By Mark Mazower. June 29, 2011 YESTERDAY, the whole world was watching Greece as its Parliament voted to pass a divisive package of austerity measures that could have critical ramifications for the global financial system. It may come as a surprise that this tiny tip of the Balkan Peninsula could command such attention. We usually think of Greece as the home of Plato and Pericles, its real importance lying ...

ALJAZEERA's Listening Post video looks at the Greek protests and how the media covered them. As Greece battles economic collapse, protests in the country have been getting louder, bigger and more heated. Greeks on the streets have been demonstrating against the squeeze on their wages and pensions, but the media covering those protests have found some hostility directed at them as well. The protesters accuse ...

Editorial Instead of postponing the inevitable Greek default, it would be far smarter to prepare for it. Seen from Brussels, Berlin or Frankfurt, the crisis playing out in Athens this month looks almost simple, and linear in its direction. The Greek prime minister, George Papandreou, wins a confidence vote, as he did on Tuesday night. The government gets MPs to approve its package of austerity measures, set ...

By Costas Douzinas and Petros Papaconstantinou The usurious conditions of the Greek bailout reveals Brussels' colonial mindset – but Athens is showing citizens can resist. After months of attacks on the supposedly feckless Greeks, the western media, intellectuals such Amartya Sen and Jürgen Habermas and the United Nations have finally woken up to the fact that the catastrophic austerity imposed on Greece is ...

BERLIN – From the start of the Greek debt crisis in 2010, the major European players should have understood the risks and consequences that it posed for the European Union. They certainly don’t give that impression to onlookers. The crisis was always about much more than Greece: a disorderly insolvency there would threaten to pull other economies on the EU’s southern periphery, including some very big ones, ...

When Stephane Hessel wrote in Time for Outrage! that indignation with injustice should turn to ‘a peaceful insurrection’ perhaps he did not expect that the movement of ‘indignados’ in Spain and ‘aganaktismenoi’ (outraged) in Greece would take his advice to heart so soon and so spectacularly. In the following link you can hear the audio from the event organized by the Birckbeck Institute for the Humanities: ...

Interview with economist Yanis Varoufakis with Dutch subtitles. "The Euro system was not designed to take the shock of the great financial crisis of 2008."   ...

They spoke about us (and about you) without us (and you)… We are Greek students in Dutch universities and we take this initiative to write you this letter regarding the event that took place on Monday, 6th of June at the Faculty of Economics of UVA. We write this letter in order to provide our perspective on the situation in Greece and its interconnection to the Dutch public financial sector. We would have ...

Here are the countries with the most to lose if Greece defaulted. The countries that report data to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) are: In Europe: Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom. Rest of the World: Australia, Canada, Chile, India, Japan, United States, Chinese Taipei, Singapor ...

The same economists who failed to predict the 2007 financial crash are still in the driving seat – and just as clueless in a crisis When did the IMF learn about the economy? That's what people around the world should be asking as the IMF presents its latest assessment of the fiscal and economic prospects for nations around the world last week. Much of the world remains mired in the worst downturn since the ...