weltweit
Well-Known Member
The Associated Press@AP 13 mins13 minutes ago BREAKING: Tsipras says Greece has submitted its proposals to the eurogroup and to the European Council.
Greek elections
- Thread starter ska invita
- Start date
Tankus
Amused OAP
even funnier if he had scribbled his notes on the back of a fag packet ...plain white ..of course ..just for extra lols
J Ed
Follow Back Pro Expropriation
Supposedly today: "Thumping the table, Juncker demands to know how Greek officials dared to call the EC terrorists."
Sounds like that one stung... I guess they must genuinely be worried about how its making them look
But we're the good guys, we can't be terrorists! We cause thousands of people to commit suicide and thousands more to forage food from bins, we are so much more than terrorists.
MochaSoul
It's being enslaved of your own free will
Supposedly today: "Thumping the table, Juncker demands to know how Greek officials dared to call the EC terrorists."
It makes his nature and that of the Eurozone all too clear. I think their kicking of Greece out of the Eurozone is yet another manifestation of that same. Everyone is watching and everyone with an inch of a long-term sense of self-preservation will be pondering on the nature of this so called ""democratic" "union"". Yet another factor to add to the euro's future disintegration (in my view). There will be other crisis, and other people will be at the raw end of them and they will remember the plight of the Greek people, the role of the Eurozone in that and, also important, how Europe eases (or not) that exit... and that's not adding those who have already realised (or started to) just how shaky political and economic grounds the euro came to be out of.
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littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
This is empty posturing.
Kaka Tim
Half Arsed and Slapdash till I Die
I think this whole cluster fuck is doing immense political damage to the EU - they have offered the greeks nothing and seemed determined to humiliate their government - forcing them to accept the unacceptable and unworkable - or throw them to the wall. And the role of germany as the ultimate authority and enforcer in chief has obvious dark historical echoes.
Aside from the economic damage from "grexit", the transformation the EU's image from a club where equal(ish) partners worked together for (more or less) the common good to an undemocratic, neo-liberal steamroller with germany in the driving seat is profoundly toxic.
It will fuel resistance, resentment and revolt accross europe - and has the potential to destroy the whole institution.
Are they really so arrogant that they cant see this?
Aside from the economic damage from "grexit", the transformation the EU's image from a club where equal(ish) partners worked together for (more or less) the common good to an undemocratic, neo-liberal steamroller with germany in the driving seat is profoundly toxic.
It will fuel resistance, resentment and revolt accross europe - and has the potential to destroy the whole institution.
Are they really so arrogant that they cant see this?
redsquirrel
This Machine Kills Progressives
I hope you are right but I think that when it comes down to it the centre left will still fall in behind the EU.
I've not seen anyone on U75 who said that they were going to vote for the EU on the threads about the upcoming referendum change their minds (despite me bumping one). Despite the terrorism (which is exactly what it is) the EU is perpetrating on Greece the centre left will yet again show who's side they are really on.
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MochaSoul
It's being enslaved of your own free will
Tsipras has done well in calling the other Greek political leaders to the table after the referendum. The proposals they have now sent are not just Syriza coalition one's. The proposals have the approval stamp of the other parties on them too.
I have not spoken to a single person in Ireland who does not admire what the Greeks have done - and only wish the lickspittle gombeens here had displayed the same amount of balls. I suspect that would be as true in Portugal and Spain too.
MochaSoul
It's being enslaved of your own free will
My mum (back in Portugal) says the much the same but also points out that few of those with standing in the air and tele waves do so with the same vehemence.
ska invita
back on the other side
Definitely puts wind in the anti-EU camp's sail but as redsquirrel says, is it enough to change people's minds? Some, yes.... but I think about all those people who continue to support austerity here in the UK, and I'm sure many will likewise see the Greeks as eating their cake and wanting to have it. I'm one of those people who can see clearly all the arguments against the EU but am not yet at a point where I could vote to leave it.
On the continent there is much more emotional sympathy to the EU project - IMO in part fueled by (fading?) WW2 memories (there's a generational aspect to that though, which doesn't bode well for, say, twenty years down the line). People still support it and even Greek people have supported it in very recent times - though I haven't seen a post-referendum poll on attitudes.
The right-wing/populist press which has enjoyed kicking the EU over this crisis will still have its moment to turn full-blooded on Syriza...but I'm really curious to see how they'll play it during the UK's EU referendum when the UK establishment for the most part will be campaigning and fighting for staying in. Surely they'll fall into line, as they did on the Scottish referendum?
I agree though - the EU leaders must realise this has been bad PR, but its not a fatal blow yet. I think the EU's problem won't be one of maintaining good PR, but maintaining financial harmony - it'll be structural/economic problems that undo it, rather than losing 'hearts & minds' i reckon.
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
I've just heard Juncker say, to the effect, that the Greek government is "unacceptable". That's a pretty blatant disregard for democracy/the will of the people. The EU isn't doing much to dispel the image of it being a dictatorial institution run for the benefit of bankers and other parasites.
Louis MacNeice
Autumn Journalist
And by implication those who elected them and those who voted no in the referendum are also unacceptable; they are the wrong sort of Europeans...maybe not even real Europeans at all.
Cheers - Louis MacNeice
Idris2002
canadian girlfriend
I'll just leave this here:
GREECE’S former finance minister has unveiled plans to ride around on his motorbike having martial arts battles with local villains.
The freewheeling politician said he will go to whichever small town needs his help, taking manly temporary jobs like labourer or nightclub bouncer and standing up for locals against corrupt local bosses and their heavies.
He said: “I will ride into town, get a room in a local boarding house and establish a simmering sexual chemistry with the widowed but still beautiful landlady.
“Then I go into a bar where toughs in sleeveless denim shirts are harassing the waitresses. I beat them up using a mixture of kung fu and kickboxing techniques, stopping short of killing them because I hate violence.
“The elderly owner, who has a beautiful daughter, buys me a drink while explaining that the town is in the iron grip of someone called Mayor Angelis who everybody lives in fear of. To which I say something like ’not any more’.
GREECE’S former finance minister has unveiled plans to ride around on his motorbike having martial arts battles with local villains.
The freewheeling politician said he will go to whichever small town needs his help, taking manly temporary jobs like labourer or nightclub bouncer and standing up for locals against corrupt local bosses and their heavies.
He said: “I will ride into town, get a room in a local boarding house and establish a simmering sexual chemistry with the widowed but still beautiful landlady.
“Then I go into a bar where toughs in sleeveless denim shirts are harassing the waitresses. I beat them up using a mixture of kung fu and kickboxing techniques, stopping short of killing them because I hate violence.
“The elderly owner, who has a beautiful daughter, buys me a drink while explaining that the town is in the iron grip of someone called Mayor Angelis who everybody lives in fear of. To which I say something like ’not any more’.
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I think you're right with this. I've been following as much as I can and now I really can't see any way out of this, I think Greece leaving the Euro is fast becoming inevitable and in doing so exposing just how fatally holed below the waterline the Euro is and has been from the start. Grim times ahead in the immediate future I fear.
I think the Euro will probably survive in some form for a handful of countries but it's hard to see much of future for it, particularly when two of the EU's biggest players don't want to touch it with a bargepole.
co-op
But....but cLoWnFiSh....
I still can't work out why the ECB/EU end of the troika have been so pigheaded about this entire crisis. The IMF policy sort of makes sense - i.e. demand the usual 'politically acceptable' solution, i.e. mass austerity, drive down wages, increase profitability etc etc "revitalise" the economy and then pay off the debt with the extra tax revenues. As this policy has obviously failed spectacularly, the IMF have now changed their tune and are talking about write-offs.
But the EU/ECB seem obsessed by absolute compliance with a policy that clearly cannot work, it simply won't deliver them their money, or even a small percentage of it. All it will do is destroy the Greek economy. Why? What's in it for the EU/ECB?
Politicised? There are a lot of European governments in power who are flag waivers for austerity, if the idea of another way gains traction then they'll all be out of job come election time.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
If the eu falls apart, they will also be out of a job.
J Ed
Follow Back Pro Expropriation
Yes, I suspect that this is it. They have invested so much, and framed the debate, in the idea of profligate Greeks... even ostensibly 'anti-austerity' sympathetic politicians (who are nothing of the sort) like Renzi have justified their neoliberal reforms under the guise of "well you don't want to be Greece, do you?" - it's now political impossible for them to do anything else.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
But it's also politically impossible for them to allow the euro to fracture.
Isn't that the contradiction in the position - having Greece there as a warning so that you can wag your finger at your electorate is all very well, but they also don't want Greece to be Greece.
newbie
undisambiguated
I'm not sure Denmark, with an economy 60% that of Belgium, really counts as a big hitter. Belgium is 3% of the EU GDP, the UK is 5 times Belgium.
All the other EU countries currently outside the Euro have been working towards entry, though current events may change that.
co-op
But....but cLoWnFiSh....
Yep and maybe also deeply complacent/institutionalised - they spend their entire lives in an ideological space that is incredibly narrow and to try and think outside that is very hard - especially trying to think differently while also acting collectively in a coalition which has different interests. That's hard.
But as LBJ says they both want austerity and don't want Greece to be the disaster it has been or the eurozone to start falling apart. Ireland could be a poster boy for austerity and the tough-medicine-but-look-it's-working thing; Greece can't, the medicine is clearly killing the patient.
There's a similar contradiction in the right wing pov here in the UK I think; on the one hand there's an undertow of gloating over the failure of the eurozone - and for exactly the same reason that was predicted i.e. that a one size fits all monetary policy won't fit all - on the other they love watching a good hard dose of austerity being applied ruthlessly to a politically weak state, it's like neo-liberal rape porn for them. They've mostly gone rather quiet.
Poland. It may not have the economy size at the moment but it is without a doubt an extremely influential member of the EU. Needless to say the Euro is very unpopular there and despite being signed up to the idea of it, there is no way they are going to go near it for a long time, if ever.
Louis MacNeice
Autumn Journalist
In or out the Greeks will have to be punished; their conditions will have to be seen to be worse than the rest of the Eurozone, both as a disincentive to the Greeks continuing to be so Greek and much more importantly a warning to everybody else not to follow their bad example. One way to describe it would be as the workhouse test writ large; another would be to call it terrorism.
Cheers - Louis MacNeice
youngian
Well-Known Member
It partly because of the treaty nature of ECB which has no nation or direct political control and was set up to mirror the Bundesbank. The Germans do not want too much of a precedence to turn it into a politically directed central bank anymore then it has been forced too (or more accurately that should be moving the political direction of the ECB that is not to the liking of the former DM zone countries). Secondly there is the CDU's obsession with moral hazard which is misplaced as there is no desire for Ireland, Spain or Italy to suddenly identify itself as a sub-prime nation with a sovereign debt crisis. Thirdly former Eastern block countries and Finland that faced post Soviet economic crisis and weathered them without bailouts (although dishonest given the amount og US aid that went their way) have little time for bailing out the Greeks.
This structure was the German price for giving up the DM. Paris and Rome believed they should get on with forming the Euro and work on the Germans later down the line to see the wisdom of a more interventionist bank. Some hope, and I cannot see Southern European desires for debt mutualisation and fiscal transfers ever coming about. Perhaps a fudged compromised version will slowly develop but the Euro has worked out well for Germany. It was forged in their image with a crafty non-inflationary devaluation that made their goods even cheaper and provide plenty of cheap credit for their banks to lend out to poorer Eurozone countries to buy even more BMWs on the never-never.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Isn't this the rub. Germany needs the euro too. It keeps them rich. A new drachma would quickly fall through the floor, but a new deutchmark would go through the roof.
Every time I go to Germany I'm struck by how low prices are for such a high-income country. That would change very quickly without the euro.
