Are you referring to this comment of mine: "Greece cannot be saved, so the smartest course of action is to push back against other socialists. A simple and very effective strategy. " If then you took this starkly out of context. I always postulated that Greece must reform and that reforms are the only way for Greece to get its act together. So far Greece has refused to reform and hence my comment that it cannot be saved. My point was that only Greece can save itself. Stop with your cheap polemic, Tsingtao.
This is hilarious. The Same Varoufakis that was praised uncountable times by Tsingtao for standing up against the ugly Germans. This is a must read. Source: FT Varoufakis plot sparks Greek opposition anger ©Reuters Greece’s pro-European political parties have demanded an explanation from the leftwing Syriza-led government over a plan hatched by Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister, to hack into the independent revenue service’s computer and set up a parallel payments system that he would control. The scheme, which was not implemented, called for individual tax codes to be copied online to allow transactions to continue in case of a prolonged bank holiday and the imposition of capital controls. It could have been quickly converted from euros to drachmas if Greece was forced to leave the eurozone. Details were first published in Sunday’s edition of Kathimerini, a Greek newspaper that said it obtained a transcript of Mr Varoufakis’s remarks to an investment forum in London on July 16, chaired by Norman Lamont, a former UK finance minister. The Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, which hosted the event, released a recording of the call on Monday. In the conversation, Mr Varoufakis admits asking a “childhood friend” and finance ministry official to carry out the plan. “We decided to hack into my minister’s own software programme to copy the code of the tax system’s website on to a large computer in his office so he could work out how to design this parallel payments system,” Mr Varoufakis said. “I authorised him, and you cannot tell anyone this . . . It is totally between us,” he added. The hacking was part of a so-called “plan B” that Mr Varoufakis says Alexis Tsipras, the prime minister, asked him to undertake. “The prime minister, before he became prime minister, before we won the election in January, had given me the green light to come up with a plan B,” he said. “I assembled a very able team, a small team, as it had to be, because that had to be kept completely under wraps, for obvious reasons. “The difficulty was going from the five people who planned it to the 1,000 that would be implementing it. For that I had to receive another authorisation that never came.” The publication triggered protests in Athens but was shrugged off by government officials claiming that Mr Tsipras never gave Mr Varoufakis the go-ahead to activate his plan. A statement released by Varoufakis’s office later on Monday said: “The ministry of finance’s Working Group worked exclusively within the framework of government policy and its recommendations were always aimed at serving the public interest, at respecting the laws of the land, and at keeping the country in the eurozone”. Dimitris Mardas, the deputy finance minister in charge of revenues, played down the reports, saying: “I can’t imagine this [happened]. But what a government minister’s team proposes doesn’t constitute government policy.” The centre-right opposition New Democracy party demanded that the government “come up with convincing answers for the Greek people . . . to shed light on this dark narrative”. To Potami, a small centre-left party, said the former finance minister’s plan was “reminiscent of a bad thriller”. Mr Varoufakis’s plan B involved creating a parallel payment system that would allow the finance ministry to bypass European authorities. “We were planning to create surreptitiously reserve accounts attached to every tax file number without telling anyone,” the former finance minister said in the call. “That would have created a parallel system so while the banks were shut thanks to the ECB’s aggressive action, it would give us some breathing space. This was very well developed,” he added. Mr Varoufakis explained the hacking became necessary because the general secretariat of public revenues in Greece is under the control of the creditor institutions. “The general secretariat of public revenues, within my ministry, is controlled fully and directly by the troika. It was not under control of my ministry, of [unclear] ministry, it was controlled by Brussels,” Mr Varoufakis said. The independent revenue office was set up as part of Greece’s second bailout in an attempt to eliminate political interference that helped vested interest groups with close connections to the government avoid meeting their tax obligations. One person with knowledge of the government computer systems said it would “probably been possible to hack into the IRO computer but it would have destroyed the credibility of the revenue office and its mission”. Some observers said the plan underlined how the Syriza government appeared willing to undermine previous agreements with creditors to pursue its own economic agenda, including a return to the drachma. “You have to ask whether a responsible government would even think about pursuing such an idea,” said a senior banker.
Can you link to the uncountable times I praised him? Heck, even the countable times. Or is the formula to that proprietary like the "likes per post" ratio?