Ian Traynor — Alexis Tsipras must be stopped: the underlying message of Europe's leaders

The cards are now on the table.

Germany’s vice-chancellor has become the first senior EU politician to voice the private views of many - that the Greek PM is a threat to the European order....

That was clear from the trenchant remarks of Sigmar Gabriel, Germany’s vice-chancellor and the head of the country’s Social Democratic party. He coupled the Greek situation with last week’s foul tempers over immigration and said that Europe faces its worst crisis since the EU’s founding treaty was signed in Rome in 1957.

Gabriel was the first leading European politician to voice what many think and say privately about Tsipras – that the Greek leader represents a threat to the European order, that his radicalism is directed at the politics of mainstream Europe and that he wants to force everyone else to rewrite the rules underpinning the single currency.

The unspoken message was that Tsipras is a dangerous man on a mission who has to be stopped.

The Guardian
Alexis Tsipras must be stopped: the underlying message of Europe's leaders

Ian Traynor

ht Clonal

Glenn Greenwald — US Threatened Germany Over Snowden, Vice Chancellor Says

This is not the first time the U.S. has purportedly threatened an allied government to withhold evidence of possible terror plots as punishment. In 2009, a British national, Binyam Mohamed, sued the U.K. government for complicity in his torture at Bagram and Guantánamo. The High Court ordered the U.K. government to provide Mohamed’s lawyers with notes and other documents reflecting what the CIA told British intelligence agents about Mohamed’s abuse.

In response, the U.K. government insisted that the High Court must reverse that ruling because the safety of British subjects would be endangered if the ruling stood. Their reasoning: the U.S. government had threatened the British that they would stop sharing intelligence, including evidence of terror plots, if they disclosed what the Americans had told them in confidence about Mohamed’s treatment — even if the disclosure were ordered by the High Court as part of a lawsuit brought by a torture victim. British government lawyers even produced a letter from an unnamed Obama official laying out that threat.

The Intercept
US Threatened Germany Over Snowden, Vice Chancellor Says

Glenn Greenwald   

Lawrence Delevingne — Germany: Our job is to strengthen Europe

A top German official has said the country supports Europe's efforts to kick start the region's economy -- including a quantitative easing (QE) program -- but that other countries have to sell reforms to their citizens. 

"The task for Germany now today is, through its own policies, structural reforms, its own investments, to support the EU and the Commission when it brings on to the market, so to speak, its stability package,"Sigmar Gabriel, vice-chancellor and federal minister of economic affairs and energy of Germany, said at the World Economic Forum Thursday in Davos, Switzerland.

"But every nation," he added, "has to have the courage to broach such structural reforms and speak clearly about them without making people afraid. This is difficult."

There could be significant political cost—such as losing elections—from such structural reforms, Gabriel said, but stressed there was no other choice.

"There is no alternative. The alternative is to simply prolonging the crisis and this situation becomes untenable for citizens," he said during a discussion about Europe's economy.

Then comes the delusional appeal to the confidence fairy.

"How can one give people the sufficient confidence to believe that they will benefit from...these structural reforms?" Gabriel added. 

"That is a difficult task for politicians to give such confidence to the electorate, so they can believe that their children will be better off. That is one of the major task of politicians and I think some have been quite successful."

Good luck with that.

CNBC Davos
Germany: Our job is to strengthen Europe
Lawrence Delevingne