I'm not sure if that is accurate but I love it. I wish whoever created that work of art, creates more of such art. I love her art style and that she tries to make the whole situation into a humorous one. The USA also looks like a huge dickhead, butting in like that to tell people to stop yelling. I'm sure that part is accurate because the USA sees the world as it's backyard.

You're not even trying now... here's the original 4 points summarised again:

Stimulus is dependent on nonexistent savings. Greek leadership is incompetent and cowardly. The power is in EU and Germany side. I see this as bad and beginning increased global problems.

Count them. Hidden in plain sight...

So, you kept trying to push this interpretation that I was defending apathy, to now drop the pretense that what I meant even mattered. Nice. I'm smugly glad and twisting my villainous moustache while cackling gleefully.

You're stretching it just a tad, it's not the inevitability of contagion, it's the risk of it motivating Germany.

Unfortunately I think the EU is done for. Morals do count for certain kind of politics, and the democratic idealism that helped EU expansion eastwards is likely fully spent. There is no credibility left to go for deeper integration, each country will be extremely suspicious of what the power attribution to federal instituations would be.

In a way this is parallel to what is happening in the financial system. Growth and expansion were seen as good in themselves, because of the "animal spirits" that were conditioned to ignore systemic risks. Hubris, plain and simple, born of victory in WW2 and fueled by victory in the Cold War. It's always human arrogance that does it. Most folks don't even see, let alone value, the moral aspects of our globalized capitalist system that contributed to the prosperity windfall of the late 20th century. Instead many think it was mainly political leadership that did it. Hence the mistake of giving even more power to politicians over the economy, and fully entrenching crony capitalism, ergo plain old fascism. In defeating it, we sowed the seeds to become it. Tragic.

Now I think there's basically two paths forward. Big Brother where the EU manages to grab more power against the member states' will, or slow fragmentation likely with increasing external interference (US and Russia of course). Both have pros and cons.

Ah, you're from Iceland. Icelandic banks almost ruined the country in 2009. That explains why you think that banks are especially dangerous.

Well I still believe that also normal people cheating can ruin a country if it's done by many over a long time.

I would still bet money that the Greek parliament will say Yes today because after all it means tons of new money. And if it is a No then there will be euro exit which would actually be not such a bad thing (actually be better).

Right from the beginning the Greek government should have negotiated either a higher stimulus or an as graceful as possible euro exit. These should have been the alternatives. Although they didn't do it like this and negotiated rather badly, they still have kind of a choice today.

Given that even Mr. Tsipras say that he is against it (but sees no other choice) one could say that the hopes of a success of the reforms are rather small then given the unwilling administration. Euro exit would be by far the better choice then.

Actually, both US and Russia want united Europe.
For US it is easier to control one Brussels than twenty countries. What US doesn't want - euro, because it can substitute dollar as world currency and stability - because only US shoul be invested into.
For Russia it is easier to do big infrastructural projects with Europe because of unified laws and standards.

In theory. But those are secondary aspects imo. In practice a united Europe antagonistic to the US is the only large enough economic power than may eventually rival it (don't joke about China please), and in practice Russia has clearly been playing divide and conquer over Security and Energy in particular.

So US is conflicted about Europe, and Russia might hide it well but is interested in fragmentation (notice, this isn't bad per se - there's pros and cons). Of course I'm not talking about populace here, nor even economic elites. I mean geopolitical power centers in each country - in Russia this is Putin and intelligence apparatus, in the US it's less centralized, but obviously State Dept. and the political trend of the Obama admin has been to disengage globally - certainly most focus has been on Middle East or in Asia, not really in Europe at all. Ukraine and Grexit have likely just ennerved our cousins across the pond, with such outbursts as "Fuck the EU!" being interesting anecdotes.

Btw. England's PM made it clear this week that they will not pay a single cent/penny for Greece not even as much as a single billion ("the euro zone must foot its own bill"). The EU sceptic taxpayer is safe.

But where is the British solidarity with Greece in all of this? And the left knows, just knows, that paying Berlin must be the enemy. ;)

I foresee a very interesting year 2017 with a really tantalizing EU referendum in GB and many discussions.

Well Merkel and Tsipras already agreed on Grexit on monday 6.00 am but were detained by Donald Tusk (Eu council president) until they agreed to the loan conditions and Greeces acceptance of the loan. The newspapers downplayed what happened then but eu definitely pressured the outcome by detaining them in the council hall. Its not so much about Germany forcing Greece then the eu burocrats fear of EU falling apart if Greece leaves the eurozone.

Sorry but do you even REALISE the magnitude and the dangerosity of that lie ?

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2813%2960102-6/abstract

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government-debt_crisis_countermeasures#Austerity_packages_and_reforms

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/02/26/the-reason-austerity-in-greece-didnt-work/

http://41.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3ptidKCwV1qm81zso1_1280.jpg

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/feb598a8-f8e8-11e0-a5f7-00144feab49a.html

https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/rbi-blogs/wp-content/uploads/mt/icisweb/blogs/chemicals-and-the-economy/2011/10/18/EU%20austerity%20Oct11.png

How long will we have to hear that bullshit ?

_____

Also, keeping a decent, responsible, level of austerity in Greece would not be destroying the rest of Europe, neither politically nor economically. It wouldn't be inflicting to Europe wht is being inflicted in Greece. But of course, a risk of discomfort "at home" is always more feaky than utter devastation abroad. So yeah, end of the world averted yay.

I fully agree that saying they did nothing is clearly wrong. They clearly cut expenses and raised taxes a lot although given the magnitude of the problem, should have done even more and of course getting compensated by stimulus. I mean, that with aftersight you could argue that everything that is being done now additionally (cuts in the military sector for example) could have been done already five years ago, provided that it is actually a good thing.

So maybe the demanded cuts never went far enough and at the same time the offered stimulus never went far, far enough for sure.

The privatization for example was already agreed upon long time ago and almost nothing happened or the opening of job sectors and increasing the base and efficiency of tax collection was critisized as far as I remember. As far as I know the Greek land register is still not fully operational. So, for sure they could have done more, especially in areas that do not cost money but rather increase the efficiency of the country.

It should be possible to list exactly the things that were demanded in the previous rescue packages and how much of them was fullfilled or was not fullfilled. I would like to see a proper evaluation from an independent source.

And what I would have done is demanding much more cuts from the Greeks already in 2010 (for example in the military sector) but also offering much, much, more stimulus. That way I would have won twice, once with the right balance and second with a better timing. But it doesn't matter much now.

So much for the sins of Greece and now for the record: While I support the reforms and cuts and privatizations in Greece I really don't know why the EU is not providing sufficient big stimulus as a side measure. It's a sign of missing economic reasoning but I think that rather cannot be, so it must be a very unfortunate political influence. The rescue of Greece as it is will fail and will cause an even larger distortion in the next years. Nothing more I can do against it (I already didn't vote for Merkel) and I expressed my disagreement publicly.

Well, in Iceland financial institutions (not just banks) certainly ruined the economy, and also in the USA, UK, Germany (yeah they helped Greece implode, hurt Spain considerably) etc.

People seem to like to think they can affect the economy, but they can't.

Not in small groups or large. They simply don't have the capacity to take money out of an economy, through debts or contracts, which is what you need to break an economy.

Let's say all people in Greece are corrupt, for argument's sake, it's still not the people of Greece that caused the current situation - it's a combined pan-European and anglo-banking effort, with an aspirational EU allowing a week Greek economy into the Euro which has caused this.

Greek corruption in general is purely incidental and quite irrelevant to the situation, if there is any more there than the cesspool that is the rest of the western world. Germany for instance is just as corrupt as Greece. Germany has a culture of corruption just as ugly as Greece. Or Iceland.

So, you are probably a stand up person, and a very honest and non-corrupted, but your society is not. It is fostered on a culture of corruption and abuse of human labor, debts and greed. Just as Greece is and Iceland and pretty much the entire western world.

That's why we all had a fucking financial crash that was only saved by fiat.

They went farther than any other country, and to Greece's breaking point. There is a ceiling to be considered there, instead of urging for even more. If hitting one's head against the wall didn't work well enough, maybe it's not because the head should strike faster and harder.

And yes, where the cuts are being made is also an issue in itself, and both "corruption" and neoliberalism (actually often the same thing : "aggravated corruption" is mostly "informal privatization", and privatization is the formalization of private interests hijacking a public service to make it a source of personal benefit) have ensured that the austerity was limited as much as possible to the most vulnerable people (the ones who need social support, and the ones who don't "produce" enough : the arendtian "superfluous" that I was mentioning earlier). The industry/media/politics collusion in Greece was ensuring the safety of political allies, in a way that is not much different from what happens in other countries - where political support leads to tax cuts in return, with a nice "it's for your own good" rationalization served to the rest of the population. That's just one of the factors that channeled "austerity" the most unfairly way possible.

But there again, on the issue of how austerity is applied, technocrats (their nose glued to their calculators) and european demagogy-fueled voters fail to recognize why changes aren't straightforward to implement. Populism works on pseudo-self-explanatory keywords and short stories. "Corruption" seems an obvious notion, and no one cares to actually check what it designates and why : it "just has to be fought" (oh yeah?). "Establishing a land register" is just an obvious administrative task, that "just has to be done", for people who never, ever, ever paid any attention to the already well documented difficultiies of shifting from customary law to centralized (and individualized) bureaucratic administration - as it was tediously enforced in so many areas, from Africa to Polynesia. Nope, it's "just do it, how hard can it be, just draw a map and write down ownerships, is it done yet ?". Greece "simply has to" cut military expenses - it "simply" has to overlook local geopolitics and the popular representations of geopolitics ? Greek/Turkish paranoïa still prevents any consensus on the ownerships of little rocks in the Egean, and people still die for their sake, while all these years greek medias keep reporting "provocations" of turkish fighters flying through greek airspace - and the left lives in the memory of disgruntled military's coups. Go explain cuts in military expenses, in that context. Especially after the EU having encouraged (and imposed) these expenses for their own benefit, but again, that's another story...

The thing is, these issues are cultural issues (and not even moral ones, because they are not grounded in moral flaws or evil values, they are neutral differences that make adjustments to a different system very complicated). And this is not something that get displayed on the technocrats' calculators and their bank account charts (nor does the ground level misery induced by the austerity dogma, but that's even another problem). This is something too complex for trash journalists to report on, and trash journalism is what drives popular supports nowadays (it's basically Merkel's fuel). So : impose numbers, run around like headless chickens when social realities didn't simply adjust to these numbers within the expected timeframe.

Again, that's the explosive flaw of the EU : it's a financial homogeneity program, driven by bankers (i mean not only people who work in banks, but people whose only cognitive horizon is "banking"), with not one look for cultural diversities and how they shape different worldviews and priorities. In that sense, it is a straightforward colonial project : you impose your own universalist "perfect system" (perfect in your own views, which implies to overlook your local issues) onto another culture, expecting this culture to adapt to it naturally or with the help of a bit of violence. It's technically blindness, as in : being deprived of the senses required to understand what is going on globally, and why the same recipe isn't simply applicable everywhere with some amount of shoehorning. But this has not the excuse of early colonialism, that is, blissful ignorance. We now have to tools and the methodologies required to assess these difficulties (we've "been there, done that" in other countries, not often sucessfully but the point is we have the experience of what does not work as expected and why). It is a whole corpus of knowledge that gets autistically ignored, both by decision makers and by their supporting voters. And the result is cataclysmically absurd.

There is one french expression for that. "Yaka". The phonetic contraction of "il n'y a qu'à" ("we only have to"). It's the naive, ignorant belief that complex issues can be solved by applying one obvious recipe. It's what is happening here with the financial reductivism of complex sociocultural questions. And this leads to bewilderment when it fails, or doesn't succeed fast enough. And this bewilderment translates into political wrath and violence, along with the reductionist propaganda justifying it. And the circle gets closed when this bewildered wrath just intensifies the policies that are failing. But rethinking the problem is out of the question, because it would mean framing it in complex terms that won't make cool-sounding political discourses or badass news titles.

And it would be an admission that there is no "short way" through complex issues. A heresy, in a world where speed and (catastrophically superficial short-term) "efficiency" are cardinal values.

With what resources Europe can antagonise US?
From Africa? US created ISIS.
From Southern America? US have biggest fleet and would be able to block shipment.
From Russia? Created by US image of crazy evil warmongers.

Biggest US fear - union between Germany and Russia.
EU as a whole are shackles on Germany. Small puppet countries together outweigh German vote in eurocomission and leech money from it.
What Russia wants - to pull off Europe from US control for mutual benefits.
Like that deal with Mistrals - realistically, what these two barges, built for fighting pirates near Somali, can change?
But "strong independent french leader Holland" blocks deal. These actions damaged image of France as truthful partner for weapon export, IIRC, India got huge discount on Rafals after this. Who is numero uno weapon exporter, which profits from damaged reputation of his competitors?

I think these things should be talked about on case by case basis. Do you want to hear "propaganda" about something in particular?

Something is brewing. There are people who want to see that "NO" manifested, who want to ensure and secure that the people's choice WILL have power and effect. People who dare to tear apart insulting documents and scatter them to the wind, instead of giving as* and signing them.

I have hope.

First sign of people coming to their senses, had been the blacklisting of both Pasok and ND. Second sign of people getting their sh*t together, was that 60% "NO"! Now only a final, third sign remains, to actually verify that people have woken up and know what exactly is happening around them; which is to support those who REALLY value whatever it is they voted for, in the first place. One tiny little step. Failing now to take that step forward will be fatal.