But pressure from the left is more than ever necessary.

What are ET's thoughts (channeling Melanchthon here) on this tribune and on Roosevelt 2012?

I might argue with their lack of insight into the reasons for the U.S. economic development during and after WW II - namely our physical isolation and, then, our position as the only intact manufacturing economy post-war. That is, the U.S., however much the political leaders may have consciously manipulated the situation, 'lucked out'.

Point being that we have to move beyond the hyper-exploitation model that has been employed by all concerned for most of modern history. It will be interesting to see how this group positions itself in that regard, as they clarify and focus their policies. Their initial rhetoric gives some hope in that regard.

paul spencer

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

In the USA in that time, the functioning of the economy depended on huge pools of grossly underpaid labor (black and female workers) plus a massive military buildup. All those Polaris submarine workers got paid very well. In addition, the economy was built on both unsustainable destruction of the environment and the grinding poverty of neo-colonial world.  The idea that "neoliberals" were able by fiat to reduce first world workers wages seems to me to relegate the economic independence struggles of China and Brazil to background - that is to be hampered by the characteristic problem of Western thought, an assumption that the experience of white males in OECD nations is what is important and all else is trivia.

We are witnessing a dramatic articulation of the essential contradiction between democracy and capitalism. More than ever, this is the essential political problem of our times. While the nation-state still remains the requisite form of society's self-determination, the pillar of integrity of the nation-form since the advent of modernity - namely, national economy - is now thoroughly dismantled by the dynamics of a globalised economy that could care less about national boundaries, cultural particularities, social histories, or even more, societies themselves as self-recognised collectives of real men and women whose very conditions of life are at stake.

This is not meant to be taken metaphorically. The lives of Greeks are literally perishing in order to satisfy ruthless profit margins of global capital. Suicide rates have tripled in the last year, in a country that statistically held the lowest suicide rate in the world. Suicides have now become a daily occurrence, a bona fide social phenomenon in a society that may be characterised in all kinds of ways, but it could never be known for either its violence or its depressive behaviour. Many more than those who choose to take their lives so as not to saddle their families with insurmountable debt are living in borderline hunger conditions, a level of poverty not seen since the Second World War and its aftermath.

Moreover, these conditions have been created with unprecedented speed - a kind of flash impoverishment on a mass scale, which can only happen when all terms of national economy are annihilated and external financial forces wield direct political power over a national terrain. This is why, though Greece still exists on the map of nations under a sovereign flag, it is effectively a country on hold - or under hold, a country whose sovereignty has been mortgaged.

I would love to hear talos' take on this article.

Now where are we going and what's with the handbasket?