John Cassidy's Blog, page 46

Grexit: An Indecent Proposal From Germany

As I write this, European leaders are meeting in Brussels, and Greece’s fate in the eurozone remains in the balance. But before we get onto the outcome of this latest drama, it’s worth pausing to consider the events leading up to it.

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Cartoons from the July 20, 2015, Issue

A Debt Deal to Keep Greece in the Eurozone?

Until we see the details of the new proposal from Athens, which is due to be delivered to Greece’s European creditors by midnight on Thursday, it is hard to assess the chances of a face-saving deal that would keep the country in the eurozone. The outlines of a possible compromise are already emerging, however. In exchange for Greece promising to introduce more spending cuts and start implementing structural reforms to its economy, the creditors would agree to a new bailout that includes the prospect of debt relief.

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Hillary Clinton’s Two Challenges: The Media and Bernie Sanders

Anyone who has followed Hillary Clinton’s career knows that she regards encounters with political reporters with about the same level of enthusiasm that most people regard dental appointments. “Look, she hates you. Period,” one Clinton campaign veteran told Politico’s Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman (who has since moved to the Times) last year. “That’s never going to change.”

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Will Angela Merkel Save the European Ideal?

In any great political crisis, there comes a moment when great leadership is required—the sort of leadership that prioritizes the general good over sectional interests, and that shapes events rather than reacting to them. Following Sunday’s referendum in Greece, the European debt crisis, which is ultimately a political crisis, has reached such a moment. Because of the way the European Union works, only Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, is in a position to preserve not just Greece’s continued membership in the euro zone but the larger vision of an open, democratic, and fraternal Europe that has dominated the continent’s history for the past seventy years.

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“Oxi”: A Historic Greek Vote Against Austerity
Greece’s Debt Burden: The Truth Finally Emerges

“Oxi”: A Historic Greek Vote Against Austerity

For the second time in six months, the Greek public has voted against the austerity policies that were imposed on the country as a result of the international bailouts that took place in 2010 and 2012. In elections held in January, Syriza, the left-wing alliance that promised relief from spending cuts and a recession, won thirty-six per cent of the vote and emerged as the largest party in the Greek parliament. On Sunday, the vote against austerity was even more decisive: in a referendum on whether Greece should accept a recent offer from its creditors, sixty-one per cent of Greeks said, “Oxi”—“No.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Greece’s Debt Burden: The Truth Finally Emerges
Can the United States Prevent a Grexit?
Greece and Europe: The Endgame

Greece’s Debt Burden: The Truth Finally Emerges

Just when you thought that the Greece saga had run out of plot twists, another one emerged on Thursday—and it was an important one. A few days before a referendum that will probably decide the fate of Greece’s Syriza government, one of the country’s creditors, the International Monetary Fund, came out and acknowledged that the stricken country is unlikely to recover until a good portion of its huge debt load is wiped out.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Can the United States Prevent a Grexit?
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What Planet Is Chris Christie Living On?

Chris Christie can yak; we all know that. At one point during the Bridgegate scandal, which derailed his Presidential hopes, he stood at the podium for what seemed like an entire morning answering questions, until, finally, the Trenton press corps ran out of things to ask. He didn’t say much, of course, except to repeat his denial that he knew anything about the Nixonian shenanigans his chief of staff and top political adviser had apparently been up to in Fort Lee, where his administration stood accused of reducing the number of access lanes to the George Washington Bridge in order to punish the town’s mayor for opposing the governor’s reëlection. But at a moment when many politicians would have stayed out of view, Christie stood there and talked, and talked, and talked, his very presence indicating that, however bad things got, he intended to tough it out.

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Can the United States Prevent a Grexit?

As the crisis in Greece continues to escalate, two questions arise. What’s really happening? And which side is in the right? For today, I’ll stick with the first question.

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Bernie Sanders Is Enjoying a Mini-Surge

On Thursday, while the political world was focussed on the Supreme Court’s Obamacare ruling, two polls came out showing Bernie Sanders making up ground on Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire and Iowa. In a survey carried out by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center for CNN and the Manchester-based WMUR TV, Clinton was leading Sanders by just eight percentage points: forty-three per cent to thirty-five per cent. Meanwhile, a poll carried out in Iowa for Bloomberg found that Sanders now has the support of about a quarter of likely Democratic voters, by far his strongest showing yet in the state that will be the first to vote in the Democratic primary. “It’s tremendous progress that he is making with voters in the first two states,” Tad Devine, Sanders’s chief political strategist, told Bloomberg’s John McCormick. “It’s something we felt on the ground.”

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The Supreme Court Just Did Republicans a Big Favor

In public, at least, the reaction among Republicans to the decision the Supreme Court issued on Thursday to let the Affordable Care Act subsidies stand was uniform and predictable: outrage. “#ObamaCare ruling is judicial tyranny,” Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, commented on Twitter. Not to be outdone, Ted Cruz, one of Huckabee’s rivals in the upcoming G.O.P. primary, tweeted, “Any candidate not willing to make 2016 a referendum on Repealing Obamacare should step aside.”

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