This thread...

No . Your bashing his arguments without merit . You seem to know a lot about every country yet bl people who live there can't . Also 18 is still an teenager . You're legally able to vote but until your twenty you're still a teen

Yeah back on topic about Greece being a shithole.

-PB

Makes sense :-"
Basically the reason they got so many votes is because of this

It says "it's time to stop organized begging on our streets"
They are syndicates. No other party opposed this.
It's not illegal to beg in Sweden, but it is part of the EU so anyone from the East can come in.
This has nothing to do with asylum seekers or refugee from war areas. They are just gypsies being gypsies.
Sorry to high jack the thread, but what is happening in Greece is happening everywhere.... Like it did before WW1 & 2.

:lol:

Jesus Christ.

You're off to uni next year aren't you?

You should consider UoM, you'll fit right in with this sort of dross.

This reminds me of a British news clip I saw years ago, some deep thinking politician's idea was to basically have more English chefs learn how to cook curries so it couldn't be used as an argument anymore.

Sweden does however have an integration issue. That's the problem, not the people.
& the picture there... The blonde girl was a politician, she pulled out because of that photo.
The fat guy is a politician, he said he has"a sick sense of humor" to justify dressing up like hitler.
If it looks like shit, smells like shit.... It's probably shit

Edited by scott21: 29/9/2014 11:49:51 PM

http://www.qx.se/12329/sd-driver-antihomopolitik-anda-far-de-stod
http://rt.com/news/187980-sweden-democrats-anti-immigrant-election/

There is a difference between being patriotic and being a nationalist.

Should we always help our own before we help others?

Being Australian and being anti immigration is a bit rich.

I've worked with many immigrants here, polish, Russian, Bolivian, Peruvian, Uzbek and Kyrgyzstani.
They work hard they pay their taxes.

1 in 9 people in Sweden were born overseas. But the reality is swedes live for a long time, swedes are having on average under 2 children and Sweden needs people to pay tax into the system. Some take advantage of it sure.

I like going to a Thai or Indian restaurant. I don't want to kick them out.

Jesus, I don't know where to begin with this :lol:

So if I moved to Sweden the validity of my words would somehow be different? He's not provided a single source for his arguments, so I called him out.

You're calling out a guy who lives in Sweden and knows their politics. :lol: I've seen it all

Absolute bullshit. Give me any reputable source which would support your arguments.

I'd vote for SD - the only people that seem intent on fixing the mess that Sweden has become.

I'm an immigrant (Australian) so they dont want me here. My girlfriend is coloured, her father was adopted, they want both him and her out. All the immigrants out. Not just stop immigration.
They are anti-gay.
I agree with much of their immigration policies, however saying people born in Sweden need be sent back to their own country, which many of them dont have.
Kurds dont have a country. Assyrians dont have a country. Christian iraqis have it tough.
Its all the rednecks/Skånsk Småland typ that voted for them.

:lol: touche

The stories are true - Swedes are truly a brainwashed bunch :lol:

Why are their policies so evil? They are just a standard centre-right party that opposes mass, uncontrolled immigration.

its easy one is for gay rights, and against men.
the other is against gay rights and against brown men.

I'm not sure I can tell the difference.

Troika returns to Athens for a new, maybe last, audit

29 September 2014, 13:27 CET

— filed under: Greece, IMF, ECB, economy, debt



(ATHENS) - Greece has prepared the ground so that Tuesday's visit by the troika of its international creditors could be the last review of its finances ahead of an early bailout exit.

Greece's massive debt crisis nearly broke apart the eurozone. But after four years and a bailout worth up to 240 billion euros ($300 billion), Athens has largely repaired its finances and is eager to get free from the EU and IMF's tight budgetary and policy leash.

Talk of a new EU bailout when the current one expires in December has faded and instead officials now say it may end its IMF programme early.

"Greece won't be needing a new bailout programme," Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras said at the weekend.

"We can cope in the coming year, even without the remaining financial aid of the existing bailout programme," he added.

Greece is slated to receive another 1.8 billion euros from the EU by December.

Samaras also raised the possibility last week that Greece could drop its IMF programme early, which lasts until 2016 and under which 12.6 billion euros remains to be disbursed.

"I believe this cooperation will be completed ahead of schedule. We will see what happens with the next bailout tranches," Samaras said last week during a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin.

That has set the stage for tense talks with the auditors from the European Union, IMF and European Central Bank, which previously insisted Greece undertake stiff budget and benefits cuts as well as reforms to improve economic performance.

Athens is expected to try to buy time concerning the implementation of crucial labour and insurance sectors reforms, scale down the 2015 budget surplus target and include tax breaks in the draft 2015 budget.

But EU sources cited by Greek media indicated the troika will insist Athens stick to the agreed target of a 3 percent budget surplus before debt payments and that it close a fiscal gap estimated at around 2 billion euros for next year.

- Political not economic motives -

Many analysts believe that government's motivations are more political than economic.

"It's a political question," said German economics Jens Bastian. "The Greek government wants to return back to normal and would like to join the same club as Portugal and Ireland," which have both now exited their bailout programmes.

Exiting the bailout could have tangible political benefits for Samaras' centre-right, socialist coalition government.

The strict bailout conditions have led to the anti-austerity Syriza party taking the lead in opinion polls, outpacing the coalition parties together.

Analysts believe exiting the bailout would help Samaras gain the extra votes the coalition needs to ensure the election of a president next year, without which an early vote would be triggered.

But a political decision to exit the bailout early "isn't necessarily economically wise," said Napoleon Maravegias, an economics professor at the University of Athens.

He expressed doubts that Greece will be able to borrow on the markets at rates as low as those offered by the IMF.

"Why pay so dearly to finance oneself? To become a normal country? But Greece will never be a normal country for the markets," said Napoleon Maravegias.

Greece's debt level is still nearly 175 percent of gross domestic product, despite a controversial write down of privately-held debt.

Despite the improvement in its finances, the Greek economy is still not growing and more than one in four people is jobless. The first quarter of growth is expected at the end of this year after 6 years of recession.

An analysis by Eurobank judged it feasible that Greece could rely on the markets to finance itself until 2022, but then the situation will become more complicated as Athens will begin paying back its bailout loans.
http://policy-network.net/pno_detail.aspx?ID=4578&title=The-political-challenges-of-institutional-reform-in-Greece

there is F! the feminists

then there is
Sverigedemokraterna (Swedish democrats)

I thought Feministiskt Initiativ only got ~3% of the vote, not 10%.

Thats only one of their things.

No..... I live here. Have you read their policies?

:lol:

They just oppose mass immigration mate, Sweden Democrats aren't "Nazi" despite what the uber-left Swedish media will tell you.

Sweden is completely fucked - an example of what mass immigration will do it a country. They are projected to become a third world nation by 2030 - behind the likes of Libya.

[youtube]EKiYJa_RmTY[/youtube]

“The reality for migrants in Greece is dire. The EU must put pressure on Greece to improve the situation. Each and every person has the right to basic legal assistance and to humane treatment upon arriving in an EU country which is clearly not the case at the moment,” concludes Beger.

It is quite clear these are not refugees, they are immigrants. Its happening all over Europe. There is a gypsy invasion.
Outside of every atm, supermarket, train station, bus station, even on the trains there are beggars here is Sweden. There wasnt 2 years ago. Since Romania joined the EU they have come in droves. Many from Moldavia too. Because they have no papers, under EU law you cant deport them. Britain has done well to keep them out and in places like Poland they get assaulted.
Swedes are more tolerant, however in the small towns people are becoming afraid because of the numbers.
The reality is they do have a knife culture.
This is one of the reasons you are seeing a rise of nationalism across Europe. Even in Sweden in the recent election the nazi party had over 10% of the vote.
This is just the Greek solution to a huge problem.

I'm confused by these Greek threads.

Is the answer more or less anal.

The political challenges of institutional reform in Greece



Kevin Featherstone - 11 February 2014






Greece has seen the biggest fiscal re-balancing in OECD history. Does this mean that the bail-out strategy is working?

Since 2010, Greece has endured deep social and economic pain. Indeed, its recession is now comparable to that of the Wall Street crash. No other European state has undergone such pain in the last fifty years or more. And, of course, Germany followed a more benign path towards the GDR than it has insisted upon with Athens. We should note the IMF’s admission of a year ago that it has wrongly estimated the effects of the Greek austerity programme: the calibration of the ‘multiplier effects’ was misconceived.

Eventually, tough austerity can overcome a government’s fiscal imbalances. Thus, in 2014 Greece will have achieved a primary budget surplus and should return to economic growth. Business confidence is rising, as is foreign investment. Greece has seen the biggest fiscal re-balancing in the OECD’s history.

Does this mean that the bail-out strategy is working? The answer is only partly and that bigger challenges remain. Removing a deficit is one thing – and when the IMF comes to town that’s what their prime aim is – and deeper, structural reform is quite another. Even if Chancellor Merkel had thrown money at Greece to ease its debt crisis, no serious analyst could have claimed that the public institutions – and the state administration in particular – were ‘fit for purpose’.

This is where Kyriakos Mitsotakis, as Minister for Administrative Reform, comes in. Not since British ministers were sent to Northern Ireland during the ‘Troubles’ has a minister faced such daunting a challenge. He is well-supported by his deputy, Evy Christofilopoulou: Mitsotakis belongs to the centre-right New Democracy party, Christofilopoulou from PASOK, the centre-left socialist party. Their agenda is not directly one of ideological contest. Rather, it is one of the reform of the state administration to make it more efficient and flexible, better informed, with higher skilled systems and staff.

It is mistaken for the outside world to identify the central problems as being only corruption and patronage. It is certainly true, as Mitsotakis recognises in the interview, that present failings stem, in part, from previous governments appointing staff from their own ‘clienteles’ with little regard to merit. He doesn’t defend the ‘political class’ or even his own family. Both major parties have been guilty of the politics of clientelism for the last thirty years or more. Both indulged in pre-election sprees to buy votes with public sector jobs. This takes its toll on the operation of the government. It also structures public attitudes towards the role of the state: corruption locks in both politicians and the voters and has them see the state as a trough. As the former Deputy Prime Minister, Theodoros Pangalos, famously put it: everyone ate together (from this trough). In other words, it wasn’t simply a rapacious political class that exploited the system: many of the public also expected its cut. Let’s hope he’s right when he says that today a ‘silent majority’ wills his reform agenda.

Mitsotakis also has a point when he suggests that the total staffing level for the state administration is not the core problem – Greece is not so out of line with other European states in these respects.

As big a challenge as corruption and patronage is the task of instituting a culture change within the state bureaucracy. There has to be a paradigm shift in the norms, procedures, and habits of how the administration operates. The Greek administrative culture drew, historically, upon that of France and Germany. Academically, it is often categorised as being ‘Napoleonic’. It distorted this model, though, and it reformed it less than other ‘Napoleonic’ states. A very thorough OECD Report of 2011 produced a ‘Review of the Central Administration’, and this detailed a damming set of failings in the system.

The bail-out strategy for Greece has evolved. The loan it received in May 2010 came with an infamous ‘Memorandum’ that set out reforms required of it, if the loan was to continue. A ‘Troika’ of representatives from the EU Commission, the European Central Bank, and the IMF have visited Athens regularly to monitor Greece’s compliance with the terms of its loan. Led by the IMF’s Poul Thomsen, the Troika has a ‘Viceroy-type’ type office in Athens for this operation. Both the 2010 Memorandum and its 2012 revision detailed a list of reforms that Greece is required to implement to its state administration. Indeed, of all the reforms required of Greece, some 40% involve the government bureaucracy.

This is the right agenda for a bail-out of Greece. Left alone, the Greek political system would be unlikely to deliver this re-modelling of its public institutions. Since 1989, every national election in Greece has focussed on the modernisation or reform of the state. But the problem of the public bureaucracy has essentially remained. There have been too many vested interests; the public sector unions are the strongest of all; and the severity of the recession would all have made the political cost of action too high. That said, the Troika’s strategy has itself been somewhat inept: insisting on too much speed and on horizontal cuts with little preparation.

The relationship between Athens and the Troika has, at times, been akin to a soap-opera. The Troika’s insistence on urgent and deep horizontal cuts set the domestic cost of adaptation too high. Greek politicians were left to haggle over every cut and every job. The contest has been nonsensical: the targets for job losses in the public administration were not set by any review of what Greece needed or where; they were crude means to the fiscal re-balancing. So, the demonstrators on the street had a point. All this deflected attention from the core agenda of the need for reform and re-modelling. The Troika supervision could hardly have been more cack-handed; the strategy needs to move on.

Much closer to the real agenda for Greece’s recovery has been the EU Commission’s Taskforce for Greece. Led by Horst Reichenbach, this was created in a later phase of the Greek crisis – in 2011 – and its role is to offer fulsome technical advice and aid to overcome the dysfunctionalities in the administrative system. An incentive is to enable Greece to absorb more EU development (or ‘structural’) funding.

This is the underlying dilemma of the Greek crisis: how to make the Greek state institutions operate more effectively. For this is the long-term task that will remain long after the Government has achieved its primary budget surplus. And it is also part of a wider challenge for the European Union: a stable monetary union is increasingly recognised to require it to be able to reach down into domestic systems and oblige them to adapt and follow stringent rules. A heterogeneous EU, beyond the euro-zone, also poses similarly difficult tasks of EU coordination of macro-economic development. In short, the new European agenda will inevitably rest, in part, on its domestic leverage.

Greece alone cannot do this; might it do so in combination with the EU? The task combines institutional re-structuring and a culture shift – both are daunting. Recent reforms are encouraging. As Mitsotakis says: the tax collection system has been re-structured and, more generally, there is more use of the internet and technology. Following the reforms of the previous government – dismissed by Mitsotakis here – Greece now scores very well in international rankings on transparency, given its innovative reforms on e-governance.

A serious reform strategy must plan for the long-term. Though organisational structures can be transformed, cultural mind-sets can’t be ‘abolished’. The task for the EU is to keep Greece tied to the reform path, but also to allow it the time to implement changes properly. We should be careful of short-term judgements on whether Athens is succeeding or failing. After all, Greece is not unique in having political corruption or ‘cronyism’, let alone inefficient bureaucracies, many European states encounter similar challenges in different shades – our newspapers are full of such stories. A smart European plan for Greece must avoid simplistic contrasts or criteria; it must be engaged step by step.

Kevin Featherstone is Eleftherios Venizelos Professor of Contemporary Greek Studies and Professor of European Politics at the London School of Economics, where he heads its Hellenic Observatory

http://policy-network.net/pno_detail.aspx?ID=4578&title=The-political-challenges-of-institutional-reform-in-Greece

Detention of minors in Greece shows failings of EU’s immigration policy

Amnesty International EU Office Press Release
Detention of minors in Greece shows failings of EU’s immigration policy

Amnesty International is calling on the EU to examine the detention practices of Greece. In a letter to the European Commission, the organization is highlighting the poor treatment of asylum-seekers and irregular migrants in the country, with the detention of unaccompanied minors of a particular concern.

Amnesty International’s report, ‘Greece: Irregular migrants and asylum-seekers routinely detained in substandard conditions’, shows that asylum-seekers and irregular migrants in Greece are detained as a matter of course, rather than as a last resort. Through this practice the government is failing to abide by international obligations, the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, as well as EU laws which clearly stipulate that detention only can be justifiable if no alternative measures are possible, and moreover should always be decided on a case-by-case basis.

Greece’s legislation on the detention of unaccompanied children is of particular concern for Amnesty International. Many children have been detained for long periods and in poor conditions, due to a lack of special reception centres for minors.

“It is never acceptable that children are detained. Children should not be subjected to poor conditions and long periods of confinement however this is sadly the case in Greece. Although Greece is experiencing economic hardship and is receiving a large number of migrants, these issues cannot serve as an excuse for treating children in such a way,” says Nicolas Beger, director of Amnesty International’s EU office.

The report found that the conditions in a vast number of Greece’s immigration detention centres are inadequate or poor and that detainees have no, or limited access to various forms of basic assistance. Overcrowding has been a pressing issue, particularly in the summer months when a large number of migrants attempt to cross the Mediterranean to EU countries. The shortage in legal assistance, interpreters and medical support further exacerbates an already critical situation. The absence of an effective mechanism to challenge the detention of an individual or to complain about detention conditions is also worsening the situation.

“The reality for migrants in Greece is dire. The EU must put pressure on Greece to improve the situation. Each and every person has the right to basic legal assistance and to humane treatment upon arriving in an EU country which is clearly not the case at the moment,” concludes Beger.


http://www.amnesty.eu/en/news/press-releases/eu/asylum-and-migration/detention-of-minors-in-greece-shows-failings-of-eus-immigration-policy-0463/