Greece: 7 Years of IMF Hell
The EU’s Whipping Boy
Originally arriving to save Greece from bankruptcy, the IMF bankrupted Greeks. On all socio-economic indicators they are much worse than before the medicine was applied. Every year after an electoral cycle or another, a boom is arriving and none ever arrives. The permanent status of micromanagement from the Troika and constant inspections serves the purpose of 24/7 propaganda that eventually turned Greece into a full blown debt colony whereby anything that is government property would be sold off, but not necessarily to the highest bidder.
The revelations subsequently that on fraudulent figures Greece entered the Eurozone and on false statistics it allowed the IMF in only highlight the absolute and mercenary corruption of all the posts assigned to all government appointments, leadership positions of political parties and all major institutions from the IMF, to the ECB and the Eurogroup. The absolute venom and class hatred by a decomposing ruling class is such that they only talk about primary budget surpluses whilst at the same time presiding over more than 2m unemployed, 500k emigres and endless cases of schoolchildren fainting in school.
The Whipping Boy of the EU
An EU Internal Colony for a Two Tier Europe
From the moment the breach occurred by the US born Papandreou and the IMF arrived in Greece for the demands of US/EU dollar parity with the Euro a massive 24/7 propaganda blitz occurred by the worlds corporate media and its internal supporters on both fake Left and Right. Greeks were allegedly the most corrupt and lazy people on earth who couldn’t organise a stag do in a bar. They were so useless that they should be penalised with a permanent overseer in the form of the Troika which became the ‘Institutions’ under Syriza.
There has been no let up under Syriza of continued privatisations, labour deregulation and pension cuts. They have continued as before. Pensioners have been beaten up and teargassed, ministers have refused to meet social groups under attack, farmers have been vilified and dragged through the capitalist courts, the unemployed have been humiliated lining up in queues to not claim social welfare assistance, the disabled have had their benefits cut. Before it was the evil right, or the corrupt socialists from PASOK, now it’s the ‘first time Left’. The circus continues, politics becomes a farce and life invariably gets worse and worse.
But there is humanitarianism in neoliberalism. They care about the ‘refugee and migrant’. They are the only ones we only ever hear about. Whether they are freezing in the winter, whether they are being fed. Whether their children can go to Greek schools. All other social issues have been resolved. Syriza has seen to that. Unemployment has gone way way down. Homelessness has evaporated, suicides are down and the hospitals and medicine are modern marvels and school kids are over moon for the non-existent free school meals enjoying many times fainting in class due to food insecurity.
The beauty of the situation is that only a party that originated on paper from the Left but is governing with a breakaway of the Right (when we say Right in Greece we mean the pro-cold war ex-3rd Reich Quisling Right) could have achieved what it has. It instituted what the ECB wanted (capital controls and electronic forms of bank seizures for bad debts) without even the small businessman kicking up a stink as they could sell it as a measure ‘against capital’ ie …communism. The selling point as always was Greeks have lived beyond their means and there is no money in the state coffers. So it’s always better to live with less and less accept cut after cut to avoid …bankruptcy. The future is always worse than the present even when you are faced looking down from a fifth floor balcony or the barrel of a gun.
There are many dangers always lurking round the corner: Turks are about to invade and have been invading almost weekly, the Eurogroup is about to cut our lifeline, Golden Dawn is rampaging the streets chasing the oh so lovely migrant arrivals who are a paragon of decent behaviour. In a nutshell we have to stay cowed and hidden to ensure all functions well, taxes are paid as it’s a moral duty and we are a hospitable nation. After all as a recent MP (Dimitri Kammenos) from the ruling coalition said ‘our pensioners shouldn’t support their unemployed relatives they should accept another Euro 100 pension cut’ Being scum is now synonymous with being in government and it wasn’t long ago another MP said we have to crush our shit to survive on an MPs Euro 8,000 salary when 1/3 of pensioners have to survive on… Euro 500. Beating up pensioners, teargassing the old is now a firm Syriza tradition after stopping them from getting their money alleging under Varoufakis the EU imposed restrictions on cashflow.
Hence under Syriza we have handed over the nations railways to the bankrupt state operator from Italy for less than the price of a large yacht (E45m), we handed over 14 regional airports to a company (Frapport German state owned) with borrowed money from one of our ECB controlled banks so they can refurbish some toilets (as our state sector wasn’t up to the task), we have leased all state assets for 99 years to a debt fund set up by the Troika and we recently sold the state owned armaments factory ELVO for less than the price of house in Kensington, England and 40% of the electricity company is going private to ensure we no longer produce our own energy but import everything so even more people live in the dark. The beauty of it all is, we are handing over everything at below firesale prices and we call it …development. Broken lives, shattered families a constant feeling of despair has destroyed all hope and once hope is destroyed a society starts to unravel. A wing of society wants wages and pensions to fall further below Bulgarias and fall below Bangladeshis and the government wants to just replace all Greeks with another society, one that is globalised and they see this happening by supporting all new arrivals financially, economically and via the medium of MSM with the fake Left parties adding their ‘crocodile tears’.
As with everything this is a fundamental contradiction. If capitalism is to replace all jobs with robots who will they sell the products to? The few that make and service robots? If they ship in 3m people they label as refugees who will support them and sustain them? By cutting pensions down from Euro 500 to 100 or basic wages from E500 to 100? It’s patently beyond parody and ridiculous as no society would function, it would cease to, the law of the jungle would replace all human interactions and not enough propagandists exist in the existing political formations to sustain such an outcome. But that is the trajectory taken and with it a great political and social impasse.
Fake Union Resistance
The fake resistance by the union leaders during endless one day strikes without any real political objectives or purpose achieved what they set out to do. Demobilised the resistance and led eventually to despair. It’s now become fashionable by those who previously limited all their actions to just letting off some steam to criticize the people for choosing the governments they deserve. In other words it’s the people’s fault they are in this predicament.
This is a continuation of the garbage one hears daily that people don’t want to work, jobs exist and the public sector is overbloated. When PASOK-ND was in power the fake union leaders paid lip service to strikes, now they have a majority they have zero strikes. Of course not everything always works to their angle. One cannot list all the situations where the ruling elites were caught offguard nor when they had to mobilise all the forces at their disposal but we need to list a couple.
When Samaras came to power the KKE called off the Steelworkers strike which had gained national prominence and when they had done everything in their power of not allowing all the factories to shut down by enlisting Golden Dawn to this cause (a systemic organization that duly obliged) and when Syriza came to power (2nd time) the KKE helped derail the farmers protest which had gained national prominence. They system obviously has safety valves the extent of which cannot always be known beforehand. But the mere fact that they need Syriza in power and have kept them for so long indicates they haven’t to date got a future safety valve in the making. They seem to have burnt all their bridges with society.
Syriza thought they could ride roughshod over society in its mass replacement migration programme. It origins are from the fake Left and it could sell solidarity and economic hardship of the multitudes of so-called refugees that arrived. It decided to park them in open ‘reception centres’ on the islands it selected and in many parts of Athens. It did not expect armed resistance in Kos or parents conflict over busing migrants into schools. Not enough propaganda could curtail peoples actions nor could it blame everyone as being Golden Dawn (who after all in every serious social disturbance has sided with the government by either demobilizing popular reaction or going into self-imposed hiding.)
The People are Always at Fault
It’s become fashionable to argue that we are at fault, we borrowed the money, we were the tax evaders, that we are lying on the couches that we are being led by the MSM that we are justly being penalized as we are quislings because we are from the Balkans, dumb and stupid, half educated as the enlightenment never arrived, and how could the other nations achieve a breakthrough with the Troika eg. Cyprus or Ireland. That we are first in corruption and as embourgeoisiefied individuals who produce nothing are pointless.
A previous refrain was that people never hit the streets. When they did in a mass way in the city occupations of 2011 which by 2014 had become indefinite strikes in various occupation which were then court martialed back to work using a junta era law, there wasn’t a lack of militancy but there was no leadership as one section of the fake Left (KKE) did not want or seek power and the other (Syriza) wanted to be voted in precisely to use the elections as a way to implement neoliberalism and they took that a step further using a Referendum to produce the mother of all sellouts
The individuals and organisations who espouse these views are the same ones who in a previous period alleged we only vote for PASOK and ND that we vote only for corruption, in other words whilst life moves on we remain stood still. If the provisional acceptance of Syriza in power is the beginning and end of all social and political activity in Greece and the guarantee for a new 99 year Troika occupation of Greece by the banksters then we have history in the making. What the 3rd Reich didn’t achieve the 4th did. If things were that simple then the issue of the return of the Drachma would never hang over the whole political class or the issue of the fragmentation of the EU, in particular with political developments in the UK, France and Italy let alone Hungary.
The mere fact that all the political forces currently in Parliament have to come out and support the Euro and the EU project (KKE in its 20th Congress stated that the re-introduction of the Dracha would essentially be a national calamity).
Having put paid to rest the populists of the ‘Left’ (Syriza) it is now fashionable to do the same with the populists of the ‘right’ eg Austrian, Dutch and possibly France. In other words no one can break out of the straightjacket of the EU. The extreme globalist centre always wins. The theory would apply if capitalism had actually resolved its insoluble contradictions and if it had actually moved away from its mass population replacement agenda, its chronic and systemic unemployment and the precarious work situation. But what is happening is that certain issues are now going mainstream when before they were isolated. The issues which led to the revolt of the periphery have now hit the centre eg. Brexit and the discussions on Frexit. This has created to a certain extent a stalemate which will be resolved one way or another as the capitalist crisis isn’t going on holiday.
VN Gelis
1st May 2017