1. All European leaders agree that a specific set of structural reforms are necessary to create a strong economy and reduce unemployment. Especially it needs to be easer to fire people.

2. All European leaders agree that government spending needs to be reduced. On the speed of the reduction there are certainly differences, but in total there is agreeme

I think the situation is a little more nuanced than you suggest. Fine Gael are the lead party in Ireland and also the most right wing. Yet they are anxious to increase Government spending (and reduce income tax) by as much as the Troika and the growth and Stability pact  will allow and have ignored advice from the Commission, OECD and the Irish Statutory Fiscal Advisory Council to tone down the spending.  Partly this is because there is an general election due shortly, but most of the spending increases under consideration are ongoing.  Also there are no proposals to make it easier to fire people that I am aware of, and some talk of making it more difficult to make them redundant when a company goes into liquidation.  Admittedly this is in the context of the economy coming out of austerity and recession, but the ideological commitment to neo-liberalism isn't as total as you suggest.

Index of Frank's Diaries

THE nation of Greece said sorry to the European Union with a present of an enormous wooden horse.

Left outside the European Central Bank in the dead of night, the horse has now been moved into the ECB's central lobby where it is proudly on display.

A gift tag attached to the horse, which is surprisingly light for its size and has small holes along the length of its body, suggested that it should be placed in the bank's vaults overnight to avoid it being targeted by thieves.

He called the snap vote with the expectation - and intention - of losing it. The plan was to put up a good fight, accept honourable defeat, and hand over the keys of the Maximos Mansion, leaving it to others to implement the June 25 "ultimatum" and suffer the opprobrium.

[...]

So Syriza called the referendum. To their consternation, they won, igniting the great Greek revolt of 2015, the moment when the people finally issued a primal scream, daubed their war paint, and formed the hoplite phalanx.

Mr Tsipras is now trapped by his success. "The referendum has its own dynamic. People will revolt if he comes back from Brussels with a shoddy compromise," said Costas Lapavitsas, a Syriza MP.

Anyone care to comment?

A finance system exists, socially, only to direct money to where it is needed to create more social good. It has no purpose otherwise. It is not an end in itself.  Money that is not a useful commodity (aka. food) is not a store of value, and never was. It is a fiction used to allow feedback in the system and to act as a distribution mechanism for goods and services based on perceived social utility (aka, people who have more money are assumed to have more social utility).

A society which understands NONE of these points will vastly mis-allocate its productive resources, as, currently, ours is. That mis-allocation will, in time, lead to collapse or another disaster (in the much larger picture here, much of the world is now in both a pre-revolutionary state and a pre-war state, though most people won't believe either until they're dying).

I have spent my entire life watching these people burn down the house to generate heat and call themselves geniuses. Neoliberalism "works" because it bribes just enough people to maintain enough of a constituency, while piling money into the hands of a very few people who will do anything to keep it going because that's how they became filthy rich, and virtually any system which cared about the common good would take their money and power away from them.

Word

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

Nor do I think they understand macroeconomics. They just can't fathom that yes, Greece has had massive structural problems for decades, but no, the Greek depression was mostly caused by the austerity programmes. This means that they are probably still misunderstanding the Greek position and the Greek willingness to leave the Eurozone, if the alternative to Grexit is continued or even intensified austerity.

They probably do not understand that Greece might recover reasonably quickly outside the Eurozone, which ironically would be a destabilizing factor in the depressed countries still using the euro after a Grexit.

And even if some of them understand this, backtracking would mean both confessing that the previous policies were mad, and would strengthen their domestic anti-austerity political opponents.

I also suspect that a lot of them don't understand that Grexit would mean a Greek default on her external creditors, which mostly are the other nations of the Eurozone. Some might consider this, but then dismiss it as they do not really care the most about recovering the funds lent to Greece anyway, or perversely consider the funds already lost in all but name due to the unsustainability of the Greek debt pile.

Even fewer probably understand how fragile the Eurozone might become if Greece is forced out, when the Hotel California logic ceases to hold sway over the minds of the market. The ECB might have to do a lot more QE than it has expected, and might relatively soon find itself holding quite a considerable fraction of emitted sovereign bonds of certain southern European countries.

Most of all I think these people do not understand that just extending the maturities of the current Greece bonds would resolve the current acute crisis in its entirety.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

In a blow to Greek hopes, the European Commission dismissed the No vote as nothing more than a "signal" because the poll was "neither legally nor factually correct".

Mr Dombrovskis, the Latvian official responsible for the single currency, said any prospect of writing down Greece's €380 billion debt mountain - a key Syriza demand - was now "off the table". The vote "dramatically weakens the negotiating stance of the Greek government", he said.

Athens 1944: Britain's dirty secret | World news | The Guardian

Even now, at 86, when Patríkios "laughs at and with myself that I have reached such an age", the poet can remember, scene-for-scene, shot for shot, what happened in the central square of Greek political life on the morning of 3 December 1944.

This was the day, those 70 years ago this week, when the British army, still at war with Germany, opened fire upon - and gave locals who had collaborated with the Nazis the guns to fire upon - a civilian crowd demonstrating in support of the partisans with whom Britain had been allied for three years.

The crowd carried Greek, American, British and Soviet flags, and chanted: "Viva Churchill, Viva Roosevelt, Viva Stalin'" in endorsement of the wartime alliance.

Twenty-eight civilians, mostly young boys and girls, were killed and hundreds injured. "We had all thought it would be a demonstration like any other," Patríkios recalls. "Business as usual. Nobody expected a bloodbath."

The negotiations didn't break down because of an unbridgeable gap between the North and South; creditors and debtors; the German `Ordoliberalism' of Schäuble and Djisselbloem and Greek-style Marxism of Varoufakis and Tsipras. This gap has never existed. They broke down because Varoufakis repeatedly breached the Eurogroup's etiquette. In doing so, he challenged the very foundations of the eurozone's mode of governance.

The Eurogroup is not a democratic institution. Though it is made up of finance ministers from democratically elected governments, these ministers meet as individuals who are there on the assumption that they will build consensus, make compromises, and reach agreements amongst themselves.

The etiquette of the Eurogroup is that one leaves one's national interests at the door. Relations are more personal than political. Ideologies and grand statements of political doctrine have no place in the body's deliberations. If a minister is constrained because of a difficult situation at home, this is treated as an understandable -- if unfortunate -- problem that needs to be solved. Ministers find in the Eurogroup a source of energy and support for taking on their own domestic populations. It is also a private club of sorts, where what goes on inside remains secret. Ministers attending the Eurogroup are transformed from politicians representing interests into experts seeking solutions to common problems.

The hostility towards Varoufakis stems from his breaking of all of these rules. He refused to play the Eurogroup game. It's not really about riding a motorbike, wearing combat trousers and being a celebrity academic-blogger -- though his charisma and popularity probably created jealousies amongst the other (colourless and tie-wearing) politicians.

At the heart of the matter is how Varoufakis presented his demands. Thinking of himself as a representative of the Greek people, he made his wishes public, and when in the Eurogroup, he maintained the same stance -- changes in views could not be informally agreed around a table but had to be taken back to Athens and argued for, in cabinet and with the Syriza party.