The referendum will decide if they stay in the Euro or not.
"The plan of initiatives calls for a confidence vote," Papandreou told his Socialist party lawmakers in parliament, moments after he had also announced a referendum would also be held on the EU deal.
"The command of the Greek people will bind us," he said.
"Do they want to adopt the new deal, or reject it? If the Greek people do not want it, it will not be adopted," the prime minister said after protests were held around the country last week against his government's austerity policies.
Excellent idea: let the people speak. Though one must note that it's a bit unusual for the elites of Europe to let the people decide. They must really be stuck...
Papandreou, who has 153 deputies in the 300-seat parliament, has faced increasing dissent within his own party over the hardening austerity policy monitored by the EU and the International Monetary Fund that has sparked general strikes and widespread protests, many of them violent.
Public anger showed itself again around the country on Friday as parades were held to mark Greece's wartime resistance to Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
Continued on Page 47
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Public anger showed itself again around the country on Friday as parades were held to mark Greece's wartime resistance to Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
I wonder if they also remember that rival resistance groups gunned for each other too.
Starting in 1943, on a number of cases EDES and ELAS fought each other in a sort of prelude to the civil war that sprang up after the German departure in 1944. EAM alleged that EDES was aided by the German occupying forces and by the Nazi-supported puppet regimes of Tsolakoglou, Logothetopoulos and Rallis. This situation led to triangular battles among ELAS, EDES and the Germans. At the same time, ELAS attacked and destroyed Psarros' military formation, the "5/42 Evzones Regiment", killing him. - Wiki
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"We are living in a neo-Bonapartist financial system. Not a single decision has been taken by the Italian parliament since the end of August except those imposed by the foreign power that now us under administration."
Democracy went down in a blaze of glory last week. Both the German Bundestag and our own House of Commons put up one hell of a fight against the dying of the light. Maybe history will record that fact in an elegy on the demise of the great 18th-century experiment in government by the people: they were eloquent to the end. Because at the end, eloquence was all they had.
Trying to hold back the resurgence of oligarchy ... derived from the Greek words oligos, a few and the verb archo, to rule, to govern, to command. Oligarchies are invariably effectual rather than established, to whit, they disguise themselves as other systems, working as the real government behind the face of of democracy, fascism, socialism, monarchy, or what have you... -- the final dismantling of democratic responsibility in the governing of Europe -- has been looking pretty hopeless for a long time. That eruption of excellent rhetoric and faultless argument which sprang to the defence of the rights of the governed (and in Germany's case, of constitutional legality) made the loss seem all the more tragic, but no less inevitable. I'm beginning to wonder why we have constitutions if we're going to spend all our time ignoring them... So this is where we are. The agreed EU "stability union" I just heard Otto I chuckling in his grave...
triumphantly paraded before the media in Brussels will have the power to approve or disapprove budgets of countries in the eurozone -- that is, to vet and police them -- before they are submitted to the elected parliaments of those countries. "We rule, you approve."
In other words, parliaments which are directly mandated by, and answerable to, their own populations will not control the most essential functions of government: decisions on taxation and spending. Even without the ultimate institutions of economic and political union, which still elude the EU, actual power over fiscal policy will be taken from the hands of national leaders. And if, as a voter, you cannot influence your prospective government's tax and spending policies, what exactly are you voting for?
Britannia being outside the eurozone, we will not have to present our fiscal arrangements for authorisation before submitting them to the scrutiny of our politicians (and their constituents). But since our own economic recovery relies so heavily on the stability of the euro, we find ourselves (or at least, George Osborne has found himself) enthusiastically supporting this rape of democratic principle in countries which regard their freedom and self-determination as precious in much the same way, remarkably enough, that free-born Englishmen do.
And among those hapless, soon-to-be-disenfranchised peoples, hatreds have been awakened that the EU was, ironically, designed to bury. The Greeks hugely resent what they consider to be the implicitly racist contempt of the Germans: the political opposition in Athens on both Left and Right rejects the idea of being "bailed out" of a crisis (with all the compliance that entails) that they believe to have been caused by the artificial constraints of euro membership rather than by national character flaws. Even their moderate spokesmen are beginning to characterise Germany's economic impositions as a revival of its wartime attempt at conquest. This is the natural consequence of the European Union. If you're going to build a European nation then you're not going to have a German or a French or a Czech or a British nation. All will be subsumed into the new Holy Roman Empire.
But the new Empire's greatest weakness is precisely that willingness to trample over constitutions. It's also the product of a "constitution," to whit the agreements bringing it into existence. Until it manages to do away with the last vestiges of the historic European states it depends on the voluntary compliance of its members with its Imperial edicts. It has no legions to dispatch to enforce its will, and sanctions, as we've seen demonstrated time after time in the past twenty or thirty years, don't cut the Gray Poupon. That doesn't say that the legions won't come into existence at some point in the future, and that brings up the danger of the war the EU was supposed to render obsolete. Pretensions to universal dominion usually lead in that direction, or so the ghost of M. Bonapart informs me. Continued on Page 47
Posted by: Water Modem ||
10/31/2011 09:02 ||
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SOFIA: Bulgarians started voting in a presidential runoff on Sunday likely to be won by the ruling center-right GERB partys candidate, strengthening its hand before 2013 general elections.
GERBs candidate Rosen Plevneliev won 40 percent of the vote in last weeks first round after a campaign blighted by rallies against the Roma minority and corruption, highlighting problems facing the European Unions poorest state.
Plevneliev, 47, previously manager of a major building company is widely expected to beat Socialist Ivailo Kalfin. A win would remove the possibility of government-initiated legislation or appointments being vetoed by Socialist president Georgi Parvanov who has often criticized the cabinet.
The cause in this election is very strong and important speeding up Bulgarias development, Plevneliev said after casting his ballot, as quoted by GERB in a statement.
Analysts say Prime Minister Boiko Borisov is unlikely to risk potentially unpopular overhauls of areas such as health care and pensions but will focus on keeping tight fiscal discipline and carrying on with large-scale infrastructure improvement. He will also be keen to demonstrate Bulgarias progress by ensuring it joins the EUs passport-free Schengen zone, from which it has been blocked due to corruption concerns, before the 2013 election.
If elected, Plevneliev plans to set up councils to monitor economic policy, as well as much-needed reform of the justice system.
Continued on Page 47
Posted by: Steve White ||
10/31/2011 00:00 ||
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[An Nahar] French police fired tear gas to break up festivities that erupted between Turkish protesters and supporters of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in central Gay Paree on Sunday.
Around 150 young Turks waving their national flag and singing patriotic songs gathered on the Place de la Bastille to protest "terrorism in Turkey" after an attack by PKK rebels that killed 24 earlier this month.
Youths saying they were PKK supporters hurled stones and other objects at the gathering before police fired tear gas to disperse the Kurds.
One of the Turkish protest's organizers, Hakan Fakili, said that 10 people were maimed.
Turkey launched a wide army operation against the PKK after they carried out a series of attacks that killed 24 soldiers and injured 18 others in Cukurca town of Hakkari province near the Iraqi border on October 18.
The latest attack of the PKK caused the biggest loss for the army since 1993, when the PKK rebels killed 33 unarmed soldiers.
Clashes between the PKK and the army have escalated since the summer.
The PKK listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey and much of the international community took up arms for Kurdish independence in southeastern Turkey in 1984, sparking a conflict that has claimed some 45,000 lives.
Turkey's last ground incursion into northern Iraq, an autonomous Kurdish region, was in February 2008, when the army struck against the Zap region.
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10/31/2011 00:00 ||
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#1
Kurds are rapidly become a majority in Turkey, thanks to their fecundity. It will be interesting see what happens as the country becomes the Kurdistan Kurds have been agitating for throughout the 20th century.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Democracy went down in a blaze of glory last week. Both the German Bundestag and our own House of Commons put up one hell of a fight against the dying of the light. Maybe history will record that fact in an elegy on the demise of the great 18th-century experiment in government by the people: they were eloquent to the end. Because at the end, eloquence was all they had.
So this is where we are. The agreed EU "stability union"
But since our own economic recovery relies so heavily on the stability of the euro, we find ourselves (or at least, George Osborne has found himself) enthusiastically supporting this rape of democratic principle in countries which regard their freedom and self-determination as precious in much the same way, remarkably enough, that free-born Englishmen do.
