3 ms·

Greece has not been treated well, but you should also admit that Greece really fucked up. They even falsified their stats to adopt the Euro. > Imagine if a US

by tgv 3y ago

Greece has not been treated well, but you should also admit that Greece really fucked up. They even falsified their stats to adopt the Euro. > Imagine if a US state were in serious debt Except the EU is not responsible for and does not control their member states' finances. The EU has a limited jurisdiction. E.g. taxation, education and defence are not part of it. Being part of the Euro zone does bring certain obligations.

DiogenesKynikos 3y ago
> They even falsified their stats to adopt the Euro. "They" is ill defined here. The people who falsified the finances were not the people who suffered under austerity. > Except the EU is not responsible for and does not control their member states' finances. During austerity, the "troika" (which included the European Commission and the European Central Bank) micromanaged Greece's finances. The Greek government was basically held hostage and forced to take very specific measures, down to which tax to change by which amount and which state assets to privatize in which way. The EU publicly aspires to be much more than just some soulless customs and currency union, and throwing a member state under the bus in this way and immiserating its population goes against what the EU supposedly stands for.
- tgv 3y ago
  > "They" is ill defined here. The people who falsified the finances were not the people who suffered under austerity. That just confounds the issue. The people who profit from pensions, infrastructure, healthcare, etc. are also not the people who set it up.
  - DiogenesKynikos 3y ago
    You're justifying a policy that heavily punished the Greek population by pointing to the actions of a small layer of elites (i.e., investment banks that aided corrupt politicians in cooking the books). You're doing this by conflating this small group of people with the entire Greek population, as an amorphous "they."

by tgv 3y ago

DiogenesKynikos 3y ago

> They even falsified their stats to adopt the Euro. "They" is ill defined here. The people who falsified the finances were not the people who suffered under austerity. > Except the EU is not responsible for and does not control their member states' finances. During austerity, the "troika" (which included the European Commission and the European Central Bank) micromanaged Greece's finances. The Greek government was basically held hostage and forced to take very specific measures, down to which tax to change by which amount and which state assets to privatize in which way. The EU publicly aspires to be much more than just some soulless customs and currency union, and throwing a member state under the bus in this way and immiserating its population goes against what the EU supposedly stands for.

tgv 3y ago
> "They" is ill defined here. The people who falsified the finances were not the people who suffered under austerity. That just confounds the issue. The people who profit from pensions, infrastructure, healthcare, etc. are also not the people who set it up.
- DiogenesKynikos 3y ago
  You're justifying a policy that heavily punished the Greek population by pointing to the actions of a small layer of elites (i.e., investment banks that aided corrupt politicians in cooking the books). You're doing this by conflating this small group of people with the entire Greek population, as an amorphous "they."