Thursday, January 15, 2015

The EU will start to work when first, Greece is out and every average, say, Spanish voter can communicate with the average German voter without more than 40% lost in language issues. Cross border communication between the people, not politicians, is downright crucial. They can all spend years learning French, Slovenian, or whatever, or spend about a year learning the easiest language possible. Which? The one hears more than 50% of the time on German, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Austrian radio. The day the average German farmer walks up to a French farmer and can actually carry out important discussions about their future as Europeans, as farmers with common interests, then there is hope. Despite the damn taboos about discussing politics in Europe which is a bar hobby by comparison in America... 
With regards to Greece ...  There is an often quoted figure of €240 billion "pumped into their economy". It wasn't. It went in and came straight out again, into the hands of desperate and grateful banksters across Europe, who, had Greece defaulted, would themselves have gone tits up.
Now. The €240 billion is most definitely still there as "extra Greek debt". And it's that extra debt that Syriza, and many Greeks, are rightly not very happy about, regardless of the "generous interest rates" they've been offered. They got no injection of capital into their economy. They instead got a gun held to their heads to accept a loan to make sure foreign banksters didn't suffer any consequences of their reckless, even criminal (Goldmann Sachs) financing of the various groups of oligarchs running the country over the past 30 years. There are many things wrong with the structure of the Greek economy. It is a monumentally corrupt place. But still, there are an equal number of things wrong with the "solutions" offered by the rest of the EU and others. And the real wrongdoers - the Greek oligarchs and the banks - have yet to suffer any meaningful consequences of their actions. Syriza would definitely see to it that that at least changed.

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