At the risk of muscling in on Steve Green’s “Scary ass chart of the day” territory — this is one scary-ass looking chart of the day. And as Business Insider notes, keep it handy, so that “You’ll Know When Greece Is About To Blow Up:”
The latest rumblings are all about how the IMF won’t be paying out a dime more to Greece unless it gets its act together and resolves this referendum issue in one way or another.
The question is: How long does Greece have to pass the referendum, get the money, and pay off its debts.
This chart should answer that.
Sent to use from Erwan Mahe of OTCexGroup, it shows when Greece has some big debt payments due. Obviously, you can see why Greece can’t wait until next year.
12/29 looks like a pretty certain drop dead, if not before that.
Meanwhile, as we saw last year when the American media melted down over first the Tea Party and then the majority of the American public’s discomfort at the Ground Zero Mosque, over in England, Theodore Dalrymple writes, “To the disbelief of left-wing media, most Britons want a referendum on EU membership.” The good Dr. Dalrymple dubs it, “The ‘Disgrace’ of the Majority:”
One can make many criticisms of the Conservative Party, but surely one such criticism is not that 80 of its members of parliament have voiced the disquiet of at least half the nation’s population about the most important question that it faces. The Guardian called the 80 members of parliament “a disgrace,” by which it meant that the opinion of fully half of the population, and possibly more, should not even be heard in the Mother of Parliaments. In other words, the philosopher-kings of the European nomenklatura should be allowed to get on with their work free of interference—because, after all (and as new evidence further proves every day), they are doing such a fantastic job.
Which dovetails into Daniel Hannan in the London Telegraph on the EU itself:
Shall I tell you the truly terrifying thing about the EU? It’s not the absence of democracy in Brussels, or the ease with which Eurocrats swat aside referendum results. It’s the way in which the internal democracy of the member states is subverted in order to sustain the requirements of membership.
And that’s by design, as Mark Steyn noted in America Alone back in 2006:
You could avoid some of the bloodshed if European leaders were more responsive. Instead, they’ve spent so long peddling Eutopian illusions most of the political class is determined to stick with them come what may. The construction of a pan-continental Eutopia was meant to ensure that Europe would never again succumb to militant nationalism of one form or another. Instead, the European Union’s governing class has become as obnoxiously post-nationalist as it was once nationalist: its post-nationalism has become merely the latest and most militant form of militant nationalism—which, aside from anything else, makes America, as the leading “nation state” in the traditional sense, the prime target of European ire.
It’s true that there are many European populations reluctant to go happily into the long Eurabian night. But, alas for them, modern Europe is constructed so as to insulate almost entirely the political class from populist pressures. As the computer types say, that’s not a bug, it’s a feature: the European Union is a 1970s solution to a 1940s problem, and one of the problems it was designed to solve is that fellows like Hitler and Mussolini were way too popular with the masses. Just as the House of Saud, Mubarak, and the other Arab autocracies sell themselves to the West as necessary brakes on the baser urges of their peoples, so the European leadership deludes itself on the same basis: why, without the EU, we’d be back to Auschwitz. Thus, on the eve of the 2005 referendum on the European “constitution,” the Dutch prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, warned his people where things would be headed if they were reactionary enough to vote no. “I’ve been in Auschwitz and Yad Vashem,” he said. “The images haunt me every day. It is supremely important for us to avoid such things in Europe.”
Golly. So the choice for voters on the Euro-ballot was apparently: yes to the European Constitution or yes to a new Holocaust. If there was a neither-of-the-above box, the EU’s rulers were keeping quiet about it. The notion that the Continent’s peoples are basically a bunch of genocidal wackos champing at the bit for a new bloodbath is one I’m not unsympathetic to. But it’s a curious rationale to pitch to one’s electorate: vote for us; we’re the straitjacket on your own worst instincts. In the end, the French and Dutch electorates voted no to the new constitution. One recalls the T-shirt slogan popular among American feminists: “What part of ‘No’ don’t you understand?” In the chancelleries of Europe, pretty much every part. At the time of the constitution referenda, the rotating European “presidency” was held by Luxembourg, a country slightly larger than your rec room. Jean-Claude Juncker, its rhetorically deranged prime minister and European “president,” staggered around like a collegiate date-rape defendant, insisting that all reasonable persons understand that “Non” really means “Oui.” As he put it before the big vote: “If it’s a yes, we will say ‘on we go,’ and if it’s a no we will say ‘we continue.’”
And if it’s a neither of the above, he will say “we move forward.” You get the idea. Confronted by the voice of the people, “President” Juncker covers his ears and says, “Nya, nya, nya, can’t hear you!”
As Mark writes, “Only in totalitarian dictatorships does the ballot come with a preordained correct answer.” That was also the goal in early 2009 in America; both continents are currently seeing how well that notion plays itself out.
Oh, and just to leave you with even more Euro-doom, “Greek Government Suddenly Replaces Military Chiefs. It’s Probably Nothing.”
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