Greece is most seriously displeased over the new austerity measures foist upon it by foreign lenders:
Though it came after days of intense debate and the resignation of several ministers in protest, in the end the vote on the austerity measures was not close: 199 in favor and 74 opposed, with 27 abstentions or blank ballots. The Parliament also gave the government the authority to sign a new loan agreement with the foreign lenders and approve a broader arrangement to reduce the amount Greece must repay to its bondholders.
The new austerity measures include, among others, a 22 percent cut in the benchmark minimum wage and 150,000 government layoffs by 2015 — a bitter prospect in a country ravaged by five years of recession and with unemployment at 21 percent and rising.
But the chaos on the streets of Athens, where more than 80,000 people turned out to protest on Sunday, and in other cities across Greece reflected a growing dread — certainly among Greeks, but also among economists and perhaps even European officials — that the sharp belt-tightening and the bailout money it brings will still not be enough to keep the country from going over a precipice.
Angry protesters in the capital threw rocks at the police, who fired back with tear gas. After nightfall, demonstrators threw Molotov cocktails, setting fire to more than 40 buildings, including a historic theater in downtown Athens, the worst damage in the city since May 2010, when three people were killed when protesters firebombed a bank. There were clashes in Salonika in the north, Patra in the west, Volos in central Greece, and on the islands of Crete and Corfu.
3000 years of history and civilization brought down in a matter of months by Goldman-Sachs. And they thought the Ottoman Turks were bad.
Let’s not excuse the Greeks. Their failure to collect taxes is one of the reasons they are in this hole. That and the fact that no one seemed to be using the same spreadsheet once they got those taxes. The bigger problem is that they were living Goldman-Sachs values with everyone trying to live in total freedom without government supervision, but they didn’t have Goldman-Sachs thuggish power to break a government’s knees.
What I can’t understand is why we keep having to give in to Goldman-Sachs. Why is it we citizens of so many countries are powerless to make these assholes eat their losses?
Filed under: General | Tagged: Austerity, Goldman Sachs, Greece |
The Confluence 
Had a meeting with director of guidance at Brooke’s school. Brooke spent last summer teaching herself German so she could be with her friends in German 3 this year. She’d never taken a German class in high school so this was all new material. Well, she didn’t get into German 3. Her German teacher wouldn’t let her take the German 2 final. Foolish consustency and all that.
In December, Brooke took the national exam for German. Today, we found out she was in the 99th percentile.
“Ooo, that’s pretty good”, said I. “I’ll bet a lot of –boro HS students are happy about scoring so well. Brooke said it was an easy test.”
“no,that was just Brooke. She score in the 99th percentile NATIONALLY. We’re moving her to German IV. The language department thinks she can handle it.”
Well, ok then. I’d love to send her to Germany this year for the summer program but the cost makes it difficult to justify even with a partial scholarship.
Oh, yeah, and unemployment sucks.
OMG. Was there any hint at embarrassment from those idiots? 4 months ago the German teacher wouldn’t let her just take a test. How big IS the “German Department” at that school? Does that same teacher now agree that Brooke should be in German IV?
And is Brooke still going to that school?
She’s getting a different German teacher once she moves.
11 years of hell grinds on in public school. But I got the slightest bit of a scent that maybe they recognize that Brooke is no ordinary bright student. There was acknowledgement today that she doesn’t learn like other people.
It’s a good thing, even if it did take 11 years.
She will be taking some of her courses online from now on including math and American history where she can go at her own pace and move on to other things. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to pay for those two courses.
wow !!! RD that’s great hope she gets to go. 🙂
No money. Smart kids are extremely expensive.
RD, have you looked into the possibility of an EU funded scholarship or some kind of student-exchange? (Didn’t you do this when Brooke went to France?)
And good on her for learning German. If only I could go back in time … and didn’t hate the grammar so much … 😉
Not that I don’t trust you to do your own investigation, but this is what a rapid search came up with.
Thanks! But there is a chance that she could go for free. Because she scored so well on the national German exam, she was given an entry form for an exchange trip for the summer, all expenses paid. She has to write a letter to her host family and fill out a questionnaire, all in German. She has until Friday to complete this. I told her to run it by her German grandfather in Texas first to make sure it looked ok and is what her host family might expect.
Her exchange from 2 years ago to France was wildly successful. That was paid for by my company as part of a program to teach French students English. This one she is doing all on her own merit. I’m very excited for her. I think she has a good shot of getting it.
In the meantime, she started German IV yesterday. Her German teacher gave her the German II midterm but said it was just a formality at this point. Brooke is a language prodigy. I think that’s pretty clear now.
Golden Sacks and their ilk own the political class. Too wealthy to pay for their crimes. Sometimes I think the only thing that will work is violent revolution. With Greece and Italy, etc. so unstable it isn’t crazy to think that could happen sooner rather than later. Throw in an attack on Iran by Israel and the U.S. and we’ve got WWIII.
Anyway I hope not and I hope your daughter gets to go this summer. Your personal experience is illustrative of why it’s not always a matter of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps during times of austerity. Rich people don’t get that. Or maybe they do but they don’t care.
The Icelandic people made them eat their losses.
So far peoples are powerless against GoSac because GoSac owns and occupies the peoples’s governments. That means the tools of governmental power are all used by the GoSac embeds within and atop governments against the subjects of those governments. If people can reconquer their Occupied Governments, they can use the tools of reconquered government power to administer Class Justice against Goldman Sachs.
In the meantime, people can study those Power Network charts which you and others have offered here and begin to understand how the revenue streams and power flows move. Perhaps people can then alter their getting and spending behavior ( the still-employed people anyway) to begin attriting and degrading the upward-directed revenue streams to begin attriting and degrading OverClass power. If enough people can degrade the OverClass severely enough, the OverClass may become weakened enough to be unable to fend off a people’s re-invasion and re-conquest of government.
There is a vast information dump-heap website called Great Dreams. It is a random mix of the good, the bad, and the strange.
SOME of the information it links to is very good economic survivalist/economic warfare information which motivated 99rs can use to deny and withhold revenue from the OverClass and its One Percenter Minions. Link to follow.
Here is the link.http://www.greatdreams.com/survival.htm
Interested seekers will have to wade through tinfoil strangeness and End Of The World dreams to find the good information. But it is there, randomly scattered throughout.
GoSac owns Obama, Pelosi and Reid ’nuff said.