the light on in his always entertaining way.
as always, most reasonable activities can be done with some financing.