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I was listening to this TRNN interview from Sunday night and was intrigued by the following points raised by Dmitri Lascaris: http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=14231 The other is the political obstacle to a Grexit. And Michael touched upon this. There--Michael mentioned that the Greek people don't seem to be ready for this. From my perspective, that's not so clear. And I say that for several reasons. First of all, the polls which are frequently cited as evidence the Greek people don't want to leave the Eurozone, many of them if not almost all of them have been conducted by media organizations or commissioned by media organizations in Greece that are controlled by the oligarchy. And the polling in Greece has performed very poorly. I think the referendum is an excellent example of this. Michael indicated that the most optimistic prediction from a poll vis-a-vis the no vote was a ten point margin of victory. The margin of victory was 24 points at the end of the day. That's a huge discrepancy, given the number of polls that were performed. As I say, that was the one that predicted the largest margin of victory. Others showed that there was going to be a vote--the difference of the vote was going to be two or three percentage points. Some were even predicting a yes victory. And yet you had this massive discrepancy between the no vote and the yes vote. How could they all have gotten it that wrong? You have in the context of a Grexit polls from external organizations or independent organizations like Gallup in 2014 in December, which showed a slight majority wanting to leave the Eurozone or preferring the drachma. There was another in March of this year by an organization, an independent polling organization called Bridging Europe, which showed 53 percent wanted to leave the Eurozone. So there's an issue about whether these polls that show a desire to remain within the Eurozone to be accurate and reliable. I recalled this point today when reading this wire service report: https://news.yahoo.com/greeks-humiliated-bailout-cry-hands-off-acropolis-210103897.html "They can't take a part of the country," said an aghast Lefteris Paboulidis, who owns a dating service business. "Has that happened anywhere else so it can happen here? The situation is dramatic." Like many ordinary Greeks, he was sceptical that the deal would bring about any improvement to their lives. - Worse for years to come - "It would be better not to have a deal than the way it was done because it will certainly be worse for the years to follow," the 35-year old said. "I would have preferred something else to happen, such as Grexit, where we would have starved in the beginning but dealt with it ourselves." Ilias, a 26-year-old civil servant, insisted that "the important thing is for the country to be better off -- not so much if we stay in Europe or not, that is the last thing to think of." "If we stay in Europe and the country goes from bad to worse, I can't see anything positive about that," he said. Haralambos Rouliskos, a 60-year-old economist, described the agreement with Greece's eurozone partners as "misery, humiliation and slavery". His feelings were echoed by Katerina Katsaba, a 52-year-old working for a pharmaceutical company, who said: "I am not in favour of this deal. I know they (the eurozone creditors) are trying to blackmail us." But despite belief in many quarters that radical left PM Alexis Tsipras has been taken to the cleaners by Europe, she added: "I trust our prime minister -- the decisions he will take will be in the best interests of all of us." The Greek population, exhausted by five years of austerity, overwhelmingly approved Syriza/Tsipras to lead them. He/they should have made an executive decision on it and explained honestly and clearly to the population why they were doing it and why it was the only option. It wouldn't have even needed to be an immediate or automatic course of action. As many others have pointed out, Syriza could have taken measures concurrent with Troika negotiations so they could have fallen back on an already printed Drachma in a worse case scenario. Moreover, if they were going to hold a referendum, it should have happened much much earlier (long before they began tapping various reserve funds to make IMF payments) and involved a very clear choice to vote on (e.g. Euro and endless austerity or Drachma and possibility of a new start in the long-term). The fact that they failed to do any of that reveals more about their own poor leadership and overall naivety/myopia than their supposed treacherous or cowardly nature... _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
