Howard Fineman, progressive

I guess I hadn't paid enough attention to notice.

Greece Is Just The Beginning Of The Great Austerity Backlash

It's pretty simple, really.

Austerity crushes the working class and in lesser degree and with some exceptions everybody else who isn't a capitalist.

It makes capitalists richer.

It greatly increases inequality and redirects the economy from production for workers and ordinary people to production for everybody but the workers (or those even worse off) and mostly for the most rich.

On the other hand, inflation is a real threat to anybody with savings and hence to the not-yet-impoverished elderly living on their life's savings, whom it quickly makes impoverished.

Demand-side (Keynesian) efforts to "prime the pump" and expand demand for labor as well as putting money in their pockets risk bumping inflation, but needn't and needn't much.

Besides, knocking the neoliberals out of the saddle, even in Europe, is good for everybody on my side of the class war.

Bloodying their noses makes them less arrogant and less dangerous, and hence less dangerous to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and those same little nest-eggs some of us geezers pinched pennies for so long to build up, old age being the rainiest of rainy days, let me tell you.

The rebellion against austerity is certainly spreading, even in the US.

Austerity Has Failed

Krugman, Reich, Stiglitz, and now others.

Interesting that Bernie has spoken up in favor of the Greek NO vote and the refusal of the Syriza government to knuckle under.

Bernie Sanders: ‘I Applaud the People of Greece’

Has Hillary had anything to say?

The president?

Meanwhile, the following bit in The Guardian allows me yet another in my very long string of I told you so's.

Xenophobia and nationalism could be the Greek vote's biggest winners

Anti-nationalist cosmo-libs have their own priorities, surprisingly not much different from those of neoliberals on the identical questions.

And since the entire European project is one of sacrificing democracy and transferring national sovereignty to the EU, who is really surprised the fans of anti-and supra-nationalism who support it are willing to sacrifice the Greek people to this Moloch, as well?

In America there are leftists who are skeptics both regarding the currency union (the euro) and the entire project of European Unity as it has been undertaken in the decades since WW2.

It seems the sovereignty of individual European nations is not in such bad odor here as it is there.

Are there NO Euro-skeptics on the left in Europe?