To my understanding, Portugal implemented a scheme whereby industries could be assessed based on average profits, rather than relying upon specific businesses to accurately report revenues. It sucks, and probably isn't fair, but where there is a culture of underreporting revenues or overstating expenses, or general evasion, then the only solution is to spread the pain between the law abiding businesses and individuals and the law breaking ones.
One way or another, Greeks are going to be paying a lot more taxes, and if they continue this evasion as a national sport, the Greek government will simply be forced to work with general assessments.
Hey, don't get mad at me. Maastritch was faulty because there wasn't a proper fiscal union. I suspect the underlying scheme was that the Euro would become so unmanageable and would generate so many fiscal crises in poor periphery Eurozone states, and would require so many bailouts from wealthier Eurozone states that finally everyone would throw up their hands and agree to a United States of Europe.
If you voted for currency union, then you either voted for its ultimate failure, or for a fiscal union. There really is no in between.
A number of Eurozone states, lead by Germany, were at a place where their governments would have been in very serious trouble had they simply repeated the process as it has rolled out to date. There were reports that if there had been another bailout like the last ones, the Finnish government would have collapsed, and Merkel certainly has been feeling intense pressure not to give in to Greek demands. The referendum seems to have been the final straw, however. The attempt to shame the Eurozone into handing Greece more money and forgiving more debt badly backfired for Tsipras.
What this all demonstrates is that the Eurozone needs to become a full fiscal union. What is happening in Greece, with the effective seizure, or at least oversight, of the Greek government's fiscal powers, is what needs to happen.
Currencies like the US dollar work because, while there may be fifty states that use the USD, there is a single issuing central bank and a federal government that holds core constitutional fiscal powers. That's why you can have economies as diverse, small and large, as Rhode Island, Tennessee, California and New York in one federal state, because there is no "sharing" of fiscal sovereignty. The states are free to borrow money, but they have no control over central fiscal policy.
In other words, as so many have been saying since Maastricht was signed, for the Euro to actually work, the Eurozone needs to effectively become a single state, and EZ members need to surrender their fiscal powers to a central fiscal authority.
It is in no small part because the other PIIGS states have gone some distance to implementing austerity measures that the Troika had no choice but to put the harshest conditions upon any agreement that allowed Greece to remain part of the Eurozone. If they had simply handed Greece more bailout money, or even gone the distance towards some debt relief, the other troubled EZ states would have had every right to demand the same considerations.
Beyond that, so controversial is any bailout, that any agreement that did not amount to an unconditional surrender would have lead to political crises in some EZ states. Finland's government, in particular, is facing a non-confidence vote if a deal with Greece doesn't contain strong elements of control. That's a big reason for the huge asset sale the deal requires.
There will be no more can kicking. The Troika is now demanding a surrender of Greek fiscal sovereignty. All government legislation going ahead will have to be cleared with the Troika before the Greek parliament votes on it, and previous legislation will have to be amended to be brought into line with the new agreement.
Greece, for some time to come, will essentially be in "administration". The Germans and other EZ members do not trust Greece anymore, and are not willing to simply allow Greece to come back in a year or two and pry more money from ECB's hands. The long and the short of it is that the Greek government will no longer exercise critical sovereign powers.
There are some pretty serious questions about the honesty of Greek officials in reporting the implementation of previous reforms. This is one of the factors that has lead to the near total lack of trust in Tsipras and the Greek government.
Debt relief does not appear to be permanently off the table, but Germany, along with some other EZ members (notably Finland) want to see verifiable evidence of significant reforms, and not just Greek negotiators saying one thing to EZ officials and then going home and saying and doing quite different things.
First of all, I have only asserted that it is understandable why some would see it as a racial stereotype. I have also said I doubt Lucas intended it as such. It's very likely coincidence, to my mind.
And I fail to see how a black actor saying "this isn't a problem" automatically makes it not a problem.
You're right. We should all pretend the rude ignoramuses around us aren't rude ignoramuses. Social pressure should never be applied, and people should simply keep their heads down when someone is being vile and outrageous.
When you couple it with the mock Jamaican patois, it's not exactly an impossible correlation to make. I don't personally agree that Lucas wrote in a racist character, but I can certainly see why some people would see it.
Frankly, the character is so awful and out of place that accusations of racism only add an additional layer on top. Obviously Lucas thought so himself, as Jar Jar's screen time is greatly diminished in the last two prequels, and his most significant contribution to the third film was to be the asshole who stabbed the Republic in the back. I often wonder if that was Lucas's way of demonstrating mea culpa.
Jar Jar's speech sounds a lot like Jamaican patois to me. Whether that is racist or not is another story, but Jar Jar's general behavior; stupid, lazy, and addled, do conjure up the way blacks were portrayed in literature and films for a rather long time. I don't think Lucas is a racist, and I've long given him the benefit of the doubt that Jar Jar was yet another iteration of the whole Ewok concept, cute funny talking things that can be made into toys that say things like "E-chooda!", because in Lucas's mind, the kids love them.
The problem with Lucas's theory is that, at least the kids of my generation (what I'd call the Star Wars generation, who were 5-10 years old when the first film came out), we had no interest in any silly characters. The most desirable action figures were Darth Vader (because he was bad ass and could crush peoples' throats with his mind), Chewbacca, Han Solo and Obiwan, because they were the fighters who kicked ass.
I was eleven or twelve years old when Return of the Jedi came out, and I found the Ewok scenes to range from fucking insipid to, in the final battle scenes, be utterly improbable.
But I don't think Jar Jar was any more intentionally racist than the Ewoks (who, so far as I can tell, were heavily modeled on African bush people). It's just that Lucas has so little capability to portray nuance that you end up with broad caricatures that you have to forgive some for confusing with rather well known racist imagery.
Because being an anti-social prick is so very superior. If it's gone too far in one direction, it's because it started too far in the other. It's time for the PCers and rude assholes to take a seriously needed chill pill. Being civil is what decent people do, and spurning hysterical people, whether because they are overly sensitive, or overly sensitive to overly sensitive people, is what decent people should do.
Grow up. Racial stereotypes, like farting in public, is just plain bad behavior, and it isn't "pussification" to call out incidents of either.
We do have birth control, which is largely why populations are in decline in much of the industrialized world. Even before the Pill, it's long been a feature of wealthier societies that they have lower birthrates. Between contraception and a presumably wealthier society, population would likely stabilize and probably enter a decline.
Hey don't look at me. I want to eliminate climatology entirely. CO2 is wonderful, and we should look at massively increasing emissions. So far as I can tell, you're in agreement. You've have, as so many of us who worship at the exalted throne of the Invisible Hand, discovered that CO2 in the atmosphere is at the very worst merely benign, but more likely increased emissions will in fact help in so many ways. Clearly we both are firm believers that the laws of physics simply do not apply to industrial activity, and we are free to do anything we want and emit anything we care to, without worry of any kind.
So let us join together and destroy the evil pinko commie climatologists. They are ecoterrorists and should be severely physically harmed for trying to destroy our way of life.
Yeah, no kidding!!! Everyone knows the laws of the universe are fundamentally capitalist in nature, and the God and the Invisible Hand themselves will never ever ever allow a free market to fall. Those filthy commie liberal climatologists are all liars and should be taken out and shot for daring to suggest that CO2 in large quantities can lead to significant climate change. It's all a fucking conspiracy, and we should crush anyone who dares suggests there are consequences to CO2 emissions.
Are you with me, my fellow Invisible Hand co-religionist?
Yeah, those rotten commie climatologists. We should have them wiped out.
And then we'll go after all the other so called "scientists" with their evil pinko theories that suggest we can damage the environment and wipe them out too. Clearly God and the Invisible Hand have us protected. Let's start really releasing CO2, because we know it cannot do anything at all, and it's all lies by those evil consequence-free socialist fucker traitor climatologists!
I note you intentionally left out CO2. Good thing, climatologists are evil fucking commies. We should silence them, so our way of life can be maintained as consequence free as it has always been. Do you agree with me that we should quadruple CO2 emissions every year? After all, CO2 is totally benign, doesn't absorb and re-emit IR like those evil lying communist climatologists claim. Perhaps we should ponder some appropriate punishments for them.
Yeah, those filthy climatologists! Their first consideration should be your comfort. Science should only ever report results that make you feel better. Fucking scientists. We should kill them all!
This Alanar Pindar sounds like a red pinko Commie (the last name totally gives it a way, can you imagine an Invisible Hand-fearing capitalist having a pinko name like "Pindar"). She should be fired and forced into some more appropriate Invisible Handy worthy occupation, instead of being an evil Communist out to ruin our economy and turn us all into universal healthcare-demanding socialist fuckers. Scientists, except where they are developing new means of producing massive profits, should all be taken out and put into work camps.
Absolutely. I'm advocating that quadruple CO2 emissions every year. From all those experts working for the Wall STreet Journal and the Koch Brothers, we know it is absolute truth that not only are CO2 emissions completely harmless, but in fact, CO2 is so astonishingly healthy that we should be able to quadruple crop yields. We should be doing everything we can to pump more "green house" gasses into the atmosphere, because, you know, green houses are really good things.
Oh, and we should really look at, if not executing every single climatologist out there, then forcing them to work in the bountiful fields we produce through the emission of that healthy wondrous gas, carbon dioxide, truly one of the Invisible Hand's greatest gifts to humanity.
Maybe they would have, though I think in general climate shifts would likely have taken longer than two or three centuries, giving adaptation and evolution more time to save them. Obviously bumblebees have been around a long long time, a lot longer than H. sapiens, and certainly a lot longer than the beginning of mass industrial CO2 emissions in the last few centuries.
But hey, I get it. Climate always changes, so we shouldn't even bother investigating if current changes are accelerated and represent something far more significant than normal background changes. We should fire all the climatologists, burn their obviously fabricated research and direct the money towards increasing profits for fossil fuel producers. I mean, isn't that what this is all about, declaring anything that suggests we may be significantly altering our climate, and ultimately fucking up the most important industry of them all; agriculture, as Commie lies?
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To my understanding, Portugal implemented a scheme whereby industries could be assessed based on average profits, rather than relying upon specific businesses to accurately report revenues. It sucks, and probably isn't fair, but where there is a culture of underreporting revenues or overstating expenses, or general evasion, then the only solution is to spread the pain between the law abiding businesses and individuals and the law breaking ones.
One way or another, Greeks are going to be paying a lot more taxes, and if they continue this evasion as a national sport, the Greek government will simply be forced to work with general assessments.
Hey, don't get mad at me. Maastritch was faulty because there wasn't a proper fiscal union. I suspect the underlying scheme was that the Euro would become so unmanageable and would generate so many fiscal crises in poor periphery Eurozone states, and would require so many bailouts from wealthier Eurozone states that finally everyone would throw up their hands and agree to a United States of Europe.
If you voted for currency union, then you either voted for its ultimate failure, or for a fiscal union. There really is no in between.
A number of Eurozone states, lead by Germany, were at a place where their governments would have been in very serious trouble had they simply repeated the process as it has rolled out to date. There were reports that if there had been another bailout like the last ones, the Finnish government would have collapsed, and Merkel certainly has been feeling intense pressure not to give in to Greek demands. The referendum seems to have been the final straw, however. The attempt to shame the Eurozone into handing Greece more money and forgiving more debt badly backfired for Tsipras.
What this all demonstrates is that the Eurozone needs to become a full fiscal union. What is happening in Greece, with the effective seizure, or at least oversight, of the Greek government's fiscal powers, is what needs to happen.
Currencies like the US dollar work because, while there may be fifty states that use the USD, there is a single issuing central bank and a federal government that holds core constitutional fiscal powers. That's why you can have economies as diverse, small and large, as Rhode Island, Tennessee, California and New York in one federal state, because there is no "sharing" of fiscal sovereignty. The states are free to borrow money, but they have no control over central fiscal policy.
In other words, as so many have been saying since Maastricht was signed, for the Euro to actually work, the Eurozone needs to effectively become a single state, and EZ members need to surrender their fiscal powers to a central fiscal authority.
It is in no small part because the other PIIGS states have gone some distance to implementing austerity measures that the Troika had no choice but to put the harshest conditions upon any agreement that allowed Greece to remain part of the Eurozone. If they had simply handed Greece more bailout money, or even gone the distance towards some debt relief, the other troubled EZ states would have had every right to demand the same considerations.
Beyond that, so controversial is any bailout, that any agreement that did not amount to an unconditional surrender would have lead to political crises in some EZ states. Finland's government, in particular, is facing a non-confidence vote if a deal with Greece doesn't contain strong elements of control. That's a big reason for the huge asset sale the deal requires.
There will be no more can kicking. The Troika is now demanding a surrender of Greek fiscal sovereignty. All government legislation going ahead will have to be cleared with the Troika before the Greek parliament votes on it, and previous legislation will have to be amended to be brought into line with the new agreement.
Greece, for some time to come, will essentially be in "administration". The Germans and other EZ members do not trust Greece anymore, and are not willing to simply allow Greece to come back in a year or two and pry more money from ECB's hands. The long and the short of it is that the Greek government will no longer exercise critical sovereign powers.
There are some pretty serious questions about the honesty of Greek officials in reporting the implementation of previous reforms. This is one of the factors that has lead to the near total lack of trust in Tsipras and the Greek government.
Debt relief does not appear to be permanently off the table, but Germany, along with some other EZ members (notably Finland) want to see verifiable evidence of significant reforms, and not just Greek negotiators saying one thing to EZ officials and then going home and saying and doing quite different things.
In the same way that an ocular migraine is fun, I suppose.
One should not he cast a white English guy as an Indian supervillain, mind you.
First of all, I have only asserted that it is understandable why some would see it as a racial stereotype. I have also said I doubt Lucas intended it as such. It's very likely coincidence, to my mind.
And I fail to see how a black actor saying "this isn't a problem" automatically makes it not a problem.
You're right. We should all pretend the rude ignoramuses around us aren't rude ignoramuses. Social pressure should never be applied, and people should simply keep their heads down when someone is being vile and outrageous.
You know, having a bigot lecture people on tolerance is rather amusing, like having a piece of shit trying to sell a bottle of perfume.
And what about the not-so-innocent things people do?
When you couple it with the mock Jamaican patois, it's not exactly an impossible correlation to make. I don't personally agree that Lucas wrote in a racist character, but I can certainly see why some people would see it.
Frankly, the character is so awful and out of place that accusations of racism only add an additional layer on top. Obviously Lucas thought so himself, as Jar Jar's screen time is greatly diminished in the last two prequels, and his most significant contribution to the third film was to be the asshole who stabbed the Republic in the back. I often wonder if that was Lucas's way of demonstrating mea culpa.
Jar Jar's speech sounds a lot like Jamaican patois to me. Whether that is racist or not is another story, but Jar Jar's general behavior; stupid, lazy, and addled, do conjure up the way blacks were portrayed in literature and films for a rather long time. I don't think Lucas is a racist, and I've long given him the benefit of the doubt that Jar Jar was yet another iteration of the whole Ewok concept, cute funny talking things that can be made into toys that say things like "E-chooda!", because in Lucas's mind, the kids love them.
The problem with Lucas's theory is that, at least the kids of my generation (what I'd call the Star Wars generation, who were 5-10 years old when the first film came out), we had no interest in any silly characters. The most desirable action figures were Darth Vader (because he was bad ass and could crush peoples' throats with his mind), Chewbacca, Han Solo and Obiwan, because they were the fighters who kicked ass.
I was eleven or twelve years old when Return of the Jedi came out, and I found the Ewok scenes to range from fucking insipid to, in the final battle scenes, be utterly improbable.
But I don't think Jar Jar was any more intentionally racist than the Ewoks (who, so far as I can tell, were heavily modeled on African bush people). It's just that Lucas has so little capability to portray nuance that you end up with broad caricatures that you have to forgive some for confusing with rather well known racist imagery.
Because being an anti-social prick is so very superior. If it's gone too far in one direction, it's because it started too far in the other. It's time for the PCers and rude assholes to take a seriously needed chill pill. Being civil is what decent people do, and spurning hysterical people, whether because they are overly sensitive, or overly sensitive to overly sensitive people, is what decent people should do.
Grow up. Racial stereotypes, like farting in public, is just plain bad behavior, and it isn't "pussification" to call out incidents of either.
We do have birth control, which is largely why populations are in decline in much of the industrialized world. Even before the Pill, it's long been a feature of wealthier societies that they have lower birthrates. Between contraception and a presumably wealthier society, population would likely stabilize and probably enter a decline.
Hey don't look at me. I want to eliminate climatology entirely. CO2 is wonderful, and we should look at massively increasing emissions. So far as I can tell, you're in agreement. You've have, as so many of us who worship at the exalted throne of the Invisible Hand, discovered that CO2 in the atmosphere is at the very worst merely benign, but more likely increased emissions will in fact help in so many ways. Clearly we both are firm believers that the laws of physics simply do not apply to industrial activity, and we are free to do anything we want and emit anything we care to, without worry of any kind.
So let us join together and destroy the evil pinko commie climatologists. They are ecoterrorists and should be severely physically harmed for trying to destroy our way of life.
Yeah, no kidding!!! Everyone knows the laws of the universe are fundamentally capitalist in nature, and the God and the Invisible Hand themselves will never ever ever allow a free market to fall. Those filthy commie liberal climatologists are all liars and should be taken out and shot for daring to suggest that CO2 in large quantities can lead to significant climate change. It's all a fucking conspiracy, and we should crush anyone who dares suggests there are consequences to CO2 emissions.
Are you with me, my fellow Invisible Hand co-religionist?
Yeah, those rotten commie climatologists. We should have them wiped out.
And then we'll go after all the other so called "scientists" with their evil pinko theories that suggest we can damage the environment and wipe them out too. Clearly God and the Invisible Hand have us protected. Let's start really releasing CO2, because we know it cannot do anything at all, and it's all lies by those evil consequence-free socialist fucker traitor climatologists!
I note you intentionally left out CO2. Good thing, climatologists are evil fucking commies. We should silence them, so our way of life can be maintained as consequence free as it has always been. Do you agree with me that we should quadruple CO2 emissions every year? After all, CO2 is totally benign, doesn't absorb and re-emit IR like those evil lying communist climatologists claim. Perhaps we should ponder some appropriate punishments for them.
There's a basic tenet of the Church of the Invisible Hand that states "There are no consequences"
Yeah, those filthy climatologists! Their first consideration should be your comfort. Science should only ever report results that make you feel better. Fucking scientists. We should kill them all!
This Alanar Pindar sounds like a red pinko Commie (the last name totally gives it a way, can you imagine an Invisible Hand-fearing capitalist having a pinko name like "Pindar"). She should be fired and forced into some more appropriate Invisible Handy worthy occupation, instead of being an evil Communist out to ruin our economy and turn us all into universal healthcare-demanding socialist fuckers. Scientists, except where they are developing new means of producing massive profits, should all be taken out and put into work camps.
Absolutely. I'm advocating that quadruple CO2 emissions every year. From all those experts working for the Wall STreet Journal and the Koch Brothers, we know it is absolute truth that not only are CO2 emissions completely harmless, but in fact, CO2 is so astonishingly healthy that we should be able to quadruple crop yields. We should be doing everything we can to pump more "green house" gasses into the atmosphere, because, you know, green houses are really good things.
Oh, and we should really look at, if not executing every single climatologist out there, then forcing them to work in the bountiful fields we produce through the emission of that healthy wondrous gas, carbon dioxide, truly one of the Invisible Hand's greatest gifts to humanity.
Maybe they would have, though I think in general climate shifts would likely have taken longer than two or three centuries, giving adaptation and evolution more time to save them. Obviously bumblebees have been around a long long time, a lot longer than H. sapiens, and certainly a lot longer than the beginning of mass industrial CO2 emissions in the last few centuries.
But hey, I get it. Climate always changes, so we shouldn't even bother investigating if current changes are accelerated and represent something far more significant than normal background changes. We should fire all the climatologists, burn their obviously fabricated research and direct the money towards increasing profits for fossil fuel producers. I mean, isn't that what this is all about, declaring anything that suggests we may be significantly altering our climate, and ultimately fucking up the most important industry of them all; agriculture, as Commie lies?