How the world sees Greece
 OregonLive.com | Portland Greek Festival returns this weekend in Northeast Portland OregonLive.com "Begun in 1952, the first bazaar was held by the Greek immigrants of the community with the goal of paying off the mortgage to their new church, the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral," according to a news release. "Several decades and thousands of ... |
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 The Guardian | Greek Government Submits Budget With Deep Cuts New York Times ATHENS — Greece's government submitted its 2013 draft budget on Monday, outlining enormous spending cuts as the country's foreign lenders returned to resume talks over a broader austerity package in exchange for the rescue money the country needs to ... Greek 2013 budget sees sixth year of recession Greek Draft Budget Shows Debt Burden Growing as Economy Sinks Greek Budget Predicts Economy Will Shrink for Sixth Year |
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 Kathimerini | Issue brief: Global finance CBS News If Greece is forced to leave the Euro, foreign governments and private lenders holding Greek bonds would be left with a worthless I.O.U. Germany's exposure to Greek debt, to take just one example, is estimated in the tens of billions of dollars. Other ... Greek youth unemployment highest in eurozone, latest Eurostat data shows Eurozone jobless soars to record 18.2 mn How European financial crisis has had ripple effect on world economy |
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LSE may think it has stepped in to rescue the Women's Library (Report, 29 September), but more than 12,000 people who have signed the petition consider it to be more of an abduction. We do not imagine LSE will harm the unique collections, just as the British Museum has cared for the Elgin marbles. However, the many items that individual women and women's organisations have donated to the library belong in the purpose-designed building in Old Castle Street, just as the Elgin marbles belong in Greece. Sadly, many significant stakeholders have only just been brought into the campaign. We have written letters to London Met and LSE asking them to delay the process and allow us to put an alternative bid together. They have so far refused. Some of the original bidders were willing to take on the building; that would indeed have been a rescue. I ask readers to contact London Met and LSE and to add to our pleas that the process be delayed for a few months. We're convinced we can put together a real rescue that will keep the unique collections where they belong.
Wendy Davis
Supporter, Save the Women's Library
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A proposal by the debt-stricken country to cut spending by €2bn has been rejected by 'troika' of creditors
Negotiations aimed at unlocking fresh rescue funds for Greece appeared to have hit deadlock on Monday after international lenders rejected €2bn in spending cuts proposed by the debt-stricken country.
Representatives of the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund – the "troika" of creditors keeping Greece's insolvent economy afloat – flatly rejected key cost-cutting measures in a €13.5bn austerity package lenders are demanding in return for further aid.
After haggling over the cuts for most of its short period in office, Athens' fractious coalition was told the measures were "unworkable". The country remains mired in what will soon be a sixth year of recession.
"They have asked for clarifications and the talks are continuing," said the Greek finance minister, Yiannis Stournaras, looking down-beat as he emerged from a meeting with the officials.
Insiders said the lenders had objected to proposed cuts to the operational budgets of ministries as well as plans to lay off an estimated 15,000 civil servants by 2014. Instead, the visiting inspectors insisted the ruling coalition agree to further cuts in wages and pensions, a potentially explosive demand that Stournaras has repeatedly said will lead to the collapse of the Greek government.
The prime minister, Antonis Samaras, made a series of appeals to his EU counterparts.
Speculation of a growing rift among creditors over how to handle the "Greek problem" added to the fraught mood. With a vital €31.5bn cash instalment dependent on the austerity package finally being agreed, officials in Athens voiced fears of an "unforeseen accident" because of differences between the EU and IMF.
Last week the IMF chief, Christine Lagarde, said Greece's debt problem "will have to be addressed" in what was widely interpreted as renewed pressure to restructure its debt mountain. Lagarde was voicing the widely-held belief that six months after a huge writedown of Greek bonds by the private sector, Athens' debt pile remains unsustainable and can only be brought under control – and meet the targeted goal of reaching 120% of GDP by 2020 – if it is also restructured by the public sector.
But with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, already hitting the campaign trail ahead of general elections next year, few in Berlin appear willing to accept further losses to salvage the Greek economy. "I think it would be fair to say [the differences] are affecting the talks," said one Greek official. "We are not just dealing with differences amongst ourselves [the three parties supporting Greece's governing coalition] but within the troika."
Meanwhile, unemployment in the eurozone hit a record 18.2 million, according to EU figures. The jobless rate across the euro area was 11.4% in August. July's reading was also been revised up to 11.4% from 11.3% previously. In the EU as a whole the jobless rate was 10.5%, with 25.4 million out of work. Youth unemployment is particularly bleak, at 22.8% in the eurozone, and 22.7% across the EU. The figures also showed
Greek youth unemployment hits 55.4%
This morning's youth unemployment stats also show that Greece was the eurozone country with the most young people out of work. According to Eurostat, 55.4% of adults under 25 are out of work in Greece, compared with 52.9% in Spain. In contrast, several northern European countries still have single-digit youth unemployment rates, with 8.1% in Germany, 9.4% in the Netherlands and 9.7% in Austria.
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The work of the renowned Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm ranged across revolutions and the centuries. Here are extracts from his major works on communism, war and jazz
On 28 June 1992 President Mitterrand of France made a sudden, unannounced and unexpected appearance in Sarajevo, already the centre of a Balkan war that was to cost many thousands of lives during the remainder of the year. His object was to remind world opinion of the seriousness of the Bosnian crisis. Indeed, the presence of a distinguished, elderly and visibly frail statesman under small-arms and artillery fire was much remarked on and admired. However, one aspect of M Mitterrand's visit passed virtually without comment, even though it was plainly central to it: the date. Why has the president of France chosen to go to Sarajevo on that particular day? Because 28 June was the anniversary of the assassination, in Sarajevo, in 1914, of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, which led, within a matter of weeks, to the outbreak of the first world war. For any educated European of Mitterrand's age, the connection between date, place and the reminder of a historic catastrophe precipitated by political error and miscalculation leaped to the eye. How better to dramatise the potential implications of the Bosnian crisis than by choosing so symbolic a date? But hardly anyone caught the allusion, except a few professional historians and very senior citizens. The historical memory was no longer alive.
The destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one's comtemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late 20th century. Most young men and women at the century's end grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in. This makes historians, whose business it is to remember what others forget, more essential at the end of the second millennium than ever before. But for that very reason they must be more than simply chroniclers, remembrancers and compilers, though this is also the historians' necessary function. In 1989 all governments and especially all foreign ministers in the world would have benefited from a seminar on the peace settlements after the two world wars, which most of them had apparently forgotten.
The Age of Extremes, Little Brown, 1994
The months in Berlin made me a lifelong communist, or at least a man whose life would lose its nature and its significance without the political project to which he committed himself as a schoolboy, even though that project has demonstrably failed, and, as I now know, was bound to fail. The dream of the October Revolution is still there somewhere inside me, as deleted texts are still waiting to be recovered by experts, somewhere on the hard disks of computers. I have abandoned, nay, rejected it, but it has not been obliterated. To this day I notice myself treating the memory and tradition of the USSR with an indulgence and a tenderness which I do not feel towards communist China, because I belong to the generation for whom the October Revolution represented the hope of the world, as China never did. The Soviet Union's hammer and sickle symbolised it.
Interesting Times, Little Brown, 2002
Before 1914, virtually the only quantities measured in millions, outside astronomy, were populations of countries and the data of production, commerce and finance. Since 1914 we have become used to measuring the numbers of victims in such magnitudes: the casualties of even localised wars (Spain, Korea, Vietnam) – larger ones are measured in tens of millions – the numbers of those driven into forced migration or exile (Greeks, Germans, refugees in the Indian subcontinent, kulaks), even the number massacred in genocide (Armenians, Jews), not to mention those killed by famine or epidemics. Since such human magnitudes escape precise recording or elude the grasp of the human mind, they are hotly debated. But the debates are about millions more or less. Nor are these astronomic figures to be entirely explained, and still less justified, by the rapid growth of the world population in our century. Most of them occurred in areas which were not growing all that fast.
Hecatombs on this scale were beyond the range of imagination in the 19th century, and those which actually occurred took place in the world of backwardness or barbarism outside the range of progress and "modern civilisation", and were surely destined to retreat in the face of universal, if uneven, advance. The atrocities of Congo and Amazon, modest in scale by modern standards, so shocked the Age of Empire – witness Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness – just because they appeared as regressions of civilised men into savagery. The state of affairs to which we have become accustomed, in which torture has once again become part of police methods in countries priding themselves on their record of civility, would not merely have profoundly repelled political opinion, but would have been, justifiably, regarded as a relapse into barbarism, which went against every observable historical trend of development since the mid-18th century.
After 1914 mass catastrophe, and increasingly the methods of barbarism, became an integral and expected part of the civilised world, so much so that it masked the continued and striking advances of technology and the human capacity to produce, and even the undeniable improvements in human social organisation in many parts of the world, until these became quite impossible to overlook during the huge forward leap of the world economy in the third quarter of the 20th century. In terms of the material improvement of the lot of humanity, not to mention of the human understanding and control over nature, the case for seeing the history of the 20th century as progress is actually more compelling than it was in the 19th. For even as Europeans died and fled in their millions, the survivors were becoming more numerous, taller, healthier, longer-lived. And most of them lived better. But the reasons why we have got out of the habit of thinking of our history as progress are obvious. For even when 20th-century progress is most undeniable, prediction suggests not a continued ascent, but the possibility, perhaps even the imminence, of some catastrophe: another and more lethal world war, an ecological disaster, a technology whose triumphs may make the world uninhabitable by the human species, or whatever current shape the nightmare may take. We have been taught by the experience of our century to live in the expectation of apocalypse.
The Age of Empire, Little Brown, 1987
The end of the cold war suddenly removed the props which had held up the international structure and, to an extent not yet appreciated, the structures of the world's domestic political systems. And what was left was a world in disarray and partial collapse, because there was nothing to replace them. The idea, briefly entertained by American spokesmen, that the old bipolar order could be replaced by a "new world order" based on the single superpower which remained in being, and therefore looked stronger than ever, rapidly proved unrealistic. There could be no return to the world before the cold war, because too much had changed, too much had disappeared. All landmarks were fallen, all maps had to be altered. Politicians and economists used to one kind of world even found it difficult or impossible to appreciate the nature of the problems of another kind. In 1947 the USA had recognised the need for an immediate and gigantic project to restore the west European economies, because the supposed danger to these economies – communism and the USSR – was easily defined. The economic and political consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union and eastern Europe were even more dramatic than the troubles of western Europe, and would prove even more far-reaching. They were predictable enough in the late 1980s and even visible - but none of the wealthy economies of capitalism treated this impending crisis as a global emergency requiring urgent and massive action because its political consequences were not so easily specified. With the possible exception of West Germany, they reacted sluggishly – and even the Germans totally misunderstood and underestimated the nature of the problem, as their troubles wih the annexation of the former Geman Democratic Republic were to demonstrate.
The consequences of the end of the cold war would probably have been enormous in any case, even had it not coincided with a major crisis in the world economy of capitalism and with the financial crisis of the Soviet Union and its system. Since the historian's world is what happened and not what might have happened if things had been different, we need not consider the possiblity of other scenarios. The end of the cold war proved to be not the end of an international conflict, but the end of an era: not only for the east, but for the entire world. There are historic moments which may be recognised, even by contemporaries, as marking the end of an age. The years around 1990 clearly were such a secular turning point. But, while everyone could see that the old had ended, there was utter uncertainty about the nature and prospects of the new.
Interesting Times, Little Brown, 2002
The sort of teenagers who were most likely to to be captured by jazz in 1933 were rarely in a position to buy more than a few records, let alone build a collection. Still, enough was already being issued in Britain for the local market: Armstrong, Ellington, Fletcher Henderson and John Hammond's last recording of Bessie Smith. What is more, shortly before the trade dispute stopped American jazz-players from coming to Britain for some 20 years, the greatest of all the bands – I can still recite its then line-up from memory – came to London: Duke Ellington's. It was the season when Ivy Anderson sang Stormy Weather. Denis [Preston, a cousin] and I, presumably financed by the family, went to the all-night session ("breakfast dance") they played at a Palais de Danse in the wilds of Streatham, nursing single beers in the gallery as we despised the slowly heaving mass of south London dancers below, who were concentrating on their partners and not on the wonderful noises. Our last coins spent, we walked home in dark and daybreak, mentally floating above the hard pavement, captured for ever.
Like the Czech writer Josef Skvorecky, who has written better about it than most, I experienced this musical revelation at the age of first love, 16 or 17. But in my case it virtually replaced first love, for, ashamed of my looks and therefore convinced of being physically unattractive, I deliberately repressed my physical sensuality and sexual impulses. Jazz brought the dimension of wordless, unquestioning physical emotion into a life otherwise almost monopolised by words and the exercises of the intellect.
Interesting Times, Little Brown, 2002
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Greece to submit 2013 draft budget The Press Association Greece's finance minister is due to submit his 2013 draft budget to Parliament as the government resumes negotiations with international creditors over a two-year additional austerity package. Yannis Stournaras is due to meet the heads of the debt ... |
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 National Post | Spain and Greece Are Being Forced to Suffer to Save Germany From High Inflation Truth-Out Protesters march and shout slogans during a demonstration against austerity measures in Athens, Greece, on September 26, 2012. (Photo: Angelos Tzortzinis / The New York Times) People in eurozone countries are sleeping in the streets and eating out of ... Eurozone faces October of unrest, with Greece, Spain troubles in focus |
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 euronews | Greece gambles on quick fix in teeth of economic storm euronews Greece is going for pain now in an attempt to produce a budget surplus in 2013 for the first time in a decade, but the economy is likely to shrink for a sixth successive year by up to four percent. Since 2008 Greece's economic output has shrunk by a ... |
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Greece sees more recession as loan talks resume The West Australian ATHENS (AFP) - Greece on Monday unveiled a draft budget that forecast a sixth year of recession as the government resumed crucial talks with international creditors to access loans that have been stalled for months. The finance ministry said the ... |
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Greek Private Sector Union Eyes Oct. Strikes Over Budget Cuts Wall Street Journal Separately, Greek power workers have threatened to move ahead with rolling 24-hour strikes in opposition to the savings plan but have yet to decide on when exactly they will take place. -Write to Stelios Bouras at stelios.bouras@dowjones.com. Email ... Greek labor unions plan anti-budget strikes in October |
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Greece says troika wants more detail on austerity cuts Chicago Tribune ATHENS (Reuters) - Greece's international lenders have demanded additional details on Athens' proposals in an austerity package worth nearly 12 billion euros, the finance minister said on Monday. "There are discussions on the measures. The troika wants ... |
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National Post | Eurozone faces October of unrest, with Greece, Spain troubles in focus National Post Europe faces a month that may decide the success of the European Central Bank's bid to end the debt crisis, starting with the resumption of talks in Athens Monday between Greece's international creditors and the government. Leaders of the 17-nation ... Greek-Spanish Pension Split Illustrates Europe's Dilemma |
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 Telegraph.co.uk | Greece-Germany: who owes who? International Viewpoint Greece-Germany: who owes who? Part 1: London 1953: cancellation of the German debt. Éric Toussaint. Since 2010, in the stronger countries of the eurozone most political leaders supported by mainstream media have flaunted their so-called generosity ... Germany to Await Troika Report on Greece Before Next Aid Greece in final stretch on austerity cuts Greece to receive a new round of aid, says German press |
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