Diplomacy Rules

6 thoughts on “Diplomacy Rules”

1. So the colonels are the only realistic alternative to a “let’s rub their faces in it” austerity plan? That, I suppose, is cause for optimism.

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   1. Alternatively, Greeks can get their shit together, defeat corruption, conduct reform and forget all this like a nightmare.

      I’m sure that Spain will figure it out. As for Greece, I don’t have the same certainty. Although if Tsipras saw reason, all Greeks can.

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      1. Greece’s problem is not corruption (it’s a problem for sure but it’s not what got them in their current fix). If every Greek started scrupulously paying ever cent of their taxes and cut pensions to post-Soviet rates and cut state employees to almost nothing and reducecd military spending to next to nothing – they’d still be up shit creek with no prospects for improvement.

         Greece’s problem is that it was encouraged to lie to enter an unworkable economic voodoo plan and the architects don’t want any defectors because they don’t want to admit the scope of their mistake.

         All the data I can find point to there not being any workable way for Greece (or Spain or Portugal) to ever get out of its current state of debt without exiting the euro or very large debt foregiveness or changing the nature of the euro into a true currency union.

         Saying that the current Greek crisis is due to ‘corruption’ is like saying that the economic problems of the USSR were due to insufficient commitment to socialism.

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         1. Well, let them cut the government apparatus and end corruption first and then we’ll see if it works or not. It’s got to be done either way because paying state employees to wash their hands or rewarding them with cash prizes for showing up to work on time or giving them clothes allowances is not good no matter what. If those 36 billion that Greece borrowed had gone into building and creating and not these pathetic handouts that pervert the populace, we’d be seeing a very different Greece today.

            In Spain, the EU plan absolutely would have succeeded if the money hadn’t been frittered on opera houses nobody visits, airports that fly no plane, princesses whose trashy husbands steal like crazy, trains that go nowhere, housing developments that destroyed the landscape and housed Russian bandits by the hundred, etc, etc.

            Of course, now the population that has learned to sit on their asses and wait for handouts balks at doing things differently. But there is no choice. It’s time to learn to come to work on time and wash hands without demanding an extra payment for it.

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         2. Greece’s problem is that it was encouraged to lie to enter an unworkable economic voodoo plan and the architects don’t want any defectors because they don’t want to admit the scope of their mistake

            Have you seen this?

            HL: You’ve said creditors objected to you because “I try and talk economics in the Eurogroup, which nobody does.” What happened when you did?

            Y[anis]V[aroufakis]: It’s not that it didn’t go down well – it’s that there was point blank refusal to engage in economic arguments. Point blank. … You put forward an argument that you’ve really worked on – to make sure it’s logically coherent – and you’re just faced with blank stares. It is as if you haven’t spoken. What you say is independent of what they say. You might as well have sung the Swedish national anthem – you’d have got the same reply. And that’s startling, for somebody who’s used to academic debate. … The other side always engages. Well there was no engagement at all. It was not even annoyance, it was as if one had not spoken.

            Diplomacy rules, indeed.

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            1. A first-person narrator, though. 🙂 Especially in a conflictive situation.

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