Greek lessons

[mickthinks]

The Greeks have voted a resounding "No" to the austerity demanded by its European partners, and unless new, less harsh terms can be agreed urgently (we are talking of hours now, not days) it looks as though no ordinary Greeks are going to get any more euros to spend ever again.

I'm closer than most of you, I guess, geographically at least, to the toing and froing between Greece and the Eurozone, and so I've been following the news and comments (from a variety of sources of variable quality) and felt the need for a thread to post some of the good stuff I'm finding. Feel free to join me!

First there was the piece on how the bankers walked away laughing from a similar collapse of Latin American economies in the 1980s. But, though the parallels are illustrative, that isn't actually abut Greece, so it went in the Fuck the Banks thread.

So instead, here's a piece by someone calling themselves Steve Randy Waldman, who is new to me and it seems to , who says some crazy stuff I hope you find worthwhile.

From the link (with my emphasis)

But “bank restructuring” is a euphemism for imposing losses on wealthy creditors. And explicit bank bailouts are humiliations of elites, moments when the mask comes off and the usually tacit means by which states preserve and enhance the comfort of the comfortable must give way to very visible, very unpopular, direct cash flows.

The choice Europe’s leaders faced was to preserve the union or preserve the wealth, prestige, and status of the community of people who were their acquaintances and friends and selves but who are entirely unrepresentative of the European public. They chose themselves. [...]

It is difficult to overstate how deeply Europe’s leaders betrayed the ideals of European integration in their handing of the Greek crisis. The first and most fundamental goal of European integration was to blur the lines of national feeling and interest through commerce and interdependence, in order to prevent the fractures along ethnonational lines that made a charnel house of the continent, twice. That is the first thing, the main rule, that anyone who claims to represent the European project must abide: We solve problems as Europeans together, not as nations in conflict. [...]

When the levee broke, instead of acknowledging errors and working to address them as a community, Europe’s elites — its politicians and civil servants, its bankers and financiers — deflected the blame in the worst possible way. They turned a systemic problem of financial architecture into a dispute between European nations. They brought back the very ghosts their predecessors spent half a century trying to dispell. Shame. Shame. Shame. Shame.

[mickthinks]

Here's an alternative view of the crisis from Bloomberg. I don't like it much, though I guess it explains the basics very clearly and very well.

The European Debt Crisis Visualized - YouTube

The problem I have with Jonathan Jarvis's narrative is the way it dehumanises the crisis by personifying the nation states. Thus Germany becomes a fiscally responsible citizen and Greece, a lazy layabout. Result, instant sympathy for those pressing for austerity measures and acceptance of the plight of those pushed over the cliff, and a complete disregard for the millions of ordinary people whose lives have been ruined, and in many cases, threatened, by the failure to seek a more humane approach.

Note also that the banks and their shareholders are portrayed as victims of Greece's selfishness and indolence, rather than the authors of everyone's downfall.

[mickthinks]

Here's a dude called John Green saying stuff:

Understanding the Financial Crisis in Greece -...

[mickthinks]

And here's a delightfully unexpected insight from one of my favourite sky-pilots, Giles Fraser.

Rev Dr Giles Fraser.mp3

[mickthinks]

Interesting first draft of history:

Exclusive: Yanis Varoufakis opens up about his five month battle to save Greece

From the link

When Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the European Council President, tried to issue the communiqué without him, Varoufakis consulted Eurogroup clerks – could Dijsselbloem exclude a member state? The meeting was briefly halted. After a handful of calls, a lawyer turned to him and said, “Well, the Eurogroup does not exist in law, there is no treaty which has convened this group.”

“So,” Varoufakis said, “What we have is a non-existent group that has the greatest power to determine the lives of Europeans. It’s not answerable to anyone, given it doesn’t exist in law; no minutes are kept; and it’s confidential. No citizen ever knows what is said within . . . These are decisions of almost life and death, and no member has to answer to anybody.”