After the financial banking crisis … saving the banks and putting the burden on manistreet … the austerity measures have left debts and obligations the ECB can’t cope with. Greece is the canary in the mine. The “last chance” for an agreement this weekend was rejected by the Eurozone political establishment. There was a Greece compromise on the table supported by the IMF and EU negotiators (Dijsselbloem). The ECB just announced the institute has shut down the credit line for Greece banks … the end is near for the banks to be able to supply cash at the ATMs. The Eurozone and ECB will now implement Plan B for Greece. [no one knows the specifics] There will be no victors in this Greek tragedy. The European Union is disjoined on many controversial issues and unable to move forward on key issues: migrants entering Italy and Greece, coping with ME extremism and the blowback of jihadists returning, and the aggresive stance towards Russia, gas supply and the Ukraine crisis. All that without mentioning the negotiations for selling out Europe to US style capitalism through the dictate of TTIP. Perhaps instigating war with Russia is a short-term solution … in chaos decision-makers get more control
and freedom to act.
See recent diary by Frank Schnittger – End Game in Greece?.
Later more …
Definitions:
Grexit or Greek withdrawal from the Eurozone.
Brexit or Brixit or UK secession from the EU, a threat by PM Cameron to keep UKIP off his back at the election. A cowardly stance to pressure Brussels to grant the UK a privileged status on immigration (keeping Muslims out) and perhaps closer ties to Anglo-American financial regulations keeping London City untouchable. To remind you, the Brits were a leading supporter [as old colonial power] for a military footprint with the US in Iraq, Libya and Syria. When the blowback comes, Britain reminds everyone it’s really an island not part of Europe. Cameron’s “Britain First.”
BBC News Dateline London panel discussion
More below the fold …
BBC News Dateline London panel discussion covered today’s headlines. I’m glad I watched the debate and learned quickly true colors of the participants. Much respect for a columnist for The Independent: Yasmin Alibhai – Brown. Not so for New York Times correspondent Roger Cohen who underwrites the root cause of succes by ISIS [US invasion of Iraq, torture, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay] but not the consequences how to restore relations with religion of Islam and the world Muslim community. His stance on Iran relations is courageous though.
A journalist on the New Statesman magazine in the early 1980s, Alibhai-Brown now contributes a weekly column to The Independent. She has also written for The Guardian, The Observer, The New York Times, Time magazine, Newsweek and the Daily Mail, and has appeared on the current affairs TV shows Dateline London and The Wright Stuff. Alibhai-Brown has won numerous awards for her journalism, including the EMMA Media Personality of the Year in 2000, the George Orwell Prize for Political Journalism in 2002 and the EMMA Award for Journalism in 2004.
Alibhai-Brown was a research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a think tank associated with New Labour, from 1996 to 2001, though she ended her connection with the Labour Party over the war in Iraq and other issues, and supported the Liberal Democrats in the 2005 and 2010 general elections. She is Senior Research Associate at the Foreign Policy Centre, an Honorary Fellow at Liverpool John Moores University and Honorary Visiting Professor at Cardiff and Lincoln Universities.
In the New Year Honours 2001 Alibhai-Brown was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire “for services to journalism”. In 2003 Benjamin Zephaniah’s public refusal of an OBE inspired her to return the award. She wrote that her decision had been made partly in a growing spirit of republicanism and partly in protest at the Labour government, particularly its conduct of the war in Iraq.
[Source: Wikipedia]