EU to Greece: well maybe we’ll bail you out, if…
Will Greece get another chance?:
Merkel and French President Francois Hollande worked together on a plan to save Greece from plunging into economic turmoil and possibly having to ditch the euro. This involved a medium-term conditional program and a short-term interim financing deal for a few months, the sources said.
However, a solution still depends on Tsipras putting forward convincing reform proposals and rushing key measures through parliament by the weekend to make Greece’s public finances sustainable.
Some of them are becoming a mite perturbed [remarks in brackets mine]:
Some of Athens’ 18 partners in Europe’s common currency vented exasperation at five years of crisis wrangling with Greece. Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite complained [mixing linguistic metaphors]: “With the Greek government it is every time manana.”…
Euro zone finance ministers complained that their new Greek colleague Euclid Tsakalotos, while more courteous than his abrasive predecessor Yanis Varoufakis, had brought no new proposals to a preparatory meeting before the summit.
“I have the strong impression there were 18 … ministers of finance who felt the urgency of the situation and there is one … who doesn’t feel the urgency of the situation,” Belgian Finance Minister Johan Van Overtveldt said.
Greece is acting as though it’s in the driver’s seat, and not the other nations in the EU. And perhaps it is; they appear afraid to pressure Greece too much.
The Greeks are in charge. This is not just a consequence of Greek overspending but of a lack of EU democracy. Your elected officials don’t have a vote on this in the EU parliament But your Prime Minister can negotiate with his counterparts as if it were a summit meeting. No one was holding your feet to the fire, but hey take it while it lasts since you cannot have an opinion if Germany won’t go along.
Greece economically competes with other low cost tourist locations like Turkey, Dalmatia etc. The other locations have costs pegged to their local currency while Greece was high priced when the Euro was 1.3 to the US$.
neo…
What’s ‘happening’ are the discussions within the ECB NOT those in Athens.
It’s sitting on a PILE of Athenian IOUs — that would BUST that quasi-central bank should they have to take the total bath in one plunge.
THAT’S the problem.
Beware of Greeks bearing purchase orders.
&&&&&&
Lest we all forget, the 21st Century Greek Drama started out as a crisis for Paris — and its (government owned/ quasi-owned) banks.
It was FRANCE that had extended all of the staggering credit to Greece… no-one else!
If Athens had bit the bullet five-years ago, Paris would’ve been in crisis. Her banking system would’ve totally imploded.
&&&
The big European banks are INSANELY leveraged. This is why even the necessary write-offs due to the sovereign Greek insolvency are enough to cripple Eurozone lending.
All this time, the Europeans have been tossing the hot potato around.
BTW, the Greeks have NOT YET cut back deficit spending.
The primary budget for Athens is in massive deficit. The political uproar is over the prospect that the easy spending is over.
In all of these travails, Athens hasn’t paid back one Drachma!
All of the ‘bailouts’ have consisted of France unloading her credits onto the ECB… with Athens merely the paperwork intermediary.
1) ECB buys fresh Greek debt
2) Greece uses proceeds to ‘stay solvent’ ie pay off maturing FRENCH held Greek bonds
3) Greece uses the remainder as political sugar to sprinkle over the budget
4) France unloads all longer term Greek paper onto US and British hedge funds — which are now the sole significant private interests hold Greek sovereign paper
5) The quality of the ECB balance sheet is destroyed — which comes at the expense of every investing/ participating government.
6) Meaning that Spain and Italy have – – in this round-about way — have picked up the French burden. No wonder Rome and Madrid — not previously significant exporters to Athens — are more than freaked out.
Which freaking is occurring long distance between Rome, Madrid, and Berilin. (ECB HQ)
Merkel’s Germany HAS had big trading relations with both Spain and Italy — and she is loath to burn those bridges.
This drama is starting to imitate the dance marathons of the Great Depression.
They can’t write down the debts without appropriating money to pay the interest and principle to the bondholders of the stability funds that were created to buy the PIIG’s debt in the period of 2010-2012. There is a false perception (pushed by the Left, unsurprisingly) that none of the PIIG’s debt matters anymore because it isn’t held by private investors, but that isn’t really true- the private investors hold the bonds of the stability funds and those bonds are guaranteed by the the EU governments. Add to that the fact that the debts Greece and its banks owe to the ECB, will require the guarantors its solvency-the same EU countries- and you realize Greece does have some leverage.
I suspect that within a year, if Greece doesn’t come back into the fold, that EU apparatchiks will start floating the idea of a stability fund to bailout the present stability funds and the ECB. The goal will be to find a way to keep the payments off the budgets of the various EU members. Rinse and repeat.
Just speculating, but it’s possible the immense patience and willingness to keep Greece in the EU has as much to do with pride and keeping things together than common sense. The whole concept was developed to resemble the USA and compete economically as cooperating states, and the vision and idea of one big happy, prosperous, “we’re Europeans first, and French, German, etc second” is something they don’t want to give up.
And Maybe the EU grand wizards are banking on the idea taking root with the younger generations, and going bankrupt is no big deal if you’re all bankrupt.. Unity over prosperity. Or possibly they think it’s better to have a manageable welfare state on your Southern frontier than something worse. Who knows.
Or, they could just be idiots like our own politicians, who can’t cut spending because it’s unpopular, even if you’re so far in debt the number no longer has a word to describe it. A million trillion will be really hard to display in Times Square unless they use exponential notation, and given the math scores of most Americans, they’ll not understand it anyway.
From the Greek people’s perspective, I’m guessing they have the same group mentality as most Americans too, who don’t have any understanding of the debt being money we ALL owe. If WE ALL owe it, the shared nature of the debt reduces any fear or feeling of responsibility as opposed to everyone getting an individual bill to start paying off, or else.
Which makes me think that would be a good way to get Americans to wake up. Send everyone a bill for the national debt and a payment book, and if you miss payments, you lose your stuff, then your wages get garnished. That way, it might stop most people from voting to raise their own montly payment.
The EU is doing two things:
1) Expecting Greece to conform to a given set of economic principles. Those principles happen to make it impossible to pay back the debt.
2) Expecting Greece to pay off the debt.
The effect is economic conditions in Greece similar to the US great depression. Under these conditions, Greece is almost guaranteed to leave the Euro. But leaving the Euro is bad for the Europeans, and in the short term, bad for the Greeks as well.
So you have this situation. Staying in the Euro is a matter of desire and will. Leaving the Euro is a matter of math. Desire and will can kill math for a while, but eventually math will win, and Greece will leave.
If you want a scenario that doesn’t involve Greece leaving the Euro, it involves even greater Central Bank money printing and Euro area debt forgiveness for the Greeks. Under those conditions, math would be respected. The Germans will not submit to those conditions and Greece will leave.
Syriza came to power promising an end to austerity and remaining in the Euro. When the Germans would not go along, they had to choose which promise to drop. With the referendum, they essentially dropped the second “remaining in the Euro” promise.
Let’s take a moment to recall that it was Goldman Sachs who showed Greece how to cook the books to gain entry into the EU…for a small fee, of course.
They know that if Greece leaves then its going to be a rout of other countries, with probably the UK going next. The Greeks have shown the member states how to leave, either the member states let a country leave, or it will run up its debts till it gets kicked out. it doesn’t matter if this is what will happen to Greece or not, its just clear how to get out now…
The economic turmoil that began in 2009 and produced the eurozone crisis has awakened nationalist instincts that undermine pan-Europeanism…..The key difference in 2015, however, is that nations will choose to backpedal on integration – a first in EU history. –stratfor
starlord Says: The whole concept was developed to resemble the USA and compete economically as cooperating states, and the vision and idea of one big happy, prosperous, “we’re Europeans first, and French, German, etc second” is something they don’t want to give up.
given the economic malaise, the second half of that is true, the first half, not so much… if you looked to the people in the west who had to be sold on what dream it would be, that is the ad copy. if you looked deeper, its was just another marxist power grab to make a eu soviet union… which would function like the many countries under Chinese soviet rule, and the many countries under Russian Soviet rule.. want to guess what was and is in store for the US Canada etc… as they are erasing the borders and creating a similar Soviet bloc
It was first formulated in Rome in 1957
They are led by a soviet (council) in Brussels, but its been slow unifying them, and they still are not all unified. they were baited with prosperity, decades after the conception and design of it, and “nationalism” has prevented this as one among several reasons.
since the 1960s and the treaty, the states have played games back and forth depending on whats going on and who they thought would come out on top. DeGaul wanted the thing returned to a prior vision and started the “empty chair crisis.”
it was left alone for the most part till for 20 years until the 1980s when it woke up again. most people then, as i remember didn’t see the states as linked at all, they were still all those countries with different currencies.
it was as if they waited for the oldest generation to die out, so that the next more liberal one might act upon what the others would not.
the real deal that made it move was the fall of the berlin wall, and the “collapse” of the soviet union into a friendlier state with the same leaders, no one exiled or kicked out and the EU ready to come together as that big old bear threat was now gone… they decided lets go the one currency route, and so on and so on.
some accepted the new constitution, others didnt… so later on the Lisbon treaty which copied the constitution got things closer and closer. The Lisbon thing was a bit of dirty pool in that the countries elite ratified it without a vote as before. the idea was if the people voted for it, then all was good and the illusion of the peoples power would exist, but if they didnt, then the elites would ratify it, and who was really in control of the world became clear to those who pay attention
the EU went through the typical economic bomb that most academics make of an economy they have control over to constantly turn knobs to “fix” things… whether soviet with marxist rhetoric or without it and under another planned experiment.
Brussels is in control, the member states are forced to comply… the greece thing can be as simple as Brussels saying, it will be this way… but that wont happen since so many member states want to take back their selves and return to a more divided but personally positive way… more so given economics, poor growth, russias blackmail on gas and oil, multiculturalism’s extremism, etc
the goal was a soviet under a central head, like the supreme soviet over the leaders of the member countries in the soviet union.. NOT like the states in the US… or at least not like they were then.. not now.. the states and their powers and freedoms have been seriously curtailed since 1957…
When former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev visited Britain in 2000, he accurately described the European Union as “the new European Soviet.”
After the death of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union was briefly ruled by a group known as “the Troika”: Vyacheslav Molotov, Lavrentiy Beria, and Georgy Malenkov.
and here is the fun part (if you remember that a soviet in Russian is a council in english):
The question today is not democracy or dictatorship. The question that history has put on the agenda reads: bourgeois democracy or socialist democracy. For the dictatorship of the proletariat does not mean bombs, putsches, riots and anarchy, as the agents of capitalist profits deliberately and falsely claim. Rather, it means using all instruments of political power to achieve socialism, to expropriate the capitalist class, through and in accordance with the will of the revolutionary majority of the proletariat. – Spartacist Manifesto 1918
we forget the articles
The “New European Soviet”
Published on September 6, 2004, was written by noted Lithuanian-American journalist and author Vilius Brazenas for The New American.
they republished his article in 2010 when he died at 97 and said it was as relevant in 2010 as it was in 2004…
http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/8607-the-new-european-soviet
the situation with Greece is throwing a wrench into it, and THATS why they are dancing around trying to find something so that the Greeks don’t upturn and upend a a 57+ year project..
In their powerful expos, The Great Deception: The Secret History of the European Union (2003), British journalist Christopher Booker and Dr. Richard North, formerly a researcher inside the EU bureaucracy, aptly describe the EU as “a slow-motion coup d’tat: the most spectacular coup d’tat in history.”
i would say the most spectacular is similar to the usa
from the article: It is also my intent to show how the deceptive NAFTA-FTAA process is directly related to the EU and patterned after it to achieve the same kind of coup d’tat in the Americas.
so now you know what Obamas treaty is all about too..
and Greece is upsetting that apple cart too
the open borders and the branding of the dominant group that would be upset over that, and tying of their hands, and destruction of their families and all that is for the merger of the states in the Americas
The European Communities Act (1972), the Single European Act (1986), the Schengen Agreement (1990), the Maastricht Treaty (1992), the Amsterdam Treaty (1998), and the Treaty of Nice (2000) are some of the most important benchmarks that have transferred vast powers piecemeal to Brussels, where the EU is headquartered.
the same city that the Communist League did their stuff in.. (i suggest looking that one up on wiki!!!!!!!)
It was actually a multitude of lies. The EU founders and their successors have been carrying forward nothing less than a brazen scheme of treason dressed up as economic trade policy. And treason is not too harsh a word, for many of the key leaders of this operation are government officials who are betraying a sacred trust and have been lying outright to their constituents.
sound familiar?
The banksters have to back down, otherwise grexit will become spanxit, portxit, italxit. No one wants to sneeze least the house of cards collapeses. And, its not just the euro zone. Nippon has debts in excess of 250 percent of gdp. Everywhere you look debt bubbles are nearing the point of popping. 2 months or 2 years, once the flames of panic are fanned the wildfire will spread like….. well, wildfire.
A culture that priorities the needs of its current population against the future generations that will inherit, is a culture that deserves to be destroyed.
Whether it be a man made law or a natural law or even a divine law, doesn’t matter. If the enforcement mechanism is still active… and it is.
The whole house of cards will be the dike with the hole in it, and no Little Dutch Boy to plug it, so the hole gets larger and the dam goes down the river. It may seem like slow motion; it may be slow motion; but it will be faster than we expect.
Meanwhile:
http://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/chinese-chaos-worse-than-greece/story-fnu2pycd-1227430761673
The Chinese stock market crash has wiped TRILLIONS off the Chinese companies’ value, and I haven’t heard a word about this. Just saw a link at Ace’s place.
A snippet, from an Australian paper:
WHILE the world worries about Greece, there’s an even bigger problem closer to home: China.
A stock market crash there has seen $3.2 trillion wiped from the value of Chinese shares in just three weeks, triggering an emergency response from the government and warnings of “monstrous” public disorder.
– LATEST: CHINESE INVESTORS FLEE FOR SAFETY
And the effects for Australia could be serious, affecting our key commodity exports and sparking the beginning of a period of recession-like conditions.
“State-owned newspapers have used their strongest language yet, telling people ‘not to lose their minds’ and ‘not to bury themselves in horror and anxiety’. [Our] positive measures will take time to produce results,” writes IG Markets.
“If China does not find support today, the disorder could be monstrous.”
In an extraordinary move, the People’s Bank of China has begun lending money to investors to buy shares in the flailing market. The Wall Street Journal reports this “liquidity assistance” will be provided to the regulator-owned China Securities Finance Corp, which will lend the money to brokerages, which will in turn lend to investors.
The dramatic intervention marks the first time funds from the central bank have been directed anywhere other than the banks, signalling serious concern from authorities about the crisis.
At the same time, Chinese authorities are putting a halt to any new stock listings. The market regulator announced on Friday it would limit initial public offerings – which disrupt the rest of the market – in an attempt to curb plunging share prices.
While the exact amount of assistance hasn’t been revealed, the WSJ reports no upper limit has been set.
All short-selling – the practice of betting that stocks will fall – has been banned, and Chinese media has rushed to reassure citizens.
I can see by the postings here that most have never figured out that there is no such thing as a Euro.
The treaty they all signed permitted them — nay demanded them — to maintain separate currencies.
Not ONE of the old central banks has been disbanded. They are ALL still doing business EXACTLY the same way they did before unification.
The ONLY thing that’s been changed is the various values of each sovereign fiat currency: they’ve all been unified such that they trade 1:1 across all European borders — without limit.
The term for that is a RIGID EXCHANGE RATE REGIME.
Europe has had numerous such regimes in the past — usually centered on silver. (France’s favorite — England shifted over to gold in the 19th Century — but still uses the original name Pound Sterling. (as in Sterling Silver )
It has obviously not sunk in: the hyper-leverage within the European banking system means that it’s IMPOSSIBLE for the players to book this loss without suffering a crippling reduction in their assets — each player in turn.
Such an over night write down would trigger a wholesale contraction in the availability in commercial credit — and an IMMEDIATE constriction in the creation of new money — across all of Europe.
{The only power not seriously affected would be those dastardly British — with their independent banking system.}
The extremely obvious nature of this prompt contraction is being evidenced in the commodities markets. On balance, the number one item that drains Greek pockets is OIL.
Not too far behind is the Greek import of high tech stuff from medicine on over. (None of this is made inside Greece — doh!)
That this crisis is occurring directly ahead of the height of the summer vacation season… it’s like Jaws hitting the beaches!
You can bet your bottom Drachma that vacations to Greece are being cancelled like mad at this time.
Consequently, the Greeks are totally freaking out… the folks dependent upon the tourist trade, in particular.
Merkel & Co are juggling more knives in the air than they can handle. Soon, expect raining blades.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Tragedy-Euro-Philipp-Bagus/dp/1908089326
I was recommended this about a year ago as a short, general-public-friendly explanation of the problems with EMU.
Apparently you can read it for free at LvMI, too: https://mises.org/library/tragedy-euro
Vigil for Greece …
Then a wake.
Wake is reserved for a group of vultures that are feeding.
Anna Says:
July 8th, 2015 at 12:18 pm
Apparently you can read it for free at LvMI, too: https://mises.org/library/tragedy-euro
Also: When Money Dies
…I had driven with Uncle and Aunt to church at Linz. The nearer we approached the more crowded became the usually deserted high road. All kinds of odd-looking individuals met us. One man wearing three hats, one set on top of the other, and at least two coats, excited our amusement … We met people drawing carts piled high with tinned foods of every description … A man and a woman were seated in a ditch by the side of the road and, without the least embarrassment, were changing their very ragged garments for quite new ones. ‘Hurry up’, the woman shouted to us, ‘or there’ll be nothing left!’ We did not understand this remark until we passed the first plundered shops.
Peaceful Linz looked as if it had been visited by an earthquake. Furniture smashed beyond recognition littered the pavements. But not only provision shops, inns, cafes, and drapers’ shops had been looted. Jewellers and watchmakers, too, had been unable to defend their wares. We saw that the inn at which Uncle and Aunt usually stopped after Mass was completely devastated. The old innkeeper caught sight of us and hurried up, almost in tears. He could not open his inn because all the furniture had been smashed and all the provisions stolen; and he strongly advised my uncle to drive home, since the ringleaders of the mob were inciting their followers to ransack the neighbourhood …
My uncle urged on the horse … In the lane which winds to my uncle’s farm … we noticed a troop of about 80 or 100 men and and women. They were bawling and singing and driving in their midst a cart harnessed with a brown horse. Uncle exclaimed: ‘They’re driving away Hansl and our cart!’ Without another word he leapt to the ground, but could only advance slowly with his stiff leg across the field towards the road where he meant to intercept the troop … 107
A lorry load of gendarmes turned up at that moment. A few shots were fired, and the mob dispersed into the hills, the horse and cart left behind.
In the cart I saw three slaughtered pigs. In addition, some pieces of slaughtered cows and pigs and a few dead hens were lying in an untidy heap. ‘My God, my God’, wailed my aunt. ‘What will things be like at home?’ … Two gendarmes accompanied us in order to ascertain the damage. ‘If only they didn’t always destroy everything’, said one of them. ‘As for their being hungry, that’s not surprising’. We were prepared for the worst. The gates of the farmyard were wide open. There was not a sign of the servant girls. A pig seriously injured but still living was lying in its own blood in the yard. The other pigs had run out into the road. The cow-shed was drenched in blood. One cow had been slaughtered where it stood and the meat torn from its bones. The monsters had slit up the udder of the finest milch cow, so that she had to be put out of her misery immediately. In the granary the store of grain and fodder were in a state of wild confusion … a rag soaked with petrol was still smouldering to show what these beasts had intended. In the kitchen-living room of which my aunt was so proud not a thing had been left whole. Uncle estimates the damage at 100,000 peace kronen, and no insurance company will pay him any compensation for his loss.
The towns were starving. The countryside had had a bumper harvest, but there it remained because of the farmers’ steadfast refusal to take paper for it at any price. ….
The price of refusing to kill evil when you first see it, is obvious. But it’s something that requires long term wisdom and perception, not the short term pleasure seeking modes of children and corrupt adults.
Don’t forget that the EU knew that the books were cooked; there was a lot of looking the other way. They wanted Greece in the EU.
Milton Friedman, the Chicago-school economist gave the Euro ten years and noted that it’s fundamental flaw was in trying to create a common currency without first having a common political will. This just evinces the prescience of his remarks even though his timing may have been off.
Were Greece still on the drachma, the govt could devalue the currency and renegotiate its debts; none of this is possible because they “sold” their economic sovereignty to the EU for the promise of living in a welfare state supported by the industrious Northern European countries (Germany, mostly). Now the only course of action is to either total economic collapse or to have people (e.g., Germans, French) who had nothing to do with this pay for their prodigal socialism.
Now, just think of California . . . Illinois . . . New York . . . . As we become a more diametrically divided country (red economic states v blue economic states, Sherrif Joe Arpaio v Commissioner Brad Avakian, etc.) we are evolving as a mirror image of Greece. We have the common currency and we had the common political will of Americans. Now, after more that half a century under the influence of the “hate America” crowd, the common currency remains but the common political seems to lie almost in ruin.
If this keeps up, the end result will be the same.
*sheriff
Sorry.
Blert – your analysis is spot on in that the past 5 years has been about saving French banks and moving the exposure to Italy and Spain, two countries not previously exposed.
However I believe that Greece is actually running a primary budget surplus, not a deficit.
A budget surplus merely means the bureaucrats can buy more boys and girls from Cuba and other areas.
blert Says:
July 8th, 2015 at 2:58 am
—-> While You Were Sleeping:
On the day after a crash the most important question is: who gets the chair when the music stops? Ben Stell and Dinah Walker, writing in the Council of Foreign Relations blog explain how the French got the Italians and Spaniards to hold the bag through the simple device of turning French exposure in Greece into someone elses’, a process called “mutualization”…
… The French now have a chair. It is the Spaniards and Italians who will have to hop around some….
Mutualization ….hmmm
‘ex BelgiumPrime minister Guy Verhofstadt speaks his mind to Mister Tsipras in the EU parliament:
see video. (in English)
Amusing.
Folks, Greece was on the Drachma, is on the Drachma, and will be on the Drachma — the only thing changing is the fiat printed — its imagery.
What’s blowing up is its EXCHANGE RATE.
The critical take away is that the treaty terms in Black Letter Ink specified that each individual sovereign nation was the SOLE and ONLY backer of its “Euros” per se.
Way, way, way back — at the very founding of the Euro the Germans wanted each note to read:
German Euro
French Euro
Austrian Euro
Spanish Euro
etc.
PARIS nixxed that! It was PARIS that drove Berlin to accept using the exclusive term Euro for what are — in REALITY — separate currencies trading at a 1:1 exchange rate.
Most real trade is done digitally — electronically — and ALL of the central banks were never disbanded. They are STILL keeping track of which nation owes which.
Get it?
The fiat notes circulating in the street are actually not relevant. In our modern times, the BULK of all finance is done electronically. Currency notes are down to about 4% of all transactions.
{Italy is taking steps to entirely eliminate currency commerce all together. }
The BIG PROBLEM for the non-Greeks is that THEY’RE in the hot seat — as the convention is that their banks have to book 100% of the defaulted notes / currency positions as DEFAULTED — and for their reserve capital requirements — WORTHLESS.
When, and if, these positions can be liquidated into other instruments, then a ‘recovery’ can be booked. Any such recoveries look to be years into the future.
This impairment of their Tier 1 capital means that almost all of the players will be restricted WRT commercial bank lending.
Right now the primary victim is the hapless ECB which — via its slow rolling program — has picked up the garbage.
This is a multinational creature that will have to PROMPTLY turn around and demand that Rome, Madrid, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, et. al. PONY UP FRESH CAPITAL — PRONTO.
This emergency funding will be, must be, in the many billions of Euros — supplied by taxpayers far and wide.
Translation: total universal ‘dynamite’ underneath every sitting European government.
The only player that is not affected: Greece. It’ll have its own poison to swallow. ( Chopped up credit cards. )
All of this slow rolling drama is to delay the collapse of the Euro — and the European dream.
The commercial and financial interests that have been the biggest financial benefactors of the top politicians are deer in the headlamps at this time. They were making their gravy precisely because of the Euro and the Eurozone.
(Particularly in France, Germany, Austria and Holland.)
While Greece was France’s trading partner…
Spain and Portugal and Italy were the big counter-parties to Germany, Holland and Austria.
It’s been centuries, but look how these polities STILL line up as power blocs.
!!
There are a lot of insightful comments here. One facet of this to keep in mind:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/08/is-putin-playing-puppetmaster-in-greece.html
Tsipras has another sugar daddy on the side. And everyone knows it.
That’s why he looks so confident. And the others in the Eurozone don’t appear eager to pressure Greece too much. But the other PMs have to walk a tightrope, particularly Merkel, because she faces a popular revolt at home and her party may join it.
The Other Crisis Happening In Greece:
refugees run after food trucks.
Painful video.
A lot of these migrants end up on the island of Lesbos and as such become Lesbians. [Not that there is anything wrong with that.]
Why read fiction?
Why read satire?
G6loq…
I’ve posted on the titanic scale of economic refugees living in Greece many times before.
Thanks for the video clip.
Folks, their are COUNTLESS souls living in Greece that are OFF THE BOOKS.
Athens — and Brussels — do not want to admit that these dependants exist.
It’s the huge under-story to this Greek drama.