You keep saying, "they". What you are refusing to grasp is that there is no "they". There are a bunch of disparate countries that happen to be part of a confederacy (or not) that share a continent.
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Let me ask you this...is the United States inviting Haiti to be backed by the same currency as Mississippi, thereby tying the economies together? Because Bulgaria is going to be on the Euro in 2015.
NAFTA. Mexico.
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Also, why do you keep ignoring Greece? They are corrupt and fucked up and definitely similar to Italy.
You only think they are the same because you understand neither.
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it's a problem throughout Europe. Many courts in europe are jokes, not just Italy.
Corruption is not a problem throughout Europe. It is a problem in some countries that happen to be in Europe...just as it is a problem in some countries that happen to be in the Americas.
Back to the beginning. This thread was about a decision by an Italian court that makes no sense. Italian courts do this shit all the time. This is because Italy has an abundance of obsolete and nonsensical laws . This situation exists partly because of the Mafia and partly because of the tribal nature of Italian society. Those conditions are unique to Italy.
Greece and Bulgaria have problems, just like many other countries. They don't have wacko courts the way Italy does, because they don't have the Mafia or the weird social issues Italy does. And that is why...Italy is a case of its own.
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With regards to Greece: You don't understand the Greek problem, so let me explain it to you.
First off, you probably are one of those people who think that the Greek problem is going to crash the Euro. I will tell you, it won't, and I'll tell you WHY it won't.
You know what the population of Greece is? 12 million. That's a little over a third the population of CA, about half the population of NY, and about 2/3rds the population of Florida. You know what the total debt is? $350 billion. That's about what the US spends on its war - which has been going on for
ten years now - every nine months.
Now zoom out...the EU is about the same size and population as the US (a little bigger, actually).
Plain and simple, the hole in the boat just isn't big enough to sink it.
So why all the hubbub? Simple: this is media manipulation by the corps. They want to scare taxpayers into paying for a bailout. The banks can survive a default...so can the EU. But they'd rather pass the buck on to the European people rather than bite that bullet, same as American corps that do the same thing.
All the same, if push came to shove...whether Greece stays or walks, the EU will press on. Greece leaving the EU would be comparable to the southern half of the Florida panhandle falling into the ocean. A terrible tragedy for those who live there, certainly a serious financial blow in the short run...but again, the situation just isn't an existential threat to the EU.
As for Greece itself: Greece is a fairly backward country, still very rural, with little advanced economy. In that sense, it is no different than many American states - again, West Virginia is a good example. The reason Greece is going belly-up and West Virgina isn't, is because of the structural differences between the EU and the US.
The US is a fully integrated federal state. Taxpayers in NY and CA subsidize WV, VA, and a bunch of other loser states that are too fuckin stupid to understand what's going on, so they bitch about federal tax-and-spend and vote Republican. Now, the EU doesn't have that. There is no EU-wide tax, nor transfers of wealth between EU member-states, besides the free market, of course. In that sense, the EU is the ultimate study in why states' rights
just doesn't work.
Greece has to compete directly against European states - i.e., Germany - that are five times its size, with 20 times its economic capacity. But the problem is more profound than that. It's not just that Greece is smaller and poorer than Germany, it's that Greece
isn't Germany, and it can't be. It shouldn't be.
Greece, Spain and Italy (to a lesser extent) are similar in that they have changed far less since the Middle Ages than France, Germany and England. They still have large rural, peasant populations and traditional industries. They also have far fewer industrial natural resources (i.e., coal). Obviously, their per capita GDP is much lower.
This same situation exists in America. CA/NY/MA and other wealthy states have far, far greater per capita productivity than states that specialize in agriculture or defense. But to prevent those states from going under, the Feds pump money into them - we don't tell WV to turn into NY.
Germany, France and England pushed loans they should have known the Greeks could never repay, for the same reason American bankers did the same thing to American homeowners: greed, and the belief that if things went sour, the EU would bail them out. When that assumption failed to materialize, the banks threw their hissy fits, leaving us here.
If the loans had never been made in the first place, it would have eventually added up to the same thing, which is that without trade barriers, the wealthier EU states would have leveraged their greater productivity to buy up the entire country. Again, this is why "free markets" don't work. Inevitably, they create fewer and fewer and bigger and bigger winners, and more and more and poorer and poorer losers.
What the EU needs to do is what it doesn't want to do. They need to forgive the Greek debt, and arrange a long-term transfer of wealth to Greece, at the expense of the EU's wealthiest, who are going to be the winners in this arrangement no matter what their tax rate is. They are already taking steps in that direction - witness the establishment of the EU fund, and the massive tax hike for France's wealthiest. It will happen because it has to happen - because dissolving the EU just isn't an option at this point. There isn't any legal or administrative way to do it. For better or worse, the European family is stuck with each other.
Now that's not to say Greece is innocent. Greece is a very corrupt country - corruption is a way of life there. That has nothing to do with Greece being a welfare state. It has everything to do with the Greek culture and way of life. Corruption and ludicrous issues with tax collection (such as third parties using ledgers proving liability as a means of extortion) have been issues, in exactly the same form, since the days of Aristophanes. It's not a political problem, and it can't be resolved politically. Same as with American states like Mississippi - in much of the poorer parts of the US, poverty is a social problem, not an economic one, and ideologically driven policies won't change that, only the very difficult task of long-term social engineering.
None of that, however, is the root cause of the problem - the problem was that this reality, which is flawed but stable in a vacuum, was put on an unequal yoke with wealthier and more powerful EU nations, and the result was chaos.
As for Bulgaria, simple enough. Ruled by the czars, then by the Soviets. They have no tradition of self-rule, the country is poor and corrupt because that's just how it is, and as such, it's similar to Haiti and other American states historically ruled by the Spanish and still very slowly recovering from the problems they left behind. It is dissimilar from Greece.
Bullet point summary:
-Italian courts are their own kind of fucked up
-There's no comparison between Italy and Greece
-Geographic European nations are no more identifiable as a "they" than nations in the Americas
