This week, we’re looking at the relationship between democracy and debt. While a great deal of media attention has been focused on the ongoing negotiations between Greece’s leftist government and its European creditors, fewer people have been paying attention to a debt crisis happening within US territory, in the free associated state of Puerto Rico. Today on the show, we go in depth on both of these crises.
We speak to Aris Chatzistefanou, a Greek journalist and filmmaker who sits on Greece’s Truth Commission on Public Debt, about the referendum on the negotiations announced on Friday.
We’re joined by Emilio Pantojas, a professor of sociology at the University of Puerto Rico, to discuss the roots of the crisis on that island, and what should be done to solve it.
And we step back to discuss the bigger picture, including how governments accrue such debt and what we know about how previous countries have gotten out of it, with economist Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C.
Originally aired on WBAI on June 29 2015. Listen to the whole show here: