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A comment on Varoufakis to Publish Notorious Eurogroup Recordings from 2015 Meetings. Parent comment

Re:Varoufakis to Publish Notorious Eurogroup Recordings from... by yellowstuff on Friday February 21, 2020 @10:58AM (#22384060)
I understand your point and the importance of the issues you're raising, but ultimately I still think it's important for leaders to be able to have confidential discussions. While transparency is important, I think that if people know that their meetings will be public then the real decisions will be made in private, and the meetings will just be an opportunity for political messaging. You don't get the same outcome plus transparency, you probably get a worse outcome and fake transparency.

EG, imagine a hypothetical scenario where Greece gets into debt trouble again, but now the other finance ministers don't trust that their meetings will be kept private. The German and French finance ministers meet privately, and decide to screw over Greece and come up with a cover story about how they can't do anything else. A better outcome would be if they had private meetings with Greece and at least had the opportunity to reach a compromise. The best possible outcome might be having the same meeting with full transparency so that the public is fully informed, but that's not what would happen.

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Re:Varoufakis to Publish Notorious Eurogroup Recordings from... by odshoifsdhfs on Friday February 21, 2020 @01:48PM (#22385621)
See, but you even say, the best possible outcome would be full transparency, but you know that wouldn't happen. And that is the problem. Ohhh Germany/France/Portugal/Greece or Lithuania (doesn't matter) doesn't want their voters to know what they are fighting for, so they will never be open about it. How is that democracy? How is it possible to vote for any party anywhere when they just tell the average joe 'yes, your pension will be cut 15%, and your kids pay more in taxes, but trust me, I did the best I could, you should be thankful'. Is this democracy?????
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Re:Varoufakis to Publish Notorious Eurogroup Recordings from... by petre on Saturday February 22, 2020 @12:08AM (#22389536)
I regularly listen to RFI. What the pro EU press tries to spin after brexit is that some questions should not be asked in a referendum, some decisions should not be left to the citizens. I am frequently asking myself the same question. How is this democracy? I'm quite certain that the next thing we'll hear from them is that democracy is not always good or something in that line of thinking.
[ Parent | on HN ]