Happens every day of the week in one place or another :nope:

Sadly!

Way to lump hundreds of thousands of protesters together! The same thinking in reverse people have, who would call any and every cop a murderer after the death of a protestor, like after the death of Ian Tomlinson in 2009.
Killing people is not the means and way by which the political left goes.
That's why I doubt that it really happened the way CNN tells:
If it was known that there were people in the bank, certainly people would have tried to stop it not only verbally, I am talking about real protesters, not kids who want to post their cool riot pics on facebook.
Yes, people blame the banks, but not the little employees.
Despite this, it is always idiotic to torch a building, as there can never be a 100% certainity that nobody is in there, and politically nothing is won. Some people may that that is symbolism, like throwing paint, but to me it is idiotic. You can never control a fire and a molotov is indeed a deadly weapon.

While indeed the individual(s) who torched the building are to blame for this tragedy, here is one piece an alleged bank employee from the very same company wrote on the night of the event: http://blog.occupiedlondon.org/2010/...ths-in-athens/

I have not done more research how much of it is true, some facts like that the employees had to work on the day of a general strike in an institution that got blamed for the crisis (read: a potential target of the protests) are undeniable.
This article from last year also says something about an ongoing investigation against the bank for violation of fire codes.
Again: Screw the people who torched the building, I hope they will be held responsible, but please don't paint any protestor in Greece or anywhere else in the same color.

Sure - its not right to band all protesters in one basket, just as you shouldn't do so with Bankers. also protesting and rioting are two seperate things.

The police here actually have the right to shoot-to-kill a rioter if he is attempting to torch a business that has residental appartments above it.
I wish they would.
......I am all for Police brutality when its used in the right context such as the above example.

Yes, but it is not only b/w, protests and protests that become violent are rather complex. I have witnessed escalations from both sides, sometimes even at the same event. The blame-game aftermath however always looks the same: "oh, it's THEIR fault! We did nothing. THEY started it!" - on all sides... :doh:

I think we both still have the pictures from last year's London riots in our head, where it was just pure luck and coincidence that nobody died in a burning building. :nope:
If someone would try to torch the building where I reside and I had a gun at hand, I would certainly use it, no doubt about that.

Sure you have some Protester thugs and you have some Police thugs, when the two get in each others face, that usually how it starts :)
Your right it was luck, Apparently, in one case, a couple of rioters were 'kind enough' to go up in to the flats above a burning shop to bang on peoples doors - to warn them of the fire.
Thats something i guess.
But yeah, the Riots last year were not political, it was just opportunistic mayhem.

This just illustrates the insidious nature of the entitlement mentality. People who get something for nothing are nearly uncontrollable when that something is taken away because it cannot be afforded.

Look what happened in my home state when teachers were merely forced to chip in a little bit and not have more rights than the rest of the middle-class - they went ballistic.

The entitlement mentality is the most destructive force in a societal construct. Instead of sacrificing something to make ends meet, people on the dole demand, often violently, that the actual producers of their largesse work and produce just a bit more. Unreal.

lol

Great web photo

Income tax, what's that?
 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...y-7801028.html

Bloody Heck this women is a perfect example of a two face cow.

I DEMAND DIPLOMATIC STATUS!! :o

You've got to hand it to the fat cats. They know how to feather their own nests. The hypocrisy is astounding.

One rule for THEM and one rule for us :yep:

Lagarde did not make the rules saying that international offices like the one she holds are not object to income tax payments.

Latest assessment on tax dodging in Greece says that 40% of Greek people avoid paying income tax. 20-25% pay their taxess - since years and decades! - in kind. The so-called "state" has neither the administrativ power nor the needed registers to control and en force tax payments. The rich elites have betrayed their people and fleed the country with their capital. All parties now again campaign with promising payments and benefits to the people that everybody should know they cannot pay for, because Greece won't get the money to afford that.

It seems to me that many people still have not heared the starting shot. The EU does not even threaten Greece anymore, and Italy and Spain already are higher on the crisis management agenda. This should make Greece think. Instead - it starts to raise steeper demands than before, especially this left egoist who is in the headlines all day on.

I liked the defence of Lagarde when she was challenged over her comments for lacking discipline and tax morale in Greece. It was sober, it was healthy reason, it was straight. Greece is in a bad situation, no doubt. But Greeks finally have to understand that they themselves have brought them there, by the failures of the past 3-4 years as well as the past decades. And in the end, the whole historical construction of this attempted, I would even say: failed state, brought them there. Considering the weak basis on which they based, it maybe was not clever to just pretend that they would be a state like any other adminstration in Europe by just acting "as if" without having the administrational, traditional and economical basis to run a state, not to mention to be a sovereign state. Sovereignity does not fall from the sky. It must be won and then maintained. Maybe Greece, in its history orf resistence against the Ottomans, won the right to one day become a sovereing state, yes. But it never assured the needs for maintaining it, at no point in modern history.

And I do not see where this should come from now or in the forseeable future. For europe, it will always just be a bucket without bottom, like it has been for decades and centuries for those Western powers who maintained it because it was in a needed strategic geographic position. With the end of the cold war, the geography no longer is a trump card to play - and Greece failed on trying to develope alternatives to that. The collapse now is the result, and I see it as inevitable. Because it never was a sovereign, survivable state in the first, was always a massively subsidised entity maintained by foreign powers that now no longer are there.

Bad for the people. But the brutal truth becomes not less harsh by not speaking it out.

I agree...Greece will not be a part of the Euro by the end of the year at the latest.

honestly, People like this woman in my mind are part of the new Bourgeoisie, At the expensive of maybe sounding a little like Marx, they don't really do anything near what their pay scale is. This Lady gets all this cash, and we just avoided (or maybe are still on the verge) of a total meltdown of the global economy...while these people still make sick amounts of money, yet helped cause it all.

If it would have been us little guys running the show, we'd all be fired and told where to shove it for our mistakes...but unfortunately the kind of power that come's with a no justification needed expense account is hard to overcome.

But then again, I don't think it's an isolated problem...is just the fact that at the end of the day money talks...and it talks loud. Think of all the rich who get away with stuff just because they are rich and have a good accountant and lawyer.

Europe in chaos...never!!
 

Euro will sort themselves out...

http://punditkitchen.files.wordpress...rca-summit.jpg

Are the G8..

Great food
Great Drink
Great seats
Great time
Great chat
Great round of slapping each other on the backs, didn't we do well

Answer: Kick the can down the road...Solved nothing.

Lets do this again soon at the next G meeting.

Heads on speers, put on display in every town's market place.

Medieval clergy and selfish aristocracy of past centuries could take lessons from corrupt and incompetent Europe today.

The dogma of eternal growth is what has sealed our doom. Sustainability should have been the key criterion deciding everything else. What we choosed for, was craving for more instead.

We are where we deserve to be. I see no longtermed rescue for us. Only collapse, and an evolutional dead end, because I do not think we will see a sudden jump in our ethical evolution. There is a 50.000 year gap between our softwar and our hardware.

P.S. Sorry, but somoebody had to lift the mood again, I think.