It's been about a year or so since Alex Tsipras led his Syriza comrades to an astounding electoral triumph in Crisis-ridden Greece. Long story short; it all got snuffed out. All the hopes,misplaced or not,all the aspirations,partially deluded or not. Gone. And the multi-layered Crises deeper and sharper and even more brutal than were apparent in 2015. The Troika - European Commission,European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund - have gotten away with carrying out regime change / externally orchestrated, unconstitutional coup d'etat via their policies of political intimidation and blackmail against yet another formerly sovereign, democratic nation state. It's as if the fevered Greek elections and subsequent referendum of 2015 had never happened. Bloomberg News quoted in the Daily Telegraph of 11 April 2016,reports :-
Germany tells Greece it needs to 'do more' as debt talks stutter ahead of May deadline
Greece said it’s aiming for an agreement with creditors on the next tranche of emergency loans by the beginning of May as German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble sought to play down debt relief expectations.
“We have almost identical estimates with the European Commission,” Minister of State Nikos Pappas said in an interview with Bloomberg News.
“And what needs to be done in the following days is to turn the almost identical into identical,” he said, ahead of frantic negotiations between the government and officials representing creditor institutions that failed to find a deal.
Bailout auditors from the European Union’s executive arm, the euro area’s crisis fund, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund have been holding talks with government officials in Athens for the past week to discuss policy measures attached to the country’s bailout.
The biggest area of contention is the management of bad loans burdening bank balance sheets, Pappas said, with their positions closer on a pension system overhaul and income tax reform.
“We’ll find a solution in the coming weeks,” Schaeuble said Sunday in an interview with German public television channel ARD. This solution “has nothing to do with debt forgiveness, but with the fact that Greece needs to do more” to return to a competitive economy, he said.
POSTSCRIPT
The irony in all this diplomatic imbroglio,is that the EU itself is in terminal decline and is losing itself in ever more byzantine chicanery and outbursts of quasi-judicial acts of diktat against an increasing array of partially comatose sovereign states all locked in to the single currency madness. There is no " solution " in sight because there are no solutions to be had. Disorder is a natural state for the capitalist economic system to find itself in ; more or less unfettered or rigged or mediated by state intervention doesn't actually make any significant difference to the actual conditions that determine and constitute Crises. Schadenfreude it is , then we BREXIT !
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