Greece Plan - are they plotting something like this , when you consider what has occurred so far after the election - Sudden and unexpected Samaras eye surgery / hospitalization , Rapanos sudden hospitalization and resignation BEFORE even being sworn in , now possibility Samaras may miss not just June Summit but a follow up July Summit ( while Greece is poised to run out of money sometime between mid - July / end of July timeframe .) Might Greece be trying to foist a crisis bailout scenario or GREXIT on Troika ?

http://www.testosteronepit.com/home/2012/6/26/the-eu-summit-to-save-the-euro-it-already-collapsed.html

The EU Summit To Save The Euro: It Already Collapsed

TUESDAY, JUNE 26, 2012 AT 5:20PM

During the two-day EU summit on June 28 and 29, all eyes will be breathlessly riveted on German Chancellor Angela Merkel—with one question on all lips: will she blink? Because nothing less than the future of the Eurozone and the euro is at stake. And by extension, the world economy. Only she can save it. And she'd have only 48 hours!

There is even the Grand Plan, issued by European Council President Herman Van Rompuy. It includes all the goodies: an unelected European Treasury with power over national budgets and how much countries could borrow; Eurobonds; a banking union that would guarantee deposits; and the ESM that would bail out the banks. The Grand Plan would require common policies on taxation and employment regulation. An aura of “democratic legitimacy” would be created by joint-decision making with national parliaments. And every item to be funded would be paid for by taxpayers in other countries, particularly by those in Germany.

Mario Monti, Prime Minister of teetering Italy, had set the stage last Thursday when he’d warned that the Eurozone would break apart if summit attendees didn’t sign off on a Grand Plan. And he’d brought his own list of items that were “absolutely necessary” to save the Eurozone [read.... The Extortion Racket Shifts to Italy].

The summit will also have to save Greece. The new conservative-led coalition government had already announced it would throw out the structural reforms on which the second bailout package had been conditioned. Instead, it came up with a plan that consisted mostly of backtracking on reforms already implemented. And it would use the summit to sell that plan. But even as the plan’s ink was drying, it was broadsided by chaos ... in Greece.

On Saturday, three days after being sworn in, Prime Minister Antonis Samaras underwent eye surgery which would prevent him, upon doctor’s orders, to travel—so he won’t attend the summit. He appointed his new Foreign Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos to fill his slot. Brussels accepted this substitution apparently then checked its thick rulebook and did an about-face; the only possible replacement would be President Karolos Papoulias. So, a largely powerless figure will lead the Hail Mary delegation to Brussels.

Shortly after settling down in his new digs, and even before he was sworn in as Finance Minister, Vassilis Rapanos must have caught an inadvertent glimpse of the true numbers; nauseated and with painful knots in his gut, he ended up in the hospital on Friday—and later resigned. So he won’t attend the summit. On Tuesday, a replacement finance minister was named: Yiannis Stournaras, economics professor at the University of Athens. But he hasn’t been sworn in yet and won’t be making the trip to Brussels either. Instead, his predecessor, George Zannias, Finance Minister in the powerless and ineffectual caretaker government, will fill the slot.

The Hail Mary delegation, devoid of political leaders, will present Greece’s plan but can’t negotiate. Remarks threatening the Eurozone with its demise unless Greece got what it wanted—a Eurozone negotiating tradition—would be brushed off as inconsequential. So Greece won’t be saved during the summit [for a Twitter & blog conversation on democracy in a US of Europe that I had with Greek blogger Panos Sialakas, read the very brief but telling.... No Democracy, No Europe].

Meanwhile the Grand Plan is floating around, fishing for reactions. And predictably, it irritated Chancellor Merkel. The balance between stronger common action and common liability has not been preserved, she quibbled. Instead, the paper would allow a rapid mutualization of debt, which she wouldn’t tolerate within the Eurozone, shesaid, “as long as I live.”

That only-over-my-dead-body stance was the clearest expression yet of what she’d been saying for months, regardless of how the non-German media had imagined her veering off track. Even Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, who’d strayed off the reservation on occasion, made it clear that Germany would “not accept” Eurobonds and that there would be no “liability for the unknown.” Europe would break apart not because of too little solidarity but too much solidarity, he said.

“We fight for the cohesion of the Eurozone but against mutualization of debt,” said Minister of State Michael Georg Link. The Grand Plan “reads for whole stretches like a wish list” he said, but to “begin with the mutualization of debt is the wrong path.”

Yet Germany is conflicted. While there are protests on the streets and the internet against the ESM and the fiscal union pact, and while Chancellor Merkel has put her body between Germany and the mutualization of Eurozone debt, industry appears to occupy the other side of the debate.

The latest was Hans-Peter Keitel, President of the BDI, an umbrella lobbying organization representing 100,000 businesses. In a letter, he pushed the government to maintain the euro for “political and tangible economic reasons.” Germany’s export-oriented industry benefits from the euro as it eliminates exchange-rate risks in the Eurozone trade, which represents 40% of Germany’s total exports, he wrote; and inflation has been lower under the euro than under the D-Mark in the 80s and 90s. “We Europeans must expand the monetary union to a political union,” he said and then called for the very mutualization of economic and financial policies that would smack into Merkel’s only-over-my-dead-body stance. And not being a big fan of democratic controls when it came to businesses and bailouts, he denigrated “populist speculation and guesses over the financial burdens and the supposedly undemocratic fiscal policy mechanisms.” He certainly wouldn’t want the people and taxpayers getting in the way of the Grand Plan.

Alas, a much more modest item, the ESM bailout fund, which hasn’t even been ratified yet, is already in hot water with the Federal Constitutional Court. Any step beyond it, such as mutualization of debt and other aspects of the Grand Plan, will most likely be unconstitutional and would require that the Germans junk their sacred and beloved document for a new constitution just to bail out debt sinner countries. Stop dreaming, the Chancellor said today.

And yet, she just can’t catch a break. She has already committed hundreds of billions of taxpayer euros to bail out collapsing countries. In return, she wants them to live within their means and restructure their economies so that the bailouts wouldn’t have to continue ad inifinitum. For that, she is added to the Axis of Evil; and then the Swiss Minister of Defense speaks up. Read.... “You Can Lose Freedom Only Once.”

and......

http://www.athensnews.gr/portal/1/56596

News bites @ 5

by Dioni Vougioukli 27 Jun 2012

1. TENSIONS RISE AHEAD OF EU SUMMIT European leaders sound unusually divided before a high-stakes summit. "I don't see total debt liability as long as I live," Merkel says a day after branding the idea of euro bonds "economically wrong and counterproductive". Italy and Spain argue that they are stretching every sinew to cut their debt mountains and need some support from their currency area peers to keep the markets at bay. "This will not be a meeting where we will give formal approval to pre-prepared documents," Monti says in parliament.   2. NO TRAVEL FOR SAMARAS Antonis Samaras will not be able to travel for another 40 days, according to To Vima. The prime minister should not travel by air following his eye-surgery as this could cause damage to his right eye, his doctors say. If Samaras follows his doctors’ orders he will not attend another crucial EU summit in July. Karolos Papoulias is already on his way to Brussels to represent the country at Thursday’s summit.   3. RAPANOS STEPS DOWN... AGAIN Vasilis Rapanos has resigned from his post as chairman of the National Bank, citing ill health, a source at the bank said on Wednesday. That comes after the banker was named finance minister last week but quit on Monday after being hospitalised for dizziness and intense abdominal pains. and..... http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_wsite1_1_27/06/2012_449369 PASOK boss distances party from partners PASOK leader Evangelos Venizelos Wednesday distanced his party from its two coalition partners, conservative New Democracy and Democratic Left, while also heralding an overhaul of the Socialist party, which suffered heavy losses in recent elections. Addressing his 33 MPs ahead of the expected opening of Parliament, Venizelos drew clear dividing lines between PASOK and its partners. “We are cooperating with New Democracy but that does not mean we identify with them, either in terms of politics or values,” he said, blaming ND for harming the country through its strong opposition to Greece’s first bailout and leaving PASOK to bear the burden of the country’s recovery on its own. Venizelos also condemned Democratic Left for trying to attract PASOK voters to join the leftists ahead of the June and May elections. Democratic Left leader Fotis Kouvelis, for his part, emphasized the need for growth-oriented measures to be implemented without delay to combat a deepening recession. Speaking to reporters after talks with President Karolos Papoulias, the leftist leader said he was confident that, in talks with European leaders in Brussels, Greece’s head of state would emphasize the multiple problems caused by the “ineffective and relentless” measures of the memorandum, referring to the country’s loan deal with creditors. Meanwhile Alexis Tsipras, the leader of leftist SYRIZA, which came second in this month’s elections on a pledge to abolish the memorandum, suggested that the result of the polls, which involved at least half of voters backing anti-bailout parties, made it clear that Greeks expect the country’s creditors to make concessions. “They have high expectations,” he said.