With Syriza’s Victory, the Anti-Austerity Movement is Going Mainstream
http://inthesetimes.com/article/17577/syriza_austerityMany have attributed the party’s meteoric rise to power as a product of the brutal austerity conditions imposed on Greece by the International Monetary Fund and the European Union in their 2010 bailout of the country. Such measures have destroyed a quarter of the country’s GDP, and driven youth unemployment to an astounding 50 percent. At this point, the country’s non-working population outnumbers the employed as national debt continues to skyrocket.
Syriza has offered Greece a hopeful alternative, focused on getting people back to work, “transforming the political system,” and meeting basic needs. The party plans to immediately implement programs to guarantee housing and electricity as well as provide free medical and pharmaceutical care for the unemployed, among other measures aimed at reconstituting the country’s social safety net—left to crumble under austerity. In Brussels, they also plan to push for a renegotiation of the country’s debt, an infusion of capital for a “European New Deal,” and quantitative easing. In confronting the Eurozone and the IMF, the party has grown into rather than shrunk from its radical-left, anti-capitalist roots. Speaking with the Guardian, Tsipras noted, “This crisis is not coincidental. It’s a structural crisis of capitalism and of its neoliberal model.”
Syriza’s success, however, is about more than just material conditions. Emerging from various splits in Greece’s communist left, as well as the alter-globalization and anti-racist movements, the party jolted from relative obscurity by mobilizing a younger, more populist base alongside trade unionists and older middle-class Greeks shaken by the country’s financial crisis. The party has made a public alliance with the Spanish populist party Podemos, or “We Can,” a largely decentralized formation out of that country’s Indignados movement that, of late, has surged in popular opinion polls and predicts a strong turnout in the Spanish general election later this year.
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and similar movements elsewhere, will serve as bases for expansion around the world, and give Americans a serious boost.
and in the U.S., action on the streets, as in Europe, just doesn't happen. And of course, there's our corrupt voting system.
edit: and look at what's happened to our labor movement. 
other stuff reserved for that. Yes, let's talk again.
Add France: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10141003302
'Right to Work.' 
I suspect that IF she wanted it, she could have the nomination (AND the presidency,) but I don't think she does want it, don't think she wants to challenge Hillary. I think Eliz is in our future. She is surely level headed, a necessary quality for a world leader. And I think any personal problems in her back ground are of no consequence. People see what she is, and Hillary has many more negatives, imo.
Thanks again. This is a fight well worth sticking with, imo, the larger one, that is, pro-Greece etc, anti-austerity b.s., anti-bank/wall street.
There does seem to be hope after all, as the anti-racist activists and other progressives of the European continent continue to gain steam; may Syriza's victory be only one of the first of many more to come..... 
See this thread above, Joe.
