93
It’s amusing to read these classic thesis-antithese-synthesis arguments, and just laugh at the syntheses.
Sure let’s scalp the bond holders, no harm there, a few tens of millionsome of fixed income retirement fund holders will become homeless on welfare, but it ‘seems cheaper than Grexit’. And we can avoid moral hazard, other than the tens of millions of fixed income seniors taking it up the troika, by ‘capping’ the bailout with those lofty words: ‘Never Again!’, … printed in Irish, Spanish and Portuguese.
And no, this is not dark-swan event, the IMF/WE have 50 years of experience credit-debt crushing economies and perfecting their QEn self-engorgement.
No this is not a dark swan event, this is another engineered Argentina Economic Meltdown.
https://youtu.be/0CzS6eHqtnQ

Posted by: Chipnik | Jul 4 2015 0:59 utc | 103

OT
https://richardfalk.wordpress.com/2015/07/03/turkeys-electoral-maelstrom/

Posted by: okie farmer | Jul 4 2015 6:10 utc | 105

This link from CP is as good an analysis of the current Greek drama as any available. The author, DIMITRIS KONSTANTAKOPOULOS, goes right to the juggler in his scathing criticism of Syriza’s “negotiating” strategy, or lack thereof, and how it embarrassed itself in its humiliating capitulation to the troika’s hardball tactics. He also gives a wider perspective regarding the Greek population. In most analyses, the adversaries are pensioners and many other of Greek society’s unfortunates in their noble fight against the Greek plutocrats. In KONSTANTAKOPOULOS” analysis is the inclusion of the Greek bourgeois, technocratic class, and others in Greek society not so affected by austerity. It is an interesting focus on the internal dynamics of Greek society and politics.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/03/the-future-of-greece-without-illusions/

Posted by: bjmaclac | Jul 4 2015 7:59 utc | 107

James K. Galbraith is piling it on – 9 myths about the Greek crisis

5. The Greek government is imperiling its American alliance. This is a particular worry of some US conservatives, who see a leftist government in power and assume it is pro-Russian and anti-NATO. It is true that the Greek Left has historic complaints against the US, notably for CIA support of the military junta that ruled from 1967 to 1974. But in fact, attitudes on the Greek Left have changed, thanks partly to experience with the Germans. This government is pro-American and firmly a member of NATO.

Posted by: somebody | Jul 4 2015 9:32 utc | 109

German workers faring worst from the Euro

Perhaps you have an image of Deutschland as being a nation of highly skilled, highly rewarded workers in gleaming factories. That workforce and its unions still exist – but it’s shrinking fast. What’s replacing it, according to Germany’s leading expert on inequality, Gerhard Bosch, are crap jobs. The low-wage workforce has shot up and is now almost at US levels, he reckons.
Don’t blame this on the euro, but on the slow decline of German unions, and the trend of business towards outsourcing to cheaper eastern Europe. What the single currency has done is make Germany’s low-wage problems the ruin of an entire continent.
Workers in France, Italy, Spain and the rest of the eurozone are now being undercut by the epic wage freeze going on in the giant country in the middle. Flassbeck and Lapavitsas describe this as Germany’s “beggar thy neighbour” policy – “but only after beggaring its own people”.
In the last century, the other countries in the eurozone could have become more competitive by devaluing their national currencies – just as the UK has done since the banking meltdown. But now they’re all part of the same club, the only post-crash solution has been to pay workers less.
That is expressly what the European commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF are telling Greece: make workers redundant, pay those still in a job much less, and slash pensions for the elderly. But it’s not just in Greece. Nearly every meeting of the Wise Folk in Brussels and Strasbourg comes up with the same communique for “reform” of the labour market and social-security entitlements across the continent: a not-so-coded call for attacking ordinary people’s living standards. This is what the noble European project is turning into: a grim march to the bottom. This isn’t about creating a deeper democracy, but deeper markets – and the two are increasingly incompatible. Germany’s Angela Merkel has shown no compunction about meddling in the democratic affairs of other European countries – tacitly warning Greeks against voting for Syriza for instance, or forcing the Spanish socialist prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, to rip up the spending commitments that had won him an election.

Posted by: somebody | Jul 4 2015 12:05 utc | 111

TheGuardian View: A failure of leadership
We will no doubt see such eminently reasonable viewpoints repeated ad nauseum by the media. This is a whitewash.
The problem is not any particular leadership, it is the political system. It is plutocracy. It matters little who the leaders are – Western political systems ensure that they serve the interests of oligarchs. US election laws, for example, make a mockery of democracy as virtually an unlimited amount of money can now be raised from private sources. Only those who have enough appeal to oligarchs that they can raise billions of dollars have any hope of succees. And those oligarchs have toxic agendas that lead to the destruction of our planet and our humanity.

Posted by: Jackrabbit | Jul 4 2015 14:08 utc | 113

@ Willy2 | Jul 4, 2015 7:47:42 AM | 109
He/she may be on point. There is (un)famous statement by City bank’s ex CEO Chuck Prince

“When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing,”

But in the end the Greeks are still just humans, we humans are having very short memory. No more Greeek Zorba dance, music from Brussels has stopped to play. Now the Greeks has to (re)learn how to think, for themselves. It might be the most difficult of lessons. And not the only them, many of enslaved nations who are victims of silent occupation by IMF-The US Department of Treasury and than the EU.
But there are signs that Greek PM will continue to rely on foreign assistance: http://greece.greekreporter.com/2015/06/19/greek-pm-tsipras-meets-with-gazprom-chief-brics-delegation-in-st-petersburg/ which includes the folks who hung up in Davos.
However, there is a facts which shows that half of this debt went on military purchases which were coming from Berlin, Paris and the US and something to Russia. Half of debt, just think of this. And the Greeks still are spending a lot of money on military even today, 2.2% of GDP. Contrast this with for example Germany 1% and you will get the picture. Of course perennial enemy is state of Turkey has been nurtured along the way all the times. And one should know that Greeks are fiercely nationalistic, if not chauvinist, and their Army fascistic. That’s the reason why is Defense Minister is coming from right wing party.
There is tendency that the Core countries (W. Europe) decrease its spending on military while the Periphery (or those who seek protection) increase.

Posted by: neretva’43 | Jul 4 2015 14:54 utc | 115

When “civilized” met barbarian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/300_(film)
This is Sparts!
This is psychological and mandatory part of one’s EU and Nato member. Let alone mention the USA.

Posted by: neretva’43 | Jul 4 2015 15:23 utc | 117

nice quote neretva’43!!
sounds like tsipras or b. sanders might be a modern version of solon..

Posted by: james | Jul 4 2015 16:59 utc | 119

IMF wants brutal “austerity” (enforced poverty) for Greek working classes but more generous welfare for Greek Bourgeois…nothing new here this is capitalism in the 21st century.

Posted by: psakiwacky | Jul 4 2015 18:22 utc | 121

It’s unlikely that Germans can be persuaded to change their spots, Merkel is not alone. And certainly not by a confrontational demand.
However, Merkel has softened quite a bit over Britain’s leaving the EU, since the British election in May. That is, she is more ready to negotiate about conditions of Britain’s membership, once a democratic result is declared (even though the vote was hardly a powerful support of Cameron).
Evidently, British membership of the EU is more important than that of Greece. But I would have thought that if the Greeks vote clearly OXI, not even Germany wants to see a revolutionary breakup, and may feel obliged to negotiate.
Not that I would be optimistic, but I could imagine that there could be seeds there of a new approach to international finance. After all, Greece is basically a poor country, without natural resources. There is, though, a strong historical tradition of trade. Greek international merchants and shipping magnates are still important, but don’t pay their part of taxes, because of expatriation of the wealth. If the Greeks have any sense, they will be looking for ways to tax the expatriation of wealth. Nobody can stop the globalisation of the economy, nor the globalisation of international finance, but you can tax it, to benefit the local economy.
If one method doesn’t work, another will be sought. A turn towards people needing to pay their taxes, in order to fund the state, is occurring in the UK, though not in government, as a moral issue.
I have no idea how this thing is going to go, but a replacement for the debt economy is needed, and hyper-moralism might be it.

Posted by: Laguerre | Jul 4 2015 19:53 utc | 123

Reflecting on the views of Engdahl and Yves Smith, in consideration of the negotiating strategy and tactics of Syriza, it seems that the antics over the past six or seven months were nothing other than pure theatre. It was completely in line with the production style of US federal elections, which delude the electorate into believing that there are real differences between Republicans and Democrats; and that character assassination and “American Idol” forms of popularity contests substitute for real debate on the more serious issues, which are largely neglected.
I think this quote from Jean Baudrillard’s essay “The Divine Left” is apropos to the current discussion. Granted that Syriza are neither Marxists or Communists, this quote well illustrates the real dilemma facing leftwing upstarts: that they are completely out of their depth in any struggle in THE arena that is completely delineated by neoliberal capitalism.
“The dialectic is definitely over. The Grand Marxist promise has ended. ‘The condition of the liberation of the working class is the liquidation of all class, just as the liberation of the Third Estate (of the bourgeois order) was the liquidation of all states.’
This isn’t true, because the dialectic is over – or rather, this is the infantile fantasy of Marxist theory – it never stopped being on the side of capitalism. And what becomes clear, because the Communists’ taking of power is impossible thanks to their phobia of power, is the proletariat’s historical inability to accomplish that which the bourgeoisie had in its time: revolution.”

Posted by: bjmaclac | Jul 4 2015 23:24 utc | 125