Your video, Spectacular landing at Frankfurt Airport, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Thinking of you. Miss your bon mots and perfect English.

My cousin just helped an ailing former POW from WWII write his memoirs. I thought of you when he told of crossing a bridge with a huge unexploded bomb wedged into it.

She did some research to pad out his few memories, and added a story about unexploded ordinance being found in... Frankfurt? During construction?

I can't remember the details, but I do know that when it first happened you sent me a link to the discovery of the bomb.

Hope all is well.

You would not believe how much attention the media over here spend on his appearance and overall attitude. Shaves his head, doesn't tug his shirt in, doesn't wear a tie, drives a motorcycle... a rockstar by every measure.

There were regular forecasts that the chicken would come home to roost for him any day now; that the public would recognise his responsibility in their suffering and that they would turn against them.

And every single time, the public cheered him on even more. The press couldn't understand it at all. What a glorious fella he is, throwing the entire establishment out of balance like this. Maybe someone should project his face onto the ECB monstrocity in Frankfurt at night, just to rub it in.

Anyways, I don't have a clue why he resigned. There are several rumours, but beyond that, nothing solid.

As for the comments: they are my way of processing my rage. Doesn't work particularly well though, I'm still pissed off. But it's nice to hear that it provides a different perspective for some folks.

"Now it is true that the price of white people is expensive..."

Pah! You can get white folks for a pittance in Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Greece. If you pay up front, our masters in Frankfurt and the City might even offer you a bulk discount...

Wall of text incoming. Again.

Sorry. Again.

tl;dr:

Debt relief right away was proposed, was neccessary, and was skipped to protect the European financial system.



You are 100% correct, we both are as convinced as one can be that a disorderly collapse would have been much worse for Greece. Might have turned it into a failed state, if things went really bad.

But the situation in Greece at the time the Troika got involved suggested a textbook approach would work just fine. Greece was insolvent, no two ways about it. A debt restructuring, including a haircut, was required to stabilise the system. Yet it was decided against it, thereby creating an enormous debt bubble that keeps growing to this day, destabilising everything.

Why?

People in Brussels, Frankfurt and Berlin knew in May of 2010 that Greece cannot service its current debt, nevermind pay it back. I remember rather vividly how it was presented to us, as it stirred up a lot of dust in Germany. They pretended as if the problem was a shortage of liquidity, even though they knew it was in fact an insolvency. And to provide an insolvent nation with the largest credit in history (€110-130b) is... well, we can all pick our favorite in accordance to our own bias: madness, idiocy, incompetence, a mistake, intent. They threw Greece into permanent indebtedness(?), and also played one people against another. People in Germany were pissed, still are. Not at the decision makers, but the Greek people.

Again, why?

Every European government, pre-crisis, drank the Cool Aid of deregulation, particularly with regards to the financial sector. When the crisis hit, they had to bail out the banks, a very unpopular decision in Germany, given the scandalous way it was done (different story). Like I pointed out before, when Greece was done for, German banks were on the hook for €17b+, and the French for €20b+. So no haircut for Greek debt.

It gets even better. The entity most experienced in these matters is, of course, the IMF. But IMF couldn't get involved. Its own regulations demand debt to be sustainable for it to become involved in any debt restructuring. Strauss-Kahn had the rules changed in a very hush-hush manner (hidden in a 146 page document) to allow the IMF to lend vast sums to Greece, even though they knew it would not be payed back. Former EC members are on record saying the Strauss-Kahn decided to protect French banks this way as a part of his race for President in France. So they changed IMF rules and ignored European law to bail out German and French banks, using the insolvent Greek government as a proxy.

Several members of the IMF's board were in open opposition. The representatives of India, Russia, Brazil and Switzerland are on record, saying this would merely replace private with public financing, that it would be a rescue package for the private creditors rather than the Greek state. They spoke out in favor of negotiations of a debt relief.

And if that wasn't bad enough, there's an IMF email, dated March 25th, 2010, that was published by Roumeliotis, formerly IMF. They put it very bluntly:

"Greece is a relatively closed economy, and the fiscal contraction implied by this adjustment path, will cause a sharp contraction in domestic demand and an attendant deep recession, severely stretching the social fabric."

Even the IMF, who chose parameters according to their own ideology, thought the European program to be too severe. That's saying something.

All that is just about the initial decision. The implementation is another story entirely, with unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats telling a democratically elected government what to do. There are former Greek ministers on record, telling how Troika officials basically wrote legislation for them. Blackmail was common, bailout money held as leverage. The Memorandum of Understanding was to be followed to the letter, and the Troika program was as detailed as a government program, so they really had their hand in just about everything.

The specifics of the program are a discussion of their own, with all the corruption going on. The Lagarde list (2000+ Greek tax dodgers) was held in secret by order of an IMF official – that alone should trigger major investigations. The nationalisation and sell-off of the four largest Greek banks, or the no-bid sale of the Hellenikon area to a Greek oligarch – all enforced by Troika officials.

The haircut of 2012, ~€110b wiped out, came two years late. As a result, it didn't hit any German or French institutions in a serious way. Most of the debt was in the hands of these four largest Greek banks -- NBG, Piraeus, Euro, Alpha – who subsequently had to be recapitalised by Greece to the tune of €50b. Cut by 110, up by 50 right away. Banks were nationalised and shares later sold again, at 2/3 the price. Lost another €15b, because the Troika demanded the sale to appease the markets.

The legal aspects of all this are nightmare-inducing as well. They violated numerous European laws, side-tracked parliaments, used governmental decrees, etc.

Let me just say this: when they forced Cyprus to give away two banks' branches in Greece for a fraction of their worth, Cyprus lost €3.5b, at a GDP of €17b, and those two banks went belly-up. It was pure blackmail, do it or you're out. Piraeus Bank received those €3.5b, and its head honcho had €150m of personal bad credit wiped clean right then and there, all at the command of the Troika. Those €3.5b had to be taken from ordinary folks by "suspending" the deposit insurance, perhaps the most stupid decision they had made so far.

Why did they do it? Because Greece was more important than Cyprus, and Cypriot banks were involved in shady deals with Russian oligarchs. Still illegal, and massively so.

Edit: I cut my post in half and it's still too long.

@chingalera

If you don't see how overgeneralizing in a derogatory sense an entire population based on their ethnic heritage (I'm pretty sure you weren't referring to the millions of European, American, Australian, South-east Asian, African, Middle Easter, etc. people who live in Japan) is racism then you truly belong on YouTube and not on the Sift. And yeah, if you had said Australians were dysfunctional savages that would not have been racist but just as stupidly xenophobic, overgeneralized, and stereotypical.

Here's the thing, though, I think you absolutely know all this. You're just, as usual, trying to be counter-Sift-cultural--trying to stir the pot, so to speak.

You are free to criticize Japanese culture. Here's the thing about "criticism" though--it's derived form the word "critical" as in "critical thinking." Unfortunately, I don't see any critical thinking going on in your posts here. You spewed a bunch of overgeneralized stereotypical bullshit (see this video--you're clearly not interested in truth but in evoking emotions in people) and when you got called on it, instead of providing any sort of evidence to make your case you tried to cover it up with some ad hominem and anecdotes.

I'm not asking you to not criticize Japanese culture. I'm not asking you to be politically correct or polite even. I'm not even asking you to stop "stirring the pot" on the Sift (because Zeus knows, sometimes the Sift needs it). I am, however, specifically asking you to not insult the intelligence of the Sift community by couching blatantly racist/stereotypical/overgeneralized statements in a faux-rational manner.

On Bullshit, Lies & Political Spin | Jon Stewart & Frankfurt has been added as a related post - related requested by bareboards2 on that post.

Industrial espionage? No shit, Sherlock.

May I point out that "Der Spiegel" published classified information about the stations Bad Aibling, Teufelsberg and Gablingen in 1989, thereby revealing how these stations were used to spy on West German politicians and corporations? Does anybody think the Special Collection Service set up shop in Frankfurt and Berlin to spy on the North Koreans?

We've been on the receiving end of this since 1945, and we know it. There are no friends among nations, there are only interests.

Snowden handed another set of slides over to the largest newspaper in Germany as well as a public broadcasting service. These slides include the names of telecoms that were involved in GCHQ's dragnet program.

The crème de la crème:
Verizon Business, Codename: Dacron, British Telecommunications ("Remedy"), Vodafone Cable ("Gerontic"), Global Crossing ("Pinnage"), Level 3 ("Little"), Viatel ("Vitreous"), Interoute ("Streetcar").

Many of these are customers of DE-CIX, the world's largest IXP, whose operators were adamant in their claim that no foreign service has access to their infrastructure -- no word about their corporate lackeys, understandably so.

And you gotta love how brazen they are in their admission that GCHQ's work is in the best interest of Britain's economy -- yes, economy.

And while we're at it: public broadcast journalists dug out a list of 207 US companies that are involved in intelligence gathering on German soil. Best comment was by the CEO of DE-CIX: these providers (re: Level 3) work in accordance with US law, even in Frankfurt. Not German law, US law.

Maybe we can still beat Puerto Rico in the race to become your 51st state.

>> ^Kofi:

She was clearly referring to the quasi-Rousseauian undertones of Obama's pre-election promises when compared to his autocratic yet Hegelian dialectic of historical materialism as demonstrated by his attempt to governmentalise the auto-industry.
This woman is clearly a first generation Frankfurt school type critical theorist as she quoted the now infamous Adorno and Hawkheimer work "Just study it out". Far from a derogatory phrase she is merely asking the American people to abandon their nationalistic self-destruction and embrace internationalism as entolled by Tolstoy and Lenin.
Kudos comrade.


...and shit.

She was clearly referring to the quasi-Rousseauian undertones of Obama's pre-election promises when compared to his autocratic yet Hegelian dialectic of historical materialism as demonstrated by his attempt to governmentalise the auto-industry.

This woman is clearly a first generation Frankfurt school type critical theorist as she quoted the now infamous Adorno and Hawkheimer work "Just study it out". Far from a derogatory phrase she is merely asking the American people to abandon their nationalistic self-destruction and embrace internationalism as entolled by Tolstoy and Lenin.

Kudos comrade.

Every presidential candidate bullshits. I don't have a problem with that. It comes with the job. Americans can't understand simple truth, and most don't want to hear it anyway. Until that changes, being a bullshitter comes part and parcel with the job of an elected official.

>> ^IAmTheBlurr:

>> ^shagen454:
The important point is still relevant: Mitt Romney is a semantic liar. But, what - do we expect American politicians to not actually lie to our face and not get angry / and put on a huge dramatic show when it is pointed out?

Semantic liar or fundamental bullshitter? I find him to be worse than a liar and I have something that you might be interested in reading. It's from Harry G. Frankfurt from his essay "On Bullshit".
It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off; he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.


Yeah, there are enough nuts out there like you to sway gun sales figures for fear that Obama or some other Democrat is gonna take yer guns! Meanwhile, Obama's most significant legislation pertaining to gun control is ALLOWING people to take guns into national parks. While bullshitting is an unfortunately necessary part of life, it actually has to be believable.

>> ^quantumushroom:

There's a reason gun sales soared last xmas. Stay tuned...

Pretty much sums up my ex-girlfriend too.

>> ^IAmTheBlurr:

>> ^shagen454:
The important point is still relevant: Mitt Romney is a semantic liar. But, what - do we expect American politicians to not actually lie to our face and not get angry / and put on a huge dramatic show when it is pointed out?

Semantic liar or fundamental bullshitter? I find him to be worse than a liar and I have something that you might be interested in reading. It's from Harry G. Frankfurt from his essay "On Bullshit".
It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off; he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

>> ^shagen454:

The important point is still relevant: Mitt Romney is a semantic liar. But, what - do we expect American politicians to not actually lie to our face and not get angry / and put on a huge dramatic show when it is pointed out?


Semantic liar or fundamental bullshitter? I find him to be worse than a liar and I have something that you might be interested in reading. It's from Harry G. Frankfurt from his essay "On Bullshit".

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off; he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

Aw - the Frankfurter is sad because of a lack of substance? Well - maybe he'd have been happier if the reporter had dove into the following topics of substance...

1. Frank's role in the housing and banking collapse (IE his role with AIG in pushing the repeal of Glass-Steagall)...
2. The coverup of fixing parking tickets for the prostitution ring that was run out of his house...
3. Frank's involvement in a banking scandal in Boston with OneUnited...
4. Frank's abuse of office in forcing Fannie Mae to hire his lover, Herb Moses.
5. Falsification of documents where he claimed a $30,000 'gift' from hedge fund manager Donald Sussman was only $1,500...

Just a few 'substantive' issues that may this total sack of crap would have preferred to discuss. Barney Frank is one of the primary reasons for the recession. It is always impossible to pin such a big thing down to just one person, but if you could name one person that was to blame for the economic collapse it would be Barney Frank. This piece of human filth should be dragged out of Congress today, banned from all public service for life, should have every penny he owns confiscated, and then he should be tarred & feathered, pilloried, and tossed in a dank prison cell for the rest of his miserable, misbegotten life.

And that would be letting him off easy.