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Yes' or 'No'? Greece votes in crucial bailout referendum

The Greek people are voting in a key referendum that will decide if they accept or reject the harsh bailout demands of international creditors. At stake, many commentators have said, is the country’s future in the eurozone and the EU itself.

A total of 4,800 polling stations across the country opened at 7:00 am local time (4:00 GMT) and will close at 7:00 pm, with first results expected after 9:00 pm.

Approximately 9.9 million Greeks are eligible to participate in the vote, which was labeled #Greferendum by the social media.

A turnout of at least 40 percent is required for the results of the plebiscite to be valid.

Syriza leaders Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis have already cast their votes in the referendum.

How Greece Has Fallen Victim To "Economic Hit Men"

John Perkins is no stranger to making confessions. His well-known book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, revealed how international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, while publicly professing to "save" suffering countries and economies, instead pull a bait-and-switch on their governments: promising startling growth, gleaming new infrastructure projects and a future of economic prosperity - all of which would occur if those countries borrow huge loans from those organizations. Far from achieving runaway economic growth and success, however, these countries instead fall victim to a crippling and unsustainable debt burden.

That's where the "economic hit men" come in: seemingly ordinary men, with ordinary backgrounds, who travel to these countries and impose the harsh austerity policies prescribed by the IMF and World Bank as "solutions" to the economic hardship they are now experiencing. Men like Perkins were trained to squeeze every last drop of wealth and resources from these sputtering economies, and continue to do so to this day. In this interview, which aired on Dialogos Radio, Perkins talks about how Greece and the eurozone have become the new victims of such "economic hit men."

Michael Nevradakis: In your book, you write about how you were, for many years, a so-called "economic hit man." Who are these economic hit men, and what do they do?

John Perkins: Essentially, my job was to identify countries that had resources that our corporations want, and that could be things like oil - or it could be markets - it could be transportation systems. There're so many different things. Once we identified these countries, we arranged huge loans to them, but the money would never actually go to the countries; instead it would go to our own corporations to build infrastructure projects in those countries, things like power plants and highways that benefitted a few wealthy people as well as our own corporations, but not the majority of people who couldn't afford to buy into these things, and yet they were left holding a huge debt, very much like what Greece has today, a phenomenal debt.

We pledge allegiance to the United States of Inc.: Corporations become nation-states in Silicon Valley’s latest utopian management scheme
In Holacracy's vision, workers are citizens of the companies that will one day rule the world

During my desultory post-graduation years in San Francisco, I lived in a big duplex with three roommates. We had bands, fledging writing gigs and other financially unpromising passions, until one of us threw over la vie bohème to work at a consulting firm. We teased him mercilessly for using nonsensical catchphrases like “think outside the box” and for getting a job telling other people how better to run their companies when he’d never actually run a company himself. In the years since, he started an airline in a foreign country, and everyone else began talking about thinking outside the box, too.

Management theory is the philosophy of the corporate class, who are more or less the ruling class in contemporary America. It’s surprising, then, how little attention the rest of us pay to what corporate leaders say to each other about what they do. True, a lack of interest in managementese is understandable, because who even knows what these people are talking about as they spill vast cloud banks of vaporous words across the landscape? To read Brian J. Robertson’s “Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World” is to sled through abstractions, euphemisms and neologisms (“energizing roles,” “processing tensions” and so on), wondering what any of it has to do with making a living by providing goods and services to a market.

“Holacracy” is particularly noteworthy, though, because it does offer a substantively new way to run a corporate enterprise, one that is already famous for requiring difficult readjustments in the handful of companies that have tried it. Zappos, the online shoe retailer, and Medium, a blend of publisher and social blogging platform, are two of the most prominent organizations to use holacracy, and the bumpiness of Zappos’ conversion has received a good amount of press. Reporters have described the new system as “no job titles, no managers, no hierarchy,” and a whopping 14 percent of Zappos’ workforce took a buyout rather than adapt to holacracy’s arcane system of circles within self-organizing circles and multiple, shifting “roles” assigned to each employee.

Still Waiting for USS Liberty’s Truth

By Ray McGovern

Israel’s chokehold over U.S. politics and politicians has been so powerful for so many decades that this obvious reality is routinely denied, a collective gagging of the truth that is itself a measure of how strong the Israeli grip is.

The most potent and poignant example of how much American independence has been surrendered to Israel when it comes to events in the Middle East may be the contortions of cover-up that followed Israel’s attempt to sink the USS Liberty during the Six-Day War in 1967, killing 34 American seamen.

The desire of virtually the entire U.S. political and media establishments was for this unpleasant incident to go away. No one, it seemed, wanted to hold Israel to account or to challenge its lame excuses about an inadvertent mistake. One of the few who eventually did was Navy Admiral and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Thomas Moorer, who helped lead an independent, blue-ribbon commission to investigate what happened to the Liberty.

Those finding were released on Oct. 22, 2003. The introduction and first four findings stated:

Direct Actions Across Canada Declare: 'Time to Move on' from Tar Sands
The #JobsJusticeClimate actions are serving as an important prelude to the Climate Summit of the Americas, happening in Toronto next week

Creative direct actions are taking place across Canada on Saturday, in a nationwide mobilization meant to demonstrate that Canadians "care about their communities, and that we are ready to stop digging, start building and move beyond the tar sands."

The 'We > Tar Sands' rallies and events are coming in advance of a major March for Jobs, Justice, and the Climate happening in Toronto on Sunday, and on the heels of a series of student-led sit-ins that swept the country on Friday.

Taken together, the actions represent "the first steps towards a new kind of climate movement," as eco-activist and anti-capitalist Naomi Klein put it.

The July 4th coast-to-coast mobilizations, which range from the creation of a giant human chain on the sea wall at Vancouver's Sunset Beach to a flotilla protest on the Ottawa River just outside Montreal to a free concert in Edmonton, the capital of tar sands-rich Alberta, are being supported by 350.org—which is providing live updates on the events here.