Fintan Dunne:

The dynamics of Friday's Greek situation are as follows. Tsipras says he has a mandate for a deal not a Grexit. True. Syriza is proposing near the SAME deal as it offered in June - one with wealth taxes the EU elites hate, but with even more austerity of the kind which Greeks just voted against. Sounds illogical? The flip-side that mainstream media are leaving out of the picture (so as to paint Tsipras as a fool?) goes to the core of Syriza's ethos and position. The flip-side is: DEBT WRITE DOWN, by any name you prefer. The Banksters- more than the EU are --and have been- key holdouts. This Syriza offer is designed to flush them out. No Debt Write Down, No Bailout Deal. Call the write down a reprofiling or a restructuring or call it an extension. Route it through any alphabet soup of acronymic institutions: ESM, EFSF, EFSM, IMF, KISS, MY, ASS. But - No Debt Write Down, NO Bailout Deal. #OXI Of course, in the event the Banksters force a Grexit, then the ref...

I  just watched the dream of European Union wither before my eyes in the EU parliament during a seven minute gutter level, populist and outright lying haranguing of Alexis Tsipras - by so-called 'EU centrist' Guy Verhofstadt. All of Verhofstadt's flourishing rhetoric - was just that: mere rhetoric. There was not even an attempt at balancing the gutter with the spire. Lies marched over damn lies. Gutter it was - all the way, until a self-satisfied Verhofstadt sat down . Merkel-led, right-wing EPP politics has long already trumped true economics and has asphyxiated our aspirational EU ethos. Verhofstadt's liberal ALDE group is clearly comfortable with the EPP in that political gutter. Their hysterical rhetoric is required as cover for their own failure. It was they who foisted upon Greece, two failed financial looting campaigns disguised as alleged 'Bailouts'. Thus did a banking class benefit from a cozy cartel with a political class. And still does - vi...

In the final hours before Greeks vote in a referendum Sunday, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble has abandoned his country's stance that a 'NO' vote means a certain exit from the euro currency. The hardline CDU colleague of Angela Merkel also seemed to indicate that ECB liquidity support for Greek banks --currently withdrawn for a week, forcing their closure-- would resume after the referendum, regardless of the outcome. In an interview with Bild, Schäuble said: “ Greece is a member of the eurozone. There’s no doubt about that. Whether with the euro or temporarily without it: only the Greeks can answer this question. And it is clear that we will not leave the people in the lurch. ” Parsing his words carefully, the first two sentences of his statement above seem to quite definitively rule out a Greek exit from the Euro zone, despite his lukewarm reference to a "temporary" conditionality. “It is clear that we will not leave the peopl...