International Business Times: Socialism causes yet another massive failure with Greece

Living in a comfortable and debt financed socialism for many years, Greece reacted with a mix of resignation and outrage on Monday to a painful austerity package from the government. It foresees a massive fiscal adjustment driven primarily by cuts in the country's bloated public sector, which makes up roughly a third of the workforce.

"The time to pay the bill has come, the time of responsibility for all of us tackling this crisis must become the big opportunity to modernize our public life, even if we have to bleed," said financial daily Kerdos.

Center-right newspaper Eleftheros Typos said the government was telling Greeks that they must die in order to live, describing the economic medicine it was doling out as "more harmful than the disease."

Center-left Ethnos said the austerity would mean "asphyxiation" for the Greek people and a "violent modernization" for the economy, which according to new government projections will contract by 4.0 percent this year and 2.6 percent in 2011.

With 7 million more people unemployed today than two years ago, why is the GNP higher than it has ever been? Who was really working?

First, you could layoff every green worker and many government workers (it has been done before) and no one would know the difference. We need to add in all the people who complain about their jobs, nearly everyone who has a job based solely on union rules and everyone who works for an incompetent supervisor or manager.

Hungary announces a reduction in government.

Viktor Orbán, Hungary's new prime minister, has announced the composition of his cabinet, reducing his team to nine and the number of national ministries to eight.

Orbán has explained his decision to reduce the number of ministries, from 12, and to reduce the size of his cabinet team, from 15, as a cost-cutting measure.

Actually it’s a collection of the editors’ political festishes, but in case you were wondering, and I know you weren’t, Clarsonimus has it all doped out for you:

In case you were wondering, and of course you weren’t. let Der Spiegel clear things up for you: “The Oil Catastrophe will be BP’s Katrina, not Obama’s”

In fact, the main export to the EU from five of the seven countries that make up the Central African region (Cameroon, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea), is oil. In particular, crude oil represents 88% of Equatorial Guinea’s exports to the EU.

Everyone’s talking about the Greek credibility deficit. But enough hypocrisy

But when politics consists in integrating countries and whole continents by sharing the prosperity, one is bound turn a blind eye to the financial unfeasibility of these noble aspirations – aka “cohesion” in Eurospeak. “Take away the life-lie from the average society and you take its political order, too,” to put a political spin on the line from Ibsen. These life-lies include all our rhetorical efforts to whitewash the fictions of rationality underlying our society. We are supposedly living in a society under permanent observation and surveillance, constant evaluation and certification. At any rate the agencies entrusted with those tasks get paid for that. We are supposedly living in a knowledge-based society, too. So why doesn’t anyone laugh at all that bunk? Not even the most flagrant political disasters are openly acknowledged till they can no longer be denied by the laziest glutton.

Through complex cogitations we demonstrate that debts are investments in the future, that Europe is a great thing or that jet fuel, increased auto production, standby mode and subsidised cattle ranching can’t be the cause of climate change. It’s the Chinese and the Americans, we sigh – because the government has already sighed at them – who have finally got to get their environmental act together. And Greece has got to become credible. As credible as we are, as credible as the banks, talk show hosts, chancellors and Cretans.

ECB agrees to accept Greek 'junk' bonds as collateral

The menacingly regimented corridors, the depersonalized looking work areas that appear otherwise unoccupied, the mass of interns paid for their apparent enthusiasm... it’s the EU’s sputtering pace car on the info-bahn, its’ full time carney barker, and press operation serving an otherwise unmoved press corps.

2010

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso will travel to China this week (29 April - 1 May) for talks with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao as the two sides look to map out a five-year co-operation plan.

"We will seize this opportunity to generate positive momentum in our 35-year relationship and develop a far-reaching agenda for the next five years," Mr Barroso said in a statement on Monday.

Western analysts say the Soviet Union’s sluggish economy may be hard pressed to attain even the pared-down production goals set out for 1980.
The new year will mark the close of the current five-year plan, as Soviet officials strive to draw up the next master plan for guidance of the centrally controlled economy in 1981-1985.

While Moscow commentators regularly harp on inflation, unemployment, and other woes in the West, sobering domestic figures for 1979 have made Soviet economists more cautious in assessing this country’s own performance.

Western analysts in Moscow said the Soviet economy appeared to be slowing down to such a degree that in the coming years the Kremlin spokesman may have to quietly abandon their long-time preditions about the economy eventually overtaking the west.

Instead, the analysts said, the Soviets might shift to stressing their economy’s stability and capacity for modest but sustained increments of growth

Europe has been harder hit than the U.S. by the economic crisis and is mired in spurious rhetoric, much of it in French, limning an illusory social-market variant to “cowboy capitalism.” This is like the Holy See’s ancient but sporadic search for a third way between socialism and capitalism. It is a vain pursuit of an economic system diluted by the imposition of self-indulgent European cultural fatigue, masquerading as gentility.

Mobs demanding something for nothing. Adulating in your class misery. You know they love it. Some should probably be thankful for Spain’s downgraded credit rating, because it gives a whole swath of people sharing a political philosophy a reason to keep living – to complain about your misery that they caused with their budgetary demands, and “real, living Socialism”.

What people do in the privacy of their