Greece and The Coming (possible) Grexit From The EuroZone

Where Greece Should Go from Here | Ian Welsh

Where Greece Should Go from Here
2015 July 7
tags: Greek Financial Crisis
by Ian Welsh
Ok. Enough.

I’ve been walking people through what’s happening, what it means, etc. in Greece now for a while, with an able assist from Mandos and commenters.

Let’s cut the crap. Merkel has come back and said that Germany will not allow debt reduction and insists on austerity—and harsh austerity, worse than the last offer. She is backed by most EU members and the European Central Bank, which has put the screws into Greece so hard that imports are piling up on docks because Greece can’t pay for them.

ENOUGH.

Syriza needs to get its act together. The Euro is a stupid idea, and it always was. It cannot work absent central fiscal policy (aka, national governments reduced to de-facto provinces). It does not allow governments the ability to devalue their currency when they need to increase exports, to print money, and so on.

It cannot work. It never could, as designed. It was always a stupid idea. (And yes, I opposed it from the beginning.)

Oh, it could be fudged. They could forgive Greece’s debt (but then would have be expected to forgive a bunch of other countries some of their debt), and money could be funneled to Greece in various ways and so on. But that can’t be done because of neo-liberal doctrine, which insists that debts are sacred and that creditors must never lose money, which is ludicrous and a direct violation of how capitalism works. People who make bad loans MUST lose their money. Without that, it isn’t capitalism and the virtues of capitalism don’t work.

This is not in question. This distribution of money to people who know how to make a profit and not lose it (and thus make “Productive” use of it), is about three-quarters of the pragmatic argument for capitalism.

Austerity is beyond stupid: In order to fix the economy, you reduce gross expenditures and expect that tax incomes will increase faster than deficits and the economy will grow as a result. It is so dribblingly inane on its own merits that anyone who believes it either hasn’t spent three seconds thinking, is an ideologue incapable of thought, or is on the take, expecting that the benefits of austerity will flow to them.

The Euro is moronic as implemented. Austerity does not do what it is sold to do. And neoliberalism does only one thing more effectively than other forms of capitalism (those which actually work): It transfers money to the rich faster.

Syriza needs to leave the Euro. They are not going to get a good deal, or even a mediocre deal from Europe. They will be better off leaving the Euro. If they do so, they should simply repudiate all debts.

Yes, all of them. Once they leave the Euro, Europe and the neoliberal order will go all out to crush them. It does not matter what they do, they will be target number one.

They should then cut a deal with Russia for oil and a pipeline, and align solidly with Russia and China, asking for aid from those two countries.

They should cease any attempts to stop refugees from flooding out of Greece into the rest of Europe. Heck, put them on buses and ship them to the border.

They should nationalize the distribution of food grown in Greece. Greece grows enough food; just start delivering it to every household. Saddam did this effectively, Greece can too.

That takes care of oil and food (Greece has plenty of refinery capacity).

Medicine is the next issue; Greece will have to arrange to get the meds it needs through Russia and China.

There are other details, but mainly Greece should do everything it can short of leaving the EU (not the Euro, the EU) or going to war to make Europe’s life miserable. Why? Because then they have something to negotiate with.

There are those who will say this escalating, blah, blah, blah.

Yes, it is. The path of capitulation, down which even Syriza was plodding (the deals they were willing to sign were terrible and would have kept Greece in depression for the foreseeable future) did not work. It is time for Greeks take their own future in their hands and be bold.

“Europe” doesn’t want them. Fuck Europe. A Europe which has turned its back on the foremost modern Greek virtue, Democracy, is not a Europe worth bothering with. Greece and the Greeks should regard themselves as what is left of the true Europe (along with Iceland), sneer down their noses at the barbarian Eurpeans and embrace and trust themselves.

Why? Well, because frankly, they don’t have anyone else.

The current world order is breaking up anyway. Russia, China, and various other nations hate how it is run, and they are moving to destroy the credit/banking gridlock which is the real power of the West. Yes, it would be nice if Greece didn’t have to be one of the first into the breach. But, at this point, every other option is worse.

As for the European leaders insisting on this course of events, and they are insisting, they will be seen as those who destroyed the Euro. Their treatment of Greece is a clear lesson to everyone else in Europe that the Euro does not and cannot work. The moment a country gets into serious trouble (and that time will always come), Europe is not flexible enough to do what needs to be done. The current pols, who are complicit in the crimes of austerity and neoliberalism cannot run against Europe, but they will be replaced, in time, by those who will.

Greece’s situation has been a completely unnecessary mistake and a crime. The amount of money involved is trivial. Simply following basic, capitalist ideology (lenders lose their money if they lend to people who can’t repay) would have solved the situation five years ago. If they’d behaved like slightly decent and competent technocrats, they could have easily solved the crisis and bailed out private investors in any number of ways, while still allowing the Euro and mild austerity to continue.

The leaders of Europe are idiots, as well as being ethical monsters who have impoverished and killed many for an ideology whose sole purpose is to make a small proportion of the population very, very, very rich. This will be seen as the moment when those leaders broke the Euro. Combine this with the US abusing its stranglehold on the financial transfer system to starve countries out, and stupidity like Iraq, and they’ve hastened an end to theie American/Western hegemonic period–decades earlier than smart, human policies would have achieved.

A finance system exists, socially, only to direct money to where it is needed to create more social good. It has no purpose otherwise. It is not an end in itself. Money that is not a useful commodity (aka. food) is not a store of value, and never was. It is a fiction used to allow feedback in the system and to act as a distribution mechanism for goods and services based on perceived social utility (aka, people who have more money are assumed to have more social utility).

A society which understands NONE of these points will vastly mis-allocate its productive resources, as, currently, ours is. That mis-allocation will, in time, lead to collapse or another disaster (in the much larger picture here, much of the world is now in both a pre-revolutionary state and a pre-war state, though most people won’t believe either until they’re dying).

I have spent my entire life watching these people burn down the house to generate heat and call themselves geniuses. Neoliberalism “works” because it bribes just enough people to maintain enough of a constituency, while piling money into the hands of a very few people who will do anything to keep it going because that’s how they became filthy rich, and virtually any system which cared about the common good would take their money and power away from them.

Neoliberalism works only in the sense that it creates the circumstances for its own continuation. But it is a locust ideology: It cannot last long in historical terms and it will not. That doesn’t mean it will be replaced by something better, the world has often seen centuries to millenia go by with most of the world ruled by nobles, kings, and despots and the majority of populations peasants, serfs, and slaves.

But, be clear: It will end. Be clear: Greece, whether they buckle or fight, is making its end come closer. And be clear: That end will almost certainly result in hundreds of millions to billions of death in war, revolution, famine, and so on.

None of this was necessary. But some people wanted to be really, really rich and many other people were willing to make corrupt deals that cut out most of society from any gains. Most of those people will be dead before the shit hits the fan in any way that would effect them, safe in their core nations. But not all will be dead.

I hope that Juncker, Merkel, and Draghi, among others, live very long lives. Sincerely. I hope they live to be a hundred, with their minds sharp. I hope this devoutly.

Meanwhile, all the stupid options having been exhausted, having a mandate from the population, and with the EU saying “lie down after taking your cup off so we can gather in a circle around you and kick you,” let us hope Syriza does what needs to be done. (They might also wish to just reinstate Varoufakis as Finance Minister. There is no deal to be had, and they’re going to need a competent technocrat to do what needs to be done.)
 
New York Stock Exchange was shut down for a few hours today, the elite must be getting giddy now.

 
LelandJ said:
The latest from the ECB suggests that they have raised the ELA "haircuts" on collateral tendered by Greek banks to 45%.

That's obscene -- unless the so-called "assets" are in fact worth nothing.

So let's take the two possibilities:

  • The assets are good. The Greek banks should take them back from the ECB and sell them into the market to repay the ECB, keeping the rest of the funds from the sale. With a 45% haircut currently being applied if the prices the banks are holding them at are not frauds then they can easily do this and pay the depositors who wish to withdraw funds while having plenty left over. The amount of collateral (bonds) involved is relatively small compared against the totality of the EU debt marketplace; there would be zero (or nearly so) move in price caused by such a sale. Doing this would shrink the size of the banks involved (perhaps to extinction), but so what? No depositor would lose a nickel and there might be created new business opportunities for new bankers to spring up to fill consumer and business demand.
  • The assets are worthless, or at least worth far less than claimed -- and most-importantly, worth less than the haircut marks! If this is the case then the Greek banks have been and are today committing fraud. In this case every one of their executives and managers should be arrested, tried and publicly executed. Yes, in this case the depositor money has been impaired and some will be lost but the people responsible will be properly punished for what they have done, deterring a future similar event.
So which is it?

Either the ECB has no bullets in this gun with their "haircut expansion" because the assets can be easily taken back and sold for more than the haircut value and this is what any rational business person would do or the assets are either worth far less than the haircut value or worse, entirely worthless.

AGAIN: Is this entire charade smoke and mirrors or is the Greek banking system a fraud-laced enterprise that needs to have virtually all of its participants face the harshest possible sanction?

One of these two must be true.
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This is wrong. Haircuts are applied to take into account credit risk. The ECB decides what haircut they want to apply, which implies the credit risk they deem Greece banks and the pledged assets to have. Greek banks are not committing fraud if the assets turn out to be worth less than the haircut implies, but they also can't just sell their pledged assets. Banks, investors and governments frequently apply haircuts to each others assets, depending on their respective credit ratings. If the assets turn out to be worth less than the haircut in the event of a default no one is committing fraud.

Anyways, the WSJ reported Greece requested a 3 year ESM bailout, and was also promising to implement tax reform, and pension measures at the beginning of next week, which had been the biggest sticking point in negotiations for the past 5 months. If this is true, it means Greece has given up and will accept all creditor demands, which means the country will be repaying its debts for decades to come. Greece Requests Three-Year Bailout in First Step Toward Meeting Creditors’ Demand - WSJ

Another interesting point view, which I think might have some truth in it, although you should always take zerohedge with a very big grain of salt:
The Greferendum Shocker: Tsipras "Intended To Lose" And Is Now "Trapped By His Success"
The Greferendum Shocker: Tsipras "Intended To Lose" And Is Now "Trapped By His Success" | Zero Hedge

Anyways, the Chinese story will turn out to be much worse than the Greek situation. 80% of the Chinese stock market exists out of retail investors, and many of those have traded on margin. More than half of the stocks on the Shanghai index have been halted,which means the stock exchange doesn't really exist anymore.
 
Monkeyface said:
Another interesting point view, which I think might have some truth in it, although you should always take zerohedge with a very big grain of salt:
The Greferendum Shocker: Tsipras "Intended To Lose" And Is Now "Trapped By His Success"
The Greferendum Shocker: Tsipras "Intended To Lose" And Is Now "Trapped By His Success" | Zero Hedge
Click to expand...

How many times we gonna post this.

Monkeyface said:
Anyways, the Chinese story will turn out to be much worse than the Greek situation. 80% of the Chinese stock market exists out of retail investors, and many of those have traded on margin. More than half of the stocks on the Shanghai index have been halted,which means the stock exchange doesn't really exist anymore.
Click to expand...

I quite agree.
 
Monkeyface said:
This is wrong. Haircuts are applied to take into account credit risk. The ECB decides what haircut they want to apply, which implies the credit risk they deem Greece banks and the pledged assets to have. Greek banks are not committing fraud if the assets turn out to be worth less than the haircut implies, but they also can't just sell their pledged assets. Banks, investors and governments frequently apply haircuts to each others assets, depending on their respective credit ratings. If the assets turn out to be worth less than the haircut in the event of a default no one is committing fraud.

Anyways, the WSJ reported Greece requested a 3 year ESM bailout, and was also promising to implement tax reform, and pension measures at the beginning of next week, which had been the biggest sticking point in negotiations for the past 5 months. If this is true, it means Greece has given up and will accept all creditor demands, which means the country will be repaying its debts for decades to come. Greece Requests Three-Year Bailout in First Step Toward Meeting Creditors’ Demand - WSJ
Click to expand...


Greek banks (all banks) are committing fraud (should be illegal by any base standard of ethics if it's not) when they're selling or buying "assets" known to be junk in reality, and known to be valued such in the future, backed by taxpayers. The euphemism has been "privatizing profits, socializing losses" a stupid way of saying fraud, then you have media brainwashing people like Journeyman that this was all an accident. "They're not smart enough to have stolen everything intentionally."

You'd have to be willfully ignorant after 2008 Wall Street scandal to think both structure of money/debt creation and derivatives shenanigans aren't based on pure theft. Of course your job requires you to not understand the problem, at least to avoid a troubled conscience, not that you should be responsible in any way regardless if your income is funded by it. The central banks own the whole world, there's nothing anyone can do about it. Doesn't matter what we or the Greeks vote, the banks will remain in power until extinction.
 
The "irremediable structural flaw" in our civilization that has inspired subtle omnipresent dread and doomsday myths for thousands of years, manifests in every human institution, from science to religion to business. None is independent of the others; none can change in isolation; yet when one changes, all will change. In Chapter Six we considered the gathering sea-change in science that we are on the verge of assimilating. Now we will look at some other social institutions, beginning where the structural flaw is the clearest and its effects most explicit: the institution of money.

Chapter Four described how our present system of money-with-interest generates the necessity for endless growth, how it embodies linear thinking, how it defies the cyclical patterns of nature, and how it drives the relentless conversion of all forms of wealth into money. As well, interest is the wellspring of our economy's ever-intensifying competition, systemic scarcity, and concentration of wealth. Yet more than an accidental artifact of history, interest is tied in to our self-conception as separate, competing subjects seeking to gather more and more of the world within the boundaries of "mine". The change in our fundamental ontology expressed in part by the new sciences will also, therefore, ultimately generate a new system of money consistent with a different conception of self and world.

A society's system of money is inseparable from other aspects of its relationship to the world and the relationships among its members. Money as we know it today both reflects and propels the objectification of the world, the paradigm of competition, and the depersonalization and atomization of society. We should therefore expect that any authentic change in these conditions would necessarily also involve a change in our system of money.

As a matter of fact, there are money systems that encourage sharing not competition, conservation not consumption, and community, not anonymity. Pilot versions of such systems have been around for at least a hundred years now, but because they are inimical to the larger patterns of our culture, they have been marginalized or even actively suppressed. Meanwhile, many creative proposals for new modes of industry such as Paul Hawken's Ecology of Commerce, and many green design technologies, are uneconomic under the current money system. The alternative money systems I describe below will naturally induce the economies described by visionaries such as Hawken, E.F. Schumacher, Herman Daly, and others. They will also reverse the progressive nationalization and globalization of every economic sector, revitalize communities, and contribute to the elimination of the "externalities" that put economic growth at odds with human happiness and planetary health.

Given the determining role of interest, the first alternative currency system to consider is one that structurally eliminates it. As the history of the Catholic Church demonstrates, laws and admonitions against interest are ineffective if its structural necessity is still present in the nature of the currency. A structural solution is needed, such as the system proposed by Silvio Gesell in The Natural Economic Order. Gesell's "free-money" (as he called it) bears a form of negative interest called demurrage. Periodically, a stamp costing a tiny fraction of the currency's denomination must be affixed to it, in effect a "user fee" or a "maintenance cost"; another way to look at it is that the currency "goes bad"—depreciates in value—as it ages.[3]

If this sounds like a radical proposal that could never work, it may surprise you to learn that no less an authority than John Maynard Keynes praised the theoretical soundness of Gesell's ideas. What's more, the system has actually been tried out with great success.

Although demurrage was applied as long ago as Ancient Egypt in the form of a storage cost for commodity-backed currency,[4] the best-known example was instituted in the town of Worgl, Austria, in 1932 by its famous mayor Uttenguggenberger. To remain valid, each piece of this locally-issued currency required a monthly stamp costing 1% of its face value. Instead of generating interest and growing, accumulation of wealth became a burden—much like possessions are a burden to the nomadic hunter-gatherer. People therefore spent their income quickly, generating intense economic activity in the town. The unemployment rate plummeted even as the rest of the country slipped into a deepening depression; public works were completed, and prosperity continued until the Worgl currency was outlawed in 1933 at the behest of a threatened central bank.

Demurrage produces a number of profound economic, social, and psychological effects. Conceptually, demurrage works by freeing material goods, which are subject to natural cyclic processes of renewal and decay, from their linkage with a money that only grows, exponentially, over time. As established in Chapter Four, this dynamic is what is driving us toward ruin in the utter exhaustion of all social, cultural, natural, and spiritual wealth. Demurrage currency merely subjects money to the same laws as natural commodities, whose continuing value requires maintenance. Gesell writes:

Gold does not harmonise with the character of our goods. Gold and straw, gold and petrol, gold and guano, gold and bricks, gold and iron, gold and hides! Only a wild fancy, a monstrous hallucination, only the doctrine of "value" can bridge the gulf. Commodities in general, straw, petrol, guano and the rest can be safely exchanged only when everyone is indifferent as to whether he possesses money or goods, and that is possible only if money is afflicted with all the defects inherent in our products. That is obvious. Our goods rot, decay, break, rust, so only if money has equally disagreeable, loss-involving properties can it effect exchange rapidly, securely and cheaply. For such money can never, on any account, be preferred by anyone to goods. Only money that goes out of date like a newspaper, rots like potatoes, rusts like iron, evaporates like ether, is capable of standing the test as an instrument for the exchange of potatoes, newspapers, iron and ether. For such money is not preferred to goods either by the purchaser or the seller. We then part with our goods for money only because we need the money as a means of exchange, not because we expect an advantage from possession of the money.
In other words, money as a medium of exchange is decoupled from money as a store of value. No longer is money an exception to the universal tendency in nature toward rust, mold, rot and decay—that is, toward the recycling of resources. No longer does money perpetuate a human realm separate from nature.

Gesell's phrase, "... a monstrous hallucination, the doctrine of 'value'..." hints at an even more subtle and more potent effect of demurrage. What is he talking about? Value is the doctrine that assigns to each object in the world a number. It associates an abstraction, changeless and independent, with that which always changes and that exists in relationship to all else. Demurrage reverses this thinking and thus removes an important boundary between the human realm and the natural realm. When money is no longer preferred to goods, we will lose the habit of thinking in terms of how much something is "worth".

Whereas interest promotes the discounting of future cash flows, demurrage encourages long-term thinking. In present-day accounting, a rain forest generating one million dollars a year sustainably forever is more valuable if clearcut for an immediate profit of 50 million dollars. (In fact, the net present value of the sustainable forest calculated at a discount rate of a mere 5% is only $20 million.) This discounting of the future results in the infamously short-sighted behavior of corporations that sacrifice (even their own) long-term well-being for the short-term results of the fiscal quarter. Such behavior is perfectly rational in an interest-based economy, but in a demurrage system, pure self-interest would dictate that the forest be preserved. No longer would greed motivate the robbing of the future for the benefit of the present. As the exponential discounting of future cash flows implies the "cashing in" of the entire earth, as illustrated in Chapter Four, this feature of demurrage is highly attractive.

Whereas interest tends to concentrate wealth, demurrage promotes its distribution. In any economy with a specialization of labor beyond the family level, human beings need to perform exchanges in order to survive. Both interest and demurrage represent a fee for the use of money, but the key difference is that in the former system, the fee accrues to those who already have money, while in the latter system it is levied upon those who have money. Wealth comes with a high maintenance cost, thereby recreating the dynamics that governed hunter-gatherer attitudes toward accumulations of possessions.

Whereas security in an interest-based system comes from accumulating money, in a demurrage system it comes from having productive channels through which to direct it—that is, to become a nexus of the flow of wealth and not a point for its accumulation. In other words, it puts the focus on relationships, not on "having". Metaphorically, then, and perhaps more than metaphorically, the demurrage system accords with a different sense of self, affirmed not by defining more and more of the world within the confines of me and mine, but by developing and deepening relationships with others. In other words, it encourages reciprocation, sharing, and the rapid circulation of wealth. It is conceivable that wealth in a demurrage system would evolve into something akin to the model of the Pacific Northwest or Melanesia, in which a leader "acts as a shunting station for goods flowing reciprocally between his own and other like groups of society."[5] These "big man" societies were not fully egalitarian and bore some degree of centricity, as perhaps is necessary in any economy with more than a very basic division of labor; the key point is that leadership was not associated with the accumulation of money or possessions, but rather with a huge responsibility for generosity. Can you imagine a society where the greatest prestige, power, and leadership accorded to those with the greatest inclination and capacity for generosity?
 
LelandJ said:
Can you imagine a society where the greatest prestige, power, and leadership accorded to those with the greatest inclination and capacity for generosity?
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Yeah, that would be awful. We'd literally devolve.
 
LelandJ said:

Greek banks (all banks) are committing fraud (should be illegal by any base standard of ethics if it's not) when they're selling or buying "assets" known to be junk in reality, and known to be valued such in the future, backed by taxpayers. The euphemism has been "privatizing profits, socializing losses" a stupid way of saying fraud, then you have media brainwashing people like Journeyman that this was all an accident. "They're not smart enough to have stolen everything intentionally."

You'd have to be willfully ignorant after 2008 Wall Street scandal to think both structure of money/debt creation and derivatives shenanigans aren't based on pure theft. Of course your job requires you to not understand the problem, at least to avoid a troubled conscience, not that you should be responsible in any way regardless if your income is funded by it. The central banks own the whole world, there's nothing anyone can do about it. Doesn't matter what we or the Greeks vote, the banks will remain in power until extinction.
Click to expand...

No, you're wrong. You don't understand what a haircut is or what its purpose is. You can say whatever you want about the way this situation is being handled by both parties, but your statements about haircuts are simply factually inaccurate. This whole situation is complex enough as it is, let's not try to muddle it even more.
 
LelandJ said:
The "irremediable structural flaw" in our civilization that has inspired subtle omnipresent dread and doomsday myths for thousands of years, manifests in every human institution, from science to religion to business. None is independent of the others; none can change in isolation; yet when one changes, all will change.
Click to expand...

:areyoukiddingme: This is totes different than the doomsday myths you promote, right?

The "Left" is slowly becoming very conservative on everything but social issues. It's fascinating to watch.
 
Algernon Crisp said:
Krugman is an asshole who is wrong about everything. He just moves on.
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lol

These measures were hugely controversial at the time, and many people thought they would lead to catastrophe. The US economist Paul Krugman predicted at the end of 2008: “Latvia is the new Argentina.”

By the second half of 2010, however, the economy had started to grow again, and from 2011 to 2013 Latvia was among the fastest growing countries in the EU. Despite the fact that the currency was not devalued, exports are now at record highs, some 60% above where they were before the crisis.
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Poorer than Greece: the EU countries that reject a new Athens bailout | World news | The Guardian
 
If Syriza Blinks | Ian Welsh

If Syriza blinks
2015 July 9
tags: Greek Financial Crisis, Pre-War World
by Ian Welsh
So, the EU wants Greece to sign an even worse deal than the “no” referendum already rejected.

If Syriza accepts such a deal, Greece will stay in depression and likely it will get worse.

Let me be explicit, this sort of thing will not stand. If the moderate left wing (not center left, moderate left) won’t do the job, then someone else will.

That will mean either the hard right, or the hard left. People who can credibly say “when we say we will end austerity we mean we will do anything it takes. Anything.”

You have all been warned, repeatedly. French Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron said it, so it’s been said by a ‘real person’

“Let’s not re-enact the Treaty of Versailles.”

The hard right is salivating over what is being done to Greece. LePen in France, the hard right in Britain, and so on. They know that rage, anger and hate is building as people are smashed in the face over and over again by neo-liberal politics. They are thrilled by Cameron’s smash-mouth budget in England. They love the way the refugee crisis is being bungled.

They know how to use the fear, desperation and rage. And they will do it. People will become so fed-up with having lousy lives and no hope for the future that they will turn to anyone who looks hard-assed enough to fix it and to break with current power structures, who will get (and deserve) the blame.

This is not a game; this is not consequence free. We are fulfilling all the necessary conditions for an age of war, famine and revolt. Greece is only one domino, but be clear, it is both a crime and a mistake. No matter what happens, the consequences of all these stupid and cruel decisions will be harsh. They will be harsher if the hard right are the ones who make the break.

Europe has a chance here to negotiate with people who still believe in the European project and who are essentially moderates (Syriza is hardly left-wing at all in historical context, sorry).

There will come a day when they will meet people, from the Left or Right, who have no interest in negotiating. Given an electorate willing to follow me, I can tell you that even in 2010 I would have had only very brief negotiations with the EU if I ran Greece.

Today, people like me who are willing to break things to make a new world are in the minority.

Today is passing.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.
 
prince nez said:
I feel sorry for the Syrizans, what with the war, and Islamic State and everything.
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I feel sorry for the Ian Welsh dipshit Rambo keeps posting. It must be awful going through life as such a nut job.
 
I feel sorry for all you fucknuts. I'm waiting for SF thread hero noodles to post. I hear on good authority he's a SENIOR think tank salary man.
 
cjic3ogwuaafdqj.jpg
 
Rambo said:
No need. They're completely fucked. Did you read that NC piece?
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Yes, I actually quite agree with the end of it. Syriza is incompetent, which has been my point all along. Lest you think I'm a Kraut eating Germany cheerleader (I am quite fond of Germany though).

Also, new name for Germany; The Loanwaffe
 
Rambo said:
I've never disagreed with this. They sold the Greek people down the fucking river. This new plan is horrendous.
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Yeah but that's the whole point. They are going to suffer immensely for voting these idiots in to power and that dumbass no vote. Don't take this to mean I don't feel for the good people impacted by this, because I do. I think it's fucking tragic. But it's the single most identifying characteristic of ideologues of the left or right persuasion to think that cause and effect doesn't exist. The Greeks took money they had no capacity to pay back. Who gave them the money and why is completely irrelevant. They took it, full stop. The onus became theirs at that moment. Then they doubled down with bad voting. When you go back again for more money, you have to do whatever the people giving the money say, period. They could tell you to shoot the first born of every family if they want. It's upon to you to weigh whether it's worth it or not, and make no mistake, in the EU is 100% the correct choice. Grinding austerity is better than the humanitarian catastrophe that would follow an exit. The understatement of the impact in the press has been borderline criminal. There would literally been a lot of death as a result. There may be some death now from medicine shortage which every rational person saw coming from a mile away. They interviewed a diabetic pensioner who voted no and now can't get his insulin. He actually said he never thought that would happen. REALLY?!?!? It was the most likely outcome possible, anyone who didn't see it is retarded. Nobody got sold down the river, they shot themselves in the foot by electing amateurs to run their country. Putting Varoufakis in talks was idiotic. They literally got a worse deal because he has no people skills. If they put Tsakalotos in to start and they get a way better deal without question. It's fucking unconscionable what this government has done to it's own people. They gambled with their own citizens well being on the backs of their righteousness and ego. It's the correct outcome as sad as that may be and as hard as it is to watch.

“Why is he signing up now? Why didn’t he do this a few months ago? It would have saved the country a lot of problems,” said Chrysa Drimouli, a 31-year-old architect. “Someone has to take responsibility for these delays that destroyed the country.”
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No shit Sherlock.


ConchitaWurst said:
pffffg. thats a very lame joke. which hilarious emereken late night show host made that one :rofl:
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Pipe down Klaus, that shit is funny and you know it.
 
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