Haven't seen this one in circulation yet:

Dear Chancellor Merkel,

The never-ending austerity that Europe is force-feeding the Greek people is simply not working. Now Greece has loudly said no more.

As most of the world knew it would, austerity has crushed the Greek economy, led to mass unemployment, a collapse of the banking system, made the external debt crisis far worse, with the debt problem escalating to an unpayable 175% of GDP. The economy now lies broken with tax receipts nose-diving, output and employment depressed, and businesses starved of capital.

The humanitarian impact has been colossal – 40% of children now live in poverty, infant mortality is sky-rocketing and youth unemployment is close to 50%. Corruption, tax evasion and bad accounting by previous Greek governments helped create the debt problem. But the series of so-called adjustment programs has served only to make a Great Depression the likes of which have been unseen in Europe since 1929-1933. The medicine prescribed by the German Finance Ministry and Brussels has bled the patient, not cured the disease.

Together we urge you to lead Europe to a course correction before it is too late for Greece and for the Eurozone. Right now, the Greek government is being asked to put a gun to its head and pull the trigger. Sadly, the bullet will not only kill off Greece’s future in Europe. The collateral damage will kill the Eurozone as a beacon of hope, prosperity, and democracy, and could lead to far-reaching economic consequences across the world.

In the 1950s Europe was founded on the forgiveness of past debts, notably Germany’s, which generated a massive contribution to post-war economic growth, peace, and democracy. Today we need to restructure and reduce Greek debt, give the economy breathing room to recover, and allow Greece to pay off a reduced burden of debt over a long period of time. Now is the time for a humane rethink of the punitive and failed programme of austerity of recent years and to agree to a major reduction of Greece’s debts in conjunction with much needed reforms in Greece.

We urge you to take this vital action of leadership for Greece and Germany, and also for the world. History will remember you for your actions this week. We expect and count on you to provide the bold and generous steps towards Greece that will serve Europe for generations to come.

Yours sincerely,

Heiner Flassbeck, former State Secretary in the German Federal Ministry of Finance;

Thomas Piketty, Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics;

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development, Professor of Health Policy and Management, and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University;

Dani Rodrik, Albert O. Hirschman Professor of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton;

Simon Wren-Lewis, Professor of economics, Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University

Thanks radx for bringing that up, and so astutely too.

I wasn't happy with a lot of the language in the video, especially surrounding the cultures of Germany and Greece. To me those parts sound like someone with a burning private agenda who just wouldn't be able to sleep at night without somehow painting Greek people as the problem and German people as doing the right thing. He tried to appear impartial, but it didn't come off that way to me. That statement sounded like it was full of moral assumptions, and I'm not surprised there's a strong counterargument to it.

Greek/Euro Crisis Explained has been added as a related post - related requested by messenger on that post.

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όχι, bitches!

Or as a cartoon, if you prefer.

Edit: With all the nasty fearmongering by the Greek private media and the corrupt elite, it takes balls of steel to basically tell them to fuck off. The Greek economy is fucked³, politicians from the entire Eurozone were arguing for, even demanding the Syriza government to step down, so they can resume business as usual with either the old nepotic elite or freshly installed technocrats. Piss off, the demos replied.

The result itself doesn't matter that much. The process itself, like the Scottish referendum, might have set into motion a development that cannot be stopped nor undone.

Edit #2: the vitriol and pure hatred from the conservatives and many social-democrats is despicable. What champions of democracy they are. Tsipras and Varoufakis should channel their inner FDR and welcome their hatred.

Thanks for the link, you have my upvote if you would like to post it.

Really he can't say that any Greek bank is insolvent, such a statement would become self fulfilling prophesy.

As for the rest, like you say, it's hard to read.

Schäuble has been quoted by the English Language press as saying that “It is clear that we will not leave the [Greek] people in the lurch.”, but it's possible that there was something lost in translation, and anyway it wasn't obvious what he meant by that. http://gu.com/p/4acjq/stw

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I think its the worst kind of irony that this shared currency, this symbol of a unified Europe, has really only served to bring cultural and economic disparity into the light. Already I hear people saying, "the Greeks had it coming". "They're lazy.". "They don't work." etc etc as if a whole country could be so completely full of moochers and layabouts that it is on the verge of collapse. So we'll go back to eating each other like cannibals. Wonderful.

Let's ignore for the moment what led to this current mess within the Eurozone. You point out, correctly, that Greece is too poor to service its debt. And yes, for the German government to do whatever is required to get back their loans is to be expected. However, Greece was incapable of servicing its debt five years ago. Yet the subsequent programs, all supported or even demanded by the German government, reduced Greece's ability to pay back at least portions of its debt. At the end of the day, goods and services are what it's all about. And by dismantling the Greek economy, nevermind the Greek society, they actively undermined what they publicly claimed to be working for: a self-reliant Greek economy, capable of financing the needs of Greece. And capable of paying back what is owed.

The question inescapably poses itself: was it done intentionally or are they blinded by ideology?

One doesn't have to be as far left as I am to see that it didn't work, doesn't work, and never could have worked. Even the likes of Krugman and Stiglitz are perfectly clear about it.

Varoufakis, as you note, has been just as clear about this at least since late 2010, when he published the first draft of his Modest Proposal with Stuart Holland. There was a very good discussion about it in Austin in 10/2013 under the topic "Can the Eurozone be saved?" Participants included Varoufakis, Tsipras, Flassbeck, Holland and Galbraith, amongst others. I submitted a short clip back then.

His argument that Germany won't see a dime when Greece is shoved off a cliff, as correct as it is, never had any bite to begin with. The German government, and large parts of parliament, are operating in a parallel universe, economically. Over here, mercantilism is the road to success. Monetarism works. Surplus good, deficit bad. Saving good, spending bad. Everyone should have a current account surplus.

It's horseshit by the gallons, and it's the official economic policy of the largest economy in the EU.

And we're not even getting into the political aspects of it. Throwing a member of the EU into debt bondage, suspending its democracy to please the gods of the market... that's a travesty and a half. Yet it's also inevitable if they insist on going down the road of neoliberalism.

Worst of all, Greece is just the canary in the coal mine, as Varoufakis likes to point out. Greece had plenty of issues before they joined the EZ, but when they chose to adapt the same currency as a much larger economy hell bent on competitiveness, which is the favorite euphemism for Germany's beggar-thy-neighbour policies, they were doomed to be crushed. The rest of the PIIGS are next in line, unless this whole mess explodes beforehand. Maybe Rajoy's Franco-esque repression techniques fail, maybe le Pen wins in 2017, who knows. Maybe Schäuble finds the 100k of bribes that he conveniently forgot about back in the '90s and chokes on them.

Last but not least, 208 billion Euros – that's the projected current account surplus of Germany this year. That's 208 billion Euros of debt foreign economies have to accumulate, so that the German public and private sector can run a combined surplus of €208b. That's the elephant in the room. Systematic undercutting of the inflation target through suppression of unit labour costs and a dysfunctional focus on exports.

I think to be more fair to Germany, the way I see it isn't that German's are complaining about their own benefits being poor by comparison. I don't even see it as German's complaining that Greece's was too rich by comparison. Your point of Greek spending it's money as it wishes stands.

I think the very legitimate side for Germany is that if Greece wanted to borrow German money for those benefits that Germany would like to see that money someday paid back. More over, if Greece is now too poor to pay that money back and is asking for even more loans to scrape by, Germany isn't exactly an ogre in demanding some spending/taxation changes from Greece first so there is some hope at least the new loans will be paid back.

Greece's current finance minister doesn't even seem to deny much of this. Rather in accepting it, he points out that in spite of these debt obligations from the past, if Greece is forced to abide by them, the resulting collapse of Greece will similarly do nothing to help pay back the debts that are outstanding. Basically that Germany and other creditors are going to take the loss regardless, and maybe it's in everyone's best interests to find a road where Greece doesn't become a failed state.

Greece accumulated debt in a foreign currency (Euro). Had they been using a free-floating currency with Greece as the sovereign issuer, it would have been much less of a problem. But that's a different discussion.

You brought up retirement benefits. These benefits have been a major talking point over here in mercantilistic Germany. Unfortunatly, a lot of inaccuracies crept into the debate over time. A closer look reveals that it's not as black and white as it is made out to be. One point at a time...

The effective retirement age, if we look at OECD stats, is basically the same for men in Greece and Germany. The age of 56 is often thrown around as the expected average retirement age for workers in Greece, but that's only for the totally messed up public sector. The average for the private sector is significantly higher, as the OECD numbers indicate.

Yet the size of retirement benefits is even more controversial. There are, in fact, some very dubious practices going on in Greece, which result in rediculous retirement benefits for a select group of people, even at very young ages. Decades of nepotism, that's what it produces. But even so, pension expenditure as a % of GDP was not significantly higher in Greece before the GFC than in Germany. When Greek GDP collapsed, expenditures as a % increased, naturally. Some have gotten absurd benefits, but the majority got a pittance. And as if that wasn't bad enough, Greece doesn't have a social safety net, unlike Germany. There is no welfare. Many people have to take early retirement at reduced benefits to have any income at all.
So I'll say it's bad in Germany. Last decade's changes to our retirement system have a metric fuckton of people (~40% of workers) heading straight into poverty when they retire. It's social security for them, and nothing else. Still, it's bliss compared to what the plebs in Greece now ended up with.

However, even all those beautiful OECD stats have to be taken with a grain of salt. Germany has a working bureaucracy. Everything is documented. Greece is a mess. Therefore, all comparisons are guesstimates at best.

Finally, as long as the Greek economy produces enough goods and services, it is for them to decide how to distribute their wealth. If they want a lavish retirement system, so be it. Our governments opted to create a true underclass of the working poor, and gutted a retirement system that made it through two world wars unscathed. If German retirees want to bitch about their benefits, it should be aimed squarely at our governments and their intentional deconstruction of our social welfare state.

So, Greece borrowed more money than they could pay off and had a bad economy.

Part of the problem is with something like the united states sharing a dollar is that spending on social programs and taxation are still centrally determined. Setting up the same assistance for the poor and retirees across the states is a given. In the Eurozone though, Greeks were retiring earlier and with better benefits than the Germans, for a long time too. It is kind of hard to blame Germany for being reluctant to keep lending money to Greece when Germans are working till much older and getting much less in return.

Damnit, I had written a long response addressing your points, but it got lost somehow and I can't be bothered typing it all out again.

Basically, your arguments are all either irrelevant or wrong.
Definition of monogamy? Widely accepted as one partner at a time, not one partner for life.
Romans / Greeks? Irrelevant, paranoid, and wrong. (They had good and bad stuff).
Circumcision? Irrelevant.
Polygamy is learned? I never said that.
Monogamy is inconvenient for "damn near everyone"? Patently false. Also irrelevant... what does the convenience or otherwise of monogamy have to do with anything?

The Australian media have been pretty much ignoring the Greece crisis, except for a few brief summaries in the business news, but this week they've suddenly woken up to it. The stories have been Greek families bringing their relatives here during the uncertainty, but also some like this Bloomberg one critical of the EU:

http://m.theage.com.au/world/the-only-reason-the-eu-would-force-greece-to-leave-the-euro-is-to-punish-it-20150701-gi2zfc.html

If we take for granted the need for cost cutting, it would be only logical, if not an outright neccessity in a democracy, to leave the details up to the local representatives. Payment of X Euros expected by mm/dd/yy, figure it out yourselves.

Why do it any other way?

Well, you know the three most discussed possibilities as well as I do: shock doctrine, an attempt to force Syriza to commit political suicide, and bureaucratic automatisms.

During the first stages of this facade, I would have put my money square on shock doctrine. The measures are just too damn beneficial to the "there is no society" kind of thinking. It's horseshit, economically, and tremendously damaging, socially.

Replacing Syriza with the Old Guard seems quite appealing, given the behind-the-scenes deals with the nepotistic elite as a means to facilitate a smoother transitition once those pesky commies are out of the picture. The vitriol against Varoufakis is just staggering in this regard. News of the World got nothing compared to what our respectable media has hurled at Varoufakis and Tsipras.

My take on the automatisms on the other hand is rooted in how our politicians and our public has been arguing this entire time. Neoliberalism is the gospel, dissent is heresy. Privatisation is good, cutting wages is good, flexible labour market is good, taxation of wealth is bad, deficit is bad, surplus is good. They drank the kool aid, they are in it hook, line and sinker.

And as a result, the diagnosis is always the same, and so is the treatment. And fuck me for using this ass of a metaphor, given how the language used is the most subtle means of manipulation. "Rescue" the Greeks, "drowning" in debt, "tighten your belt". How about: food only on five days a week, grandma gets to croak on diabetes and your baby boy dies of diphtheria.

Yes, I had a fucked up day. The discussion in parliament about the "Greek problem" was a disgrace and high treason of the humanistic ideas that are supposed to be the foundation of the European Union.