the Greek bailout offer passed 250 Yes, 32 No. But from 162 govt MPs, 8 abstentions, 7 absent, 2 no.
I’ve said my piece on this. To be crude, Tsipras and his party have been: stupid through all this, not understanding what they were up against; cowards, in not standing up, and; fools, in not making any contingency plans.
This is emotive, judgmental language, but this is a big mistake, with wide reaching consequences.
There are still some possibilities of this turning out well (unlikely for Greece), but for Spain, Italy, and so on, if their left-wingers learn the correct lessons from this and figure out how to gird their loins. There will be no meaningful negotiation. If they get into power, they must be prepared to take unilateral action.
If the left continues to blink, the people who don’t blink will be the far right.
We are in a pre-war, pre-revolutionary world, and we are coming up on a century which will see far more death and suffering than did the 20th century. Far, far more. Continued gutlessness by those who would claim to be trying to stop such things is making the baselines scenario worse and worse and worse.
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Blissex
Also as to the proposal to the “institutions” the situation is much worse than the vote shows. If the proposal had been made before June 30th it would have been accepted as an extension of the existing bailout treaty, as the EU governments and the ECB and the IMF were empowered by the treaty to accept an extension without further formality.
But on June 30th the existing bailout treaty expired irrevocably, and now the greek proposal has to be ratified in a new treaty by the other 17 *parliaments* of the eurozone, not just their governments.
This could take a long time, and it could fail, because the majority of public opinion in the EU is far less favourable to Greece than that of their governments. There were already considerable problems getting the previous treaty approved.
Stirling Newberry
“We in a prewar ,not postwar, age”
I believe I have said this.
V. Arnold
I finally gave up trying to understand this fucked up situation. Varoufakis may well have bailed because he saw where Tsipras was going, I don’t know.
But, here is an interview with Michael Hudson; if he’s right (and I think he may well be) there is a very dirty game going on;
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=14213
This is well worth a watch…
markfromireland
Ian,
The lesson won’t be learnt by the left, you know that, it’ll be learnt by the extreme right. You said it yourself up above. I don’t think the left are capable of learning. I wish I did but I don’t.
mfi
mike
https://storify.com/billmon1/the-shadow-of-brest-litovsk
Ian Welsh
I’m not sure /this/ left is capable of learning.
But, we’ll see. Say what one will about the Greek communist party, they called this right down the line. And first-half century unionists were as tough as they come.
Still, I tend to think that if the Left in Spain blows it, next up will be the right in some other countries.
ghg
Dear Mandos:
Ppblpplptttpt.
Blissex
«I finally gave up trying to understand this fucked up situation»
A comment stuck in moderation because of many links to statistics explains a bit of the “fucked up” and that both the eurozone governments and especially the greek government are not being clear. Here is the version without links…
The dramatic language is out of all proportion to the numbers related to this story. Greece is not suffering austerity, is not having a depression:
* Active population:
2001: 4.6m
2008: 4.9m
2014: 4.7m
* Activity rate:
2001: 77% for males, 50% for females,
2008: 78% for males, 55% for females
2014: 76% for males, 59% for females.
What has happened is that between 2001 and 2011 Greece’s GDP rose and then fell 20% simply because greek net imports paid for with debt rose to 20% and then fell when the money run out:
* Net imports:
2001: $9 billions
2008: $51 billion
2012: $33 billion
* Private final consumption:
2001: €102b
2008: €164b
2014: €128b
This is summarized in these two graphs:
research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1prt
research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/BPBLTT01GRA637S
The result has been that also GDP per person at PPP as a percent of EU average has risen and fallen back:
2001 78.2%
2008 89.7%
2014 82.9%
In 2014 it went back to levels equal to or higher than in 2001, when Greece was considered a rich, developer country as it was joining the eurozone. No austerity there. Except for people who receive their welfare from the greek government, as the greeks cleverly loaded all their debts onto their government to engineer what in the commercial world would be called a fraudulent bankruptcy.
The whole discussion between the “institutions” and Greece seems to me to be theater, because in practice the “institutions” have been subsidizing the greek government with very significant handouts, probably worth a few dozen € billions per year, to the point that despite being bankrupt with enormous debts the interest rate payments of the greek government are half what they were before bankruptcy.
Since the great rise and fall in greek GDP was due mostly or entirely to borrowing to finance a surge in imports of 560% to a level of 20% of baseline GDP, the only way that Greece can go back to the GDP levels of 2008 is for someone to send them “free” imports equal in value to 20% of their current GDP.
Any volunteers?
Mandos
Well, I honestly don’t know what the raspberry *or* the cute Charlie Brown gif is for — *I* certainly don’t think the football has been taken away or even that it’s a good metaphor for anything. Amid all the wailing and gnashing of teeth here, all I see is the usual tendency (and I’ve been familiar with this commentariat and political perspective for approaching a decade now) for reaching deeply down the gullet of small victories, yanking hard, and gleefully pulling out big defeats! Then: Jeremiad Party Time, woo. But Billmon is right.
You were all chomping at the bit for Syriza to be the one to pull the plug and use the Greek situation as a catalyst to — finally — push History forward, and the frustrated disappointment is palpable. That, I suppose, is the Lucy football moment here. *I* certainly never expected the Grexit. And I certainly never bought into the frankly hokey and wishful-thinking discussions of how exactly Syriza could have planned a less-than-totally-catastrophic Grexit under these conditions by calculating alliances with an unready and unpredictable mix of outcasts from the American order.
There never was a football to take away. Yanis Varoufakis — bless him, the most honest broker in this whole game, I don’t begrudge him his “Gone Fishing, Can’t Vote” a Greek iota — tried to tell you this repeatedly. No time for games, and all that. No game theory. No possibility of wielding the Grexit card for real. I too allowed myself occasionally to fantasize about Greece saying “Screw it!” and going it alone, but I knew that I had no right to demand it of the Greek people and I also knew that that wasn’t the meaning or purpose of the OXI — something I also tried to tell you.
And now Yanis is telling you that if a Grexit happens, it will be because of a (undoubtedly no less hokey and contrived) theory by the creditors that what follows from a Grexit will produce a well-constructed ordoliberal/Schäublist Europe. And that is as it should be — because the very possibility of them visibly holding bag is the only thing that has driven a wedge amount the creditors. I was not surprised by this.
But the root of my disagreement with you is more or less the same as the disagreement during the Obamacare warz, etc, based on the same approach:
Neoliberalism is the Hotel California of ideologies. I would like to quote Bob McManus in another thread:
I can’t say it better than this. Soviet communism will have a far lighter future footprint than neoliberalism. Whatever hegemonic ideology succeeds this one, even in opposition to neoliberalism, will be indelibly afflicted with/affected by neoliberalism’s intellectual structure.
2. Forget yer BATMEN or BATNAs or whatever you want to call them. One of the genius aspects of today’s neoliberal order is that it makes it particularly difficult to walk away from the table, because it is particularly effective at smashing your BANTAMs to a pulp once you’ve flown them. There is no more likelihood that Golden Dawn won’t triumph after a Grexit than without a Grexit, because there is no more likelihood that Greece would be allowed to recover after Grexit. A larger country might have been able to get away with it, but a larger country has correspondingly less hypothetical reason or temptation to do so. Clever, eh? I don’t doubt that YV knew this.
What progressive movements working for a post-neoliberal world (which, as I said, will not completely escape neoliberalism’s intellectual legacy) need to do is to learn how to operate without these kinds of awesome-in-theory strategic curlicues, ie, to play BATNA-less jiu-jitsu, so to speak.
Now there is a reason why I keep putting up German-language links beyond merely showing off my polyglottery: the ideological agenda in Europe is being set by a certain brand of German conservatives, and how they see the world is the yardstick by which winners and losers are classified, like it or not. So have an opinion article in yesterday’s Die Welt entitled “Tsipras must not be allowed to get away with it.” In this article, it is explicitly stated that what might have been an acceptable proposal before the referendum should not be accepted now. And there’s a raft of such articles in the conservative German press stating explicitly that to allow Tsipras to “own” even something like the June proposals is to visibly reward him and keep him in power — destroying the precious “credibility” of the Eurozone. And exactly as Varoufakis said, provide an alibi for France to reject German terms.
That was the result of the big OXI.
Some of you are probably asking yourselves, is there any condition under which this guy would think leaving the table is the right thing to do? And the answer is yes: when it can be clearly made to appear as though it were forced by others. And as I said, just as it started to reach exactly that point — of appearing to be forced by others — the creditors have shown division in their own ranks.
That—appearance—is the precious capital that the other side understands and those opposed to the further expansion of present-day neoliberalism do not. Just as Tsipras can be seen to have toppled Samaras once and for all (he said he’d be back), consolidated the Greek political spectrum, and caused the troika to be (possibly, we’ll see) divided on what in sensible times would be minor issues, y’all want to highlight only and only the failures because Tsipras didn’t deliver your historical inflection point.
As I said before, I don’t know if he intended it or not, but Tsipras is possibly the most successful leader of anything in Europe that can be called “left” in a long time — despite the inevitable continuation of austerity. The only thing to see is whether or not Podemos, etc. will succumb to the kind of attitudes shown here or actually use the capital generated to make the incremental progress that they can also make, rather than chase after dramatic historical inflection points. There’s no guarantee, of course.
And there are a couple of days left. The creditors themselves have to agree on something. If they don’t, then that likely means that you’ll get your Grexit anyway. Whether you’ll get what you *wanted* out of the Grexit is another matter.
S Brennan
Some notes in this sad affair…on unhelpful labeling, I don’t think a party like Syriza who seeks debt relief on an unpayable amount, largely created by the transfer of private foreign debt to public foreign debt, is some radical left party. That’s normative behavior that Germany engaged in three times in the last century, indeed, Germany has still not started paying it’s obligations since reunification, so they are the first entry in this century.
Is Syriza left of the goose stepping, heel clicking Germans that Merkel represents, to the left of France’s German collaborator, “Shorty” Sarkozy ? Yes, but that means anybody not willing to accept Friedman’s Satanic Verses as Gospel falls into that category. That’s a ridiculous standard, Eisenhower, Nixon, indeed even Reagan, who reversed himself and Bush [the 1st] need to reclassified as radical left…
On the printing presses, Syriza could have temporarily outsourced to either China, India, or Russia. Printing money is not hard…I think Tsipras was told, subtlety, that they would killed if they resisted the 4th Reich requisitioning of Greece’s wealth.
A new virulent form of fascism has revealed itself in Europe, perhaps this time the concentration camps will not have gas chambers disguised as showers…it’s not necessary, people seem willing to enter without any resistance.
Ian Welsh
Oh come now Mandos, you’ve always preferred the role of gadfly to star.
bob mcmanus
Blissex: The result has been that also GDP per person at PPP as a percent of EU average has risen and fallen back:
I would definitely to need these kind of numbers broken down by class, quintiles, median, etc. It certainly would not surprise me if the top 1%, top 10% did fairly well even after the GFC, I have seen stories about high end shops and restaurants in Athens.
Not interested enough to do my own research, I just presume it.
The defense/military complex in Greece kinda interests me, a pampered dog that doesn’t bark. There may be a global disarticulation goin on, where militaries are becoming separated from politics.
Blissex
«numbers broken down by class, quintiles, median, etc. It certainly would not surprise me if the top 1%, top 10% did fairly well even after the GFC, I have seen stories about high end shops and restaurants in Athens.»
Indeed, if the *average* GDP per person has gone back to the pretty high level (4 times those of Bulgaria in euro terms) of 2001 and some greeks have become much poorer than in 2001 there is good chance of a big upwards redistribution.
I think the scam was like the one that Republicans want to do in the USA: load the government with debt with huge spending that benefits various republican constituencies, and then when the debt comes due declarate bankruptcy and stop paying welfare.
The greek twist is that they want to continue to pay welfare by “taxing” dutch, finnish, german, french, citizens instead of rich greeks who have hundreds of billions of euros in foreign accounts.
Sometimes I suspect that like in some other kleptocratic countries the greek kleptocracy are cynically worsening the situation of their poorest citizens to create “poverty porn” that helps in getting more out of donors.
But Greece is not poor or *that* poor (again, GDP per person 4 times that of Bulgaria, the poorest EU member) and just like in 2001 it could easily afford to pay welfare itself. Rich greeks just don’t want to.
Blissex
List of EU members that in nominal (not PPP) terms had lower GDP per person than Greece in 2014:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita
$7,752 Bulgaria
$10,034 Romania
$13,881 Hungary
$19,100 Czech Republic
$19,111 Malta
$20,904 Croatia
$21,381 Latvia
$21,408 Portugal
$23,275 Poland
$23,876 Lithuania
$24,417 Slovenia
$25,049 Estonia
$25,333 Slovakia
$28,237 Cyprus
$29,635 Greece
Mandos
But the idea that rich Greeks don’t want to pay welfare is not new. That’s what the inflation/devaluation game was for. So now that’s stopped, the rich people were magically supposed to want to pay for welfare? None of this is new information. However, if Syriza is given time to breathe we will see if they actually start acting to change that aspect.
Mandos
It’s a tough job but someone’s got to do it. And everyone with an opinion is someone else’s gadfly.
EmilianoZ
Francois Hollande could preempt Marine Le Pen by organizing a referendum on Frexit but he’ll never have the guts to do that.
Mandos
MLP is *why* France started talking down Grexit.
The Raven
The European Union is failing in its efforts to prevent war in Europe.
My wife asks an excellent question: who is Greece being sold to? It’s a small number of people, not so? What are their names?
I don’t think Greece can be cut off from the internet without the concurrence of the Greek government, though bandwidth can be reduced.
“no more likelihood that Greece would be allowed to recover after Grexit.”
What are they going to do? Blockade Greece? Close the Gates of Hercules?
Well, they could do those things. Are we looking at war?
mike
Mandos–Do you see any significance to Nuland’s meeting with Tsipras and the later submission of the offer with more concessions? Didn’t the latter come after the meeting?
S Brennan
As I feared and stated at the time of the reunification, now they will do it again, it will be different, I don’t know how, but they will do it.
I am surprised the route the sleeper cells of modern Nazis took, but I shouldn’t be, the 1930 Nazis rose due to German businesses attraction to Nazis willingness to brutally liquidate any who opposed them…particularly, those who were attracted to Bismark’s socialism. The Nazi Business class wasn’t even lightly slapped on the wrist in 1945. German financial business interests enjoyed the structure/subsidies/slaves fascism provided, sadly for them, reconquering Greece lacks the brutality of the blitzkrieg, but at least they won’t lose entire divisions as they did before, even businessmen can see this is a much better way to conquer Europe.
This time it will be different, the Greeks will stay conquered, the US & Britain now fully embrace the same ideology thanks to the Chicago School making fascism acceptable and accepted.
anonymouscoward
In a rare scrap of good news, Finland’s Finance Minister has told his fellow Ministers of the Eurozone that Finland cannot back any third bailout program for Greece. Finland’s ruling coalition includes populists who have threatened to bring down the Finnish government if the bailout proceeds. A new program would need the approval of all Eurozone governments -one vote against kills it. And with that, Greece’s membership in the monetary prison -er – union is left twisting in the wind. Germany’s Finance Minister only wants Greece killed for five years he says. What a Christian gentleman! As if Greece would ever want back in after how they were treated 2010-2014, and then put through the dislocation of forced Grexit in 2015.
Stick to your guns, Finland! Eurozone delenda est. (Would this be a good time to remember that Finland joined the Nazi Wehrmacht in its multi year seige of the Soviet city of Leningrad, and refused to accept the capitulation of the defenders, so that the city could be razed to the ground with millions of starving civilians trapped inside?)
The Raven
I suspect the Finns hold quite a lot of Greek debt, and are looking to foreclose, somehow. In other news, the Guardian reports that “Tomorrow, Italy is reportedly going to demand that Germany hammers out an agreement with Greece.”
Stirling Newberry
Euro want more pain. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33491776
Lisa
Mike well spotted. I think he got read the riot act and, while by no means the only reason, it was quite possibly a deciding factor in caving.
As I said before, totally incompetent.
Steve Keen summarises it nicely (as he so often does).
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevekeen/2015/07/11/its-all-greek-to-me-the-politics-of-syriza-and-the-troika/
Usual useless left, which has been corrupted, coopted, neutralised, marginalised and filled with traitors at every turn. Amateurs.
Even more so because the right, though nasty and cunning, are all incredibly stupid and it should be easy to run rings around them most of the time.
But, and here is a nasty observation, far too many members of so called ‘left’ or ‘progressive’ (etc) organisations (political parties, unions, NGOs, etc) are all ‘fake left’, get them drunk enough and they will admit that they are really neo-liberals through and through.
*** The Ideological Battle ***
At the heart of it is that no one has come up with an alternative ideology that is more attractive to elites than neo-liberalism.
As I said, neo-liberalism is not and never has been an economic ‘theory’, it is a political and moral ideology. One major reason for its success is that it give a rational for elites to make themselves far richer. Take the example of the US Red Cross as a sobering example.
It has replaced social, tax and political controls on the elites that existed in the past, that restricted their bad behaviour to an extent. Under neo-liberalism just being rich is justification for becoming even richer, being poor is justification for being made more poor. if you are not rich, but are in a position of power, then it is almost a duty for you to use that power to get rich even at the expense of everyone else.
In other words, all those complex social constructs, duties, ethics, morals, behaviour limitations et al have been replaced with:
Rich = Good. Because they Good, then they should be richer, which makes them more Good.
Poor = Bad. because they are Bad they must be punished for being .. well Bad. By making them more Poor, which makes them more Bad…and so on.
So every increase in wealth disparity is seen as a Moral Imperative.
Add in: Rentier = Good (with Adam Smith spinning in his grave). if you own something then you should be entitled to extract wealth from it forever.
The Rentier part is very important to understand, especially in term of all these debt arguments at the moment.
Under traditional economic and financial theory (and factual experience) all debt has a risk of not being repaid, hence a part (even a major part) of interest is to cover that risk. The issuer of debt has to be cognisant of that. Over time most countries got more civilised about that and would allow default on debt without overly punishing the debtor, hence the end of debtors prisons, etc.
Under Rentier ‘theory’ (and Adam Smith is now doing 3,0000rpm) the owner of the debt MUST be repaid under any circumstance, no matter the cost to the debtor (or even society as a whole).
That includes (as it did in the past) effective slavery, starvation, homelessness and death. Anyone that tries to default must be publicly punished as well, to dissuade any others from doing it too. It doesn’t matter that the debt was issued with a price to cover the probability of default, it still must be paid, it is a Moral Imperative.
Things like TISA, TPP and TIPP are actually just attempts to codify Rentier Rights over everything else internationally .
Take a simple example, someone buys a bridge and charges a toll. Under Renter Theory it is correct for them to ensure no competition, by arranging that no other bridge will be allowed to be built (by the way this happens a lot in areas like private roads).
The Govt’s job is to protect those Rentier Rights above all others, so it will ensure no competition is allowed.
The Renter is perfectly correct to extract as much wealth in the short term as they can. So if (as they will) stop any maintenance and the bridge deteriorates, that is ok.
The social good of the bridge is meaningless. if the bridge starts to collapse then if society wants a bridge then they Must pay the Rentier more money for repairs.
They Must Not force the Rentier to do maintenance, because that interferes with Rentier Rights to extract the maximum short term profit.
The Govt also cannot just build another bridge to replace it, because (yes you got it) that interferes with Rentier Rights.
The fact that this cause a perverse incentive is also meaningless because …yep…Rentier Rights trump everything.
So neo-liberalism is a simple poltical/moral ideology at its core:
Rich = Good. Poor = Bad.
Rentier Rights are higher than any other rights.
Government’s role is to (a) Protect and reward the Good, (b) Punish the Bad and (c) protect Rentier Rights above all others.
The job of economists is to provide semi-political justifications for this. Such as that howler the Efficient Market Theorem, which states that gaming, manipulting, stealing from, etc the Market is impossible. Criminal activity is impossible you see, the Market will prevent it!
This was just a reason to gut regulation of markets. You will notice that none of those economists say anything else but ‘deregulate markets’, even with all the examples of market theft (Libor, foreign curency, various commodities and all the many others).
That is because they know their job and what they are supposed to do.
Exceptions like Steve Keen (etc) are very rare, 97+% of economists are true blue neo-liberals (interestingly they tend to score higher on the sociopath scales as well).
Like those religious theorists who found way to justify wars or the Inquisition (etc) so their masters could do what they wanted. You can add all those communist ones, Nazi ones and all those other historical ideological ‘justifiers’.
Mandos
To understand why YV wouldn’t even talk of Grexit, you have to understand why Schäuble has come out in the open precisely with a plan to cause it. That is because there is another game being played, but played over the body of Greece. While people keep talking about Spain and Portugal, and those are important, it is France that is at ultimate issue here.
When Hollande was elected, he went full of bluster to Berlin to show them what’s what…and came back a month later defeated, dejected, and stuck in a quasi-austerian holding pattern that has made him catastrophically unpopular and may complete the pasokification of the French Socialists. Why would he do this? My belief is that the most likely explanation is that Merkel and Schäuble basically told him that they were willing to blow up the Eurozone if it ever followed rules significantly different from the ones they had agreed on. They probably showed him the steps they were willing to take. And he seemed to have believed them.
(Now many of you are probably wondering why Germany would take such a suicidal course. That is because the single currency is viewed by German conservatives as, aside from a convenience, yet another cross that Germany had to bear for its sins and for reunification. What about those exchange rates? German conservatives seem to believe that that’s an irrelevant issue because German manufacturing is just so awesome that everyone would want it anyway. No, seriously.)
Now France has the Front National, which is increasing in popularity, and Marine Le Pen has made no secret that she will blow up the Euro herself if she comes to power. Now, many German conservatives have difficulty conceiving of French fascists, so they think that she’s just a paper tiger on an elaborate grift. The French elite don’t think so, however. (Oh, they think she’s on a grift, but they don’t doubt that she wants to blow up the EU.) Given the nature of the French electoral system, it’s still not that likely that MLP will be president. But it is well within the realm of possibility that she will be able to push a, for example, weak Sarkozy presidency around. That kind of Sarkozy presidency would have to then seek changes to the Eurozone, bringing the whole question into the open again.
That is why Schäuble thinks that a Grexit is useful, and has for a while — and he’s been looking for the political opportunity to make it happen. When Syriza was elected it made the first real bid to challenge the Spardiktat, whose purpose is to ensure that the Eurozone isn’t designed to adapt, but rather to follow the rules that would prevent the kind of transfers that happen inside Germany (that are far more controversial, I might add, then they are in Canada — Bavaria thinks that Bremen, Saarland, etc. should be getting the Greece treatment, for example, as not every German state conforms easily to the competitiveness fairy tale).
We’ve been talking about Grexit as a mode of default on debts. But European media is just starting to signal that this may not actually be true, I think. In fact, it’s increasingly clear to me that Grexit is to be used to put Greece into a financial torture box that is worse than the austerity being presented. Now, people here have been talking about Greece selling itself instead to China or Russia so that it doesn’t become a total basket case.
I don’t doubt that Nuland (whom I don’t cartoon-villainize, but who is not a nice person) was sent to tell Greece that that option was off the table — and she doesn’t have to tell Germans for them to know it too. Probably, the USA doesn’t care so much of Greece manages to cut for itself a better deal inside the Eurozone — perhaps occasionally cutting the Germans down to size is a good idea from their POV — but Greece will probably get Ukrained somehow if it tries to sell itself to Russia to any extent that would induce Russia to seriously alleviate its crisis.
So Syriza did not have a BATNA worth mentioning, because their putative BATNA was another desired outcome of the most hostile of their creditors. Now freed from the limits of office, Varoufakis has told us that he knew some time ago of Schäuble’s desire to put Greece in a Grexit punishment box. That is why he has refused to support the use of Grexit as an explicit threat. That’s why Syriza needs the BATNA-free jiujitsu I mentioned earlier and why the French broke ranks. It’s also why this round would never have concluded in a true culmination of austerity. Greece was set up for this the moment its own lying politicians set it up for the joining the Eurozone under particularly non-convergent circumstances, and Syriza even now has been and continues to be the major beneficiary of the intellectual collapse of its previous political elite.
Of course, this could all fail again on behalf of Finland and the Baltic countries, which is another story…but I suspect that if a non-Grexit out come is in the cards, they will be bought off somehow. Anyway, I leave you to contemplate an EU in which Germany and France are plotting against each other behind the scenes.
Mandos
Finland is not doing this to delenda the Eurozone.
Mandos
(I answered the other questions in a now-spamulated post. Gotta wait til Ian gets back 🙂 )
Mandos
Oh and now it looks like the Eurogroup is turning full farcical. So maybe delendaing it is.
De castro
Simple answer.
Who will soon own Greece. ? Germany ! Hitler must be smiling in his grave.
If I lend you money and you can’t or refuse to pay me back in foreclose and seize all your assets …..car home land the lot….at market prices (knock down prices)….
A big sell out by their naive political class.
Que Sera
QED
jump
I used to be idealistic and optimistic for man’s better nature, and though that may still hold true on a local scale however limited…
I think I am with Mandos on this one. When you get slammed, you get slammed, and for good measure you are black listed so that you cannot recover. You are not allowed in the playground anymore and anyone sympathetic gets the same treatment. Classic bully. Classic playground.
Ideals and ethics are a thing of the past. Your mother likely smacked you on the head for not playing nice once, but that is illegal now.
The Raven
Well, seems the Eurozone finance ministers, like the Republican Party, can’t take yes for an answer. Germany wants €50bn of Greek property (at depressed prices, of course) to let Greece out of the Euro.
anonymouscoward
Oh I know that Finland’s populists are rebelling against giving more money to those thieving lazy Greeks. “Eurozone delenda est” reflects my own fervent wish, but it’s also what the Finns and Germans will accomplish -eventually and unwittingly- if they follow their instincts to inflict their condign punishment upon those rascally Greeks. Destroying the Eurozone isn’t what the Finns and Germans think they are doing, nor what they want to do, but they’re doing it anyway. They mean to apply a moral corrective to what they see as a flawed national character (bad, wicked Greeks). They hold a right to dispense correction because of their own alleged moral superiority. But their morality is vicious. When everyone, especially the French, see what the Germans and their little axis of toadies do to anyone who has different spending priorities and social values, they will start to want out. Even though they know it will hurt. Even though an example has been made of Greece. Nobody else should be able to sleep at night knowing the shape of their own society will be dictated by the same monsters “who did that to the Greeks”. The true face of the Eurozone is being revealed in these proceedings and it shouldn’t be forgotten. Real motives are coming to the fore, where they can be sensed by masses of people, even if they’re still mostly shrouded in complicated rule driven machinations and elite class subterfuge. Sane people across the continent should be able to draw the appropriate conclusions when witnessing this spectacle of punishment and plunder. Accordingly I hope they will move to preserve what’s left of their homelands and social solidarity. And if they will not, we are all completely fucked. So I say, stick to your guns, Finland!
markfromireland
@Lisa July 11, 2015
You don’t even have to get them drunk lisa, just get them in private pick your. Nastiness is what goes on between consenting liberals in private (I know you’ll get the reference). Mind you as standards of behaviour slip ever lower the “in private” part is becoming less and less the case. It’s the political of dogging.
Well yes, liberals and others of the usual useless left (to borrow your phrase) and economists do that. It’s their structural function. The useless left act as fig leaves when they’re not actually kite flying and the economists make it sound reasonable and rational and good. Of the two the useless left are the more despicable but that’s only a matter of degree.
mfi
PS: Actually now that I think of it. I think I won’t borrow “usual useless left”. They’re very useful indeed to the current ruling class.
m
S Brennan
MFI,
My ode to economists:
Having tired of defending that which is indefensible, men of the cloth stepped aside for the new priesthood. The new clergy called themselves economists, their nihilism allowed them to cloak the most abhorrent of acts in a twisted logic that is as thick as any bramble and in simple, elegant, mathematical graphs, utterly lacking in 1st and 2nd order terms. Without any predictive talent, absent any moral authority, economists were scribes to the same patrons the clergy had once served. Pleased with economists willingness to do what the clergy were no longer willing to do, the patrons created temples to their cult and they even gave a yearly prize they decided to call “In Honor of Nobel”. In keeping with their moral dexterity, economist convinced the gullible that their Prize had the same value as a Nobel Prize.
Ian Welsh
Saying rich Greeks don’t want to pay welfare misses the point that in many of the deals things that are transfers to the poor are mandated to be cut or kept at low levels by each of the austerity deals. Levels of taxation are deliberately managed and high on stupid things that hit the poor and middle class and not allowed to rise on the rich (the “institutions” kept cutting any tax raises Syriza suggested on corporations, for example.) Yes, if you could tax the rich and give it to the poor, in Greece, as in every other industrial or post-industrial society, there would be no poverty.
Austerity is the policy of “you can’t do that, it is bad.” Austerity is also the policy of “don’t tax the rich, and especially don’t tax corporations.”
Certainly Greece can easily deal with its problems IF it is allowed policy freedom and if Greeks want to use that policy freedom and IF the neoliberal world order does not use its policy levers to strangle Greece.
This is the CRUX of my multi-decade critique of both the politics and culture of neo-liberalism. It is EASY to do the right thing if we WANT to. Since we do not want to, we are headed for serious problems, and yes, they will be easily serious enough to warrant my rhetoric.
(Though not the important here, one should also be very careful in using aggregates like GDP to determine the actual health of economies for a variety of reasons to tedious to go into, and too extensive for a comment.)
Ian Welsh
Well, I’ve said my piece on the left repeatedly. New leaders will arise, new ideologies will arise. We’ll see how it plays out. Two pieces: part of it is belief (they don’t really believe in left-wing ideology, but in “slightly kinder-neoliberalism”; the other is that those who do believe in something better are simply unwilling to fight and break things. I’d be quite happy to break the Euro or EU or whatever, because my calculus is “if my people can’t be treated properly under your regime, I will destroy your regime. If we can’t have nice things, you can’t either.”
This is the only calculus which leads to long term prosperity. “You will treat us all right, or we will break you.”
Anyone who is not willing to do that is not really dedicated to prosperity for all, or for their particular group (whichever one that is.) Unions failed because they stopped being about solidarity for all unions and about making everyone unionized who wasn’t a boss (aspirational, but that sort of aspirational goal makes you stronger and more threatening.)
Ian Welsh
No Mandos, YOU particularly enjoy being a gadfly. Don’t squirm, I know your history on various forums and blogs. You virtually always play devil’s advocate. You don’t spent a ton of time on places that agree with you, you seek out places that don’t.
Jessica
Much of the left behaves as though its primary function is to assuage the conscience of the upper middle class, which is well-off enough economically, but hyper-alienated and needing an extra dose of theater (The Spectacle) so that they can go on ignoring how much their own well-being is gained by selling out those below them in the social structure. Perhaps the most significant factor in 1st world politics has been that the knowledge worker sector (the 10% or so) has content to be the privileged servants of the oligarchs and other elites, not matter how blindly self-destructive the elites becomes, rather than attempting to forge a broad alliance to make themselves the new masters.
I am not sure that that really applies to Syriza though. They were operating from genuine weakness. Yes, they could have prepared for a more all-out battle, but how many of their supporters were willing to back that? How far could they have pushed without provoking a coup? It is possible that Syriza’s capitulation was the best they could do. That can not be said for those who have continued to support Obama long after his colors became clear.
At this moment, it looks as though Greece will be thrown out of the Euro zone, which gains Syriza far more support within Greece than if they were perceived to be leaving at all voluntarily. It is even possible that Tsipras’s recent capitulations were done knowing full well that it did not matter, except in the eyes of the Greek people, because the Eurozone would refuse to accept Greece’s surrender no matter what terms Greece agreed to.
Ghostwheel
“Overwhelming majority of Greeks want to keep Euro.”
“A total of 84 percent of Greeks want to keep the euro, an opinion poll released on Friday showed, with just 12 percent favoring a return to the drachma, as the country races to clinch a cash-for-reforms deal with its creditors.”
http://www.ekathimerini.com/199306/article/ekathimerini/news/overwhelming-majority-of-greeks-want-to-keep-euro
I have no idea if this poll is accurate or a sham, but if true, it might explain why Tsipras made another offer. The Greek people, apparently, really don’t recognize that staying in the Euro and being relieved of austerity are incompatible.
So we’re left wondering whether or not Tsipras is serious about the offer and really does want Greece to stay in the Euro, or if he suspects the EU will turn that latest offer down, in which case he can shrug his shoulders and explain to the Greek people that the EU themselves have forced the reissue of the Drachma.
Ian Welsh
Not a useful question.
“Would you rather accept any deal offered by the EU and stay in austerity OR return to the Drachma.”
Of course they’d rather stay in the Euro. But in isolation that question is not useful.
Mandos
But the question you want to ask has been asked many times, and the answer has consistently been a preference to stay in austerity.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-06-11/poll-finds-greek-majority-ready-fold-troika-even-anti-austerity-protests-return
http://www.macropolis.gr/?i=portal.en.the-agora.2630&cid=776
I recall seeing some more, post OXI ones but I can’t find them. Nevertheless, even if you ask explicitly about a bad deal, a consistent majority of Greeks will still prefer to capitulate and keep the Euro. Remember, Syriza’s near-majority in the Vouli only comes from the 50-seat magic majority bonus. Only after adding a fringe party (ANEL) do you start getting to something close to 50%. And many Syriza voters approve of Syriza’s Grexit-ambiguity.
Mandos
Ah, but there you have me wrong. I usually end up in places where I agree with 80% of what is said and I focus the 20% that I think is wrong. But actually my two biggest haunts (Dr. Dawg and Dammit Janet!) other than this one over the last year or two, I mostly don’t argue with the main premises. And the last time I actually sought out a place with an explicitly opposing view was quite a long time ago, when I argued with libertarians.
anonymouscoward
I just wanted to add this drivel to the original drivel I posted above. It was to be part of the original, but it was incomplete and the original was already too long. Feel free to disregard, but I wanted to indicate that I am not unaware of apparent lurking contradictions in my thoughts on the whole topic of the EU vs. separate nations of Europe.
You might say the populist “True Finns” are already acting the way I would wish them to act in putting their own interests before Greece’s. By that I mean not only are they doing what I wish, and doing everyone a favor by initiating Grexit, thus unwittingly initiating the breakup of the EMU, but they are also exhibiting the post-EU nationalist ethos I might seem to some people to be advocating. I would mostly disagree with that. According to their obligations as EMU members, they are supposed to be willing to act in solidarity with other Eurozone member states, (After all what else is a union for anyway?) But they absolutely refuse. The Finns are expressing solidarity with their own: you’re not bailing out Greece with any more of our money! That would seem to be in line with my view of how governments should act in their own people’s interest. But they’re also kicking a weak victim, a fellow union member to whom they owe mutual aid, when he’s down. Their motivation is largely vicious as can be seen from their stubborn disregard for the circumstances of Greece’s case. The victim is not entirely blameless for his condition, but a great deal of the current problem has been either the result of direct action of the Troika, whose side Finland toadies for reliably, or else has occurred because the Masters of EUniverse winked at improprieties of Greek governments of long ago. But regardless of how we came to the present situation, the rule enforcing behavior going on right now amounts to telling Greece “We have a well known rule in this club: everyone must stand up on their own two feet!” Then the upstanding members of the club savagely kick at Greece’s ankles, breaking them – which is the prescribed punishment for breaking the club rules. Get up Greece – you’re breaking the rule! (KICK.) Stop goldbricking and stand up Greece! (KICK.) Why do you insist on breaking the rules, you congenital, miscreant rule breakers? (KICK)
In their selfishness, the Finns are performing a valuable service though. They are instructing the rest of the Euro states in the stark fictitiousness of the concept of EU-solidarity. European solidarity may be a word or a term composed of words, but it is not a thing. The term refers to a non-existent. When you have fallen on hard times, as an Euro member you must expect the other states to turn on you in the manner Greece has experienced. Powerful states like Germany will look for nice things in your country to plunder, and they will find rules you have violated – and make up more to catch you with. Their passion for rules and punishment starts out with seeming reasonableness but very soon breaks out into mania and frenzy. They will kick your teeth in for mumbling before the end. Smaller states like Finland or Romania will join in and hold you down so as to curry favor. There is no “People of Europe” to appeal to for solidarity. There are Finns, Romanians, Germans, French, Italians, Spaniards and Greeks. Each of these will be looking out for their own interests – and mostly the interests of their richest citizens at that. All of them are fearful of strong Germany and the weaker ones are mostly eager to suck up to the Master.
That is the reality of the Eurozone and its “ever closer union”. Probably the Finns will be pummeled back into line, or bought off with trinkets somehow, but should they persist in their zeal to kick Greece the whole house of cards that is the Eurozone will start to collapse. May it be swift and soon.