Euro Area

[Andres]

I've been saying that they need our money as much as we need their gas for years but I always felt ignored. As such I've now used the opposite argument and immediately got your attention. I think I'm on to something...

I haven't read this entire thread, so if you've been saying that for years, I didn't read it. Sorry.

You're a....Belgian....

See, that's where the EU fails. If want to be truly Europeans, then we need to consider the Mediterranean as our sea. As long as we think "Belgian", "German", "French", etc. this whole European Union thing won't work.

Contrary to how it may seem, I'm not at all opposed to a European Union. I do am opposed to the way things are being run now. There's so much going wrong with the EU that it's easy for local politicians (Belgian, French, English, etc.) to (rightfully) critizise the entire project and of course, plenty of people are turning their backs towards the EU. Europe needs to start getting its' act together or we'll fall apart and then it'll be each country for its' own again.

And to channel gaelic cowboy, why are we still discussing this? The government of Cyprus keeps spawning ideas that would avoid a deal with Russia yet I'm supposed to happily look forward to more russian involvement.

No, I'm saying that you seem to be defending the people who screwed up with their moronic "give us your savings" plan, which now gives an opportunity for Russia to turn Cyprus into a Russian puppet state. Perhaps (and hopefully) it won't happen, but the fact that this opportunity has been created is bad enough. Not to mention the latent risk that people will indeed perform a run on the bank whenever their country risks to perhaps get in trouble.

The people responsible for that idea should get fired and never allowed into office again. And they should be fired immediately, not after the next election.

Not before Monday.

Never heard of long term investments? You put in money now and get a return within 5 years. Or is too difficult for our glorious leaders to think past behind the next election?

Only the voters can do that but they would rather abandon the EU.

Only the EU in its' current form.

The elites playing with us? I thought I made that point earlier when I said the voters are allowing them to do just that. The people have a lot of power but they do not use it. Instead they do things like voting for the same party every time because they always did that.
I have sympathy with the people, but I also see that the people make mistakes, sometimes knowingly, and as such are partly to blame themselves. The Greeks for example still pay bribes to pass their driver's license test and many, many other things. The whole society is corrupt to some extent, why would their politicians be any different? They come from this society after all. And with "whole society" I don't mean every single person but quite a lot of them. As for the elites, they will always play with people who know less, knowledge means power and that's why I mentioned education. People collect bonus points here but for a long time many didn't even know that the other side of the coin was that all the info about their purchases was sold and used for market research. It's possible to know about quite a few things but it requires some education and some interest, which is often not there and as such these people are easily exploited.

You just gave the answer to why the elites are still in power yourself.

But you're wrong to assume that people let themselves been screwed over because of a lack of education or interest. Not everybody is born with good set of brains and the capacity to see through everything. And even if they do have such capacities, the ordinary man needs to work his butt off, so he doesn't always have the time to keep following things very close by.

Sure, if you look and search hard enough, you'll find plenty of data and figures, but when are people with families and jobs going to do that?

And so, we keep getting exploited, until somebody goes a step too far, like "give us your savings!". And if they keep going further, eventually, you'll get a bloody revolution.

You're wrong in assuming that true change (not the Obama kind of change or, here in Belgium, the NVA "power of change") will come through the democratic process. At best, you'll get the same old same in a new package.