GREECE: FIVE TERRIBLE FALLACIES

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Greece, if you haven’t noticed, is bankrupt. Stone cold bankrupt. Its government has stopped payments domestically, leaving thousands of suppliers and contractors stranded. It has stopped refunding VAT to those entitled to refunds, including major companies. It cannot rejoin the “markets” in any form or shape. It cannot borrow, even at extortionist rates from “private investors.”

It cannot feed and warm itself without borrowed outside cash to buy food and oil. It cannot pay salaries and pensions without loans from its “partners.” And it generates fearfully less and less in terms of “domestic product” as its economy continues to implode under unprecedented taxation and the effective transfer of the public sector’s crippling waste and still gargantuan appetite for cash to what has been left of a private economy.

In short, Greece is an economically non-viable entity under these present and future circumstances -- unless miracles happen outside the movies. But even desperate basket cases like Greece could see some, dim perhaps, light if there’s motivation for creative thinking and bold initiatives.

No such action can be realized under the present Papandreou regime, however. This “socialist” regime’s sole, criminally amateurish, “plan” is to wreck the very foundations of the country without much of a thought on how to create and sustain something -- anything -- that could be better, more productive, and with longer-term hopes of survival.

The Papandreou regime, already politically and socially bankrupt itself, has nothing to cling too but its own buffoonish polemics and First Grade little self-taught songs of self-praise. Meantime, the country remains in the grip of Five Terrible Fallacies created by Papandreou & Co. in their maniacal urge to finish off what has been left of this country after 36 years of catastrophic post-junta “democratic” government:

“The IMF/EU memorandum is the only hope for survival:” As even freshmen economists would explain to you, the “memorandum” is nothing but a makeshift crutch designed to buy time for Greece’s creditors, and specifically German, French, and British banks. None of the “memorandum” monies goes toward stimulating economic recovery inside the country and help it stand on its own feet again. Papandreou collects the “bailout tranches” and deposits them intact in the hands of bankers, who constantly recalculate the costs of a potential Greek “haircut” and, thus, welcome the “European support mechanism.” And the “memorandum” has further imposed an additional €110-billion burden on an already dead horse economy: our “partners” expect Greece to begin repaying the bailout package plus interest as early as 2013 -- or if an “extension” is worked out somehow, as late as 2020. How? With what money? The MOU is one additional, pretty huge, nail driven into our coffin.

“Greece is doing well and will be returning to the markets in 2011 or 2012, at the latest:” There is nothing that is farthest from God’s honest truth than this out-and-out lie. Greece has simply lost its borrower’s credibility demanded by the extortionist markets, constantly on the lookout via “international rating houses” to hammer national economies into dust and stimulate the spiral of “speculation economics” that brought the world very close to generalized meltdown in 2008, and continues to undermine even economies of the size and wealth of the United States. In this gigantic maelstrom, Greece is but a sorry speck of a country with nothing that the “markets” could use to restore its “creditworthiness” so it can borrow more and sink itself deeper into the bottomless black hole. Our foreign “partners” know this very well, hence their constant hypocritical congratulations to the Papandreou regime: they need a subservient “government,” playing with its toys, crushing its people, and sucking its thumb, in place in the old tattered Hellas while they try -- unsuccessfully -- to work out a broader solution to the advancing deterioration of the “European Union.”  But back to the “markets?” That’s the laugh! This is a game for grown poker players, which Greece is not.

“The IMF/EU memorandum is the strategic carrier for change:” With the so-called “troika” (IMF, EU, ECB) having put the pistol to Papandreou’s head as the loan sharks call in their Greek markers, the MOU serves as the baseball bat tangling over the “socialist” regime’s head. Its drafters cared little about the true human economics of this country. With a long, firmly established tradition of unhinging countries to near extinction in order to suck them dry in pursuit of “free market” liberation, the IMF “technocrats” drew up an execution list which they handed to the Papandreou rather amateur, but well motivated, special op commandos with orders to go out there and do not return until pyramids of hundreds of thousands of severed heads have sprung all over the country. “And the rivers shall run red with the blood of millions.” MOU “reform” translates into genocidal economics aiming to turn Greece into the first truly 3rd world country of the “European Union.” 

“Growth will spring from the “necessary reforms” implemented through the MOU:” Perhaps the vilest lie of the Papandreou regime, “growth via the MOU” is simply a non-existent option for the obvious reason that the MOU has no such target but, rather, focuses on squeezing Greece for all that it is still worth and making sure that the family silver is safely mortgaged through the “bailout” scheme so that this “aberrant” nation remains under “supervision” perhaps in perpetuity. To those who haven’t noticed it yet, the MOU is no Marshall Plan: it contains no provisions for building roads and factories, buying food for the needy, and sustaining the less fortunate; it is entirely constructed around the brutal slashing of incomes and the suppression of buying power so that the infamous “domestic devaluation” takes hold since Greece has no sovereign money to devalue but rather, insanely, joined the “hard” euro in 2001.

“Violent austerity is necessary to restore competitiveness and all-round national well-being:” In an ideal “neoliberal” world, a Hellas populated by the equivalents of Pakistani village farmers and sweat factory workers would be the embodiment of “true competitiveness,” at least in the eyes of the Papandreou regime. This “vision” though suffers fatally on several counts: “competitiveness” based on slave labor, and outside investment attracted by “economies of scale” manned by slaves, has never brought “well-being” to the natives; Greece, even with all of its woes and distortions, is hardly the type of material that can be violently “adjusted” back to the Stone Age, IMF or no IMF; although on the “periphery” of the “union,” Greece’s collapse below basic human decency and survivable standards of living via outside occupation with the help of a local collaborator regime could trigger the type of social-political chain reaction European “leaders” have been supposedly trying to avert; and violent austerity has more than just theoretical capabilities of triggering a civil war  with incalculable consequences for the longer term survival of this country in its present form.

Greece’s New Occupation by our “friends and partners” is daily assuming more concrete and more permanent forms with the unabashed help of the Papandreou regime.

The black year 1941 is here again. 

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