Jul 1, 2020
The Chapel at Le Château de Versailles, Paris.
A must visit as a dark academic; it’s gilded walls may seem light, but its history is certainly dark and twisted.
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The Chapel at Le Château de Versailles, Paris.
A must visit as a dark academic; it’s gilded walls may seem light, but its history is certainly dark and twisted.
Today, March 14, 2020, the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) is releasing the complete audio files of Yanis Varoufakis’ Eurogroup meetings in 2015 on: euroleaks.diem25.org!
During 2015 Yanis Varoufakis participated in thirteen Eurogroup meetings. After the first three Eurogroup meetings it became clear that no minutes were being taken!
This kind of intransparent action by an unelected group of politicians who influence all our lives is unacceptable. That is why DiEM25 is today releasing the recordings of the meetings of the Eurogroup from 2015.
Two particular aspects should be emphasised:
The new right-wing Greek government of Nea Dimokratia has repeatedly tried to lay the blame of SYRIZA’s failed economic policies to Yanis Varoufakis’ 2015 negotiation for a better deal that made more sense than the Troika’s repeatedly failed, austerity-oriented memorandum. In short, they are accusing the only one who stood against the absurdity of austerity politics, for the results of austerity politics! The European community is still trapped in massive austerity programs, which in many countries have led to a renaissance of right-wing populism. With all the consequences that can be observed at the Greek-Turkish border: inhumanity and xenophobia. The decisions of that time have had a lasting impact not just on the Greek population but on all Europeans.
What we aim to achieve by releasing the recordings is nothing less than the democratisation of the EU! Only through transparency is it possible for elected parliamentarians to make fundamental decisions.
DiEM25 as a pan-European organisation has a special interest in restoring the confidence of the citizens of Europe in its institutions and to make Europe finally become what it has failed to be so far: A community that serves the peoples of Europe and creates a better future for all citizens not just financial institutions and powerful vested interests.
Brexit has happened and we have to make sure that the European Union does not continue to lose itself in petty squabbles where no single country will emerge the winner.
Much trust has been lost over the last few years. With this initiative, we do not wish to play into the hands of the Eurosceptics, but rather to ensure that, by moving towards more transparency and democracy, the trust and faith of the people is regained.
Eurogroup President Mario Centeno
Pedro Silva - Portugal
A lack of trust is blighting Greece
February 20, 2017 (Link) By, Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, Financial Times (whole article provided here, because you would otherwise have to pay to read the whole article on the FT website.)
Seven years after the start of the Greek crisis, it’s not easy to follow what’s going on between the International Monetary Fund, the eurogroup of finance ministers and the Greek government. The negotiating process is being impaired by so many contradictions and a Catch-22.
First, the IMF wants Greece to implement a milder fiscal adjustment programme than the eurogroup, which insists on a primary surplus — which excludes debt interest payments — of 3.5 per cent of gross domestic product. The IMF is probably right, at least on paper, as the country’s dire economic situation leaves it ill-equipped to deal with more austerity. Last year’s primary surplus was close to 1 per cent, and can hardly be increased in the current environment. On the other hand, experience has shown that Greece has often fallen short of its targets, not only concerning the budget but also structural reforms. Given such a record, a more ambitious target may be necessary to ensure that Athens keeps up to minimum commitments.
[Lets start here. First you say “Last years’s primary surplus was close to 1 percent, and can hardly be increased in the current environment.”
Then you say: “On the other hand, experience has shown that Greece has often fallen short of its targets”
That is not another hand. That is THE hand. These “two” points you have identified are not only connected, not only related, they have a cause and effect relationship -- Greece has only managed to bring in a 1 percent surplus after all the austerity, wage and public spending cuts, depression level unemployment levels, and all resources being put into paying back “bailout” debt before, or even replacing payment for, any other of Greece’s needs. This means, since there is little to no investment in ANY part of the Greek economy, improvement in decaying civil structures, help for disabled and elderly and unemployed, and job creation in a country with a ~23% unemployment rate. Meanwhile, businesses are taxed so heavily in order try to make the targets demanded by the eurogroups, that they are forced to lay off even more workers, and invest in even less of everything, in order to afford just the basics of their business to keep them running. ]
Second, the IMF wants the eurogroup to concede more debt relief to Greece, given that debt is likely to be on an rising trend again by the end of the next decade. The fund is certainly right on paper, as all analyses show that Greece will not be able to repay its debt. The eurogroup has already committed to debt relief, as recognised by the IMF, but is reluctant to be more specific lest the pressure eases on the Greek government to continue implementing the programme. Indeed, experience has shown that debt restructuring tends to relax the reform effort.
[Yes, because these “reforms” being demanded by the Eurogroups are to sell off extremely valuable assets that could and have been major sources of revenue for the Greek economy, just to obtain the short term gain from the sale in order to pay off debt -- not to mention austerity measure contribute to plateauing at best, though rising at times, unemployment rate. And a minimum wage that has been going down since the financial crisis in 2008, and is the only EU country who’s minimum wage is actually LOWER than it was in 2008. Public transportation infrastructure is breaking down with no money to pay for its maintenance, and those who run the public transportation have had their salaries cut over and over and over. This includes trains and trams and busses and AIRLINES and metros. This underpaying trend of civil workers in present in all other areas of civil servants and employees. Overall, wages have dropped dramatically, and taxes increased exponentially. So if debt restructuring “tends to relax reform effort,” it’s because the level of “reform effort” is INSANE!!!]
Third, the IMF wants Greece to implement a series of measures immediately, to reduce the eurogroup’s doubts about the required reforms. These requests are certainly legitimate, but Athens considers them unfeasible in the current economic and political environment.
[WHY DON’T YOU LISTEN TO ATHENS!!! THEY ARE TELL YOU THAT THEY CANNOT DO IT! THEY CANNOT CUT ANY MORE, THEY CANNOT MAKE ANYMORE “REFORMS,” THEY’RE NOT LYING, THEY’RE NOT TRYING TO SLINK OUT OF PAYING BACK THE MONEY, THEY JUST CANNOOOOTTT DOO ITTTT]
Fourth, the IMF has indicated that it will not endorse the programme unless its requests, both to Greece concerning the adjustment programme and to the eurogroup on debt relief, are accepted. For their part, Germany and other European countries have signalled that unless the IMF signs up, they themselves cannot support the programme, even though they disagree with the fund on its contents, in terms of both fiscal adjustment and debt relief.
[Germany, you are a fucking asshole, and we get you think you’re making a big ass sacrifice, but no one is going to pat you on the head for this one.]
In the end, it’s all a question of trust, which has been seriously eroded over the past seven years. [FUCKKKKK YOUUU] The IMF continues to put too much trust into its numerical calculations about debt sustainability [so your fault, not Greece’s], assuming that when policy measures are adopted, they are effective and cannot be reversed. [When has Austerity only ever worked. EVER?] The Greek case over recent years has proved the contrary. [Again, give me one example where only Austerity ever brought an economy back from depression] The IMF doesn’t seem to trust eurozone countries either to deliver on debt relief when the time comes, even though debt relief has been provided in the past. Eurozone ministers, in turn, do not trust Greece to pursue its fiscal adjustment and reform path, if they give in too early on debt reduction. [Sociopaths. You’re Sociopaths.] The Greek government does not trust that it will obtain sufficient relief if it implements the conditions requested by the IMF. [Now THAT’s something that has a grounding in history for fucking real] Some eurozone ministers do not trust European institutions to be tough enough with the Greek government, and have made their agreement conditional on the IMF.
[TOUGH ENOUGH? TOUGH ENOUGH? TOUGH ENOUGH? Are you on Mars? Do little ants bring your crumbs and arrange them on your kitchen counter and you interpret their patterns and that’s how you learn about what’s going on in Greece?]
The consequence of this lack of trust is that the Greek economy continues to underperform, [no, it’s because those demands on Greece are impossible to perform] the Greek people are losing faith and international investors are reluctant to put capital in a country that may be forced out of the eurozone. [That’s all on the Eurogroup. Thank, you fucked up the possibility of bringing in non-IMF non-EU sources of income into Greece with your fuck up. Con-fucking-grats. ]
As in the past, the solution is likely to be found in the end, with some concessions on each side. The Greek government will get some last-minute measure through parliament, the eurogroup will agree on a slightly lower primary deficit and to being more specific on debt relief, and the IMF will provide some reassurance about debt sustainability. Nobody would benefit from a failure to agree. But whatever agreement is reached, it will not solve the issue definitively.
[Greece has not gained shit by any of the recent bailout agreements.]
It will be a long time before mutual trust [Fuck Off] is restored. This may require some of the people around the negotiating table to pass the hand to others.
Lorenzo Bini Smaghi is a former member of the executive board of the European Central Bank and currently visiting scholar at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and LUISS School of European Political Economy in Rome
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2017. All rights reserved. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web. [screw you]
Klaus Regling is “very sad” as a result of the “breach of privacy” by Yanis Varoufakis’ audio recordings of the Eurogroup meetings.
Of course he is sad, given that if citizens could hear and see what he said and did, Mr. Regling would find it very difficult to stay employed in any European country, including his own.
If he was scrutinised by the public, would he ever have dared to recommend to a minister of a fellow European nation that he should withhold all pension payments so that his country could pay back an instalment to the IMF?
If he was scrutinised by the public, would European citizens have not noticed that Mr. Regling is not simply a cynical bureaucrat, but an inept one at that?
When he speaks off-script, even when the camera is pointed at him, Mr Regling makes basic technical mistakes. For example, in the most recent documentary of George Avgeropoulos, AGORA II, he said that Italy and Belgium have managed a primary surplus of over 3% per year for decades – something that, with only some basic research, the documentary-maker revealed to be false.
This is the reason why people like Mr. Regling are terrified of the eyes and ears of citizens: public scrutiny.
This is the reason why the Eurogroup meetings have no minutes.
Five years ago, on 25 January 2015, the Greek people sent a great signal of hope to the rest of the world.
The purpose of this timeline is to review the main events of 2015. The chronology ends with the results of the May-June-July 2019 elections. ...Syriza’s less catastrophic political fortunes show above all that the Greek people are not massively turning to the Right or the extreme Right. But also that they have responded with an attitude of resignation and adaptation to the “normality” created by the neoliberal purge. The extreme Right lost votes compared to 2015, even though a new party of the same stripe (Greek Solution) made its entry into Parliament while Golden Dawn, mired in court proceedings, lost its 17 seats, falling short of the threshold of 3 per cent. Mitsotakis’s New Democracy stole votes from Golden Dawn by putting extreme-Right leaders high on its tickets. Crushed by a debt that is still in excess of 170 per cent of GDP, Greece remains in a kind of protectorate status concealed behind the simulacrum of sovereignty. But the people of Greece have not said their last word.
At a time in which the discussion of the events of 2015 is resurfacing again, this account of what went on behind the surface in the days around the infamous 2015 referendum, is definitely worth a read or re-read.
Late on the afternoon of Friday 10 July, as European finance ministers were packing their bags for Brussels to attend yet another meeting on the Greek debt crisis, a shocking email from Berlin landed in the inboxes of a very small number of top officials. Earlier that week, the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, had been given an ultimatum by his fellow European leaders: deliver a radical new blueprint for economic reform and spending cuts – or face bankruptcy.
Lose yourself in a great story: Sign up for the long read email Read more Tsipras had delivered a new set of proposals, but before officials could meet in Brussels to discuss them, the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, delivered a preemptive strike: if the Greek government would not undertake more drastic reforms, the German email said, “Greece should be offered swift negotiations on a time-out from the eurozone.” There had been speculative talk that Greece might have to quit the single currency – and sentiment among other euro members had hardened against Athens in the six months since Syriza, Tspiras’s leftwing movement, came to power – but until now, no one had formally proposed pushing the country out.
“It was clear,” one recipient said. “It was written down. It was harsh. It was brutal.” Schäuble, the most experienced politician in power in Europe, had gone for the jugular – and the email sent alarm bells ringing in Paris, Rome, Frankfurt and Brussels.
“It was never officially distributed – only to core people,” said a senior official involved in the meetings, who saw the email on the Friday evening. “It showed a tough stance. It was clear that Grexit was an option. It meant that on Monday we would start the preparations.”
Schäuble’s demands gave shape to the weekend of tense negotiations that followed – the most fateful days in the history of the beleaguered single currency, culminating in 17 hours of talks that dragged out until 8.30 on Monday morning. After five years of crisis that had seen Greece bailed out twice – and the rescue of four other eurozone countries – the question was whether Greece could remain in the euro, or become the first country to be kicked out. In order to stay, and secure another bailout, Athens would need to capitulate to German demands on austerity, overhaul its welfare, pension and tax systems, and surrender sovereignty over large parts of policy-making.
Advertisement Schäuble’s proposal popped up on screens in the upper reaches of the European Commission at around 6pm that Friday. It took the form of a one-page memo – what Eurocrats call a “non-paper” – sent by Thomas Steffen, one of Schäuble’s deputies in the German finance ministry. As well as calling for Greece’s suspension from the single currency for at least five years, it also proposed that Athens would transfer assets worth €50bn – a quarter of the national wealth – into a trust fund located in Luxembourg and controlled by the European Stability Mechanism, the eurozone’s bailout fund. It would be a massive asset-stripping enterprise, modelled on West Germany’s privatisation of East German state property after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989: gradually, th
“You can hear Schaeuble’s voice saying that the profits from Greek bonds he wanted for the German budget,” Yanis Varoufakis revealed in an interview ahead of the controversial release of his secret recordings from the Eurogroup sessions in the first half of 2015.
“Don’t you want to hear Schaeuble speaking about the ECB’s profits from the Greek bonds?” he said in an interview with Skai TV late on Thursday.
Stressing that the promise to Samaras’ government in 2012 was that the profit would return to Greece, Varoufakisrevealed that then German finance minister Wolfgang Schaueble said during a Eurogroup meeting: “No, I need the for my budget. I have no obligation to pass it on to German citizens so that they understand what their own finance minister is doing in their own name. There is no democracy without transparency.”
He revealed that then Eurogroup head Jeroen Disslebloem had threatened with closure of the banks already at the first meeting in February 2015.
He pointed out that the lenders”took back what they had promised” and “started to lie,” adding that he was expecting “a war.”
he revealed that IMF’s officer in charge of Greece Poul Thomsen and he had agreed on the Value Added Tax issue. “While we were preparing the announcements, he took everything back demanding [a new deal?] on Labor issues,” Varoufakis said adding “that’s lack of word of honor.”
The world has to learn all these things during the negotiations, it has to hear “how we argued when they were giving deadlines to Greece.”
He accused the EU lenders of cheating saying “they never went to the meetings with proposals, but they would come out and claim I was going there with proposals.”
This is what the world has to learn. They had never come up with suggestions and they went out and said that I was going there without suggestions. This is what the world has to learn. You have to hear how they were cheating on the ultimatums they were giving to Greece, “he said, and said if there would be any legal implications for their publication:
Varoufakis announced that the unedited audio recordings will be uploaded on the website of his party MeRa25 on March 10, 2020. He added that he was not aware there were no minutes of the Eurogroup sessions, therefore there are no recordings of the first three sessions. The recordings are from some ten meetings.