rex362
Senior Moderator
Pellazg
PELASGIANILLYROALBANIAN
Posts: 19,058
|
Post by rex362 on Jul 1, 2011 14:29:24 GMT -5
Btw, where are those touted Greek maritime giants that you Greeks seem to be so proud of? Where are their billions that could help ease the current situation? I'm guessing safely sealed in off-shore investments, away from the needy hands of the people that birthed them, perhaps? ahahhahahahahhh...I always asked/told them why they promoted and put on high pedestal the greekness of rich businessman they need Nov 17
|
|
Patrinos
Amicus
Peloponnesos uber alles
Posts: 4,763
|
Post by Patrinos on Jul 1, 2011 14:32:13 GMT -5
Btw, where are those touted Greek maritime giants that you Greeks seem to be so proud of? Where are their billions that could help ease the current situation? I'm guessing safely sealed in off-shore investments, away from the needy hands of the people that birthed them, perhaps? kalos ton alvano... These ...giants are businessmen and can't risk their capitals to lame hands like that of Papakonstantinou and aliens-in-economy like Venizelos... not to talk about Yorgakis now... Well, since you referred to them, yesterday I've learned about the Stavros Niarchos foundation plan for this: 450 million € investment in this period is a good thing.
|
|
|
Post by toskalik on Jul 1, 2011 14:39:32 GMT -5
"These ...giants are businessmen and can't risk their capitals to lame hands like that of Papakonstantinou and aliens-in-economy like Venizelos... not to talk about Yorgakis now..."
Well, Im an advocate of Keynesianism to some extent (although the more radical in me whats more than just modest redistribution that maintains the wealthy) but if they were to come together, pool in their money and create some kind of redistribution scheme, whereby they provide some relief to the millions of Greeks in their country (particularly those hardest hit) it might have a real influence in helping to re-balance Greece.
|
|
Patrinos
Amicus
Peloponnesos uber alles
Posts: 4,763
|
Post by Patrinos on Jul 1, 2011 14:51:10 GMT -5
Do you have any idea of the height of the Greece's debt and deficit? In that kind of situations only the state can put the engine back to work. Private initiatives follow. If the government could inspire the Greeks that all that extremely tough measures will have a result then things would be simple. But look at the statistics. The optimistic scenario is in 2015 to have the samey percentage of debt! ... When supposedly growth of the GDP will come again and the road to wealth will be open again...
|
|
|
Post by toskalik on Jul 1, 2011 15:07:32 GMT -5
I didnt say it would solve the crisis; however, it might be able to keep a many of Greeks from the destitution that is quickly coming over them. It would allow some more time to be able to organize something. In such cases, the economy moves quickly and without some intervention, people are left with nothing. As has happened in many places across the US.
|
|
Kanaris
Amicus
This just in>>>> Nobody gives a crap!
Posts: 9,589
|
Post by Kanaris on Jul 1, 2011 15:55:41 GMT -5
Ted,I never knew the extend of your liberalism... don't you see this sick socialism defeated Greece.... I see you believe in taking money from the rich and giving to the lazy poor.... Not my cub of tea..
There's only one way out of poverty... go to school and work hard.
|
|
Kanaris
Amicus
This just in>>>> Nobody gives a crap!
Posts: 9,589
|
Post by Kanaris on Jul 1, 2011 15:57:19 GMT -5
Btw, where are those touted Greek maritime giants that you Greeks seem to be so proud of? Where are their billions that could help ease the current situation? I'm guessing safely sealed in off-shore investments, away from the needy hands of the people that birthed them, perhaps? kalos ton alvano... These ...giants are businessmen and can't risk their capitals to lame hands like that of Papakonstantinou and aliens-in-economy like Venizelos... not to talk about Yorgakis now... Well, since you referred to them, yesterday I've learned about the Stavros Niarchos foundation plan for this: 450 million € investment in this period is a good thing. Bravo
|
|
|
Post by uz on Jul 1, 2011 15:58:34 GMT -5
^ Unfortunatly in this day in age this ^ happens to be true. The system wasn't designed to be fair, but being lazy, and complaining all day is not going to solve anything either.
|
|
|
Post by toskalik on Jul 1, 2011 16:04:27 GMT -5
Ted,I never knew the extend of your liberalism... don't you see this sick socialism defeated Greece.... I see you believe in taking money from the rich and giving to the lazy poor.... Not my cub of tea.. There's only one way out of poverty... go to school and work hard. Im liberal yes, almost socialist. I never hid it, actually. In fact, Im so much so, that many of my family members don't dare to open a political mouth for fear of setting off something they cannot compete with or control. I didn't form my views out of the thin air. I have seen how the poor work, they work tirelessly and endlessly; they work like nobody else around them does. I have seen the "lazy poor" work 14 hour shifts with barely no bear in between for five six days straight. You could read the book Nickle and Dimed to see for yourself. I would gladly take from the wealthy, especially the bankers and corporations that have stolen so fragrantly from the poor around them, and squared the wealth through careless mass investments. I believe quite strongly that the mechanisms of capital are naturally suited towards exploitation, manipulation and corruption. The wealthy in the country pay off government, lower taxes and rig the system to their own ways. You don't have to believe me, pick up the book Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Politics or Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill) or Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens . There is a wealth of evidence to show how the whole game is pretty well rigged in order to maintain the disproportionate share of wealth at the top.
|
|
|
Post by toskalik on Jul 1, 2011 16:07:15 GMT -5
^ Unfortunatly in this day in age this ^ happens to be true. The system wasn't designed to be fair, but being lazy, and complaining all day is not going to solve anything either. This absurdly Reaganite, neo-liberal idea that somehow people who don't make money simply "don't work" is perhaps the most ludicrious and blind idea that has ever permeated through the modern western mind. There is nobody who works on minimum wage that does not suffer immensely from the stress and exhaustion of their work. None. There are no "welfare queens", there are mothers who work two-three jobs to just to maintain rent while all forms of social contract are stolen from under their feet.
|
|
|
Post by uz on Jul 1, 2011 16:08:21 GMT -5
Are the legitimate wealthy people responsible for the state of affairs of the poor?
Any type of system you name has it's own form of exploitation, manipulation and corruption. The game just get's played differently, that's all.
|
|
Patrinos
Amicus
Peloponnesos uber alles
Posts: 4,763
|
Post by Patrinos on Jul 1, 2011 16:15:03 GMT -5
By
MARK MAZOWER
YESTERDAY, the whole world was watching Greece as its Parliament voted to pass a divisive package of austerity measures that could have critical ramifications for the global financial system. It may come as a surprise that this tiny tip of the Balkan Peninsula could command such attention. We usually think of Greece as the home of Plato and Pericles, its real importance lying deep in antiquity. But this is hardly the first time that to understand Europe’s future, you need to turn away from the big powers at the center of the continent and look closely at what is happening in Athens. For the past 200 years, Greece has been at the forefront of Europe’s evolution.
In the 1820s, as it waged a war of independence against the Ottoman Empire, Greece became an early symbol of escape from the prison house of empire. For philhellenes, its resurrection represented the noblest of causes. “In the great morning of the world,” Shelley wrote in “Hellas,” his poem about the country’s struggle for independence, “Freedom’s splendor burst and shone!” Victory would mean liberty’s triumph not only over the Turks but also over all those dynasts who had kept so many Europeans enslaved. Germans, Italians, Poles and Americans flocked to fight under the Greek blue and white for the sake of democracy. And within a decade, the country won its freedom.
Over the next century, the radically new combination of constitutional democracy and ethnic nationalism that Greece embodied spread across the continent, culminating in “the peace to end all peace” at the end of the First World War, when the Ottoman, Hapsburg and Russian empires disintegrated and were replaced by nation-states.
In the aftermath of the First World War, Greece again paved the way for Europe’s future. Only now it was democracy’s dark side that came to the fore. In a world of nation-states, ethnic minorities like Greece’s Muslim population and the Orthodox Christians of Asia Minor were a recipe for international instability. In the early 1920s, Greek and Turkish leaders decided to swap their minority populations, expelling some two million Christians and Muslims in the interest of national homogeneity. The Greco-Turkish population exchange was the largest such organized refugee movement in history to that point and a model that the Nazis and others would point to later for displacing peoples in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and India.
It is ironic, then, that Greece was in the vanguard of resistance to the Nazis, too. In the winter of 1940-41, it was the first country to fight back effectively against the Axis powers, humiliating Mussolini in the Greco-Italian war while the rest of Europe cheered. And many cheered again a few months later when a young left-wing resistance fighter named Manolis Glezos climbed the Acropolis one night with a friend and pulled down a swastika flag that the Germans had recently unfurled. (Almost 70 years later, Mr. Glezos would be tear-gassed by the Greek police while protesting the austerity program.) Ultimately, however, Greece succumbed to German occupation. Nazi rule brought with it political disintegration, mass starvation and, after liberation, the descent of the country into outright civil war between Communist and anti-Communist forces.
Only a few years after Hitler’s defeat, Greece found itself in the center of history again, as a front line in the cold war. In 1947, President Harry S. Truman used the intensifying civil war there to galvanize Congress behind the Truman Doctrine and his sweeping peacetime commitment of American resources to fight Communism and rebuild Europe. Suddenly elevated into a trans-Atlantic cause, Greece now stood for a very different Europe — one that had crippled itself by tearing itself apart, whose only path out of the destitution of the mid-1940s was as a junior partner with Washington. As the dollars poured in, American advisers sat in Athens telling Greek policy makers what to do and American napalm scorched the Greek mountains as the Communists were put to flight.
European political and economic integration was supposed to end the weakness and dependency of the divided continent, and here, too, Greece was an emblem of a new phase in its history. The fall of its military dictatorship in 1974 not only brought the country full membership in what would become the European Union; it also (along with the transitions in Spain and Portugal at the same time) prefigured the global democratization wave of the 1980s and ’90s, first in South America and Southeast Asia and then in Eastern Europe. And it gave the European Union the taste for enlargement and the ambition to turn itself from a small club of wealthy Western European states into a voice for the newly democratic continent as a whole, extending far to the south and east.
And now today, after the euphoria of the ’90s has faded and a new modesty sets in among the Europeans, it falls again to Greece to challenge the mandarins of the European Union and to ask what lies ahead for the continent. The European Union was supposed to shore up a fragmented Europe, to consolidate its democratic potential and to transform the continent into a force capable of competing on the global stage. It is perhaps fitting that one of Europe’s oldest and most democratic nation-states should be on the new front line, throwing all these achievements into question. For we are all small powers now, and once again Greece is in the forefront of the fight for the future.
Mark Mazower is a professor of history at Columbia University.
Τhe New York Times 29.06.2011
|
|
|
Post by toskalik on Jul 1, 2011 16:21:24 GMT -5
There are very very very few "legitimate" wealthy people. Almost all wealth is the byproduct of exploitation of some kind, whether it is people or resources. Often it is the byproduct of corruption and manipulation; other times it is the byproduct of "lucky sperm" (being born into a wealthy family). In almost all of these scenarios, the wealthy are not formed out of some Randian vision of self-fashioning and creation (a twisted version of Nietzsche), but by direct influence and exploitation of political order that allows the wealthy to have an exhorbitant amount of control over market capital. The reason why the economic system today is in the place that it is has a strong correlation to the rise of Wall Street's political influence.... as a result, a few get richer and the majority lose out. If you wish for a great example: 1990s Russia.
If we wish to have a democracy, therefore, such a society cannot be allowed. A democracy means egalitarianism of the highest order (equal opportunity to education is principal for political understand, but also equality in other aspects of life as well). If you wish to create a modern feudal reality where a single few control everyone under them, then no, the "legitimate" wealthy do not owe anything to do the poor and destitute. If we are to live in an egalitarian structure that has any semblence of a democracy, then yes, absolutely, the rights to capital are essential. This isnt new, it goes all the way back to ancient Greeks in Athens or commentators of Rome.
Economic inequality breeds political inequality.
In another argument. What kind of mindset says that it is okay for a person to have a billion dollars in their bank account while millions around them starve or are rendered homeless? What kind of thinking is that? How can you justify the idea that selfish accumulation of wealth is in anyway justifiable? A person with 10 million dollars could retire easily on such a money and can afford a lifestyle very few can even think of, if you have 100 million or 1 billion that is ridiculous. How can society stand together if we believe that mass accumulation of wealth on such a high scale is even remotely positive?
|
|
|
Post by uz on Jul 1, 2011 16:30:05 GMT -5
Human nature is what it is. If you take a poor man and put him in the shoes of a rich man, the same s**t will happen. It's the phenomenon of money that is the root of all evil.
I agree with most of what you say, in fact I used to concider myself an old-fashioned marxists once upon a time. But I realised something, we have choices to make. Politics doesn't have to run anyone of our lives, we can be seperate quite easily from it.
Certain people are less fortunate than others for many different reasons, just look at Africa. Is it fair? We are human beings, we have a duty right here. When the earthquake in Haiti happened, why did money become the most important thing? Over 200 000 lives were f**king lost because stupid excuses, and you know what? We take it. We take this crap because we are used to it. We are used to it because we know no different. The time has come for a drastic change I will not speak of here.
|
|
|
Post by toskalik on Jul 1, 2011 16:38:47 GMT -5
"Human nature is what it is. If you take a poor man and put him in the shoes of a rich man, the same s**t will happen. It's the phenomenon of money that is the root of all evil."
Specious argument. Would you exploit your family in such a way? You would be a monster to consider such a thing. In fact, people do all that they can to save a family member. This is enlarged to the tribe and then the nation (modern Social Democracy). Why, then, is it okay to do such a thing to another human? Does he not have a family, a wife, a child, a daughter? How come we have one way of thinking for family and another for human all we can think of is exploitation? Imagine if all men were influenced and pushed into thinking that all men are related (as we actually are, btw) rather than told who or what is a danger.
Im not saying make a rich man poor and a poor rich. I am saying to promote a society where such a reality is not existent. A reality that does not promote the idea of shoe shines (who are only necessary because of the vanity of their superiors). My stand is to fashion a world where maybe there isnt total equality but enough to make sure that there is enough balance to prevent a person being rejected from a hospital because he doesn't have insurance.
Absurd, please look around your house and find me something that isnt even remotely political? Where were your clothes from? Your car? Where do you get your oil? By what means is your cash measured in worth? Please find one thing that is no political. It is only the privileged who can say that its not political because their world is taken care of for them. You cannot be "unpolitical" in a world that is inherently political in every aspect of its society. This is something that I have come to learn over the last few years of life.
Its not and the possibility for change is there. Do you walk past a homeless person looking for spare change and not give any? People do it often, I have often done in the past. People often do it for absurd reasons. They dont want to give money to a person because they want a frappucino, irregardless of the fact that person may need it to survive.
|
|
|
Post by uz on Jul 1, 2011 16:51:17 GMT -5
You mis-understood me. I never said it's ok to exploit. I am just saying, as long as we have a system with loopholes that allow exploitation IT WILL HAPPEN REGARDLESS. Any system you name, has it's holes...hence the fact we have such political divisions across the world (a part of the plan btw). I
If you get rid of the incentive to exploit, then exploitation will cease to exist.
If you are saying I am a part of the problem because I buy gas, and clothes that are probably made in sweatshops, I agree. Yet, I am in no position at the moment to have an alternative. I need a car for work and school, and I need good quality (affordable) clothes to well... be clothed. I dont trust politics. I beleive if we function under a humanist ideology, things can change. We can slowly seperate ourselves, and no longer be slaves. This is what I preach about all the time here.
I only give money to a homeless guy if he comes off as being honest. If he tells me he needs it for weed, sure I give him a buck or two. If he says I don't have a job, don't have a home, and nothing else, I say fuck it. I need more convinving than that.
During the winter, if a homeless man asks me for money to buy food, I go and buy soup for him. This is how I try to change things. I am no Saint, but we need to start somewhere. Money will not solve anything, nor will $1 help a homeless guy.
|
|
|
Post by toskalik on Jul 1, 2011 17:00:30 GMT -5
Well, I think any society that promotes the accumulation of capital into the hands of the few will naturally be open to exploitation. I do not think that Eastern European communism was an answer, it was overly rigid, doctrinaire and divested of the major ideas of Marx's theory on Capitol (which I have read and find far too liquid to apply to the systems of Eastern Europe, which were really forms of totalitarian elite domination with the image of socialism). However, I think that any system like capitalism will always be open to exploitation and it requires an adept and intense vigilance that is often lost in times of crisis (See Shock Doctrine). So long as the system itself promotes inequality, than we will always be liable for it.
I agree, but I think that politics in an intrinsic aspect of that. The American Christian Right decided to become recluse in the 1930-50s, they soon found out that they were being completely outnumbered and outdone by not partaking in politics. The end result was the offensive in the 70s and 80s; as a result, they have fashioned a new image of political America. Political ascendancy is essentially to shaping perspective and thereby humanity.
|
|
|
Post by uz on Jul 1, 2011 17:04:35 GMT -5
^ For a long while now nations all over the world have been structured under the pyramid system. Few at the top, and the rest at the bottom. Do you agree with me?
|
|
|
Post by toskalik on Jul 1, 2011 17:06:23 GMT -5
Of course... but we are not living in times that have precedent. We are living in an age of greater and greater mass literacy. People have greater ability of shaping the world today than ever before.
|
|
|
Post by uz on Jul 1, 2011 17:08:29 GMT -5
Then you will probably agree that this world will always have corruption, exploitation along with manipulation while we worship this structure.
Are you with me?
|
|