By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--July 10, 2015
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Friday morning, Tsipras met with Syriza members to urge them to back the deal or face financial meltdown. “Either we’ll carry on all together or we will all fall together,” he told Parliament members, according to Greek media. Even so, it may not be enough to placate skeptical creditors —namely Germany — who are weary of paying for what they view as Athens’ reckless behavior. On Friday, leading German politicians from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU and its sister party CSU questioned the credibility of Greece’s proposals. Hans-Peter Friedrich, deputy chairman of the CSU, pointed out the similarities between the new proposal and the one voted down on Sunday. “Either the Greek government is fooling their own people or once again us,” he said in interview with public radio broadcaster Deutschlandfunk. Tsipras is slated to bring the proposal before Greek parliament on Friday afternoon as a demonstration that Athens is serious about reforms. Germany has called on Greece to enact stricter austerity measures before it will consider providing additional aid. “The question is, whether all of this will be implemented, even if it is adopted in parliament, or whether these are just promises,” said Ralph Brinkhaus, the deputy chairman of the CDU group in parliament, told German public television network ZDF on Friday.Understand, although Greece has only had a government that calls itself "socialist" for a few months, they've been operating in a socialist manner for years. And this is the inevitable destination of any socialist system. You promise people generous benefits, undercut the private sector's ability to generate the wealth you need to pay for it all, and then, when the whole thing is on the verge of collapse, you beg for a bailout on the grounds that it wouldn't be fair to all those people who depend on your beneficience to let you go under. The Germans are right to be skeptical. Even if Tsipras wanted to keep these new promises, which I doubt, the people of Greece clearly don't want him to. They just want their checks to keep coming. If Greece falls into bankruptcy and is kicked out of the Eurozone, that would absolutely deliver a shock to international financial markets. But maybe it's a shock those markets need to absorb. Somewhere along the line, people have to start experiencing the consequences of this fiscal recklessness. If left-wing politicians can make these kinds of promises to the ends of the Earth and they're always bailed out when the gambit collapses, when do we ever reach a point where we have to grapple with fiscal reality? Absent a deal that basically gives the creditors power to run Greece, my vote would be to tell the Greeks the jig is up.
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