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General discussionThe Greek referendum(750 posts)(750 posts)
(750 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted July 08, 2015
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timppu: Argument from authority. Unfortunately they are not unclouded by ideology.
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Telika: Unlike you ?
I am mostly a pragmatic person who doesn't tolerate that much of double-faced empty talk and vague hand-waving, including "austerity baaaad!", "think of the children!", "patriarchy!" etc.

Unfortunately with Greece I have already lost confidence they really want to co-operate with others, and whether their leaders with empty promises can be trusted. I don't really have similar reservations for e.g. Spain, Ireland or Portugal, mainly on how they co-operated with their rescue operations. Well, unless those Poledomos or whatever come to power etc.

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Telika: I have a honest question. Do you personally believe the IMF is driven by ideology or not ?
From IMF's homepage:

About the IMF

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is an organization of 188 countries, working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world.
I guess that is ideological too. Yet, I don't see that as a proof that they are making decisions in the Greek crisis based on trying to get Tsipras out of the office. Isn't there a Greek representative in IMF as well? I think it should be the Greek finance minister, so does this mean Varoufakis was scheming against Tsipras all this time?

Not to mention that isn't the IMF membership voluntary anyway, and IMF will not intervene unless a country asks for their help? Why would Tsipras collaborate with someone who is trying to get him out of the office?

I'll tell you why: because that is just an inane conspiracy theory. There is no such hidden political agenda.
Post edited July 08, 2015 by timppu
Posted July 08, 2015
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Telika: Unlike you ?
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timppu: I am mostly a pragmatic person who doesn't tolerate that much of double-faced empty talk and vague hand-waving, including "austerity baaaad!", "think of the children!", "patriarchy!" etc.
I don't think you realise the extent to which you do. The way you hand-wave the human impact of austerity, the way you endorse the idea that "austerity gooood" (if doesn't work then needs MOOORE).

And to narrow and specify my question : do you believe that neoliberalism is an ideology or do you believe it is a rational form of organisation above ideologies ?

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timppu: Unfortunately with Greece I have already lost confidence they really want to co-operate with others, and whether their leaders with empty promises can be trusted. I don't really have similar reservations for e.g. Spain, Ireland or Portugal, mainly on how they co-operated with their rescue operations. Well, unless those Poledomos or whatever come to power etc.
The "co-operation" issue is subjective. You could also try questionning the IMF/EU's "co-operation" with Greece (although their "co-operation" with creditors isn't really questionnable here).



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timppu: From IMF's homepage:

About the IMF
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is an organization of 188 countries, working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world.
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timppu: I guess that is ideological too.
That's not what I meant. Everybody shares this "ideology" (basically everybody think that reducing poverty is good, peace is nice, employment is useful, etc). However, if you zoom in on the methods, the supported mechanisms, the beliefs, the values (and their rationalization, that is how these values get articulated to the general consensual goals above), do you think it is all technical and rational and neutral, or do you think it is driven by neoliberalism as an ideology.

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timppu: Yet, I don't see that as a proof that they are making decisions in the Greek crisis based on trying to get Tsipras out of the office. (...) I'll tell you why: because that is just an inane conspiracy theory. There is no such political hidden agenda.
So you see proof of the opposite. Quite a strong choice of stance.

You also dismiss quite a few elements, such as the parallel meetings with Samaras and with Theodorakis (the leader of a 6% party) in Bruxelles during the negociations with Syriza, such as the cynical presentations of "bank runs" as tools to crash the Syriza government, such as the unnanounced switching of EU propositions when one was about to get agreed on, etc. You also weirdly deny how much it is in the interest of the Eurogroup and the IMF to have an obedioent neoliberal government in Greece instead of hardcore anti-austerity leftists. That's quite a few elements that you seem eager to dismiss, in order to affirm that there is no european attempt to replace the greek government with a more convenient one.

You overestimate your objectivity.
Posted July 08, 2015
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Trilarion: To apply this to Greece you would have to assume that the banks bribed the Greek government into spending too much for the last 20 years.
Why not?
2004-2009. Kostas Karamanlis. Education: Tufts University (Boston) USA
2009-2011. George Papandreou. Education: Harvard University, USA
2011-2012. Lucas Papademos. Education: MIT, USA
2012-2015. Antonis Samaras. Education: Harvard University, USA

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Trilarion: As far as I know the money went to thousands of government officials, to pensioneers, to almost everyone. Also not many Greeks demonstrated against this policy before 2010. Does it mean they were okay with the deficit spending economy? Or were they all bribed by the banks?
And they still live in poverty, because they have no export but forced to pay EU level wages, welfare, purchase good from EU with EU price etc.
Probably, deals like purchasing used weapon from US have something with it too?
http://www.russiadefence.net/t3227-russia-greece-military-cooperation
Post edited July 08, 2015 by Gremlion
Posted July 08, 2015
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Trilarion: To apply this to Greece you would have to assume that the banks bribed the Greek government into spending too much for the last 20 years.
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Gremlion: Why not?
2004-2009. Kostas Karamanlis. Education: Tufts University (Boston) USA
2009-2011. George Papandreou. Education: Harvard University, USA
2011-2012. Lucas Papademos. Education: MIT, USA
2012-2015. Antonis Samaras. Education: Harvard University, USA
Nice reversal of evidence... bank positions are political jobs in Greece, meaning the winning party put it's own family and/or party people there. Notice how new positions match and end with election dates... only Syriza (as far as I know..) didn't yet indulge in this corrupted cesspool.

Also google who that Kostas Karamanlis is and was... ... why would he bribe himself? :)
Posted July 08, 2015
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Gremlion: Why not?
2004-2009. Kostas Karamanlis. Education: Tufts University (Boston) USA
2009-2011. George Papandreou. Education: Harvard University, USA
2011-2012. Lucas Papademos. Education: MIT, USA
2012-2015. Antonis Samaras. Education: Harvard University, USA
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eRe4s3r: Nice reversal of evidence... bank positions are political jobs in Greece, meaning the winning party put it's own family and/or party people there. Notice how new positions match and end with election dates... only Syriza (as far as I know..) didn't yet indulge in this corrupted cesspool.

Also google who that Kostas Karamanlis is and was... ... why would he bribe himself? :)
I'd also add that there would be no need to "bribe" a government into spending too much. The young ever-in-construction greek democracy was very much dependant on foreign expertise (actually that was the case long before democracy, since the very birth of that State back in the 1830s). A few "experts" with cool credentials (a Goldman-Sachs calling card, for instance) would have had no trouble convincing greek decision-makers of the "rational" way to use the systems at disposal. Add to this the strong populism of greece's very polarized bipartism, and the nice 'joker card' that cheap loans offered, you hardly needed a nudge to get the ball rolling in the desired direction...
Post edited July 08, 2015 by Telika
Posted July 08, 2015
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eRe4s3r: Nice reversal of evidence... bank positions are political jobs in Greece, meaning the winning party put it's own family and/or party people there.
Um, I didn't try to reverse anything.
It is absolutely possible that during their education in US banks took promising people on pencil, helped with winning elections later and got huge profit.
Pay $million to leader, get $billion contract. It's not like leaders paid their own money.
Posted July 08, 2015
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monkeydelarge: So what you are saying is, a Norwegian who hates Swedes is no different from a racist? But what if he hates Swedes because he hates their culture? Then he still being no different than a racist, right? And so you think, the right thing to do is to call him, a racist?
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Telika: Yes. Culturalism is functionally equivalent to (racialist) racism. Culturalists and racists hate the same thing : the supposedly determined behaviour and abilities of a human group considered as homogeneous. The difference is only on how they "explain" it, but they "explain" the very same thing.

Some day, culturalism will be a dirty word in the same way as racism. People will realise it evokes the same attitudes. That day, the "i am not a racist because no races" line of defense will be moot.

But the same essentialist and discriminatory attitudes will happen towards categories that are neither cultures nor races, and we'll still have to juggle with these terms in order to designate them (if we don't want to use sentence-long terms that require paragraph-long explanation each time).
There's also ethnic prejudice which falls along the same lines. I remember complaining in class that refusing to use the word racism for such cases is effectively letting them off the hook for their prejudice. Nobody else seemed to think that there's a problem with it.

When you consider the fact that race is a purely social construct, it makes little sense to distinguish between racial, cultural and ethnic prejudices to the extent that we do.
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eRe4s3r: Nice reversal of evidence... bank positions are political jobs in Greece, meaning the winning party put it's own family and/or party people there.
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Gremlion: Um, I didn't try to reverse anything.
It is absolutely possible that during their education in US banks took promising people on pencil, helped with winning elections later and got huge profit.
Pay $million to leader, get $billion contract. It's not like leaders paid their own money.
I can't speak for other countries. But, usually in the US they'll help both candidates out. Not necessarily equally, but it's hardly unusual for a company to be giving money to both sides. Usually they give more to Democrats because Democrats are typically less amenable to corporate interests, but it's hardly unusual for more than one candidate in a race to get money from the same groups.

I don't blame them for doing it, it makes political sense, the candidates notice money coming into their campaign and don't usually pay attention to where the money funding their opponents comes from.
Post edited July 08, 2015 by hedwards
Posted July 08, 2015
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Trilarion: ...He saved General Motors against political resistance and together with all the suppliers saved at least 100,000 of jobs in the industry.
He put legislation on the way to limit the financial risks coming from the banking sector.
He gave health care against political resistance (death panels) to at least 16 (sixteen) millions (millions) of US citizens which didn't have it before therefore really earning the name Obamacare as a name of honour.
Obamacare seems to be more efficient than private health care because costs have risen very moderately only since the introduction.
...
He put saving the environment on the agenda which no other US president did before (this will probably be even more important in the future).
...
i'm no amurikan scholar but all he did financially was delay a fundamental problem and half-ass a temporary fix. disappointed.

as for Romneycare... it's Romneycare. just that the republicans were too busy beating on the big bad black guy to take credit for it.

saving the environment ? ack. Richard Nixon. despite the stereotype of being "dirty dick", in practise he's more of a moderate and a "liberal" than any modern politician INCLUDING OBAMA. i wished he was still alive to save us from ourselves.

and if you go back further, there's good ol' teddy.
http://www.nps.gov/thro/index.htm

who the hell did you think created those national parks? god? aliens time-travelled from the future?
Post edited July 08, 2015 by dick1982
Posted July 08, 2015
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Telika: ... I have a honest question. Do you personally believe the IMF is driven by ideology or not ?
I was not the one who was asked but I find this question so interesting that I will answer it too.

I actually want to believe that the IMF is driven by science, by economic science to be more precise. I hope they have models how economy works and they can accurately predict what will be the outcome of each measure (unfortunately their accuracy is not so high).

Then I hope their goal is to get a country in need up and running again with the minimal effort (minimal amount of money possible but maximal chances for success) and they distribute the costs on all involved equally (but this really depends on a lot of things).

In the end they just know empirically and from best practise approaches, what works and what not, and as unideologically as possible negotiate a viable path for the future. If there are different possible ways they should let the debtor decide which to follow. If there is only one way... there is only one way.

So far so good.

The only difficult question is who pays what? Who will have to take a loss and how much? This is of course a deeply political issue. It probably will be difficult to have general rules.

So, if only the IMF would have better models (which are regularly revised and adapted) and if they would stick to them and if they would offer options and let the debtor decide if there are several ways - than I would say that they have found quite an unideological way to help nations in need. Then they are not more than an insurance company.

Would you say that insurances are driven by ideology instead of by money?

Being an insurance company with charity aspects is probably the ideal. How close the current IMF comes... (well close than the EU for sure). The economic research department of the IMF at least is a great institution and has gained worldwide fame.
Post edited July 08, 2015 by Trilarion
Posted July 08, 2015
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Trilarion: The economic research department of the IMF at least is a great institution and has gained worldwide fame.
From the long list of countries which took IMF credits, only South Korea isn't in half-assed state.
Russia got small chunk and got default in 1998.
Posted July 08, 2015
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dick1982: ...as for Romneycare... it's Romneycare. just that the republicans were too busy beating on the big bad black guy to take credit for it. ...
Sorry but this seems to be a joke. If you remember how strongly opposed the GOP was against Obamacare (death panels I say) you would immediately agree that they lost all possible credit for it. Obamacare is the rightfully earned name this deed should be remembered by from now to the end of time.
Posted July 08, 2015
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eRe4s3r: Nice reversal of evidence... bank positions are political jobs in Greece, meaning the winning party put it's own family and/or party people there.
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Gremlion: Um, I didn't try to reverse anything.
It is absolutely possible that during their education in US banks took promising people on pencil, helped with winning elections later and got huge profit.
Pay $million to leader, get $billion contract. It's not like leaders paid their own money.
Possible are many things. But I meant one can reverse the meaning of your evidence list when one knows more information about how these positions are chosen ;) I won't even deny that this US centric education and BANKER education may be part of the problem. In fact it is quite possible this is not just a problem with these positions, but goes to the top of these 3 corrupt families that ruled Greece for a long time.

And you have to know something else, political finance decision making works (in worst case) this way -> make tax that brings in 1 million -> take on debt that brings 100 million, but has repayment rate of 1 million (or less) to do a project that costs 100 million. That is how governments nowadays leverage tiny tax increases into high expenditures to do whatever it is they want to do. Nobody ever even plans on repaying that debt anytime soon. Political decisions are made "Can we finance the interest of that total project cost" not "can we pay for the entire cost of this project upfront"es.

This obviously leads to a problem when that interest rate skyrockets and thus you can't get that much new tax income to actually back finance a new projects through debt. And the moment you have to raise new taxes just to meet interest payments this system collapses, as nobody will want to give you new money (aka, more debt). Everyone is just worried that you can repay their interests.
And Greece has not just this problem, but it also an completely broken tax collecting system. And these 2 things do not go well together when you follow a spending system like the one I mentioned. It's possible these people learned how this system worked in the US and thought it would work for Greece too?

My point is, where you see conspiracy, is see a systemic failure of a system that is in place because the people in power didn't know and or didn't learn any other way to do this. Where you see potential malice, I see stupidity.

In a system like the one I described above, you don't ever need to bribe a gov to spend money and make debt. All you need are people in positions that propagate that system and don't ever doubt how it works. And as long as you grow (as country) and have slightly increasing tax income every year, this works beautifully... until it stops working ;)

I don't know Greece finances in the decades before 100%, so obviously I could be wrong ;) But if Greece DID operate on that system, then a bailout will not ever rescue it. Not even a debt cut. As nobody would lend Greece money after a cut and so a country would have to completely operate on tax income alone.
Post edited July 08, 2015 by eRe4s3r
Posted July 08, 2015
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eRe4s3r: And you have to know something else, political finance decision making works (in worst case) this way -> make tax that brings in 1 million -> take on debt that brings 100 million, but has repayment rate of 1 million (or less) to do a project that costs 100 million. That is how governments nowadays leverage tiny tax increases into high expenditures to do whatever it is they want to do. Nobody ever even plans on repaying that debt anytime soon. Political decisions are made "Can we finance the interest of that total project cost" not "can we pay for the entire cost of this project upfront"es.
I know it, it's not a rocket science. I'm working at the level of 3 handshakes away from Putin. My boss gets tasks from people in Moscow who in their turn can get direct orders from him.
Greece's problem is that decisions on big structural projects aren't taken in Greece itself. Eurocomission can ban deals as "treating for Eurounion" and you can hang yourself. Like Bulgaria was denied from South stream.

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eRe4s3r: And Greece has not just this problem, but it also an completely broken tax collecting system. And these 2 things do not go well together when you follow a spending system like the one I mentioned. It's possible these people learned how this system worked in the US and thought it would work for Greece too?
Not familiar with it, but, I suppose, with borderless Europe getting taxes is a bit problematic for every country.
There should work culture and education (Like US implants these ideas since childhood - personages from cartoons would stop everything to do taxes. Even silly Homer Simpson does it).
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eRe4s3r: I don't know Greece finances in the decades before 100%, so obviously I could be wrong ;) But if Greece DID operate on that system, then a bailout will not ever rescue it. Not even a debt cut. As nobody would lend Greece money after a cut and so a country would have to completely operate on tax income alone.
Greeks were paid to destroy their olive gardens. 200 euro per tree, as I heard. When they refused - big fire conveniently destroyed them. Greece had naval yards for supertankers. Now closed.
Post edited July 08, 2015 by Gremlion
Posted July 08, 2015
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Gremlion: I know it, it's not a rocket science. I'm working at the level of 3 handshakes away from Putin. My boss gets tasks from people in Moscow who in their turn can get direct orders from him.
Greece's problem is that decisions on big structural projects aren't taken in Greece itself. Eurocomission can ban deals as "treating for Eurounion" and you can hang yourself. Like Bulgaria was denied from South stream.
Well, it is called a Union and sadly the US, and with it Nato has more influence in it than it should have.... geopolitics will always beat national interests in this regard.

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Gremlion: Greeks were paid to destroy their olive gardens. 200 euro per tree, as I heard. When they refused - big fire conveniently destroyed them. Greece had naval yards for supertankers. Now closed.
The situation with big trading fleet naval yards is bad in every EU country, nothing can beat China in that regard or heavily subsidized production. Can find no source for that money per tree thing. So either rumor or the program was intended to give incentives for crop rotations. Part of the problems of Greece are that it is extremely fertile country that can't even feed itself because everywhere you look.. olive trees. And Olives are profitable export business where you want scarcity to push price up...

If I were a cynic, I'd say that burning olive trees are more profitable than a harvest of too many olives killing price :)

Anyway.. I hope Greece will not collapse or fall back to military dictatorship.... we can talk about this up high and mighty looking at numbers and what not.. but Greece people are suffering over things done to them by corrupt families in the decades past. They need to be offered something that gives them hope and a vision for the future while avoiding the cursed word "debt cut" (because that would cause massive upheaval among poorer EU member states. But I fear this is not something the EU technocrats will offer. A Greek drama.. proper
Posted July 08, 2015
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OldFatGuy: Congratulations to the people of Greece for making the right choice.
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timppu: If anyone actually had any idea what exactly they said no to. :)

There was a funny article a couple of days ago how many Greeks seemed to believe this referendum was about whether Greece needs to pay its debts or not. As in, "no" means the same as "all Greece's debts are instantly forgiven" while "yes" is "you have to pay all your debts, and fast". (This according to one local, her view on it based on discussions with common people).

If it really was that easy to get rid of debts... Ask Argentina.
They knew, and understood, what is going on. They've been acutely aware of what's going on for quite some time now. And good on them. I wish the sheeple in my country would wake the fuck up.
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionThe Greek referendum(750 posts)(750 posts)
(750 posts)