That George Papandreou and Antonis Samaras (with an interval of the hapless Papademos administration) were entrusted with navigating Greece through her own “Perfect Storm” will be undoubtedly marked in future history books as mishaps at least as severe and catastrophic as the sovereign debt crisis itself.
The Greek people, through “free and democratic elections,” chose the wreckers as the conductors of the rescue.
While Papandreou brought the IMF inside the European “Union,” via unabashed back-door machinations, and pushed his country into the open arms of lenders and “partners” eager for blood, Samaras performed one spectacular about face from hard-knuckled opponent of Greece’s destruction by “memorandum” to obedient follower of German austerity instructions designed to demolish Greece and her people.
Both men, products of political forces that meticulously prepared Greece for the fall, project the grotesque demand that we recognize them as “saviors.”
Close behind these “leaders” follows a wrecking crew like no other.
Members of parliament, owing their presence in parliamentary caucuses exclusively to the whims of the “leader,” got to work, earnestly and eagerly, offering their votes to foreign-dictated legislation that has resulted in the slaughter of the weaker, the methodical genocide of whatever we used to call a “middle class,” and the mortgaging of Greece for generations into the distant future.
These “leaders” and their parliamentary packs
• hammered Greece’s private sector to extinction;
• have brought pensioners face to face with destitution via savage pension cuts;
• have destroyed the national health system, which was admittedly club footed and corrupt but was, still, the only health care provider for substantial majorities;
• have orchestrated the collapse of family budgets across Greece and threaten millions with expropriation of their private property;
• are preparing further “plans” for the selling of whatever infrastructure is there at fire sale prices;
• are implementing a taxation blitzkrieg that has already made hundreds of thousands, if not millions, unwilling potential felons by reason of inability to pay the crushing amounts demanded by the Sultan’s tax collectors;
• and have succeeded in actually increasing the sovereign debt from 280.4 billion euro in the first quarter of 2012 to 305.3 billion in the first quarter of 2013 (or 160.5% of GDP), their greatest “success” so far.
Such record of sophisticated “saving” the country is stunning, even by traditional Greek standards established after the restoration of “democracy” in 1974.
Even more worryingly, while people in countries close to Greece, like Egypt, Bulgaria, and Turkey, are pouring into the streets to battle against corruption, authoritarianism and in favor of openness, democracy, and accountability, Greeks remain frozen in space as their “leaders” and their wrecking crew continue wallowing in the dirty pool of “budget consolidation,” “rationalization of resources,” and, above all else, by German diktat, the “streamlining of revenue.”
We are all witnesses of the macabre dance of Greece’s tormentors, led by the Germans, in openly mocking the local collaborators and expressing their kudos, soaked in cutting irony, for a “job well done” in assassinating their own country.
It seems that evisceration is the only “solution” our “friends and partners” have to offer -- and that they have found the perfect willing executioners in the persons of our own politicians.
The greatest irony of this horrifying mess is that the Greek ancien regime -- the one that built the corruption networks during the past four decades and was instrumental in the genesis of the congenital malformations that make up the Greek political system -- is very much alive and kicking behind the scenes.
The hope of some in the early days of the crisis that the economic crash would be unavoidably followed by the collapse of the corruption networks has not been realized. As we speak, the same dishonorable, illegal, all-embracing gangs dominating the various segments of Greek public and political life, in cahoots with political parties, remain untouched and uninterrupted by the ongoing destruction of Greek society.
The tenacity of these elements, combined with the increasingly authoritarian and unconstitutional actions of a “democratically elected” government, inevitably pose the question of which methods and what type of counter-action are required in order for the Greek people to reclaim their future and defeat those who are leading us to chaos, conflict, and, ultimately, national breakdown.
One thing is for sure: the wreckers must be stopped -- in one way or another.
