But Greek democracy remained fatally flawed just below the surface: corruption, promoted by both “conservative” and “socialist” politicians, became the measure by which the system operated. Impenetrable, vast corruption rings came to dominate the public sector, with politicians buying “loyalty” via providing cushy government jobs to legions of functionally illiterate “workers,” who would have been dropped like a brick by employers in any modern labor market. The private sector wasn’t entirely innocent either, with a small robber baron elite exploiting the state treasury to amass fortunes of their own.
Today, with Greece already bankrupt and just barely kept breathing by more borrowing (which may soon end), alternative futures are all universally daunting, as the New York Times recently said.
While economists wrestle with impossible figures that affect not only Greece, but the entire European “periphery,” the political crisis that has been engendered by the money collapse still remains largely ignored. And since economics alone is incapable of finding a way out of the mess by itself, political reconstruction increasingly appears the one subject that we need to put at the top of the priorities list.
The Papandreou regime, a piece of Greece’s corrupt past caught in its own bottomless incompetence, sees nothing wrong with transferring sovereign powers to foreign “experts” arriving to preside over a fire sale of Greek state assets.
In a similar context, the regime sees the costs of allowing the Greek constitutional order to become a rag under the pressure of European “central powers” as acceptable, given the circumstances. And the regime feels comfortable with the idea of turning the country into a rickety flea market, where all of Greece’s public assets may be sold at rock bottom prices to feed not the Greek economy, but, rather, the coffers of foreign banks.
In short, the Papandreou regime has lost every last shred of legitimacy as a sovereign government by its very own actions -- and, in the process, it exposes the country to political risks we all thought had been relegated permanently to the pages of history books.
With the Europeans still wallowing in their fixations with barbaric, economy-killing austerity, and the “medium-term fiscal strategy” recently ratified by the Papandreou regime as a means of throwing the Greek people back into the economic Middle Ages, Greece’s political crisis now supersedes the fiscal crisis and demands an immediate solution.
Greeks are becoming acutely aware of the catastrophic impact of debtocracy.The immediate result of this newly acquired awareness is that regime parliamentarians, but also politicians in general, are now thinking twice before showing their faces in public. Public anger is rising fast and violence against politicians, until recently rather unthinkable, is gaining wider acceptance.
Media commentators, as universally discredited as the politicians themselves, save the rare exception, are racing to condemn this billowing public rage as “unacceptable” under our “democratic values.” What they forget of course is that the Papandreou regime has taken it upon itself to begin the deconstruction of these “democratic values” first and, as a result, it is now exposed to the inevitable backlash from those on the receiving end.
Greece has no alternatives left.
The complete shedding of its enormous debt has become the exclusive condition for national survival -- to be coupled with the jettisoning of the old political system whose tail end is the Papandreou regime.
Without such a revolutionary new beginning, we have no hope in freezing hell.