Financial Crisis in Greece

[JJAskiz]

Originally Posted by Benito

2 days ago you said the Serbs will help Macedonia and now they are 2 faced c*nts... Straingh. Anyway, not so much Albanians you mentioned in a earlier post? Are you kidding me? I saw thousands of them in the north of the city, and from the car on my way back home i counted atleast 8 minarets only in the north of the city (and for sure i missed a few).

I said "The Serbs would help Macedonians and Macedonia out to take out the Shiptari minority out of Macedonia but when they are done doing that then they will go back and be allies with their so called " Orthodox brothers" the Turko-Albanian Greek Gypsies and the Former Turko-Albanian Undemocratic Republic Of Greece (Hell Ass), The Serbs are two faced because one minute they are with the Macedonians and Republic Of Macedonia and then the next minute the Serbs are with the Turko-Albanian Greek Gypsies and the Former Turko-Albanian Undemocratic Republic Of Greece (Hell Ass) against Macedonians and Republic Of Macedonia".

[JJAskiz]

Shiptari.ge S.;162104]That's a good point Askizz.Whilst we are very critical of whats going on what alternatives is there??Macedonia seems to accept second best.There are sellout merchants like zaef and others.

The only solution is start a war with the Shiptari minority again and either kick them out of our country or ethically cleanse them (Kill them). We kicked their asses in 2001 before they cried to USA to save them and start the 2001 Ohrid Agreement/Peace Treaty with us to stop the war with us and stop them and we can kick their Shiptare asses again.

And as for Zaev and the other corrupt politicians too, we take them out too with the Shiptari.

We keep Gruevski in charge and find better, non corrupt politicians to make new political parties in Republic Of Macedonia.

[Phoenix]

Originally Posted by JJAskiz

The only solution is start a war with the Shiptari minority again and either kick them out of our country or ethically cleanse them (Kill them). We kicked their asses in 2001 before they cried to USA to save them and start the 2001 Ohrid Agreement/Peace Treaty with us to stop the war with us and stop them and we can kick their Shiptare asses again.

And as for Zaev and the other corrupt politicians too, we take them out too with the Shiptari.

We keep Gruevski in charge and find better, non corrupt politicians to make new political parties in Republic Of Macedonia.

Why would you keep Gruevski and where do we find better politicians...you don't have to look beyond the current Australian political crop to understand that good political parties and politicians don't exactly grow on trees. Most nations are burdened by politicians of the low hanging fruit variety...
Stop with all the war threats, you sound like you've just come off a marathon 'Call of Duty' and ice session on your Playstation

[George S.]

They have been playing rome total warand smoking the whacky tabaki.Who is left as a politician?None the wiser.

[JJAskiz]

Originally Posted by Phoenix

Why would you keep Gruevski and where do we find better politicians...you don't have to look beyond the current Australian political crop to understand that good political parties and politicians don't exactly grow on trees. Most nations are burdened by politicians of the low hanging fruit variety...
Stop with all the war threats, you sound like you've just come off a marathon 'Call of Duty' and ice session on your Playstation

A war with the Macedonians and the Shiptare minority in Republic Of Macedonia will happen again whether you like it or not, it's enevidable.

Who would you rather have as prime minister of Republic Of Macedonia if not Nikola Gruevski?, The sell out and traitor Zaev? I would rather have Nikola Gruevski in charge and have as prime minister of Republic Of Macedonia then the sell out and traitor Zaev.

And our government have to find good politicians in our country and get more people in our country in to politics again because no one cares about politics in our country that much anymore and that is how our government will find good politicians in our country.

And i don't play Call Of Duty or much computer games that much anymore besides Grand Theft Auto on my mobile phone and Counter-Strike 1.6 when i am at college or when i am at the internet cafe when i am bored. Mostly i just argue politics with people online more these days then play games.

[George S.]

Europe’s deep structural flaws on full display
TIMOTHY GARTON ASH
Special to The Globe and Mail
Thursday, Jul. 09, 2015

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe...ticle25399965/

Timothy Garton Ash is professor of European studies at Oxford University, where he leads the freespeechdebate.com project, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His latest book is Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name.

Whom the gods will destroy they first make bored. We have seen so many “last chance” euro-zone summits about Greece that many Europeans have almost succumbed to narcolepsy. We doze in the passenger seat even as the car goes over the cliff. But this is it. If the EU heads of government don’t find a way forward at their emergency summit on Sunday, then on Monday a 70-year-old project of European integration may start to unravel. If you think it’s just the future of Greece that is at stake, think again.

The trouble is that the euro zone’s recurrent failure to do anything but kick the can down the road is not merely the result of flawed policies and weak leadership. There have been plenty of those, on all sides, including the Greek government, the German government and European and international institutions. But the causes lie much deeper, in structural weaknesses of the European project that go back decades. Most of the politicians responsible for those weaknesses are dead or in their anecdotage. In many ways, today’s leaders are trapped in the dysfunctional logic of institutions that their predecessors created. It will take the most extraordinary leap of courage and imagination for them to go beyond it.

If you ask who are the two people most responsible for the euro-zone crisis, of which Greece is just the most extreme manifestation, I would say former French president François Mitterrand and long-time Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti. Those two old foxes were the key players who, immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, pinned the West German chancellor Helmut Kohl down to a timetable for European monetary union in return for their own grudging support for German unification – but then would not accept the fiscal union needed to make it work. “Recent history, not only in Germany,” said the historically informed statesman Mr. Kohl, “teaches us that it is absurd to expect in the long run that you can maintain economic and monetary union without political union.” How right he was.

This was only one of several original sins of the euro zone. While France and Italy demanded the commitment, Germany wrote most of the rules – and they were German rules, obsessed by countering inflation and crafted for the macroeconomic circumstances of a different time. Because this was above all a political project, and France and Italy had by definition to be in from the outset, there was a kind of reverse domino effect. If Italy had to be in, then surely Spain; if Spain, then surely Portugal; and so all the way to Greece, a profoundly unmodernized state, which should never have entered a monetary union that should itself not have been allowed to proceed – even within a smaller group of more compatible economies – until the original design flaws had been addressed.

Now old king Kohl hoped that, as so many times before in post-1945 Europe, this economic integration would eventually catalyze the necessary political one. But so far it has not happened that way. As personal memories of war, occupation and dictatorship have faded, national publics across the continent – not least in Germany itself – have become more pragmatic, skeptical or downright disillusioned about the European project.

The solution proposed for the EU’s so-called democratic deficit, namely to give more power to a directly elected European Parliament, and then to have the top candidate for European commission president nominated by the main party groupings in that Parliament, simply has not done the trick. Many times over recent months I have asked audiences consisting mainly of people who did actually vote in elections to the European Parliament whether they had consciously been voting for one of the Spitzenkandidaten. Hardly anybody says yes. Theory is one thing, practice another. So whatever you think of Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s behaviour, it is nonsense to pretend that Jean-Claude Juncker somehow enjoys a broader European democratic legitimacy in confronting him.

The reality of European democracy remains national, and behind that truth is an even deeper fact: There is hardly any more of a European public sphere today than there was when I first started studying and travelling in Europe 40 years ago. There is a thin layer of publications, now online as well as in print, which reach a small, educated audience across the continent, but most people in Europe still get most of their news and views from national media. This is true even when there is a shared language. In Vienna recently, I was told how much the Austrian coverage of Greece differs in tone from that in Germany.

So there is not just one Greece, but 28 different ones, according to the country you are in. The Estonian and Latvian “Greece” would barely be recognizable to Italians, let alone to Greeks. Equally, there is not just one Germany but 28 – and few Germans would recognize their own country in the Greek newspapers’ “Germany.” These drastically contrasting narratives are fed by national politicians, who emerge from every Brussels summit to trumpet their own successes and blame any concessions on other governments and nasty European institutions. The Belgian foreign minister rather amusingly says that he is the only one who can’t blame it on “Brussels” (because that is also the seat of his own government).

“Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages,” wrote John Stuart Mill, “the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist.” Europe has yet to prove him wrong. I have been in six European countries over the last six weeks, and the lack of fellow-feeling between them has been painful to observe.

There’s a cliché about “democracy versus technocracy.” Unfortunately, the truth is even worse, for in the euro zone we have the worst of both worlds. Institutions such as the European Commission and the IMF do have some of the flaws (as well as the virtues) of technocracy, including a tendency to stick to unrealistic, one-size-fits-all economic orthodoxies. But when it comes to European leaders, then it is a case of democracy versus democracy. Immediately after last Sunday’s “no” vote in Greece, Mr. Tsipras celebrated “the victory of democracy” – Thermopylae replayed as agitprop. Yet, though German Chancellor Angela Merkel may not be directly descended from Pericles, she is every bit as much a democratic leader as Mr. Tsipras, and equally subject to the constraints of national interest and (often more important) national emotions.

So the 28 national leaders who gather in Brussels on Sunday, together with the heads of European institutions, will not merely have to leap over their own shadows. They will have to surmount giant structural obstacles that their predecessors created, at once going beyond the orthodoxies of technocracy and somehow negotiating a way to reconcile the legitimate imperatives of 28 different national democracies. If they fail, not just Greece but the whole European project will be plunged into still deeper crisis. Will that existential crisis then finally be seized as kairos, the opportunity for decisive action? As a European, I hope it; as an analyst, I doubt it.

[George S.]

Juncker: EU will not keep Greece in the euro at all costs
By Mehreen Khan
09 Sep 2015

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/e...all-costs.html

European Commission president urges new Greek government to stick to its bail-out terms as 'the bell tolls' for crisis-hit continent

Jean Claude-Juncker has warned that Greece's third government in four years will have no flexibility over its new €86bn bail-out plan and could still face the prospect of a disorderly exit from the eurozone.

Addressing parliamentarians in his annual "State of the Union" speech in Strasbourg, Mr Juncker defended his personal role during seven months of crisis talks with Athens but said any new government would have to fully abide by the punishing conditions laid out by its creditors.

"It was important that [the Greeks] understood that they would not be saved at any cost," he said of the third bail-out agreement, reached in July.

"I want the programme to be respected by all future Greek governments. We are serious and for real. We need respect for arrangements that have been reached."

Greece faces its second general election in just nine months on September 20 after prime minister Alexis Tsipras capitulated to the country's lenders and lost majority backing from his Syriza party.

The latest polls suggest there will be no clear winner after the incumbent Leftists lost a 15-point lead to centre-right opposition party, New Democracy in just six weeks.

In a 90-minute address, which was peppered by heckles from Ukip's Nigel Farage and was halted after an Italian MEP was ordered to remove a face mask of Angela Merkel, Mr Juncker said Europe could not continue in its "business as usual" fashion in the face of a refugee crisis and a stagnant economy.

"We have got to be frank: the bell tolls. Our European Union it is not in a good situation. There is a lack of Europe in the European Union, and lack of union in the EU."

The former Luxembourg president said he was "perturbed" by the prospect of Greece leaving the single currency but defended the final deal to raise taxes, overhaul the economy, and privatise €50bn of national assets, as socially fair.

He also justified his personal intervention in Greece's crisis talks, hitting back at criticism that the Commission had become too politicised under his reign.

"I was not a magician, I did not have a magic wand, and cannot pull rabbit out of a hat," said an impassioned Mr Juncker.

"It is not a technical question whether you increase VAT not only on restaurants, but also on processed food. It is a political and social question."

More Europe for EMU

Mr Juncker's Commission has spearheaded plans to deepen economic and monetary union and will push ahead with plans to create a common eurozone treasury. The move has been supported by France as the first step towards a full-blown fiscal union.

The treasury would be based on the European Stability Mechanism, which currently acts as the bloc's joint rescue fund and is being deployed to bail-out Greece for the third time in five years.

However, Brussels will not yet move towards pooling member-state debts - a quantum leap towards an "EU superstate" that has been repeatedly rejected by Germany, said Mr Juncker.

"I no longer want our recommendations for the economic orientation of the euro area as a whole to be empty words. I want them to provide real orientation, notably on the fiscal stance of the euro area".

"It is essential that @Europarl_EN has a stronger role in Economic & Monetary Union" @JunckerEU #SOTEU #deepeningEMU pic.twitter.com/G8R9GKPwlM
— European Commission (@EU_Commission) September 9, 2015
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[DedoAleko]

N. Kotzias: Imaginary Professor at Oxford University, Harvard, Marburg…



We have forwarded the following communiqué to the President of the European Council Mr. Donald Tusk, the President of the European Commission Mr. Jean-Claude Juncker, the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Ms. Federica Mogherini, the Secretary of State of the US Mr. John Kerry and the 27 Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the member-states of the EU. We attached the responses from the University of Oxford, Harvard University and the University of Marburg. They refute the claim made by the Greek Minister of Foreign Affairs, that he supposedly has been a Professor at all of these universities. The communiqué was mailed on November 9th, the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

***

Honorable Minister,

I am editor of the periodical publication The Athens Review of Books and I am writing this letter because I would like to bring to your attention that the current Greek Foreign Minister Mr N. Kotzias is an imaginary Professor at three renowned universities. In particular N. Kotzias claims that

«(…) I was elected Associate Professor in that University [of Marburg]. (…) Among other things, in the summer of 2001, due to the position of Professor I held at Oxford University in the UK before my appointment at Harvard University in the US (…)»

The Athens Review of Books decided to investigate Mr Kotzias’ claims which appear in official documents by contacting the universities of Oxford, Harvard and Marburg. The replies we received confirmed that Mr Kotzias has never been Professor at Oxford and Harvard universities, and has never been elected Associate Professor in Marburg (the title of Associate Professor [C3-Professor] does not even exist in German universities).

I am attaching these replies to my letter as evidence to the truth of my assertions. Mr Kotzias shows great talent and ease in manufacturing lies, in fact this is his area of expertise as head of propaganda of the Stalinist Communist Party of Greece.

Yours faithfully,



Maria Vasilaki
Publisher of the Athens Review of Books

izvor: http://athensreviewofbooks.com/?p=1944

[Philosopher]

Greek economic woes are becoming even worse, a new study suggests, as young Greek women are selling sex for the price of a sandwich.

Young Greek women are selling sex for the price of a sandwich as six years of painful austerity have pushed the European country to the financial brink, a new study showed Friday.

The study, which compiled data on more than 17,000 sex workers operating in Greece, found that Greek women now dominate the country’s prostitution industry, replacing Eastern European women, and that the sex on sale in Greece is some of the cheapest on offer in Europe.

Apparently, the nebulous and ill-defined Eastern European women are no longer the dominant group, having been replaced by another crypto Eastern European women known as Greeks.

“Some women just do it for a cheese pie, or a sandwich they need to eat because they are hungry,” Gregory Laxos, a sociology professor at the Panteion University in Athens, told the London Times newspaper. “Others [do it] to pay taxes, bills, for urgent expenses or a quick [drug] fix,” said Laxos, who conducted the three-year study.

When the economic crisis began in Greece, the going rate for sex with a prostitute was 50 euros ($53), the London newspaper quoted Laxos as saying. Now, it’s fallen to as low as two euros ($2.12) for a 30-minute session.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...pm_world_pop_b

A terrible tragedy in a Orthodox country.

I fear it is only going to become worse in the Balkans.

[Amphipolis]

This story has caused huge laughter in Greece and the “sandwich thing” is the latest joke. (Un)fortunately, this isn't true; and Prof. Lazos denied today he has written something like that.

As far as I have heard the lowest prices (in Athens) can drop to 5Euros/fuck for illegal African streetwalkers (for a similar cast of clients). All street walkers are illegal and their price could start from around 30-50E/fuck, these are also the lowest (not the average) prices in legal or illegal brothels or studios. It’s hard to find Greek girls in these categories (probably less than 10%).

Greek girls are usually (also illegal) call girls with prices that would start from 100-150E/visit. One does not have to go to the jungle to find these numbers as there are forums in Greece discussing and rating prostitutes (just as IMDB discusses and rates movies).


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