The whole of Europe is laughing: Greece is at the helm of the EU. The country is at a terminal stage of decomposition and yet its leaders talk pompously about setting goals for "more Europe" and such trash. They have to find approximately 10-15 billion euros for 2014 to plug the holes of their management and still they declare success in leading the country out of the crisis.
It's clear that our strangulation has still further to go. For the budget surplus that they are declaring, to the extend that it is real, has been achieved only through the vicious extortion of their last remaining penny of those who have no way to dodge the tax office, namely the small people with some meager savings amassed by perfectly legitimate means. Their procedures have been so ruthless, that all constitutional protections have been swept away. Revolutions have broken out in the past for much milder oppression that that. Meanwhile, the fat cats who have been robbing us blind for a generation are still partying.
Since 2010 the only thing that successive governments have done in order to convince the European overseers that they are complying with the obligations undertaken in return for the loans that kept the country afloat is tax to death the small portion of the population that could not hide its income at the same time that they slashed their salaries and pensions. What a triumph. Everything else that they promised they failed to carry out, above all the closing of countless government bodies performing no work at all and existing only for providing fat recompense for the party hacks running them. There are, for instance, four different state-run institutes for doing the same thing, namely study international legal relations, all funded out of our pockets. And that's just a minor example. Oh, and there is another ingenious trick: it's called "amalgamation." A number of these bodies are terminated on paper, but instead of being dissolved they actually continue to exist as before under the roof of a new single public entity. The latter acquires an independent bureaucracy of its own, superimposed upon the previous ones. So out of the seeming termination of, say, three preexisting boards or institutes or what have you you end up having four! This is what is called here reducing the size of the state sector.
In one of my very first posts I predicted what has come to pass, namely that all the solemn commitments made after endless debates in parliament (and not least the repeated burning of Athens by crazed "revolutionary" gangs) were going to be violated by the authorities. It took no particular wisdom to do that, just having endured the vileness of the local governing class. The hydrocephalic monster that crony government has created over the past generations has at this point just about consumed the flesh of society at large and it is beginning to devour its own.
This is the last stage before the implosion, in which a final explosion of generalized greed masquerading as militant socialism will reduce everything to ashes. And it is only in mythology that new life spontaneously springs out of such desolation. The European elections in May will strip the sitting government of all legitimacy, and deservedly so. For they came to power promising a liberal administration that would clean out the Augean stables of statist corruption, and instead they delivered an intensification of Soviet-style control by minorities entrenched in the public sector ruthlessly defending their private interest at the expense of the commonweal -and all that under the flaming red banner of leftism.
The most charitable thing that can be said about our current rulers is that they were not in a position to subdue the hydra that they themselves brought into being. Nor did they wish to, however, for after all it was flesh of their flesh.
One last reminder. Well-meaning people abroad should not be deceived by the legal prosecution of the neo-nazis that has dominated the headlines over the past few months. For one thing, it was carried out in violation of key constitutional provisions: you cannot fight fascism by fascist means. But maybe this is the least of ills, for the constitution in modern Greece has since her very inception been just a facade to bamboozle credulous foreigners thinking that they were dealing with a civilized country -and an heir to the glories of Hellas no less. Fat chance. The more relevant, and damning, consideration is that despite the aforementioned legal show the ideology and the methodology of the extreme right is still triumphant, penetrating all political factions and coloring the thinking and the emotions of the average person at large. The nationalistic hatred of sundry "foreigners,"the glorification of the "chosen race" under attack by international Jewry, usually called "capital," the readiness to use violence to silence liberal thought and to shake off the "yoke" of the west -all these are the staple of public discourse and are hysterically propagated by the media (the chief perpetrators of public corruption over the decades). A recent offer by the Soros foundation to heat all schools in a northern district during the winter was vehemently rejected by the local education council. They did not deign to stoop before the nefarious designs of such an evil agent of Jewish imperialism. They preferred to have their children freezing between four stone walls.
Happy new year.
It's clear that our strangulation has still further to go. For the budget surplus that they are declaring, to the extend that it is real, has been achieved only through the vicious extortion of their last remaining penny of those who have no way to dodge the tax office, namely the small people with some meager savings amassed by perfectly legitimate means. Their procedures have been so ruthless, that all constitutional protections have been swept away. Revolutions have broken out in the past for much milder oppression that that. Meanwhile, the fat cats who have been robbing us blind for a generation are still partying.
Since 2010 the only thing that successive governments have done in order to convince the European overseers that they are complying with the obligations undertaken in return for the loans that kept the country afloat is tax to death the small portion of the population that could not hide its income at the same time that they slashed their salaries and pensions. What a triumph. Everything else that they promised they failed to carry out, above all the closing of countless government bodies performing no work at all and existing only for providing fat recompense for the party hacks running them. There are, for instance, four different state-run institutes for doing the same thing, namely study international legal relations, all funded out of our pockets. And that's just a minor example. Oh, and there is another ingenious trick: it's called "amalgamation." A number of these bodies are terminated on paper, but instead of being dissolved they actually continue to exist as before under the roof of a new single public entity. The latter acquires an independent bureaucracy of its own, superimposed upon the previous ones. So out of the seeming termination of, say, three preexisting boards or institutes or what have you you end up having four! This is what is called here reducing the size of the state sector.
In one of my very first posts I predicted what has come to pass, namely that all the solemn commitments made after endless debates in parliament (and not least the repeated burning of Athens by crazed "revolutionary" gangs) were going to be violated by the authorities. It took no particular wisdom to do that, just having endured the vileness of the local governing class. The hydrocephalic monster that crony government has created over the past generations has at this point just about consumed the flesh of society at large and it is beginning to devour its own.
This is the last stage before the implosion, in which a final explosion of generalized greed masquerading as militant socialism will reduce everything to ashes. And it is only in mythology that new life spontaneously springs out of such desolation. The European elections in May will strip the sitting government of all legitimacy, and deservedly so. For they came to power promising a liberal administration that would clean out the Augean stables of statist corruption, and instead they delivered an intensification of Soviet-style control by minorities entrenched in the public sector ruthlessly defending their private interest at the expense of the commonweal -and all that under the flaming red banner of leftism.
The most charitable thing that can be said about our current rulers is that they were not in a position to subdue the hydra that they themselves brought into being. Nor did they wish to, however, for after all it was flesh of their flesh.
One last reminder. Well-meaning people abroad should not be deceived by the legal prosecution of the neo-nazis that has dominated the headlines over the past few months. For one thing, it was carried out in violation of key constitutional provisions: you cannot fight fascism by fascist means. But maybe this is the least of ills, for the constitution in modern Greece has since her very inception been just a facade to bamboozle credulous foreigners thinking that they were dealing with a civilized country -and an heir to the glories of Hellas no less. Fat chance. The more relevant, and damning, consideration is that despite the aforementioned legal show the ideology and the methodology of the extreme right is still triumphant, penetrating all political factions and coloring the thinking and the emotions of the average person at large. The nationalistic hatred of sundry "foreigners,"the glorification of the "chosen race" under attack by international Jewry, usually called "capital," the readiness to use violence to silence liberal thought and to shake off the "yoke" of the west -all these are the staple of public discourse and are hysterically propagated by the media (the chief perpetrators of public corruption over the decades). A recent offer by the Soros foundation to heat all schools in a northern district during the winter was vehemently rejected by the local education council. They did not deign to stoop before the nefarious designs of such an evil agent of Jewish imperialism. They preferred to have their children freezing between four stone walls.
Happy new year.
