Niki Ashton vs. harpercon fuckheads on Greece

Niki Ashton is one of the NDP MP's who I like. Recently she was on Twitter cheering the Greek people's rejection of the austerity conditions attached to the latest bail-out package (a bail-out for Greece's creditors really, not for Greece). She wrote:

"NO to austerity! YES to democracy!"

It's long been a problem for me that since I don't watch mainstream news at all and read very little of mainstream print news, I have no way of understanding the world-views of the ignorant deluded fools who imagine that the neo-liberal, 1%, bankster financial crisis is the fault of the last vestiges of the welfare state.  Which is not to say that I was surprised when the harpercons attacked Ashton's sensible response to this good news. It's just that I can't really fathom how they can take issue with it and still be capable of pointing their asses in the right direction when they sit on the toilet to take a shit.

(Perhaps they don't?)

The political sparring began when the Prime Minister's Office reached back three years ago to highlight comments NDP Leader Tom Mulcair made about his belief that the Canadian government should have given money to a global fund to prop up faltering European banks.

First of all; what the fuck is the PMO doing with our tax-dollars by attacking the opposition? The job of the PMO used to be coordinating with other federal departments to organize policies and policy delivery, not to engage in pissing contests with other political parties.

Second of all, while I don't think I agree that Europe's banks should have been protected from their bad decisions, short-sightedness and probable criminality, it's not as if the harpercons stood fast against bailing-out banks. Also, now, the banks have their money. It's the IMF that wants it now. Also, the Greek government has been very clear that they're prepared to pay back whatever they can, just not at the cost of pensioners, national assets and the unemployed. Complete stupid idiots like Joe Oliver, Jason Kenney, and Captain Closet himself, stephen harper, have no clue about the nature of the Greece-Troika negotiations. Nor will they admit the ruinous impact of the austerity policies that have been foisted upon Europeans and which they'd dearly love to bring here. 

Foreign Affairs Minister Jason Kenney later tweeted a response to Ashton, quoting former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher: "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money to spend."

Again, if Jason Kenney wasn't the drooling half-wit that he is, he'd be aware that Margaret Thatcher's impact on public spending was negligible. She spent other people's money on weapons and tax-cuts for the wealthy (when she wasn't squandering the windfall from North Sea oil).

The past few days, I've been thinking about what the shit-head, uninformed, deluded people are saying about the Greek crisis. So I managed to find this link from the Toronto Sun. Let's check it out! (Ezra Levant took a hand at debating this topic, but I'm not about to link to that repulsive ignoramus.)

It's a sad day in Canadian politics when a possible future cabinet minister applauds the latest news in the current Greek tragedy.

Um, unless the news is good, right idiot?

Niki Ashton, the MP for Manitoba, and a prominent voice in the NDP caucus tweeted "NO to austerity! YES to democracy!" in celebration of Greek voters' rejecting the latest bailout terms offered by the European troika on Sunday.
Ashton also retweeted more severe and more popular comments made by author and far-left celeb Naomi Klein: "Nobody should be forced to sign their own death warrant. So many Greeks voting no to blackmail and terror. Powerful day."

Sounds about right. What's your problem Furey?

It's a powerful day indeed when we can kid ourselves that going above and beyond the call of duty to offer a loan to a neighbour in need is blackmail and even terror.

Well, Furey has just revealed the most contemptible ignorance of over THIRTY YEARS of IMF austerity demands on indebted nations. I'm too busy to do his homework for him. The troika are not neighbours, trying to go above and beyond being neighbourly to help Greece out of a tight spot. For him to characterize things as such is just inexcusable. For fuck's sake! There are libraries of literature and academic studies, many from the fucking IMF and the World Bank themselves about the deleterious impact of their policies on the receiver countries. I'm seriously pissed-off that a doofus like Furey gets to make a living from his ignorant stupid ravings.

Greece ran deficits for years. Then, when it came time to join the European Union, they fudged the books to make their financial situation appear rosier.

First of all; read this, and see if you can say that Europe's banks were innocent of self-deception. We won't even get into the concept that Greece's wealthy do not pay their taxes and force the Greek government to subsidize them and their vanity projects and the military. Just read that link and see if you can tell yourself that it was the evil Greek politicians who covered up everything and thereby deceived the innocent bankers who tried to do due diligence but were thwarted by massive fraud and cover-ups.

The point is that you can't. Greece's lenders knew what they were getting into. They've been bailed-out by the IMF, now the IMF wants its pound of flesh.
Then they failed to clean up their books before the recession, so the latter hit them harder than it otherwise would have.

Their debt-to-GDP ratio jumped every year until it got to the point where their ability to repay debts was considered so shaky that traditional lenders wouldn't help them. Greece was downgraded to junkbond status.

AFTER they joined the Euro, they were helped by the criminals at Goldman Sachs to further disguise their precarious financial situation. (Goldman Sachs being well compensated for their chicanery. Goldman Sachs has also been the beneficiary of over $10 billion in US taxpayers' largesse, which it has paid back, largely through "investing" the TRILLIONS of dollars of "Quantitative Easing" it's received from the US Federal Reserve in the financial markets.

ALL the banks that stupidly loaned money to finance the tax flight and fancies of the Greek 1% have been bailed out. There's nothing coherent from the ignorant SUN writers like Anthony Furey about the significance of THAT fact.
That's when the IMF and others jumped in. Simply put, that's other nations' taxpayers' money. It's redistribution. So you can understand why the lenders wanted Greece to agree to clean up their act. They didn't want them coming back for more.
What this shit-head hasn't learned yet, is the nature of the negotiations with Syriza and the Troika:

The Troika’s demand was for austerity to be deepened solely by taxing labor and reducing pensions. Its policy makers had vetoed Syriza’s proposed taxes on the wealthy and steps to stop their tax avoidance. The IMF for its part vetoed cutbacks in Greek military spending (far above the 2% of GDP demanded by NATO), despite even the European Central Bank (ECB) and German Chancellor Merkel agreeing to this.

Furey continues:

But they did. The first bailout was in 2010, then there was another finalized in 2012. During this time private credit holders agreed to take a 53.5% loss on what Greece owed them. Thus anyone calling out for debt forgiveness needs to understand that it already happened.

And Furey needs to understand that the banks were already repaid for the loans they so recklessly made. Furey needs to understand that Canadian taxpayers have been on the hook for over $100 billion in economic stimulus necessary to counter the economic damage caused by the total corruption of the world's financial sector.  Oh yeah, also:

As long ago as 2010, when Greece was first bailed out, many knowledgeable observers, including some members of the I.M.F.’s board of directors, worried that Greece would never be able to pay back all of its debts—its total debt burden is about a hundred and seventy five per cent of the country’s G.D.P.—and advocated imposing a haircut on its creditors. Rather than doing this, the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the I.M.F. loaned the Greek government money to pay its creditors, which were mostly European banks, at a hundred cents on the dollar. In the now-famous words of Karl Otto Pöhl, a former head of the Bundesbank, the bailout “was about protecting German banks, but especially the French banks, from debt write-offs.”

Continuing;

The funny thing is the situation actually improved for Greece towards the end of 2014. The economy was looking rosier. But voters got impatient with the slow pace of improvements and did something really naive.
They voted for a party, Syriza, that's an acronym for "coalition of the radical left". And by radical, they meant radical. In North America, someone on the centre-left gets called a Marxist as a hyperbolic slur. But over there, many of them really are Marxists.

Gasp! As opposed to WHAT Furey? A blood-soaked US Republican or Democrat? A super-corrupt bankster scum-bag? A "Conservative" openly contemptuous of parliamentary democracy, free and fair elections and the most basic of human rights?

As for Furey's ramblings about Greece's economic turnaround in 2014, it was mostly cosmetic. The usual drivel that we hear here: Profits are up. The stock-market is up. Deficits are down. Stupid, useless, empty-headed blathering from people who either don't know or don't care about the factors that affect the majority of a country's people.

Syriza campaigned on ignoring previous bailout terms - this next part is key - that they'd already agreed to. This naturally made their lenders nervous and caused the crisis that resulted in Sunday's referendum.
It's unclear what the Ashtons and Kleins of the world want. Endless free money? Loans, no questions asked?

You fucking idiot.

Greece behaved badly and is paying the consequences. After you've proven you're fiscally reckless, you can't expect to get multi-billion-dollar loans from your neighbours without them placing a few conditions on you.
It's no surprise that in Greece the young, students and public sector workers were most likely to indulge in this magical thinking.
Greek pollster Public Issue broke voting intention down by demographic and found 85% of 18- to 24-year-old voters wanted to reject the package.
Canadians got a glimpse of this in the 2012 Quebec protests when students took to the streets angry over modest increases to tuition frees, while Quebec benefited from equalization transfers. It's the height of entitlement culture.
We don't need more antics like this. We certainly don't need our own Canadian political figures calling for them.

And there it is. Austerity for Greece's youth. Austerity for Canada's youth. Meanwhile, Bay Street and the oil sector get lavished with subsidies, despite their corruption and violence. $100 billion in deficit spending to counter the recession caused by their criminality. Billions in stupid and evil wars. Fuck you Furey. Fuck you SUN newspapers. Wrong about everything as usual.